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Molly Shannon once spent an unfortunate evening fending off child actor Gary Coleman — with the “Diff’rent Strokes” star “sticking his little baby hands under my shirt.”
The “Saturday Night Live” comedian recalled in her new memoir “Hello Molly,” out Tuesday, how she was visiting Los Angeles in 1987 and had just been signed by Coleman’s agent, Mark Randall. Coleman had just left his sitcom and was still hugely popular.
“I was over the moon,” writes Shannon, then an NYU student. “If he signs me, I thought, his clients will be me and Gary Coleman! I’ll have a talent agent who represents Gary Coleman.”
In the fall of 1987, when Shannon was back in school, Randall asked if she wanted to meet him and Coleman for tea at the Plaza Hotel. Coleman was 18 at the time but very small, as he suffered from a kidney disease that limited his growth to four-foot-eight.
He was also extremely flirtatious, comparing Shannon to his “Diff’rent Strokes” co-star Dana Plato, who played Kimberly Drummond on the show (and who later died of a prescription drug overdose, after years of substance-abuse struggles).
“We had a great time, laughing and joking,” Shannon recalled, and then Coleman asked if Shannon wanted to see the Presidential Suite where he was staying. Once in the room, he asked Shannon to sit on the bed.
“The possibility of something sexual occurring hadn’t even crossed my mind,” she writes, taking note of Coleman’s dialysis machine in the corner.
“I was an innocent virgin, still. He was playful at first, tickling me, trying to lie on top of me and smooch me. Then, when I pushed him away and stood up, Gary climbed up on the bed and jumped off, using it as a springboard to launch himself to me, kissing me wildly and sticking his little baby hands under my shirt.”
The “White Lotus” actress says she was able to flip Coleman off the bed, but he repeatedly tried to kiss her. Finally, she got up and he draped his whole body around her calf so she ended up dragging him across the floor.
Shannon then ran across the room and locked herself in the bathroom while, undeterred, Coleman wiggled his fingers underneath the door.
“Gary’s relentlessness was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced … I didn’t run out until he stopped trying to get in. I waited till he gave up,” she remembered. “I was in shock.”
Shannon writes how she managed to escape the room and warned Randall that his client “is wild.” She never heard from the agent again.
Coleman died in 2010 at the age of 42 after suffering an epidural hematoma.
The comedian, now 57, also writes of the tragedy that has defined her entire life: When she was 4, her mother, younger sister and cousin died in a car accident while her father was driving after having too much alcohol at a family celebration. Shannon and another sister survived.
Still, the actress adored her father — who, she writes, was alternately loving, encouraging, berating and jealous, and who struggled with alcoholism for years.
It wasn’t until her final appearance on “SNL” in 2001 that a male friend told her that her father had confided a year earlier that he was gay but too scared to tell her.
“In that moment, and all at once, I felt my heart grow a thousand sizes. All the pieces began to fit together,” Shannon writes. “I was so excited and started making plans for him. He was going to go dancing at gay clubs. He was going to fall in love. My head went wild with visions of his new life as an openly gay man.
“Suddenly everything made sense — the craziness, the drinking, the anger. I realized he hasn’t gotten to be himself.”
But it was not to be, Shannon’s father was sick with prostate cancer and it wasn’t until a few months later that she asked him if he thought he might be gay.
“Most definitely,” he replied, explaining that he knew so beginning in eighth grade.
“He told me his gay life was mostly limited to occasional blow jobs at bars and truck stops,” she writes, noting that her father was born a generation or two too early. “He couldn’t break out of what was expected of him as a Catholic growing up in Cleveland in the 1930s and ’40s.”
Despite the actress’ tough childhood, the overriding theme of the book is gratitude and an incredibly sunny outlook.
“I feel so lucky,” she writes near the end of the book. “I got four and a half years with my mom on Earth. I’m grateful I got that time with her. It’s substantial and thank God I had that.”
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