By the time a California judge declared Drew Barrymore legally independent from her parents in 1989, she had already hosted Saturday Night Live, starred in one of the most beloved films of the twentieth century, checked into and out of a psychiatric hospital, and attempted to end her own life. She was fourteen years old.
The word “emancipation” carries enormous emotional freight. It suggests liberation, a door thrown open, a future reclaimed from a past that had grown dangerous. In legal terms — at least in California in the late 1980s — it meant something more specific and considerably more complicated: a court order releasing a minor from the legal authority of her parents, making her responsible for her own contracts, her own debts, her own daily survival. It did not make her an adult in every sense. It did not guarantee she would be all right.
What followed was not a fairy tale of independence. Barrymore moved into a rundown Los Angeles apartment and struggled to do her own laundry. She worked briefly at a café and was, by her own cheerful admission, not very good at it. She spent three months living with musician David Crosby and his wife Jan Dance, learning what a household that operated on sober routine actually looked like. The girl who had spent years at Studio 54, who had been photographed stumbling out of clubs before she was old enough to read a wine list with any authority, was learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to be a person.