Join the Fan Club

Last time we checked, a show was considered a hit when it pulled in a certain number of viewers--oh, somewhere in the tens of millions. Recently, however, we queried two young stars from Full House (a hit, by any standard) as to the number of viewers who were tuning in to their ABC show on any given Tuesday night. "A thousand," replied Ashley Olsen, after carefully considering the question. "Maybe over a thousand." "Over a thousand," opinioned her twin sister, Mary-Kate.

Try 25 million viewers, girls. Of them, 2,000 people write to the 6-year-old Olsen twins each month. "We get the mail in a box almost every day," reports Ashley (whose creditability as a source remains intact, despite her trouble with figures). Though she and her sister don't actually get to read their fan mail, they say they have a good idea what most of the letters say: "Dear Mary-Kate and Ashley, I'm one of your biggest fans and I hope I can see you in the show. Love, Somebody," guesses Ashley, with her sister parroting the words just half a beat behind her.

Responsibility for the replies--which consist of an autographed photo and nothing else--falls to Heather Weakley, a fulltime employee whom the twins' parents, Dave (a mortgage banker) and Jarnie (a former Los Angeles Ballet dancer), have hired. Aside from addressing and stuffing envelopes, Weakley also signs athe photos with Ashley and Mary-Kate's names. "I try to make it look like children's handwriting by holding the pen loosely," she says. "When I first started, I looked at a picture with the girls' signatures on it and forged it. And I've been doing it ever since."

And what about the toys that the fans bombard them with on a regular basis? "We get to keep some," says Ashley. As for the rest, "My Mommy gives them to people who don't have anything." Despite the gifts and the letters, Mary-Kate and Ashley seem to have little sense of what all the attention signifies. "Being popular means that you're famous," says one. What does being famous mean? "I don't know," says the other.

That down-to-earth innocence--along with pathological cuteness, a knack for humor, and a taste for tossaway lines like "You got it dude"--has helped cinch the Olsens' tremendous popularity among young audiences. But their fans include millions of doting adults as well.

"America watched them grow up," says Adria Later, the special consultant and welfare worker who has been with them since the start. "Each week, from the time the girls were 9 months old, the country tuned in as Michelle (the character the twins alternately portray) crawled around the set, began to take her first steps, and learned to talk."

For many Full House viewers, it was like watching one of their own. And while other child actors have grown up on-screen before, the fact that Ashley and Mary-Kate's character is central to each episode helps intensify that emotional investment.

With so much acclaim, the two little stars might be expected to be on the fasttrack toward becoming spoiled brats. Amazingly, they're not. Both realize, of course, that not everybody gets approached by strangers for photos or autographs (which they have to sign, since writing still doesn't come easy.) Not everybody is chauffeured to work. For that matter, not every child works. But since that's what the two have known since they started on Full House, it all seems pretty normal.

And normal is just how their parents want to keep it. At home, they're treated not as stars, but simply as two of the family four children. They attend Brownie meetings; play soccer or basketball with their father, Lizzie, 4, and Trent, 8; swim in the pool, climb up to their treehouse with their friends, and dance to Aladdin in gauzy Arabian outfits.

For the deal-makers who surround them, making sure that the girls have a good time at work is almost as much a priority as the deals themselves. "Whatever they do, we try to create fun around it," says their attorney Robert Thorne. Especially when traveling.

While filming Full House's season finale in Disney World, the cast was given a private escort--and priority--on all the rides. (That still didn't enable Mary- Kate to go on Splash Mountain, since she was too short. The slightly taller Ashley just barely passed the height requirement. "I was a little bit small, so we had to put tissues in my shoes to go on.")

During the New York phase of their promotional tour for the Brother for Sale album they released last fall, they went ice-skating at Rockefeller Plaza, had hamburgers at Planet Hollywood, and were allowed to shop for toys at FAO Schwarz before the store opened to the public.

The two did get down to business while on tour, handing out promotional stickers to the 27,000 fans who lined up to see them. Their reaction to the huge turnouts? "Uh-ohhh! They're going to want to take our pictures and they're going to want our autographs," recalls Mary-Kate. Luckily, autographs were out of the question. "Because if we sign one, the other crowd will all come again, and then more and more, and we'll never get through it," Ashley explains in her typically convoluted 6-year-old fashion.

With new projects that include a second record, a music video compilation, read-aloud cassette/storybooks, and a TV-movie currently in development, the Olsens are indeed busy for first-graders. But they're not always on the go. For starters, they work only three days a week. They attend their regular school on Mondays and Fridays, as well as the fourth week of every month. At the studio, they have lessons in the mornings, then hit the set in the afternoons. During downtime, they play handball and indulge in their favorite dressing room pastime, as described by Mary-Kate: "You turn all the lights off and then you hide and the person who's looking, they have to try and see where you are."

And now that 2-year-old twins Blake and Dylan Wilhoit have been added to the show, the girls have become the unofficial toddler tutors. When the tots talk or have trouble with a scene, Ashley and Mary-Kate will dance, crawl, or do whatever else is required to make the little boys copy them. "We're the assistant baby-helpers," says a proud Ashley.