Sorry Not Sorry

by Naya Rivera

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by NMR, Inc.

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  Photographs courtesy of the author with the exception of the photos here, here, here, and here.

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  eBook ISBN 9780399184994

  Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Cover design: Jess Morphew

  Cover photograph: Deborah Feingold

  Version_1

  Wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now

  —Maya Angelou*

  For my family, friends, and my fans

  *Because as a wise woman basically once said, “Sorry not sorry”

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph and Dedication

  Introduction

  1 | THE NAY NAY YEARS

  2 | I AM MY OWN AFTER-SCHOOL SPECIAL

  3 | NO MONEY, MO’ PROBLEMS

  4 | FROM BROKE TO BIG BREAK

  5 | DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’

  6 | FROM BOYS TO MEN

  7 | THE BEST WORST YEAR EVER

  8 | WHAT ARE YOU?

  9 | BFFS, BAD GIRLS, BITCHES, AND MY MOM

  10 | SORRY NOT SORRY

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  HELLO, AMERICA (and, hopefully, other parts of the world):

  You might know me from shaking my butt and singing in a cheerleader costume on Glee, or from throwing shade (or dodging it) in the tabloids, or maybe even—if you’re a super fan or just have a really good memory—from my child-actor days on TV shows like The Royal Family or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

  Which is exactly why I wanted to write this book—I wanted to tell my whole story and talk about the path (which was really more of a roller-coaster ride) that I took to get to be who I am now—an actress, singer, wife, and mother, currently knee-deep in spit-up.

  Sometimes growing up happens in the blink of an eyelash extension. You spend years struggling to figure out who you are, and through a lot of those years you feel like it’s going to take a bit of divine intervention for you to pull it all together. And then, all of a sudden, you find yourself sitting in the dining room, wondering what to make for dinner and what that baby-related stain on your shirt is, and your adulthood smacks you in the face. And if this hasn’t happened to you yet, God willing someday it will. “Holy shit, I did it,” you’ll think. “I’m a grown-ass woman now.” And let me tell you, it will feel good.

  Writing this book gave me a chance to relive some of the best and worst times of my life, from predawn wake-up calls as a kindergartener getting ready to shoot my first sitcom to being a twenty-year-old with a fat stack of unpaid bills and an anorexic wallet. But you know what’s crazy? Even when I look back at that girl I was decades ago, I still feel like I just saw her yesterday, like she hasn’t been gone for all that long.

  I started working on this book while I was still shooting Glee, and finished the last few chapters with my new baby boy, Josey, sitting in his chair just a few feet away. Motherhood means learning new things and having your expectations turned upside down every single day, but it has also taught me one thing for certain: Josey is my greatest success, and I will never do any better than him.

  So yeah, being a mom changes things and makes you feel different in a lot of ways, but for me the big one is this: I’m braver. I’ve never been afraid of being an open book and telling it like it is, but now I can say, with 100 percent confidence, that zero fucks are given anymore. I don’t care what other people think, because being a mom puts everything into perspective. You no longer have to decide what’s important to you, because it’s right in front of your face, and chances are he’s hungry.

  Josey gave me wings (I know it’s cheesy, but it’s true), and with this book I hope to pass on a little bit of that flight to you. Your life doesn’t have to be perfect for you to be proud. In fact, I think it’s the opposite: the more imperfect your life has been, the prouder you should be, because it means you’ve come that much further, and also probably had a lot more fun along the way.

  And with that—I hope you have as much fun reading this book as I had writing it.

  I came into the world ready for the camera—Mom even used my baby book to keep a record of auditions.

  1

  THE NAY NAY YEARS

  FROM THE TIME I was in utero, it was my fate to be in front of the camera. The sound of flashbulbs made me kick, and I’m sure if the sonogram technology had allowed it, you’d have seen little fetus me trying to turn so they got my good side.

  My mom was an aspiring actress and model when she unexpectedly got pregnant with me. She was only twenty, but she’d already done pretty well for herself. She had worked a lot for Kohl’s in her hometown of Milwaukee, and every weekend there she was in the Sunday paper, modeling a different sweater.

  Once she landed in Los Angeles, she ate chicken in a KFC commercial with David Alan Grier and wore bunny ears and danced in a freezer (what?!) in a Smokey Robinson video. In her first trimester, she even made an appearance on The Young and the Restless, where I tried to steal the show by causing a bout of morning sickness that left her making secret trips to the bathroom.

  Once I was born, Mom kept it moving and didn’t miss a beat. She got me an agent before I could walk, and my grand entrance into life in the public eye was a topless scene: at seven months old I was cast in a Kmart commercial, to crawl across the floor wearing nothing but a diaper.

  From baby age on, I booked print ads, almost all of which were shot in front of a gray seamless, with me wearing a floral romper, OshKosh, or Plum Pudding—the height of late eighties, early nineties kids’ fashion. Even as a tot model, though, I couldn’t just stand there, nor was it all fun. It was work! I’d have to do stuff like hula-hoop, blow bubbles, pretend to laugh, or (the worst) hold hands with other kids—usually their hands were sweaty and clammy, or they’d pick their nose right up to the very last second, then reach their fingers toward mine.

  Even though I’d just recently stopped wearing diapers, I was three feet tall and all business. I got the hang of modeling really quickly and easily took direction from the photographer. When other models would get all teary eyed and hiccupy about holding hands with someone they didn’t know, I was always annoyed. “Why do we have to convince you?” I’d think. “Just do your job and hold my damn hand and take the picture!” I didn’t even pick my nose.

  I also started to book television commercials, and soon I was Mattel’s go-to ethnic girl, doing ads for Cabbage
Patch dolls or twirling around with a Bubble Angel Barbie. Sometimes all they wanted in the shot was my brown hand, so I’d get a manicure and then have to hold a toy very, very still while the cameras got their shot.

  My agent was a woman named Arletta Proch, who repped mostly babies and child actors. My mom had a pager so Arletta could get a hold of us when we were out running around for auditions, and when the pager would start buzzing, we always knew I’d gotten a job. We’d head straight to a pay phone, and Mom would call into the agency. They’d celebrate by clanging a cowbell on their end, and on our end Mom would pick me up so I could reach the receiver, and I’d scream as loud as I could into the phone. No matter if we were at a shopping mall in the Valley or at a phone booth in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, I practically tore my lungs out, screaming bloody murder, to show how excited I was. In retrospect, it’s amazing my mother didn’t get picked up on suspicion of kidnapping.

  At the time, my dad had a full-time job working in IT, which gave my mom the opportunity to devote herself full time to my career, and she founded a company called One-Plus-One Management. She was my manager, and I her only client (my husband and I joke now that we’re going to bring it back, and that I’ll represent him under One-Plus-One Management).

  Make no mistake, though: Mom was no mere momager. She was a badass, and really good at her job. She took my auditions very seriously and considered every detail when helping me look the part. We made a lot of trips to T.J.Maxx, where we’d dig through the racks until my mom found exactly what I needed. She also invested in makeup and props. I had a mole on my chin that we’d sometimes cover up using this thick, creamy makeup that was invented for burn victims to use to cover scars (to this day, I still use it for contouring), and we got really expensive flippers made—fake teeth that we could plug in when a real one fell out.

  If I was auditioning to play a girl who was kind of nerdy and wore her hair in braids, you could bet I’d show up with fake glasses, braids, and some dork-ass outfit of clashing plaids and prints. Since I was mixed race, I could play a lot of different ethnicities, from just plain old dark-skinned white girl to Latino to African American. Mom stopped short of giving me a spray tan, but if I was auditioning for a role specifically for a black girl, you could bet she’d encourage me to play outside in the sun.

  Mom’s diligence (and my hard work, of course) paid off, and at age five I landed my first television role on CBS’s The Royal Family. I honestly don’t remember the audition, but when I heard that I got it, I bet you could hear me scream all the way in San Diego.

  Created and executive-produced by Eddie Murphy, the show was a family comedy that starred Redd Foxx and Della Reese as a retired couple who are forced to deal when their daughter and three grandchildren move in with them.

  I played the youngest grandchild, Hillary, and Redd Foxx and I were intergenerational BFFs from the moment we met. He started to tell people that I really was his granddaughter, and I believed him. He and his wife were so nice to my whole family; they were always bringing me souvenirs from their trips, like a floral lei from Hawaii, or a tiny ceramic red fox—get it?

  Redd had a reputation for being a flashy dresser—he believed in dressing like a king—and so he got a lot of his clothes custom made to fit his opulent tastes. When he’d hit upon an outfit he really liked, he’d tell his tailor, “Get baby girl one too,” and then, boom! we’d be matching—which is how Redd and I ended up going on The Arsenio Hall Show looking like we’d both just raided Michael Jackson’s closet.

  In 2013, I went on Arsenio again, to talk about Glee, and he surprised me with the footage from twenty-two years earlier. In it Redd is wearing a red (again, get it? the man liked to work a theme) jacket covered in gold chains and tassels, a red beret, and giant sunglasses. I’m wearing a cream-colored two-piece suit, also covered in gold chains and tassels, with a giant crown on the back. Arsenio asks me if I want to be a model, and without missing a beat, I tell him I’m not into it because “I already did that!” Then he asks if I want to get married someday. My answer? “No!”—said in a tone of voice that implied that my prekindergarten self had never heard such a stupid question.

  However, my favorite outfit that Redd gave me, and possibly my favorite outfit of all time, never made a television appearance. It was a gold-lamé bandeau top that showed a little belly; a giant gold, poufed skirt, with a black net tutu underneath; and a gold biker hat.

  Once, I came downstairs with the whole ensemble on, determined to wear it to preschool. “Mom,” I said, twirling around, “this is so cool. People need to see this!” Mom rightly figured that it might be a little much for me to go to preschool dressed like a baby Paula Abdul, and marched me right back upstairs to change.

  That outfit is still in a box in my closet, though. The bandeau now barely fits around my foot, which is sad because I would definitely still rock that look if I could.

  On The Royal Family, I fell in love with being on TV. I’d just started preschool not too long before, so I didn’t really have much old life to compare my new life to, but I was still aware that I was doing something special. We’d wake up for call times at four thirty in the morning, and quietly tiptoe around and out the door so we wouldn’t wake up my dad before he had to get up and go to work. I never once complained about having to get out of bed so early, because secretly I knew that if I was up before the sun, I must be important.

  The schedule for being on a half-hour, multicamera sitcom was super regimented but not terribly strenuous. We were finished each day by the middle of the afternoon and didn’t ever have to shoot on weekends.

  Every Monday started with a table read of that week’s script. I still couldn’t read, so I was basically a parrot in pigtails. Mom would sit me on her lap and read lines off the blue-paper script, over my shoulder. When it would come to my lines, she’d say them out loud and I’d repeat them back. This was usually the first time the cast would see the script, so there was always a lot of laughing and joking about the lines.

  Tuesdays and Wednesdays were for the blocking rehearsals we needed before shooting in front of a live studio audience, which is a lot like live theater. They use terms like “downstage” and “upstage,” and you have to learn to cheat yourself, which means keeping your body open to the camera and the audience no matter what you’re doing.

  When the script called for me to do physical comedy—like running into the room while shooting Redd with a water gun, or making a giant mess by inexplicably pouring buckets of paint into a birdbath—I had to learn how to do it without ever turning my back toward the camera.

  I remember one particular scene where I had to pretend I needed to pee really bad while they slowly unspooled me from a sarong. Another episode called for me to sing a song and do a little dance, hitting three different marks along the way as I walked off camera. I shot this scene with a 102-degree fever—not because anyone told me I had to but because I insisted. There was no way I was missing a day of work or a fun scene! And even though I was burning up, I nailed it.

  On Thursdays we’d shoot any scenes that were too long to do in front of an audience, and then Friday was the big payoff. Shooting in front of a live audience on a Friday night always feels like a party, especially when you’re only five. When the actors come in, you do a precurtain call, where you run on set and are introduced to the audience. The adults would crack jokes, take bows, and shake hands with the audience, but since I was just a little kid, all I did was wave. Since we filmed at night, my dad was able to come when he got off work, and it always made me smile when he cheered extra loud.

  Sometimes people would bring presents or flowers after the taping, and after a few episodes of the show had aired, I started to get fan mail. My mom and I would sit in my dressing room with a stack of little headshot cards. She would open the letters, read them to me, and then I’d sign the card, in my child’s handwriting, with a little heart and “Naya,” and then we�
��d send it back. To this day, I still draw a little heart when I sign my name—which actually irks me, because I think it looks childish, but I can’t help it because it’s totally automatic at this point.

  I remember one time my mom opened a letter and started to read it to me. “Okay,” she said, “make it out to ‘Eddie.’” She started to spell it out for me, then stopped. “Oh no,” she said, “Eddie’s . . . in jail? How does he even watch TV?” Needless to say, Eddie and I would not go on to become pen pals.

  The Royal Family wasn’t a kids’ show, so I didn’t have many fans in my peer group, but occasionally people would see us out in public and come up to my parents to tell them how much they liked the show. One such person was Tupac, who saw us in LAX and came over to introduce himself to my mom.

  The story goes that he picked me up and held me for several minutes while he and my mom—who can chat up anyone—hit it off. Where are the photos of this, Mom and Dad?! Seriously, why didn’t you take pictures? Le sigh . . . But still: Tupac held me. Legendary.

  On set, the cast and crew really were like a family. Every Thursday, Redd’s friend Bubba would make gumbo for everyone, and on the days when my mom wasn’t eating gumbo, she was talking about how good it had been or how good it was gonna be. I was a weirdo kid who loved shrimp, so I gobbled it up right along with her.

  Redd Foxx was most well-known for his role on Sanford and Son, a show that had been created by legendary television producer Norman Lear and was hailed as having paved the way for African American sitcoms. Redd was first and foremost a comedian, and as the title character, Fred Sanford, he had a bit about having a heart attack. He’d clutch his chest dramatically and wail and moan about, warning his wife that he was coming up to see her. It was all part of his schtick.

  On October 11, 1991—less than a month after The Royal Family had premiered—Redd and I were running our lines on set. He was sitting in an easy chair, and I was standing on my mark in front of him, when all of a sudden he kind of slumped over and fell to the floor. For a while, no one moved. One of the producers even yelled, “Redd, come on!” Everyone assumed it was just part of his routine, so we waited patiently for him to stand back up. Except, he didn’t.