Happy Accidents

by Jane Lynch

  For my part, I had decided that Laurie Bohner was a woman with no shame about her porno past. I purposely gave her a womanly sexual confidence because I had no idea what that felt like. I put chicken cutlets in my bra, emphasized my round ass, and sprayed on a tan. Although I couldn’t wait to shed this getup at the end of the day, it actually got me more in touch with my womanly self. Though I didn’t keep using the chicken cutlets, I did continue showing more cleavage after we were done shooting.

  My inner MILF.

  In between the shooting of A Mighty Wind and its premiere, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. It was small cell carcinoma, the kind that’s usually too far along by the time it’s discovered to do anything about.

  My dad was the type of guy who went to the doctor for a cold. He wasn’t a hypochondriac, but he was mindful of his health. Like most of his generation, he had smoked when he was a young man and was given a ration of cigarettes while in the service. But he had quit more than thirty years prior, so the diagnosis was a kick in the pants.

  He went through a couple of rounds of chemotherapy, but we had all been told that it probably wouldn’t do much to stop the cancer. It just made him very weak. My dad had always been the head of the household, the good husband and provider, and I had seen him vulnerable only a few times in my life. But now my mom was fully in charge. He even let her drive. Julie stepped up to help during this time as well, going to their house at all hours to deal with one crisis after another. And I flew back home every couple of weeks to be with them.

  While I was there one week, my mom came down with a severe kidney infection and was on fire with fever. She had to be in a separate room because we couldn’t risk my dad catching anything, and I remember the doctor telling me I had to get my mother’s temperature down by putting wet washcloths under her armpits. She was almost delirious and was resisting me, and oh god it was awful.

  My dad as a U.S. soldier in World War II, guarding the Iranian oil fields.

  Meanwhile, my dad was worried and scared, and turned this into a fixation on some insurance papers that he couldn’t find. He kept asking about them, so I told him I would find them, and that all he had to do was focus on feeling better. He said he was relieved, so I searched the house for the insurance papers while trying to take care of him and my mom. I ran up and down the stairs to tend to both of my parents.

  At this point it really hit me that I was no longer a kid. The people who had taken care of me now needed me to take care of them.

  When her fever finally broke, Mom walked to the stairs to yell down to my dad, who was set up on the first floor, that she loved him.

  My dad had gone to twelve years of Catholic school and Mass every Sunday of his life, yet I don’t think he ever really thought about his own death. He did what he was supposed to do and kept faithfully moving through life. Now that he was facing his mortality, although he had been such a good man, he seemed frightened of what was to come. I wished he could be at peace.

  We took him to hospice in early June and tried to focus on keeping him comfortable. He had been at home for a while, but he was experiencing delirium and needed round-the-clock care. I know my mom had an awful time accepting that she couldn’t take care of him anymore.

  My old friend Chris’s parents, Mike and Joan, had been hospice volunteers for years and had learned a few things about helping people pass away. They told me that people have a hard time letting go if there are matters in life that remain unresolved, or if their loved ones are present in the room. After my dad had been in hospice for about a week, my mom finally found those insurance papers he had been so worried about. She whispered this in his ear and went down to the gift shop to buy something that had caught her eye earlier. Always the shopper, my mother. When she came back, the nurse told her that my dad was “actively dying.” I think he picked his time, and let himself die.

  Aunt Marge, my dad’s sister, had just arrived as well. She had gotten a feeling that she needed to get to the hospice and had just hopped in a cab.

  I was in LA, driving, on June 11, 2003, when my mom called and said, “Honey, he’s gone.”

  A hospice worker gave my mother the candle they’d lit in the chapel for my father, and a few days later when she was at home, she made herself a drink and lit the candle. She toasted the candle with “first today, badly needed.” My mom is a pragmatic, unsentimental type, so when she told me the candle emitted a prism of light directly aimed at her, a light that followed her as she walked around it, I believed her. When she said it was Dad sending his love to her, I believed that, too.

  This was the first time I had lost someone close to me. The grief came in waves, and has never completely gone away. It still catches me today. I remember the most intense feeling of loss was the sadness I felt for my mother about a year later, at my cousin Maureen’s wedding, when the band played one of Mom and Dad’s favorite songs, “Can I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life?” They had some kind of love, my parents.

  A Mighty Wind had opened in April, just before my dad died. Though he was pretty sick already, he and my mother had gone to see it. He was thrilled with the music and proud of me. I’m so glad he got to see it.

  After we buried my dad, I came back to LA and immediately went to work on a short called Little Black Boot, a retelling of the Cinderella story. I played the wicked stepmother, the first of three times I would play that character, in three different movies.

  It felt very strange to just go on like that, and I had to talk myself out of feeling guilty.

  That fall, the album for A Mighty Wind was released and we went on tour. We traveled in an actual tour bus and played to sold-out houses in Philadelphia, New York, Washington, DC, Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

  It was a joy to be part of this talented group of good people, a panacea for my heart and soul. We all loved to sing and we all loved to laugh, and I no longer felt on the outside of everything. I was a part of something I loved, and I felt like I deserved to be there.

  I had work already scheduled for after the tour. I was mostly getting offers with no audition required, and I was partly relieved not to have to do it anymore, but I also sort of missed auditioning. Unless you are half-assed, you have to prepare for an audition as you would a performance. For me, that meant being entirely off book (i.e., knowing all the lines), because I’ve found it’s almost impossible to do well if I’m half off and half on. I enjoyed that preparation, but I also liked the feeling of walking into a room in which no one knows you from Adam, and making everyone sit up and wonder where you came from. But still, the pressure of auditioning could be pretty heavy, so I was fine letting it go.

  Let it go I did, until Judd Apatow called me and asked me to audition for his movie. I was very happy to get to audition one more time. Not surprisingly, I would be auditioning for a part originally written for a man.

  I’d known Steve Carell since the Second City days; we had been in different touring companies at the same time. When he was getting ready to cast The 40-Year-Old Virgin (which he’d written and would be starring in, with Judd directing), Steve’s wife, Nancy Walls (a fine actress in her own right), told him he had too many men in his movie. “At least read Jane for the store manager,” she said. Bless her for that. So there I was in the waiting area, along with a bunch of guys, all of us auditioning for the store manager of SmartTech.

  Steve and I improvised together, and in the scene we created I offered to relieve him of his virginity. When they offered me the role, my new agents advised me to turn it down, because they thought the script was ridiculous (it was) and because I would only be paid scale, which at that time was about $1500 a week. These agents were not going to allow me to work for a buck-fifty and a steak. I listened to them, and for the first time in my life, I turned down (legitimate) work. “If they really want you,” my agents said, “they’ll come back with a better offer.”

  The script really wasn’t good, but it didn’t really matter. It was basically
an outline with some suggested dialogue that would be a blueprint from which we would improvise. That’s how Anchorman had been made, and these were the same producers.

  They did come back with a little more money, but my agents said it was still an insult. I held my breath as I turned it down again. But I really wanted it.

  Then Steve called me, and said, “Jane, we wrote your audition into the script, verbatim. You have to do this movie.” That’s all it took.

  I called Gabrielle, my point agent at this new agency, and blurted, “I have to do this movie!!! They want me! They need me!!! I can’t play this game anymore! Please accept their offer!” She accepted for me the next day.

  I was called in to work every day that we shot at the fake SmartTech store. The set was built in a warehouse on La Cienega near the freeway. Judd wanted us all there every day because we were making a lot of this movie up as we went along, and he needed us to be handy in case he wanted to throw us into a scene. I felt like I was sitting on the bench and hoping to get called into the game. It was not at all like my experience on the JV basketball team in high school when I prayed “please don’t put me in, please don’t put me in!”

  It was while sitting around waiting to play that I started to put dialogue from my high school Spanish textbook to music. The next day, I’d finished my “Guatemalan Love Song,” and I told Steve before we shot the scene that I would be singing to him and not to be alarmed. The song set the pedestrian words of the dialogue to a sweet romantic melody. My character sang the song to Steve as she recalled her own sweet deflowering at the tender age of fourteen by a middle-aged gardener. “Cuando arreglan mi quarto, no encuentro nada” translates as “Whenever I clean my room, I can’t find anything.” Steve’s expression was a perfect blend of dumbfounded horror and awe. “Donde vas con tanta prisa? Al partido de futbol.” “Where are you going with such haste? To a football game.” I blew Steve a kiss, and sauntered away.

  As with the Guest films, none of us knew which scenes we shot would end up staying in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. We shot so much film; when we hit the million-feet-of-film mark, there was a champagne toast. That’s a whole lot of film, and it can’t all be in the final movie. I try not to have any investment in whether something is in or out of these films, as I have no control over it. But I couldn’t help hoping my little ditty would make the cut.

  At the cast and crew screening, Judd came up to me and said, “I think you’ll be happy to know there’s a Guatemalan love song in this movie. Who’s your favorite director?”

  The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a hit, and suddenly Judd Apatow was the hottest guy in Hollywood. His next film was Talladega Nights, with Will Ferrell playing a famous NASCAR driver, Ricky Bobby. Instead of just offering me a role in that movie, damn it if my favorite director didn’t want me to audition again.

  Supreme confidence. Steve Carell and me in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

  Photo courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC

  Honestly, it was probably because Judd was producing this film rather than directing it. Adam McKay, Will Ferrell’s producing partner, was directing, and he didn’t know me.

  On my forty-fifth birthday, I walked into the same room of the same studio as I had for The 40-Year-Old Virgin audition. I was up to play Ricky Bobby’s sensible mother, and Jack McBrayer, who had a small part in the movie, improvised with me as Ricky Bobby for the audition. Jack had been at The Second City in Chicago as well, but several years after my time. I hadn’t met him, but I knew of him. He was adorable and funny and just so quick on his feet. Jack is also a good Georgia boy. He rolled out the “ma’am”s, which on that day served to make me feel every one of my forty-five years. (He’s a big honkin’ star now on 30 Rock, as Kenneth the Page, and I couldn’t be happier for him.)

  I was hired to play Lucy Bobby, Ricky’s mother. As on The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the script was a work-in-progress and we’d be improvising most of the dialogue. I immediately borrowed a book from Jeannie of expressions and sayings from the Deep South. I loaded myself up with a bunch of them so they’d be on the tip of my tongue. I chuckled through practicing “Well, that just dills my pickle” . . . “She looked rode hard and hung up wet” . . . “I’m gonna paint your back door red.” My law-and-order granny was taking shape.

  When we started filming, the story line following the rise and fall of Ricky was set, but scenes would be added or cut as we went along. One day, Will came up with a scene he wanted to add in the part of the story where Ricky Bobby is depressed because he’s no longer racing and he’s moping around Lucy Bobby’s house. Will wanted Lucy to confront Ricky about giving up and not trying to do something with his life. Ricky would then very earnestly attempt to impress his mom (me) with his newfound talent of passing gas in complete sentences like “I love you” and “Merry Christmas.” I had to say the Hail Mary to myself several times, as it was one of the best fart skits I have had the pleasure of being in. Sadly, it is not in the final cut of the movie, but you can find it among the DVD extras.

  We shot the movie in Charlotte, North Carolina, and just as when I’d lived in New York, I made things hard on myself by moving constantly. I could have just moved into the same hotel with the rest of the cast, but I wanted to bring Olivia, to keep me company and because I loved her so. The only hotel that allowed dogs was a shady place on the other side of town. I moved in, but despite having Olivia with me, I was lonely. After less than a week, I moved into an apartment downtown where the wardrobe designer I’d befriended was living and where they allowed dogs. But she was so damn busy and I was not, so I rarely saw her, and I was still lonely and still far away from the cast. Finally, I snuck Olivia into an apartment that forbade dogs next to the hotel where the cast was staying. I got to hang out with Leslie Bibb, John Reilly, my old pal Andy Richter (whose part was cut from the movie), and of course, Jack.

  Will Ferrell with my sister, Julie, and her kids—John, Ellen, and Megan.

  I finally allowed myself to be a part of the group after hopping around, and to my great surprise and satisfaction, I found I actually preferred my own company; I liked hanging out with me. I had a lot of free time, as I had to be in Charlotte for over two months but wasn’t shooting that many scenes. I took most of my days off solo, walking around the huge mall near my apartment, carrying Olivia in a shoulder bag, spending all my per diem. I was having a ball.

  My apartment was huge, with two large bedrooms. It reminded me of the cavernous apartment I’d rented in Westwood while I was doing The Real Live Brady Bunch. But this time it wouldn’t stay empty for long. My mother and my sister’s family would be coming out to visit, to watch us shoot the race sequences, and I offered a room to anyone who didn’t want to stay in the hotel. My mom and my niece Megan (Julie’s now twenty-one-year-old daughter, whom I adored) took me up on it and bunked at my place. We all had a great time, but when they left I was just as happy to get back to my solitary and entirely joyful puttering.

  I loved creating a temporary home in Charlotte. I had my routines, my friends when I wanted them, and most important, my puppy dog. I had no other worries or cares: I’d left those behind in Los Angeles. When I arrived, I’d brought only Olivia and one huge suitcase. By the time I left, I had accumulated six boxes full of stuff: clothes I had purchased while mall shopping, as well as the home comforts I’d acquired, including sheets, a featherbed, candles, and even throw pillows.

  It seemed I had a new compulsion to add to coffee and paper straightening: I was purchasing with abandon. But like my drinking before, it was never bad enough to take me down. I could afford what I was buying, but I could tell the behavior was controlling me, rather than the other way around. I had a low threshold for discomfort, so while it didn’t destroy my life, it did nag at me. As fate would have it, and in the form of what seemed like a happy accident, one of the new friends I met in Charlotte was a financial advisor at a local securities company. Marcia, a no-nonsense, straight-talking Southerner, would take me on as a client and beco
me extremely instrumental in getting me to mind my finances and become conscious about my compulsive spending.

  A week before we wrapped Talladega Nights, I flew back to LA to shoot my three days for Chris Guest’s new movie, For Your Consideration. We shot at Culver Studios, the old MGM, and I shivered with delight knowing Greta Garbo had shot every movie of hers I’d seen on this very lot.

  I was teamed up with Fred Willard, this time as TV co-anchors of an entertainment show called Hollywood Now. Fred is a national treasure. He has more trivia, statistics, and useless information in his head than anyone I’ve ever known, and he knows just how to jumble it all up. Using this, he can hold forth on any number of topics, sounding fully confident while confusing all the facts.

  Me and Fred Willard on the set of Hollywood Now.

  Photo from For Your Consideration © Shangri-La Entertainment, LLC. Licensed By: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  For this movie, the pressure was almost completely off me, as most of my scenes were not only scripted but displayed for me on a teleprompter. From having watched entertainment shows for many years, I’d noticed that the female hosts stand at a sort of a forty-five-degree angle from the waist down, with shoulders squared to the camera, giving the impression of having a tiny waist, long legs, and a small ass. If you hold that pose and speak A LITTLE LOUDER THAN NECESSARY, you’re golden. So that was my plan.

  Fred had another plan, completely unknown to me. The first scene we shot, the only scene Fred and I had to improvise, we were to interview the cast of Home for Purim, the movie within our movie. For the first take, Chris had told Fred not to allow me to finish a sentence or get a word in edgewise.

  Fred asked him, “Shouldn’t we tell Jane?”

  Chris said, “No.”