“Wait,” she said. She turned back and climbed over the chain. I marveled at her tenacity and followed her. We noticed a dim light inside the shop. I knocked on the door, and a woman saw me. As she walked our way, my mother whispered, “I’m gonna make up a story.” I’d seen that look on her face before: impish, mischievous.
When the door opened, Mom wrung her hands and wove a charming tale. That is, she lied.
“Oh, hello! So sorry to bother you. We bought stationery here as a present for a friend and we lost it on Space Mountain and we’re never going to be able to get it back because”—here came the hint of unspeakable sorrow—“we can’t ever come back to Disneyland. Ever.” With that, the store reopened just long enough to provide us with a new box. Though we offered to pay for it, the woman gave it to us for free.
“This really is the most magical place on earth,” Mom told the woman, making her day. We giggled the whole way home, and I clutched my stationery, appreciating it all the more.
—
Father of the Bride WAS almost an instant classic. The Monday after the opening weekend, I got a call at home in New York from Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was then the head of Disney’s motion picture division.
“Congratulations!” he cheered. “It’s a hit!”
—
I went from feeling invisible at Northwestern to being the most recognizable person on campus. My picture was on the cover of USA Today and People magazine, and I was a guest on national programs like The Tonight Show. Wherever I went, people stopped me. Boys I’d never met showed up from other parts of the country at my dorm room. Women everywhere told me stories of their own weddings, and fathers reminisced about playing basketball with their daughters. I took pictures and signed autographs. Life was indeed very different.
—
More than a year later, in July 1992, I invited my mom to accompany me on the press junket for the film’s release in Japan. We flew first-class, all expenses paid, and felt completely spoiled by everything Japan Airlines offered: a hot towel, tube socks, a kimono, and chocolate fudge sundaes. We toasted with our orange juice in champagne glasses and made friends with the flight attendants.
We had connecting rooms in a lavish Tokyo hotel, and splurged on in-room massages. We called my dad direct on separate phones in our rooms and had him conference us in so we could all talk at the same time. In a sushi restaurant, Mom charmed a man at our table so much that he swiped a set of sake cups for her. We couldn’t believe what we were being given (or being allowed to take), and no one celebrated it more than my mother. Her enthusiasm kept me going.
I had a lot of promotional work to do, and I was drained. On one particularly long and grueling day, I had to be a judge in the Best Father of the Bride Contest. But judgment was what I’d lacked in agreeing to be part of the show in the first place.
In the script, they would teleport me magically from California to Tokyo. When I appeared, I would recite the one phrase they’d taught me in Japanese. Roughly translated: “Where in the world am I?”
They put me in a short white Vera Wang dress, I guess to highlight that I was the movie bride. I was pushed onstage, without a translator, in front of a large audience including reporters.
The host seemed to welcome me at first. He rattled off a few sentences in Japanese and thrust the microphone in my face. That was my cue, so I said my line as best I could. The audience laughed. Success.
But then he kept jabbering and held the mic out to me again. I had no idea what to say. He added something else, maybe about how I was speechless. The audience roared. It was as if I were the subject of a comedy roast but didn’t understand any of the jokes about me. Finally a producer in the wings beckoned. I waved and walked offstage with a big smile plastered on my face, but feeling embarrassed and confused.
I didn’t have to say a word to my mom. As soon as I made it out of the spotlight, she responded with certainty about what to do. “Get her a bourbon!” she snapped at our guide, who hurried away to look for it backstage.
I was twenty years old and had only ever smelled bourbon. I didn’t really want any. But in an instant, all the unwritten mother/daughter rules we’d previously established dissolved (rule one being never drink alcohol in front of Mom or Dad). Suddenly we were contemporaries. So this is what she’s like, I thought, when she’s not trying to be a parent.
We went out to a club together that night, danced and flirted with people, and laughed about how awful the day had been. My relationship with my mother began to shift. She was still Mom. But she was becoming my friend. I couldn’t wait to get to know her better.
Before she met my father in 1964, Mom broke up with her previous boyfriend, in part because of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. She was a student in Paris at the time, homesick and devastated by the president’s death. During a transatlantic phone call, her potential husband—a handsome, athletic business whiz, adored by her stockbroker father—didn’t seem to empathize with her grief. It was one of the first signs that their relationship was rocky. They parted months later.
She met my dad at the perfect time, when she was ready to fall in love with someone quite different. She saw something in Gurney Williams that her father did not. When my dad formally asked George Payne for Mom’s hand in marriage, my grandfather hardly knew what to say. Dad learned later that Grandpa was more than perplexed by the skinny liberal journalist sitting in front of him and was lamenting what might have been.
Like Mom after the Kennedy assassination, and like many Americans, I felt deep grief and isolation on September 11, 2001. I had been enjoying life. Father of the Bride had led to other film and television roles, most recently as a series regular on the ABC TV show According to Jim. But that day, as I sat immobile on my couch in Santa Monica, California, watching scenes of destruction and death, my work, my little house on the beach, and all the things in it didn’t matter. Life, so very fragile, became simple. I prayed that my family and friends were all right.
My mother had gone back to work by then, as a fundraiser in New York City for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Our relationship was as strong as ever. Both of us were working hard and traveling a lot. We talked every couple of weeks or so, but I didn’t know her daily schedule. Her office was about four miles from Ground Zero, and I wondered if maybe she’d had a meeting downtown. Friends of mine lived and worked all over Manhattan. Any of them could have been close to the attacks.
I worried about Ash, too. A budding actress, she spent a lot of time in the city, and she had been prepping that morning for an audition. And I thought about my brother, Jay, who at that time was training in California to become a firefighter. How many people with his brave commitment to rush toward danger had died that day?
Where was everyone?
There was no way to know. Phone lines were jammed. I felt helpless. By the time I walked away from my TV hours later, four hijacked jets had crashed and thousands had lost their lives.
I stepped outside onto my small front porch. The California sun sparkled on the Pacific beyond an empty beach at the end of my street. The city was unusually quiet. No planes rumbled overhead toward LAX. No traffic choppers whirred above the freeways. My neighbor appeared with his dog on a leash. We had occasionally traded hellos on the street. But on that day, without saying a word, we hugged.
Within hours, thankfully, I knew that everyone I loved was safe. But, driven by my vulnerability, I began to yearn to find someone to be by my side during future disasters, failures, or fears in the night. Someone who could celebrate success with me, laugh, listen, and understand me. I wonder now if Mom had been feeling the same way when she’d met my quirky and steadfast father.
I knew at the time that this was more of a wish than a plan, and I wasn’t sure that it was realistic. Conversations with guys in LA, mostly actors, never delved much beneath the surface. I didn’t fully trust them.
Enough. I wanted what my parents had: a stable, loving relationship. My wish became a praye
r. A couple of weeks later, I wrote something like this on a scrap of notepaper:
I am ready to meet my life partner. I know this person is out there. Thank you, God, Universe, Higher Power, for protecting him and helping him to have a good day today. Help him to rest well tonight. Thank you for working out a way for us to find each other.
I rolled the paper into a tiny cigarette-sized cylinder and jammed it into a purple ceramic prayer jar with a cork lid by my bed. I never needed to reread it. At night, in the mornings, in the car driving to work, it became my mantra, a continuous song in my heart.
I am ready. Bring us together. Open his eyes. Help him find me.
And then, not five weeks after I began asking for divine matchmaking, a country singer named Brad Paisley woke up on his tour bus thinking of me. He swears this had never happened to him before.
He’d seen Father of the Bride nine years earlier with his girlfriend. When she broke up with him, he was devastated. Later she tried to reconcile. But Brad was conflicted. On the anniversary of their first date, he went to see Father of the Bride, Part II by himself. He hoped that if he and his ex were fated to be together, she’d have the identical idea and show up for the same show, ensuring that their lives were inexorably entwined. Brad is an idealist. A romantic.
Fortunately for me, she was neither. He went on to write a song about his great disappointment:
Hollywood never fails to make a sequel
For each and every movie that does well.
Why can’t love be more like that,
Where the best ones get a second chance?
And that way though you’re gone,
It wouldn’t be that long
Till I’d see you in Part Two.
Through all of his pain, Brad didn’t give a thought to Annie, the young bride on the screen. He pined after the girl who didn’t show.
But years later, when he woke up after an overnight bus ride to Nashville from a Halloween concert in Kansas, he was suddenly determined to find me.
As he drove his truck past Opryland on the way back to his bachelor pad, he called the only person he knew well in Los Angeles. He hoped that Peter Tilden, a radio personality and writer, might be able to connect the two of us.
Brad was clueless about who I really was. Single? Married? No idea. But his plan had formed quickly. As his opening line, he was going to ask me if I’d appear in a music video for the song “Part Two.” This was a little lie. He had no real plans to shoot it.
He was lucky. Peter knew my manager at the time, Tammi Chase. Brad reached her before he pulled into his driveway. Minutes later, the phone rang in my car as I was on my way home from a funeral.
“I just talked to the cutest guy,” Tammi said. “A country singer. You’re totally gonna date him.”
“What?”
“He’s got the coolest story to tell you. He said he wants you in a music video, but I think you guys are going to date. He’s got a southern accent!”
Later that day, intrigued, I dialed Brad on his cell phone from my house. He picked up right away and began relaying his version of the Father of the Bride story. As he went through all the details, I tried to ask a question. He stopped me.
“No, I went to the seven-thirty show by myself, and when she didn’t turn up, I bought a second ticket for the nine-thirty,” he said. “Pay attention!” I loved his sassy humor and the way he made fun of me right away. We talked for a long time. He tossed off a few words about the video he wanted to make, but quickly the conversation turned to other things—life in Tennessee versus California, our families, and relationships. We were both children of long-standing marriages and hoped to follow our parents’ examples. We exchanged email addresses, traded messages, and talked again a few days later. I was dying to meet this guy in person. Was he the answer to my prayer? We stayed in touch during the next couple of weeks, each conversation more interesting than the last.
We had a lot to learn from our differences, especially our tastes in music. I’d never listened to country. My family listened to the Beatles, Top Forty, classical music, Broadway soundtracks, and even the Yale singing group the Whiffenpoofs from my dad’s time in college. I hadn’t heard of the Opry, and thought Brad said he was going to perform “at the opera” (was it his accent?) when he first told me about the original home of country music.
A few weeks later, Brad came to LA for work and I asked him to dinner. At the restaurant in Marina del Rey, he excused himself to the bathroom while I was in the middle of telling a story. He was reserved and a little nervous in person. We had a pleasant couple of dates, but I didn’t sense the humor that had been there over the phone. I wondered if we had the connection I’d thought we did. I told him I wanted to proceed cautiously.
“That’s totally fine,” he said. “I get it. I like you. I like spending time with you. I don’t know what this relationship is supposed to be, but I think we’re meant to be in each other’s lives. Maybe just as friends.” He was calm, confident, understanding. “If you want to go to dinner again sometime,” he told me, “I’ll fly to wherever you are to make it happen.” There was no game playing here. No drama. It was really attractive.
—
So I took him at his word. I didn’t make a commitment to him, and we stayed in touch. In late December I decided to accept his dinner invitation. I was going to be in New York and thought it might be fun to meet him in my home state.
“How’s December twenty-eighth?” I asked, not knowing that was the same date Brad had first gone out with his old girlfriend exactly ten years earlier.
Bad weather on the day of our date meant that Brad’s flight was rerouted to White Plains, just fifteen minutes from my parents’ home. So I invited them to join us.
I thought the dinner at an Italian restaurant went well. There was one awkward moment when Brad seemed to forget my dad was talking and leaned in to whisper something in my ear. But overall, the conversation flowed. Mom giggled easily, though she was mostly quiet while my father and Brad got more serious, talking about music and religion. In what almost seemed like a Freudian slip of a move, when we left the restaurant Dad accidentally pulled away from the curb before Brad could get into the car. We all laughed it off, but the truth was, my father was a little nervous. Maybe he sensed there was a lot at stake.
“Wow,” he said to my mom later, when my parents were alone, meaning he was impressed.
“Yeah, can you believe that?” Mom said, meaning she was sure it wouldn’t last.
Ironically, although my mother didn’t notice it, Brad was in some ways like her last boyfriend before Dad. Brad had a business degree and a solid career plan. He was talented, successful, self-assured. He knew how to ride a horse, drive a truck, and shoot a gun. He was a guy’s guy. My mother’s father would have been thrilled.
Maybe Brad was too quick to assume he didn’t have to work hard to impress her. He was casual in front of her, and maybe she was expecting more formality. In West Virginia, Brad grew up drinking filtered water. When I offered him a glass straight out of the tap in our kitchen in New York (“the cleanest water in the country,” Mom always insisted), he joked, “Why don’t you just pee in it?”
Maybe this boyish humor distracted my mother from his talent and charm. Or perhaps she just wasn’t ready to face the reality that her first child might start her own family all too soon. She assumed I’d move on, perhaps the way she had many years earlier.
She may also have sensed the truth, which was that I was still unsure. Was there enough there between the two of us for me to really commit to a long-distance relationship? I know I said I was ready to meet the one, God, but is this him? I called Brad once we’d both returned to our homes after a couple of days together in New York. I let him know that I was still reticent. His reaction surprised me. He got fired up, and for the first time I saw his passion.
“I don’t want to take anything away from your life,” he said, his voice louder than I’d ever heard it. “I only want to add to
your life.” He told me he’d wait until I decided how I wanted to move forward.
And then he went off and wrote “Little Moments.” We now joke that this is the song that got him married. He called and played it for me over the phone:
I’ll never forget the first time that I heard
That pretty mouth say that dirty word…
It was the F-word. I knew right away that he was referring to the first time I said it in front of him, right after he told me he didn’t curse. I wanted to see what he would do, if the southern gentleman could handle a northern woman’s potty mouth. At the time, he chuckled in surprise. But he was fine.
The lyrics in “Little Moments” made me recognize Brad’s insight about me for the first time. He’d written poetry from mere snapshots of our relationship, pictures I never would’ve remembered because they seemed insignificant at the time. Not only did he understand me, he appeared to accept and adore me as I was.
I invited him back to California. Over two days, everything changed. After that weekend and a few trips out on the road on the tour bus (ten guys and me!), I’d fallen in love with him.
As we walked on the pier in Marina del Rey one night, I pressed Brad about why he’d called me in the first place.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just woke up with the clearest feeling that we were supposed to be in each other’s lives.” It seemed to both of us like divine intervention.
I called home and told Mom and Dad I’d never felt this way about someone before. They sounded startled. I could hear it in their voices. Really? So soon? My mother stifled her hesitation, apparently still thinking that my infatuation would fade. On the contrary, Brad and I started seeing each other whenever possible.
Eight months after we met, Tammi asked me to meet a photographer who was working on the pier Brad and I had walked on not long before.
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