M: Somebody asked us to. The people demand it. So let’s just make it all up.
So, how many times a day, on average, would you say we have sex? Not the weekends—just the weekdays.
N: I mean, we’re well into middle age. So usually . . . three times a day?
M: That’s a fair estimate. Mainly, at this point, we never have sex at home. Only in public places. Because we kind of got tired of just having it in our house. We like to do it at the Grove. That’s one of our favorites.
N: The Grove, for those of you who don’t live in West Hollywood, is a rather resplendent shopping mall with a fake pond that has incredible water shows.
M: A beautiful pond.
N: It’s one of those ponds that has choreographed fountain shows to Rick Astley songs.
M: (Sings) So we like to do it there.
N: Where else do we like to do it? The roller rink is fun.
M: That is fun.
N: And there’s an element of daredevil to that particular coitus.
M: Mmm-hmm. Really anywhere in the Hollywood Walk of Fame area.
N: In the San Diego aquarium, there are three tanks you can access.
M: Not a lot of people know this.
N: Let’s just say that maybe we’re even more closely related to dolphins than we ever realized. There were about five years there where you were calling me Flipper.
M: Let’s revive that nickname.
N: They’re not the only ones with a blowhole!
M: Approximately three times a day on weekdays, I’d say . . . five on weekends?
N: That’s fair. That’s an average, though, because it’s usually twice on Saturday, ten or twelve times on Sunday.
M: Not sure about that math, but it’s hard to do sums with all that testosterone coursing through your body . . . We like to do it in movie theaters as well.
N: And churches are really fun, mostly for handwork. This is true—we were in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican.
M: Is that true?
N: Yes. And the Vatican is part of Italy, which is in Europe.
M: What?
N: Which is on the planet Earth.
M: I’m not following.
N: I follow Neil deGrasse Tyson on Twitter.
We were in the Sistine Chapel, and it was amazing, but the experience was pretty uncomfortable, because it was crowded, and the guards were constantly yelling at everybody. You weren’t supposed to take pictures, so they didn’t want to see your phone. You had to keep moving, and you had to stay in a certain area. So it was like getting on a crowded airplane where the flight attendants keep telling you, loudly, over the speaker system, how to put your bag in the overhead compartment. So we just pressed up against each other and started rubbing each other’s genitals with our hands, giggling.
M: (Laughs)
N: And then we made a mess. I will say this—Italian mop equipment is garbage. Centuries behind American janitorial tackle.
M: That was last year that we took that trip. Just for archival purposes. So when we’re arrested, they’ll have the dates.
I think we’re more affectionate in public than a lot of people. Or anyone on earth.
N: There weren’t too many people getting fingered in that particular chapel on that day.
On a serious note, something I would say in a book to people—because I wish that someone had said this to me when I was a teenager, when I was overcome with these instinctive feelings of lust, they really affect one’s life, going through puberty and having this incredible drive to have sex—all the propaganda I’d seen was about how to impress ladies, how to get ladies in the sack. There’s a lot of popular culture directed toward teenage boys, or at least there was in those days. Back when a rated-R movie meant that you would see some boobs. I’m glad that things have gotten more mature in that regard. But still, I would say to people who are not having sex a couple dozen times a week like we are, it’s important to take the pressure off it. And treat your lover, or prospective lover, like a person, and talk about it. Sex got so much better when I let all of this teenage angst roll off of me and said, “Hey, what parts of you do you like me to do this to?” Getting into a casual, comfortable, and mutual sexual relationship.
M: I hope you find that someday.
N: (Whispers) Thank you. When I think about my early relationships—my late teens into my twenties—they were so driven by animal instinct. There was a selection process that had a lot to do with sex drive. I’m glad I made it through that period to where my sex drive mellowed enough so I was able to listen to my heart and my brain.
M: I have not made it through that period yet. Did I tell the witch story?
N: The good thing is that we’re doing well in our professional careers. To have an oversized custom oven built, in a patch of woods behind our house, was not inexpensive.
M: And Nick is fire in that witch’s outfit.
N: That really has done me a lot of good.
M: Let’s move on.
N: That’s it?
M: What else do you want to say? We have to cut this chapter short because we’re going to get it on. Have to stick to the schedule.
N: That’s right. Okay, get in there . . . slow down . . . um . . . try two of those . . .
M: You’re not the boss of me—
N: Goddammit.
M: And we have arrived at . . .
N: Fighting!
M: Punch!
N: Ow! Will you shut up for one second?
M: It’s a new topic. Fighting! Although I don’t know what we’ll say, because we’ve never had a fight. (Laughs) In eighteen years. We’ve just been blissfully happy. Just cracking each other up. He acts like Ron, and I act like Karen . . . everything’s perfect. End of chapter.
N: Sometimes when we don’t fight, we don’t have sex afterward.
M: We’re too busy having sex to fight.
There’s a perception of us as this perfect couple, so we’ve always been paranoid that if we get into a scrape at the grocery store, it’s going to be running on a chyron on CNN. That’s ridiculous, of course, but I’m exaggerating to make a point, the point being that people think that we have such an idyllic relationship that if we had a normal spat, like people do sometimes in public places . . .
N: It would be like the Death of Love.
We’re accused of being “couple goals” enough that it puts a pressure on you in the public eye—“We’re supposed to be amazing. Shit.”
M: I will say—we’re pretty lucky. Early on, our fights were more splashy than they are now. Now they’re pretty boring. But we had some good ones early on.
N: I feel like we have a real complementary set of personalities and dispositions. The RPMs I run on, and yours . . .
M: I’m a lot more mellow than Nick is. (Laughs)
N: You’re all chill. All the time. It’s hard to get a rise out of you.
(Both laugh)
N: And I’m like a fucking moth in a lamp.
(Both continue to laugh)
M: That’s going to be the name of my autobiography: Moth in a Lamp.
N: We had to figure out, pretty quickly, how to compromise our yin and our yang.
M: I call Nick Farmer Joe sometimes. Or Grandpa Joe. Because he’s so fucking slow. In the beginning of our relationship, we’d be walking, and I’d be like eight miles ahead of him. Because he fucking WALKS so slow. And I’d say, “Use your legs! Let’s go!”
N: (Laughs) “Farmer Joe”?
M: “Pick up the pace, Geegaw.”
N: And to his credit, Geegaw picked up the pace . . .
M: He picked it up, and I slowed down. We’ve compromised. Because I was walking at full-on Midtown Manhattan pace, and he was walking at Corn Shucking pace.
N: As one does . . .
Of t
he many couples I’ve experienced in my life, I feel like we take a lot less umbrage with each other. I took as a cautionary tale some of the relationships in my family, the older generations, that complain about each other. It goes both ways. The husbands would bitch about their wives, and the wives would hilariously bitch about their husbands. Once I got into this marriage—
M: Which one?
N: This one right here. That occurred to me—this is when I go to my friends and I say, “Christ, guess what the wife did today?” and I immediately recognized that I didn’t want to be like that.
M: It’s hard to complain with a mouthful of puss.
N: (Laughs) True dat.
The example of my mom and dad has always helped me so much. In terms of swallowing my male pride.
M: It’s helped me as well.
N: Go on . . . it’s right there.
(Both laugh)
(Inaudible for a bit)
N: But here’s a slightly different tack. We never really fight about the tangible things. The physical things. (Joking voice) “You’ve got to stop buying so many fancy hats!”
M: I really need to stop doing that, though.
N: You’re welcome to do as you please in the hat department.
M: Thank you.
N: So generally, when we fight, it’s about our state of being at the moment. And that always turns into a perceived slight. Or just anything—dealing with stress on some level. “I need to blow off some steam, so what the fuck are you doing with that suitcase?” It has nothing to do with the suitcase—it has everything to do with our state of mind.
M: Just us being stressed out in general. And then some fight will start over something really stupid. Like most people.
N: And as we’ve said—we certainly say it to each other a lot—just stupid schedules of traveling and high-pressure performance jobs of one sort or another—I think we fight pretty infrequently for the amount of stress we’re under.
M: Oh my god, I agree.
N: Fuck off.
M: But I . . .
I moved to Los Angeles in 1985, when I was twenty-six years old. I had just done a TV movie in Chicago, which starred this young actress named Amy Steel, who I got to be good friends with. So I’d been in LA for about a week, and I was at the Beverly Center, which was like the center of the universe at that point in time.
I was in the parking garage walking from my car to the escalators when a car slows down and this man’s voice says, “Hey, Megan!” I turned around, and it was this guy who had produced the TV movie in Chicago.
He said, “What are you doing?”
I said, “I just moved out here five days ago.” He asked me if I had an agent and I said no.
And he said, “Well, I know this woman at William Morris. I’m going to call her—she’s young and looking for clients. I’ll call her and maybe she’ll see you.”
I gave him my phone number, and a couple days later, she called me and I went in for a meeting. Her name was Beth Cannon. There were two other young female agents she shared clients with. I was twenty-six, and they were all between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-eight. They were all my age, but they seemed like my mother—they seemed so much more mature and worldly than I was that I felt like a little kid. It was Beth Cannon, J. J. Harris, and Elaine Goldsmith. They ended up signing me. The agency didn’t want to sign me, but Beth Cannon went to the mat for me and said, “I really believe in her,” based on nothing—I had no reel or anything.
And so, within two weeks of being in Los Angeles, I got signed by William Morris, which at the time was the biggest agency in Los Angeles. I kind of couldn’t believe it. They started sending me a million scripts to read, and sending me out on auditions. They also loved for me to come over and just hang out at the agency, which is so funny. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. I would just go over there and hang out in their offices. This was back in the day when agents would scream obscenities—scream at the top of their lungs at whoever they were trying to make deals with—and slam the phone down in its cradle, hanging up on each other. It was very exciting.
The other thing they loved to do was take me out to dinner. They were all so young—I don’t know who their other clients were, but apparently nobody particularly interesting. I had to be the least important client at William Morris, but they were constantly asking me out to dinner, which was really nice because I had no money. They liked to go to the Ivy and put it on the William Morris expense account.
At the time, the Ivy on Robertson was like Studio 54 or something. You’d always see a bunch of celebrities. So I had been to dinner with them one night at the Ivy and we were walking out, the three of them and me. They had valet-parked. They asked me if I had valet-parked, which is funny because that would have been an unimaginable extravagance for me at the time. So I said, “No, but I’ll stand here and wait with you guys until you get your cars.”
At the Ivy there’s a terrace outside, with tables by the sidewalk. Suddenly my agents started saying, “That’s David Lynch. David Lynch is sitting at that table.” And then all of a sudden J. J. Harris said, “They’re looking over here. They’re pointing at you. Turn around!”
I said, “Who’s David Lynch?” And they said, “Shut up and wave!” And David Lynch’s table starts beckoning me over. So I walked over to their table. It was a big table, about ten people. It was David Lynch and Isabella Rossellini and a bunch of other people. I wasn’t quite sure who David Lynch was, although after the fact I did realize I knew his movies because I had seen Elephant Man and Eraserhead.
There was a woman at the table who said, “Hi, I’m [so and so], I’m a casting director, and I cast all of David’s movies.” She said, “We’re casting a movie right now.” They asked if I was an actress, and I told them I was. They all kind of laughed like that had been a rhetorical question.
Then David Lynch asked if I could come in and audition for the lead in the movie. I said, “I guess . . .” I didn’t really understand exactly what was happening.
I gave the casting director my phone number and went back to my agents, who were in a huddle. I said, “They want me to audition for the lead in a movie he’s directing.”
The movie was Blue Velvet. I remember reading the script, lying on the floor of the living room in my apartment, and thinking, “What the hell is this?” I was completely stumped.
Then, a couple days later I went to David Lynch’s office to meet with him. We chatted. After a while I said, “Do you want me to read?” He said, “I don’t read people. I just talk to people.” I said, “Oh . . . OK.” He said, “You’re definitely not a Sandy. You have too much of an edge. But there might be another role you can play.” He ended up casting Laura Dern as Sandy, who was seventeen or eighteen at the time. And he did end up casting me, but in a different role.
They shot Blue Velvet in Wilmington, North Carolina. The night I arrived on set was the night they shot Isabella Rossellini when she walks out of the house naked, down the driveway and across the front yard. So I got to see that, and to see for the first time a street in a real town with the trees lit up at night to shoot a night scene. I was enchanted by that. I got to sit in the trailer with David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan. David Lynch read my palm.
The next day, I met Laura Dern. I run into her occasionally now and I always think of her as being seventeen. David Lynch was very nice and very “Gosh!” His real-life persona is very different from his movies.
My role took place at the beginning of the movie. Kyle MacLachlan is in college, and he has a girlfriend who’s kind of bitchy and clearly not interested in him. She’s just using him so that she can say she has a boyfriend. That was me. I had about three scenes.
So the character is in college and he has this horrible girlfriend, who is me. Then he gets a call that his father has died suddenly, and he has to go back home to run the hardware store. He
goes home, is walking along, and finds an ear in a field.
They ended up cutting the first twenty minutes so that the movie starts with him finding the ear in the field. So I was cut out of the movie. But I didn’t know I was cut out of the movie, and I went to see it, and was like . . . “Oh. Wait a minute.” They didn’t let me know I wasn’t in it. I just went to see it and realized that I wasn’t in it anymore.
Plucked from obscurity on the sidewalk in front of the Ivy, only to have my indelible performance cut from the movie. But then recently, they reissued the DVD with extras and I finally got to see my scenes. And it turns out I really laid one on Kyle MacLachlan—I full-on French-kiss Kyle MacLachlan in that movie. I have no memory of even shooting a scene where we kissed or touched in any way. I completely blocked that all out, which is funny, because I don’t think I’d ever kissed anyone on film before, so you’d think I’d remember.
Megan: I think it’s time for a car chase?
Nick: Yes. It’s that time in the book.
M: So, what would be the comedy relationship book equivalent of that, preferably as it pertains to our fascinating careers?
N: . . . When we were late to the Emmys?
M: My adrenaline is already through the roof.
N: You’re welcome.
M: What happened, exactly . . . ? The car was late?
N: Yes, there was a mix-up with our address and they got to us very late. They made the cross-town drive to the Shrine Auditorium, but then once you get within half a mile of the place, you have to drive through a choreographed set of streets, because everything is blocked off. There’s a long line of limos, and you’re driving slowly, past all the picket signs that say “God hates fags” and “Hollywood will burn in hell” and all that. And it’s getting down to the wire because Megan’s category is first. We’re able to tell from the map they sent us that we’re going to make a large letter C—we’re going down two blocks, over two blocks, and up two blocks. And we said, “We have to get out and run. The show is starting.” And Megan said, “I can’t get out and run in these shoes.” So she jumped on my back . . .
The Greatest Love Story Ever Told Page 14