Melissa Explains It All: Tales from My Abnormally Normal Life

by Melissa Joan Hart

  To people who thrive on being scandalous, this time in my life will seem like a careful rebellion. But what can I say? I like to chase a buzz with a sensible amount of caution, and it rarely gets in the way of how much fun I have. I always tried to be around friends or family in case I got too wasted or freaked out on drugs, and I always made sure that I had a safe ride home. And while most party pals are only as good as their impaired judgment, mine always came through for me. One time, I tagged along on a surf trip to Tijuana with Sabrina’s camera loader, Todd, his girlfriend, and some of his buddies. By day, they caught waves; by night, they caught shit. When we hit a club called Papas and Beer, full of busty putas and rough gallitos, the bouncers tossed us out because some of the guys started a fight after someone ogled Todd’s girlfriend. We got out alive, though we were banned from coming back in, and at this point, feeling invincible, ate some street meat and took a remote dirt road back to our villa. The car was going thirty miles per hour when Todd climbed out the window and decided to “surf” on the roof. Though I’d never even boogie-boarded, I decided to join him. Todd jumped on top of me and held me down until the car slowed to a stop, and we both bailed out before someone got seriously injured.

  Putting myself in safe hands often involved being with James, who always made me feel protected, even if he was the one who introduced the precarious situation. As a skier and woodsy guy, James was into a lot of natural, recreational drugs, like pot and mushrooms, so I got into them too. I’d done shrooms with college buddies once on my own, when I was at our New Jersey home and my parents weren’t around. Though he wasn’t there at the time, I called James when I was tripping to talk about how cold the kitchen tiles felt, and how, if I laid down at the right angle, I could see straight down the grout line to the other end of the room … it was a playful high.

  But when James and I took drugs together in Colorado, we nearly put our lives in danger. During a hiatus, we went with our roommate, Parker, and my Sabrina costar Nate, who played Harvey, to Parker’s cabin in the Boulder woods and did shrooms. It was the most beautiful, magical walk dotted with neon green pine trees, mountains that appeared to move, and small mushroom villages that I swore were occupied by Smurfs. We also heard a pack of coyotes, which sounded like barking dogs. At nightfall, we walked to a rocky cliff to look at the constellation-packed sky, and the boys carried rifles and flashlights, and me, a knife, just in case the coyotes or Freddie Krueger attacked. At one point, Parker saw what looked like the glowing yellow eye of an animal, and then Nate saw it too. We put our backs together, forming a square and facing outward, and listened for the echo-y crunch-crunch of branches breaking underfoot. After ten minutes of total tripping, panicky, sweaty silence, our jittery instincts told us to make a run for it. We bolted for the house, falling over sticks and rocks, but made it there with only a few nicks and scrapes. The next day, we wondered if Nate and Parker hallucinated the whole thing, but when we went back to the clearing, we found proof that their sighting was legit—giant day-old animal droppings. To use a phrase from my dad’s T-shirt, that night in the woods was no bullshit.

  James wasn’t the only rabble-rouser in my life. When eleven of my friends and I went to Cabo San Lucas to celebrate a group bachelorette party for my friends Eryn, Kimi, and Christine, they didn’t exactly hold back on having fun. One night we ran into the famous, and famously handsome, boxer Oscar de la Hoya at a bar. We guzzled our yard-tall drinks and danced on tables, as he sent over shots. Each time, though, I noticed that there was a special one set aside for me, and it didn’t taste like tequila. I didn’t have the most sophisticated palate for spirits, but I suspected he was sending me shots of water. I get punchy when I’m under the influence, and I couldn’t tell whether Oscar was helping me stay sober, punking me, or implying that I couldn’t handle my liquor. No matter what, I didn’t like it.

  I stormed right up to Oscar’s table, backed by my eleven-girl posse … and proceeded to hang out, have some laughs, and end up at his place. I’d fully intended to give him some sass, but his big brown eyes got the best of me. Back at his house, when Oscar suggested we pile into his hot tub, I noticed that there was no water in it. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, I’m gonna think you’re fucking with me. So when his bodyguard kindly brought me a tall glass of water to help me sober up, and Oscar simultaneously referred to me as “Sabrina,” I decided it was a good idea to throw that water in his face. I didn’t care that this big, strong man had defeated seventeen world champions or came from a long line of hard-core boxers; my tequila was liquid courage. It’s weird because people called me Sabrina all the time, and still do, but I’d never reacted like that—nor have I since. Oscar’s bodyguard immediately pulled me away to keep us both safe, and the girls and I left soon after that. It wasn’t until the sober light of day that I realized I had soaked a man with lethal weapons for hands in a foreign country. It was a pretty stupid move, but at least when we left and walked past his car, I didn’t puke into his sunroof like my friend did.

  On that same trip, six of us girls decided to get tattoos. My friend Jenna, who played Libby on Sabrina, went with a sparrow on her ankle, Eryn got her soon-to-be-married initials on her lower back, and Danielle opted for a kiss mark on her upper butt cheek. (The tattoo artist had her kiss a piece of paper while wearing lipstick, and then traced those lips onto her, so she basically kissed her own ass.) I chose a Celtic cross that I’d found on set and was once a prop. I knew it would make the perfect tattoo, so I had kept it in my wallet for years, waiting for the right moment to have it grace the back of my neck. I felt like this epic trip with my closest friends was just the time to pull the trigger. My girls Tara and Lindsay sat with me while I dropped my head and let a man stick a sterile needle in my flesh. Though we were all sober when this went down, our celebratory dinner afterward was anything but.

  Next stop: a burrito and a striptease. Beautiful, half-naked Latino men humped all the ladies and poured shots directly into our mouths. One zeroed in on me, took his belt off, and wrapped it around my neck. He pulled the leather back and forth across my raw, swollen new tat, and no matter how much alcohol I had in my system, it hurt like a bitch. I bit my bottom lip to keep from screaming, but not in a flirty Fifty Shades of Grey way.

  We then went back to the bar El Squid Roe, where we’d met Oscar the night before. I have only fuzzy memories of this, but my friends say they lost me in the crowd, and the next thing they saw was me dancing in a cage, up above the dance floor, dry-humping professional dancers. When the girls dragged me down, they said I refused to get in the cab unless they promised we could party at Oscar’s house before calling it a night. They agreed, lying to get me back to our hotel. Then I apparently tried to make out with all of them. The next morning, I saw the faded imprint of my tat stuck to my pillowcase and went nuts. I vaguely remembered getting the tattoo I’d wanted for years, but I had no idea what happened after that. The girls had to help piece it together for me, like in The Hangover.

  * * *

  A few months after I got back from Mexico, I found out that James was cheating, like my first boyfriend, Mike, had, five years earlier. Even the bimbos’ names were the same. But instead of abruptly ending the relationship, I tried to move past it, though I no longer trusted him or anyone named Stacy. I broke up with James for good a year later. I drowned my sorrows in a lot of Patrón, but for all my inebriated nights, I never forgot to set the house alarm now that I was alone in my house for the first time. Thank God for ADT. I tested that system weekly, just like the pamphlets tell you to.

  Not long after I ended things with James, in the fall of 1998, I began shooting the movie Drive Me Crazy with Adrian Grenier, or, as you may know him, Vinnie Chase from Entourage. It was a relaxed set with a young director named John Schultz. For the first three weeks, I was on hiatus from Sabrina, and then I finished the film by doing my show in L.A. during the week and flying to Utah on weekends. I missed at least one full night of sleep a week due to this schedule
. I was also busting my bum at the gym and on a strict juice diet to keep up my shape. I felt harried and tired, but by now, burning the candle at both ends was second nature to me.

  Adrian and I had a very close and intimate relationship from the first day we met, but not the romantic kind that everyone imagined we had. He and I admired and respected each other, and just truly enjoyed the other person’s company. We had a similar work ethic and sense of humor, so the chemistry we were trying to create on-screen came pretty naturally to us. I did give him a sneak-attack smooch in his trailer, under the guise of rehearsing our kissing scene in the movie, but it meant nothing and we were mostly good friends. We were also falling for other people. Adrian began dating actress Ali Larter, who’s also in the film, and I was really into Gabriel Carpenter, who played my crush in the movie, too. Gabriel and I liked to flirt and tease each other on and off the set. After the movie wrapped, we went on to have a hot and heavy love affair over the next year, whenever I wasn’t searching for a serious relationship.

  Our movie was originally titled Next to You, but the producers at Twentieth Century Fox changed it to Drive Me Crazy to cross-promote the film with Britney Spears’s hit by the same name. A lot of the movie’s PR involved Britney, so she and I did a few interviews together, bumped into each other at awards shows while waiting for the film to come out, and even dropped by each other’s day jobs. I made an appearance in her music video for Drive Me Crazy, along with Adrian, and she was a guest star on Sabrina.

  When Britney was on Sabrina, I was six years older than her and had been in the business longer, so I could sense that she was already under a lot of stress. I constantly asked her to grab lunch, which caused her to smile a wide, friendly grin as if it sounded like the best idea ever. But when she’d turn to her agents, publicist, assistant, and bodyguard for their okay, they’d remind her of the super-busy agenda they’d laid out for her that day and she’d turn me down. She didn’t have time to grab a burrito on the Paramount lot? I guess not, when she was also shooting a Pepsi ad, recording an album, prepping for a tour, doing photo shoots and press, and hitting the gym every day. I felt a protective instinct come over me and decided to support her the best way I knew how. I devised a plan to sneak her out of her hotel and then take her dancing so she could chill with people closer to her age, if just for one night. Britney loved the idea.

  At go-time, Britney ran out of her hotel lobby and into my car. Her enormously scary but sweet bodyguard called Big Rob jumped in front of the vehicle and asked where I was taking her. I lied and said we were going to my mom’s house for homemade lasagna, so he let us leave. When we pulled up to Club Cherry, a raucous weekly dance party, L.A. club promoter Pantera Sarah met us around back to sneak Britney in and get us a booth. But once we were inside, Britney got absorbed by the crowd, and I lost her. After looking for her to no avail, I assumed she was fine and went off to dance with friends. At the end of the night, I found her in a private booth with dozens of people kissing her ass as she basked in the attention and down time she’d worked so hard for. She gave me the okay to leave without her since I had to work the next day, and Sarah promised to get her to the hotel safe. Since then, Britney’s been snuck in and out of more back doors than I can count, but I shudder to think that I first showed her how it’s done.

  * * *

  In January 1999, I cohosted the American Music Awards alongside the fabulous recording artist, actress, and producer Brandy. It was a huge honor to be offered such a high-profile gig, and I took the job very seriously. By the end of the night, my adrenaline was pumping. I’d never been at the center of a show like this and surrounded by so many incredibly talented people who I respected and adored. I heard that after the official after-party, all the presenters and talent were going “upstairs at Dublin’s.” I had no clue what this meant, so I hopped in my limo alone and asked the driver to take me there. I met the door girls, was ushered through a large crowd, and taken to my own table. Dublin’s was a dark Irish bar with a dance floor in the middle, and it teemed with A-listers like Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, Rick Fox, and Adam Duritz. I knew I had to become a regular. I began going on Mondays and rubbed elbows with young Hollywood. After seeing the same faces over and over, a few of us began hitting a different bar every night of the week. Mondays was Dublin’s, Tuesdays was Las Palmas, Wednesdays was La Poubelle, Thursdays was Cherry. On weekends, we recovered from five days of hangovers and went to house parties.

  I’ve never been the type to opt for staying home, ordering takeout, and plowing through my laser disc collection alone—not when I can be out with friends. L.A.’s club and bar scene was a perfect fix for what little free time I had. I also looked the best I had in ages, thanks to all that juicing and gymming, so slipping into tube dresses or leather pants was fun for once. Going out also created a stronger bond with girlfriends like Soleil Moon Frye and China Shavers, who played Dreama on Sabrina. We’d grab sushi, have a gin and tonic, dance, and get home by 1 A.M., so I could still function at work the next day.

  After two years of the same routine, though, I got bored and needed a change. I decided to open my own nightclub. I’d become close to one of the promoters, Dave Osokow, who knew I’d always fantasized about having my own bar and had the cash flow to back it. He asked me to invest in a small club that he and some other guys were opening on Sunset Boulevard called Trocadero Sunset Lounge. It was named after the first iconic Hollywood bar that was owned by Hollywood Reporter founder and nightclub legend Billy Wilkerson. (No relation to my future husband, but I did wonder if Mark’s last name was a sign when I met him.) The original Trocadero was a black-tie supper club, now demolished, that in the 1930s was filled with movie producers and stars such as Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, and Lucille Ball. It was a hot spot for movie premiere parties. The Troc is still a small, intimate scene with a nice patio and French doors, and dark, old-school art deco décor inside. The bar was the perfect place for me to entertain friends and hold parties, take casual meetings, and hang out after we’d hit the louder clubs. Every time I directed an episode of Sabrina, I treated the crew to a Friday night there. I also made out with my longtime crush Josh Hopkins (Grayson Ellis on Cougar Town) in the women’s bathroom on a drunken St. Patty’s Day, hosted Soleil’s twenty-fourth birthday, and later celebrated one of my bachelorette parties there before I got married. The Troc was officially my spot—literally.

  * * *

  Sometimes I feel bad for Hollywood’s younger stars who are constantly stalked by paparazzi whose job is to get a high-paying shot of their cellulite, dark under-eye circles, or fashion faux pas. I’m so relieved that back when I was sowing my naughtier oats, there were no TMZ, Splash, or Flynet photographers to harass me as I left the latest club or piss me off until I felt tempted to chase them down. I could stash my most uninhibited moments and mistakes under wraps, unlike a lot of today’s bigger names, who may just be bumping around their twenties like the rest of us did. I often suspect that the reason I’m able to maintain such an untarnished image isn’t that I’m such a good girl, but simply because I’ve never been caught with my pants down, so to speak. Though one time I came dangerously close.

  In the summer of 1999, I was invited to my first Midsummer Night’s Dream Playboy Mansion Party. This is a tawdry annual event held on the first Saturday in August. I couldn’t wait to drive through those famous iron gates, past the “Playmates at Play” street sign, and get a glimpse of what really goes on in the grotto. Since I was single, I asked my new crush Jonny Moseley, who’d won the Olympic Gold in freestyle skiing in 1998 in Nagano, Japan, to join me and a few mutual friends for the party; earlier that year we’d met at the X Games, where he took the silver. The Playboy bacchanalia’s dress code called for sleepwear, to put it modestly, so I spent days working with my Sabrina wardrobe team, choosing just the right set of bra and panties that would complement my curves and keep me from feeling too exposed and slutty. I chose a pair of vintage-inspired cream lace bik
ini bottoms, and a matching bra that was trimmed in red and printed with cherries. I paired them with a red silk robe and matching heels that had fluffy caribou feathers across the toes. I looked like a pinup from a 1930s issue of Esquire.

  When our limo pulled up to the circular drive, the Playboy Mansion reminded me of an old Scottish castle. This was before The Girls Next Door was on E!, so I didn’t know what to expect. I passed through a grand foyer to get to the tented backyard. If you’ve seen Bridesmaids, it’s the same area where Kristen Wiig’s character destroys the chocolate fountain. To the right was a pool and grotto area with beanbag chairs for hanging out, and to the left, a zoo with peacocks and monkeys. A nearby guesthouse held a pool table, pinball machines, and private rooms for getting it on, though you could pretty much do that anywhere on the property without causing a stir. The Playmates working the party were sprayed to look like they were wearing bathing suits or lingerie, though they were actually nude and completely shaved. When I was talking to one of the waitresses, I didn’t even realize her naughty bits were exposed and painted until she told me.

  Not long after we got to the mansion, some friends and I decided to drop ecstasy. I’d used it before, but here I thought the elaborate décor, grounds, and sensual atmosphere would drive my touchy-feely senses into overdrive in a fascinating way. It made me feel sexier, more talkative, and gave me a little swagger around guests like James Woods and Vince Vaughn. After a few hours, I grabbed Jonny, and, on the limo ride home, me and another half-naked lady began putting on a show for our dates. I’m not sure if she was black, Hispanic, Asian, or maybe a combo of all three. I’d kissed some girlfriends in high school and college for shock value or to get in the “gay door” at a club, but this was the only time I’d really made out with a woman to this kind of lengthy degree. On X, my tongue tingled and my libido surged. Of course, after twenty minutes of this, I looked over and noticed that two of the guys we were with had passed out and the other was on his phone. All that hot girl-on-girl action did more for us than for the boys.