I'll Never Change My Name

by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

  Finally, in time for Season 14, Barbara changed her tune. “Fine, Sherri, you can do it,” she said (and I’m paraphrasing the conversation I got secondhand from Sherri). “We’re going to arrange for you to be in L.A. on Monday and Tuesday, and on those days you’ll be on The View via satellite. Then you’ll take the red-eye Wednesday to be on the show in person Wednesday and Thursday, and for Fridays’ taped show.”

  Got it? Okay. A midforties new mother, flying back and forth across the country for weeks. But Sherri’s passion for Dancing with the Stars made it happen. It was her dream come true. I had a private thought of “Fuck! What a responsibility!” I didn’t want to be the one who shattered the dream. How could I not want to give this woman an awesome chance to grow? I wanted her to be the star, because she deserved it.

  She kept to her regular schedule on The View during our three-week rehearsal period, which I loved because we were in New York City, not in West Hollywood or in some kind of windowless soundstage bunker somewhere in the Valley. I was working two blocks from Lincoln Center, with a dream gig in my dream city. I could be a human being with some resemblance of a normal life. I could have dinner with my parents, act irresponsibly with my friends, or hang out with a local artist over a big lunch in the Village—and at the same time still be part of an incredible television phenomenon. The best of both worlds.

  Even though I wasn’t exactly a pro at being a pro quite yet, we had a great season, and I was able to give Sherri a lot more than I had given Elisabetta. I discovered the skill of patience, which could work wonders with a partner new to the ballroom world, and which was a revelation for me at the time. I kicked myself for being such a little Hitler with Elisabetta, and resolved to be more forgiving this time around.

  Sherri wound up with a collection of amazing appearances to treasure, a string of killer routines, as well as smaller moments of serene reflection. She was a memorable contestant on Dancing with the Stars, which was no small feat amid the dozens upon dozens of contestants spread over twenty-five seasons, some of whom were not memorable at all. We were eliminated after week four, so again, I wasn’t able to bring my partner to the halfway point in the show. But by that time Sherri was exhausted and ready to leave.

  I idly formulated a half-assed conspiracy theory, speculating that Barbara Walters had a hand in what happened. She got fed up with Sherri flying back and forth, with half her heart on the dance floor in West Hollywood, the other on the set of a talk show in New York City. Barbara was powerful enough in the network hierarchy to get the word to the judges: Sherri Shepherd must be eliminated!

  “You did a little dancing,” I imagined Barbara telling her cohost, “but you’re finished out there.” I couldn’t blame Barbara a bit if she had been thinking that way. Sherri was an essential element on The View. When there were awkward moments between the other hosts, between Barbara and Whoopi Goldberg, say, it would always be Sherri’s voice sounding a comical “dun-dun-dun” that cut the tension and made everything okay.

  She contributed at least one great punch line every time she was on Dancing with the Stars. She might not have been the best dancer, but she was the highlight of each episode she was in, just due to her effervescent personality. On the level of pure entertainment, on the level of lasting inspiration, she was awesome.

  Peta Murgatroyd won that season as a pro dancer with her celebrity partner, Green Bay Packers wide receiver Donald Driver. She and I had both joined the show the season before, when she was eliminated first and I was eliminated second. Now I was eliminated fourth with Sherri, and Peta won the whole thing, taking home the Mirrorball Trophy with Donald. I loved Peta and was happy for her, but my inner competitor took a cold-eyed view of the situation.

  “Well, Peta’s moving at a faster pace than me,” I couldn’t help telling myself. “That means I’m probably doing something wrong.” I needed to evaluate what I could do differently in the next season, but I wasn’t totally sure how to make the adjustment.

  BY SOME SECRET CALCULUS OF PUBLIC TASTE, AFTER THAT second season I moved up from being a G-list celebrity to taking my place on the F-list. I managed to get invited onto The View and shake hands with Barbara Walters, which made me feel a little bit full of myself. I took a picture with Whoopi Goldberg. I mean, come on! Whoopi Goldberg! I was moving on up!

  At the same time I was still the same old Val, the local kid, teaching lessons and holding seminars at the Dance With Me studios in the New York metropolitan area. I was the same dude that students had sessions with for $60 an hour a year ago. I was on a TV show, but nothing had changed apart from that. Who cared about Hollywood?

  Doing the hard work on the dance floor was where all my credibility had come from. I wouldn’t have been able to preach what I did if I didn’t have follow-through in the studio. It wasn’t any kind of a miracle, and I wasn’t there exactly doing God’s work—I was doing Val’s work. I wanted to help people feel good and help them sense their innate self-worth.

  Heavily involved in the Dance With Me studios and hitting every meet and greet I possibly could, I nevertheless kept my ear to the ground for word from West Hollywood. Through the grapevine I heard that the next season, Season 15, would be an all-star affair, bringing back champions and fan favorites from the show’s entire run.

  Okay, I thought, I’m out of a job. I had been on for only two seasons at that point, and neither of them had achieved an all-star result by any stretch of the imagination. It seemed I would never make it past eighth place. I was simply doing the math, being not pessimistic but rather realistic about my prospects of getting called back for this special season. My life hung in suspension.

  But finally the call came.

  First some British guy came on the line and screamed, “Hello! Hello! Hello!” several times over. Then he handed the call over to the American producers, Joe and Ashley.

  “Hey, how are you?” Ashley burbled. “We’re very excited because you’re back on!”

  “Oh, wow, thank you so much.”

  “No, thank you so much,” Joe chimed in. “We’re excited about your partner.”

  Next the celebrity cast got announced, headlined by popular champions Emmitt Smith and Drew Lachey. Then there was Apolo Ohno, who was, you know, Apolo fucking Ohno, wearer of the sickest soul patch, possessor of possibly the coolest name ever, and winner of eight Olympic medals. Gilles Marini, probably one of the best celebrity male dancers the show had seen, came back for a second turn. Peta got paired with him, making her the clear front-runner among the pros. Actress Kirstie Alley was again matched with Maks, forming the same couple who were runners-up on the show’s highest-rated season.

  Victim number three for me would ultimately be the one who helped me turn a corner on the show. My partner, Kelly Monaco, had won the Mirrorball six years before, in the first season, when Dancing with the Stars was just a six-couple, six-week show. She represented probably my last best chance. If I didn’t prove myself this time around, paired with a former champion, how could the showrunners possibly justify bringing me back again?

  Kelly and I vibed right away. She was a chick from Philly, and I was a boy from Brooklyn, so we had growing-up-in-the-hood stories to share. Hanging together meant a blast of big-city East Coast nostalgia. I was twenty-six, Kelly was thirty-six and had been through a lot of experiences in her life. On my part, I was happy AF teaching rumba walks to a former Playboy Playmate.

  She had broken out at age twenty-one as a centerfold and worked her way into a starring role on the long-running ABC soap, General Hospital. During the years after her first Dancing with the Stars season in 2005, she had become increasingly connected with A-list Hollywood, a world that was totally beyond my scope. She knew everyone in town and had all the heaviest hitters on her speed dial.

  She was also an extraordinary beauty, and as a dance couple we looked perfect together. When we interacted during our rehearsal spots we displayed a great sense of banter, indulging in smart-mouthed urban patter. We simply had g
ood chemistry, the kind that translated perfectly onto the TV screen.

  That season was the first time that I felt the fans marked me for a big dose of romantic melodrama. Viewers played up my intimate relationship with Kelly, which took me somewhat by surprise.

  Maybe it was naive of me, but I never could understand why people are so obsessed with other people’s chemistry. Getting swept up in the tempest of gossip, as I did with Kelly, I found the fixation was a little over the top, not to mention annoying. Interviewers and columnists wanted to know everything. But when you’ve got something really special, you’re not talking about it publicly 24/7. You’re too busy living it. The curious public pried into every corner, marking everything we had together like a dog marks its territory. And, yes, I just drew a comparison between gossip and a dog pissing on a tree.

  I didn’t want the negative energy of other people’s opinions to infiltrate my life. I never read the tabloids or checked into the gossip shows on TV, but just knowing that they were talking about us became an intrusive influence. Whether Kelly and I were an item wasn’t why I wanted to be the focus of conversations around the office water cooler. I wanted my efforts, my accomplishments, my moments of impact to be the center of attention, not what I did or did not do off the set.

  This is where you might look at me and say, “Really, Val? Hollywood is obsessed with romance? You’re so damned smart, but you didn’t know that?”

  Yeah, I’ll cop to it. For all my experience, I was naive. I didn’t know that people in general and Hollywood in particular had become absurdly fixated upon other people’s relationships, to the point where it sometimes seemed as though it was the only fucking thing in existence. I’d gaze longingly out of my bedroom window and wish upon a star: “Oh gee, I wish people were this concerned with a single-payer health care option.” Yes, well, not really, but you get the idea.

  With Kelly I experienced for the first time being the focal point of the public eye. As a couple, Elisabetta Canalis and I had been nonstarters. Even though we had great chemistry, Sherri Shepherd and I didn’t exactly look like we were messing around—fooling around, maybe, joking like crazy, yes, but not hopping into bed together.

  I can’t completely play ignorance over the situation, because to some degree I participated in it. There was a reason for that. I had gone two-episodes-and-out with Elisabetta and four-and-out with Sherri. Honestly, I was down for whatever would earn me another week to produce an awesome dance number for Kelly, even if it meant taping a package crammed full of cheeky innuendos and romantic nuance, and even though it meant being unable to watch a package without cringing at least once.

  It wasn’t as if what Kelly and I had together was some kind of artificial charade. I was young and single, she was amazing, and we had a natural attraction for each other. But I was never a person who kissed and told, and I was raised to keep personal lives private, with flamboyant PDA’s considered low-class. So the season might have been cringeworthy at times, but at least I did get a lot of airtime, and the internet went crazy with Kelly and Val.

  For the first time, I had a fully adult season. The producers promoted me as the new sex symbol on the show. It worked because Kelly was so feminine and confident that she was a model for every woman. When a woman looks happy, fulfilled, empowered, and strong, the man standing next to her suddenly becomes a sex symbol.

  Yes, we played into it, okay? By week ten Kelly and I were just laughing at the whole melodrama. Since I was already committed, I pushed my chips into the center of the table and went all in. During a “Wet, Wild, and Skimpy” flamenco routine, Kelly flung off her top like a challenge, stripping down to a feathered bikini. As if in response, I ripped off my pants and went near-commando in a black Speedo. Then we climbed onto a platform with a pool of inch-deep water and dance-splashed around in that for a while.

  Off the hook, out of control, but way, way popular. The audience went nuts. For a quick minute “Speedo flamenco” became a thing. I had pushed the trademark Chmerkovskiy move of taking my shirt off to a whole new level.

  “Well that happened,” I tweeted afterward. “#sorrymom.”

  The routine was a testament to our relationship, how I made Kelly feel, how I was able to present her to the world. On the discussion boards, the comments came fast and furious. “Damn, so it’s real, not just made for TV, and he’s not just the little brother.” I started enjoying a bigger presence on the show, a bigger voice, and made it farther and farther into the season, all the way to the finals. But romance-for-ratings represented a deal with the devil, one that would come back to haunt me on future seasons.

  My partner mentored me in ways that I desperately needed back then. I didn’t have that many friends who were truly entertainment industry insiders, and I lucked out with Kelly. My brother had a very different kind of relationship with Hollywood, and a different relationship with the show, so while much of his counsel helped me out, some definitely did not work for me.

  Kelly knew the town backward and forward. She was friends with people who had made it to a very high level, and now she was in love with a person who had just pulled himself up from G-list status and clawed his way onto the F-List. She was able to give me invaluable insight on how the wacky world of Hollywood worked.

  To cite just one example, I had always struggled at press events, especially the sort of round-robins with multiple reporters that were commonplace in entertainment. I would get upset over questions that seemed shallow and absolutely brain-dead, centered on some kind of nothing issue that I didn’t care about. In my mind I pictured myself as a talk show hero, on Larry King Live or Real Time with Bill Maher, deep into meaningful and incisive political exchanges. I’d be ready for complex discussions, but the journalists would toss me softball question after softball question, and I always wound up feeling as though my intelligence had been insulted.

  Kelly set me straight.

  “The key in all situations, Val, is always to know your audience,” she told me, an example of the kind of memorable advice that’s helped me forever afterward.

  “It’s not about what you know or what you want to say,” she went on. “It’s about doing all of those things at the right time for the right audience. There’s a time to preach about changing the world and a time to just lightheartedly discuss your cha-cha.”

  If you know that the audience was there for a specific reason, in other words, speak to your audience and speak to that reason. Don’t just blurt out opinions, and don’t just share your weighty thoughts with everyone equally.

  Know your audience—a good rule of thumb in show business, and since the entire world is a stage, a good idea in life as a whole, too.

  Reflecting on the events of my childhood, I realized that I had understood the concept from the very first, even if I was too young to put it into words. One way or another, I had always been playing to the audience.

  To explain better what I mean, let me go back to the beginning, not to my start on Dancing with the Stars, but back to the real beginning, in a decayed Soviet harbor town known as the Pearl of the Black Sea.

  Part 2

  A Journey in Life

  Family

  The most important thing to know about me is family.

  In fact, very nearly the only thing to know about me is family. Ours was a household of two sons and two parents, and as a team we worked together better than the 1998 championship Chicago Bulls, better than a NASA astronaut crew, better than any other family I know. We were like a circus act, “The Flying Chmerkovskiys & Sons.”

  At the head of the clan stood my father, Aleksandr Chmerkovskiy, nicknamed Sasha, and my mother, Larisa Chmerkovskaya. My older brother, Maks, beat me into existence by six years, seventy-six days, and a few spare-change hours and minutes. He might have had a head start, but I’ve been catching up ever since.

  Whenever I spoke as a kid, everything tended to come out in terms of “we.” We have a dance school. I might have won a dance competition, but it was r
eally we, we, we. I was afraid people couldn’t understand that. I began to censor myself, because it sounded as though I was using the royal “we,” that obnoxious, high-handed, regal style of speaking, as in the British Queen’s “We are not amused.” But for a long time, my reality was limited to a core gang of four: me, my brother, my mom, and my pops.

  My whole life was “we.”

  Only recently, as I grew out of my twenties and into my thirties, have I felt any degree of separation from the family unit—not much, but some. When I was growing up, my parents were always nearby, always with me, and my whole world was right there in front of my nose. Courtesy of my mom’s cooking, the Chmerkovskiy family was a movable feast. It didn’t really matter where we’d park our gypsy caravan, whether living in Ukraine or experiencing life as immigrants in New York City, I’d always be chilling with the fam. We could be chilling in Antarctica and we’d still be together.

  Odessa, Ukraine, was where my father was born and grew up, where he met and married my mother, and where my parents raised Maks and me. Moms and Pops had what could be jokingly described as a mixed marriage. My mother’s parents were both Eastern Orthodox and raised their daughter in that religion, while my father’s people were Jewish. The truth was, our household was secular, and everyone was too caught up in keeping hearth and home together to attend church or temple services.

  I grew up in a Communist country where the weight of history was almost crushing. My paternal grandmother watched as her entire family was executed by the Nazis. Then she raised her children, my father included, in Soviet Ukraine, an atheist environment where the official party line portrayed religion as the poison of humanity. Comrade citizens could be sent to prison for any overt display of a religious symbol, whether it was a cross or Star of David. My family’s roots might have reached deep into Judaism and Christianity, but that background had to be kept buried, out of sight, when my father was young.