Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology

by Leah Remini

  On June 16, the day after my thirty-fourth birthday, my daughter, Sofia Bella, was born.

  A couple of days later when the nurse told me I was ready to go home I looked at her like she had three heads.

  “I can’t stay here a week?”

  “No.”

  “So when Courteney Cox had her baby here just a week ago, you kicked her out? I bet not, because she was on Friends.”

  “She left in the same amount of time as you.”

  “And I bet she had a better room.” (Better show, better room.)

  “Nope, same room.”

  “Really? Hmmm. Okay. BUT, I’m not ready to leave. You are just going to trust us with this baby? Isn’t there any psychological test I’m supposed to take?”

  “You’ll be fine. If she has a fever of a hundred and four, come back.”

  “Whoa. Why would she have a fever? What are you talking about? What if she has a hundred-degree fever?”

  The hospital staff practically had to push me out the door. And the minute I stepped outside, everything felt like a threat. We were in the middle of Beverly Hills, which was filled with exhaust. “My baby’s lungs are going to be ruined!” I yelled. Driving home, I was sure that everybody on the road was trying to kill my baby. They knew I had a newborn and were responding by saying, “Let’s get into an accident. She wasn’t on Friends, fuck her baby.”

  In the hospital, Sofia was the perfect baby, lying there in her little plastic bin sleeping her ass off no matter how loud people were talking. What I didn’t realize was that she was resting up for home life when suddenly she became allergic to sleeping.

  Every night, as soon as the sun went down, Sofia started crying. I started to develop a phobia of the dark. “I don’t want night to come,” I said to Angelo. “I’m scared.” It almost felt vindictive on Sofia’s part. Like, as soon as she knew there was no one to relieve us, that’s when she started up. At five o’clock, our house became a ghost town because visitors don’t come to see your newborn at that hour. I was begging the sun, “No, no, no! Don’t fall! Don’t go, sun!” And then…“Whaaaaah!”

  When friends asked what time would be good to come over and meet the baby, I answered, “Five o’clock. We’re seeing people at five o’clock. At ten p.m., and midnight.” Angelo and I began reconnecting with folks we hadn’t talked to since the second grade.

  “Hey, what are you doing? You want to come over and visit? We just had a baby. Come at 2 a.m. You can hold her for five hours if you like.”

  We tried everything to get her to stop crying and sleep. Gas was the big theory, so I did that thing where you push the legs into the baby to let the gas out. Not only did it not work, but I worried I was breaking her little legs. Then I discovered that her diaper was cutting into her thighs and leaving little red marks. Maybe that’s what she was crying about! I yelled at Angelo that he had to make sure to leave a finger of room in her diaper when he closed it up. As I laid her down on her changing table to diaper her, she started crying again.

  “She doesn’t like to be on her back! Maybe she has a thing with falling!” I said while putting a pillow to prop her head up.

  “She doesn’t not like anything, Leah,” Angelo said.

  “Of course she does not like something, Angelo. She’s crying.”

  “I have three kids.”

  “That you didn’t raise.”

  Low blow, but all is fair when you’re sleep deprived.

  Angelo and I had the nastiest “deaf fights” where instead of speaking, we mouthed the words—“Fuck you” or “I want a divorce”—because we didn’t want the baby to be any more upset than she already was.

  Things were so insane that I called the doctor and said, “There’s something seriously wrong with my baby. You need to come right away. I can’t put her in a car. Things are very bad. Come quick!”

  He dutifully came over right away and examined her.

  “She doesn’t sleep. She’s crying all the time. All she’s doing is eating and peeing and crapping, and crying.”

  “That’s what newborns do.”

  “So you’re saying nothing’s wrong with her? I want to be clear about this conversation for the lawsuit. You’re saying there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her. Welcome to parenthood.”

  “So you’re telling me that normal babies never sleep and always cry?”

  “As I said, ‘Welcome to parenthood.’ ”

  “Are you even a real doctor?”

  And with that he closed the door behind him, leaving Angelo and me standing in the entryway of our house. With our crying baby.

  —

  SOFIA CONTINUED TO CRY HER head off for the next few months. Everyone thought they could cure her. Everyone, including every Scientologist I knew, offered advice. As new parents we felt as if we were doing everything wrong. They told us that it must be something about her environment or that technology wasn’t being applied correctly. Friends would take the baby and do a Scientology assist (a hands-on form of auditing that you can do anywhere, without any equipment). They would take her outside and have her touch a tree, a leaf, the grass. All she would do was continue to cry and scream.

  So when I woke up one morning and didn’t see Angelo and the baby in my bedroom, I ran downstairs in a panic. I almost ran past him in the den, where he was—gasp—sitting on the couch, drinking coffee.

  “What’s happening?” I panted, looking over to see Sofia drooling in front of the TV. “What is that? What are those ugly things? Why are they making that sound? Why is she being quiet?”

  “Shhh,” Angelo said. “They’re Teletubbies, and they are magic.”

  I looked at our daughter, who was mesmerized, as if this show had suspended her brain. It was genius. She was like a vegetable. Could we just sit here and have a cup of coffee? Could this be real?

  “How much time do you think we have?” I asked.

  “Don’t ruin it,” Angelo said. “Just enjoy.”

  Chapter Eleven

  WHEN SOFIA WAS FIRST BORN, I had a support system most women can only dream of. And yet, there were still times when I would run to the grocery store for no reason at all, just to get out of the house. I would walk up and down every aisle—even aisles no one ever goes down, like the one with auto supplies—feeling like the worst mom ever. There I was, hiding out in Albertsons, because I needed to be away from the bottles, the diapers, the crying. Just for a moment I wanted to feel like my old self.

  In addition to figuring out how to be a mom, I had to also continue to be the breadwinner for my family, which meant losing all the weight I had gained during my pregnancy. I had only four weeks after Sofia’s birth to return to the King of Queens set, and the pounds were not coming off quickly.

  I had never really had body issues, even though I was in an industry where women are constantly scrutinized for their weight, but after Sofia was born I got a complex. I kept thinking of all those actresses who seemed to be back to their old selves by the time they left the hospital with their newborns. I worked out three or four times a week, did the fat flush, tried the cayenne drink cleanse, suffered through the cabbage soup diet. Some people in the business suggested diet pills, but because I was a Scientologist that was off limits.

  So I returned to work still forty pounds overweight. Everyone on King of Queens was encouraging after I had Sofia. The producers accommodated me in any way possible so that I could bring her with me to the set. Still, I needed a full-time nanny. Even though I interviewed a bunch of candidates, Trish stood out immediately. Taking Sofia from my arms, she said, “Bless,” in her English accent, and then started noticing things that I adored too, like the rolls on my daughter’s legs. I was so impressed by how loving Trish was, because for me, that was what it was all about. I just wanted to know that when I couldn’t be with Sofia, somebody
who loved her was with her. The clincher, however, came when Trish put my daughter on her big, huge bajunga tits, and Sofia fell right to sleep. “Those are magical tits, which I’m sure your husband has told you,” I said, and the deal was sealed.

  Trish was a traditional nanny and not a Scientologist, and I preferred it that way (even though all of my church friends urged me to use a Scientologist nanny). I didn’t use Scientology tools in dealing with my daughter, because I didn’t want her to be ridiculed for anything that seemed strange to the general public. For example, I was told that if she got hurt, I was not to react but perform a Contact Assist, which “consists of putting an injured body part exactly on and in the place it was injured.” So if she hit her leg on the corner of the coffee table, I was supposed to remain quiet and gently touch the hurt part of her leg to the exact spot on the table where she hit it—and continue to repeat that action until she said it was better. Instead, the second I heard Sofia crying from a fall or bang, I was shouting, “Are you okay? Mommy will kiss it better.” I refused to raise Sofia in a way that would make her incompatible with the rest of the world as I felt I was, and as were many second-generation Scientologists.

  Even though Sofia is now eleven, I still have Trish. What can you do? I’m a family person. Whether it be the cast and crew of a television show, a friend, or a nanny, I quickly grow attached. It’s hard for me to let go of people.

  Going to the playground with Trish and Sofia when she was a toddler was certainly an education. After we had been watching Sofia sit in that disgusting sandbox for a while, I asked Trish how much longer we were going to stay.

  “Love, we’ve only been here two minutes,” she said.

  “I’m just asking, because in the baby world time is totally irrelevant. Like, if we just started to randomly pack up, she wouldn’t know if we’d been here for an hour or five minutes.”

  “Darling, usually parents stay until the kid’s nap time.”

  “That’s two hours from now! Is an ice cream truck going to come by? Is anything going to happen? Is there a crime in progress we could stop? I mean, this is just not enough.”

  “Let’s take her on the swings.”

  “God.”

  Most moms used to look at me with a confused expression and say, “You don’t love playing with your daughter?”

  Then I would start lying about it: “Aw, of course I love it. I mean, God, every moment’s a joy.”

  “I just cherish the time, which is going by so fast that I’m thinking about having another one.”

  Out of your own vagina? Why would someone do that to themselves?

  I thought there was something wrong with me, because I never understood the joy in playing with my kid. When Sofia got older and she insisted we play Barbies while she was in the tub, I usually lasted about four minutes before I tried to weasel out of the game.

  “My Barbie is tired,” I would say. “My Barbie wants to go sleepy.”

  “No, she doesn’t want to go sleepy. She just got up,” Sofia would insist.

  “No, she needs to go sleepy, because she stayed up all night. She stayed up all night because she wanted her ba-bas and she’s so tired right now. So mine’s going to go to bed.”

  I really admired other parents I saw running around with their kids. I thought, How nice is that for their children? But they also left me racked with guilt—until one mother, out of the dozens I met, told me I shouldn’t feel bad. “You’re not your daughter’s playmate,” she said, and I nearly burst out in tears, because I needed to hear that so badly.

  I loved my child and liked to watch her be happy. While I wasn’t so much a “player,” I did love spending time with her. I also loved taking care of her, protecting her, and setting up her future. But playing, eh.

  And while I may not have been the best mother in the world, I was the one paying the bills, providing for my family, and trying to clear the planet. Between Sofia, work, and the church, I had a tall order to fill. When I returned to The King of Queens, the time spent at the studio and the hours spent every day at the church left me lucky to have any time at all with my daughter. And I felt the weight of it, often thinking that I wasn’t giving adequate attention to one or another part of my life.

  Now that I was on my OT levels and diligently participating in auditing and my studies, my commitment to Scientology was more consuming than ever. I was typically at the church all day if I wasn’t at work. On top of that, I was a celebrity, which meant that I had more responsibility than ever to be a positive—and active—member of my church.

  My special celebrity status that came around the time I was on Fired Up also had its benefits. When I went back to Flag to work on my OT levels twenty years after leaving the Sea Org, I fully expected other Sea Org members to look down on me, because it’s pretty much policy to view ex–Sea Org members as deserters. But because I was on TV and had appeared on the cover of Scientology’s Celebrity magazine, I was treated within the church like, well, like a star.

  It was so strange to be staying at the Fort Harrison like any other parishioner. Occasionally, I would have flashbacks to that nightmare period of my life when as a teenager I was ripped from everything I knew in Brooklyn only to end up cleaning hotel rooms at Flag. After I returned, every time I ate dinner in one of the hotel restaurants I remembered how I used to steal food because I was so hungry.

  During one of my sessions at Flag, I gave this up as a transgression and my auditor asked how much I thought I owed to make up the damage for the food I stole twenty years earlier.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How much was custard and hamburgers for three months in the eighties?”

  “Well, let’s just round it up to forty thousand dollars. Okay?”

  Forty thousand dollars?

  I was dumbfounded, but I was also trying to get onto my OT levels so I paid the church forty thousand dollars for this transgression.

  The real surprise of the trip, though, wasn’t my huge bill for snacks I stole back then. It was seeing Mike Curley, the head of the EPF when I was in Clearwater and the guy who threw me overboard into the ocean. I spotted him while I was walking out to the Fort Harrison’s pool; he was still doing the same job, leading a group of shell-shocked young Sea Org members.

  I stopped him and asked, “Do you remember me, Mike?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You’re the little ballbuster Leah. You’re a big celebrity now. I saw you on all our magazines. You do so many great things for the church. I always knew you’d make it. I always knew you had something.”

  “Even when you threw me off that fucking boat?”

  He laughed and said, “You were okay.”

  I had imagined this moment more than a few times in my mind, that I would confront him for the way he treated me. Instead, he met me with admiration. “You know, I’m actually kind of glad it didn’t work out in the Sea Org,” he said, justifying his reason for being so happy to see me. “Because you do so much more for our church being a star.” And with that, all of my resentment washed away in an instant.

  All Scientologists are expected to present an image to the outside world that is so perfect and happy that people can’t help but want to join. If you are a celebrity, your reach is that much greater. And celebrities are expected to use the full extent of their power to bring new parishioners into the fold.

  However, I was never really comfortable with recruiting new members. Instead of getting new people into Scientology, my instinct was to do the opposite because I knew what an extremist religion it was. All in or all out. I knew how onerous the commitment to this religion was and how—despite what certain church representatives said—you had to leave any other belief behind, and I didn’t want to be responsible for others making such a big decision. What I decided to focus on instead was assisting other participating Scientologists. So I started doing events to help people move up the Bridge fas
ter, which I enjoyed. I gave speeches and seminars for those stalled on the Bridge, meaning people who after becoming Clear—achieving a state of total clarity and control over your thoughts and emotions—stay there and don’t move on to their OT levels (like I did). I pushed by reminding them, “If you signed up for this, then you need to get on with it.”

  So while I wasn’t overly keen on being a missionary, and dodged constant pressure from the church to bring new members in, I found that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut when I saw injustice or someone having trouble speaking for himself or herself. Being so confrontational made me an unofficial advocate for Scientologists who were having problems within the church, because I would say anything to anybody, no matter how high their supposed rank. One of these people was Stacy Francis.

  I had met Stacy through a friend and had instantly fallen in love with her. She was very funny, very New York, and very loud, just like me. But more than anything else, I felt drawn to Stacy because she reminded me of where I used to be, struggling and without family support. So I welcomed her into ours, becoming not just a friend but a kind of mother as well. I counseled Stacy through her first marriage, her pregnancy, her divorce. I was her daughter’s godmother, and when they had nowhere to go for a month, I took them in.

  One day when we were sitting outside, she gestured to the house and pool and asked, “How do I get all this?”

  “Hard work,” I answered. “It doesn’t happen overnight.”

  “No, come on. It’s gotta be that Scientology stuff that you’re involved in. It must have given you a leg up in the business.”

  Stacy touched on a myth that the church has very successfully used to its advantage. Many people were under the same impression that there are tons of Scientologists in the film and television business and that we all help each other out. The real truth is that while the church would like you to believe it wields a tremendous amount of influence in Hollywood, that is simply not the case. Throughout my career I knew of one minor casting director who was a Scientologist, but other than that, no real movers and shakers. As a matter of fact, I think identifying myself publicly as a Scientologist probably hurt my career more than it helped it as far as perception was concerned. And while some of the courses the church offered provided me with better communication skills to help land roles, the time, money, and effort I invested certainly didn’t outweigh the benefit for me.