She didn’t have to tell me. I knew.
“Oh my god, M. How many weeks?!”
I had called Michelle to tell her about a part I’d landed in a pilot with Peter Dinklage. Michelle had worked with Peter in the brilliant movie The Station Agent, and I was so excited to work with him too.
She was barely pregnant. The kind of pregnant where you only tell your best friend and the father. I started crying. Michelle was living in Australia with her boyfriend, Heath Ledger, whom she’d met while they were filming Brokeback Mountain. He was working on a movie there. She said Heath wanted to fly me to Sydney to hang out with her while he was working. She was just doing yoga and eating Australian yogurt, which was all she was craving, and could use a friend.
As soon as I was done with the pilot, I flew to Australia to be with her for a week. Heath introduced us to a show he loved called Kath & Kim and we started saying, “LOOKATME LOOKATME LOOKATME,” which was our favorite line from the show. I had started running in my break-up devastation and since I was so jet-lagged in Australia, I would wake up at dawn and jog from their house in Bondi Beach to Bronte Beach, along the cliffs overlooking the ocean, listening to the Arcade Fire album Funeral and feeling like maybe the future would be okay and maybe I could recover from what was certainly the most intense heartbreak I’d ever experienced. Maybe there was more out there for me, even if it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I wasn’t even twenty-six yet.
When I got back to L.A., I started to fill my days with running at the gym with Jennifer Carpenter and our other friend Candi, and meeting Abdi for lunch at Hugo’s. I filled my nights with going out to bars and clubs and concerts with other friends. I went out on a non-date with a producer who was very persistent about dating me, but I wasn’t into him. Not my type and the date ended with a handshake and a chaste kiss on the cheek. Years later, I would find out he told people he had fucked me, which was annoying, but I didn’t particularly care. I mean, if you’re so pathetic that you have to lie about sleeping with me, you have bigger issues. It made me really roll my eyes when he came out in such strong support of the #metoo movement last year. Like, okay, dude. Yeah. I guess if you just lie about fucking someone, it doesn’t count? I tried to get this cute musician who had recently moved to town to date me but he had a longtime girlfriend back in Boston who, while they were technically on a break while he was in L.A., he was obviously deeply committed to. So we agreed to be friends instead.
I would still have to pull my car over occasionally and sob, deep heaving grief cries, which would hit me in waves when I had a second to myself to think or some song would come on the radio. Some days, I truly thought there would never be a time when I wouldn’t feel that way.
A week into June, Carpenter and I went to see Pinback, one of my favorite bands at the time, play at a club in Hollywood called Avalon. After the show, she wanted to go home, and after we said goodbye, I pulled out my phone and called my friend Joel, who was always up for a party.
“Oh my God, BABE! Tonight is the OPENING night of the Roosevelt Hotel pool bar! It’s Amanda Demme’s night! LET’S GO! I’m PICKING YOU UP NOW!”
Ten minutes later, his vintage Mercedes screeched around the corner.
“BABE! GET IN!!!”
We pulled up to the valet at the Roosevelt Hotel, which was teeming with huge black SUVs all jockeying for space, and scantily clad club girls milling about everywhere. Joel took my hand and pulled me through the packed crowd to the velvet ropes at the front. The scene was already feeling insanely overwhelming, but Joel had connections, and I was certain that this was the place to be on this particular Saturday night. He held my hand tightly as he pushed us through the crush to the two huge bouncers guarding the entrance. I saw him lean into the bouncer and say, “I HAVE BUSY PHILIPPS WITH ME.”
I wanted to die. What?? HE wasn’t on the list? He was trying to use me to get into the opening? The bouncer gave me the once-over and no joke, shrugged his shoulders like he had no idea what Joel was talking about. Just then, Amanda Demme, the matriarch of the Hollywood hotspot scene in the early 2000s, came up with her list. The bouncer whispered to her and gestured to us. She looked at me up and down, like you would see in a movie, then turned back to the bouncer and very clearly said, “NO.”
This was beyond. I mean. How does one recover from that kind of humiliation?
Joel turned to me. “That CUNT. Now I’m mad. We’re getting in there!”
“No. Joel, let’s just go to the Abbey or something.”
“Fuck no!”
With that, he grabbed me and we snuck around to where there was a service entrance, and all of a sudden, we were in. It was shockingly easy to sneak in, which I wish we would’ve just done from the start so I could have been spared the humiliation of Amanda Demme’s withering gaze of rejection. We tried to get a drink at the bar, but it was at least ten deep. I saw Wilmer Valderrama holding court in the back with a gaggle of hot girls hanging on his every word. I gave a head nod to him from across the pool but there was no sense heading over there to say hi. It was almost impossible to move, it was so crowded.
“Joel. I’m just gonna go home. This is lame.”
“Yeah, babe. I thought the crowd would be better, but you know, whatever.”
We started to slowly make our way out when I turned to take one last look around.
“JOEL! WAIT! That guy! I want to go talk to him! I’m obsessed with him and every time I see him we talk forever but he’s never asked me out. Is he gay?”
On the complete opposite end of the party, a pool between us, in a suit jacket and tie, smoking under a perfectly lit palm tree, was a guy I’d run into three or four times in the year since Craig and I had broken up. And every time we saw each other, we would stand outside and smoke and talk, but he never asked for my number or asked me out. Obviously, I assumed he was gay.
“Marc Silverstein? No. He’s not gay. But if you’re into him you’d better get used to Lizzy Caplan and Kate Towne because those bitches are always by his side.”
“Let’s go talk to him.”
“Oh! He’s with Anna!”
The only thing Joel liked more than whatever current actress he was hanging out with was finding a more famous actress to hang out with. Marc Silverstein was standing with Anna Faris. We headed back into the fray, toward their little group.
“HEY!” Marc said, and I smiled at him.
“Hi!”
“We always see each other at real Hollywood hot spots!”
I laughed. “Yeah, I know. It’s actually super embarrassing.”
“It’s funny! I was just thinking about you. I’m having a birthday party soon with Lizzy Caplan. You know her, right? From Freaks and Geeks?”
“Yeah. I haven’t seen her in a while though.”
“Let me have your email, I’ll send you the invite!” He pulled out his Sidekick and looked up, dejected. “Oh shit. It’s dead. Oh well. Just tell me. I’ll remember.”
“Oh. My email is long and dumb and you won’t remember it now!”
He threw his cigarette to the ground and stomped on it. “Yeah I will!”
I told him my silly AOL address, which I had come up with freshman year of college. BIZZIEBEEFREE@AOL.COM.
“Cool. I’ll email you.”
Joel and I headed out, back to the valet, where we waited forty minutes for his car to be returned to us. The next day I got an email from Marc Silverstein.
Good to see you last night. Here’s the invite for the party, as promised. But maybe we should try to see each other before that? Like on purpose.
I walked into the living room where Emily was doing the crossword and petting our dog, Henry. She looked up at me, “What’s up, Pup?”
“I’m gonna go out with this guy,” I told her, “and we’re totally gonna get married.”
• • •
Marc Silverstein was a grown-up. The most grown-up adult of anyone I had ever known. Emily started calling him my fiancé in the days le
ading up to our first date. He took me to Islands, in Burbank, as a sort of joke—like we kept running into each other at cool Hollywood bars, so we needed to get down to who we truly were. It was the same chain burger place where Craig had made me run to the bathroom in tears a few years earlier. But I obviously didn’t tell that story.
After Islands, we weren’t ready for the date to end, so we went to a bar called the Cat & Fiddle and got distracted by what were clearly Russian call girls and their dates and spent most of the time silently listening in on the insane conversations they were having. When we couldn’t contain it anymore, we ran outside to smoke, laughing about the insanity of Los Angeles. He drove a car that looked like something a chauffeur would drive, something I’d never seen or heard of before, a Volkswagen Phaeton. Apparently it was a luxury Volkswagen that they tried to launch in the U.S. for one year but it didn’t really go over well. I think only Marc and William Shatner had one. (That’s true, by the way, that William Shatner drove one. I saw him like twice driving it around town.)
Marc drove me home and we sat in the driveway of my duplex and talked for four hours. We didn’t stop. And only when I was almost actually falling asleep did I say I thought I needed to go to bed and he finally leaned over and grabbed my arm and kissed me over the gearshift in the center console. I knew the rules of dating. We were supposed to play it cool. But he called me the next day.
“Hey. I’m leaving for that wedding in Tulum tomorrow,” he said, “so any way you’d want to hang out again today? Is that weird?”
It wasn’t.
I went over to his house (HE OWNED A HOUSE) and took him to a frozen yogurt place that Abdi and Candi and I were obsessed with called Pinkberry in West Hollywood. He hadn’t heard of it yet. Abdi and I had discovered Pinkberry shortly after it opened and we quickly became regulars, even making friends with Shelly (whom we called Shellyberry) and her boyfriend Young (whom we called Youngberry), who owned the place and were the only employees in the early days. I think people sometimes roll their eyes when I’m like, “Ummm. We were into Pinkberry before anyone else.” But TRULY. Abdi went there on opening day and evangelized it to us immediately. It became our hangout. I didn’t even have to tell them my order. They knew. Shellyberry even came to Abdi’s birthday party. We talked about trying to franchise it. HA! I MEAN! IF ONLY WE HAD.
So anyway, I took Marc there and told him what to order. While we were sitting outside eating, he got a call on his Sidekick, which he answered right away and had a furtive conversation, laughing and getting off the phone as soon as he could.
“Sorry.”
“No, that’s okay.”
“It was my writing partner, Abby.”
“Oh. Cool. How long have you guys written together?”
“Ummm. Since we met at grad school. Actually, you tested for one of our shows years ago, it was called Close to Home?”
Oh my God. The writer with the good taste in music. OF COURSE.
“Wait. Weren’t you guys like married??”
He laughed and shook his head. “No. But we were engaged and then we called it off before the invitations went out.”
I raised my eyebrows. “But you still work together.”
“We still work together. But she’s engaged now. She’s getting married in December.”
Oh. Okay. So, this was how grown-ups did things? I could deal with this, I was certain. Marc seemed worth it.
“I’m bummed you’re leaving for two weeks. Plus it’s my birthday on the twenty-fifth. I’m having a party. I’m trying to make up for last year, which was kind of a disaster—I wish you could come.”
“I know! Well, we’ll see. Maybe Tulum will be boring and I’ll come back early.”
We made out on the couch in his professionally decorated home and said goodbye and that we would talk when he got back.
Gabe Sachs said, “If he comes back early from his vacation, you should marry him FOR SURE.”
Kate, my BFF from high school, said, “You know, after my first date with Larry, he left town for two weeks and we got married. I think this is a good sign.”
Emily BB said, “My grandma is gonna be so mad that you’re dating a Jewish guy and I’m not.”
Abdi said, “I’m obsessed with this for you!”
My mom said, “He sounds great, Biz! What has he written?? Anything I would know?? Also, say, have you seen if maybe you could get on Grey’s Anatomy?? I think you’d be so good on that show!”
Marc called to tell me Tulum was nothing but rain. The wedding had been fun but there was no reason to stay for the rest of the time if it was just going to rain. Plus, Abby was annoyed he was taking such a big vacation since they needed to start thinking about TV pitches for fall. He would come back the day before my birthday.
Yes. I would marry him. It was decided.
The week after my birthday, he took me to a Fourth of July party at his close friend’s house. It was everyone he knew, his giant group of extended friends, most of whom I had never met, the exception being Ike Barinholtz and Josh Meyers, who I knew because Carpenter had dated Seth Meyers off and on and another friend of ours had dated Josh. Almost as soon as we got there and he’d introduced me to a few people, he disappeared. I saw Molly, his roommate—who used to be his and Abby’s assistant—and her boyfriend and chatted with them for a while. And then I sort of wandered around, trying to figure out who to talk to. I sat and smoked with a guy named Devin, who seemed closest to my age. He knew Molly from college. Everyone else was in their thirties, many of them married with babies, firmly ensconced in adulthood. I saw Marc talking to a blond actress who looked in my direction and then laughed and put her hand on his chest. I felt so self-conscious. I asked Devin who she was.
“Ahhh. Yeah. She’s tricky.”
I didn’t want to seem needy, so I just waited for him to come find me. Which eventually he did.
Here’s the thing. When Marc and I were alone, it was great. He was fun and we could talk about anything. We watched American Idol and reruns of Friends and movies at his house. We woke up late and walked to Toast, the restaurant around the corner from him, and we would eat giant plates of scrambled-egg quesadillas for me and soup for him. It was easy to fall in love with him. He was certainly the smartest man I’d ever dated, just objectively speaking. The fact that he thought I was smart, and was always interested in what I had to say, made me fall for him even more. I had spent so long trying to figure out how to make myself LESS ME in order for Craig to fully love me, and then here was this dude, who HAD HIS SHIT TOGETHER, who thought I was wonderful the way I was. He liked my weird loud laugh, especially in restaurants. This is hard to explain fully, but within weeks it seemed like we had been together for years, in the best way possible. We even took to lying to people about how long we’d been dating, because it seemed absurd to say that we had basically just met.
But when we were out with his friends, things were a little bit more complicated for me. And we basically only hung out with his friends. More often than not, I would find myself alone, trying to figure out where he had gone and what I was supposed to be doing. I guess just making friends with his friends, which I tried to do. I tried especially hard with Abby, who seemed unsure about me, and who would also call at all hours. Marc would always pick up and talk to her in a quiet, soothing voice, calming her down about whatever pitch or rejection they were facing. He didn’t seem super interested in getting to know my friends, aside from Emily, who I would invite everywhere, like my security-blanket friend from childhood. But I figured that that was just the way it was. He had known all of his friends for years and years. It probably just took a while for him to get comfortable with people. Plus, he was nine years older than us, so that was probably part of it too. But my friends didn’t really see it that way.
“Marc’s a jerk. Like, he totally thinks he’s better than us,” one of Emily’s work friends said one night when we were out.
I didn’t know how to respond. I tried to tell her that
it wasn’t true, but over time, I slowly stopped hanging out with them in favor of Marc and his friends. It was just easier. Marc took me to a super-fancy resort in Cabo in August for the weekend, where we drank tequila and ate chips and salsa and got massages. If this was being an adult, I wanted all of it.
In the fall, I started working on a sitcom for the now-defunct UPN network. ABC didn’t pick up the Peter Dinklage show, and in July I’d gotten a call that UPN was looking to recast the lead on a sitcom that had already been picked up called Love, Inc. The part was played in the pilot by Shannen Doherty, but they had decided to replace her only after they had trotted her out at the up-fronts and used her for publicity, which I thought was a fairly shitty thing to do and made me wary of going in for it. But the showrunners were huge fans and wanted me to come in and at least meet them. The script was actually pretty funny, and one of the showrunners had worked on Friends (my favorite show in the world), so it seemed like something I should consider. After I met with them, UPN asked me to do a screen test. I’m not sure if there were other girls up for it or not. In my memory, it was clear I was the first choice of the showrunners but that’s not to say UPN didn’t ask them to screen-test more than one girl.
The sitcom was super fun. I loved being in front of a live audience and I liked my costars. Holly Robinson Peete was the other lead and she was so fun and such a real TV veteran, I loved her instantly. But I had some difficulty with the showrunner from Friends. I felt like he would often try to push me in a direction with my acting that was super cheesy, and he was prone to giving me line readings, which I fucking hated. For me, as an actor, line readings are truly the worst. I know that writers sometimes have in their heads exactly how they want a joke to sound, or a particular turn of phrase, but I’ve always believed there’s value in how an actor brings a joke to life. Sometimes in TV, though, it doesn’t matter how you think it would be funniest—you’re just there to service the script. Marc came to every single Friday-night taping of the show, even when it overlapped with Lakers games, for which he had season tickets. The only time he missed one was when the show was on the same night as the rehearsal dinner for Abby’s wedding in Napa Valley.
This Will Only Hurt a Little Page 18