Finally, the director stopped filming and took me into another room. “You can’t talk to the crew,” she said.
I took a step back. “What do you mean I can’t talk to them?”
“On reality shows, they don’t interact with the talent. They’re supposed to be background, almost invisible.”
I shook my head, not angry but firm. “Then you’re working with the wrong person. These people are in my home. This is very personal. I’m going to talk to them. I can’t feel like I’m being an asshole by ignoring them.” She tried to offer a rebuttal, but I interrupted, “I’m sorry. I can’t not talk to them.” By the end of the season, they were eating my dad’s chicken nuggets and we would have dinner with them.
Coming from movies and scripted TV, I was used to scene-by-scene direction and hitting certain marks, but on the reality show I was told to go wherever I wanted and do whatever I planned on doing, which struck me as bizarre. It took a while to adjust. In a way, though, that was a perfect metaphor for what I was trying to do with my life. I had to toss out the old way of doing things, forget about the places I used to stand, and create a new vision for myself.
That new vision included a familiar last name. The opening episode showed me changing my last name back to Richards, but it didn’t fully capture my frustration when that seemingly simple task turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. I’d had to wait four years or until my divorce from Charlie was granted in the court system, which meant I was Denise Sheen longer than I was actually married. So with cameras following me, I went to the DMV to change my driver’s license and all the corresponding paperwork. After I waited in line, the woman behind the counter looked over my paperwork and shook her head no. I needed my court-approved divorce decree, she explained. “It’s our policy,” she added.
I couldn’t believe it. “Come on,” I said. “My divorce has been everywhere, on the news. You know I’m divorced.”
She nodded. “From Charlie Sheen.”
“See. You know.”
“But I need to see the official court papers. That’s our policy.”
A few days later, I returned with the legal document, waited in the same line, and saw the same lady. To my disbelief, I received another shake of her head. This time, after scrutinizing my divorce papers, the woman pointed out that the judge had failed to stamp my divorce decree.
“So even though it says I’m divorced, even though the judge signed it, you can’t process my name change?” I asked.
“Nope. Not unless it’s stamped.” I stared at her, frozen. Begging her. She was not swayed. “It has to be stamped.”
Now, Charlie was about to marry his girlfriend, Brooke Mueller. Their engagement and upcoming nuptials were all over the news. “This isn’t fair,” I said. “My ex-husband is allowed to get remarried but I’m not able to change my last name? I still have to be Denise Sheen?” She nodded yes. Whatever … still doesn’t make sense to me, but I was at the mercy of the DMV.
After my attorneys took the papers back to the judge, I made another trip to the DMV. The third time was the charm. At home, my dad congratulated me. He whipped up a celebratory dinner, one of his three-course specialties.
That was another problem. After being married to my mom for thirty-seven years, he was lost without her. They’d sold their coffee shop when she got sick; his life was about taking care of her, as he squeezed every possible minute of companionship before she was gone. Then his life fell apart and I had to be there for him. At my insistence, he moved into my house right before production started. The timing was perfect. Being around the girls helped him through the worst of the pain, and he enjoyed hanging out with the show’s crew. In a way, it was a godsend to have so many people in the house every day.
He took over the cooking chores with the gusto of a man with a renewed purpose. At breakfast, he planned lunch and dinner. While he was skilled in the kitchen, he only knew how to cook multicourse feasts. Every meal was Thanksgiving dinner—meat and potatoes and dessert. My dad was a rail. He’d never worried about weight in his life. However, I ended up gaining about ten to fifteen pounds. It was the first time in my life I added padding where I didn’t want any. I began to look at the bowl of mashed potatoes as my enemy. I forced myself to decline seconds when, in truth, nothing made me feel better than a heaping spoonful of spuds whipped with butter and showered in salt. I knew I was going to have to start hitting the gym. Ugh.
My body needed more work than that. I also visited tattoo artist Kat Von D., who transformed the tattoo of Charlie’s name on my ankle into a beautiful, and feminine, fairy. It hurt like hell. But I expected as much. Changing your life, like a tattoo, isn’t easy—or without pain.
3
AS WE FINISHED episodes and the airdate neared, I fretted about the obvious risk of doing a reality show at this tenuous point in my life. What if nobody watched? What if people didn’t like me? What if being myself wasn’t good enough? What if it didn’t go over? Would low ratings mean I would never, ever work again? Was I doing the right thing? Was I setting myself up for failure?
These were all normal concerns people have when they venture to remake their lives. Hey, talk to any woman who starts to emerge from her shell after a divorce. It’s not easy showing up at your kid’s classroom as a single parent or going to a party with friends as a third wheel. Doing all that on TV just magnified the risks, though I only had myself to blame if it failed.
Fortunately, it didn’t. Though I was grilled about everything but my new TV series when I promoted it on shows such as Today and CNN’s Larry King Live, more than 1.5 million people tuned into It’s Complicated when it debuted in May 2008. E! considered it a success. Mail and e-mail poured in. As I’d hoped, the show struck a nerve among a group of viewers who settled in front of their TV sets on Sunday nights. Judging from the comments I received, many saw someone like themselves in me or someone they knew. They identified with me. “Denise, I do the same thing,” one note said. Others shared stories of their divorces. “Hang in there, girlfriend,” another wrote.
Relieved to have support instead of criticism, my spirits and self-confidence slowly started to build. People related to me and my family, especially my dad. Despite some of the corny scenes that were set up, they got to know me. They saw me with my friends, my dad, and my children, and they liked what they saw, which was exactly what I needed after two years of thinking the world hated me.
The fifth episode, titled “Saying Good-bye,” dealt with my mom’s death, and not surprisingly it garnered the biggest reaction. It was also the most authentic of all the episodes, too. It came about after the director observed my dad and me off camera still grieving my mom and suggested we deal with it on camera. I debated whether I wanted to show that much of my life. It seemed too personal. There had to be limits. But then I thought, why not? We were going through this painful process—maybe other people going through the same thing would be comforted seeing they weren’t the only ones crying or calling a loved one’s cell phone just to hear his or her voice again.
After my dad and sister agreed to share these intensely personal emotions, which took a lot of guts, cameras followed us down to Encinitas and into my parents’ house. It was the first time Michelle and I had gone there since my mom passed. All three of us had a difficult time going inside. We felt my mom’s absence in every room. My sister and I went through my mom’s closet and drawers looking for favorite items to turn her clothes into memory bears for our children.
My dad and I gave Sami and Lola their special bears one afternoon as they were having a tea party. They were made from an old pair of denim pants and shirt. I told the girls they were special gifts that “would always remind them of Nana.” They reached out, their faces lighting up as if my mom were giving them the gifts herself. “How pretty!” Lola said. “I love it,” Sami added.
I tried my best not to break down. “Whenever you want, you can talk to Nana,” I said. “She’ll always be with you.”
Lola lo
oked up at me with her wide eyes that reminded me of my mom. “My angel?”
“Yes, your angel,” I said.
Afterward, I was pleased with myself for doing that episode. Again, it opened a door few people knew how to go through. Death is a subject rarely spoken about, and grief is similarly neglected. Not for lack of interest. I think it’s more about fear—fear of the unknown, fear of the pain and what the deep sorrow of loss and grief feels like. After my mom, a few people did speak to me about their experiences and asked me about the feelings I was experiencing, and it was helpful. Talking and sharing was cathartic, and they jump-started the hard process of healing. Likewise, in the same way I’d found it helpful when I was pregnant to talk to girlfriends who’d had a baby, I talked to friends who’d lost a parent. I found it therapeutic to open up with girlfriends who’d gone through breakups and divorces, who were single moms raising children on their own, and who’d worked up the nerve to get their asses back into the world.
Talk is good, especially when it’s real and substantive and addressing subjects that might turn into debilitating fears and secrets if kept bottled up. It’s equally good to chat about the tiny, everyday stuff, such as the brand of shampoo or beauty products you have on the bathroom counter, a fabulous farmers’ market in the neighborhood, or a good summer camp for the kids. In those discussions I’m always reminded of how similarly most of us live. Anyway, I’m a talker, and I hadn’t done much of that since my life had turned into a nonstop soap opera after I got together with Richie. Even though it took doing a reality show to open me up, the resulting conversations had a positive effect.
We did an episode in Hawaii where I refused to get into a bikini and took heat in the tabloid press for looking chunkier on the sand, but as soon as the season ended, I put myself on a disciplined exercise regimen, starting at 5:00 a.m. when I gulped a cup of coffee and my Pilates instructor had me on my reformer getting my ass in shape.
Besides getting into better shape, I made other changes. I moved to a four-bedroom, two-story Cape Cod–style home in Pacific Palisades. I wanted to be closer to town and thought the girls might like living by the beach. I also used that time to figure out where I really wanted to settle before they started kindergarten. But when I look back at what was behind my decision that summer, I can see another reason I moved, a reason not readily apparent to me but one stemming from the risks I’d taken and the work I was doing on myself. I wanted light in my life.
I know that might sound a little too New Agey for some, as it would for me, but that’s not the way I mean it. I literally wanted light. I was ready to step out from the darkness of the past few years. I thought it would be nicer living closer to the ocean. I didn’t realize fog fills the sky much of the year, but, hey, that was a technicality; and as things turned out, I moved back to my old neighborhood a year later. But the change was a fun distraction that got me thinking about how I wanted my life to look. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with devoting time and energy to your surroundings. I encourage it. I am constantly working on a project, redecorating a room, renovating a house, rearranging my closet, doing something that makes me feel good. It can be as little as lighting a wonderfully aromatic candle, or taking forty-five minutes out to get a manicure, or meeting a friend for a long, leisurely lunch, or sitting on the beach with the kids in the last warm rays of the day’s sunshine, or curling up with a good book.
An insight that took me time to rediscover: life’s short, and we’re all adults. If you get the urge to redecorate a room, your house, or your entire life, do it.
4
IN JANUARY 2009, I flew to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival to help promote a small, offbeat romantic comedy I was in called Finding Bliss. As I got off the plane, my It’s Complicated crew met me. It was the first time I’d seen them since the previous summer. Now we were starting the second season. I gave one guy a big hug and turned to the camera and explained, “This is my crew!” I saw the director. “Everyone knows there are cameras following me,” I said. On the second season we actually broke the third wall and talked into the camera a lot of the time. Since I did it a lot with the crew, when the producers saw dailies, they actually liked it. Probably annoyed I was still Chatty Cathy with our crew, but whatever. I still did it.
If keeping it real was my new mantra, I was happy to see return another part of my life—my sense of humor. Before the Finding Bliss press conference, I was chatting with my costar Jamie Kennedy. He asked if I had any idea what questions reporters might ask us about the movie. “I wish they’d ask me about the movie,” I said. “They’ll just ask about my social life and my relationship with Charlie.” As for Jamie, I thought it was pretty obvious what the press would ask him, too. Then I realized something. “You haven’t seen the movie yet, have you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Why?”
I smiled.
“Does my pickle show?” he asked.
I nodded. Jamie played a young porn star in this movie about an enterprising young filmmaker who enters the business through the adult-film industry. One scene included a full-frontal peek at his pickle. “Oh my God,” he said facetiously. I laughed. Having done nudity on-screen, I assured him there was nothing to worry about, as long as he kept his parents from seeing the movie—and from looking at websites that would post screen grabs.
A little more than a month into shooting the second season of It’s Complicated, I took another risk. I joined ABC’s hit series Dancing with the Stars. Yes, gulp. It seemed from the time the show debuted in 2005 they had invited me to participate, and each time I politely declined. The reason? I wasn’t a dancer. Oscar-winning choreographer Debbie Allen had her hands full when she prepared Charlie and me for our first dance, and prior to that my only real experience with anything resembling dance moves was pom-pom girls and cheerleading, and if you recall, my career came to a teary end in eleventh grade when I didn’t make the team. But I said yes this time for a couple reasons.
First, Sami and Lola, who were fans of the show and enjoyed dressing up in costumes with sparkles and fixing their hair, like me, had started taking gymnastics lessons. They seemed like naturals to me, but they were shy about doing routines the first few times. They expected to be perfect out of the gate. I tried explaining that nobody starts out perfect and that having butterflies is normal, but they had a hard timing understanding. Then the Dancing offer arrived and I thought, perfect, I’ll show them Mommy goes through the same thing.
Selfishly, I’d noticed many of the Dancing participants got in great shape from doing the show. That sounded good to me. I also simply thought it would be fun to learn how to dance. Looking back, it would’ve been more fun to take private lessons instead of doing it in front of twenty-two million people. Oh, well, c’est la vie.
Like every other fan of the show, I waited eagerly for the rest of the cast to be announced. Except for a couple of the performers, I learned the names like everyone else did—well, most of them anyway. At the time, I was with a girlfriend in New York. I quickly read the names: Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak; rodeo champ Ty Murray; his wife, Jewel; Steve-O; football star Lawrence Taylor; singer Belinda Carlisle; country singer Chuck Wicks; Nancy O’Dell; rapper Lil’ Kim; David Alan Grier; actor Gilles Marini; and—
“Here’s the winner,” I said.
“Who?” my girlfriend asked.
“Shawn Johnson. She’s the Olympic gymnast. She won a gold medal and a silver.”
“And you think she’s going to win?”
“Yup.”
I was partnered with Maksim Chmerkovskiy, the handsome, fiercely competitive dance champion. We met for the first time on Good Morning America—not even in the greenroom, but on the air—where we promoted the new lineup of stars. We hit it off right away. I thought he was sexy, obviously an amazing dancer, and funny. We had the same sense of humor.
On and off camera, I mentioned I was nervous but hoped to have fun anyway. Maks told me not to worry. But he told me he’d b
e mad if I got nervous … um, okay. Welcome to Maks’s sense of humor.
The mistake I made in agreeing to go on Dancing was doing it at the same time I was shooting my reality series. It was too much and made every day a scheduling nightmare. Starting from the moment I left Good Morning America, Dancing required an intense time commitment and concentration, and to do well with my nonexistent dance background I needed to devote more time and energy than I had.
The first two weeks of rehearsals were great—then not so great. Maks and I were best pals during our three-hour lunch breaks, but our friendship was strained on the dance floor. The problem? Our approaches were different. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you I’m disciplined and a hard worker, and I wanted to learn how to dance. But without any experience, I wanted to start with simple steps, not complicated routines. Maks disagreed. He had his way of teaching and long story short, after one particularly physically and emotionally grueling rehearsal, I asked my construction worker brother-in-law if he would bring over a sledgehammer and break my ankle. “It’ll hurt less,” I said.
5
THANK GOODNESS MAKS and I liked each other outside the studio. The camaraderie with all the participants was the best part. I loved the entire cast. As we rolled up to the season premiere, Shawn Johnson still looked to me like the front-runner. Gilles Marini, who became a good friend, also looked super, and I suspected he had some dance experience. If not, he was a natural. I picked him to give Shawn a run for the title. As for the pros, Derek Hough was amazing to watch and awesome at finding the strengths in every partner. You could tell he had a talent for making each dance about them, not himself. Cheryl Burke was similar—amazingly skilled at bringing out the best in her partner. Kym Johnson is one of the nicest women I’ve met and has the hottest body!
Real Girl Next Door Page 17