Ahhh, the baby weight. With my pregnancies, I didn’t count calories at all. Depending on which child I was carrying, I gained between fifty-one and sixty-three pounds. For someone who is five feet three inches and usually weighs between 98 and 110 pounds, that’s a lot. It worked out well for the babies; I had strong, healthy, perfect kids. But getting that body back into shape—well, I had my work cut out for me.
A new baby also meant more financial responsibilities. Schools, college funds, pediatricians, clothes, toys, tutors, all the things a growing child needs. I needed to go back to work—needed to find work.
Salvation came in the form of a TV movie with James Garner titled Dead Silence, based on the novel A Maiden’s Grave. It would shoot in Toronto, and by the time production started Sarah would be about six months old.
Signing on for a few months to shoot in Toronto or Portland or wherever was no problem when it was just Kevin and me. Now with a baby, we had to figure out how we were going to handle things. Kevin says, “I remember the discussion, it went something like this: ‘I would like Sarah to go with me.’ ‘No, you’re leaving her at home.’ ‘No, I’m taking her with me.’ She won because she was breast-feeding.”
On that trip, I’m sure I was way over the airline’s limit on bags—I packed enough stuff for Sarah to get her through first grade. I’d had some help finding a nanny who lived in the Toronto area to help me through the shoot.
Sarah and I and our three thousand bags checked into the Four Seasons Hotel, where the producers had decided to house some of the cast. It was a terrific place to stay as a new mother—if I needed something, no matter what time of the day or night, no matter how crazy the request, the Four Seasons’ staff would find it. Thank you, Randy!
As a perfectionist, I’m sure I drove the nanny up the wall—everything had to be perfect for Sarah, and just a few months into this mom gig, I wasn’t sure from day to day what perfect was. I glommed on to anyone on the set who had kids, especially young ones, to grill them for tips on how they were raising theirs.
While I had a baby in the hotel, I had a handful of kids to work with on the set. Dead Silence tells the story of a twelve-hour siege—three escaped prisoners take a busload of Deaf schoolchildren and their teachers hostage. In a tense showdown between the bad guys and a hard-boiled hostage negotiator, the role Jim Garner played, one hostage is to be killed every hour until all the demands are met.
My character was Melanie, a teacher at the school and one of the hostages. We’re being held in an abandoned slaughterhouse, and I’m not content to wait for a rescue and start looking for a way to sneak the children out.
It was interesting to shoot something that takes place over just one day. We had no different looks or styles to our wardrobes, just a single outfit each, which got dirtier or ripped or wet or shot through with holes and splattered with blood, but that was it. Same thing went for hair and makeup.
Sometimes things that seem so simple when you’re watching them are the toughest to pull off. Rarely are scenes shot in the exact sequence in which they unfold on-screen. Since the clothing, makeup, and hair needed to undergo small changes during the siege, continuity was critical over the eight-week shoot. If I ran through a muddy drainage ditch at 4 p.m. and the bottom of my dress got dirty, the dress couldn’t be dirty during a scene at 3:59, and it had better be at 4:01 and every minute and hour after.
James Garner was a hoot to work with. He’s a great storyteller and had hundreds of Hollywood tales. I loved working with the Deaf kids as well; they were sweet and talented, and I got to know their families a little bit, too.
Entertainment Tonight came on the set to shoot a segment about our show. Jim said no way was he doing it, he was boycotting ET, but I was certainly free to go ahead. I wanted to know why he did that—had the show done something terrible to him in the past?
Sweet Jim Garner
“They announce everybody’s birth date and their age,” he growled. “I don’t like it.”
Just about anyone can find out how old an actor is pretty easily. On the other hand, I was thirty-one and Jim was around sixty-eight, so maybe I’ll feel differently about it in another thirty or so years.
Like Jim, I want any assessment of me to be about the work, not my age, not whether I can hear. There’s always an x-factor lurking around in the background, shadowing all of us, something that can shift the focus away from what is really important every time you step on a set or a stage.
KEVIN DID NOT like being away from his new baby daughter any longer than he had to, so he made a couple of trips to stay with us in Toronto. Babies can change so much in just a few days.
One morning all three of us were in the room. Sarah was teething on a piece of cold cantaloupe, when I saw her put her little finger to her mouth and her thumb to her ear and fold the rest of her fingers neatly down.
“Look, Kevin, it looks like she’s signing ‘telephone.’”
But he was already headed over to grab the phone. Sarah had said her first word—in sign language! And we were both there to witness it.
On another day, Sarah had been eating baby food—apricots—and suddenly Kevin said, “Don’t look at Sarah.”
“What?”
“Just don’t look at Sarah.”
So of course I immediately looked and gasped—big red blotches covered every inch of my baby’s pink, smooth, beautiful skin. We got the doctor on the phone right away; he said to give it ten or fifteen minutes and see if it went away. He suspected it was just a mild allergic reaction. Which is what it turned out to be, one that she eventually grew out of.
But until you know everything is going to be okay, your heart is racing and your mind can conjure up the most horrible things. At these times a vivid imagination is something I’d gladly give up.
At the end of the production, I started packing to go home. Sarah was so cute that day and being so good, she’d fallen asleep sitting in her little car seat on the bed while I was finishing up. I couldn’t resist; she was sleeping so peacefully and her little toes were just as still as could be.
I grabbed some hot-pink nail polish and painted her toenails in a flash. When I got home and Kevin saw them, he freaked out! I let a few years pass before I painted Sarah’s toenails again.
The flight home should have been exhausting, but I was in luck. Goldie Hawn was on the same flight, and she came over and asked to hold the baby. I was so grateful for the break and thought I’d have about a five-to-ten-minute breather, but Goldie held Sarah for more than an hour, talking to her, rocking her, completely engaging her. She didn’t miss her mom at all. An hour’s rest when you have a six-month-old is heaven. Thank you, Goldie!
Babies are just hard not to love and be charmed by. In 1998, when I was at designer Nolan Miller’s being fitted for a dress for the Oscars, Sarah was playing on the floor. Nolan asked if he could borrow Sarah for a minute while I was changing.
When he came back, I asked where he’d been. He said Sophia Loren was there and had caught sight of Sarah and wanted to hold the baby for a few minutes.
“Sophia Loren? Do we get a picture?”
But the legendary Italian actress had already disappeared into a waiting limo. I sighed. How I would have loved to have a photo of Sophia with Sarah.
THE WORK WAS coming in fits and starts. Nothing steady. I got a call about doing an episode of Spin City, working with Michael J. Fox. Once again I was thrilled to be doing comedy and to be back on prime-time television.
In television, it’s easier somehow to think that whatever role a person plays in a comedy or a drama is really pretty much how they are in real life. Sometimes that’s the case—the show will build off the energy and essence of the person—but just as often it isn’t.
If you think that Michael J. Fox is anything like his TV persona, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong. He’s actually nicer, more decent, kindhearted, and has some of the best comic timing I’ve witnessed.
Like Seinfeld, Spin City was fill
ed with actors who’d been together for a while. They were blessed with terrific writers/producers, and the episode, written by Sarah Dunn and Kirk Rudell with me in mind, was called “Deaf Becomes Her.”
One of the best scenes is when the temp who’s been hired as the sign-language interpreter for the mayor’s State of the City address hasn’t a clue how to sign and just starts making it up as he goes along. In a couple of scenes I get to flirt with Michael J.—who wouldn’t like that? The show was an absolute blast to work on, completely irreverent.
I also got to do a scene with Brooke Shields on The Larry Sanders Show with Garry Shandling, which was a lot of fun.
Then a handful of smaller film projects started casting me as the seductress, the villain, the con artist—I liked playing against the good-girl stereotype.
In Her Defense with Jeff Fahey was just downright steamy. I think 90 percent of my wardrobe was different cuts of black leather. Then in When Justice Fails, an affair ends in murder—did she or didn’t she?
The most interesting project to come along during this time was Freak City, in which I played an adult who was intellectually and emotionally about nine years old.
Samantha Mathis’s character is at the center of the story. She’s a young woman struggling with multiple sclerosis and finds a different sort of family in a group of us who have all been relegated to the same nursing home. It was one of those great sets where everyone just clicks. Natalie Cole played an injured blues singer. Peter Sarsgaard was already crafting his ability to portray infinite layers of cynicism, and Jonathan Silverman played a blind man to perfection.
This bittersweet story was about finding hope in the place you least expect it.
In 1999, I was in production in Portland on Where the Truth Lies, another courtroom drama. My character is accused of murder, and my attorney is blinded by his feelings for me.
I liked the challenge of this film, but it carries such sad memories for me. We were in midproduction when news broke of the plane crash that took the life of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn. John and his sister, Caroline, had been so gracious to me over the years.
I’ll never forget how they helped me navigate an uncomfortable situation in August 1987. They had invited me to the Special Olympics being held on the Notre Dame campus, and Bill Hurt was also attending. It was all coming just a month after our horrific July break up, and it was beginning to feel as if every time I turned around, he was there.
For the duration of the event, John and Caroline gathered me up and kept me close, and I was so grateful for their friendship during that difficult time. One of the funniest moments came when we all went out for pizza. When the check came, everyone kind of looked around—none of them had cash or credit cards—so I picked up the bill.
John’s death, so unexpected, so needless, was such a loss for the country and especially painful for those of us who had experienced his kindness firsthand.
Elaine on Seinfeld would’ve been very jealous: I spent a lovely day with John F. Kennedy Jr.
AS KEVIN AND I headed down to San Diego with Sarah in 1998 to celebrate Christmas Eve with his family, it felt as if everything was coming together for us.
We had decided to sell the house in the hills and move to a quiet neighborhood outside L.A. where we could raise our kids away from the Hollywood scene. Though there was much to love about our house, it was expensive, and one Sunday when we were doing our loop walking Sarah, as we rounded the corner on Sunset Boulevard, we walked right into a hooker fighting with a john. It was 10 a.m. and Kevin said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s it, I’m done.”
Besides, we had another baby on the way.
On Christmas Day I told Kevin I had seen a little blood and said we had to drive home from San Diego right away. On this solemn ride, we were quiet; there wasn’t much for either of us to say. I dropped Sarah off with Jack the next day, and Kevin and I went together to the doctor.
This was the one time in my life I didn’t want to be right. I was praying that I was wrong, that everything was going to be fine. It wasn’t. The doctor confirmed what I had feared.
The miscarriage hit us hard. It took about a year to mentally and emotionally recover. Then we faced a terrifying scare with Sarah.
She was about three and a half and was in child care during the day. On a Monday, she came home with a big bruise on her wrist. One of the kids at school had accidentally hit her with a plastic dinosaur. On Tuesday she came home with a few more bruises. On Wednesday she came home with even more. Now Kevin and I were alarmed.
We talked to the child-care center, and on Thursday an observer watched Sarah throughout the day, recording everything that happened to her, especially anything that could cause bruising. It was all ordinary stuff, such as at 8:35 Sarah bumped into the arts-and-crafts table. Everyone was mystified. By Thursday night, she also had some little red dots—they looked like tiny pinpricks—that were barely visible along the back of her neck.
On Friday, Kevin headed off to work with my worry level rising. I decided I had to get Sarah to a doctor. The doctor took one look at her and said, “Go get a blood test right now.” I got to the lab and it took five people to hold Sarah down, she was screaming bloody murder, so much I could see the veins bulging on her little neck. It was killing me.
The doctor said they’d call with the test results that night. The call came at 9 p.m. Sarah was asleep, I was lying down. Kevin, who was livid that I hadn’t told him about all this from the start, answered the phone.
He remembers: “The doctor said they had the results back from the lab and that they’d called ahead and the hospital had a bed waiting, she needed to go to the hospital now. ‘Right now?’ I asked. ‘Right now.’ It was a hospital we hadn’t heard of, but we got Sarah up and headed out. When we drove up, the first thing we saw was the sign: CITY OF HOPE CANCER RESEARCH CENTER.”
We went from worry to absolute terror. We got inside, and as soon as the doctor walked in, he began looking over the test results. I asked if it was leukemia. He said it wasn’t. He told us, “This is the kind of case I enjoy. At the end of the weekend she’ll be going home. And she’ll be fine.”
Sarah had a serious case of idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, or ITP. Mild cases are not that uncommon in kids and usually clear up on their own. Essentially, as they explained it to us, Sarah’s platelet count was extremely low; her blood was so thin that if she broke the skin in a fall, her blood had no ability to clot. Also, internal bleeding that we wouldn’t be aware of until the situation had become life threatening was possible. All of it was compromising her body’s ability to fight off infections.
The doctor who treated Sarah was a visiting specialist from Oregon. Dr. James Miser, who was the hospital’s chief medical officer at the time, also got involved and was so filled with compassion and patience. He was great with kids. None of us will forget the Donald Duck puppet he used to explain what was going to happen—I’m not sure whom Donald reassured most, me and Kev, or Sarah.
Kevin and I took shifts staying with Sarah that weekend. He stayed the first night—I was so afraid something would happen and because of my deafness I might not understand, or the doctors and nurses might not understand me. I took the days, and we did that through the weekend.
Sarah quickly adjusted, and she still remembers clomping down the hospital corridors in a pair of princess high heels, pulling her IV behind her. Over the next year, we had to take her in for weekly, then monthly treatments until the platelet count was stabilized. I don’t think we have ever felt such anguish as we did going through that experience—and we were so lucky that ITP was so treatable and that Sarah is completely healthy today.
When Sarah was in kindergarten, she had a birthday party and asked all the kids to bring unwrapped gifts to donate to the City of Hope toy room. The hospital has a toy store, and each child patient gets to go in each day and pick out a toy. Sarah wanted to fill up that room. Sarah’s birthday netted about forty-five toys, an
d we had another fifty toys we took from our closet. Then we headed over one day to donate them.
Sarah wanted to give the toys herself to the children there. But hospital policy forbids a child who could have an infection so slight he or she might not even be aware of it to be around children whose immune systems are already so weak. But Sarah was adamant—she had to give at least one toy to one child.
The staff found a two-year-old who had Down syndrome who was being released the next day. Her name was Sarah. And so my Sarah, with a big, purple dancing Barney in hand, got to hand him off to another Sarah and see her smile and giggle with delight. It was one of the best days ever.
With Sarah healed and bouncing back, I was anxious to throw myself into work again. I needed a role that would really challenge me.
The role didn’t come overnight, but finally arrived courtesy of the brilliant Aaron Sorkin.
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BY NOVEMBER OF 1998, I was already hooked on the new Aaron Sorkin series, Sports Night. It was so sharply written and so unexpected, and considering my love of sports, I had to watch this show.
But then he wrote an episode called “Dear Louise,” which aired on November 10.
In the episode, Jeremy, who was played by Josh Malina, is writing to his Deaf sister, Louise, a college sophomore. He’s telling her all about his new job at Sports Night and everything that’s been happening over the last few days.
“Dear Louise” was funny, poignant, and I dropped Aaron a note just to let him know how much I’d enjoyed it and appreciated the shout-out to the Deaf community. I wanted him to know we paid attention to that sort of thing, that even a simple gesture like that meant something.
That note soon led to a completely unexpected lunch at Mandarin in Beverley Hills. Aaron and I had such a good conversation and found that when it came to character and story and ideas, we thought about things in many of the same ways.
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