by Jennie Garth
God, I was so happy to have him on the phone with me, but I have to say (and I know you ladies who’ve been there know what I’m talking about), every time he’d say something encouraging, like, “You can do it!” or, “Breathe!” I wanted to take that giant cell phone and throw it across the room.
In other words, it sucks to be on the phone when you’re a sweaty, heaving mess who is ten centimeters dilated and so far gone into the la-la land of end-stage labor that you’re pretty certain your head is going to spin 360 degrees and you are going to start speaking in tongues and levitate off the bed.
When I was no longer able to speak, my mother continued to hold the phone up to my ear so I could hear Peter and so, presumably, he could hear every grunt and scream and wail coming out of me. And then I gritted my teeth, turned all my energies inward, and it happened: I pushed and she came and . . . that was when the phone died.
Just before it did, though, Peter got to hear our darling baby cry and he knew she was here and safe. About an hour later, he came bursting through the door with roses and a teddy bear in hand, a look of utter joy and wonderment on his young, perfect face.
When I think of that moment now, with him holding our sweet, delicate little baby in his arms for the first time, it can still nearly bring me to my knees. It was such a profoundly beautiful moment in our lives. She was here! We named our sweet daughter Luca Bella, which means “beautiful light” in Italian. She was so perfect and so luminous, our shiny little star. We were both madly in love with her and even more madly in love with each other. My life, it seemed, just couldn’t get any better.
THE CUTEST GIRL ON SET
Peter and I brought our Luca Bella home and we immediately slipped into the wonderfully out-of-it paradise of new parenthood. We were all about cooing and cuddling and sleeping. And eating and soothing and sleeping. It was a very sweet, quietly blissed-out time for us, but in the end, like all the best things in life, it was just too short.
Duty—meaning my 90210 contract—called. The summer hiatus was nothing more than a quick month off, and even though I’d almost literally just given birth, I had no choice but to go back to work.
We quickly ran through our child-care options, which included hiring a full-time nanny to come in and virtually live with us, and enlisting my mom (and dad) to stay nearby and help out around Peter’s work schedule. Or . . . I could bring baby Luca to work with me.
We were still in that early, intensive bonding phase, Luca and I, and I just couldn’t imagine parting with her—even if it meant having to bring her out to Van Nuys to that grubby, run-down soundstage that had been my home away from home for more than six years by then. I discussed this with Peter and the rest of my inner circle and we all agreed that I ought to give it a try, and if it didn’t work out, well, then we’d figure something out and adjust.
So when our work hiatus ended, there went my maternity leave, too. On the dreaded first day I was due back to work, I dragged myself up and out of bed before the sun came up, swaddled up my teeny-tiny newborn, and gently buckled her into the car seat in my SUV. Then, in the dark, quiet hours of earliest morning, I drove us both to work.
It was pretty jarring bringing a newborn baby into our intensely industrious, high-energy work lair. It was like bringing a baby, say, into a strip club: She was just so out of place in that environment. I might as well have brought a tiger cub with me—the soundstage where we worked was barely fit for adults, never mind children. Everyone was so excited to meet her, of course, and there was a lot of oohing and ahhing and hugging—for about thirty seconds. Then it got awkward, because we were on the clock, so everyone started bustling around, Luca got hungry, and I had to put on my game face and act like this was just another day at the office. But, man, let me tell you: It’s a challenge pretending you’re an angsty teenager when in reality you’re a new mom with squishy boobs and a radically altered body whose head and hormones are still spinning wildly.
I do need to clarify, though, that I didn’t just show up with Luca in my arms unannounced: A tremendous amount of planning and preparation had to go into my returning to work with a child in tow, and I have to give Mr. Showbiz endless credit for how artfully he helped arrange this. He had to really work his magic, and his butt off, to negotiate with the producers so that we could create some kind of safe, serene, and secure environment for me and my baby. The soundstage was, as noted, a grimy hole of a place, a big drafty warehouselike building that was purposely unadorned and uninsulated, a place that could withstand the rapid building and dismantling of sets, a place that was user-friendly to hammer-wielding union contractors but definitely not babies.
The solution we came up with was this: I bought a fully loaded RV that would be parked on the lot. This would be my new dressing room, Luca’s home away from home, and her day-care facility all rolled into one. Not only would the RV be stocked with diapers, a crib, and age-appropriate toys, but I would need to hire a nanny to be a part of this rolling baby show, someone whom I could trust to be with Luca when I was needed on set. During the ramping up of this very personal “Take Your Kid to Work” campaign, I was given the number of a professional nanny service, an outfit with an impeccable reputation, and which many an actress had used and raved about. I went through the interview process and hired a lovely woman who was about twenty years older than me. I learned, shortly after I hired her, that she’d also recently given birth to a child, and it pretty much broke my heart to think that someone else was somewhere looking after her child while here she was, looking after mine. I don’t know if she was pouring all of her own thwarted maternal love into caring for my Luca, but every time I left the set and came back to the RV, my heart would jump a little when I’d catch sight of this lovely woman, who was a stranger to me, fawning over my daughter. I don’t know if the uncomfortable feeling this gave me was raw jealousy or if it was some kind of maternal bell that, I would learn with experience, rang whenever I sensed that something wasn’t quite right. Whatever it was, I couldn’t shake it, and so I made the decision that I had to have someone I already knew, someone who was virtually family to me, look after Luca. So with as much grace as I could muster, I let the agency nanny go and I brought in my Evangelina to work alongside me out in Van Nuys as Luca’s nanny. Now, instead of being my housekeeper, Evangelina’s task would be to take exquisitely good care of Luca—just the way she had always taken care of me.
With Evangelina in place, Team Luca was complete. Now I could get back to work with some peace of mind.
And what a relief! Evangelina proved to be more than up to the challenge, and she finished out the run of 90210 with us. As soon as Luca could talk, she christened Evangelina “Nina,” and that’s when she became our Nina for good. Since then, she’s helped raise all three of our girls and . . . she’s still with us! Nina is absolutely part of our innermost circle, a cherished family member, an incredibly loving, stable, and constant force for good in all of our lives.
Even with Nina there, getting back into sync with Kelly Taylor and leaving my real life and family behind was a challenge at first, but I was able to do it and to pull it off for the next three years.
ZEN AND THE MAKEUP CHAIR
It’s amazing how your perspective on things can change so radically once you’ve had a baby. Not that long before Luca was born, sitting in a makeup chair had been a certain kind of torture for me, so much so that I even once took the drastic step of having all of my hair chopped off because I just couldn’t stand sitting for the amount of time it took to do a blowout. I just could not do it. One. More. Time.
Now, sleep deprived and cranky, with huge, achy milk boobs weighing me down, I found the prospect of spending two hours in a makeup chair to be right up there with a first-class vacation on a deserted tropical island.
By the time I staggered into the makeup room and backed myself into the waiting chair, the joint was usually jumping—and this was at six a.m. Music would be blaring, the air would be filled with cigarette smoke
, people would be laughing and regaling whoever would listen with stories about their latest acts of debauchery, and once the blow-dryers started up, the din in the place would rise to a crazy, catty pitch.
That was when I’d sink into a beautifully meditative state, not unlike the blissful mental escape I’d experience whenever I’d pop off to “Switzerland.” The “glam squad” would swoop in and go about transforming me into Kelly Taylor, a process that took a lot longer than you’d think. I’d take this time to learn my lines and bring my focus back to work. And just when I’d begin to feel like my old, professional self, my mommy alarm would clang and I’d beg for a quick break so I could dash out to the RV to feed, change, or just eyeball and kiss Luca Bella; then I’d dash back to makeup, hustle back into my chair, and we’d pick up where we left off. And just as quickly as I’d snapped out of my makeup-induced reverie, I’d be back, almost nodding off, filled with gratitude for the rest this time gave me.
I swear to God, I was bringing a whole new meaning to the concept of work/mommy balance, and the proof was in the path I was beating from the studio out to the trailer, a few yards of concrete that I probably wore down to nothing, given that I made the trip about a thousand times a day.
And I have to give it up to the glam squad, the crew, and everyone on set: They were incredibly patient with me while I figured all this new-mom stuff out. I was well aware of this generosity, so I did what I could to bring my best game to work, to be on time, prepared, and as ready, willing, and able as possible.
While I was adjusting to being back at work, Luca Bella was doing what babies do: She was becoming cuter and chunkier and more delightful by the day. As she grew, we expanded her world accordingly. The set designers were always sprucing up the RV by doing incredibly sweet things, like adding an AstroTurf lawn and a white picket fence. I have a dear friend, my first mommy friend, a woman named Andy, whom I met in a Billy Blanks Tae Bo class. There I was in his gym, faux-kickboxing in an effort to shed the last vestiges of my baby weight, while Luca was in the room next door, playing baby games with other Tae Bo kids. After class one day, Andy, who’d had a baby girl right around the time I’d had Luca, zoomed in on me and decided we were going to be friends. She’d come out to the set with her sweet daughter, and we would fill a kiddie pool with water and watch our babies splash and play, and at times our RV with its little front yard would feel like an actual home. When Luca was big enough, Nina would bring her onto the set after her naps, and I’d get to hug her and squeeze her before she’d be passed around like a beautiful, sweet-smelling football. (It’s amazing what the presence of a supercute baby can do to defuse workplace politicking: Suddenly whatever was causing so much stress vanishes and everyone is smiling—at least as long as the kid is within sight.) She was with me for those long days for three years, and while she was cutting her teeth, learning to crawl, then walk, and then learning to speak, I was working. I remember one day, after a couple of years of our routine, realizing that little Luca had actually spent more time on set than she had at home. Talk about being a working girl.
I guess that means that showbiz really is in her genes.
As for me, to this day, I find sitting in a makeup chair to be an incredibly relaxing and restorative experience. So much so that recently, when a healer asked me to envision a safe place, I closed my eyes and thought about a makeup department, a place that was stocked with pots of foundation, tubes of lipstick, and trays of brightly colored eye shadow. And just as I would be drifting off to a happier place, a pair of hands brandishing a giant blush brush in one hand, a powder puff in the other, would be moving in close.
Ah, heaven.
LEAVING THE ZIP CODE
The end of 90210 was so many things to me. On the one hand, it was a huge relief; I mean, we’d been on the air for ten years. Ten. Freaking. Years. By the time Donna and David walked down that aisle and Dylan and Kelly were back together, I was chasing after a three-year-old. The vast disconnect between my real life and Kelly Taylor’s life was almost comical at that point, except for the fact that 90210 was not a comedy; it was a drama, and Kelly Taylor had lived through every trauma a harried team of Hollywood writers could dream up. Let’s see, off the top of my head, the character I played had been shot, addicted to cocaine, addicted to diet pills, trapped in a burning building, and then terribly scarred. She’d also been in a cult, held at gunpoint by a lesbian stalker who wanted to be her, almost raped by a cowboy, and . . . I’m sure I’m forgetting your personal favorite calamity, but you get the point: As Kelly Taylor, I was just all cried out, so leaving her behind was almost a relief.
But, man, saying good-bye to the cast and crew? That was a whole other story, given that we had been with one another day in and day out for those long and developmentally important adolescent and early adult years. Shannen, Luke, Jason, Tori, Ian, Brian, Gabrielle, and I had all grown up together. We were, in some ways, more like siblings than just friends, having walked through so much with one another. By the time the show ended, we’d been to one another’s weddings (at least a few of us had been married, and, in my case, divorced), and I’d gone ahead and broken the baby-making ground.
Throughout the filming of the show and afterward, we had an unspoken pact that we would do our best not to act out and misbehave the way young stars are prone to do, and that we’d take care of one another, that we’d have one another’s backs. And we meant it: Not one of us ever went off the rails, and this says something about what kind of people my castmates are, what kind of bond we had. Our loyalty is just as solid today as it was in 1990.
But all good things come to an end, and it was time, finally, for us to leave the Peach Pit, and Beverly High, and the angst and drama and sparkly sunshine behind. It was time to give up my parking spot and my cozy little dressing room–slash-cubicle and to pack up my awesome baby trailer. It was time for me, for all of us, to get on with life.
One of the things I did right away was dye my hair dark brown. I don’t know if this was a symbolic gesture, a way of washing Kelly Taylor out of my hair once and for all, so to speak. But I wanted to find out what it was like to live on the “darker” side, to give up my blonde identity while I retreated from the spotlight and thought about what I wanted to do next.
Becoming a brunette gave me a level of anonymity I’d never experienced before. It was as though I’d joined the witness protection program or something: I could go places and not be recognized. I could talk to strangers now, without being asked for an autograph. I didn’t get constantly hit on either, which was a good thing, because I was madly in love and recently engaged. All in all, becoming a brunette was a pretty wonderfully liberating experience.
The only person who wasn’t loving the darker shade was Mr. Showbiz. He could not get anyone interested in a brunette Jennie Garth, which struck me as absurd and silly, because they were hiring me, right? . . . not my blondeness. Or so I wanted to believe, but I was wrong. I was a blonde through and through. It got to the point where Mr. Showbiz told me to just call him when I went back to my roots, and finally I did. But not before heading down to the DMV and getting a new picture taken for my driver’s license—as a brunette. I also had a picture taken and had it blown up and framed, and presented it to Mr. Showbiz the next time I saw him, because I know how much it bugs him, seeing me with brown hair, and I just love pushing his buttons.
It was time to get real. Time to get back to work. And time to get on with the rest of my blonde life.
I knew I didn’t want to take on anything that would take me away from Peter and Luca, so feature films were out, because doing film work usually requires traveling to far-off locations for months at a time. I landed a recurring role in a new drama, The $treet, but it would be shot in New York, which didn’t feel so far away. Plus, we had Peter’s family there. So I packed up baby Luca, and my mom came along to act as nanny, and off to the Big Apple we went. It was quite a bonding adventure for us girls! The production rented us an apartment in the superswan
ky Trump building overlooking the Hudson River. It sounded great, but in reality being over on the West Side Highway was like being in a wind tunnel. Plus, it was the dead of winter, and my call times were, of course, at the crack of dawn, so I’d be standing in front of my building, trying to hail a cab just before rush hour hit. It was freezing cold and I was freshly showered and all moisturized and dewy, and the first bus that would pass by would blow up a cloud of authentic New York City street grime. I’d show up on set looking like I’d been out all night, and the makeup people would shake their heads while they scrubbed the MTA grime off of me. The show was about a group of gorgeous, horny Wall Streeters and was created by my friend Darren Star, the brilliant mind behind Sex and the City and Beverly Hills, 90210. I got to play a really bad girl who was the sister of one of the brokers, and who got into a steamy tryst with a rich guy played by Bradley Cooper. We’d be setting up for a sex scene, lying in the set bed, and he’d be asking me what it was like to be engaged or what it was like living with someone and having a child. Then we’d get ready to do a take and the next thing you know, I’m making out with him. Or I’d be shooting the breeze with another hot young actor while everyone was bustling around and working, and then we would gear up for yet another steamy scene. It was a great job, but only one season was ever shot, and only part of that season was ever aired. Turns out that was just enough for me. I was ready to get back to warm and friendly and less grimy LA, and back to my life with my family, and readjusting to being a “civilian” after the long, rigorous march of 90210. I kind of liked the quiet; it gave me time to think—and to plan a wedding.