Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me

by Chelsea Handler

  “That is good. Start putting a beat sheet together and then let Tom and me see it.”

  “Okay,” I said as I walked out of her office. As excited as Chelsea was about my ideas, I still thought the whole movie was weird, but at least I was coming up with something. Just as I returned to my desk, my phone rang. I saw Chelsea Handler appear on the phone’s screen and my heart skipped a beat.

  “Hi,” I said as I picked it up.

  “Hey, I really like your ideas about me having multiple personalities. How soon can you get them to me?”

  “Can I have the weekend?” I asked meekly.

  “Sure.” And then I heard a click.

  When I got home I told Peter how Chelsea loved my ideas for the movie and wanted something by Monday. My son had a game on Saturday, so I planned to write on Sunday. Peter would take the boys golfing so I could have the house to myself.

  Sunday morning I got a call from my best friend, who is best friends with Kris Jenner. She told me that our whole family was invited to the Jenner/Kardashian house in Hidden Hills for swimming and a BBQ. You don’t understand what a Kris Jenner party is like. It does not mean bring your own towel and have a hot dog. First of all, a Kris Jenner pool party is the only kind of pool party you want to bring your kids to, because she hires real lifeguards, so you don’t have to worry about your kids drowning while you’re busy impersonating a Real Beverly Hills Housewife with your back to the pool. She has waiters dressed in black, white, and pink, to match her patio furniture, and they walk around with an unlimited amount of Veuve Clicquot. This means you never have to get up off your four-inch heels in your mono-kini to refill your glass yourself. Needless to say, when I got this call I was beyond bummed, knowing I would not be able to attend. Instead, Peter and the kids would go without the matriarch of their family.

  Around 4:00 PM I had made pretty good progress and actually had a loose outline for a scene where Justin Timberlake had reason to sing and moonwalk. The ingeniousness of it had me feeling I was up in the clouds, like an astronaut. I was about an hour away from polishing it up and printing it out to show Chelsea the next morning, when, being the procrastinator that I am, I decided to check my e-mail.

  The fourth e-mail down was from Eva, Chelsea’s assistant, and the subject matter read “Chelsea’s Playboy Interview.” I opened it and began reading. The interview was to be in question-and-answer format, to be featured toward the back of an upcoming Playboy issue. About halfway through, the interviewer said to Chelsea, “You do a lot of pranks in the office, I hear.” To which Chelsea answered, “Yes. Some are still going on and the person who the prank is on is totally unaware of it. For example, we told one of our writers that I was playing opposite Meryl Streep in a comedy about the Challenger blowing up. Can you imagine? She believes that this movie is actually being made.”

  I could not believe it. I read the words several times. I looked up from the computer screen and yelled out to my empty house, “MOTHERFUCKER!”

  About ten minutes later Peter opened the door with the kids. Just looking at his sunburned red face and still-wet hair infuriated me. I said, “The whole fucking Sky Is Crying is a lie. I wasted my one day off so I could work on this stupid thing while you got to frolic in a swimming pool.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I told him about the Playboy interview. “I told you I didn’t think it was a good idea, but you are so fucking cheap you made me do it because you wanted me to make the money!”

  “That’s not true. You were all excited about it when you came home on Friday. So I let you work today and took care of the kids all day.”

  “Oh, like you’re some amazing father, because you got to shoot the shit with Bruce Jenner about the 1976 Olympics while inhaling filet mignon and watching Kim Kardashian attempt to do a back flip,” I yelled. “What an amazing sacrifice. You are so selfless. You should win Father of the Year!”

  And then the thing that gets me angrier more than anything possible happened. Peter started to laugh.

  For the rest of the night I attempted to ignore him, but he kept coming into the room I was in, so then I’d leave and go into another room, and then he’d come in there. Every time he entered the room, I’d yell, “Leave me alone!”

  “Why is Mommy being so mean? Oh, are you sad you missed out on the gift bags?” he would say with a giggle.

  “What? Who has gift bags for a pool party? Kris Jenner, that’s who! You do know if we got divorced you’d never be invited again!”

  “Yes, I do. That’s why I really enjoyed today, because I never know when it’s going to end,” he answered, laughing.

  The lost afternoon and the Trina Turk tankini and matching cover-up I would have worn to the pool party haunted me into the wee hours of the night. Peter did bring up several times that the person I should be mad at was Chelsea. But being mad at Chelsea didn’t do anyone any good.

  I feel more married to Chelsea than to Peter, like Gayle and Oprah before Gayle got divorced. In the last few years, Chelsea had given me better gifts than Peter, written me more heartfelt letters than Peter, taken me on more romantic and better vacations than Peter, and given me the most important gift of all—the gift of being on television. My relationship with Chelsea was much like a marriage, only better. Yes, like a marriage, it has its ups and downs. You have to take the good with the bad. What am I going to do? Quit Chelsea Lately and go back to selling residential real estate because she lied to me about a ridiculous romantic comedy premise? Of course not. So, instead, I took my anger for Chelsea out on Peter and am proud to say I have not missed a Kardashian/Jenner event since.

  The occasional lie or bagel and cream cheese thrown in your face when you’re not looking, solely for Chelsea Joy Handler’s enjoyment, is more than worth it. Plus, cream cheese does come off pretty easily, except when it’s in your hair or in between your ass cheeks.

  Heather is retarded. Period.

  Heather and Johnny in Cape Cod. Heather has her usual cougar glass of chardonnay while Johnny looks on in disgust. It is 3:00 PM in this photo.

  Chapter Four

  A Brother’s Testimony

  ROY HANDLER

  Chelsea first approached me about writing a chapter for her book one weekday morning on her way out the door to work. It was less of a request than a threat. Chelsea has a way of asking for things in what I refer to as “Al Capone style.” The tone of her voice makes it sound like a question, but the look on her face tells you it’s in your best interest to shut your mouth and agree to whatever she’s requested, then promptly duck for cover.

  Personally, I think I’m hilarious. I’ve been writing e-mails to Chelsea and my other siblings for years, but I could not bear the thought of sitting down for days, possibly weeks, and writing a chapter. My attention span has never been and never will be at full capacity. Then she told me what the book would be about: lies that Chelsea told me.

  There has to be a minimum of five hundred lies that my sister has told just me. I grew up with her. All the chaos she is causing now was experienced by me and my brethren years ago.

  There aren’t a lot of things I do remember about my childhood because of my allegiance to marijuana. My fondest memories are of doing one-hitters in the garage, as it was the only safe place away from my father, who was also like Al Capone but worse. For hours he would sit in a chair half-asleep, then smell pot and follow the trail, which ultimately led to me. After that would come interrogation and screaming. I was always scared, but not scared enough to stop smoking the weed. One day, I was in the garage getting high next to a can of paint when I turned around and saw Chelsea sitting on a tire. I knew she wanted to get high, but in good conscience, I could never do it. Plus, she was only six.

  I do remember critical times in the initial development of my retardation and Chelsea’s ascent to the throne, such as one morning I came downstairs to get ready for middle school. My mom was on the couch with Chelsea and I sat down next to them. Chelsea and I spoke baby
talk for a few minutes. She would always talk, but we could never make out what she was saying. Her vowels and consonants were not coming together and it sounded as though she were going through a Russian phase.

  She looked at me and said, “Oyn oyn oyn.”

  I smiled. “Wow, she said my name—or at least she’s trying to say my name.” My mom smiled, too, and I was ecstatic. So as a good mommy and brother, we prodded Chelsea to continue saying my name until she got it right.

  “Oyn oyn oyn,” she continued.

  “What the fuck, Mom? Can’t she pronounce R? She’s not Asian; she should be able to do that.” I felt comfortable cursing in front of my mom. Chelsea would later follow my lead in that department. My mom didn’t mind if we cursed, as long as it was casual and we didn’t use curse words as verbs or in anger. She told us life could be very disappointing at times, and if we were upset about the outcome of a soccer game or a D-plus on a math test, “Oh, fuck” was a perfectly acceptable way to express ourselves.

  “Oyn oyn oyn,” Chelsea continued while looking at me.

  Simone, a soon-to-be-litigator, sat down next to us and listened. Of course Simone, the smartest one of the bunch, figured it out. “Roy, listen to her. She’s saying, ‘You’re a moron.’ That’s what she’s saying.”

  “No, she wouldn’t say that,” my mom chimed in, shaking her head at Simone. My mom was trying to make me feel better about being insulted by a two-year-old. “I think she’s just saying she’s annoyed,” she assured me.

  Insulting us wasn’t the only thing Chelsea learned to do before she could walk. Shortly after she started crawling, she would make her way to one of the bathrooms, untape her diaper, and throw it in the toilet. We just thought she enjoyed being naked, but once she got a better handle on the English language she explained her reasoning: “It’s pretty unsanitary to sit in your own shit.”

  At dinner (food, good; conversation, not so much) Chelsea would bitch about kindergarten, then ask me in front of the whole family if I masturbated. I would bow my head in shame, lie, and say no, but everybody knew I did. We would pass all the food to my dad, and then Chelsea would roll off a couple of jokes, which were funny. Someone would inevitably fart silently, and we would try to figure out who it was, then my father would tickle my mother and blame her. “Oh, Rita, come on,” he’d say with a twinkle in his eye. That usually meant dinner was over.

  Martha’s Vineyard, 1978. This is three-year-old Chelsea in someone’s above-ground pool. She had no use for clothing—a sign of things to come.

  Simone was the only one who could take Chelsea aside and knock some sense into her. She would share words of encouragement that seemed to have an impact. Glen was good with numbers, so he helped Chelsea with business affairs and taxes. What business affairs a ten-year-old had, I didn’t know and didn’t ask. At a certain point my father had had it with Chelsea, but reform school was out, because it was too expensive.

  “Let her do what she wants and she will eventually come around.” That sounded brilliant. Why the hell didn’t he do that with me?

  Fast-forward twenty years. I didn’t have a care in the world, and things were going wonderfully. Actually, they were quite pathetic and everyone basically saw that except for me. I was forty-three, a chef, single with no children, and owned 33 percent of a house. The other 67 percent belonged to my sister Shana and her family. The obvious benefit of living together was that Shana’s son Russell had a head that looked exactly like mine, and this caused a few awkward moments when we were introduced to new people.

  One day while I was sitting in my third of the house, Chelsea called and asked me to move to LA. “What?” I said. “Are you crazy? The land of fruitcakes and nuts? Why would I leave my happy, pathetic life and move to LA? I love New Jersey and its culture. My whole family is here.”

  “I’m not,” she reminded me, Al Capone style.

  “No, Chelsea, I can’t do that. My friends, my job, my life is here. I’m not ready for that kind of change.”

  “Are you sure, Roy? Your life isn’t really going anywhere. You’re almost forty-five, single, and living with Shana. Obviously, things aren’t going great. If you come out here you could work for me, cook a couple of times a week, travel, and be on the show, which will probably lead to a lot of penetration.”

  “Okay. That sounds terrific. When should I come?”

  I was scared, but I made the decision, and the rest of the family wished me luck, though I believe I caught Shana giving me the finger as I left. It may have been a wave, but it was very questionable nonetheless.

  Fast-forward to California. Chelsea had just broken up with her boyfriend, Ted, rented a ridiculous house in Brentwood, and proceeded to move me, her Pilates instructor, and two Dallas lesbians into it.

  “This is your new family,” Chelsea informed me.

  Johnny “Baby Bird” Kansas, Shelly (one half of the Dallas lesbians), and me on one of our golf outings.

  I started catering for Chelsea Lately right away. I’d work there twice a week and pick up random catering gigs on the side. Chelsea immediately started putting me on the show and taking me with her on the road on weekends. I was getting more action in six months than I had in my entire life. Before I knew it, my bald head had become the characteristic that separated me from all the other guys on the show trying to get laid. People on the street were recognizing me, I was a burgeoning television star, and I was flying around the country in private jets. I felt like a Rolling Stone, only I couldn’t sing and I was thirty-five thousand dollars in debt. Chelsea eventually paid that off, but not before she took away all my credit cards and told me I should be ashamed of myself.

  Two of the people in Chelsea’s life who never thought they’d see the inside of a private plane.

  Chelsea’s quest to find me a little bit of penetration hasn’t stopped since I moved to LA. I appreciate it, but more important, I know better than to get in her way when she is on any kind of mission. I once got between her and a plate of chicken fingers and my finger still hasn’t completely formed back to its original state.

  In 2010, Chelsea was the host for the MTV Video Music Awards. Between doing Chelsea Lately, her book tour, and preparing for the VMAs, she had a pretty full plate. She decided that the weekend after the awards were over, she was going to blow off some steam in her favorite place to relax, Cabo San Lucas. I don’t know why she calls it “relaxing,” because as soon as her feet hit the sand she consumes more alcohol than David Hasselhoff at Oktoberfest. It’s pretty impressive what goes down when she has a couple of days off.

  Chelsea invited everyone who’d worked so hard for her on the VMAs: her annoying writers, her lesbian stylist, and her semi-bitchy makeup artist. She also took me and her fucked-up book agent, Michael Broussard, who hadn’t done shit for the awards show but was fun to be around and a good backup in case Brad Wollack had too many shots of tequila and tried to put his toe in Chelsea’s vagina, which, by the way, happened again on that trip.

  Chelsea’s makeup artist, Gina, and I had become some version of friends. She seemed a little distant when I first met her, which I mistook as her having complete disdain for me, but according to her she’s “been in the business a long time, sweetheart,” and tends to be “guarded.” Whatever… She’s got pretty hair and a plump pout, so I don’t really take issue with her. She fancies herself a green thumb and also thinks she can cook, so I’ve spent a little time with her in both the yard and the kitchen. I’ve definitely seen worse things bent over.

  This is Michael Broussard on our family vacation in Anguilla, but he was in this same bathing suit on that trip to Cabo. It’s the one Chelsea wore on the cover of Shape magazine. Several people have worn it since, none of them women.

  One night while we were in Cabo, everyone got really drunk. Well, that happened every night while we were in Cabo, but during this particular night most of the group had trailed off. Gina had passed out, Brad had facial-ticked himself into a coma, Johnny “The Bird” Milord
had finger-blasted some stranger on the couch, and Chris Franjola had disappeared at some club downtown where you could buy sex for less than two dollars. I had no idea where Michael Broussard was, but I do know that one of the resort busboys went missing for three full hours. The only people who were still up and drinking were me, Chelsea, Amy the lesbian stylist, and Sarah Colonna. Sarah may have been in a blackout, but at least she was still sitting upright.

  We were staying in two villas: boys in one and girls in the other, although nobody ever slept in their appointed room. As you may have heard, Chelsea has some very questionable sleeping tendencies. Maybe it’s because we have a big family and she’s used to having people around, but she likes to share her bed with random people. When she’s actually involved in a sexual relationship with someone, she prefers that person to sleep in an entirely other state.

  Heather McDonald had been studying Gina over the weekend and was working on an impression of the poor girl to add to her repertoire. In case you didn’t know, Heather does borderline decent Drew Barrymore and Celine Dion impressions, and an impression of some poor girl who was popular in the ’80s and had cerebral palsy. I have to say, though, that her impression of Gina was dead-on. Like I said, Gina has been in the business a long time. She likes to talk about movie sets she worked on in the seventies, and she acts as if she’s met every big-time Hollywood person there is to know. I guess at some point in her life she threw a fur coat out of the sunroof of a limo on Sunset Boulevard and told Heather about it.