Happy Accidents (17 page)

“But I like what she did with my hair.” Me and Jennifer.

There was a tray of sushi nearby, so I grabbed a tuna roll and popped it into my mouth. Suddenly, a guy was running toward me going, “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Turns out, it was prop sushi for the scene. One would have thought I was some hick tourist wandering blindly through the movie set rather than an actual, professional actor.

I looked around sheepishly, hoping to god that Chris hadn’t seen me chow down on prop food. I think he had, but he acted like he hadn’t.

From there, Jennifer and I went to meet the makeup people. As we were absorbing everything and trying to get our bearings, we overheard Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara have the following conversation with each other as they sat side by side, looking into the makeup mirror.

“What are you gonna do?” asked Eugene.

“I don’t know—what are you gonna do? Have you thought of anything?” Catherine replied.

“I have two left feet and funny teeth. That’s all I know. So what are you gonna do?”

“I guess I’m a hussy and I’m gonna try and do that funny thing with my knee. But other than that, I really don’t know.”

Jennifer and I looked at each other. If they didn’t know what
they
were gonna do, what the hell were
we
gonna do?

Eugene and Catherine went out and nailed it, of course. They were pros and had done their preparation. The anxiety about failing they expressed while emoting into the makeup mirror is almost a part of the process for comedy people, I think. We have skills that are hard to measure, and most of us fear being found out for not having any idea what we are doing. We have all fallen flat at some point, and being overconfident is the kiss of death. Maybe this terror keeps us open and vulnerable. I was glad to learn that I was not alone in my fear of making it up as you go along. And I’d made a good choice—early on in my preparation, I decided that my character would be full of anxiety. Luckily for me, I had plenty coursing through my body.

The next day, our first day of shooting, Jennifer and I would be doing the last scene in the movie, set in the offices of our magazine,
American Bitch
. It was weird to shoot the last scene first and to show up for work not having a script with lines or any idea how the day would go.

All I remember from that day is that first take. When I felt tapped out and had nothing more to say and felt the scene was over, I continued to hear the “whirr” of the camera, which meant we were still rolling. I didn’t hear “cut” either. We had to keep going, so we did. We were both pretty sure that nothing we did that day could be used in a movie, but I would come to realize that as long as we stayed honest and in the moment, all would be fine. Chris was in charge of putting the whole thing together in the editing room. That’s where he worked his magic.

Chris rarely laughs. He rarely gives “direction.” He keeps his eye on the story and can let the camera roll for what feels like forever. Incredibly prepared, he works fast and does few takes. The fresh Canadian crew was always shocked by how speedily we moved. In terms of designers, editors, and producers, Chris always works with the same people, over and over. Of actors, I’ve heard him say that he casts who he casts because he trusts that they know what they are doing, so why bother telling them? As an actor, if you want positive reinforcement or strokes, you must go elsewhere. It was a good thing that I hadn’t met him any earlier in my “development.”

The net result of
Oh Sister, My Sister!
was not a job or someone handing me a career. What it did was make me much more confident, so that I would be fine without Christopher Guest coming over to me after every take and telling me how fabulous I was.

I still recognized my desire for positive reinforcement, of course, but instead of letting it affect me, I made it my character’s struggle. Christy is always trying to prove herself, with an eye out for how well she’s pulling it off. She’s hoping no one sees the cracks in her armor. In a moment that didn’t make the final edit, I had Christy say something about how she hoped everyone in her hometown of Romulus, New York, saw what a winner she was and wished they hadn’t been so mean to her. That came right from my
own
soul, out of the shadow and into a movie.

I began to see that there were no “wrong” choices for a character, so long as you were rooted in who the character was and in that moment. The work was to stay within the perspective of the character and, rather than try to be clever, to be honest. Which I think is pretty good acting advice across the board.

When not working, Jennifer and I took walks through Stanley Park in the constant October rain. We were in the same hotel, but for some reason she got porn in her room for free. As we walked, she’d narrate the story of the porn she’d watched the night before. I remember being doubled over, gasping for breath as she reenacted some insane position on a park bench. But she viewed it almost scientifically, mechanically. I came to find out while in Vancouver that Jennifer is not only wildly and singularly hilarious, she’s also an incredibly deep thinker and has moments of such intense consideration that time just seems to stop for her. We had a lot of good food and many great talks, and whenever we went out, we almost always had to retrace our steps in the rain because she’d left her wallet somewhere. She was pretty much unfazed by such things. Details are not her strong suit, but I am all about them, so we were a great team. I fell in love with her just a tiny bit.

We were together all the time while filming, often just the two of us. If it weren’t for watching dailies with the other cast members in a ballroom at the Sutton Hotel, where we were all staying, Jennifer and I might have felt we were in a movie all by ourselves. It was a heady experience, and I loved every moment of being in Vancouver and being part of such a distinctively talented group of people.

The last day of shooting, Jennifer gave me a ceramic Great Dane she’d bought at that dog show back in LA. It was male, and for some reason the dog’s penis was circumcised; i.e., it had a visible head. Though she was not usually big on details, this was one she loved.

When I moved from that apartment in Venice, the penis broke off. I still have the dog, just without its manhood.

Best in Show
premiered at the
2000
Toronto Film Festival, and Jeannie was my date. We flew with the cast in the Warner Bros. jet, and I walked a red carpet for the first time in my life. We settled into the theater and the lights went down. Watching myself was just awful. I thought I wasn’t funny and that I had played it too subtly. I knew what I was trying to do, but it didn’t show up on the screen and I was devastated. I felt that everything I
thought
I had done had gotten lost. After the film was over, I was in a state of shock and said to Jeannie, “I was so flat!” She looked at me like I was insane. Sitting there, still in our seats as the theater emptied, Jeannie verbally replayed my performance back for me, complete with nuance. Relieved, I kept saying, “Oh, you got that? You got that?” I had to see it a few more times before I was finally able to see that it was all there, and just enjoy the movie.

The premiere of
Best in Show
at the Toronto Film Festival.

R
ight after I shot
Best in Show
, as I was
sitting on a tumbling dryer at Bubble Beach Laundry in Santa Monica, I had a sudden thought.
I can’t be forty and still be doing my laundry at a laundromat.
I was thirty-nine, and no matter how I tried to deny it, I was an adult now, with a bank account and a career. It really was no longer necessary for me to schlep down to the corner and drop quarters into an industrial-size washing machine.

I’ve always felt young, though not in a breezy, devil-may-care kind of way. I was just immature. This was probably because I spent so much of my younger life drinking, and being drunk makes learning to be a grown-up kind of hard. Even well into adulthood, I had very little confidence in my ability to do grown-up things, and often found myself hoping someone else would swoop down and save me, or at least show me the way. Without my dad calling to remind me to change the oil in my car, I would never have remembered to do it. My friends acted as parents to me as well; I couldn’t break up with someone without Jeannie’s permission. I acted as if my agents were authority figures that I needed to obey; they decided which jobs or auditions I took. Then, when I realized that some of these people were actually younger than I was, it began to dawn on me that perhaps it was time to grow up.

I had maintained very few obligations and had been slow to do the things adults generally do in order to build an adult life. I always rented apartments and did nothing much to make them my own, never painting a wall or owning a stick of furniture that I didn’t garbage-pick or buy off the street. I’d never lived with anyone I was dating, and most of my relationships never lasted longer than a toothbrush. Marriage had never crossed my mind, and because I was such a child myself, I’d certainly never entertained the thought of having one.

My first foray into taking care of something other than myself had come several years prior, when Nicki had wisely suggested I get a cat, my beloved Greta. Revealing the extreme nature of my relationship fears, I pleaded, “But what if it dies?” She replied casually, “You’ll get another one.”

I had settled happily into my role as nurturer of the fur-covered creature, and at this point I had
two
cats, Greta and Riley, and had just gotten a puppy. (Right after I’d come back from Vancouver, I’d fallen for the doggie in the window and named her Olivia after Olivia Newton-John, a huge high school celebrity crush.) I hadn’t moved on to people yet, but I couldn’t have loved my animals more. I poured all my previously unexpressed adoration into them. And boy, did I have a lot of it. (Georgie Girl, my Wheaten Terrier, would join us in a few years.)

Greta

Riley

My friend Jeannie and I shared our enormous love for our animals and created a special language, spoken in a high-pitched voice, just for them: “
Dis gurl what is berry booty-ful
,” we’d mewl. Each animal had his or her own song: “
Greta Maritsky you are very cute, If you were not you’d get das boot
.” We once improvised an entire opera for Jeannie’s dog, Molly. I’m certain we were utterly intolerable to anyone who happened to hear us.

Olivia (in flight) and Georgie (seated).

With all these critters in my care, I decided it was time to woman up and buy a home. I went to an open house in Laurel Canyon one Sunday in the pouring rain, and although I was unimpressed with the A-frame I’d set out to see, I had parked in front of another place that also happened to be holding an open house.
What the heck
, I thought, and made my way up the cobblestone path. I peered in through the wide living room window and saw a fire burning in the fireplace, creating a warm, inviting glow made even more enticing by the rain. I walked around the deck to the back and looked in through the bedroom window and saw a black cat on the bed, sound asleep, and I pictured Greta and Riley curled up there. I walked back around to the front door and finally walked inside. My knees went weak, and I blurted out, “I love this house” to the Realtor sitting at the dining room table. My father would have killed me for neutralizing all my bargaining power, but the Realtor was pleased and said, “Well, then you should buy it.” So I did, and with my animal kingdom in tow, I moved in.

Smack dab in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles, Laurel Canyon is a beautiful and verdant oasis teeming with nature and wildlife. The hills of the canyon rise up, creating nooks spotted with houses in which you are likely to find musicians and old hippies. In spite of my fear that coyotes would devour them, Greta and Riley insisted on being outdoor cats. Though not a believer in God, I prayed a little every time I heard them go out the cat door.

I had been listening to Joni Mitchell’s “The Ladies of the Canyon” in my car when fate had led me to park in front of my new house, so I had become a Joni Mitchell fanatic and a regular canyon lady myself: “
Cats and babies ’round her feet / And all are fat and none are thin.
” Now that I was living in Laurel Canyon, the lore of its inhabitants of the late sixties and early seventies became fascinating to me. I felt so lucky to be living in the neighborhood where Mama Cass had brought Crosby, Stills, and Nash together, where Carole King had written
Tapestry
, and where Joni and Graham Nash had fallen in love. Some of my neighbors had lived in the area for decades and had fabulous stories. During the time when all these interesting things had been happening in the Canyon, I had been growing up totally immersed in generic pop culture (I knew every episode of
Bewitched
but knew nothing about the Vietnam War), so when I moved to Laurel Canyon, I was discovering it all for the first time.

Cozily ensconced in my house with my animals and my very own washing machine, just a few months shy of my fortieth birthday, I finally felt like a grown-up.

I decided to celebrate my newfound adulthood by throwing myself a birthday party. I hadn’t had one since I was a kid, and it felt like it was time again to start celebrating getting older. It didn’t hurt that I shared my birthday with Bastille Day. I invited all my nearest and dearest friends, and started a birthday/Bastille Day party tradition that continues to this day. Although it had only eight hundred square feet and two small bedrooms, my house was a perfect party house, with a deck off the kitchen for great indoor-outdoor flow. The only thing I knew how to cook was salmon with teriyaki sauce, so I made that on the new Kenmore gas grill I’d bought right after moving in. I also cooked up some burgers and bought bottles of ketchup and mustard for the very first time in my life.

When I ordered my birthday cake that first year, the woman at the bakery asked if I wanted anything written on it and I said, “Yes. ‘Happy Birthday, Jane.’”

“Great,”
she said. “And what’s
your
name?”

“Uh . . . Jane.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she rushed to say. “Lots of people order their own birthday cake.”

I had a house and a menagerie of animals and friends; I had condiments and appliances, but I still didn’t have someone special to order my birthday cake for me.

But rather than wallow, I threw myself into homeownership and became a painting junkie. I wanted the rooms in my house to be perfect in hue and tone. This was very frustrating, though, as I had absolutely no talent for choosing colors. At first, my choices were much too vivid and my poor little house looked like a demented nursery school. Then I went through just about every shade of taupe available. I painted all the walls and all the trim in my house over and over and over again. I was obsessed. I couldn’t sleep if I hated the color I had just painted a room, and I could be found at the twenty-four-hour Home Depot in the middle of the night, looking at swatches. Jeannie was sure I had lost square footage due to the many coats of paint I’d applied.

I had never decorated before and I had absolutely no knack for it, either. Although I appreciated a well-put-together room, I had no idea how to make one. I could shop, though, so I bought all sorts of furniture. I mixed country chic, shabby chic, Craftsman, cheap Spanish, and early American. None of it worked together, and I kept getting rid of things that didn’t match and buying new things that also didn’t match. No matter what I did, it always looked jumbled and chaotic, and more like a tag sale than a home.

My little dog Olivia complicated my efforts to decorate when she decided the couch was her toilet. She was clever about it, and peed between the back of the couch and the seat cushions, apparently trying to hide her work. In the course of three years, I purchased three different couches and tried all the different odor removers on the market, to no avail. So I went online and bought the dog a diaper.

Olivia in a diaper.

I had also reached the point where I could no longer tolerate chaos and clutter. Growing up, I had been a slob who never made her bed, and now I couldn’t think straight if a piece of paper was out of place. To this day, I have things in neat piles. I may not know where anything is, but at least there’s the appearance of order.

I also had a TV for the first time in my adult life, with a full-on cable package. I watched in shock as Al Gore lost Florida, making George Bush president and turning me into a political junkie. I watched MSNBC at all hours and was a
Hardball
fanatic. Chris Matthews became my best TV friend; he helped me understand what was going on and that made me feel safe. Like Chris, I was always looking for the honest man or woman, regardless of their politics. I mean, I preferred it if my politics lined up with another person’s, but in all truthfulness, what was more important to me was knowing the truth of what someone really thought, and not the party line.