Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology (11 page)

Angelo’s history with women was what the church calls an ethical blind spot. Every man he knew growing up, including his father, cheated. It was accepted. What wasn’t okay was to leave your wife for your girlfriend. So for Angelo to finally admit to himself that he was in fact a cheater was a huge first step for him. And the fact that he was willing to do something about it was even more impressive to me as a Scientologist. This was someone who could confront things and make real change. Angelo felt like that perfect mix I was waiting for, a “normal guy”—not a Scientologist—but someone who could quickly get with the program and get with Scientology.

My mom had a completely different take on the situation. “This guy isn’t actually divorced,” she said. “He isn’t even separated.” Maybe it was the echo of her own situation with my dad and Dennis, who had both left her for other women, or that she wanted more for her daughter than being the other woman, but she showed a hardness with me that I had never seen before. For the first time, my mother, who had supported me through many things other mothers wouldn’t have, expressed utter disgust toward me. “I don’t even know you,” she said. “I did not raise this person.”

My mother’s reaction brought me back to my senses. Angelo was married with three kids. I was so focused on his ethical blind spot that I had completely ignored my own. Suddenly I asked myself, “What are you doing?” And the answer was horrible: I was destroying a marriage. Which opened up a new blind spot. I had no real respect for marriage. What did it mean? Clearly, it meant nothing when it came to my dad or my stepdad Dennis.

And just as clearly, I had no respect for the family unit either.

I went to the only place I had to work out my crisis of conscience—the church. I eventually and begrudgingly told them that I was having an affair with a married man, who had a son with his current wife. I was told I needed to make up the damage. It was determined
that the way for me to do that was to pay for Angelo and his wife to go to marriage counseling offered by the church.

Scientology couples counseling is vastly different from typical relationship counseling. The church teaches that a marriage can’t survive if one partner has any unknown transgressions against the other person. You need to reveal in excruciatingly specific detail what it is you’ve done wrong. Scientology doesn’t factor in how much this kind of truth can break a husband’s or wife’s heart. Unlike other religions, where one can relieve guilt by talking to a member of the clergy, Scientology forces its parishioners to confront their partners face-to-face and admit their transgressions, no matter the consequences.

So I did it. I told Angelo that he needed to give his marriage a chance, and the only way he was going to do it was through counseling, which I would pay for because of what I had done by sleeping with him. Although he was as sad about leaving me as I was about leaving him, he had realized the impact the values course had on him and knew that for the good of his family he should give counseling a try.

I felt no relief for making up the damage. Instead, I got to watch Angelo and his wife walk by me at the Celebrity Centre, where they were going to counseling, holding hands like newlyweds. My church was telling me, “Do not contact Angelo.” And again I was back in auditing and ethics to deal with my hidden evil intentions toward men, which clearly had not changed.

The church took little pity on me. On top of paying roughly five thousand dollars for the counseling Angelo and his wife did in the church, I now needed to meet with his wife in person and apologize for what I had done. I was beyond humiliated, but I also felt like I deserved everything I was getting.

I met Angelo’s wife at a coffee shop and stumbled with my words.

“I don’t have the answers. I can’t justify what I’ve done,” I said, unable to apologize not because I wasn’t sorry but because an
apology felt weird. “I’m sorry” weren’t the right words. An apology didn’t do it.

His wife, however, had no problems expressing herself. I sat there and took my punches.

I
WAS DYING OF A
broken heart, but Angelo never felt better in his life. After I met with his wife, he called me on the phone to thank me for all I had done for him.

“This is a whole new way of life for me,” he said. “I never thought I could be honest like this. I mean, to look at my wife, tell her I’ve cheated, and have her still hold my hand. Oh, my God, Leah. Thank you.”

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck her. Fucking hell.

“You’re welcome,” I said, barely able to get the words out and pulling the receiver away from my mouth so he couldn’t hear me crying. “I hope you have a happy life now with your wife and your son, and I am sorry for what I have done to you all. I hope you can repair it.”

From that call on, I plunged into a well of despair, confusion, and self-doubt. Did I do the wrong thing by doing the right thing? Is that the way this love story was supposed to end? I guess it wasn’t a love story after all. In the end, though, I understood what had happened through the lens of Scientology. The purpose of my meeting Angelo was to do penance for my years as a cheater. The pain I was feeling was my punishment, and I deserved it. I was told by the church that I must no longer talk to Angelo, so I didn’t, and he didn’t call me.

I was still feeling pretty low several months later when Angelo called out of the blue. I was shocked that he reached out to me. I didn’t want to hear that he was happy. I was steeling myself for it, though. He told me he had some things he wanted to talk to me about. We agreed to meet at a restaurant.

After we sat down, Angelo told me about what he had been going
through since we had last seen each other. The couples counseling had been really therapeutic for him because, as he said before, it was the first time in his life that he was truly honest with a woman. But an unintended consequence of no longer being burdened by his own guilt was that he began to realize that his wife had her own set of issues and her own skewed set of values, telling Angelo that he could still have a girlfriend but he didn’t need to leave her and his family to do that. He just needed to come home. But Angelo didn’t want to be that guy, he wanted to be better. He was realizing that his own core values were changing as a result of his time spent in the church, but his wife’s were not. Previously he overlooked anything she did because of his own bad behavior. He had been trying to make it work, but it felt like he was back to living a lie. He had already told his wife he was leaving.

“So it’s either with you or somebody else,” he said, “but I want to be happy.”

I wanted it to be with me.

T
HIS W
AS IT.
I
WAS
sure of it. This was going to be my big break. A sitcom in the time slot right after
Seinfeld
? It didn’t get any better.

When I got a lead role in the new series
Fired Up,
a mid-season replacement on NBC’s Must-See TV comedy block, I wasn’t just thrilled. I was relieved. Finally, my chance. Finally I will arrive home.

Fired Up,
which first aired in the spring of 1997, was exactly what I had been working for all these years. This was a sitcom with some serious pedigree. Kelsey Grammer, of
Cheers
and its spin-off
Frasier,
was producing the half-hour comedy starring
NYPD Blue
’s Sharon Lawrence as a self-centered promotions executive and me as her mouthy assistant. Our characters quickly got fired from their jobs, and were forced to move in together and team up to create a business as equal partners. Mark Feuerstein, who in real life is one of those really good guys, played my brother in the show. Since I’ve known him, Mark’s proven himself to be a good friend and one of maybe five “real men” I’ve met in this business.

Although we were getting an audience of about 15 million (which would be a monster hit these days), we were still losing about half the
audience of about 30 million viewers who tuned in to
Seinfeld
every week. The network changed our time slot for the second season. With that,
Fired Up
lost its audience. Our last episode aired in February 1998.

The death of that show represented yet another failure as an actress and as a Scientologist. At twenty-seven years old, I was having to go back to the drawing board once again.

There were so many starts and stops in my career, ups and downs, moments of triumph and then heartbreak. It always felt like “This is it” and then it wasn’t. Although that’s the nature of the business in Hollywood, when it is happening to you it seems like the end of the world. My failures in my professional life ended up driving me toward the church, which taught me that because I wasn’t successful on a regular basis, I was doing something wrong in life. Being a Scientologist means you are responsible for all the bad things that happen to you (and anything
good
that was happening was due to the church), so it was only natural to assume that the cancellation of
Fired Up
was somehow caused by my transgressions or some technology that I was misapplying in my life.

So when my agent Harry Gold called me about a new series for CBS,
The King of Queens,
about a blue-collar couple in Queens, I instantly came up with a reason that this wasn’t going to work. I loved the idea of this show, but I felt America had left it behind and networks were looking more toward making sitcoms about young, sophisticated dot-commers.

What’s the point?
I thought.
I am only going to do the pilot and it won’t get picked up or it will go to series and get canceled
. My heart couldn’t take it. So I passed on it.

Harry swore up and down that this was my part, my show. “Will you just meet with Kevin James?” he asked, referring to the Long Island comedian set to play the part of Doug.

It was Les Moonves, the president of CBS, who ultimately got me out of my funk. When he heard the news that I didn’t want to meet on
The King of Queens,
he called my agent to say, “Who the
fuck does Leah think she is, passing on a show when she just came off some shitty show for NBC?”

Oddly enough, that kind of honesty always cheers me up. I got up and showered and took the meeting with Kevin. Les Moonves was a “real man” I needed to work for.

As soon as I walked into the room, Kevin took one look at me and said, “I’m sorry. Were you too busy not counting the money you weren’t making on your canceled shows to make it to this meeting?”

I was in love.

Kevin had me crying from laughter in the first five minutes of our meeting.

Some changes were made from the pilot to the series. The important change to the original pilot was the addition of the legendary Jerry Stiller as my wacky father, who moves in with Carrie and Doug after his third wife dies and he burns down his house with his lucky hot plate. Originally, Jerry, who perfected the art of the crazy dad as Frank Costanza on
Seinfeld,
didn’t want to do the pilot, but it was awful without him. When the show got picked up, he agreed to the part, we reshot the pilot, and it was like night and day. The concept for the show was simple.
King of Queens
was unpretentious and, most important, funny.

Still, as I stood next to Kevin backstage on that late September day in 1998, waiting to be introduced to the live audience, I knew better than to take a single second for granted. The emcee (the guy who warms up the audience before the taping) introduced everyone in the cast individually. Because Kevin and I were last, we had a moment to take it all in. I looked around—at the back of the sets, which were just plywood over sturdier wood frames with jacks to hold them upright, and at the cheap staircase that led to the back of the kitchen set. There I saw a name in a heart engraved into the wood—a leftover from another set, another show, another time.

“Look, Kevin,” I said, “we should always remember that we’re lucky to be here. There were shows before us and there will be shows after us, so let’s never take it for granted.”

Kevin got it completely, and we looked up at that rafter before greeting the audience at every single show. We were always aware of how fleeting this opportunity could be. And at the last show, nine years later, Kevin pointed to that same piece of wood, but I couldn’t look at it.

Even if we had wanted to forget that we could be canceled at any minute, no one let us. Despite the fact that we averaged about 12.7 million viewers our first season (thereby keeping 95 percent of the viewers from our lead-in,
Cosby
) and we hands down beat
Conrad Bloom,
which we were up against on NBC (sorry, Mark, but you did okay), our success was called “modest.” We certainly weren’t a critical success, that’s for sure. The press either ignored us entirely or wrote pretty bad reviews.

“The performers are pleasant enough, and Ms. Remini almost gives Carrie some zing,” some guy wrote in
The New York Times
when the show debuted. “But they can’t overcome the stale setup. As for the title, there is no obvious connection to Queens, for which residents of the borough can be thankful.”

So, yeah, we never really got too comfortable. At first it was “Let’s see if we can make it past the first thirteen episodes.” Then we prayed to get the last nine ordered to complete a full first season. Even then, most of us said, “Eh, we’ll see if we make it to Season Two.” The threat of cancellation always hanging over us actually had a positive side, though. Even if any of the cast had fights with the writers or complained about atrocities against humanity, like not having a sesame bagel, there was still an underlying appreciation for everything.

Although I did more than my share of complaining, I loved
King of Queens
. (I hate when people say, “Enjoy it,” when you’re complaining about something. I am enjoying it. But I also enjoy complaining about it. It’s one of my favorite pastimes.) I loved the audiences and the crew, but above all I enjoyed the everyday-ness of the job. I never got bored of saying hi to the guard at the gate of the lot, or seeing my name on my parking spot, or listening to the latest from makeup and
hair. The same thing, the same people, week in and week out—the routine was the part I loved. I had a home. Finally.

And I had Kevin, who has ruined me for life. He was my first leading man; and despite doing other shows with other leading men, I’ve never found anyone who could compare favorably to him. When I was acting with him, I felt safe. I knew that no matter what the joke or the script was, Kevin would find a way to make it better. He was gracious, the kind of actor who would often say, “Give Leah the joke instead of me”—unheard of in a town full of ego-driven males.

Yes, we fought, like many married couples who were together every day for years. And yes, I treated Kevin just like I treated my husband, meaning I drove him crazy like any good wife would. And there were days when we didn’t even speak until the cameras were rolling, but we always made up.

If Kevin and I were like a true married couple, Jerry Stiller was definitely the crazy and wonderful father of the show. Kevin and I would constantly tell him, “There’d be no show without you, Jerry.” And it was true. He was so funny, but he had no idea how funny he actually was. We would be in rehearsal and Jerry would say his line and do his Jerry thing, and then Kevin and I would laugh and break character, and Jerry would just look at us like “What’s happened?”

His wife, actress Anne Meara, was the same way, so talented and loving, and she would say, “You two are fantastic together.” Or she’d pop her head into my room and say, “You got the goods, sista.”

I miss her.

When he was done with his scenes but still had to stay for curtain call, Jerry would take off his TV clothes and put on his street clothes, which were usually a tank top and pants pulled up way too high. Out he’d saunter from his dressing room in his backstage grandpa attire, drinking a martini. Anne would come by and say, “Jerry, look at ya, what the fuck are you doing? Put a shirt on!” When he made us laugh, he always looked around like he wanted to know what we were laughing about. “It’s you, Jer!” we’d say. He’d
just lift his martini and shake his head. “It’s you kids. You kids are the show.”

It’s a cliché, but there was a lot of love on
The King of Queens
. The only time I felt a distance from other people on the show was when the topic of Scientology came up. I kept my religion very much to myself. Even though I had to go directly from the set to the church nearly every day, I didn’t let anyone know where I was headed. If Kevin or any of the other cast members or crew invited me for a drink or dinner, I declined with one excuse or another. I didn’t want people on the set to think I was weird based on the amount of time I had to spend at the church.

As much as I tried to keep the different aspects of my life separate, everyone knew I was a Scientologist, and because of that I still sometimes felt judged for it. If I looked at someone directly in the eyes or for a beat too long, they might say, “What, are you going to sign me up for a course now?” It hurt when people pointed out my quirks and acted as though everything about me was a manifestation of my oddball faith. I thought,
Couldn’t I just be considered a diva or a bitch like everyone else? Why does it always come back to Scientology?

On the flip side, I felt an added burden on set because of my Scientology outlook. If I had a bad day and snapped at someone or acted like a brat because I was given the wrong call time, I was guilt-ridden. The church would have frowned upon my actions, always pressuring me to set a good example, and that if I didn’t, it might prevent someone from becoming interested in joining Scientology. I was never at a loss for reasons to beat myself up, and I worried about what bad effects my actions might have.

As we went into the second season of
The King of Queens,
and the network decided to shoot the opening credits in Queens, things were looking pretty positive for our show. To take the whole cast to shoot the opener in New York was a real vote of confidence. I got to spend time in Bensonhurst and went to the San Gennaro Feast, an annual celebration in Little Italy that I used to go to when I was a little girl.
It was a real hometown-girl-makes-good moment. My dad, two half sisters, and Angelo had appearances in the opening sequence, and on the street fans shouted things like “We love you, Carrie!” or “Where’s Arthur?”

It was loyal fans like those that got us a third and then a fourth season, a huge milestone that meant the network had a hundred episodes, enough to sell to syndication. Going into our fifth season in 2002,
King of Queens
continued to dominate our Monday night eight o’clock time slot, as we had done every season before, thanks in part to our comedy block that included
Yes, Dear
and
Everybody Loves Raymond.
Even the critics admitted that our show wasn’t as unfunny as they first said it was.
Variety,
which in its original review wrote, “If only Doug and his show were funnier,” now said that Kevin had “the finest timing on television, and his couch potato humor is pitch perfect.”
Entertainment Weekly,
known for its snarky editorial tone, called us TV’s best comedy in its 2002 year-end issue.