A Little Bit Wicked (13 page)

“No,” he said. “No, no. That’s—no.”

“What? Why not? How is that wrong?”

Marc howled with laughter.

“Well, at least I’m making an effort,” I sniffed. “You haven’t done a thing to learn about Christianity, and I bet I know more about Judaism than you do. And I don’t know why I’m going to all this trouble because you don’t even care. You make a big deal out of
being
Jewish—maybe you should try
doing
Jewish like your father. If all that matters is being born Jewish, who’s to say? I could be every bit as Jewish as you are!”

Marc did his best to backpedal, but I was hurt and angry. A few weeks later, we went to see his father, and when Marc was out of the room, his dad took my hand.

“I saw your gift,” he said, and when I started to stammer an apology, he shook his head. “It’s the sweetest, kindest gift I’ve ever seen.”

He smiled and pressed a gold necklace into my palm. A chai—the simple but elegant symbol that is (I knew from my studies) the Hebrew word
living.

Almost two years later, I sat at Marc’s kitchen table, waiting for him to come home, thinking about his father and my father. They reminded me a bit of the two bold gentlemen in
The Fantasticks,
who want so much for their children, but more than anything else hoped they would have a life filled with love. I’d flown in that afternoon from L.A., dreading seeing Marc, not knowing if I had the strength to say to him what I wanted to say. Needed to say.
Had
to say.

Or not.

No, I did. I had to say it.

“Denny, I don’t know if I can do this. Tell me I’m doing the right thing.”

Denny said the best thing a friend could possibly say in the situation: “I can’t tell you what to do, but I’ll be here for you when you get home.”

I hung up the phone when I heard Marc in the stairwell.

“Oh…Jesus…I can’t do this unless you help me. You have to show me. Make me see clearly that I’m doing the right thing.”

Marc walked in the door, seeing me for the first time in a month, and said, “Geez, we had a terrible audience tonight.”

A curtain of heartbreak fell over me. There was such an absence of joy in the air between us. I’d been thinking that the distance was time and geography, but now, even in the same room, we weren’t
living
together, and I knew we never would.

I said what I had to say and walked forty blocks home, weeping.

Ten years later, I was doing a revival of
The Apple Tree
at Studio 54 (which has been revamped since its disco-balls-and-cocaine-spoon days). When a producer asked me whom I’d like to have cast with me, I said without hesitation, “Marc Kudisch.”

“We were hoping you’d say that,” he grinned. “I wasn’t sure you’d be okay with it.”

But why shouldn’t I be? I still love the man, admire his work, respect his commitment to his craft.
Could it have worked out between us?
I occasionally wondered during the run of the play, which is all about what works and doesn’t work between men and women.
He’s so handsome and talented and funny and…oh
.

Suddenly, I’d remember. He’s that guy. And I’m this girl.

Which is why I love him. And why it didn’t work out.

Do you know what a magical kingdom is in your ear? A fairy cave leads to an Ali Baba doorway, beyond which the bony little ossicles—Malleus, Incus, and Stapes—guard the great snail, Cochlea, to whom God has given the power to transform the indiscernible movement of air into music. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, karma, or mechanics, but those bastard angels Malleus, Incus, and Stapes are my greatest allies and most dreaded enemies. My hearing is finely tuned; I have perfect pitch. But I also have that stupid frigging Ménière’s disease.

During one particularly devastating bout with Ménière’s, I was told that the only help for me is a surgical procedure called a cochleo-sacculotomy, which has been shown to give a lot of relief but can cause significant hearing loss, which for me is the loss of music, and I can’t risk that. Even in my most miserable moments, I am not even tempted to risk that. And I feel the same way about love. To protect yourself from heartache, you have to close down parts of yourself that are also a source of joy, and that’s so not worth it.

The happy married life—the “normal” life—I naively envisioned for myself and my baseball player is never going to happen. That ship has sailed. I’ve known men who can handle the complicated logistics of my life. A few who were willing to work around it, loved me in spite of all that. But I want to marry a man who genuinely loves all the logistical and ideological quirks and cabbages that come with loving me. I want to marry a man who loves
living
with me, even when we’re not
on the same coast. If I cease to be myself, I’m shut off from that possibility. I won’t give up on it. I’d rather put up with the emotional vertigo. Even if that means perpetually being the wedding singer instead of the bride.

In 2002, Ashley got married, and Denny and I sang at her wedding. This was post–Josh Bell and pre–Aaron Sorkin. I was in a particularly unsatisfying hot fudge phase, and not in much of a mood for a wedding. But Malleus, Incus, and Stapes were on my side that day, and as we waited for the beautiful bride to make her grand entrance, I tipped my head and listened to a finely tuned rendition of Pachelbel’s “Kanon und Gigue in D.”

“Don’t forget, Denny. You said you’d be my maid of honor.”

“I’ve given up on that dream, honey.”

“Oh, c’mon, it’s possible that someday—”

“Kristi.” Denny knuckled my back, and I followed his startled gaze to the string quartet in the corner. Sitting there between the viola and a tall spray of hydrangeas was…

“No. Way. It can’t be…”

But it was. The Tyrone Power jawline. Tousled Clark Gable hair.

“It’s our cello player!”

The guy hadn’t aged a day in ten years. I swear he looked exactly the same.

Immediately, I started to cry.

“Oh, Denny,” I hiccupped, hugging his arm. “That brings back such memories.”

After the ceremony, we made a beeline for the poor bloke, introduced ourselves, poured out the whole story—OCU,
Carmen,
tech rehearsal, blather, blather, blather.

“We have to know,” I said. “Who were you flirting with, me or him?”

Of course, he said it was me. Would I be including it in my book if it had been Denny? I think not. But to this very day, Denny refuses
to believe it. Six years later, as we ascend the steps of Lincoln Center, girding our loins for an evening of Mahler, it’s still a bone of contention.

“He was
so
flirting with me,” Denny says.

“Dream on,
Denwhah.
He was straight.”

“You can put a wire hanger in the closet, sister; that don’t make it straight.”

“Oh, for crying out loud.”

I hear my name across the evening air. It’s an old beau. Not so much a hot fudge sundae as a…Dilly Bar. He was attractive and intelligent and very dear in many ways, but he’d vociferously condemned the institution of marriage. Said he’d certainly never bring a kid into this world. But as we stand on the steps chatting, I sense the seasoned warmth of fatherhood about him, and I make a wild guess: “You’re a daddy.”

He gives us all the details with that Babies-R-Us air of every person who just invented parenting. He says, “What are you in the end if you don’t have a child?”

As he walks away, I stand there feeling like I’ve just been bludgeoned with my own biological clock. Then I feel Denny’s arm around my shoulders.

“Don’t even go to that place,” he tells me softly. “Plus—he’s fat.”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: on a scale of one to ten, Denny’s a tenor.

I
’m on my way to a meeting about my hair.

Yes, there are meetings. About my hair.

I don’t make the rules, people. I just go along to get along, okay? My hair used to be a subject of deep and constant concern because in its natural state, it is frinky, flyaway, three-year-old-boy hair. Mosquito thin with manic cotton-candy ends. When I was a little girl, I wanted that perfect ballet bun, and the skinny hair actually worked pretty well for that. During my pageant days, I had those Southern girls helping me out backstage, and nobody knows big hair like us. We do big, bigger, and
juuuuuuust
right. I got used to wearing wigs on Broadway, and for film and television, hairdressers abused, begged, and cajoled my bonny locks into shape, which only left my real-life hair sadder and wispier, pleading into the mirror for a baseball cap to cover the frizzled specter of its fading self-esteem. Poor-little-match-girl hair.

But all that changed while I was shooting the pilot for My Huge Hit Sitcom
Kristin
on NBC. (Huge hit. Wagnerian breastplate huge. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.)

One day on the set, the hair dominatrix was teasing and poofing, trying to achieve some continuity with the more vigorous hair I’d had earlier in the day. She finally sighed and said, “What you really need is extensions.”

I was hesitant, afraid of the damage it would do to what little hair I had.

“They have amazing technology these days,” she assured me. “And it’s not like you suddenly have this Lady Godiva hair. It’s more for volume than length. We can keep teasing it all night if you really want to, but if you get hair extensions, it’ll stay.”

She sent me to this guy who was
the
big fa-shizzle of the day. Piny from Israel. His family was famous for rugs, so in my mind this was a natural tangent for him to follow. Great thing about L.A.: the best personal fixer-uppers on the planet are all here. If you want a brain, heart, or courage installed, go to Oz. For anything else, it’s L.A. all the way.

“The
weft,
” Piny said, draping the silky curtain over his arm. “We braid across the scalp. Teeny-tiny little braid. Then with great skill, we sew the weft.”

It took several hours for Piny to work his wefty mojo, but when he was finished, I had a thick, gorgeous head of absolutely natural-looking hair. Every two months or so, I went in, spent a few hours in the chair, which was no hardship compared to all the hours I’d spent on the set every day for results that were never half this tresslicious. I was hooked like a rug, honey, and I have never looked back. Piny had me addicted like a crack ho to that weft. But wefts were just the gateway drug. I was soon on to the hard stuff. Copper. Nylon. Glue.

When a revolutionary new extension technique was recommended to me, I was reluctant to try it, but a charming woman named Kimarie
sweetly seduced me to the next level. She had a tragic past, which she alluded to during our long hours together, and she didn’t shave her underarms, adding to her mystique. With the individual bonds, you could get volume where the weft wouldn’t go, closer to the hairline, and not in straight lines, so it looks even more natural. Which is not to say it
feels
completely natural. When I was dating Josh Bell, he went in for that first kiss, teasing his concert-violinist fingers through my hair and—

“Gah!”

He recoiled like he’d encountered a tarantula on the back of my head. Wasn’t quite the moment we’d both been hoping for. It was kind of like the first time I met Julie Andrews. She came back to my dressing room to meet me when I was in
Steel Pier,
and I was so thrilled my legs were shaking. She glided into the room—this woman I’d worshipped since the camera had swooped in over the alps and found her twirling on the hill, alive with the sound of music. I managed to squeak some sort of greeting. Julie Andrews extended her lily-soft hand and parted her lips to speak
in the voice of Julie Andrews
—

At that exact moment, the stage manager’s voice graveled across the intercom instead: “Anybody order chicken from Pluck You?”

So…yeah. I feel your pain, Josh. Sometimes you gotta let go of the dream and love life for the yodeling goatherd that it is.

Once I committed to a long-term relationship with my extensions, I had to find an East Coast person, too. We’ll call him Cartoosh. He used nylon instead of copper and was very conscious about the morality of the hair-extension ecosystem.

“Very important to reuse the hair,” said Cartoosh. “Someone grew this beautiful hair. Some woman in Russia or Scandinavia. To throw it away—where is the respect? We must be grateful to this woman.” (And I am. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Svetlana, Ingaborg, Olga. You girls rock. If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.)

I had a disastrous affair with glue bonding. When the hairdresser on the set hair sprayed me the next day, it was like a marshmallow in the microwave. Some kind of freaky chemical reaction took place, and it took Kimarie nine hours to pick out the sticky, coagulated mess and place the new extensions. There was also a bad moment involving a lit candle I’d set on the back of the toilet. (Big Hair Safety Tip: Unless you pee standing up, set the candle by the sink.) By the time I started asking myself,
Hey, what’s that smell?
the smoke alarm had deployed, and moments later the maintenance men pounded through the door and found me beating my head with a towel. I had to go out and walk Maddie with a big charred spot, and Denny complained for days about the lingering stench, which was like burned tire with a twist of lemon lip balm.

My worst hair mishap unfortunately coincided with a big benefit for the American Film Institute. This was a major televised red-carpet event so I had fresh extensions put in. Slated to rehearse my number (“I Could Have Danced All Night”) with the orchestra at ten in the morning the day of the benefit, I got in the shower at ten the night before. So
tra-la-la,
there I was, singing in the shower, washing my hair…which started feeling a little weird…so I combed a little extra conditioner through it…except the comb kind of didn’t want to skim through the hair…which was getting more and more tangled, so I used
more
and
more
conditioner, which made it even
more tangled,
even though I kept
combing
and
wrenching
and
dumping on more and more conditioner,
and I started to panic because
oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh! What is wrong with my HAIR?

By the time I got out of the shower, it had matted into three dense plugs. Like Princess Leia’s bagels plus a large inoperable tumor. At the time, I was dating a man who was younger than me and is now in jail. In fact, you might have seen him; he was on that show
Prison Break
. (Long story. We don’t have time for that now. We’re in the midst of a serious crisis that requires our full attention.) He was a cool customer
(probably what led to his downfall), so I called him, and he came right over.

“Geezes,” he said with a low, horrified whistle. “It looks like something you’d pull out of a drainpipe.”

“Could you take this comb and—”

“No.”

“Denny!” I sobbed. “I need Denny!”

Cool Guy called Denny, and Denny came right over. When I opened the door, he laughed so hard, he practically had to have oxygen. We worked at it for an hour or so, wrenching and pulling, all three of us falling out in fits of nervous laughter. But after a while, I wasn’t laughing. Just crying. It was now about two in the morning. I called my manager, Dannielle Thomas.

“You’re waking me up to tell me about your hair?” she said.

I told her about the epic battle being pitched in my kitchen.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” she groaned. “Come over.”

We all piled over to Dannielle’s, pounding on the front door. She opened it, stared for a moment, and said, “Houston, we have a problem.”

Instantly grasping the gravity of the situation, she sprang into managerial action. She wasn’t able to get Kimarie on the horn, but she finally rousted out Jonathan Hanousek, a guy who often does my hair for photo shoots. He came right over.

“I’ve seen this before,” said Jonathan, with a keen eye which thank the Lord, was not wasted on neurosurgery. “The hair was bonded on the wrong end. So when you comb it, it’s like backcombing, and now you’ve basically ratted your own hair into it.”

He worked at it for about two hours before he knelt beside my chair.

“Kristin, I need you to start thinking about cutting it off.”

“No, Jonathan, no,” I whimpered. “It’s taken years to grow it this long.”

He took pity on me and noodled at it for another hour. The darkest hour just before dawn. He knelt beside me again.

“Baby girl…,” he said.

“I know.”

I cried as he cut it all off, leaving pinkish bald patches between a scattering of scrubby blond thatching. Looking like a little grass beach cabana in the wake of a tropical storm, I lay down for a sad, fitful nap, then donned a baseball cap and a tragically brave smile and went to rehearse with the orchestra. As I walked in, Catherine Zeta-Jones came over to say hello, and rather than make strained small talk, I lifted my cap. It was actually a lot of fun seeing the look on her face.

“Oh, my Lord!” she gasped. “Honey, what happened?”

“Extension mishap,” I said darkly, and she nodded with awe and understanding, as if reacting to the sinking of a commuter ferry. It’s not that actresses are fantastically vapid and vain (much), it’s that our persona, our appearance—that’s a large part of our stock-in-trade, so a major hair issue for us is like a computer crash for a commodities broker. It matters.

Kimarie was beside herself when she saw what had happened.

“I always check to make sure it’s bonded on the right end.
Always
. I can’t believe this happened.” She guided me to the inner sanctum of the salon and set out a tray of long golden hair. “You see this? Eighteen-inch, guaranteed virgin blonde. I got it special from the Ukraine. I was supposed to put it on Nikki Ziering later today. But it’s yours if you want it. Seriously. It’s yours. No charge.”

“Who’s Nikki Ziering?”

“Playboy bunny. Wife of Ian Ziering from
Beverly Hills 90210
.”

“Do it.”

A few hours later, courtesy of Kimarie and one gorgeous Ukrainian virgin, I walk out of the salon with the high-potency mane of a California playmate. Tough break for Nikki, but I figured she had other natural resources with which she could muddle through.

An amusing footnote to this harrowing tale:

A few days after the event, I baked muffins to send my mom and dad, and when my assistant was packing them up to FedEx, one of the hair tumors somehow got tossed into the box. Scared the bejeebers out of poor Mom, who thought it was a dead mouse. For reasons I hope to never understand, Mom sent the hair tumor back to me, and I thought it would be a funny little sight gag if I coughed it up on Jay Leno’s desk when I was on the
Tonight
show. You know. Like a kitty coughs up a hair ball. Funny, right? So I did that.

(Love ya, Jay! Call me?)

My Huge Hit Sitcom
Kristin
on NBC was the brainchild of John Markus, a writer and producer who’d worked on lots of great shows, including
Cosby
and the
Cosby
spawn
A Different World,
the unfairly hilarious
Larry Sanders Show,
and lots of other stuff dating all the way back to
Taxi
. John first saw me on an audition tape for a show called
Blind Men
—a sitcom about a couple of guys selling venetian blinds. My TV résumé was pretty slim. I’d played a scrappy 1940s reporter in the miniseries
Paramour,
which got great notices but was discontinued when Ted Turner bought AMC and canceled all original programming. That was the humble but heartfelt beginning of what a theatre friend calls my “bicoastal disorder” and my first inkling that television might be something that I could do.

I was one of three women brought to L.A. to test for
Blind Men,
but one of the other girls got it. Okay by me. I learned a lot about the TV process, so the experience was a plus. John did ask me to do a guest shot on the show; I was a hot tamale in need of window treatment and seduced Patrick Warburten when he came to do the installation. (Seducing Patrick Warburten—another plus right there.) The shoot was loads of fun, and John Markus was one of those people I just immediately wanted to know. His mad skills and my mad skills are an instant eHarmony hookup.

After the Tony Awards show, there was a lot of excitement and he
was part of that rush. My agent told me my acceptance speech was a nice little icebreaker that showed I could smile and form cohesive syllables under pressure. Phone calls were generated. Meetings were taken. It was weird, but wonderful. John came to visit me backstage after one of the last performances of
Charlie Brown
and invited me to a meeting at Paramount. I was going to L.A. to shoot
Annie
anyway—a new TV movie version with Kathy Bates as Miss Hannigan—so I thought,
Cool. Two birds, one stone,
and all that. Why not go to the studio for a quick meet’n’greet? I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

At the meeting, we talked about my life, Broken Arrow, church, Mom and Dad. I thought we were just small-talking so they could get to know me, but then the talk turned to actual deal making. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this. Or that I was even
available
to do this. I’d been involved in workshops for a revival of
Thoroughly Modern Millie,
and the producers wanted me to do it on Broadway. A dream gig, if there ever was one. Turning my back on that to do a sitcom—this would be a major lane change in my career.

“It would have to be something I really care about,” I told John Markus. “And it would have to be fun.”

John’s high concept was basically “a small-town-Oklahoma Christian girl trying to make it as an actress in New York City.” (Rings vaguely familiar, doesn’t it?) As the talks progressed, I loved the idea, but barfed in my mouth a little when the studio suits suggested using my name for the title. For one thing, this was an ensemble show, not about one person, and for another, if the show was a turkey,
Kristin
would be a turkey, and that scared me. I wasn’t interested in being the Southern-born synonym for
Ishtar
. Sadly, the other proposed names were hideous—
Short and Sweet, Sweet and Sour
—I guess they hire companies to make up these titles, and no one was clever enough to come up with something like
That Girl.
So…okay. Go along to get along. I decided
Kristin
wasn’t so bad.