Official Book Club Selection (13 page)

I’ll digress for a moment to tell you just what a man among men Clooney is, ladies and gays. A few years after that ER episode, I got asked to do a table read for the Steven Soderbergh movie Out of Sight. It wasn’t an audition, just one of these movie situations where the filmmakers want to hear their script read out loud. I don’t know why they asked me at all, but the call came from my agent, and I quickly said, “Yes.” It was going to be at Danny DeVito’s house, since he was a producer on the film, and when I got there, they were very strict about where we could and couldn’t go in the house, because of course I wanted a tour. Then the celebrities started showing up. Lolita Davidovich was there, reading the part that would go to Jennifer Lopez, and Don Cheadle, and big studio mucky-mucks. Of course, I didn’t know anybody, and I was so nervous, clutching my script and trying to prepare, that when this nerdy guy came up to me and started making small talk, I thought, “I don’t have time for your needs, mister,” so I turned to him and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I kind of need to be studying right now.” That was Soderbergh. Oopsy!

But when Clooney came in, with the room full of people, he walked right up to me and said, “There’s the sexiest girl in the room!” and sat right next to me. I will never forget that. He went out of his way just to be nice and make a fun joke, and I was much more relaxed from then on, and everyone in the room looked at me differently after that, which was nice. (I was reading a black woman’s role, by the way, the one eventually played by Viola Davis in the movie. You’d think my experience on Fresh Prince working alongside Andrew Young would have helped me get that part, but alas, no.)

Anyway, aside from discovering how great Clooney was, that ER gig was special for me because at the time I was sort of seeing Quentin Tarantino, who directed the episode I was in. I met him through the Groundlings. Julia Sweeney had become friends with Quentin, and wrangled him for the night during the week when we had a guest star perform with the main company. Reservoir Dogs had just come out and was the biggest thing in movies. We all went to dinner after the Groundlings show and I sat across from this larger-than-life character shouting with passion and gesticulating wildly to make every point.

“Did you see Reservoir Dogs?” he asked.

I told him I hadn’t yet. That set him off, but jokingly, and with no small amount of spastic confidence. “I can’t believe it! You’re the ONLY person in LA who hasn’t seen it! It’s genius! It’s brilliant! It’s a brilliant movie. Ask anyone here! There’s this scene where Michael Madsen starts to freak out and slice a cop’s ear! And then there’s this other scene with Tim Roth where he’s bleeding out of his stomach for hours!”

He just started describing the whole movie, and then stopped himself. “That’s it! I’m gonna take you!”

I said, “Haven’t you seen it a million times already?”

He said, “There’s a screening next week with the whole cast, and I’m taking you!”

So he took me, I was his date, but beforehand we went to dinner with Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Tim Roth, and Michael Madsen. I was like, “Holy shit. How did I get at the indie-film heavy-hitter serious-actor table?” I said to Madsen, “I understand you play a pretty brutal character. You don’t hit any chicks or anything, right? Cause I can’t handle that.” An opener I’ve used many times with attractive men.

Michael started playing with my hair, and doing his whole brooding, mumbling, bad-boy sexy act, saying things like, “No, I would never hit a woman.”

Movie actors are weird.

It was fun at dinner watching all the actors fawn all over their beloved Quentin. I was dazzled by him as well. He has a rapport with actors and movie stars that cuts through their Hollywood BS, and he’s able to communicate with them as if he’s talking to real human beings. He came from the fan-boy world, sure, but I felt like every star at that table knew they were in the presence of The Great Tarantino.

I went out with him only a couple of times, and I’m so glad I got to know him. He put me in small parts in several of his projects: Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, and his episode of ER. But there is a dark side to Quentin Tarantino you haven’t known about till now. I spent the night with him. That’s right. The whole night. In bed. What we did is, um, a little hard for me to reveal. (Cue Barbara Walters.) Drum roll. We … cuddled. Yeah. Cuddled. Anybody could have fucked him. It takes a lot of balls to cuddle with Tarantino. He had come over to my studio apartment one night and we were joking around about whether or not he should stay the night. I made the point that I wouldn’t be able to respect myself in the morning if I didn’t fuck him. Because I didn’t want to be one of those girls who did “that thing” with a guy. You know that thing, girls, where you decide you’re not ready to sleep with someone, so you just want to cuddle for a night? Not on my watch, bitches. But Tarantino, being the persuasive cinematic artiste he was, was determined to see if I could go all night without fucking the shit out of him. So we did “the thing” instead. I’ve never felt so dirty.

Anyway, back to ER. This is how dorky I was about my day on that show. A little background first: With every TV or film job I got, I would make sure that I had a deal where my parents were allowed to come to the set. I wasn’t a child actor. I was a woman in my thirties. And I took them to everything. I’d book the gig, and then add, “Oh, can I get a drive-on for John and Maggie Griffin?” My mother in her muumuu met nearly every giant star. When I did this low-budget indie comedy for Bobcat Goldthwait called Shakes the Clown, I made sure they came to the set the day Robin Williams was scheduled to film a cameo. Thankfully, Robin in his downtime didn’t go hide out in his trailer. He was so restless he stayed in this communal room and performed all day. So my parents set up two chairs, like a small theater, and basically got to watch one of the biggest comedy stars of all time perform off and on all day. It was a complete treat for my dad, who was a huge fan.

Me being a typical stage daughter, dragging her parents to a set.

So even though I was only working one day on ER, I brought my parents. To taping, lunch, everything. They had a set kit in the car—cooler, folding chairs, water for survival (although a box of wine was preferred)—for these very moments. I, of course, assumed everyone looked at me like I was a weirdo. In much the way I complain about people bringing their children to work, I am, it turns out, worse than any new parent. But the deal is, as those of you who watch The D-List know, Mom and Dad were so fucking charming that to this day no one has ever said to me, “You know, that was kind of strange when you brought your folks.”

There we were on the Warner Bros. lot, with Mom pulling me aside in the cafeteria. “Look at that DARLING Julianna Marguiles! She’s a skinny young thing! You need to learn from that one! Look at how she keeps her figure! See how she has a salad? You shouldn’t be having a hamburger, Kathleen! Look at the way she does her hair. Why don’t you do your hair like that?” By the way, for years my mother tried to convince me that I could “train” my curly, kinky, frizzy hair to be straight. She actually believed that if I blew-dry my hair straight for long enough, that it would eventually grow in that way. This had to have come from one of those goddamn Rona Barrett magazines. A Myrna Loy tip, probably. In any case, she was focused, a mom-ager before there were mom-agers. Watch out, Dina Lohan.

Then there’d be Clooney in his scrubs playing basketball, and my father giving him shit. “You’ll never be in the NBA, Clooney!” Then Clooney would walk toward the fence and gravitate toward my adorable parents, my mom fawning all over him. If you talk to my mom, she thinks they’re best friends. But really, from minute one of my getting these types of gigs, I thought, What good is this if I can’t bring my parents? It’s cool I got the job, but way more fun that they got to meet Clooney and see Quentin work.

Perhaps the biggest deal for me during that time was winning a guest role on Seinfeld, the hottest show on TV. It was just one of those auditions that, after years, finally fucking went my way. Again, all the stand-up I was doing was probably what helped the most. The thing to remember is that, even if you’ve been doing characters for years in the Groundlings, when you go into an audition, you’re kind of going as yourself. And the alternative stand-up comedy world had given me plenty of experience in that department.

That table read was mind-blowing, if only because you went in, and there was fucking Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer. Newman, too. The diner set. The living room set. The fake New York street. To be sitting in Jerry’s living room was a thrill I was not prepared for. I asked about ten people to take my picture, thinking, Who’s gonna believe this if I don’t have hard documentary evidence? My part was that of George Costanza’s fiancée’s college roommate Sally Weaver, and during the actual reading, I was shaking, telling myself whatever happens, I cannot be the one who fucks up, because the other thing about table reads—it’s where people get fired. You can have a good audition, but if you have a bad table read, you’ll get the call a half hour later while you’re in your trailer, and then before you know it, you’re going home. The stakes are incredibly high.

Luckily the table read went well. Most of the cast, writers, and producers laughed. But Jerry was kind of an asshole. We were working early on a Sunday morning, which was unusual, but that was because the Golden Globes were that night. I was planning on going to a gay Golden Globes–watching party that night, so I went up to Jerry, thinking nothing of it, and asked if he’d sign something for me so that when we were watching the awards and his category came up, I could impress the gays. “Guess what, fuckers?” I imagined saying. “There’s Seinfeld on TV, and I’ve got a fucking note from him!” I wanted him to write something like, “Dear Kathy’s Golden Globe party, be rooting for me! Jerry Seinfeld.” Or whatever.

Well, he wouldn’t do it. “Grrr,” was about all I got out of him. All day on the set he was like, “Ugh, are you still gonna bug me about writing your stupid note? Why do I have to write a note? I don’t want to write a note. I don’t even know you.” I remember thinking, Oh for God’s sake, just write the fuckin’ note! What Jerry didn’t realize at this point was that we were in a big fight, and I was officially not speaking to him anymore. He did not notice this, because he did not notice that I existed, and because he obviously had better things to do than tend to me and my needs. He finally, begrudgingly, wrote me that note for the gays telling them to root for him. But I think this was the first time I’d pissed off an A-lister to his or her face. Normally, as you know, I prefer to talk about people behind their backs.

Naturally, this experience had to go into the act. Beloved American treasure Jerry Seinfeld was an asshole. I thought it was funny. I felt wronged, and felt I had to blurt this out. It didn’t occur to me to think, Okay, Kathy, when you do stand-up in Los Angeles, there are going to be industry people there. Don’t bash the number one sitcom star in the world. But once I got laughs from it, I told that story in my act for three months. I couldn’t tell it twice at Un-Cab or Hot Cup O’ Talk, obviously, so it went into heavy rotation at all the clubs, alternative coffeehouses, and alternative donut shop performance spaces I could book myself in.

Jerry Seinfeld with his comedy idol.

Then, around that time, I got my first HBO comedy special. It was a half hour, and I was one of eleven other people who got half hours. Maybe not as prestigious, but still pretty cool. Sure enough, HBO said to me, “Oh, that Seinfeld story is funny, you have to put it in.” That’s when I finally thought, What if he sees it?

Ever since the audition, I had become a little friendly with Seinfeld co-creator/executive producer Larry David, so I thought I’d feel him out. “How’s Jerry going to take this?” I asked him. “I’m thinking about putting in this story about him.”

Larry thought it was hysterical that I was giving Jerry shit. “I know Jerry,” he assured me. “Jerry will NEVER see this. Never in a million YEARS. You’re FINE, kid, you’re good!”

Whew.

Meanwhile, Suddenly Susan was a-brewin’. After eight years or so of obscurity in the Groundlings, and a year of doing stand-up, I was up for a bunch of sitcom auditions. Casting directors and studio and network people were packing into Hot Cup O’ Talk and Un-Cabaret, and I finally started to get a sense of inevitability. Granted, I was often the girl cast after somebody already hired didn’t work out. But things were rolling. “You know what?” I would tell my friends, “eventually, they have to fucking put me on a TV show. They’re going to run out of girls to play the secretary, and they’ll have to come to me.”

After paying my dues for more than ten years, I was this close to getting a regular sitcom gig. I really do believe I was the favorite for a part on Caroline in the City, that mid-’90s Lea Thompson sitcom where she played a New York cartoonist. But I blew it at the test for the NBC bigwigs. How? I lost my voice. I even got a huge laugh out of it when I turned to Jeff Zucker, the head of the network, and scratched out the words, “Sorry, I just got that chimp virus from the movie Outbreak.” But they were starting production in two days, and they all just looked at each other, like, “She’s not talking. How do we know she can do this role?” So they hired Amy Pietz, and she did that show for four years.

Actresses are pretty competitive when it comes to vying for those sidekick roles. Keep in mind, a studio or network may audition seventy-five girls for one part. So when Suddenly Susan, with Brooke Shields playing a San Francisco magazine columnist, was being put together in the spring of 1996, it just seemed weird that I wasn’t in contention for the part of Vicki, Susan’s wisecracking colleague. Sidekick girls were coming up to me at auditions and saying, “I didn’t get Suddenly Susan. Are you up for it?” I’d have to say, “I don’t know. They just haven’t seen me.”

They saw every goddamn girl in town. Megan Mullaly, Morwanna Banks, Jennifer Coolidge, Rachel True, Sarah Silverman, Jennifer Esposito, even Downtown Julie Brown. Casting director Tony Sepulveda said to me, “Nobody was sold on you to test for the role.” Eventually for the pilot they cast Maggie Wheeler, that Fran Drescher–voiced actress who played Matthew Perry’s ex-girlfriend Janice on Friends. The show got picked up, but as is often the case, the cast from the pilot changes, and for some reason it didn’t work out with Maggie. Eventually it came down to the wire for the Vicki part. As in, the table read for the first episode of the first season’s shooting was on a Monday, and the Friday before they finally agreed to let me audition. They still didn’t even want to see me. But apparently Brooke wanted to look at other girls after that first audition, for whatever reason. The head of Warner Bros., the studio producing the show, wasn’t sold, either. But somebody at NBC kept reminding them, “She’s done guest spots for us, she’s good.” I’m positive the decision to hire me was out of desperation, because time was of the essence. A sort of “Fine, we’ll take her” scenario.