Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences (11 page)

Looking ahead at the open road as I wove through the canyons, I experienced a peaceful resolve I hadn’t felt in ages, as though
the California expanse promised a surfeit of miracles. As I listened to eighties pop songs in my rented car, the lyrics that
would normally have made me roll my eyes suddenly struck me as weighty and insightful. I wept listening to “Escape (The Pina
Colada Song),” deeply moved that destiny had allowed the couple to find each other again.

I left L.A. feeling sun kissed, optimistic, and confused.

Troilus and Cressida
opened to horrendous reviews a couple of weeks later, with one critic calling it “an embarrassment of embarrassments!”

Even my mother decided not to come.

Shortly after the show closed in May, I got a call from Dan at
SNL
, who said that the Chicago trip was scheduled for the following week.

“Lorne wants it to coincide with the Knicks-Bulls game he’s going to with Bill Murray.”

NBC sent me a round-trip business class ticket and told me I would be put up at the Ritz-Carlton, where Lorne and other
SNL
staffers would also be staying. I was told there would be no per diem; for all food and drink, I’d be on my own.

I spent the next week polishing my makeshift act. The night before I left, I met Billy at our favorite haunt, Joe Allen’s,
for a drink.

“Well, darling, break a leg,” he said, raising a glass of the cheap white wine he called Penis Grigio. “Things are going to
change for you now. Forever . . .”

The next day, I arrived in Chicago around noon. While I was unpacking my things, I received a call from Dan, who told me that
he and his assistant would take me over to Second City so I could get acclimated with the space where I’d be performing.

“Will I be going on tomorrow?” I asked in the cab on the way over.

“Yes,” Dan said, nodding vigorously. “I really think so.”

At the theater, we just sort of stood around for a couple of hours, schmoozing the Second City folks. I poked around a bit,
asking about the itinerary for the weekend, but couldn’t get any concrete answers. By the time I returned to my hotel room,
I realized I was starving. I had been so nervous about everything, I’d forgotten to eat, so I picked up the menu and ordered
the cheapest thing I could find, a sixteen-dollar chicken club sandwich with potato chips. As soon as I got off the phone
with room ser vice, Dan called.

“Lorne wants to meet with you later.”

“OK . . .”

“He may want to see a few things, you know, as a preliminary . . .”

“You mean . . . wait—what do you mean? Like, I’d do some of . . . what I’m supposed to do for my audition?”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

I thought it was weird, but what hadn’t been weird?

“OK, um . . . what time?” I said, trying not to sound rattled. My audition now seemed to have a pre-audition.

“Not sure. I’ll call you. Just—just stay put, OK?”

As I waited for my sandwich, I went over the notes for my act. When room service arrived, I flipped on the TV to watch while
I ate, only to discover that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had died the night before. For the next few hours, I watched repeated
press coverage of the outside of Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartment, interspersed with footage of her as First Lady, JFK’s funeral,
and scenic shots of Greece in the seventies.

“Wow,” I thought. “She’s really gone.
Jackie, Oh!
” I remembered how when I was fifteen my dad told me he had always loved her—until she married Aristotle Onassis.

“She
sullied
herself, you wanna know the truth,” he instructed, late one night, as he devoured jumbo shrimps from a freezer storage bag
over the kitchen sink. “She married that ugly Greek asshole—Christ, what a
meeskite
he was.”

Watching Jackie clips in Chicago that night, I wondered which Jackie was the real Jackie: the sixties, Kennedy, Oleg-Cassini-muffs-and-hair-coiffed-within-an-inch-of-its-life
Jackie or the seventies, windblown, capri-pants-Gucci-bag-and-ginormous-black-sunglasses Jackie? In theory, I agreed with
my dad that Ari wasn’t the greatest-looking guy, but I couldn’t help thinking that Jackie was more herself—whatever that was—when
she was with him and even later, after he died. Or maybe I wanted to believe that because the seventies Jackie was
my
Jackie—a Jackie I could get into. I loved the jet-set Jackie. The Jackie who hung out with Truman Capote and Misha Baryshnikov.
The Jackie who chain-smoked and rode bikes braless with John-John in Central Park. The Jackie who got a gig at Doubleday even
though she didn’t need the cash. This was the sisters-are-doing-it-for-themselves Jackie, and now she was gone.

At eleven thirty, Dan called.

“So, Lorne’s thinking maybe in an hour or so, you could come by his room?”

“OK. Does he want me to come at a certain time or—”

“No, no . . . I’ll call you back. Just—stay put and I’ll call you back.”

I waited, watching more Jackie coverage. I was exhausted, so I ordered some coffee. At two thirty in the morning, the phone
rang.

“Hi, Nancy. Dan, here . . . uh, listen, so I think tonight’s a no-go. I’ll call you in the morning, ’kay? You good?”

“Well, is—am I meeting with Lorne in the morning?”

“Yeah.”

“And will this be . . . but, aren’t I performing at Second City tomorrow night? I’m sort of not getting what the deal is.
What time should I be up and ready by?”

“You’re definitely performing tomorrow night, and, uh, Lorne wants to see you at some point tomorrow in the morning. I don’t
know what time yet, so just hang out in your room, and I’ll call you, ’kay?”

I was flustered, but it was too late to call anyone. After a while, I fell into a fitful night’s sleep, only to wake at seven
A.M. in a panic. I took a shower, blew-dry my hair, got dressed, and put on makeup. Then I waited. And waited. At noon, Dan
called.

“Hi. So, Lorne wants to get together with you, but he’s trying to figure out his day, so things are still a bit murky. Can
you hang out?”

“Yeah, I can, but for how long? And what time is the thing to night?”

“I’m . . . yeah, I—I don’t know—”

“Look, I’m not trying to be a pain, but Dan, I mean . . . I’m just sitting here—”

“I know, I know, and I’m really sorry. It’s . . . I know, I know, I totally know. I’ll call you back. Just hang. It’ll be
soon.”

I couldn’t leave. I guess I could have, but “soon” might have been any minute, and I didn’t want to be unprofessional. As
the day dragged on, I started to feel like Susan Hayward in
I Want
to Live
!, waiting in jail watching the phone outside her cell, jumping at every terrifying jangle.

Hour after hour after hour passed. I watched Jackie getting married to Ari; watched her at the 1960 inaugural ball; watched
her get off of Air Force One in her bloody pill box getup. I called Dan once out of desperation, but there was no answer in
his room. At six, I received a call from Lorne’s assistant informing me that there was a “change of venue” and Second City
wasn’t going to work. Someone would be in touch within the hour to give me an address.

I was starving. I hadn’t eaten all day, so I ordered another chicken club sandwich with potato chips. Fuck it, I figured,
and turned up the volume to watch an early-sixties televised special of Jackie taking the American people through a tour of
the White House after her renovations.

I sat eating my sixteen-dollar sandwich, marveling at how breathy Jackie’s voice was. Did she really talk that way? Was that
her real voice, or was that some kind of polite lady way of speaking back then? She sounded like she wanted to make herself
as ethereal as possible, as if having any bottom to her voice would make her gauche and unappealing. It was as though she
was attempting to be invisible, which was how I felt sitting aimlessly in another city eating potato chips on an unmade hotel
bed.

My friend Kevin, a soap actor who lived in L.A., called to see how it was going.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked, incredulously. “
Get outta there!
Just take off, man. Let them find you! Go see a movie! Go buy some shit in the Water Tower and have dinner. Fuck ’em. Lemme
tell ya: they all just wanna make money and
be blown
, and they don’t give a flying fuck about the actors, man. I say you just split; get outta the room and go cruise Chi-Town.”

I wanted to do what he was telling me, but I couldn’t. I was too afraid.

At eight thirty, I got a call from Lorne’s assistant.

“Hi, Nancy, OK, it’ll be any minute now.”

“What’s gonna be any minute?”

“Oh—didn’t Dan talk to you?”

“No.”

“Oh, uh, OK—lemme call you back.”

“Wait! What’s going on? Am I seeing Lorne? And where’s Dan?”

“He’s . . . wait—you know what, I’ll have Dan call you, OK? He’ll call you in ten minutes.”

I called Robin in L.A.

“I’m seriously going out of my mind. What should I do? I’ve been holed up here since yesterday! It’s almost nine at night!”

There was a knock at my door.

“This might be them! This might be it—I’ll call you back.”

Click.

I answered the door. It was housekeeping. Did I want turndown service? Suddenly, standing there with the maid and her cart
in my doorway, I realized that this wasn’t going to happen. There would be no audition. I would leave Chicago the next morning,
having accomplished nothing. Except for maybe becoming an authority on Jackie Kennedy.

I flipped on the TV, and there she was again, giving her first post-assassination sit-down interview. The phone rang.

“Hi, Nancy.” It was Lorne’s assistant. “So . . . ugh, I’m really so, so sorry. Tonight’s just not good, and in a way, this
is better for you, ’cause Lorne’s actually in a bit of a bad mood because the Knicks lost, and he’s just . . . he’s just not
in a
good
space
right now, you know?”

“Uh-huh.” I turned up the volume on the TV. It was Richard Burton singing “Camelot.” “So. OK. Is that it?”

“Yeah. I’m—I’m real sorry that this has all been so, like, you know . . .”

“
In Camelot! Camelot!
” Burton’s voice boomed in the background.

“But it’s really better for you this way, and you can get the benefit of Lorne seeing you when he’s, you know, in a better,
like, space.”

“In Camelot! Camelot!”

“So, um . . .” the assistant continued, “Dan will, uh, call you to set up another . . . something for you to, um, you know—another
time. ’Kay?”

I sat on my bed and lit a cigarette, feeling too spent to cry. I ordered another chicken club sandwich with potato chips and
ate it while I watched Sarah Michelle Gellar in a made-for-TV movie called
A Woman Named Jackie.
At around midnight, I drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, as I was leaving the hotel to catch my flight back to New York, I ran into Dan in the hallway. I was wearing
sunglasses. My mother had always told me that if you’re wearing sunglasses and you run into someone you know, you should flip
them up; it’s rude not to let your acquaintance see your eyes. I kept my shades down, like Jackie O, covering my eyes. I was
done being polite. And, I was done being Winger.

“I’m so sorry, Nancy,” Dan began. “But we’ll
definitely
be getting you in—”

“You realize that I was trapped, right? You guys kept telling me that this thing would be any minute now, and I was trapped
in my room for two days, eating expensive sandwiches.”

“You know what?” he said gallantly. “Get me your bills—get me your receipts and we’ll take care of it. For sure. OK? And I’ll
call you—
really soon
—to set up a—a
situation
for you to do your thing. OK?”

I walked into the elevator and didn’t look back. On the trip home, I made a decision: I would tell Lorne, Dan, Tim, and the
various assistants to go fuck themselves; I would move to Los Angeles and buy into the myth that TV credits could be parlayed
into a life on the stage. I figured I would hit that scene now, while I had some casting people interested.

I had Robin call Dan at
SNL
to tell him that I was “no longer interested” and “moving to L.A.”

In the ensuing weeks, when people heard the
SNL
story, I was heralded as a hero by some people and derided as a fool by others. An agent I knew at the William Morris Agency
who’d been intensely following the
SNL
activity said, “You’re out of your fucking mind,” and told me that I should “go back there, to 30 Rock, right now, crawling
on your hands and knees,
apologize,
and
beg
Lorne to give you another chance!”

I never heard back from Phil Hartman; plans for his variety show were scrapped and NBC instead folded him into their new sitcom
NewsRadio.

The night I arrived back home from Chicago, I went to Billy and Bobby’s for dinner.

“Nancele’s here,” Billy announced, greeting me at the door with a tumbler of vodka. “She’s going to tell us about those cunts
at
Saturday Night Live
—”

“WHOOOOOO’S A CUNT?” Bobby yelled out from his bedroom.

“The people at
Saturday Night Live
—”

“THEY CALLED HER A ‘CUNT’?” Bobby stood astonished in the doorway.

“No,” Billy said, laughing. “
They’re
cunts. They made her go to Chicago for nothing.”

“Well, baby,” Bobby laughed, taking a sip of vodka. “That’s television.”

Three months later, I flew to Los Angeles for good. It was right about the time that Debra Winger left show business and retreated
to the East Coast, and I sometimes wonder if, high above the clouds, our paths crossed. I never impersonated her again.

5. The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

I scored the
first job I auditioned for when I got to Los Angeles, playing a jailed biker on a doomed sitcom that was a vehicle for some
comic. I had been in town less than twenty-four hours, having arrived at the sparsely furnished Hollywood Hills bachelor pad
I would be house-sitting, along with an amiable actor named Jeff, late in the afternoon the day before. I was thrilled; I
had hit the ground running. A few auditions later, I landed a role on
Seinfeld
.

“I wanna tell you something,” my father said when I called to share my big news. “You are a very courageous person. I’ve always
said it. You are a person of great courage.” He continued to wax emotional for a while, and I sat on the floor, listening
and nodding, so happy I could make my father proud. I was always seeking such moments, clinging to them feverishly when they
arrived, never fully embracing an accomplishment unless it had been acknowledged and appreciated by him first. I suppose most
people seek out parental approval, but I often think that a performer’s thirst for this praise is even more heightened—perhaps
unquenchable. I always felt that the single most amazing revelation about Madonna in the “rockumentary”
Truth or
Dare
(aside from the nonpareil virtuosity she exhibited deep-throating a Perrier bottle) was how desperate she was to please her
dad. And how could anyone not relate to that? After making my father sit through years of theater he neither understood nor
enjoyed (on uncomfortable chairs), I was finally doing something he could get behind: a part on a hit network television show
that everyone he knew watched. I could picture him: watching me on the tube, kvelling, lying in his black leather recliner
receiving phone calls from his friends, other lawyers dotted around the country, all duly impressed. The whole thing did feel
rather lionhearted all of a sudden. Before decamping to Hollywood, I had decided that getting a gig on
Seinfeld
would be my litmus test: if I was hired, it would be a harbinger of impending success. I don’t know why; I had never even
watched the show. But I knew everyone else did, and in an uncharacteristically bold way, this is what I set my sights on.

After I hung up with my father, I lay on the floor daydreaming about my soon-to-be-swelling bank account and what I’d say
to Oprah when she asked me if I “always knew this was my destiny.” “Yes,” I’d say as the camera panned into an audience of
solicitous Midwesterners. “Yes, I did.” Later that night, watching myself in the steamy mirror of my Advanced Spinning Class,
I continued to marvel at my streak of providence: “I
am
doing the right thing,” I mused while frantically pedaling on a sawed-off bike, going nowhere. “These things are happening
for me because I am doing the
right thing
.”

Booking this job was a major coup, particularly because my first
Seinfeld
audition was a disaster. When I visited L.A. in the midst of the Lorne Michaels craziness, Robin sent me to meet the
Seinfeld
casting director, a very nice guy with whom I immediately hit it off. He called me back that afternoon to meet with the producers,
and I sat anxiously in a fluorescently lit waiting area, watching girls teetering in and out of “the Room,” all of them wearing
skimpy skirts and tight little tees. I looked down at my drab, shapeless, black New York Actor rehearsal getup, which was
fine if I was auditioning for a deconstructed version of
King
Lear
on Ludlow Street, and thought nervously, “They’ll get it—right?”

The Room was crammed with at least twenty Jewish guys and one lone woman (the writers and producers), not to mention the director,
Larry David, and Jerry Himself. I was so intimidated I didn’t even
look at them
when I was introduced, keeping my gaze instead on the casting director, who read the scene with me. Absolutely petrified,
I couldn’t breathe, and I shook like I suffered from Parkinson’s. My voice never got louder than a weird, raspy whisper. Worse,
I didn’t look up from my script on the punch line. Oh my god. If there is anything you do on a sitcom audition, no matter
what, ALWAYS, for god’s sake, LOOK UP ON THE JOKE. Even if the script is the worst, most unfunny thing you’ve ever read in
your life (usually it is!), look up on the joke. I’ve landed jobs where I’d taken only the most cursory glance at the script
before the audition, merely because I made sure I looked up on the joke.

When it was over, someone halfheartedly muttered, “Thank you,” whereupon I slunk away, like a dog that’s been reprimanded
for peeing on the carpet. Driving back through Coldwater Canyon in a daze, I thought about my friend Jane, now starring in
something like her eighth pi lot. What had she told me about the importance of auditioning with good hair?

Always get your hair blown out—you’ll feel stronger.

Of course it’s important to be funny, but it’s more important
to look sexy
.

I pictured her, a plethora of firm convictions and beauty products, sitting on my couch and delivering wise nuggets while
I stomped around screaming about feminism and art. Even the Jazz Musician, ever the artiste, told me that when hiring a “chick
singer,” the “cats” in the band ask themselves two questions: (1) What does she look like? And (2) can she sing? Weaving through
the canyon, I had a Helen Keller “wah-wah” moment: I had gone about it all wrong, preparing for the audition by
working on the script.
But I wasn’t actually
prepared—
not outwardly.

Strangely, the casting director didn’t attribute the hideousness of that audition to me and told Robin that the “energy in
the room was off”; they (meaning Jerry) were just “having a bad day.” He assured her that he would bring me in again. That
was March. Six months later, at the end of September, Robin called: I was getting another chance. I told myself I wasn’t going
to make the same mistakes this time. There was no way I was going back into the Room without confidence. No more baggy clothes,
no more hair in my face, no more “don’t look at me, I’m just this cool, unassuming, artsy chick.” I decided to take a few
of Jane’s tips. I went to a hot new place called Estilo—Spanish for “style”—to have my hair professionally blown out. Then
I did something I’d never done before: I stuffed. Jane had long ago suggested that I use “chicken cutlets” to augment my boobs,
and I didn’t really know what she meant. But a few hours before the audition, I was at Neiman Marcus buying new underwear
and I saw them: silicone inserts that looked like six-pound boneless, skinless kosher chicken breasts, ready to be stuffed
into your Wonderbra. They were expensive—a hundred dollars—and I was pretty broke, but I was mesmerized. I couldn’t walk away.
It was like stumbling onto the Rosetta Stone and then saying, “But how will I get it back? I have so much luggage already.”
Whipping out my plastic, I charged a pair, dashed home to Nichols Canyon, and locked myself in the bathroom. With my hair
bouncin’ and behavin’ and my “TV-ready” makeup emphasizing my pouty lips, I stuffed the cutlets in, pulled down my tight,
low-cut T-shirt, and took a gander at myself in the bathroom mirror from the side. “Jesus. I look good with tits,” I thought.
I felt a twinge of guilt about it, but . . . “It makes sense for me to have tits,” I decided. On my way out, I found Jeff
eating a taco in the kitchen.

“Well,” I said, grabbing my keys, “I’m finally getting another shot at
Seinfeld
. What d’ya think?”

“Wow,” he said, his eyes popping out, his mouth full of food. “Nice ta-tas!”

“I know—right?”

“Where’d you get those?”

“Neiman Marcus!”

“Awesome!”

“That was
wonderful
!” Jerry enthused after I finished my reading. I turned to face the sea of beaming, ebullient faces. I smiled sweetly, chirped,
“Thank you! Byeee!,” waved, and practically skipped out of the room. I sailed back over the hill, singing “Tits and Ass” from
A Chorus Line
the whole way, and by the time I got home, there was a message on the voice mail from Robin telling me I’d gotten the part.

I arrived an hour early for my first day of rehearsal, went to grab some coffee and a bagel (“Jerry has them shipped in from
New York,” the first AD told me. “He
loathes
L.A. bagels”), and encountered Jerry, scarfing down a bowl of cereal. Like his character on the show, Jerry was always with
the cereal.

“Well, there she is!” he exclaimed enthusiastically, extending his hand out as though presenting me. “The girl with the hair
in her face! Nice to see you, Nancy! Welcome!”

“Hey, Jerry,” I said. “Thanks for having me on!”

Even with the expensive blowout, my hair still managed to droop into my face. Ned, when he was my teacher, was constantly
harping about my hair being in my face during scene work.

“Nance,” he’d say, shaking his head, “what’s with the hair? What are you trying to hide? Get it the fuck off your face. Next
time, I won’t let you even start the scene without barrettes.”

I snapped to just as the makeup and hair people rushed over to get a look at me.

“Keep her hair natural looking,” Jerry warned them as they swarmed around me wielding measuring tape, notepads, and concerned
expressions.

“No big hair—and make sure it’s off her face,” he smiled at me, then hopped on his skateboard and zoomed off, leaving them
to their appraisals. In the end, they made me look great, and I even went to the Christophe Salon in Beverly Hills, where
there was a very snobby lady with a fake-sounding French accent who ran the front desk (I was sure she was really from Queens),
and got my hair highlighted for the first time. I had never felt so pretty. I loved the new me, even if she was a lot of smoke
and mirrors and peroxide and rubber.

Rehearsals went remarkably smoothly the whole week. The episode’s baroque plot is built around the premise that Jason Alexander’s
character, George, believes he has unwittingly purchased the actor Jon Voight’s old Chrysler LeBaron. Jon Voight, in a cameo,
played himself; I played a dental hygienist named Terry, who gets cruised by Kramer at Tim the Dentist’s Thanksgiving party.
I was treated royally by everyone on the show. They were some of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with, warm and generous,
and the vibe on the set was totally relaxed and fun.

Once, when the air-conditioning in my trailer broke, Jerry came out to have a look. “Here, hold this,” he said, handing me
his turkey sandwich and standing on a chair. He stood there, jiggling something in the ceiling, and voilà: he fixed it.

Who knew?

On the day of the taping, Michael Richards invited me to join them for a preshow catered Chinese meal on the set, but I was
so nervous I couldn’t eat. The taping, which took something like three hours, flew by. The klieg lights came on, we were rolling,
the laughs came as planned. Jerry announced my name and brought me out for my curtain call with the cast. It was thrilling.
After my scene wrapped, Larry David gave me a hug. “You did it!” he said, and I breathed a sigh of relief before practically
floating home around midnight.

For the next month, I stayed busy doing voice-overs and auditioning. I got my hair blown out before everything and started
keeping the chicken cutlets in the trunk of my car—along with extra head shots and résumés—in case I had to whip them out
for any last-minute auditions. Casting people were invariably impressed that I had just worked on
Seinfeld
, and I had to regale them with what it was like to work there and details of the episode’s nutty plotline. One slightly disappointing
side note was that people were always asking me what Jon Voight was like, and I had to say I had no idea. His one scene was
shot ahead of time, so he hadn’t been at the taping.

The episode aired during November Sweeps, when networks stack their decks with celebrity guest stars, hoping to garner immense
ratings and wipe their asses with their network opponents. Commercials for the episode ran ad nauseam, and for the entire
week prior to its airing, I got calls from people I hadn’t talked to in years who had seen flashes of me saying my big laugh
line: “Wait—Jon Voight bit you?,” with the funky
Sein-feld
bass riffs playing in the background. I was ridiculously excited.

The day the show aired, I spoke to my father in the morning.

“I’ve got about a hundred people watching to night,” he gushed. “Everyone’s really excited!”

“That’s great,” I said, feeling butterflies in my stomach for the first time.

“I wanna call you right after—you gonna be home?”

Because my parents were on the East Coast, they would be seeing the show three hours earlier than me. At six thirty that night
my time, I sat next to the phone and waited. And waited. Where was he? Maybe he was fielding phone calls from friends? Finally,
at five past seven the phone rang. It was my mother.

“Hi—” she said, though it sounded more like a “huh,” like she was being slapped on the back during a chest exam.

“Hi . . .” I volleyed back, after which followed a protracted pause.

“Sooooo!” she intoned. Was she hoping I would think that was a sentence?

“Did you watch it?” I asked finally.

“Yes . . .”

“And?”

“It was good. It was . . .
short
.”

“Short?”

“Yes. But it was very good.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“He’s—he’s . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Yeah?”

“He’s asleep. He has to get up early tomorrow.”

What happened to I was so courageous, I was a hero,
yadda,
yadda, yadda
?

I don’t know how long I sat in the darkened living room of that seventies-style ranch house, staring at the enormous turned-off
tele vision set. I don’t recall what I thought about either. I remember at one point getting up and walking around and around
the Ping-Pong table—the only other piece of furniture besides the TV and a frayed club chair—before perching on it and staring
out the glass sliding doors into the dusky canyon. Jeff came home with chips and beer in time to watch me in a part that had
been cut so significantly that if you blinked, you missed me. And then there was my hair. Once again, my hair, the subject
of so much conversation and concern, almost completely obscured my face.