I'll Scream Later (No Series) (23 page)

T
HE ENERGY ON
the set that first year was great and was exciting to be a part of.

Both Mark Harmon and I are practical jokers, and not necessarily of the highbrow kind. So any number of times the toilets were wrapped with Saran Wrap—both of us were guilty. Or I’d find my glasses had been buttered—yes, the lenses slathered with butter. All I can say on that front is that fingerprints can be traced!

Mark was fond of sneaking up behind me with a fake mouse. I favored launching Silly String attacks. There would be tape-ball fights. My retainer disappeared on a few occasions and turned up in the freezer. And we were always jockeying for the best parking space. Two spaces were near our trailers, but only one was easy to get in and out of—it was definitely the primo spot.

Then there was the executive who looked at an early episode and said. “That Marlee Matlin is terrific. Is she going to be Deaf for the entire series?” Unfortunately he wasn’t kidding!

The crew was great—I loved them all. One of my favorites was a grip named Mike. One day he was walking toward me carrying two cups of coffee. I said, “Come on over here.”

He said, “I can’t, I’ve got these cups of coffee.”

“Well, why don’t you drop them,” I teased.

And he did. Right there, just let both cups of coffee drop to the floor. I laughed so hard! It became a running joke between us. Whenever he’d see me, he’d drop whatever he had in his hands—a hammer, food—and come give me a hug.

I also got really close to this sweet girl Adrianna, who did my wardrobe. We would always talk, and I found her to be sensitive, straightforward. In a horrific tragedy, she was getting into her car one day on a busy street and a drunk driver hit and killed her.

I
WAS SO
new to the television side of the business that I didn’t realize we wouldn’t know until the end of the season whether we were going to be picked up for another year. But as soon as I understood the process, I started saying my prayers.

When I found out that we had gotten picked up for a second season, I was so happy. I loved the show. I loved the people, and by now I was also in love with a guy named Kevin.

A
N OLD
B
URBANK
hospital that had long ago closed down was our first location shoot on
Reasonable Doubts.
Anytime you shoot in Burbank, the city will have a number of cops on the set—to manage traffic and security, that sort of thing. Since I’d wanted to be a cop when I was younger, I always chatted them up.

On this day, I noticed a good-looking guy in uniform standing there and thought I’d just say hi. Who can blame a girl? We talked a little, but he was serious, somber, being very professional.

My day was short as I only had one scene. So when I was finished, on my way out, I said, “Have a good day,” and left.

Kevin remembers, “When I work on a set, I’ll usually ask who’s there. Somebody said that day it was Mark Harmon and Marlee Matlin. I’m not big into the movie scene, so I knew who Mark Harmon was, but I hadn’t heard of Marlee, didn’t know anything about her except that she was a Deaf actress.

“When she left, I saw her get into her car. It was a Porsche, but I took a second look because I noticed it had a cell phone antenna, and I couldn’t figure it out. She was Deaf, why did she have a cell phone in her car?”

I wouldn’t see Kevin again until November. During the four months in between, I’d met just about all the cops who worked on the set. That morning I arrived at work exhausted. I went up to Sergeant Tim Stehr, who’s now the Burbank chief of police, to say hi. We’d gotten to know each other pretty well. But when I reached to give him a hug, his body froze.

I took another look and realized it wasn’t Tim.

Kevin and Tim—they could be brothers

“I’m so sorry, sir.” I was so embarrassed, blushing madly as I slinked away. A little later the real Tim showed up. I told him what had happened and he said, “Yeah, it happens all the time. His name is Kevin.” I felt a little better. Even now, if you see photos of Kevin and Tim, they look so much alike, they could pass for brothers.

Kevin started working on the set more, and before too much longer I told him I’d love to go for a ride-along—“for research…” He said sure.

Another couple of months passed before we set a day. The department sanctions ride-alongs, but a male and a female can’t be in the car alone. Perfect, I brought along my gayest assistant, B, who rode in the backseat in the cage.

I wouldn’t sit in the back because I didn’t want anyone to think I’d been busted. I could see the headlines…it would be a nightmare. Besides, I wanted to be next to Kevin.

With B in the back, I started talking to Kevin on my own. He didn’t get many calls that night, but when one finally came in, he turned and said, “We’re going to a gay bar.” I thought to myself, How weird, a gay bar in Burbank.

In a few moments we pulled into the parking lot of a Kmart.

“There’s a gay bar at Kmart?”

“What gay bar?”

“I thought we were going to a gay bar.”

He laughed. “No, I said Kmart.”

I was having trouble reading his lips because he had a mustache!

At the end of the shift, I asked Kevin something, I can’t remember what, but he signed yes. I looked at him and said, “Did you just sign to me?”

“No, no, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did, you are so busted!”

He told me that he’d taken sign language at Fresno State, where he’d gone to college. Approval had been given to allow students to use sign language to meet their foreign-language requirements, and he’d opted for that.

But with me he was worried that he really only knew a little bit. It was enough. We began to see each other and we began to fall in love.

I
T SEEMS LIFE
always has complications. I was still involved with David, and Kevin hadn’t broken off with his girlfriend—in fact they were still engaged.

One evening when David got home, he came upstairs and sat down next to me. My heart dropped, I felt in my bones what was coming next. He looked at me with such sad eyes and asked, “Who are you dating?”

I knew I couldn’t lie to David, but it broke my heart to hurt him in any way. He couldn’t have been more kind, more civil, which only made my leaving that much harder, but I knew I had to follow my heart.

Kevin’s got such a good heart, and just as I had struggled with ending my relationship with David, he was struggling with how to break it off with his girlfriend. He didn’t want either of us to be hurt, which was not going to be possible no matter what.

By now
Reasonable Doubts
was on hiatus and I was heading to Portland to do the film
Hear No Evil.
The night before I left, I told Kevin, I cannot go do a movie knowing you are seeing two people.
He needed to make a choice. And he chose me. I got on the plane the next morning filled with relief and hope for the future.

One of the best things about Kevin is that he is absolutely not interested in the Hollywood scene. As he says, “Other than going to movies and being entertained for a couple of hours, it doesn’t have any real fascination for me.”

I could coax him to come with me to an occasional premiere, or to attend the Oscars or Golden Globes, but he was always doing it more for me than anything else. Our dates were much more likely to be catching a movie, packing a picnic, hiking or going to his beloved Mammoth Lakes to ski, eating sushi, simple pleasures.

From the beginning, we were really comfortable in each other’s company. We talked, laughed, had a great time just being together. We always had wonderful chemistry, too—sometimes it was hard to keep our hands off each other!

As we got to know each other, we found we wanted the same things—a big family, four kids, a dog. We could see building a white-picket-fence kind of life together with a close-knit family at the core of it all.

K
EVIN’S BIRTHDAY IS
February 13, the day before Valentine’s Day. In 1993, it was warm and we decided to go on a picnic to our favorite park in Burbank.

Kevin recalls, “I think we both knew that we were entering that next stage of the relationship that led to marriage. I’ve always tried to think of the least-expected thing to do whatever the occasion. And I figured Marlee would think that if I were going to propose, it would be on Valentine’s Day.

“During the picnic, I had a picture of roses and a picture of a wedding ring. And while we were having lunch, I pulled both out and said something like ‘Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Which do you think you’ll want, the roses or the ring?’

“She got all excited and it seemed like that meant ‘I want the ring,’ so I got down on one knee and opened up the box that had the ring I’d gotten for her and asked if she’d marry me.”

Kevin had just popped the question but we were very much in synch because I got him a ring, too!

I said yes so fast!

We were in jeans, sitting at a picnic table in the middle of a park, and it was absolutely the most romantic moment ever. We started calling people to tell them, and one of the first calls went to Tim Stehr and his wife, Barbara, who is also one of my best friends. If I hadn’t mistaken Kevin for Tim that day of the ill-fated hug, maybe none of this would have happened.

I
’
D NEVER WORKED
out with a trainer. I was on the go a lot, no couch potato, but exercise was not part of the agenda. And then
Hear No Evil,
a project I’d been working on with director Robert Greenwald for about four years, was finally going into production.

The film was about a woman who’s a personal trainer and marathon runner who finds herself caught up in a web of corruption and betrayal that she doesn’t begin to understand. What she does figure out pretty quickly is that if she can’t untangle the web, she will likely pay with her life.

I went through three months of training before we began shooting, cutting fats, oils, sweets, and red meat completely out of my diet. When I showed up on the set, I was seventeen pounds lighter, and as lean and buff as I would ever be until years later when I landed on
Dancing with the Stars
and found movements and muscle tone I didn’t know existed!

As I headed up to Portland in the spring of ’92, I was excited about the project and absolutely infused with the glow of being newly in love, and that made everything around me feel like warm sunshine.

Portland in May was amazing, what a beautiful city; it remains one of my favorite places. I had a terrific apartment, a penthouse overlooking downtown. Kevin would fly up a couple of times during the production, and we would disappear behind its doors, in our own little world, until I had to be back on set.

This was the first film I’d done since
Children of a Lesser God
where the character’s deafness was key in a way that played very much into the core action driving the film.

We went through a number of writers to get a script that both the director and I were happy with. The film had echoes of
Wait Until Dark,
the thriller starring Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman trying to evade a killer, but was very much its own movie.

The central thread was how vulnerable you can be in certain situations if you’re deprived of a key sense. And then, how you fight to compensate and overcome the jeopardy you find yourself in.

Jillian, my character, was definitely the target of the bad guys, but I still wanted her to be infused with an inner strength. She becomes very much a part of her own salvation.

One powerful scene in the film, when I’m out and being chased and desperate for help, was particularly emotional to shoot. I’m running for my life, desperate to find help, when I see a phone booth. It looks to be my only chance. I grab the receiver and begin desperately calling 911—but since I can’t hear, I don’t know that the call hasn’t gone through. I fall to my knees, sobbing and screaming into the phone. I let myself just collapse into the terror of that moment—I let my mind wander into exactly what that would feel like, and it was a dark, dark place.

Getting swept up in that scene reminded me uncomfortably of my own vulnerability, which most of the time I keep completely locked out of my thoughts. I hate the notion that I would ever be at greater risk than someone who can hear, and I don’t like the idea that I ever need help to navigate the world, even when I do.

For part of the shoot, we moved out to the Timberline Lodge in Mount Hood, Oregon. It’s beautiful there, fir trees rising to impossible heights, the gorgeous lodge set in this pristine landscape. They also shot a good bit of
The Shining
here, which made it hard not to imagine a menacing Jack Nicholson lurking in the shadows.

Our film had a lot of darkness, Robert did his best to lighten things up. As a director, he had a deft hand and a keen sense of humor. Oh, he could be funny. His favorite line was “Screw continuity,” which is scary since continuity ensures that even though you shoot the film out of sequence, all the scenes match up when they’re edited together.

I kept telling him, “But I was there in the scene and now I’m here.”

He’d just laugh and say, “Screw continuity!”

He was good about getting me to the emotional ledge I needed to be on throughout the film. “Marlee, remember why she’s here,” he’d say as Jillian moved through a range of crises trying to outwit her pursuers. We had talked a lot about the different “whys” as we developed the script, so I could lock in and get there quickly.

I grew to adore many people in the cast. Martin Sheen, though he plays a scary bad guy, Lieutenant Brock, was terrific and such a professional. D. B. Sweeney’s character, Ben, who becomes my ally and falls in love with my character, is so funny and so charming that it made work a joy. At least for me.

One day Kevin was visiting the set, and D.B. and I had a pretty steamy scene with a long kiss. I looked over at Kevin after the scene wrapped and noticed he looked stunned.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I didn’t know you were going to have to
kiss
him!”

“But that’s acting.”

Later that night when I covered Kevin with kisses, I promise you absolutely no acting was involved.

John McGinley plays a down-on-his-luck journalist who seems to be a friend, but in a surprise twist betrays me. He is a fantastic actor, has a great wicked smile, and is a supernice guy. Of course, I have to watch
Scrubs
now, so I can follow his pitch-perfect turn as the cynical Dr. Perry Cox. I am so proud of him.

It was a cool cast and crew to work with. Bill Pugin was there as my interpreter, and when they needed someone to step in and play a doctor for a scene or two, they grabbed Bill.

Bill was going through such a difficult time then, I was grateful that he was able to be there during any of the production. He stayed only half of the time, flying back to L.A. to be with his partner, who was on his deathbed from AIDS. Watching Bill go through the excruciating pain of losing someone who meant so much, and being completely unable to do anything to help him beyond just being there, was one of my hardest times.

H
EAR
N
O
E
VIL
was, without question, the most physically demanding film I had done. My work with the trainer focused primarily on running. Before I hit the set, I was averaging about six miles a day. I loved it.

Running created just the right rhythm and space for my mind to work through all sorts of issues and problems. Whether it was life or a scene I was struggling with, if I went running, I had it figured out by the time I got back. I even ran an 8K race while I was there.

The more time I spent acting, the more I was able to understand and tap into the ways in which my deafness could enhance it. If you’re Deaf, you learn early on to use your face and your body language to communicate instead of your voice. As with just about everything else in life, as you get older and more experienced, you get better. That life experience fed into my acting. David Kelley used to call my eyes my weapon of choice in front of the camera. My eyes are my ears and I put that into my work.

All that is nuance; this role also demanded that I be concrete and visceral, too. I had to be able to run long distances for many of the scenes; some days it felt as if I were running most of the day. When it was on big, open boulevards, it was easy. Much more difficult were the scenes when I had to run through woods with thick underbrush in the middle of the night.

Before we wrapped, I had to run, get attacked, get knocked over, and scream over and over. I’ve never screamed so much in my life! And I was covered in scratches and bruises throughout the shoot.

Most days ended with my edging toward exhaustion, but in a good, this-body-had-gotten-a-serious-workout kind of way.

It was a long shoot—we started the first week in May and wrapped at the end of June—but was a light, bright time for such a dark, dark thriller…except for one serious tiff with the director.

In one scene, I’m in a bubble bath when something startles me and I begin getting out of the tub. My body was not supposed to be exposed. When I saw a rough cut of the film, the camera had captured far more than I wanted revealed.

I was furious! Absolutely no artistic reason justified it: nothing in the narrative demanded it. It was a cheap shot, a bid to show a little skin. When the skin in question is mine, I care deeply.

I had a few days of extremely testy exchanges with Robert over this. He wanted to leave it in. I wanted it completely cut.

In the end, the scene was trimmed, then trimmed a bit more. It was still more of me than I wanted out there, and it wasn’t pleasant to have that fight. All of my contracts in the years since have been tightened significantly on this front. No nudity, and no body double either—at least not without my knowledge and consent.

I
F THE FIRST
season of
Reasonable Doubts
was heaven, the second season was not quite hell, but a long way from heaven. The show was struggling in the ratings, and what had been a really good working relationship with Mark began to sour. I began to feel isolated, as if I were an outsider in an old boys’ club.

It began to feel as if the production revolved around Mark. On too many days I’d get called to the set, then be left waiting with the rest of the cast and crew until he showed up. I felt his character was getting more of the focus and mine was receding. Virtually all of the publicity for the show was falling on my shoulders.

Signing never came easy to Mark, and trying to learn pages of dialogue and signs each week was wearing him down, too—you could just feel the energy deflating. Our time slot didn’t help the mood on the set either. NBC had put us head-to-head with
Roseanne,
then the number-one-ranked show in prime time. It was hard not to feel that was a battle we had no chance of winning.

I was still so new at all of this. The writers would come in and observe, but never really talk to me. I tried throwing a few ideas their way and got a few story lines added that brought in other Deaf actors for an episode or two. But there was no real collaboration.

At one point Bill heard one of the producers say, “Keep Marlee’s dialogue short, we don’t want so much dead air.”

You cannot write for me or shoot me exactly as you would a hearing actress. There are differences, not impossible differences,
but ones that you need to understand.
Children of a Lesser God
was a prime example of how to make it work.

It always starts with the script, and in
Children
there is almost no air—as I was signing, dialogue kept running, translating everything for the audience but in a way that felt natural. It was written so that you are hearing Bill Hurt’s character’s reactions as well as seeing them. Randa spent hours planning, adjusting shots in different ways, to catch the action between me and the other actors.

Here’s a simple way to think of it. If a director is shooting two people talking, they typically do a lot of over-the-shoulder shots. The person who is speaking is shot from the back, over his or her shoulder, so that the audience hears the voice, but is watching the other person’s reaction.

If one of the actors is Deaf, that pretty much kills the over-the-shoulder shot for at least half of the dialogue. So the director has to be more inventive in staging the action.

Another mistake that’s often made in writing for me is to over-explain, to be too literal with the dialogue for the character translating my signing. It’s a delicate balance between telling the audience too much and not telling them enough—but that’s really the case with all dialogue.

It is definitely an art, but one that the best writers seem to know how to do intuitively. The brilliant Aaron Sorkin, who would write me into
The West Wing,
was one.
Seinfeld
’s incredible Carol Leifer, one of the show’s core writers, absolutely got me and my humor. She wasn’t afraid to use my deafness as comic grist.

On
Spin City,
I was lucky to work with the legendary Gary David Goldberg; Bill Lawrence, who went on to create
Scrubs;
and Kirk Rudell, who helped sharpen tongues later on
Will & Grace.
And the always clever David Kelley, who, years after we were just sending each other family Christmas cards, wrote me into
Picket Fences
in a pretty remarkable and crazy way.

You can look at any of those episodes and they flow seamlessly; the dialogue between me and the other actors feels organic, believable. As an actor, those are the qualities you’re looking for.

T
HE SITUATION ON
Reasonable Doubts
continued to deteriorate. The ratings continued to drop, despite the fact that both years I received an Emmy nomination for Best Actress in a Drama series.

On one particularly difficult day when tempers were already short, I muttered something under my breath about Mark’s attitude—unfortunately he overheard it. Things turned nasty and we didn’t speak for weeks unless it was the dialogue on the page. Given the number of scenes we had together, that made for an extremely tense set. It reminded me a little of the high school standoff Liz and I had had years ago—not good for anyone.

We got no feedback from the show’s producers on what they did or didn’t like about any of the performances. I would have loved being a part of discussions on how to improve the show. It seemed the only way they thought I could help was to hit the publicity trail. I was a good soldier on that front. I did endless interviews and I think I hit every talk and late-night show in the universe.

When I found out the series had been canceled, I was both relieved and devastated. Relieved because I wasn’t going to be fighting with Mark anymore—because at heart I know he’s a good guy and I hated that we were at such odds—and devastated to lose the work. Now what?

It was time to move on, but whatever I did career-wise, I also had a wedding to plan.