I'll Scream Later (No Series) (26 page)

For other reasons, also, I’ll never forget this birthday. It was a difficult time for us; an early blood test had indicated our child could possibly be born with Down syndrome. I had an amino before we left, but the results would take a while and we had left still not knowing the outcome.

One morning the baby stopped moving. I couldn’t feel a kick or a push or anything. I went down to the pool by myself and lay there and talked and talked to this baby. When I patted my belly and the baby kicked, I ran up to the room, opened the door, looked at Kevin, and said, “Yes!”

It was terrifying, wondering what would happen, but I was praying that we wouldn’t be faced with deciding what to do if the baby had Down syndrome. We wanted this baby very much.

We called the minute we got back home, and the doctor’s office said he would get back to us in a couple of minutes. After what seemed like forever, the phone rang.

“Can I see you smile over the phone? We have good news, the baby is healthy.”

After that, everything else was a snap.

W
ITH
R
EASONABLE
D
OUBTS
canceled, I was once again a struggling actor. One of the most intriguing opportunities opened up with
Seinfield.
They were playing around with the idea of lipreading and deafness for an episode and asked if I would be game.

That’s like someone asking if you’d like to win the lottery. This was my first chance to really show what I could do with comedy, and it was
Seinfeld,
smart, funny, unconventional, and such a remarkable collection of actors with Jerry Seinfeld at its center.

I said yes right away, but as the day approached for me to show up on set, I was intimidated. This was season five and the actors had worked together from the beginning. I knew they must be so close by now, able to play off one another completely organically. I wasn’t sure how it would feel walking into that group.

But it was great!

Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer—I mean Jerry, Jason, Julia, and Michael—could not have been more welcoming. We had such fun on the set and I loved the way the script was so irreverent. There were no sacred cows, especially the Deaf.

I realize I’m biased, but I still think “The Lip Reader” is one of the series’ classics. Whether it’s Jerry and George discussing the relative merits of PABA in sunscreen or Elaine pretending she can’t hear so she doesn’t have to talk to a limo driver; Kramer as a disaster of a ball boy at the U.S. Open; or George saying that having a lip-reader is like having Superman for a friend.

In one of my two favorite scenes, Jerry, George, and I are having dinner, and George starts to hatch a plan to have me read the
lips of his ex-girlfriend at a party. He and Jerry begin assessing the pros and cons, and a crazy conversation unfolds behind their hands, drinks, napkins, food, anything they think will keep me from using my superpowers on them. It was funny dialogue, but even funnier physical humor.

In my other favorite scene, Jerry and I are working out the details for our next date. I turn my head away just as he says we’ll be taking a car service. When I look back, he’s asking, “How about six? Six is good. You have a problem with six?” A series of my reactions mirror his dialogue—an arched eyebrow, a gasp of disbelief, a look of disgust—enough to clue anyone watching that I’ve mistaken what he said for “How about sex? Sex is good. You have a problem with sex?”

That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about
Seinfeld,
the writers expect the audience to get it. And they did. That freed both me and the other actors to play the moments for all they’re worth.

A few months later it was great to hear that I’d been nominated for an Emmy for that performance. Icing on the cake. I did actually bring a cake to the set for everyone on the day we wrapped.

Emmy-nomination day was a particularly good one when it finally rolled around in 1994. I was nominated in two categories, Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy for
Seinfeld,
and Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama for a
Picket Fences
episode called “The Dancing Bandit.”

W
HEN
D
AVID
K
ELLEY
heard I was looking to do more television as I coped with losing
Reasonable Doubts,
he decided to write me into an episode of
Picket Fences,
the quirky drama/comedy about the folks in small-town Rome, Wisconsin.

And so the Dancing Bandit was born. In the bandit, David had created a character that had so many little bits of my life stitched into it, the episode will always be one of my favorites.

First there was the bandit, who is Deaf. Her MO, which the FBI has been tracking, is charming. She truly “stages” robberies—complete with specific roles that her cohorts play. She’s delightful, mischievous, entertaining; after she’s finished a heist, boom box at
the ready, she takes a moment to dance for bank patrons on her way out the door.

David knew my history—I’d grown up signing songs. He knew I loved to dance, so it was a nice touch, and I’m sure he was one of a handful of people who wasn’t surprised in the least that I turned up nearly a decade later on
Dancing with the Stars.

In one of the episode’s plot twists, he has me and three others in my gang walk into a school disguised as the characters from
The Wizard of Oz
—Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Lion, and the Scarecrow. So just as the role of Dorothy was a career changer when I was eight, it was again when I was thirty.

To cap off this totally surreal escapade, when my character needs to be airlifted to a hospital for a special procedure, the only hospital able to do it is located in Chicago—so at the end of the episode, David airlifted me safely back home.

The Dancing Bandit was never intended to be anything but a one-shot appearance. But as David explains, “There’s a lot of humanity to Marlee that comes through even if she’s holding a gun or kicking down a door. She’s profoundly intuitive, which makes her a great actress, she always finds the truth within the character.

“As the Dancing Bandit, she played a bank robber, who ended up being mayor of the town…. Even for that series, that was a big character arc, but she’s so truthful she was able to take the audience with her on a believable ride.”

The episode of
Picket Fences
that is always at the top of my favorites list is “Snow Exit,” which aired on January 19, 1996.

By then, I had become an occasional guest star as Mayor Laurie Bey. The Dancing Bandit had morphed into one of Rome’s upstanding citizens, but then she was a Robin Hood–style bandit even in her criminal days.

I’d also become pregnant with my first child. By this time David had moved on to focus on
Chicago Hope
and was getting
Ally McBeal
under way, but the writers decided to write my pregnancy into the script.

We shot it a couple of months before it was set to air, when I was around seven months pregnant. In the episode, the town is hit
by a blizzard and I go into labor at the police station—I have to deliver there. So I give birth—breathing and sweating and pushing and pushing. A nurse/midwife was on set to monitor me to make sure my acting wasn’t so good that it induced real labor—and Mayor Laurie Bey gave birth on a cold winter day.

M
Y BABY WAS
due on January 15. The day came and went and no baby. My doctor told me not to worry, first babies are often late. I remember asking, “When will it come?”

“Oh, you’ll know when you’re ready. You’ll have contractions and your water will break. Don’t worry about it.”

Don’t worry? Me?

Kevin and I went to sleep on the eighteenth, but I was soon awake, pacing the floors. The doctor was right; I knew it was happening.

I waited until daylight, then woke Kevin up. He remembers, “Marlee was sitting up in the bed. She told me she’d been up all night having contractions, but she didn’t want to wake me. She said, ‘I thought I better let you sleep because I think we are having the baby today.’”

You couldn’t have found two happier people anywhere that day than the Grandalskis as we grabbed a suitcase and got ready to drive to the hospital to have our first child.

One of the few things Kevin has always insisted on is that we not know the sex of our children before they are born. This despite the technology, despite the amnio, the sonograms, all the ways it’s possible to have that question answered long before the birth. He says, “My feeling is that it’s the last true surprise left on earth, that if God wanted you to know what kind of baby you were going to have, there’d be some sign,
you’d
turn pink or blue….

“Marlee kept saying, ‘I don’t know what color to paint the room, I don’t know if I should get boy’s clothes or girl’s clothes.’”

“I said, ‘When the kid pops out, we can paint the room and buy some clothes because they aren’t going to need anything right away, and they don’t care about what color the walls are anyway—at least not until they’re twelve.’” (The kid who popped out
was twelve as he was recalling this story. Sarah turned thirteen in January.)

How could I not fall for that argument? My husband, a romantic at heart?

Now you might think that’s easy to do—keep the sex of the child a secret. But it’s really tough in the delivery room, when I have a baby, there’s usually a crowd. At a minimum there’s the doctor, the anesthesiologist, the pediatrician, the nurses, Kevin, an interpreter—someone I can’t do without. Kevin can sign, but a new father in a delivery room has a few other distractions—Liz, when she can make it, and often one or two more family members.

Jack faints at the sight of blood, so he’s always with the waiting-room contingent. For baby number one, I got Bill Pugin to interpret. By the time I had the other three, I’d met Connie Schultz, a mother of seven. We met at a Baby and Me class, where she was interpreting. She’s become a good friend, is an expert signer, and besides being at my side for births, has come to sets more than a few times to work with me, too.

I’d planned to deliver the baby naturally, but I just wasn’t dilating, and after about fifteen hours the doctor said we needed to do a C-section—now. And so Sarah Rose Grandalski entered this world. Kevin walked out into the waiting room, grinning from ear to ear, but not saying a word. We’d come equipped with two buttons—a blue one that said
BOY
and a pink one that said
GIRL
. When the assembled masses finally noticed the pink button, there was much laughing and crying.

A couple of hours later, with Sarah in my arms, we watched Laurie Bey give birth on
Picket Fences
. Forty-three years earlier, on January 19, Lucille Ball had given birth to Desi Arnaz Jr., and on that night her character, Lucy Ricardo, had given birth on
I Love Lucy
to the child we’d come to know as Little Ricky, on the same network, CBS. I loved that Sarah became a little bit of history that day.

F
OR A FEW
glorious months I did nothing but feed, change, bathe, dress, coo, cuddle, and play with Sarah. I loved this baby girl beyond measure and I adored being a mother.

People say you can’t imagine what you will feel about your children before you hold them that first time, you can’t understand that it’s something that is so much bigger than anything that has come before in your life. They’re right. It was magical even through all the sleepless nights, the endless diaper duty, and the desperate attempts to lose all that baby weight.

Ahhh, the baby weight. With my pregnancies, I didn’t count calories at all. Depending on which child I was carrying, I gained between fifty-one and sixty-three pounds. For someone who is five feet three inches and usually weighs between 98 and 110 pounds, that’s a lot. It worked out well for the babies; I had strong, healthy, perfect kids. But getting that body back into shape—well, I had my work cut out for me.

A new baby also meant more financial responsibilities. Schools, college funds, pediatricians, clothes, toys, tutors, all the things a growing child needs. I needed to go back to work—needed to find work.

Salvation came in the form of a TV movie with James Garner titled
Dead Silence,
based on the novel
A Maiden’s Grave
. It would shoot in Toronto, and by the time production started Sarah would be about six months old.

Signing on for a few months to shoot in Toronto or Portland or wherever was no problem when it was just Kevin and me. Now with a baby, we had to figure out how we were going to handle things. Kevin says, “I remember the discussion, it went something like this: ‘I would
like Sarah to go with me.’ ‘No, you’re leaving her at home.’ ‘No, I’m taking her with me.’ She won because she was breast-feeding.”

On that trip, I’m sure I was way over the airline’s limit on bags—I packed enough stuff for Sarah to get her through first grade. I’d had some help finding a nanny who lived in the Toronto area to help me through the shoot.

Sarah and I and our three thousand bags checked into the Four Seasons Hotel, where the producers had decided to house some of the cast. It was a terrific place to stay as a new mother—if I needed something, no matter what time of the day or night, no matter how crazy the request, the Four Seasons’ staff would find it. Thank you, Randy!

As a perfectionist, I’m sure I drove the nanny up the wall—everything had to be perfect for Sarah, and just a few months into this mom gig, I wasn’t sure from day to day what perfect was. I glommed on to anyone on the set who had kids, especially young ones, to grill them for tips on how they were raising theirs.

While I had a baby in the hotel, I had a handful of kids to work with on the set.
Dead Silence
tells the story of a twelve-hour siege—three escaped prisoners take a busload of Deaf schoolchildren and their teachers hostage. In a tense showdown between the bad guys and a hard-boiled hostage negotiator, the role Jim Garner played, one hostage is to be killed every hour until all the demands are met.

My character was Melanie, a teacher at the school and one of the hostages. We’re being held in an abandoned slaughterhouse, and I’m not content to wait for a rescue and start looking for a way to sneak the children out.

It was interesting to shoot something that takes place over just one day. We had no different looks or styles to our wardrobes, just a single outfit each, which got dirtier or ripped or wet or shot through with holes and splattered with blood, but that was it. Same thing went for hair and makeup.

Sometimes things that seem so simple when you’re watching them are the toughest to pull off. Rarely are scenes shot in the exact sequence in which they unfold on-screen. Since the clothing, makeup, and hair needed to undergo small changes during the siege, continuity was critical over the eight-week shoot. If I ran through
a muddy drainage ditch at 4 p.m. and the bottom of my dress got dirty, the dress couldn’t be dirty during a scene at 3:59, and it had better be at 4:01 and every minute and hour after.

James Garner was a hoot to work with. He’s a great storyteller and had hundreds of Hollywood tales. I loved working with the Deaf kids as well; they were sweet and talented, and I got to know their families a little bit, too.

Entertainment Tonight
came on the set to shoot a segment about our show. Jim said no way was he doing it, he was boycotting
ET,
but I was certainly free to go ahead. I wanted to know why he did that—had the show done something terrible to him in the past?

Sweet Jim Garner

“They announce everybody’s birth date and their age,” he growled. “I don’t like it.”

Just about anyone can find out how old an actor is pretty easily. On the other hand, I was thirty-one and Jim was around sixty-eight, so maybe I’ll feel differently about it in another thirty or so years.

Like Jim, I want any assessment of me to be about the work, not my age, not whether I can hear. There’s always an x-factor lurking around in the background, shadowing all of us, something that can shift the focus away from what is really important every time you step on a set or a stage.

K
EVIN DID NOT
like being away from his new baby daughter any longer than he had to, so he made a couple of trips to stay with us in Toronto. Babies can change so much in just a few days.

One morning all three of us were in the room. Sarah was teething on a piece of cold cantaloupe, when I saw her put her little finger to her mouth and her thumb to her ear and fold the rest of her fingers neatly down.

“Look, Kevin, it looks like she’s signing ‘telephone.’”

But he was already headed over to grab the phone. Sarah had said her first word—in sign language! And we were both there to witness it.

On another day, Sarah had been eating baby food—apricots—and suddenly Kevin said, “Don’t look at Sarah.”

“What?”

“Just don’t look at Sarah.”

So of course I immediately looked and gasped—big red blotches covered every inch of my baby’s pink, smooth, beautiful skin. We got the doctor on the phone right away; he said to give it ten or fifteen minutes and see if it went away. He suspected it was just a mild allergic reaction. Which is what it turned out to be, one that she eventually grew out of.

But until you know everything is going to be okay, your heart is racing and your mind can conjure up the most horrible things. At these times a vivid imagination is something I’d gladly give up.

At the end of the production, I started packing to go home. Sarah was so cute that day and being so good, she’d fallen asleep
sitting in her little car seat on the bed while I was finishing up. I couldn’t resist; she was sleeping so peacefully and her little toes were just as still as could be.

I grabbed some hot-pink nail polish and painted her toenails in a flash. When I got home and Kevin saw them, he freaked out! I let a few years pass before I painted Sarah’s toenails again.

The flight home should have been exhausting, but I was in luck. Goldie Hawn was on the same flight, and she came over and asked to hold the baby. I was so grateful for the break and thought I’d have about a five-to-ten-minute breather, but Goldie held Sarah for more than an hour, talking to her, rocking her, completely engaging her. She didn’t miss her mom at all. An hour’s rest when you have a six-month-old is heaven. Thank you, Goldie!

Babies are just hard not to love and be charmed by. In 1998, when I was at designer Nolan Miller’s being fitted for a dress for the Oscars, Sarah was playing on the floor. Nolan asked if he could borrow Sarah for a minute while I was changing.

When he came back, I asked where he’d been. He said Sophia Loren was there and had caught sight of Sarah and wanted to hold the baby for a few minutes.

“Sophia Loren? Do we get a picture?”

But the legendary Italian actress had already disappeared into a waiting limo. I sighed. How I would have loved to have a photo of Sophia with Sarah.

T
HE WORK WAS
coming in fits and starts. Nothing steady. I got a call about doing an episode of
Spin City,
working with Michael J. Fox. Once again I was thrilled to be doing comedy and to be back on prime-time television.

In television, it’s easier somehow to think that whatever role a person plays in a comedy or a drama is really pretty much how they are in real life. Sometimes that’s the case—the show will build off the energy and essence of the person—but just as often it isn’t.

If you think that Michael J. Fox is anything like his TV persona, I’m here to tell you you’re wrong. He’s actually nicer, more
decent, kindhearted, and has some of the best comic timing I’ve witnessed.

Like
Seinfeld, Spin City
was filled with actors who’d been together for a while. They were blessed with terrific writers/producers, and the episode, written by Sarah Dunn and Kirk Rudell with me in mind, was called “Deaf Becomes Her.”

One of the best scenes is when the temp who’s been hired as the sign-language interpreter for the mayor’s State of the City address hasn’t a clue how to sign and just starts making it up as he goes along. In a couple of scenes I get to flirt with Michael J.—who wouldn’t like that? The show was an absolute blast to work on, completely irreverent.

I also got to do a scene with Brooke Shields on
The Larry Sanders Show
with Garry Shandling, which was a lot of fun.

Then a handful of smaller film projects started casting me as the seductress, the villain, the con artist—I liked playing against the good-girl stereotype.

In Her Defense
with Jeff Fahey was just downright steamy. I think 90 percent of my wardrobe was different cuts of black leather. Then in
When Justice Fails,
an affair ends in murder—did she or didn’t she?

The most interesting project to come along during this time was
Freak City,
in which I played an adult who was intellectually and emotionally about nine years old.

Samantha Mathis’s character is at the center of the story. She’s a young woman struggling with multiple sclerosis and finds a different sort of family in a group of us who have all been relegated to the same nursing home. It was one of those great sets where everyone just clicks. Natalie Cole played an injured blues singer. Peter Sarsgaard was already crafting his ability to portray infinite layers of cynicism, and Jonathan Silverman played a blind man to perfection.

This bittersweet story was about finding hope in the place you least expect it.

In 1999, I was in production in Portland on
Where the Truth Lies,
another courtroom drama. My character is accused of murder, and my attorney is blinded by his feelings for me.

I liked the challenge of this film, but it carries such sad memories for me. We were in midproduction when news broke of the plane crash that took the life of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn. John and his sister, Caroline, had been so gracious to me over the years.

I’ll never forget how they helped me navigate an uncomfortable situation in August 1987. They had invited me to the Special Olympics being held on the Notre Dame campus, and Bill Hurt was also attending. It was all coming just a month after our horrific July break up, and it was beginning to feel as if every time I turned around, he was there.

For the duration of the event, John and Caroline gathered me up and kept me close, and I was so grateful for their friendship during that difficult time. One of the funniest moments came when we all went out for pizza. When the check came, everyone kind of looked around—none of them had cash or credit cards—so I picked up the bill.

John’s death, so unexpected, so needless, was such a loss for the country and especially painful for those of us who had experienced his kindness firsthand.

Elaine on
Seinfeld
would’ve been very jealous: I spent a lovely day with John F. Kennedy Jr.

A
S
K
EVIN AND
I headed down to San Diego with Sarah in 1998 to celebrate Christmas Eve with his family, it felt as if everything was coming together for us.