I'll Scream Later (No Series) (28 page)

I finally made it back to the hotel around 1 a.m. with a flight out just a few hours later—all in all, an absolutely grand night.

L
ATER THAT SPRING
, David wrote me into an episode of
The Practice,
the newest of his prime-time series. The drama put him back in the courtroom, where he is a master storyteller.

I played a woman who kills the man who had raped and murdered her seven-year-old daughter. It’s one of my favorite pieces of work, also one of the toughest.

I was seven months pregnant and the script was emotionally heavy all the way through. I was terrified of doing it.

Knowing that David had written it, I wanted to do a great job so that he would be proud of my work and glad that he had featured me in the episode.

In this script, he pushed me to tap into all the darker emotions—anger, hatred, remorse, sadness, pain, retribution.

In one scene, Camryn Manheim, who plays one of my attorneys, and I have a heated argument. Camryn, like my husband, Kevin, had learned sign language in college. As a starving actor she would pick up extra work interpreting at hospitals, usually in delivery rooms when one or both of the parents were Deaf, so she is fluent.

In the scene, neither of us ever speaks, we’re both signing furiously, faces and bodies expressing everything that needs to be said. The silence made the exchange even more potent.

But the most difficult scene for me was in the courtroom. Bill Pugin, who was interpreting for me on that set, remembers, “In the script it says that Sally Berg, Marlee’s character, breaks down on
the stand and cries. Marlee said, ‘I’m not going to cry here. I mean, there are not going to be tears here.’ And the director said, ‘But it would be great if you could.’ She said to me, ‘I just can’t do it; I can’t give them what they want.’

“I looked at her and said, ‘You are not going to like what I’m going to say.’ She looked back at me and said, ‘Then don’t say it.’

“All I said was ‘Sarah, Sarah. When you do it, you have to think of Sarah.’ She got onto the stand and it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever witnessed, her ability to break down on that stand, in that way. There was not a dry eye. Grips. cameramen…

“Oh my God, when they called, ‘Cut,’ Marlee couldn’t stop crying. Tears were streaming down
my
face. Camryn turned around
and called for makeup and said, ‘Thank God the camera wasn’t on me.’”

David E. Kelley knows how to write for me. I earned two of my four Emmy nominations, one for his show
Picket Fences,
and one for this episode of
The Practice
. Here I am opposite my friend Camryn Manheim in a tense courtroom moment. (
©
Vivian Zink/American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.)

One take. It was a wrap. They got everything they wanted and more. I was nominated for an Emmy for that performance for Best Guest Actress in a Drama Series.

Aaron Sorkin sent me the sweetest e-mail the day after that episode aired. Here’s a bit of what he wrote:

I couldn’t wait either—but a baby was about to be born.

W
ITH MY SECOND
child, I wanted to have a natural delivery, Lamaze, breathing, no C-section. I talked it over with my doctor and he told me, yes, it was absolutely doable.

With Sarah, I’d gained fifty-one pounds; with this second pregnancy, I had gained sixty-five pounds. Too much—and I’m lucky that I didn’t develop diabetes or other complications.

I was ten days past my due date, enough that the doctor called his office over the weekend asking if they’d heard from me. He told me it was time for this baby to come, so we picked a day to induce labor—September 12, 2000.

Liz got on a plane and headed to L.A. Connie, an incredible interpreter whom I’d first met at a parent/infant/toddler group and who was my on-set interpreter for
The West Wing,
said she’d meet me at the hospital. My mom and dad flew out, Kevin’s mom and stepdad drove up. Jack was there. Other friends kept arriving. We could have fielded a baseball team!

This birth seemed completely different from the first; everything went much faster and I hardly felt the contractions. I was so tired at the end I could barely stay awake, and I was so uncomfortable. Someone bumped the bed and I must have looked as if I would tear his or her head off because Kevin immediately said, “I did it, I did it.” He was protecting my mom, who’d accidentally hit the corner of the bed.

I started to push. And I pushed. And pushed. And pushed until I couldn’t push anymore. It wasn’t going well. Everybody in the room was tense, including the bunch of medical students who were
observing. At one point the doctor whipped around and snapped, “Quiet, peds!” in their direction.

The doctor came around to huddle with Kevin and me and said, “You have thirty seconds to decide—C-section or forceps.”

I looked at Kevin. I was exhausted but we’d gotten this far. I looked at the doctor and said, “I’ll push.”

“Okay, forceps it is.”

I had no time to ask what risks might face the baby with a forceps birth. It felt like an emergency and I just put all my trust in the doctor.

And boom, the baby came out and Kevin was bawling. He said, “It’s a boy. It’s a boy. Brandon, Brandon.” It was 6:09 p.m. when Brandon Joseph came into the world with a lusty cry. A healthy baby boy, my Brandon was fine.

I wasn’t doing so well though. I looked over at the doctor and saw he was covered with blood. It was all over him, on his shoes. I lost 1,300 cc of blood, and they came close to having to give me a transfusion. Kevin recalls, “It was hard for me to tell how bad things were because I was by Marlee’s side, trying to comfort her. It wasn’t until after the birth that I saw the huge mess on the floor that they were trying to clean up.”

After a frenzy of activity, everybody left the room but Connie. Everything felt as if it was moving in slow motion. I was having trouble concentrating. Connie told me later I was as white as a sheet and she was trying to keep me distracted. I remember Connie leaving and my father-in-law coming in and talking to me, then a nurse came and whisked me up to intensive care. My blood pressure had gotten dangerously low.

I spent five days in the ICU. The first few times I tried to get up, I felt so faint I couldn’t do it without support. The doctors would later start me on Synthroid, which helps boost the thyroid, and I’ll be on it for the rest of my life.

The pain was excruciating—I’d never experienced anything like it, it felt as if my insides had been ripped apart. The medication they put me on to help with the discomfort was so strong that the
doctors were constantly monitoring me so that I wouldn’t become dependent on it.

The birth was extremely hard, and the doctor said if I had other babies, they would have to be by C-section, no debate. But Brandon was an easy, sweet baby; maybe he knew that I was too weak for him to be anything else. When the American Red Cross asked me to aid their blood-drive efforts, I was more than honored to lend my name, my time, and my support. I had come so close to needing a transfusion and couldn’t imagine how frightening it would be for anyone whose life is hanging in the balance not to have access to lifesaving blood.

When Brandon was about six months old, I was suddenly offered a film. When I say suddenly, I mean they told me if I accepted the role, I would have to get on a plane the next day,
the next day,
to fly to an animal preserve in South Africa where they were shooting.

It was insane, but the project sounded interesting and I knew we could use the money. So I got on the plane.

Not too many hours later I learned one of the cardinal rules of breast-feeding—you have to stop it gradually or you will suffer. Oh, did I suffer. I hadn’t had any experience with breast pumps yet, and I had planned to just take a break for the three weeks I would be shooting.

Thanks goodness Bill Pugin was with me. He could keep a goose entertained, and that’s just about the challenge he was facing with me. Bill says, “If you are going to fly to South Africa, fly first class on South African Airways. They make up a bed, a flat, beautiful bed with down comforters. We’re side by side and Marlee is in pain, tossing and turning. Finally she turns to me and says, ‘There’s too much turbulence, I can’t sleep…. Tell the attendant to tell the pilot to do something about it.’

“I looked at her, rolled my eyes, and said, ‘We’re flying over the Atlantic Ocean, there is turbulence, you are not at the Four Seasons—deal with it!’”

That story always makes me smile!

Africa was absolutely beautiful, and depressing. Once again, extreme poverty was everywhere you turned.

In
Askari
I played one-half of a couple tracking the behavior of elephants and struggling to save them from encroaching poachers. At first I was petrified to be around the elephants—they looked massive at a distance. But then, standing next to one and just looking up, their power and their size can just take your breath away.

The trainers were there all the time with the five or six elephants I was working most closely with. They were well trained and well cared for, and soon I began to relax around them and enjoy the experience.

Most of the time when we were shooting around the elephants, it was on an open plain, which made things easier. But in one scene near the end, the poachers are trying to shoot the elephants from a helicopter. The elephants begin stampeding, heading right into the sights of the poachers’ rifles, and I run out in front of the elephants trying to scare them into turning and also to keep the poachers from firing.

In the leadup to the scene, I’m in a van and my niece and I jump out of it to run in front of the elephants. Bill had a walkie-talkie in the van, and he’s crouched down, ready to give us our cues. Bill will never forget what he calls our
Jurassic Park
scene:

“I just remember seeing the elephants—they were totally panicked and racing by. I’m looking out of the window thinking that just one little movement by their trunk and they could knock this van over.

“I remember thinking how much it looked like
Jurassic Park
to me—the elephants’ eyes were huge and looking right in the window of the van. I have done a lot of scary stuff, but this really scared me.”

We found out on the day we were to fly out that one of the workers had been killed by one of the elephants. The wranglers had told us never to touch the elephants if they weren’t around, no matter how calm they seemed, and that this sort of tragedy could so quickly happen.

K
EVIN AND
I had always talked about having four kids—we thought that number would be the perfect size for us.

Not long after Brandon was born, Kevin told me if we wanted to have more children he wanted to do so before he hit forty and ran out of energy. So the Grandalski baby boom began.

Brandon was born in September 2000, and by December of 2003 I’d had two more babies. Tyler Daniel came along twenty-two months after Brandon on July 18, 2002—it was Connie’s birthday, too. She stayed to interpret through Tyler’s birth, then we all sang “Happy Birthday” to Connie in the OR, then sent her off to celebrate with her family.

Finally, Isabelle Jane arrived on December 26, 2003, just seventeen months after Tyler.

I remember when I found out I was pregnant that last time. Kevin had taken Sarah on a father-daughter weekend to Mammoth with another neighborhood dad and daughter, John and Casey. It was Oscar weekend and I was due to attend. On Saturday afternoon, Kevin and Sarah were zooming down one of the runs when the sled went off track and was heading straight for a tree.

Kevin says, “I could see a low branch on the tree and thought I could just put my foot out and stop the sled. What I hadn’t figured on was the block of ice underneath it.”

Kevin stopped the sled all right; and Sarah, who was sitting in front of him, was safe. But his ankle snapped. He was transported to the hospital there, but he wouldn’t let anyone call me—he knew I’d drop everything to get there.

The doctors in Mammoth stabilized his ankle while John took the girls for dinner. On Sunday, I headed to the Oscars with no idea what had happened, and Sarah, Casey, John (behind the wheel), and Kevin, his ankle wrapped and elevated, began the long drive back.

When I got home that night, I walked in and found Kevin already in bed, watching TV, the remote in his hand. I was standing in the doorway in my gown and he looked up, smiled, and said, “You look pretty.”

That’s my sweet Kevin, but I knew something wasn’t right. “What are you doing in bed?” I asked. He flipped off the covers—
his foot was propped up and it looked awful. I was angry that he hadn’t called—and relieved that he was okay.

Kevin’s broken ankle

A few days later, he was due to have surgery to repair the ankle. Just before he was rolled into the OR, I gave him a box with a little pregnancy-test stick in it. My final plus. I wanted to make sure that he knew a baby was on the way.

My Isabelle. I remember walking into the hospital the day after Christmas thinking,
What kind of childhood are you going to have with Christmas and Hanukkah and your birthday and New Year’s all at the same time?

This time the kids were all with me. Finally it was time and the nurse told me I could walk to the OR if I wanted to, but the doctor said only one person could go in with me—my husband or the interpreter.

“But I need them both!”

The doctor said he would compromise—only one person with me while they did the spinal injection—“We can’t deal with two people in there who might faint.”

So I said, “You both wait, you both stay out.” I had requested a nurse who had been there for Sarah’s birth whom I just loved. She held me and talked to me, and the spinal wasn’t as bad as I remem
bered, though I did ask the doctor as the numbness set in. “Are my legs still there?”

As always, strict instructions were for no one, including the interpreter, to tell me the sex of the baby. I would hear that only from Kevin, and he told me the baby was a girl. Sarah chose her name—Isabelle—and the Jane is in memory of my uncle Jason, who was so dear to me.

Usually after each baby, Kevin and I would look at each other and say, “Yeah, I think we could to this again.” After Isabelle’s birth, we looked at the baby, just cleaned up and wrapped in a blanket—such a beautiful baby—then looked at each other and said almost at the exact same time, “We’re done!”

Photographers at red carpet events were convinced I was constantly pregnant for four or five years, and they were close to right!

Aaron kept fitting
West Wing
episodes in between the pregnancies, but it was almost impossible during those years for me to do much of anything except care for our growing family.

Gap asked me to do a print ad for them when I was pregnant with Tyler—with a photo that I love. I’m in a white, tailored shirt with my big belly peeking out. It was just a beautiful shot, great lighting—the sort that make you appreciate the great photographers of the world.

A
FTER
T
YLER WAS
born I got what ranks as my most difficult project of all time—
What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
It tried to blend the story of Amanda, a Deaf photographer that I played who is going through life-changing events, with real-life experts from scientists to psychics talking about quantum physics and the notion that we’re all connected in this world.

I still had my postbaby body. I was pumping breast milk every day, freezing it, then sending it off to California by FedEx, three days a week, so it would be there for Tyler. It was expensive, but it worked and was worth it to me. And, more important, Tyler was content.

In one scene my postbaby self has to stand half-naked in front of a mirror in front of a crew, and of course ultimately an audience in a movie theater.

I don’t think I slept for a week before that scene was shot. But I told myself, this is what the scene is about—there is no such thing as a perfect body. Still I wanted to make sure everyone was off the set except the cameraman, the sound guy, and the director.