Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me (12 page)

For a moment, rationality prevailed. “Okay, Brad,” I assured myself, “there’s no way this is true. Technically, since we’re not covered by the Writers Guild of America there is no way that E! would allow a whole story to run about ‘writers’ on their network. Plus, it’s Time magazine. Why would they want to run a story about the writers on a stupid basic cable show? They haven’t even run a story about Chelsea. Hell, the writers couldn’t even get a story in Highlights magazine. Why would Time run one?”

I took a few deep breaths, allowed the pool boy to rotate my umbrella, and tried to relax. I couldn’t.

I turned to Shannon. “If this is a joke, why would John Rizzotti have cc’d all of the big executives at E!? He can’t be bothering all of them with pranks like this. Plus, I made it very clear before I left that I wasn’t checking my work e-mail, so if this is a prank, they wouldn’t have sent it to my work e-mail. This has to be real!”

I immediately pounded out an e-mail to Chelsea and Tom.

CHELSEA & TOM:

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THE TIME PHOTO SHOOT? THERE’S NO WAY THEY CAN SHOOT IT ANOTHER DAY?

Tom replied.

NOPE. SORRY. YOU’LL JUST BE LEFT OUT. WE’LL TRY AND MAKE SURE THEY AT LEAST MENTION YOUR NAME IN THE ARTICLE.

“Try and make sure”? What the hell? How dare they? I had worked my ass off for Chelsea and all I could get out of them was a “we’ll try”?

All of my instincts told me that this was a lie, a total hoax. But my instincts had also once told me that Sugar Ray was a great band with staying power. So, clearly my instincts weren’t always spot on.

I was obsessed. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Suddenly I became the worst person in the world to be with.

“I want to go home. This honeymoon sucks. I knew it was too long. I told you,” I said to Shannon as my pool umbrella was being rotated yet again.

Now Shannon was pissed, and for two very valid reasons. One, the anxiety it was causing me was ruining her honeymoon—the operative word being her. Two, we were in paradise and I was now being a complete asshole.

I had to get to the bottom of it, but if it were a hoax, I knew Chelsea and Tom wouldn’t crack that quickly. I had to go to another source. I went to the weakest, most guilt-ridden person I knew: Johnny Kansas. If I tugged on his heartstrings hard enough and played up how emotionally distraught I was, he’d break down and tell me it was all a lie.

JOHNNY, YOU’RE THE ONLY PERSON I CAN TRUST. THIS IS RUINING MY ENTIRE HONEYMOON. IS THIS TIME MAGAZINE SHOOT REAL?

Little did I know, Chelsea was one step ahead of me. She had already descended upon Johnny, knowing full well that I would try to exploit his weakness in my quest for the truth. Like a terrorist holding an AK-47 to the blindfolded head of her hostage, Chelsea had forced Johnny to go along with it.

He responded: Yes.

Recognizing that he could be monitored, I waited a few minutes and wrote again.

JOHNNY, THIS IS RUINING EVERYTHING. IT’S THE LAST DAY OF MY HONEYMOON AND SHANNON IS PISSED. PLEASE TELL ME THE TRUTH. I KNOW I CAN TRUST YOU. DON’T BETRAY THAT.

Johnny’s an easy one to break. All you have to do is question his trust and loyalty, and he instantly squawks. But this time there was no immediate response, only radio silence. My heart sank, my head swelled, and my twitches ignited. I waited five minutes and checked again. Nothing. Beads of sweat, entirely unrelated to the heat, began to form. I was not sure what was happening to me physically, but I could only imagine that this was the beginning of a severe anxiety attack. And on a tranquil pool deck in Greece was not where I wanted to lose my shit. I had to do something.

“That’s it, we’re heading home early,” I announced. Shannon freaked, but I told her that she and I had, in theory, a lifetime together but “This may be my only shot for Time magazine.” As she continued to yell at me, I snapped, “Fine, you can stay here and I’ll head home early.” This marriage was clearly getting off on the right foot.

I hustled my ass up to the hotel’s business center, plopped down at a desk, and used the phone to call the airline. We had originally booked first class, but the only available seats were in economy, and the fee to downgrade was almost a thousand dollars—not to mention our having to forfeit the final night at the hotel, for which we’d already paid. “Fuck it,” I said. “Advertisers pay millions to be in Time magazine. I can afford to pay eighteen hundred dollars to be in Time.”

The tickets home were changed—Shannon was coming back early with me whether she liked it or not. And she was definitely not going to like it… especially since we were now both in economy—and I put her in the middle seat. Hell, I was hating the thought of travelling sixteen hours in coach, too, but I was focusing on the greater good: a Time magazine photo spread.

Having made the change, I felt better but understood that this was not the ideal way to end a honeymoon. From champagne to shit. I was still not sure how to tell Shannon that we needed to go pack up immediately. So I didn’t. When I returned to the pool, I pussyfooted around the issue, telling her that I’d “looked into changing the tickets, but didn’t actually make the change.” Even “looking into” got me in trouble.

She was pissed off and started crying. She couldn’t believe that I would even consider going back early. I began to realize I would be in deep shit when it came time to tell her that I hadn’t just “considered” it; we were going home early. At that moment, I fully accepted that I might have to resort to drugging her and dragging her ass to the airport.

“They’re just fucking with you and you’re stupid enough to fall for it!” she yelled before storming off.

I yelled after her, “But what if they’re not?! I have to be in Time magazine, Shannon!” I decided to hang back a bit and let her cool off. At least I hoped she was going to cool off.

Needless to say, the pool boys hadn’t been by to rotate my umbrella recently—they wanted no part of our marital problems. I got up and glared at the nearest pool boy as I struggled to rotate the umbrella myself. Then I slinked back down into the deck chair and checked my e-mail again. There was a message from Johnny.

Too timid to defy Chelsea outright, he responded to my last pleading e-mail as best he could without actually revealing anything. But like death row inmates sending coded messages, I understood the subtext of his e-mail.

BRAD, THERE IS NO REASON TO LET THIS RUIN YOUR HONEYMOON.

Oh shit. Just then I realized that the whole thing had been a lie—an awful, tumultuous Chelsea Handler lie that had sought to drive me crazy and disrupt my blissful, once-in-a-lifetime (I think) honeymoon. I was now out $1,800, my wife was pissed at me, and worst of all, there would be no Time magazine shoot.

How would I reveal this to Shannon? She’d been right and I’d been wrong. Not only would I pay the immediate consequences, but for the rest of our marriage I knew that she would lord this over me, never missing the chance to remind me who was right and who was dead wrong.

It was going to be bad enough when I told her that it was all a lie. I couldn’t top it off with “Oh, and we are actually going home a day early… and we’re in economy… and it cost us eighteen hundred dollars.” It would have been too traumatic for her. And she would have wasted no time insisting that, as punishment, I buy her an eighteen-hundred-dollar Chloe purse. Somehow my losing money means I always have to spend the equivalent on her. I’ve never been certain of her logic there.

I returned to the business center to change our flights back to the original itinerary. Good news: we could switch back for a very slight fee. Bad news: there was only one seat left in first class. Relieved just to be back on the initial flight, I accepted and decided to worry later about explaining to Shannon why she was flying economy and I was still in first.

With the matter resolved and our love restored, Shannon and I wrapped up the honeymoon as intended.

Checking in at the airport on the day of our departure, we received our boarding passes and Shannon wondered why we weren’t sitting together. Still attempting to cover my tracks, I stupidly decided to sternly ask the ticket agent, “Sir, why are we both not sitting in first class as our itinerary states? There has to be an error.”

Not appreciating my tone, the all-business ticket agent wasted no time in looking at the monitor and explaining ever so bluntly, “Because our records show that you changed your flight, and when you changed it back there was only one first-class seat remaining.” He looked at Shannon and said, “Your husband bought you a ticket in coach, Mrs. Wollack. Enjoy your long flight and enjoy your marriage to him.”

Shannon glared at me. The jig was up. I offered a sheepish grin, and she simply said, “You’re an idiot.” Then she took my first-class ticket and handed me hers. That’s why I married her: she knows me so well.

As Shannon settled into her plush first-class seat with a mimosa, I lumbered back to the forty-eighth row of the plane, climbed over two smelly Greeks, and assumed my seat in the dead center seat of the middle row. Even worse? The smelly Greek to my left was reading—wait for it—Time magazine. Clearly that was someone’s way of saying, “In your face, asshole.”

While I forgave Chelsea soon after, Shannon did not forgive as easily. My first day back at the office, I received the following e-mail from her.

TELL THEM THAT WE WANT THE $1,000 BACK FROM THE NIGHT/DAY THEY RUINED AT ONE OF THE BEST HOTELS IN THE WORLD. I COULD BUY A NEW PURSE WITH THAT MONEY.

Considering that Chelsea had helped fund half the trip with her wedding gift, I wasn’t going to ask her to pay us back, but I did appreciate that Shannon, my wonderful new bride, clearly had her purse-buying priorities straight.

Chelsea Handler has caused me extreme turmoil, angst, fear, and thousands of dollars in psychiatry bills that aren’t covered by my insurance. However, in the end, I’ve realized what this all means: if Chelsea takes the time and energy out of her insanely hectic life and goes to extraordinary lengths to screw yours up royally, leaving you utterly humiliated and degraded, then you’ll know you’re good to go. She clearly loves you.

Chelsea, for everything you’ve done, thank you and… fuck off.

I want to go on record that Shannon is a very close friend of mine, and I would never have allowed Brad to return from their honeymoon early. I would have come clean had I known that Brad was egomaniacal enough to shortchange his bride on her honeymoon for a picture in a magazine. He is a sad, sad clown. My apologies to Shannon exclusively.

-Chelsea

AMBER MAZZOLA

Chelsea Handler is a dirty fucking liar. But what most people don’t know is she respects honesty and loyalty more than anything. That is, if it’s on her terms. But she’s okay with lying if it’s for a joke because for her, laughter trumps all.

My friendship with Chelsea started ten years ago, when she was one of the stars of the hidden camera show Girls Behaving Badly. She would offer happy endings at car washes, sit in shopping carts yelling at passersby, drink vodka and sodas at bars while wearing a pregnancy suit, and test out makeup artists for her “newborn,” to name a few stunts. I was the girl who jumped out of a cardboard box, camera in hand, in the middle of Ventura Boulevard, screaming, “You’ve just been pranked by Girls Behaving Badly!” We were quite a pair.

Back then, Chelsea was paid to lie. Now she does it as a hobby.

“Sarah” is the pseudonym Chelsea gave me in her three books. The anonymity was a nice touch, until she decided to blow my cover on Jay Leno when she referred to her friend Amber who took off her shirt in the London restaurant Dining in the Dark. Immediately after, I got dozens of text messages from people I hadn’t heard from in years, people I wasn’t that interested in hearing from.

“That was you? Did you really take your top off at a restaurant?”

Everyone knows Chelsea is a liar, so I just chalked it up to that. “Oh, come on! Do you really think I would take my top off? Of course not!” Chelsea’s reputation comes in handy.

Sometimes, very rarely, she lies for the right reasons, if that’s at all possible.

When I was going through a horrible breakup that would make most women curl into a ball and never leave the house, Chelsea had a rough time.

“It’s okay, Chelsea,” I would say to console her, handing her a tissue. “Everything happens for a reason.”

“I know. It just sucks,” she would say in between crocodile tears.

“I know. I know it does.”

This was my breakup, but for some reason, Chelsea was taking it way worse than I was. One night, while we were at her aunt and uncle’s house in Bel Air drinking vodka and eating more than a pound of Costco-size brie, the usual Sunday staple at the Burkes’, a hot guy came over to pick up Chelsea. Chelsea got a little weird and tried to hurry the guy out of there, saying he was her accountant and she had to go do her taxes.

I didn’t question the tax session with a hot guy on a Sunday evening in July. Why would I have? Who would lie about doing taxes? As soon as Chelsea left, her aunt informed me that the guy was a date, someone Chelsea had met on Myspace (yes, Myspace) and didn’t want to tell me about because she thought it would hurt my feelings, what with my breakup. Truth is, Chelsea needed this rebound to get over my ex more than I did. I had been encouraging her to start dating again for weeks.

At 2:00 AM, Chelsea came over to my dad’s house (I had moved in with him after the breakup) and crawled into bed with me, to make sure I didn’t spend the night alone or wake up alone. She was very persistent about this, and for months she had slept in my childhood room, in my canopy bed draped in Paper White linens, with my glow in the dark solar system overhead and the Laura Ashley flower-print border wrapped around the room.

One morning, I woke up to sunlight pouring in through my bedroom window, heating up the room like a sauna. Chelsea was lying above the sheets buck naked except for her underwear. Her tank top, which had started the evening on her body, was tied around her eyes like a bandana to shield her from the light.