A Little Bit Wicked (18 page)

Something sweet and wonderful about all the
West Wing
men is
how unabashedly they love their families. It’s touching and reaffirming to see such good men walking the halls.

Jimmy Smits is living proof that gallantry is not dead. In a van going to location, he’d get in last and out first to help the ladies. One day, I showed up on set late and crying; I’d gotten a car with a navigation system that somehow left me even more lost than my old car and Key Map. Without making me feel like an idiot, Jimmy said, “Let’s go figure it out.” I don’t know where I would have been without him. Literally and figuratively.

Brad Whitford needs a good spanking. He was always horsing around, putting something in someone’s muffin, going off on politics. One day, I wore a skirt that laced up the back, and as we cruised down the hall doing a walk and talk, he unlaced it. I was oblivious; everybody else was giggling. He takes more time to get ready than a Twelve Oaks debutante, but he’s another dialogue wiz and a spark plug to every scene he’s in. A joy to work with.

Josh Malina was another prankster. He never got me, but he and Brad would pants each other like twelve-year-olds. Josh couldn’t work on Shabbat and never made any apologies about it. Something I felt he and I had in common was a commitment to faith, which isn’t always easy to combine with the working world of Hollywood.

Martin Sheen might actually think that he is president. It wouldn’t surprise me if he showed up to give the State of the Union. He’s another good dad, who loves his kids even if they step in it, and he extended that dadly warmth to everyone on the set. One day I was bumming about having to fly somewhere. He went to his dressing room and came back with a rosary blessed by the Pope John Paul II.

“Carry this with you when you travel,” he told me. “You’ll be all right.”

He’s a mighty good man, Martin Sheen. Never wavered in his life or his craft.

I first met John Spencer while I was doing
Wicked
. He came back
stage, and we immediately knew we were kindred spirits. I always wrangled to sit next to him at table readings and became his right-hand man on
The West Wing.

“Oh, John,” I said one morning, “we have a good scene together this week.”

“Get used to it,” the director said.

The two of us had done a scene in an elevator, and it popped, I guess. Producers said, “We want more of that.” We both felt a little awkward about a romantic interest between our characters because we had such a brother-sister thing going in real life.

“I don’t know,” John teased. “If I was a little older, and you were a little younger…”

During an interview with Charlie Rose early on in the series, John said, “
The West Wing
is all about language. That makes it like stage work.”

My first scene was a perfect example: Annabeth Schott (me) thinks she’s coming in to interview for the job of deputy press secretary, only to discover that they’re interviewing for press secretary, while the communications director, Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), thinks he’s interviewing a fairly dim blonde, only to discover that she’s pretty quick on the uptake. I went to the set wearing only a little makeup, a plain ponytail, conservative tweeds, and a pair of smart-girl glasses, prepared to do anything they asked. I knew the words inside out. My lines, Richard’s lines, Janel Moloney’s lines, everyone’s blocking. You know how I am about doing my homework, and that was a good thing because until I looked it up as part of my research for this scene, I’d always thought Uzbekistan was a kind of leather. (Who knew?)

Richard was the opposite of warm and fuzzy while we were shooting, so I never really got a read on what he was thinking, but at the end of the day he said the nicest thing anyone could possibly have said: “You’re going to fit right in.”

I was on what turned out to be the last two seasons of
The West Wing,
and during the hiatus in between, John Spencer came to see me in a workshop performance of
The Apple Tree
.

“This is your show,” he told me. “You have to do this show.”

I’m so sad that he didn’t get to see it.

John’s health issues were ongoing and not small, so I got mad at him one day when I found him out behind the building smoking a cigarette between takes. He sucked on Jolly Ranchers all the time, trying not to smoke, but sometimes that just didn’t do it for him.

“John,”
I scolded. “What are you thinking? What is in your head? Put that down.”

“Sorry, kid. Every day without a cigarette is hell. No, make that every day without a drink and a cigarette—that’s hell.”

“Well, it’s better than chemotherapy,” I said, plucking the butt from between his fingers.

“Geez, yeah. I wouldn’t want to go slow like that. I want to go quick.”

“Me, too. Except I wouldn’t want to be murdered. I’d love to be murdered in a slasher movie. But not in real life. And I don’t want to drown. I hear that’s horrible.”

“Hear from who?” He laughed, unwrapping a Jolly Rancher.

“Well, you know. People get revived sometimes.”

“Then they ain’t dead! What the hell do they know?”

He offered me a Jolly Rancher, and I sucked on it while we debated that for a while, discussed the forensics of brain death, speculating on the soul, and that segued into speculating about what was being filmed on a lot down the street, then moved on to my various love-life issues and his various life-love issues, and one thing and another. Our hurry-up-and-wait conversations always climbed around like kudzu on a telephone pole.

On a rare night off, I went with Lippa to sing at a fund-raising gala for a small group of very rich, very drunk people, who basically treated
me like a little canary chirping in the background. I came home from the miserable affair and crawled into pj’s. Mom sent me a soft white pair with little red cherries. I love lingerie, but I keep that hidden. I wear either a tank and boxers or the style of pajamas you’d expect to see on Wally and the Beaver. Crazy, sexy, cool, huh? But that’s how exciting my life is. I do my thing, go home, take a bath. I pray and read the Bible. (I love Psalms and Proverbs, and also the adventuresome Daniel and his kin.) Eventually, I plug my face into the TV. I try to avoid infomercials, but I do get talked into buying something once in a while—Slim n Lifts (I know! I know!), a hideous brooch for Mom, some crazy kitchen gadget for a friend. Sometimes I’ll order a workout DVD. I was on the Tae Bo train for a while. And of course there’s always good old Richard Simmons.

But on that particular night, I was rescued from home shopping by one of my favorite
West Wing
episodes: “Bartlet for America,” in which Leo McGarry falls off the wagon.

“It’s the one that got you the Emmy,” I told John on the phone as soon as it was over. “I had to call you and tell you what a genius you are.”

“That’s what you’re doing with your night off?” he said. “Watching reruns?”

“Well, look what you’re doing with your night off. Listening to someone talk about watching reruns.”

“Geezes. I don’t know who to feel sorrier for in this scenario.”

I told him about the evening festivities, and he laughed.

“Oh, honey, that’s not about you. Just take the money and run. Screw them.”

He shared a few good war stories with me. (Did you know he was on the
Patty Duke Show
back in the day?) He’d been around the block a time or two and was glad to share what he’d learned, and I was glad to receive the benefit of his hard-knock education.

That was the last time we talked. I received word a few days later
that he’d died of a heart attack. He went quick, and I was glad for that, but, oh, so very sad to see him go. They asked me to sing “For Good,” a song he particularly loved from
Wicked,
at his memorial service, and I summoned every scrap of self-control inside me so I could sing it the way he would have wanted people to hear it.

Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better? Because I knew you, I have been changed for good.

Our first day back on the set, Jimmy Smits and I ended up shooting outside late at night, exchanging hurried dialogue, striding across the tarmac toward Air Force One. Between takes, someone came and put a coat around my shoulders, and I gratefully huddled into it, pushing my hands deep in the pockets.

I started to cry, and Jimmy put his arm around me. “Hey…hey…are you okay?”

I pulled my fist from my coat pocket and showed him the handful of Jolly Ranchers.

There was really no choice but to write Leo’s death into the show, and it made sense for Annabeth, who loved him, to discover his body. But that was a hard scene to shoot. The episode that featured Leo’s memorial service gathered almost all the actors who’d appeared in the series over the years, and the shoot was like a family reunion. The new kids—Mary McCormack, Janeane Garofalo, and I—sat there watching the tearful hellos and hugs and feeling lucky to be a part of this company. An old gospel song asks,
Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by?
This made me think about that place, that day, when I’d be gathered in with all the people from all my seasons.

Everyone felt that full circle, I think. Most everyone agreed that it was time for the show to end. Shows end. That’s the way of it. You go on to the next thing. But some people you take with you, and NiCole is one of those people for me.

The night of her 3 Angels Fund benefit, she raised a walloping lot of money for research, and I hope that it brings her some peace, know
ing that she’s making a profound difference in the life of another family, a mother who reached out. NiCole was the mother who was forced to let go. When she found a way to go forward from that, she passed King Solomon’s ultimate test. That night, I put my arms around her and said, “You did a good thing.” This is the magic bubble of celebrity, it turns out: a gift becomes a song, which becomes a gift again, changed for the better, changed for good.

Toward the end of the evening, in the live auction, one of the items up for bids was “the opportunity to come up onstage and have Kristin Chenoweth sing a song just for you.”

“Let’s start the bidding at five hundred,” I said. “Do I hear five? C’mon, let’s give five hundred dollars to this worthy cause. I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Two thousand dollars.”

Heads swiveled toward the corner of the ballroom. Mr. Writer stood with his arms folded in front of him, smiling one of my favorite smiles from his extensive repertoire of facial expressions. The one that reminds me what a good heart he has. A light round of applause and an audible
Awww
acknowledged the moment had definitely tested closer to eHarmony commercial than “Falls on Ass.” Aaron’s smile widened to a grin. The one that triggers something like champagne pouring down my spine. There are times when I ask God to please,
please
make me stop loving this man, but at that moment I could not for the life of me remember why. At that moment, all I could feel was the song inside me.

I held out my hand and said, “Sold.”

M
y BlackBerry buzzes in my pocket. Another message from Aaron.

The people sitting near my table at Cosi must think I’m either on Ritalin or very easily amused. He keeps making me laugh out loud. This is how he wins my favor, skins my resolve, does a double-buffalo-time-step around every meltdown and blowup. How am I supposed to argue with a man whose words strike as true as
you can’t handle the truth?
Nothing is more cranium-cooking sexy than a guy who gives good text.

I’d done a couple of TV movies, the dozen or so eps of
Kristin,
and a handful of series guest shots, but I didn’t get the full workout until
The West Wing.
You get shot out of a cannon at 7 a.m. and drag home exhausted at eleven that night. It took me a while to learn to pace myself; sometimes it was six hours before I got on camera, and after all that hurry-up-and-wait, my skirt was wrinkled, I’d had a nap, food
was all over my shirt, and I’d have to start the whole journey over. Part of what made it so exhausting—and so exhilarating—was how much I learned in between. Not just about television (though this was definitely the boot camp that prepared me for
Pushing Daisies
); my role on
The West Wing
required me to read about, learn about, and
care
about the world in a way I never had. Aaron has said that writing
The West Wing
during the two years before and the two years after 9/11, he felt as if he had “a front-row seat to the tectonic cultural shift in America.” His gift is the way he challenges us to think while making us laugh.

No one else can pull words out of the universe and settle them into a jet stream of meaning like Aaron Sorkin. His writing is beyond musical; it’s operatic. Which makes it just my thing. He was no longer writing the show when I was hired, but during the first four seasons, he’d set the tone that carried the series to the end. Everyone on the show had tremendous respect for him, and he couldn’t stay out of
Variety,
so I felt as if I knew him. But of course I didn’t.

Oddly enough, in 2001—three years before we met—a
New York Observer
gossip column ran an item about my purchasing an apartment on the Upper West Side, and directly below that was an item about writer/producer Aaron Sorkin being arrested for possession in the Burbank airport. What made me laugh a little about that at the time was that this big-shot executive producer was not in possession of the stylish sort of drugs you would expect from a Hollywood hedonist on his way to an orgy. He was packing ’shrooms, the navel-contemplating drug of a spiritual seeker on his way to a poetry reading. What makes me laugh about it now is how terribly insulted Aaron is that my apartment purchase outranked his arrest in the litany of celebrity gossip.

“How is ‘Cheno purchases apartment’ more newsworthy than ‘Sorkin arrested’? Come on!” Using both his hands and his lanky arms, he makes a wide gesture of outrage that’s only half-joking. “You were in a ‘quaint one-bedroom with stellar view’; I was in
jail
.”

Aaron has a totally logical explanation about how the incriminating items came to be in his bag, but his struggles with substance abuse were well-documented, and, honey, I don’t touch that with a vaccinated cattle prod. So I have to assume that had I taken that first job on
The West Wing,
it would have been the wrong time and place for us to meet, and things would have been very different.

Three years later, I was in an entirely different place professionally; he was in an entirely different place personally. Shortly after I signed on to do
The West Wing,
he called and asked me out to dinner, and on the phone, the guy everyone talked about as if he were the Great and Powerful Oz was genuine, funny, and sweet and seemed to have gotten a leash on his demons. He sounded like someone I wanted to know.

At the right time on the right day, I walked out the front door of my hotel and looked around the parking lot. Across the way, I saw a quiet man in khaki pants and a blue shirt. Leaning on the door of his car, he raked his fingers through his hair, and for a moment he looked like a boy watching a jet plane pass over, squinting up at the sky through his smart-kid glasses.

When he saw me, he smiled, and I said, “God, please, let that be Aaron Sorkin.”

He Said (Special Guest Appearance by Aaron Sorkin)

I don’t have a lot of cool. If you looked in my closet, you’d see a half dozen pairs of Gap khakis, a half dozen blue button-down shirts, and a half dozen dark sport jackets. For my first date with Kristin I boldly chose a dark sport jacket, blue button-down shirt, and a pair of Gap khakis. I picked her up in front of the Beverly Wilshire at the appointed time looking like I’d just been elected cocaptain of the Andover debating team.

When she walked out the door, the first thing I noticed was that she didn’t look short. Kristin is famously short. I defy anyone to find anything
written about her that doesn’t mention her height. I’m six feet tall, so anyone who doesn’t play for the Duke Blue Devils looks a little short to me, but she didn’t. And the only reason I was thinking about this was that she was still about fifty yards away and I hadn’t seen her eyes yet.

I’d fallen for Kristin two years earlier, on a Sunday night in February 2003—two years before I met her. I was living at the Four Seasons Hotel on Doheny Drive, my five-year marriage having ended in the summer of 2001. ABC was broadcasting its production of
The Music Man
with Matthew Broderick and Kris in the leads. I’m crazy about musicals, and
The Music Man
is one of my favorites, so I settled in with a sixteen-ounce bottle of Yoo-Hoo and a bag of Ruffles.

I’d heard of Kristin but somehow I’d managed to miss everything she’d been in on and off Broadway. The year she won the Tony Award was the first year since I was fourteen that I’d missed the Tony Awards. The summer her sitcom was aired, I was spending a lot of late nights at my office at Warner Bros. working on the new season of
The West Wing,
so I’d missed her on TV, too.

I’d written a new character onto the show—Ainsley Hayes, a lawyer with the Republican National Committee who was drafted into service by Jed Bartlet’s lefty White House. Our casting director said, “You have to go to Kristin Chenoweth for this. Her series didn’t get picked up and I think she’d do TV again.” I told him to get me some tapes and check on I&A (interest and availability), but we quickly heard back that Kris was in San Francisco doing a pre-Broadway tryout of a new Stephen Schwartz musical. Something about witches, they said.

So I sat down in front of
The Music Man,
ready to see what all the fuss was about. Her character, Marion Paroo, Marian the Librarian, makes her entrance about eight minutes into the piece. Eight minutes and twenty seconds into the piece I understood what all the fuss was about. She was charming and beautiful. Confident and effortless. (Effortless is hard—
effortless in a period piece is a lot harder.) She was funny and feminine and irresistible.

And we hadn’t even gotten to the footbridge.

It’s called “The Eleven O’Clock Number” in the theater (because it’s the second-to-last song, which, back when curtain time was eight thirty on Broadway, would come at around eleven o’clock). Evening. A small Iowa town’s Fourth of July picnic going on in the distance. Matthew and Kristin standing on a footbridge and Kris starts singing “Till There Was You.” She modulates up a halftone for the final verse…

…and the Ruffles slipped out of my hand. I put down my Yoo-Hoo, and I fell for her.

The next day at the office, I faxed her manager a note saying how much I liked her performance. The next day I got a fax back from Kristin saying she’d never heard of me but thank you.

After four years of writing
The West Wing,
I’d left the show. It was 2005 now and I’d moved from the Four Seasons into a rental in the Hollywood Hills that had once been owned by one of the Mamas and the Papas and then Sam Kinison. Exactly the right place for someone who needs to concentrate every day on not using cocaine. Whoever was renting the house before me had home subscriptions to
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter,
and the trade papers were still coming to the front door every day. Flipping through
Variety
one morning, I saw that—incredibly—Kristin was now joining the cast of
The West Wing.

I started slowly banging my head against the polished granite kitchen counter.

And it turns out that if you bang your brains against something hard for long enough, something good might happen. Because that’s when it occurred to me that I’d been both single and clean for quite some time. I couldn’t stand that I was missing the chance to work with her, but didn’t that also mean I wasn’t her boss? In other words, couldn’t I, without any undertone of creepiness…hit on her?

You bet.

I sent flowers to her trailer on
The West Wing
set with a note that read, “Just my luck—I stop writing the show and you come to work. Knock ’em dead. Aaron Sorkin.”

My assistant, the long-suffering Lauren Lohman, called me that night and said, “There’s a message on the voice mail at the office I think you’re going to like.” It was Kristin singing eight bars of “Till There Was You.” Then she thanked me for the flowers and told me she was staying at the Beverly Wilshire while she was looking for a place in L.A. I spiked the phone. Then I started bothering Lauren.

As she walked toward me on this October night in front of the Beverly Wilshire, I gave her a half wave that said, “Hi. I’m grown man and I don’t know how to dress myself.”

As she got a little closer, her eyes were all I could see. She has eyes the
color of the water off Bermuda. Her eyes are so diverting that it takes another moment to notice that she has, as Jerry Seinfeld would say, many of the other qualities prized by the superficial male. (Our first fight would come when I was schooling her on how Jews invented Broadway—from the Shubert brothers to Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kaufman and Hart, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, Mike Nichols, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Neil Simon—and I said that if it weren’t for Jews, she’d be working at the Hooters in Tulsa. You want a reading on just how dumb I am? I meant it as a compliment.)

The date had been under way for about twenty minutes and I hadn’t yet spilled something on myself or said anything stupid—the rough equivalent of being in a boxing ring with Evander Holyfield for twenty minutes and not being dead yet. My hot streak would come to end when the waiter came by to tell us the specials, ending with “Anybody have any questions?”

Silence.

“Sir?”

“Uhh, I’m so sorry,” I blurted, “I wasn’t paying attention. I was—I can’t stop looking at her eyes. I mean, look at her eyes! You see what I’m talking about, right?” The waiter smiled in agreement, then gave Kristin the pitiful look reserved for women who are on first dates with complete schmoes.

After dinner I took her back to her hotel and she invited me in to the bar to have a drink. I took this as a good sign. At the end of the night she told me to call her again sometime. So I called her as soon as I got home.

Date number two was at Mr. Chow, a trendy Chinese restaurant about a block from her hotel. I mention that it’s a block from the hotel because on the way there I got lost. Kris’s face isn’t something you want in your head when you’re trying to do something hard like driving one block to a restaurant. The place was jammed and rowdy and great. I made her laugh a few times. She made me laugh a lot more. She asked me if I minded that she loved Jesus. I said no and asked her if she minded that I thought she was crazy for thinking a magical wizard walked the earth two
thousand years ago. And then I did a rewind in my head to see if there was a way I could have said that without insulting her entire family. I didn’t wait to get home before I asked her out for a third date.

I took her to a place on Melrose called the Little Door, where they don’t like you unless you were born in Europe, so you know it has to be good. We sat down at the bar and either I said something right or I’d picked the right jacket and pants combination because right there at the bar Kristin leaned in and kissed me.

It was so much better than the footbridge and the Yoo-Hoo.

Monday morning my press rep sent me an item in Page Six that said that Kristin and I had been spotted making out at the Little Door, and the blurb went on to suggest that Kris had poor taste in men. I was stunned because it was the first time I’d seen something in the
New York Post
that might be true. We saw each other steadily until New Year’s Eve rolled around. Kristin was singing with the San Francisco Symphony that night and asked if I’d like to come up for it.