Homesick (14 page)

“Her husband was there, and he was kind of staying away, just letting us girls be girls. There was one girl who had also suffered through breast cancer, and she had had breast removal and reconstruction surgery. Poor Beth was just so scared, but this girl showed Beth her breast, to let her know that it was nothing to be afraid of, to give her the strength to face it.

“She showed Beth that, and Beth asked, ‘Would you mind showing my husband, so he won’t be scared, too?’ And she did. There was hardly a dry eye in the room. There was nothing bad about it at all. In fact, I’d say it was the kindest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Everybody around the table was quiet. Then Becky jumped in.

“During Beth’s illness, Liz more than once called me and said, ‘I’m a mess. I just left Beth’s bedside. Where are you?’ And more than once she came over and cried her eyes out. She had a broken heart. I sat there with tissues, holding her and putting her back together.

“And one time, Cornelius, our yard man, whose mother and sister died of breast cancer, saw what was going on, and he came inside and prayed with us for our friend,” Becky continued. “He had big ol’ tears running down his cheeks. I adore that man. The next day he came by with a cassette tape of a healing sermon his pastor had preached—preached!—just for Beth. And you know, as soon as Beth was feeling better, she wrote him a note. Now, that’s a Southern woman for you!”

That image—of the friends and neighbors who helped Beth in her fight for life—stayed on my mind long after that weekend. It brought back so much about what I missed about small-town life, and about the emotional solidarity Southern women have with each other, especially in times of adversity. It reminded me of the power of faith in God, of its power to heal and to cement bonds between people linked as closely as those women, or as tenuously as an ailing woman and her friend’s considerate gardener.

By comparison to the lives Becky and Liz live in Birmingham, women can really be considerably more isolated from each other in the bigger coastal cities, especially if they have no family around, or no strong history with the women around them. There are very few women in my life with whom I would be close enough to comfort them tenderly on a morning before surgery. We could never be as demonstrative. We’d be more concerned about respecting each other’s space and privacy than we would about offering a hand in consolation.

Those women who climbed into bed with Beth have a closeness born of years spent together, and of shared history. Taking the time to foster that kind of relationship is something I really miss. In my Hollywood life, I know that even the best people I know spend so much of their time in their own heads, worrying over their own problems—myself among them. It’s just too difficult to be giving in that atmosphere, to think as often as we should of others. Instead we lead quiet inner lives, behind invisible shields that close us off from most true intimacy.

This is especially true in Hollywood because it’s such an ego-driven company town. Most of the people I know are in show business, so work is an understood part of every conversation. Social relationships are often corrupted by the suspicion, valid or not, that somebody is befriending you only because of what they think you can do for them. Once, when I was up-and-coming, I ran into an actress from a popular 1980s primetime soap. I found a moment to tell her how much I admired her work. It wasn’t false flattery; I just wanted to give her something by acknowledging how much she’d given me through her work.

“Oh, thank you, that’s nice,” she said curtly, then turned around and went about her business. I was crushed. How can you hope to build lasting friendships in a town where warm words are met only by a cold shoulder?

I don’t pretend it’ll always be easy for me to build that kind of bond—the kind that comes with uninterrupted years spent breathing the same air—during the time I spend in Meridian. And yet I’ve found I can come back home and fall into fast friendships with women I haven’t known since childhood. Southerners know this well: when you meet a Southerner in another part of the world—whether in New York, California, or overseas—you can’t stop talking to each other. A lot of natural barriers between strangers collapse at once. You speak the same language, share so much common culture. I didn’t get to know my dear friend Manny Mitchell, a Meridian native, and his terrific wife, Melanie, until we started working on a project together recently, but Manny was no stranger to me. He’s been part of my life all that time. And expatriated Southerners are almost always living among people more reserved than they, so they fall all over themselves with excitement at the chance to swap stories with a sympathetic soul.

My boyfriend and I broke up right before I got the role of Teddy Reed on
Sisters,
and about then something in me snapped. As I say, I was getting tired of subjugating my own dreams to the whims of ill-suited men; what I needed was a new outlook.

I had always had long, silky hair, in the classic Southern mold, and I was reluctant to cut it during my modeling career because I was getting TV commercials and print ads for hair-care products. My whole look was that of the well-put-together, modern Southern belle—which might have had something to do with why I kept getting offered ice-princess roles. Well, it was time for a change. My looks didn’t honestly reflect who I’d become—much more of a risk-taker, much less reliant on my physical appearance, and more confident about my ability as an actor. So I had my locks chopped short, put away my vast collection of cream-colored silk blouses and skirts, and started wearing T-shirts and jeans. For the first time in my life I felt free from my looks—ready to offer more than what you see on an eight-by-ten glossy.

That one simple gesture really changed the way I felt. Maybe it would take a psychologist to explain why. All I know is, suddenly I felt more free to express myself—as if I’d finally lifted some more profound weight off my shoulders. I started to have more fun. I was happier.

And I’m sure it also had to do with my work on
Sisters.
Teddy Reed was unlike any character I’d ever played. The producers had wanted me for yet another ice-princess role—the corporate, career-driven sister, who ended up being played by Julianne Phillips. But I was so tired of those parts; they made me feel as if I were choking. I took a chance and showed up for the audition in jeans, a tank top, and a black leather jacket, hair cropped short, ready for a risk. And, thank God, I got the part.

Teddy Reed was the role that would make a real actress out of me. It was like going to acting class on a daily basis, week after week. I studied very hard with my brilliant coach, Shawn Nelson, on every script over the entire six years. The role was an enormous challenge, one that forced me to stretch in every direction. Teddy was an alcoholic, which was painful for her, but which allowed me to explore a range of stormy emotions on camera. Once I had to play Teddy as blasted at her sister’s wedding, shooting up the crystal with a shotgun. In another episode, Teddy tenderly comforted a friend dying of AIDS; in another, the script called for Teddy to play farce. Sometimes, I’d pick up the next episode’s script, terrified of what they wanted Teddy to do, praying I’d find a way to pull it off. And sometimes, frankly, I felt as if I’d fallen flat on my face—though it seemed as though the next episode always offered a chance to redeem myself.

Learning to play that volatile character freed me to be more confident and expressive in my personal life. Because there was comedy in almost every
Sisters
script, I started to find more humor and fun in the world around me. At long last, years after I left the South to chase my dream, I was becoming the woman I’d always hoped to be. By the time
Sisters
ended its six-year run I’d been given an Emmy for my acting—but my real reward was this new, stronger sense of myself.

And part of that transformation was knowing a little more about what I wanted in my personal life. I’d finally matured to the point of knowing I didn’t need a man to be happy. But I knew now, just as powerfully, that what I
wanted
was a husband and children. Just as I couldn’t be fully myself without my career, I knew my life would be incomplete without a soul mate to marry, and, in time, children to nurture and love. I was tired of living in a house. I wanted a home.

Of course, as Flannery O’Connor said, a good man is hard to find—and she’d never even been to Hollywood. I’d had it with self-involved actors, whose egos were so insatiable and fragile that they couldn’t make room for anyone else in their lives—never mind committing to lifelong marriage or fatherhood.

One day in 1991, during the first season of
Sisters,
a friend of mine said she knew a businessman, a private investor, who seemed perfect for me. She wanted to introduce us. I thought,
Why not? If he doesn’t work in show business, he stands a chance of being a sane, normal person.
I agreed to meet him on a blind date.

5

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Howard was as blasé about meeting me as I was about meeting him. When our mutual friend, Carrie, the matchmaker, called to tell him about me, he was curious . . . until she told him what I did for a living.

“She’s an actress,” Carrie said.

“Wait, stop right there. Completely not interested,” Howard told her. He’d grown up in Los Angeles; he knew actresses were a dime a dozen.

“Well, she’s a
working
actress,” she said.

“Even worse,” Howard replied. “Let me tell you what she probably is: an actress who’s dated lots of actors, and she wants to meet a regular guy.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Here’s the thing,” Howard explained. “We regular guys, we put our pants on one leg at a time. We’re mortals. We’re not going to call and say, ‘The jet will pick you up and we’re meeting Woody Allen for lunch in Barbados.’ When you’re dating actors, it’s a whole different world. She probably thinks she wants a regular guy, but she’ll think it’s not exciting enough.”

Carrie tried for three weeks to sell Howard on the idea of a date with me. Finally she told him, “Howard, I don’t think you understand. I’ve only set up three couples on a blind date in my life, and all three couples ended up getting married.”

Based on that track record, the man who would become my husband agreed to meet me.

But first he decided to do a little research of his own. He rented
Nothing in Common,
a film I’d been in with Tom Hanks, to see what I was like on-screen. My character in that movie was one of those ice princesses I’d been trying to get away from before I got
Sisters,
but it was the only time he’d ever seen me. So he became convinced that in real life I was just like my character—“Kind of a typical L.A. woman, been-there-done-that, nothing impresses them,” he says today. Carrie told him I was a football fan, so he suggested the four of us—Carrie and her boyfriend, Howard and I—take in a Raiders game, for what he was sure would be our one and only date.

Carrie arranged for the three of us to meet Howard on a street corner and drive to the stadium together. He was late, and when he finally arrived he pulled up in his car and said, “Follow me.” Follow him? Sure, he was tall and handsome, but was this guy raised by wolves? We three tailed him in Carrie’s car, and when we stopped at a red light I got out of Carrie’s car, walked up to his window, and said, “Shouldn’t I be sitting in this car?”

In the thirty minutes it took us to drive to the stadium, though, my impression of Howard Sherman began to change. Dressed in jeans and a faded green turtleneck, he seemed so comfortable, quietly sure of himself. There was no posturing, no trying too hard, and he wasn’t wrapped up in himself. And in his presence, somehow, I just felt safe.

We fell for each other right away, but it was a while before we started dating exclusively. I was also dating a French restaurateur at the time, who had a restaurant in St. Bart’s. He was really only proficient in restaurant English—“How is your meal?” “Where are you from?” “Have a good trip.” So when I’d go down to visit him, Howard would court me by faxing love notes written in business English. He’d send a fax that said, “Are you available for a meeting in Napa next weekend?”—and that’s how he would ask for a date, right under the chef’s nose.