Happy Accidents

  Then I met the freshly showered Haden. Seven years old, with long, curly brown hair just like her mom’s, she wore glasses with transition lenses that were starting to go dark in the bright sunlight pouring into the hotel room. My dad had worn transition lenses, as had many old people I’d known, but I’d never seen them on a child. She danced around, kicking up her legs for us to examine the pants she was wearing, wondering aloud if they qualified as capris or gauchos. I suggested they were gauchos because they had very wide legs. She considered this a bit and then agreed. Suddenly we heard a loud noise from down on the street below and a man yelling furiously. Haden raised her eyebrows and said, “Someone’s having a bad day.”

  I’ve never found kids very interesting; I’m a dog person. But this kid was charming and she was ironic. I thought that maybe I could deal with a kid if it’s this kid. Again, I had to be careful to keep my feet on the ground, e.g., not suggest they move across the country to live with me just yet. Before they left, the kid sat in my lap for a photo.

  Photographic evidence of the moment I met Haden Ryan Embry.

  They were flying back home to Sarasota later that day, so I said good-bye. As I was leaving the hotel room, Lara took me in her arms and held me; it felt so wonderful and right. As I walked to the door, I sang, “When will I see you again?”

  She smiled. “I hope soon.”

  We would talk even sooner. While I was in the airport later that day waiting for my plane back to LA, we talked on the phone for about two hours. We were having the “relationship interview,” the conversation where you learn as much as you can about each other, usually served up in sound bites. We lined up in all the important areas: she loved coffee and the New York Times columnist Frank Rich; her few good friends were long-term and of good quality. I remember I had just passed through security when she brought up the subject of my past relationships. My heart started to pound and I felt all the blood rush to my face. I did not look good on paper; I was nearing fifty, and with a couple of exceptions, most of my relationships had lasted two months, max. As I had in the past felt embarrassed talking about my relatively unremarkable drinking history, I was ashamed of my pitiful dating life and seeming inability to connect—I sounded like such an underachiever. But she did not gasp in shock or send me on my way. She simply listened with what felt like no judgment and then shared her answer to that same question: she had been with her ex-partner for almost ten years, but she said that it probably should have been over much sooner. I thought to myself: So her relationship history isn’t anything to write home about either. As I breathed a sigh of relief, we hung up so I could board the plane back to LA. Once on board, I got on my BlackBerry to look into flights to Sarasota.

  I was so elated to find there was a direct flight to Tampa from LAX; I don’t change planes. Tampa was only an hour drive from her home in Sarasota. I checked the schedule and called Lara right there on the runway. “I can come to Sarasota next weekend. Are you around?” She had a very good friend coming into town that weekend and was so sorry, but she wouldn’t be available. I was afraid that the shock of my relationship history had sunk in and she was blowing me off, until she asked, “How about the week after that?” I would be back to work on Glee, so no could do. We hung up saying we would talk again when I landed.

  Just before the plane took off and I was about to turn off my phone, she called me back. “My friend is fine with your coming into town the same time she’s here, so book that flight for next weekend.” This was Lisa, her best friend from high school who was like a sister to her. Wanting Lara to find love, Lisa even offered to watch Haden so we could have some time together. This was music to my one hearing ear. My heart was full and pounded all the way back to LA.

  My hopeful mind reeled along with my heart: Could this wonderful, amazing, beautiful woman be “the one”?

  Whereupon my practical mind interjected: There’s no such thing as “the one,” Jane.

  And my hopeful mind snapped at my practical mind, Why do you have to be such a killjoy?

  When the appointed day and time arrived for me to board the plane to visit Lara in Sarasota, I was on the phone with her. I said, “I just want to say how brave we both are right now. Me for getting on a plane to fly across the country to visit someone I just met, and you for inviting someone you just met to fly across the country.” She agreed. I flew on the direct red-eye flight into Tampa, arriving at about five-thirty in the morning. Already almost ninety degrees and about 80 percent humidity, the hostility of the air almost knocked me to the pavement, a la Patsy and Edina in the “Morocco” Absolutely Fabulous episode. I hoped to god she didn’t want to live in Florida forever.

  No rental car company would give me a car, because I had only brought a debit card and they required a regular credit card, so I took a cab to Sarasota that cost me around $200. I declined to tell Lara about this, as I didn’t want to look like an idiot right away. I was staying in Turtle Beach, about a fifteen-minute drive from Lara’s home. She had cleared her Friday of appointments save one first thing in the morning and would arrive at around 10 A.M. As it was early in the morning and the front office of the small resort where I was staying was not open yet, a key to my little cabin on the bay had been left for me, taped to the screen door. I walked in after my all-night flight, thrilled but exhausted. When my head hit the pillow of the huge bed that took up the entire room, I fell into a deep sleep and had a very vivid dream that Lara, followed by what I imagined was her Mexican cleaning lady and her Mexican cleaning lady’s family all carrying suitcases, had filed into my hotel room. I made the mistake of texting this dream to Lara before I could think about it, and she texted back, “Worried I might have too much baggage?” I learned another important lesson: never tell a therapist a dream unless you want it analyzed and your covers pulled.

  I was coming into Lara’s life during a very trying time for her. She had a lot on her plate; she was raising one child by herself, fighting to regain joint custody of the other, all the while needing to be available and sane enough to deal with other people’s problems in her very busy therapy practice. I had a job on a TV show that had the potential to become a phenomenon and felt myself to be on the brink of a career explosion. Perhaps that dream was my subconscious trying to knock on my door of awareness: Do you want to get involved in all this? Do you really want to take this on?

  I had no answer just yet; all I wanted was for her to get to my cabin, already. She arrived mid-morning, all dreamy-looking and self-assured and bearing soy lattes. I met her at the door with a kiss, after which we rarely left my place for the rest of the weekend. We took full advantage of Lara’s friend Lisa, happily having Haden play with her daughter, Amelia.

  In and out of sleep on our first night together, I had another very vivid dream. In it, a trio of lisping musicians dressed as clowns was performing an oompah band rendition of “At Last.” This time, I didn’t need a psychologist to tell me that I was falling deeply in love with Lara.

  She really was up to her ears in her own life, with a long road ahead of her full of legal twists and turns as she fought for her daughters. I would watch as she underwent this ordeal, amazed at the way she always remained calm and steady and focused. Even on the rare occasions when she became frustrated or angry, I never saw her freak out or lose her temper.

  What I found most delightful was how much she loved Haden. It moved me to the core, how absolutely enchanted she was with her daughter. She beautifully mirrored Haden’s bright light back to her. She adored her child beyond measure, and my heart ached for the daughter who wasn’t around to know Lara’s brand of love. Lara was her best person with Haden.

  In the months to come, Lara’s concerns, hopes, and dreams would become my own. And mine would become hers. This, I was discovering, was what relationships were about.

  I returned to Los Angeles a woman in love. I hit the ground running, going right back to Paramount Studios to shoot the remaining episodes of our first season of Glee.


  The night before we started shooting, Fox TV execs Dana Walden and Gary Newman took the cast and executive producers out to dinner. We sat down to steaks in a private room at BLT Steak, and Dana made a toast to the success of the pilot and expressed the high hopes we all had for Glee as a TV series. She basically said to all of us, “Your life as it now stands is over.” I’d heard this sentiment before at other cast dinners for pilots past, but this time it caused me to pause and ponder. I didn’t know anyone in the cast very well, and it was a very strange and delightful thing to look around the room and think, I may well be going on a lovely journey with these people. This also may have been the last time that Cory, Lea, and all the Glee kids would leave a restaurant without being hounded by TMZ or paparazzi.

  We got word from Fox International that the Glee pilot had also been a huge hit in Australia; on the night it aired, one of every two televisions in Australia had been tuned to Glee. So in September of 2009, the execs sent the entire cast down under to Melbourne and Sydney to promote the show. By this time Lara and I had made a handful of trips to see each other, and it couldn’t have been going better. I was having a real, live grown-up relationship with a wonderful woman. As I kissed her good-bye right before I would be flying to Australia, I was hit with a wave of panic. What if I’m killed in a plane crash and Lara and I never get to have a life together? I said it, and she told me that she’d had the same thought. I had something so special to live for: Lara and little Haden. We were becoming a family. I reluctantly flew off to Australia with the rest of the cast and breathed a sigh of relief when on each leg of the trip the plane landed safely.

  While we were in Sydney, Fox announced that we were getting an order for what’s called the “back nine” episodes. Only the pilot had aired so far, but Fox was confident enough in the success of the show that it wanted us to film an entire season, twenty-two total, including the pilot.

  As an actor, I had never known job security, so having just been contracted to work through May of the following year couldn’t have pleased me more. I’d spent many years going from job to job never knowing what would be next, and I heaved a huge sigh of relief to have a place to hang my hat for at least a while. Although I was doing quite well in my efforts to root myself firmly “in the moment” as far as my relationships with Lara and Haden were concerned, I was nonetheless very heartened to know that I would have a nice bit of money coming in were we to become a family.

  As I have described before, in relationships I had a tendency to jump in right away and then take it all back when I came to my senses. This time I was trying very hard to avoid this pattern. I was quite conscious of keeping my mouth shut and resisting my desire to start promising things to her. This turned out to be a very wise choice, because there’s nothing speedy about Lara.

  I was learning that Lara moved slowly, carefully, and with great deliberation. We were out-and-out polar opposites in this regard. I moved crazy fast and then cleaned up any mess afterward. She wouldn’t make her flight reservations until she had fully analyzed the calendar and then sat on it for a while to be sure, whereas I was always making and then canceling them. She was like that about relationships, too, it seemed.

  I was also fascinated with how she didn’t dwell on setbacks, great or small, or feel the need to apologize for who she was. It amplified my feeling that I was always bemoaning some slight, or feeling sorry about something. She was extraordinarily patient with me and charmed by my desire to be efficient and do the right thing. And she was grateful for the way I got things done in a timely manner, even if I had to go back and correct a mistake or two from moving too fast. “I hope you still find this cute in a year or two,” I’d say to her. As I raced around the house and my life like a chicken with its head cut off, she’d just smile at me, allowing me to be me and loving me for it. I was seen and I was gotten.

  I also spent the first months of our relationship in wonder at her ability to let things go and to very carefully choose the battles she would fight, especially with respect to the custody drama. When I asked her about how she was able to do this, her response was “I have more patience than they have anger.”

  One great benefit of Glee’s success was that I now had a hiatus. It wouldn’t be until January that we started shooting again, so I had months in which I could visit Lara frequently in between other bits of work. When I was in Sarasota, ensconced in her life completely, with no fish of my own to fry, I began to explore a whole new part of myself heretofore unexpressed; I became “wifely.” Lara would work all day, seeing patients, whereas I had my daily list of errands. I would drive the station wagon to Whole Foods, then head to the dry cleaners, and then zip over to the hardware store to pick up lightbulbs. I loved taking care of my girls.

  I also got to develop a real relationship with Haden and to learn just how special she is. I went to lunch with her in the schoolyard most days, bringing food for us to share. On October 2, her eighth birthday, I brought her a McDonald’s apple pie. She took a bite, closed her eyes, and said, “Now that tastes like October.” I always forgot to bring a ball to play with, so we would play catch with wood chips from the yard. I’d pick up Haden after school, and we would do her homework together. She was smart as a whip and she’d blow through it fast. Then we’d have a snack and settle in for a few Tivo-ed episodes of iCarly until Mom came home. The show was so clever, and Haden and I would laugh out loud, watching funny moments over and over again, and then repeating the lines to each other, laughing some more. We’d just kill it.

  One afternoon, I was watching a particularly surreal and dreamlike sequence in the movie Nine with Daniel Day-Lewis when Haden joined me. She watched for a bit then paused the TV and, looking at me with great consternation, said, “Okay. Walk me through it.” I loved this kid.

  One morning when I was back in LA, Lara called to tell me that when she had been walking Haden into school that morning, Haden had been deep in thought, and Lara had asked her what she was thinking about. Haden had said, “Look-alikes. I’ve been thinking about look-alikes.”

  “Oh, yeah? How’s that?” Lara asked.

  “Well,” Haden said, “I look like you. I mean I am smaller, but I look just like you.”

  Lara had started to say something to Haden about genetics, when Haden cut to the chase. “Yeah, yeah, I look like you, but I’m funny like Jane.”

  When Lara told me this, my heart melted; she’d claimed me.

  Allowing me to get to know Haden and be a part of her life was also something special; I knew Lara wasn’t going to allow just any girlfriend to bond with her child unless she meant business.

  Back when I had been shooting Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron, being the foodie she is, told me that any significant moment in her life is always accompanied by the memory of what she ate. I told her that my mother, being the clotheshorse she is, remembered what she wore. Nora gasped, “You must do our play!”

  Nora and her sister Delia had put together an all-woman staged reading called Love, Loss, and What I Wore, based on a book of the same name by Ilene Beckerman. Performing at the Westside Theater in New York City, the Ephron sisters put together a delightful and sometimes moving series of stories where each turning point in a woman’s life becomes associated with an article of clothing. The reading would have a revolving cast, the lineup changing each month. They invited me to be in the second group, which would begin performing in October of 2009. During my Glee hiatus, I spent a month in New York, renting my friend Kara Swisher’s mother’s apartment on 57th Street near Park Avenue.

  It was just an idyllic situation, and I couldn’t have fantasized it any better: New York in the fall, doing a play where I got to sit down the entire time. I had no lines to learn as it was literally a reading, with a notebook in front of each actor, and we were performing for extremely delighted audiences. Add to that a fabulous cast of women I’d never met before, including the profoundly wonderful Tyne Daly (who upon meeting me said, “I don’t know your work but I understand you’r
e a credit to your profession”), and I was pinching myself to see if I was dreaming. For this brief time I got to live the life of a theater actor doing a play off-Broadway.

  Lara came up to visit for the weekend, and we had a wonderful time pretending to live in the city. Her parents had gone down to Florida to take care of Haden, in yet another complicated travel arrangement. After Lara got home, we had a long talk on the phone in which Lara’s practical, planning side was fully engaged. Lara suggested that we get married and she and Haden move out to LA. It wasn’t a very romantic conversation; it was more of a logistical one. We both acknowledged that we wanted to be together, and having a long-term long-distance relationship was not plausible given the demands of our lives. We also missed each other too much. I was at the start of a potential five-year contract with Glee that would keep me in Los Angeles ten months of each year. Her career as a psychologist was more mobile, so they should be the ones to move. It would be better for Haden to start in a new school at the beginning of the school year, so the move should take place over the summer. Lara would also need a while to close her practice, and that process should start soon if she was going to be able to move during the following summer. And Lara didn’t want to pick up and move her entire life without being married, so we should do that in the spring. I agreed with all of it and agreed quickly.

  Then I freaked out. Everything became very real and I tossed and turned all that night. This is happening too fast. We are now involving a child. Will Lara be able to create a life for herself outside of our relationship in Los Angeles? What if it doesn’t work and we break up? We’ve only known each other for a handful of months! When Lara awoke the next morning, she found these questions and concerns on her phone from me via text message.

  I was just falling asleep when my phone buzzed at around 5 A.M. with her response. She was nervous, too, and sympathized with me. “If we do this and then break up,” she said, “I will be sad but I will go on.” I was relieved and unburdened. I now could enjoy and celebrate as we started planning. And that’s all I needed, and I loved her even more for her honesty and bravery.