They’d walk by my desk and wave at me and say, “You’re doing a great job, Janie!” To this day I don’t know what I did to make them like me so much, because the one project they gave me, I completely screwed up.
I was supposed to plan a luncheon at a hotel, so I took Boris over to meet the people who were going to throw it. They wanted us to go to the kitchen for a tasting of the planned meal, but it turned into a scene from This Is Spinal Tap. We kept walking through the basement and turning right, then turning left, and wondering, “Where’s the kitchen? Where’s the kitchen?” Boris got more and more frustrated, until he finally barked, “Just forget it!” and we somehow found our way through the labyrinth and back out of the hotel.
I thought Boris would fire me, but instead he just said, “Janie, I love you, but we won’t put you in charge of anything again.” So I just worked on accounts at my little desk—the Crest account, whose reps went into schools and stained innocent children’s teeth to show them cavities, and the Crayola account, for which my job was to cut and paste press clippings onto pieces of paper. I’d take the clippings in and show them to Boris and Ira and say, “Look at all the great coverage we got.” And they’d say, “Good work, Jane!”
But as sweet as Ira and Boris were to me, the rest of New York kicked my ass.
I didn’t have an agent, so getting auditions of any kind was out. I bummed around in a few off-off-Broadway shows, doing things for free with little theater companies—such as a production of Macbeth helmed by an acting teacher who had “disciples” rather than students. She put an ad in the paper, and a few of my Cornell pals and I responded and got cast as spear carriers and the like. But the rehearsal process was so ridiculous and demeaning that all the self-respecting people kept dropping out, leaving us with principal roles. I was one of the three witches, and I almost came to blows with another one who kept pronouncing “hover” as “hoover.” Appropriately, the show closed after about two nights, as most of the audience left before intermission.
Not only was I unable to find a professional home, I couldn’t even find a literal one. When my sublet in the Village ended, I bounced around to four or five other places, always getting kicked out after a few weeks or months, whereupon I would have to move myself and all my stuff on the subway. In one place, the landlord knocked on the door and said, “You know, this is an illegal sublet. You’re not supposed to be here.” So I panicked and packed my two suitcases and headed out. The guy I was renting from actually followed me down the street, saying, “What are you doing? You don’t have to go—he does that to everybody!” But I was a rule-follower from way back, plus that guy had threatened my sense of home and safety. I didn’t have the constitution to withstand that, so I was out of there. I felt rejected and alone.
The roughness of New York City’s streets seeped in everywhere. At that first sublet, my Chinese roommate had invited home some guys who were rumored to be connected to the Chinese Mafia, and they ended up ransacking the place. Another time, a friend of mine named John brought a trick home, and after I’d left for work and John was passed out, the guy rummaged through my stuff, took some cash and my boom box, and for some reason cut the sleeves off my sweatshirts.
Then there was my roommate in Chelsea. He and I shared bunk beds, and late one night he came into the bedroom all excited. “Hey, Jane,” he said, “I just got four hundred bucks for giving a guy a blow job!”
Wide-eyed and shocked, trying not to look like a Midwestern bumpkin, I just smiled and said, “Hey, that’s more than I make in two weeks!”
The whole time I was in New York, I drank nonstop, gained weight, and felt unsafe everywhere I went. Everything about the city felt hostile to me; it was as if New York itself were screaming, “Get out!”
The Duplex was the only place I was happy. During prime evening hours, the regulars, all of them Broadway musical theater performers, either chorus members or understudies, performed. They were fantastic singers, and I envied how close they were, how witty. I wanted to be one of them.
By around 4 A.M. I’d finally get my chance at the mike. With no awareness of the irony, I chose “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” as my signature song. It massaged my soul to warble it (drunkenly, I’m sure). Then the bar would close, and I’d stumble home to wherever I happened to be living that week.
One night, about nine months after I’d moved to New York, I was fast asleep in a big apartment in Brooklyn that housed an unknown number of other roommates, when two of them came home, drunk. They stumbled into the apartment and turned all the lights on, yelling, “Get out! Get out of here!” Startled by the shouting, I emerged from the bedroom, bleary-eyed, and freaked out.
“Get the fuck out, bitch!” one of them yelled. “Now!” They obviously were not good with my living there.
“But I have no place to go!” I said, panicking. I didn’t know anyone in Brooklyn. I didn’t even know where to catch the subway. This was my fifth sublet in nine months, but my first in Brooklyn—which in the mid-eighties wasn’t the charmingly gentrified place it is today. It felt scary and dangerous, like a no-man’s-land. I was always worried about my physical safety in New York, so putting me out on the street in Brooklyn at three in the morning might have killed me from fright, if nothing else.
The guys kept yelling, and I kept begging not to be thrown out, and eventually they stumbled drunkenly back out the door. It was the cherry on top of the horrible sundae that was New York for me.
The next morning, I got up, dressed for work, and walked to the subway to catch my train. Somewhere between Brooklyn and Midtown, I started feeling sharp pains in my stomach, like I had food poisoning. By the time I got to my stop at 50th Street, it was so bad I was doubled over.
I walked to Glick & Lorwin, but because I was early as usual, no one was there. I didn’t have a key to the office, so I just sat down on a box of paper outside the door, slumped over in pain. I thought my appendix might have burst, so I straggled back to the subway and got on a train heading for the Village, where St. Vincent’s Hospital was.
On the train, hunched over in the worst pain of my life, I suddenly thought, I have to leave New York. I have to get out of here. And my stomach relaxed. I got to 14th Street, stood up, and thought, I’m all right. The pain was gone.
I took the subway straight back to Brooklyn, packed up my two suitcases, and called my mom. “I’m coming home,” I told her. I would miss Boris and Ira (who acted like they were mad at me for leaving and wouldn’t make eye contact). But I couldn’t wait to get back home.
Chapter 5
The Call of Comedy
I was now twenty-five years old when I went back home to Dolton, back to the house where I grew up, on Sunset Drive. When I walked into my old bedroom, still with its green-and-yellow shag carpeting and bedspread, there was a big “Welcome Home Jane!” banner, with balloons and everything. I turned to my mom and, half-joking, half-serious, exclaimed, “You can go home again!”
Mom was happy to have me home as well. “Look, Jane—I organized your books,” she said, waving her hand at the shelves.
“By author or title?” I asked.
“By height.” And there they were, perfectly arranged from smallest to tallest.
My mom’s excitement was short-lived, though. The balloons in my room hadn’t even lost their helium when she started urging me to apply for a regular job, to start my backup career. “You could work as a secretary,” she said.
My mom had been working at Arthur Andersen for years. She was an old-school secretary: she typed an outrageous number of words per minute and knew shorthand. I was a college graduate with an advanced degree; I considered myself vastly overqualified for secretarial tasks. I had no interest in working at Arthur Andersen.
But even with my inflated sense of self, I knew I needed a job, so I called and got an interview. Dressed in one of my mom’s suits and looking like a young Janet Reno, I went downtown to their offices. I took the English test that they gave all new subman
agement employees . . . and failed. Yes, I was college educated and I even had a master’s degree, but I didn’t know the first thing about the proper form for business letters.
My mother was so embarrassed.
Since I had been deemed unqualified to be a secretary, I sent my résumé to an employment agency, this time for receptionist work. Within a week or two, they found me a job answering phones at the Civic Opera House in Chicago.
I loved it—after all, I was working in a theater—but I also kept trying out for acting gigs. Before long, I got a part in a new Shakespeare company’s outdoor production of The Comedy of Errors.
On the morning after I was cast in the play, I came bouncing into the office, all excited about my good news. “I got a part in The Comedy of Errors,” I told a girl I worked with. “But it’s gonna be over the summer, so I’ll have to quit my job here.” I didn’t think twice about telling her. She, in turn, didn’t think twice about going straight into my boss’s office to tell her.
What I didn’t realize was that, having paid a fee to the employment agency to find me, my boss wouldn’t be too happy about my leaving so soon. So she fired me on the spot. Even though I had been planning to quit, I felt humiliated, as if I had been personally rejected. I was in agony over it.
I called Chris, so upset I could hardly get the words out. “They fired me,” I said, near tears.
“Well,” he said, “you weren’t going to stay anyway. So who cares?”
In my place, Chris sure wouldn’t have. He’d have just gone on his merry way, acting in the play and never giving the Opera House a second thought. But I couldn’t let things roll off my back like he could. I had halfheartedly surrendered to my mom’s idea of a backup plan, but I had failed. I couldn’t even get into the club I didn’t want to be a part of, and I took it as affirmative evidence of my uselessness. At that time in my life, if I had an opportunity to suffer, I seemed to have to take it.
To get me to forget about it and move on, Chris took me out that night and we hit the bars from Rush Street all the way up to the Closet, a gay bar in Boys Town. We called this kind of night “drinking our way north.” Our “First today, badly needed” toast was usually “Cheers to queers,” but tonight, since it was clear we would be downing one Long Island iced tea after another, we simply clicked our glasses and said “Bye-bye.”
The Comedy of Errors was staged outside, in Lincoln Park, with the sparkling waters of Lake Michigan as the backdrop. On opening night, the park was packed. Everybody came—my parents, sister, brother, cousins, friends. Nobody had seen me act since high school, so this was a big moment for me. And I had a big role: Adriana, the wife who fears her husband is cheating on her, only to find it was a “comedy of errors.”
While at Cornell, I had accumulated a huge bag of acting techniques and methods, and I employed every one in my “process” of creating Adriana. So complete was the backstory I invented for her, I even gave her an astrological sun and moon sign. I could barely walk and talk at the same time for all my training.
In spite of my meticulous overpreparation, I had a blast out there on that stage, performing the immortal words of the Bard under the stars. It was a beautiful night and I felt incredibly lucky to be there.
Afterward, everyone was fawning over me: “Jane, you’re an actress! We didn’t know you had it in you!” I drank it all in, so happy to feel validated in the dream I’d been chasing for so long.
And then my mother said, “You know, Jane, I still see you teaching.”
I turned to her and said sternly, “Mom, you cannot ever say that to me again.”
I knew she was only trying to protect me, but now, at age twenty-five, I just didn’t want to hear it anymore. I would not, and could not, pretend to want the life she wanted for me. To Mom’s credit, she finally got it. She just said, “Oh, okay,” and never mentioned it again.
The combination of being in a Shakespeare company and having an MFA from Cornell turned me into an even bigger, more impossible pain in the ass than I’d been before. I was sure that I knew more than anybody else in the company, considering my “classical training.” I was displeased with my cast mates about 90 percent of the time and made a point of letting them know it. Some of my criticisms were valid, but I didn’t have to punish people for what, in my opinion, were their failings. But some of it was me still not knowing how to let things roll off my back. I couldn’t just focus on my own work and let people make their own mistakes.
They would speak their lines, and I’d be certain they had no idea what they were talking about. “You have no respect for the language!” I would splutter. “Why bother doing Shakespeare at all?” To which people would respond by rolling their eyes. “Oh, Jane’s on her ‘why are we doing Shakespeare’ kick again.”
I would criticize details that were in no way germane to my job as an actor in the company, even complaining about a paint color on the set. “Who chose this?” I demanded, infuriated. As I child, I had thrashed on the floor to release my pent-up dissatisfaction. As a pissed-off adult, I made myself completely unappealing by spewing it at others.
I could not seem to stop myself from being such a bitch. As my mom would call it, I was acting like “Madame Full Charge.” The following behavior by this band of players always served to take me around the bend: to make sure the audience understood Shakespeare’s language, or to be certain they got a joke, the actors would literally use finger quotes or cheap and stupid gestures while performing. Bunny ears around Elizabethan dialogue . . . While I will admit the paint color was none of my business, I found this absolutely galling.
I just wanted the experience of acting in a Shakespeare company to be the Shakespeare company experience I had in my head, but instead of accepting the gig for what it was and finding what I liked and leaving the rest, I fought it so hard that no one liked me anymore. There was no “going with the flow” for Jane Lynch. So I took control of the one thing I could. I pulled the ultimate “diva” and quit.
One night, as I was putting on my makeup before a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I announced to the cast in a war-weary tone, “After this show . . . I am done with the company.”
You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief. No one said anything for a moment, until one guy quipped, “You’ll never get a gold watch that way.”
No one chased after me and begged me to stay, and at first that pissed me off. Then it really hurt my feelings. The thought did cross my mind that I had gone too far . . . and that, in fact, I had been the one who rejected them . . . but still, the old “I have been rejected, no one wants me” pity party began again.
My career as an office worker was a nonstarter, but I still needed to make money. Fortunately, I was able to take my prodigious Shakespearean talents to a new, more challenging, venue: America’s Shopping Place.
It was 1987. America’s Shopping Place was one of the first home-shopping TV shows in the country, part of television’s new retail frontier. It stayed on the air into the wee hours of the morning, with live hosts describing products and taking phone calls from insomniac shoppers. I showed up at the studio for what I thought was an audition. It turned out their idea of an audition was to throw me into makeup and put me on the air. There I was with a pretty young woman named Kendy Kloepfer in front of two huge cameras waiting for the red light to come on. Kendy was a sweetheart and exactly the kind of girl they wanted on the air—feminine, adorable, and good on her feet. I was not as feminine or adorable as they wanted, but I was good on my feet.
Kendy and I would stand in front of the cameras, talking about whatever we were supposed to be selling—cubic zirconia jewelry, electronic flea collars, grandfather clocks. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the best training in the world for an improv actor. Television home shopping was uncharted territory, so we had to fly by the seat of our pants and make things up as we went along. We’d smile into the camera and do our pitch. “Flea season is upon us!” or “Now, this bracelet is
a delightful way to say ‘I love you’!” Then they’d switch to a close-up shot of the product so we could read the product specifications out of a wire-bound notebook. Then the camera would suddenly be back on us, and we would have to be ready with a big smile and a clever line.
I loved everything about the job—being on camera, improvising, bantering with Kendy. The problem was that the producers did not love me. They wouldn’t even look up at me when I came into the studio chirping “Hey, everybody!” They never fired me, but they never told me I had a job either. I would get a call a few hours before I needed to be there. I’d drop whatever I was doing to show up to do the graveyard shift of America’s Shopping Place. Did I mention I loved this job?
But it was all to no avail, because no matter how good I was at improvising my enthusiasm for jewelry and housewares, I was not feminine and adorable enough. I was no Kendy Kloepfer, and the producers tried to replace me as quickly as possible. They actually auditioned my potential replacements on the air with me. These young and inarticulate pretty girls were always half my height, so the producers would pop an apple box next to me for them to stand on. But they would still come up no farther than my ear. I had to show these girls the ropes, knowing that if I trained them well they would take away the first livelihood I had enjoyed. I did so as cheerfully as I could, hoping the producers would notice how magnanimous I was and change their minds and let me stay.
I remember one poor gal was completely out of her league and unable to say anything interesting about anything. While she was selling a cubic zirconia tennis bracelet, the director had prompted her through her earpiece: “Tell them who they can buy this for.” She intoned, dead-eyed and flatly, “You can buy this for your mother. You can buy this for your sister. You can buy this for your aunt. You can buy this for a girl cousin . . .” The director begged into my earpiece: “Jane, stop her!!!” And I heroically saved the day.