Authors: Elisabeth Rohm
“You're going to love me and hate me,” he said.
“No!” I protested. “I only love you!”
“You have to leave for New York in seventy-two hours,” he said. “So start packing, kiddo.”
“I'm ready!” I said, already planning what to pack in the back of my mind. “Thank you, thank you!”
“You have no idea what you're getting into,” he said. “It's a golden cage.”
I didn't know what he meant at the time, but I found out later it was true. All I knew was that I had attained something I had busted my butt to get, and I was on my way. I'll never forget the feeling of landing very late at night at JFK with my cat and seven suitcases. I had come home. After all that time in California, with its ups and downs, highs and lows, I felt like I had finally returned to a safe place I totally understood. New York has always been the only place I call home, even after all these years of living in La La Land. It's the place where I feel most like myself, and now I was about to play a part that was smack in the middle of my comfort zone.
After years of playing characters with emotional issues like mine, it was a relief to play someone on a show that was plot driven rather than character driven. The show was about the story, not about me or any
of the regular characters. A television series was steadyâespecially one this well established. I liked that idea very much. That night, a driver took me to my new corporate housing where I would live for three months while I acclimated to the ten- to fourteen-hour-a-day shooting schedule. In the spring of 2001, Serena Southerlyn had arrived in New York, and my life would never be the same.
My first day on the set, Angie Harmon was there. She put her arm around me and gave me the tour with a huge smile on her face, giddy with joy that she was leaving. I was slightly overwhelmed by her happiness, and hugely curious about it. I was thinking,
Thank God she quit!
But here she was, obviously overjoyed to be leaving. I didn't know why. I couldn't imagine why she would want to leave. To me, such a role was a dream come true, but I wasn't going to ask any questions. She'd opened the door of the golden cage for me. She was out, and I was in. She was happy, I was happy, so what did it matter why?
Walking down the hallway with Dick Wolf to shoot my very first scene with Sam Waterston, I had a lump the size of a fist in my throat. I didn't think I'd be able to get my lines out. I could barely speak. I was paralyzed with nerves. I was an experienced actor by now, but this was the biggest job I'd ever been given. In that first scene, all I had to do was stand in a hallway, take law books from a dolly, and put them on a shelf. How hard could it be? That's what I was thinking:
Just put the books on the shelf, Lis.
Sam Waterston approached me and said something about the case, “Blah blah blah,” and I said something back, “Blah blah blah” (that's how it felt!), and that was it. I was so incredibly grateful that my first scene was such a short one. I felt like I had that lump in my throat for a week.
Being on
Law & Order
is all consuming. It was a hulking, massive experience. It became my life. My life became law, and there was no breaking this law. After years of metaphorical lawlessness, I was about
to learn exactly what it was like to exist within the intricate structure of a legal drama.
I loved this time in my life. It was intense and fulfilling and it galvanized my lifelong love of being on television. I had to fall in love with
Law & Order
before I could want to leave it for other creative endeavors. It was a very long time before I understood why Angie Harmon was ready to leave. I was too busy falling in love.
Law & Order
was my new romance, my grand passion.
Law & Order
was and is a quintessentially New York show. People often stopped to tell me that we had filmed an episode where they worked or near where they lived. People also liked to tell me how much they loved Sam Waterston. When I walked down the street with Sam, people would stop and stare or crowd around him like he was one of the Beatles.
It wasn't at all like filming a show in LA, where you drive in a cart onto the Paramount lot and you get a spacious trailer and you smell the sea breeze and flowers whenever you step outside. Dick Wolf had taken over a warehouse on the Hudson River and turned it into the
Law & Order
studio, so we smelled the river and the city every day. We smelled mold and rotting fish. Filming
Law & Order
was gritty. We were working stiffs, real New Yorkers, and every day, we went to work like everyone else in the city.
I had a view of the river from my small dressing room. The whole building was musty and sometimes buggy. It was dark and moody and intellectual. It was the best place I could imagine. I built a family there. It was my new circus. Nothing felt as good as stepping out onto that darkened stage every day, ready to film.
I liked my character, too. Serena Southerlyn was a do-gooder. She would defend any downtrodden person who came along, which didn't always work for the prosecutor's office. She couldn't just fight
the case objectively. She was a humanitarian, and she would have probably made a better public defender. I admired that about her.
Most of all, I admired my fellow actors, especially Sam, who became like a father to me. In the past, some of the female characters had romantic tension with Sam, but my character saw him as more of a mentor, and that's how I felt personally, too. Sam and Fred Thompson, who also became near and dear to me, taught me what it meant to take acting seriously. They treated the job like any other job that requires you to be prompt and come prepared and not waste anybody's timeâlike construction work or food service or stepping onto the line every day. Sam and Fred had this work ethic that we were all in this together and we all shared in the toil. The rest of the people on the show also became like family. Diane Wiest was divine, her distinctive laugh and warm energy a highlight on the set. And who could forget Jerry Orbach, one of the most gracious and loving people I've ever met?
When I first joined
Law & Order,
during the very first week, I threw a big party for myself to celebrate. I invited everybody in the whole cast, and the only people who showed up were Jerry Orbach and his wife, Elaine. They stayed for a whole hour. Jerry taught me that when you are part of something, you act like you are part of it. There is no need to act cool, or better than everybody else. When you are part of the circus, you participate in the circus. You don't ignore the clowns, or the trapeze artists. You are all one big family, and there is a strong sense of family values.
As much as I thrived on the dark, gritty intellect of the show, apparently I stood out a bit from the traditional characters, or so everybody liked to talk about in the press. I was the first blonde they had ever hired on
Law & Order
and there were a lot of hurtful comments out there about me, comparing me to the other women on the show. I
learned to stop reading what people published about me because it made me feel terrible. “She's blond, she shouldn't be on the show, she doesn't look like a lawyer, she's not like the others, she's different, different, different.” My whole life I'd been hearing how
different
I was, when all I wanted was to be like everyone else. I was tempted to dye my hair brown, just so I wouldn't stand out so much.
I finally decided my difference could be a gift to the show. I became known for my blond hair and Diet-Coke habit on the set, and I did my best to brighten up the place. I decorated my dressing room like a Ralph Lauren studio, with red walls and equestrian paintings and a celery-green chaise longue with curves like a woman. I invited people into my dressing room to sit in the leather chairs and visit, or thumb through the law books that I kept on a shelf but never needed to read because Sam was such a bastion of legal knowledge.
My days were all about the schedule. This was a typical day on the set: A driver named Carlos would pick me up at five in the morning and take me to the studio on Hudson River Parkway. I would get there around six and go straight into hair and makeup. They would throw a few newspapers at us if we wanted them, and I had to try very hard not to annoy anybody by talking too much at such an early hour about my twenty-something adventures in New York City (dates gone wrong or right, red carpet events, parties, romantic entanglementsâit was a busy and exciting time).
At around seven, we would go into rehearsal. We would rehearse the first scene, talk about it, block it, and then leave to get dressed while they lit the scene. This is when people started to wake up and talk to each other. We might hear Frank Sinatra blasting out of Dennis Farina's dressing room during the time he was on the show, or in Jerry Orbach's time, we would peek inside his dressing room to see what interesting thing he might be doing. Dianne Wiest was always laughing, and we could all hear the sweet soothing sound of her voice
down the hall. Fred Thompson's door was always wide open. Anybody was welcome to come in and see what he was up toâusually reading something political, perhaps plotting his presidential campaign. He was brilliant, but also so human that you would never know how distinguished he was. Fred was surprisingly user-friendly. He always made himself accessible and he made everybody feel like they were just as smart as he was, even though he is a genius. You would never know you were involved with anyone who had any influence over Supreme Court decisions, or who was a potential US president, because he seemed like such a regular guy.
While we were all in hair and makeup, we would sit around on our breaks and debate and say smart things. At least, they would say smart things! There was always this pressure to be in the know on that show, because you can't sit in a room with Sam Waterston and Dick Wolf and Fred Thompson and not have something intelligent to say. There was a lot of pressure on that set to prove oneself, and that worked for me. It's one of the things I miss most about that show. A lot of movies and television shows are fun, but not necessarily intellectual.
Law & Order
was rare in that way.
After we were dressed, we would go back to the set and film the first scene. That's how the rest of the day would goârehearse, dress while they lit the scene, shoot the scene. Sam Waterston and I would have lunch together. We would order vegan food and I would end my meal with a vegan chocolate cupcake. In the afternoons, we would meet to discuss the script for the next week, and then we would keep filming. We were usually out by eight to ten at night.
Over the course of five years, I transformed from a round-faced little girl with a blond bob to a more curvaceous, small-waisted, deeper-voiced grown woman with long blond hair. I grew up as Serena Southerlyn. We grew up together. When you play a character over the course of years, you can become indistinguishable. The show and
Serena became part of me.
Law & Order
changed me, but I did my fair share of changing
Law & Order,
too.
When I came on the show, I was appalled at the Amish-looking, stiff gray suits we were supposed to wear. All the women were dressed down to look sexless and androgynous, their natural beauty stifled, and I wasn't interested in that at all. They would show me these suits I had to wear, and I would say, “No way, I am not wearing that.” I would wear red lipstick, and they would tell me that a lawyer wouldn't wear red lipstick. The weekend I got my bangs cut, you would have thought I'd chopped off my own head. The entire production team was in an uproar.
Bangs? A lawyer wouldn't wear bangs! Cute blond bangs? Call the Marines! She cut her bangs!
Were they worried the show would be cancelled because Serena Southerlyn had
bangs?
I was pretty sure the show would be just fine.
I've always believed that a smart woman can still be sexy. Sarah Lawrence was filled with smart sexy women, and my stepmother embodied this principle. I grew up assuming that you could wear stiletto heels and a fitted Gucci suit and still be brilliantâin fact, you might even be more effective and powerful. I didn't understand why we had to be dressed down or made dowdy to be believable as lawyers.
By the end of my time there, the producers had gradually conceded my point. I gave a little; they gave a little. I felt like I brought some light to those dank dressing rooms. I insisted on being happy and the golden cage Dick had warned me about actually felt safe. I've never been afraid to live the off-kilter life of an actor, but of all the jobs I could have gotten in the context of the bohemian career I'd chosen, this had to be the least bohemian of them all. I began to feel balanced, even as part of me wanted to throw myself off balance again.
But as much as I gained, I also lost. Being in
Law & Order
left little time for anything or anyone else. None of my relationships lasted. They all imploded because the show was my priority, because I wasn't
ready, because no matter what I thought I wanted from love at the moment, nobody was perfect enough or supportive enough or romantic enough or in the right place at the right time. In other words, my love life was a mess. Work consumed me and I became so attached to the people on the show that I didn't really feel like I needed anyone else, even as I mechanically searched for Mr. Right. I had more money than I knew what to do with, a beautiful house, fame, and yet . . .
I might have stayed on
Law & Order
forever, but part of me was already thinking,
Is there something more out there for me?
I'd grown up, but in some ways I hadn't changed at all. I was still searching for something, and I was beginning to realize that maybe it wasn't professional success.