I'll Scream Later (No Series) (5 page)

W
HEN
I
THINK
of my childhood, so many days begin with Liz. Long blond curls bouncing, always laughing and smiling, loved bubble gum so much she wrote an essay about it one year.

Just as she was absorbed into my family, I was absorbed into hers. Sometimes it felt as if her father, Ted, had adopted me, and over the years I would often turn to him for advice, and at least once for financial help when I hit rough times in the acting world. Unless Liz was off on a day trip with my family, I’d go with them on Sundays for lunch and a swim at the country club.

The Tannebaums started taking me on many of their family vacations, which opened up a different world to me. I’m sure it helped them, too, since the family never really learned to sign though Liz was Deaf from birth.

Where my family was middle-class, Liz’s was not just well off but wealthy. I think when I first dreamed of movie-star houses, I imagined something like Liz’s house, a maid who lived with them and cooked for them. When they took me on vacations, it was for two or three weeks to Florida, Palm Springs, or Acapulco, where they bought another home. Most of the time, we stayed at the Princess Hotel on Revolcadero Beach, where Liz had her first French kiss.

We went to different schools until we were in third grade. That was the year I transferred to Wilmot Elementary School in Deer-field, Illinois, and my life changed. A lot of other Deaf kids were there, and I began to seriously learn signing. All of a sudden I had a group of friends who understood everything I said and, more important, all the things I was feeling. That’s also where they gave me my name sign.

I guess the easiest way to understand a name sign is to think of it like a special nickname. Instead of your name spelled out by hand, it’s a blend of your name, usually the first letter, and your personality in some way. Mine is an
M
but up by the cheek because I have dimples.

I had an identity. Finally! I thought it was the coolest thing. My mother made up Liz’s name sign—which takes the sign for “I love you” and blends it with a
Z
in the air, the movement you do when you sign the letter
Z.

I’
M NOT EXAGGERATING
when I say that Liz and I spent almost all of our time together. Every Saturday while I went to rehearsal at the Center on Deafness, Liz would sit and watch until it was over so we could go play. One day the director walked over and asked if Liz wanted to take on a role.

She remembers, “I was very shy. The play was
Peter Pan,
and of course Marlee had the lead. But the director, Kathy, asked if I wanted to play one of the Lost Boys. I was nine years old. When Marlee saw that, she was like ‘Yes, yes, yes, go for it.’ And so I started getting involved not just in that play but ICODA [International Center on Deafness and the Arts]. My first time onstage with spotlights, the moment freaked me out, but I also loved it and I thank Marlee for that.”

We were forever getting into trouble together, and as friends do, at times we fought. Our roughest year was our junior year of high school—we didn’t speak for almost the entire year.

Now I can’t even imagine how we managed that when we couldn’t usually stand to go for a day without talking. If we couldn’t see each other, we’d spend hours on the phone—using the TTY, a text telephone system that was really the early version of instant messaging today. But both of us can be stubborn, and that year was one of those times.

When I think of what caused our rift, I remember we were running with two different crowds, and Liz didn’t want to get involved with mine. As Liz remembers it, the split happened over the rights to share her locker:

“Before and after school all the Deaf kids would hang out in one corner of the schoolyard, near where the bus picked us up and dropped us off. My locker was right there, but Marlee’s was upstairs way on the other side of the building. So I was like ‘Use mine, use mine.’ But I had a friend named Mitch, who was a sweetheart, would do anything for me, that Marlee just did not connect with. He also was using my locker. To Marlee it was a big thing and she got angry and said, ‘You’re not my friend.’ So for a year, even though we were in the same class, we wouldn’t look at each other or talk to each other.”

But one day we looked at each other and started to laugh. I’m glad I didn’t win that argument. I know now I was being manipulative and ridiculous. Liz and I made up right before lunch, so we skipped class and went to her car and got so stoned. We’ve had our ups and downs since then, but eventually it always comes back to the connection we have that just can’t be broken. When I think of it now, maybe that was the first time I felt Liz might like someone more than me, and that would be a loss I couldn’t take.

That day, we went back to class still incredibly stoned. Liz ended up confessing to one of the counselors, which immediately meant that I was going to be involved somewhere along the way.

I remember I was in seventh period and the dean of students came into my classroom, looked at me, and motioned for me to come with him. We went to the office of the teacher who ran the Deaf-education program. She sat looking at me, the school’s police officer was looking at me. Everybody was looking at me.

“Were you smoking?” the police officer asked, using the universal sign for taking a toke off a reefer.

“No.”

“I’m going to ask you one more time, did you smoke?”

My heart was out the window and the school cop just stood there with his arms crossed. I didn’t know if he was disappointed in me or if he thought it was no big deal.

They turned my purse upside down and rifled through everything, but no drugs were there. Then the dean came over and sniffed my hair. He was furious.

“Okay, fine, we’re going to take you downstairs to the nurse’s office, and we’re going to see if you smoked or not.”

I remember walking down this long hallway, passing all the counselors’ offices, one by one. Then finally we get to the nurse’s and walk in, and Liz is on one of the cots. She looks at me and starts, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I had to tell, I had to, I’m so so sorry.”

I thought, I am so busted. My heart was racing, I was trying to figure out how I could get out of this one. The nurse took my blood pressure and said to everyone in the room, “Yes, she’s high.”

At that moment I blurted out something that I would have given anything to take back, it still bothers me all these years later.

“My father hit me this morning.”

Instantly they dropped the entire pot investigation and instead called social services to report possible abuse. The county workers called my mom and dad, came by and talked to them. It was horrible. My mom and I had had a fight that morning—lots of yelling, nothing else—and my dad had tried to intervene. He never in my life hit me, ever. And I still so regret that day.

While my family was going through that trauma, Liz was suspended from school for three days since she had confessed. Her parents were so angry at me. I worried that they wouldn’t forgive me.

But like everything else along the way, we would weather this, too.

F
ROM THE BEGINNING
, having Liz there has always just made things better. A confidant. Someone to talk to who understood me. As I got older and particularly when I began traveling to work on film and TV projects, Liz would often come to stay for a while.

When I went to shoot
Children of a Lesser God
in Saint John, New Brunswick, Liz came and stayed with me for about three weeks. When I would make the talk-show circuit for various projects, Liz often came along—she was there with me in the greenroom, in the audience. When I joined the cast of
The L Word,
she flew to Vancouver, where they film the series, to spend time with me.

We’ve always been there for the important moments in each other’s life. She is a godmother to my children: I am a godmother to hers. I was maid, then matron, of honor at her weddings; she was the matron of honor at mine—and that was just two months after her second son, Luke, was born.

When the doctor told Liz her first baby was about to deliver, she called me in L.A. and said, “Marlee, I’m having the baby tonight.” I packed and ran to the airport and got on a plane. Liz has the shortest, easiest deliveries of anyone, so by the time I got to the hospital Morris was eight hours old.

I came a few days early when Luke was due; I didn’t want to miss it. She says, “Marlee was with me the whole week before. The night before Luke was born, I was exhausted, but there was such good, positive energy between us we decided to all go out to dinner to one of Marlee’s favorite places to eat, Bob Chinn’s Crab House. The next morning I knew it was time to go. So I hit the bed and said, ‘It’s time.’ Marlee ran downstairs and screamed for Mark, my husband. She called my parents to let them know. When we got to the hospital, Marlee grabbed a wheelchair for me. She was there with me all the way. And when Luke was born, Marlee was just filled with emotion, holding him and crying.”

When Liz’s father was dying, once again I was on a plane to be with her. I got to his building—walked inside, took the elevator, walked into his house and past his bodyguard, and began looking for Liz. She walked into the foyer and stopped. One look at her and I knew. We held each other and cried.

We have had sad times, but we’ve had many more happy, silly times. Going to Club Med together, two bikini-clad chicks who wanted to play. And sometimes we’ll just think of the craziest things and we can’t stop laughing.

I still have a whole circle of Deaf friends in Chicago who are dear to me—Barb, Wendy, Mark, Phil, Paula, who lives in California now, and many more—and sometimes they’ll come out here to be with me for special occasions or just to visit, but the head of that posse is always Liz.

Our birthdays are both in August—me on the twenty-fourth
and Liz on the twenty-sixth—and we try, when we can, to celebrate together the way we did when we were younger. Any significant event in my life she is there for, and vice versa. But it is the little moments, those more organic connections, that I treasure most.

If there’s an earthquake, it’s hard to know who will text the “You okay? Did you feel it?” message first. BlackBerries have made our conversations across the miles seamless. It only takes a few words, like “I’d laugh very hard if…” that mean nothing to anyone else to send either of us into spasms of laughter.

One New Year’s Eve Liz was out here spending a few days with me. I had just miscarried my second pregnancy. She was supporting me and doing her best to cheer me up. We engaged in one of our favorite sports—smoking cigars. We sat on my porch as the sun went down, slowing savoring our smokes and old memories. A band was next door, amps outside, lots of electrical cords snaking around. One of us wondered if we touched the electricity, would it turn us into cartoon characters, our hair frizzed out, exploded cigars in our mouths. We didn’t stop laughing until tears were streaming down our faces.

Liz is someone who remembers the five-year-old me. I can still be a crazy kid around her and for a few moments let everything else in life—the fears, uncertainties, worries—fall away.

A
CONFESSION
—
MY FIRST
true love in the world of music was Billy Joel.

I was all of ten and I fell hard. For some reason, what minimal residual hearing I had could pick up his voice—at least a little.

Both my brothers liked his music, so it was on at the house a lot. After a lot of “Please, please, please…,” at some point my brother Marc had written out all the words to “Just the Way You Are,” “The Stranger,” Movin’ Out,” and “My Life” for me.

I learned the lyrics, seriously studying them. Then I used the lyrics to “hear” the music, the way a person using a cochlear implant has to learn what sounds are what.

We had this old cassette tape recorder, and I remember pressing the
PLAY
and
REWIND
buttons over and over, what felt like hundreds of times a day, and at what I’m sure were ear-piercing decibels for everyone else.

I could feel the vibrations, the rhythm, and the words just moved me, especially “Just the Way You Are,” which, not a surprise I’m sure, was my favorite.

For hours, I would sign, sing, and dance along, until I could do it perfectly in sync with the song.

One of my favorite memories is of the night my brother Eric and Gloria took me to a Billy Joel concert when he played in Chicago in 1975. Somehow we’d gotten phenomenal seats, in the first row, and I just sucked it all in—the sound, the concert, the performance, everything.

I never imagined then that I would ever get to meet him. But after
Children of a Lesser God,
our paths would cross.

The first time I met him was in 1988. Someone who knew what a fan I was arranged for me and Richard Dean Anderson, who was my boyfriend at the time, to have dinner with Billy at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. I feel sorry for everyone else at our table, we just talked and talked for hours.

In 1989, I got to do a cameo in his video for “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” And I still have a funny drawing he did for me, with a piano and his profile, for my thirtieth birthday.

But one of my best Billy Joel memories was a
Sesame Street
segment we did together in the fall of 1988.

It opened with Billy and me pushing an old piano up to the trash can where Oscar the Grouch lived.

The piano was broken, Billy explained, and he was there to give it to Oscar. The only thing the green grouch had to do was to listen to this love song. So Billy played and sang, and I signed and sang, an Oscarized version of “Just the Way You Are.”

Signing for Billy Joel

Nearly all of my friends have their own Billy Joel moment—usually it happens in a fast car with the radio blasting. Here’s how Carla Hacken, who was my agent for years and remains a good friend, remembers it:

“Riding in a car with Marlee is hair-raising! Hair-raising! At some point she had a convertible of some sort or I did, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been with her in a car where—you know, Billy Joel is not somebody you think of in incredibly loud decibels, heavy metal maybe, but Billy Joel…at crazy decibels driving at crazy speeds. We’re talking or singing or both. It was just freaky, but great.”

Although I would love other music and other performers over the years—James Taylor and Garth Brooks top that list—Billy Joel will always be the first musician I love. I wouldn’t trade my
Sesame Street
moment for anything, so thanks, Oscar.