By Alex Witchel | Ladies Home Journal Magazine
Everybody Loves Raymond's Patricia Heaton
is proud of her breasts, happy to joke about her
marriage, and sanguine about one day leaving the
show that made her a star.
Motherhood and Hollywood
"You'd never think an actor would say
this," Patricia Heaton says, settling into a
booth at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills
Hotel, "but I'm sick of talking about
myself."
Maybe so, though no one seems sick of listening. In
addition to co-starring on the hit sitcom Everybody
Loves Raymond as beleaguered housewife Debra Barone,
permanently stuck in bicker mode with her
sportswriter husband and meddling in-laws, Heaton,
in the last few months, has become a best-selling
author. Her collection of essays, based on her own
life experiences, Motherhood and Hollywood: How to
Get a Job Like Mine, was published last fall and
Heaton has been talking about it, her show and
herself ever since.
She came to lunch during a hiatus week from
shooting Raymond, for which she has twice won an
Emmy Award for best actress in a comedy series, and
took full advantage of her freedom, drinking a
Campari and soda. As she talked, a waiter stood
tableside, engaged in what was perhaps the longest
steak tartare preparation on record, hanging on
every word Heaton said.
Maybe he was waiting to see if she would blow up
when asked about her famous contretemps about
plastic surgery. In her book, she scoffs at
Hollywood women for having it and lying about it.
As a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman
last fall, she alluded to an unnamed star who was
then on the cover of a fashion magazine who denied
having it. It just so happened that Michelle
Pfeiffer was on the cover of Harper's Bazaar that
month, and within hours, it seemed, Heaton was on
record as having apologized to the stunning movie
star. When asked about the incident at lunch,
Heaton gives a short, cold stare and says,
"We're not discussing any of that," in
the same tone she might use to discipline an unruly
child -- or perhaps, Ray Romano.
Soon enough, though, Heaton, 44, switches gears and
talks about her own plastic surgery, which has
included a tummy tuck (much needed, she says, after
her four sons were all delivered by cesarean) and
an accompanying breast lift. She also raises her
chin to show where some loose skin had been lifted.
She really does look terrific, thin and toned. She
is wearing a sleeveless black top and Burberry
plaid pants, which -- in the true test -- do not
amplify her behind. On the contrary, you can barely
find it.
"Plastic surgery is like the big elephant
sitting in the Hollywood living room," she
says. "Everyone does it and apparently, no one
is supposed to talk about it. I understand privacy,
but when women come up to me who've also had four
kids and cesareans and say 'My body's shot, but you
look so great,' I'm not going to lie to them. I
probably look better now than I have my whole life,
including when I was 15. Some people are cool with
the fact that their bodies bear witness to this
great thing they produced, their children, and I
understand that. But on a personal level, it makes
me feel better that my breasts are not down to my
knees when I'm undressed in front of my
husband."
"The fourth kid did me in," she says.
"But I also found that I do well with surgery.
I don't bleed or scar, and painkillers don't make
me nauseated. I could operate heavy machinery on
Percoset."
The mention of pills prompts her to pull from her
purse a small plastic bag marked "Lunch,"
filled with pills and capsules. "Herbs,"
she says, "something that helps process body
fat, another that's an appetite suppressant."
As she speaks, she is eating her way through the
steak tartare and a plate of French fries.
"This guy I go to named Avtar," she says,
"does the herbs and gives colonics. He's got
four kids, one of them plays tennis, and he's doing
a colonic and you're on the table looking at a big
map of your colon saying, 'How's your kid doing in
tennis?'" She laughs. "It's one of the
things that I love about Los Angeles, that that's
considered normal."
Life at Home
What's not normal in this company town, obsessed as
it is with showbiz, is that Heaton and her husband,
actor and producer David Hunt, don't let their boys
-- Sam, 9, John, 7, Joe, 5, and Danny, 4 -- watch
TV after 4 p.m. on weekdays. Not even Raymond.
"It's not appropriate for their age,
anyway," she says. "People will come up
and tell me the show is not for kids, and I say,
'No kidding.' That's why it's on at 9 at night,
which is when they should be in bed."
This discipline echoes her own Midwestern
upbringing in Bay Village, a Cleveland suburb. She
was the fourth of five children born to Chuck
Heaton, a sportswriter for the Cleveland Plain
Dealer, and his wife, Patricia. She comes from a
large and devout Catholic family, but, in a long
spiritual journey of her own, Heaton has chosen
Presbyterianism instead. Her children attend a
private Episcopal school (she's not exclusionary)
and when they come home each day, the first thing
they do is their homework, which she later checks.
The family eats dinner together at 5:30, the kids
play outside for an hour, then she reads aloud with
them before bedtime.
Between shepherding their schedules and shooting
her show, it doesn't sound like she gets much
private time with her husband. She holds up her
hand, forming a big zero. "That's his major
complaint," Heaton says. "Of course, if
he could cook, he would get sex a lot more
often." She smiles wryly. "We're supposed
to go out once a week but it doesn't happen. We do
go to therapy -- though if we stopped going and
used that hour to have coffee together, that might
help more."
The couple takes a break each summer at their home
outside Cambridge, England, where her husband is
from. An added bonus for Heaton is seeing her
mother-in-law, June Hunt, whom she adores. Her
father-in-law died six years ago.
"I just love her," Heaton says. "And
the kids can't get enough of her. She's the dream
mother." She stops herself. "The dream
mother-in-law," she amends. That goes to the
heart of what seems to be the greatest sorrow of
Heaton's life: She was 12 when her mother died of a
brain aneurysm.
"I was in seventh grade then," Heaton
says, "and there wasn't any grief counseling
or therapy or anti-depressants. I went to school
one day, and when I came home she was gone. Then,
literally, there was the wake, the funeral, and
then the next night my father was asking, 'Did you
get your homework done?' I think that's when I
started to feel that I was always on my own, every
man for himself. I'm not good at accepting help.
When it comes to accepting emotional support or
affection, I'm a little guarded and hardened to
that. My mother-in-law was with me during all four
of my births and when she was sitting next to me
holding my hand during the cesareans, well, I
craved that." She blushes. "It's almost
embarrassing."
It's not, of course. But this issue is central to
Heaton's innate struggle: the simultaneous need for
affection and hating herself for needing it.
Although she is smart and articulate, she is not
warm, and when she speaks of her feelings -- baldly
and fearlessly -- she does so without making eye
contact.
Her father remarried when she was 17, Heaton says,
to a woman who had never been married before.
"Part of the problem was that I hadn't
accepted my mother's death yet," she says.
"It was an adjustment for everyone, although I
think it was hardest on my stepmother, Cece. She's
a lovely person and now it's fine, we're all
adults. I don't feel anger toward anyone. But
still, that whole thing was a lot of where I got my
sense that, 'Okay, I'm on my own. Dad's remarried,
he'll be taken care of, one of my older sisters
became a nun, the other one got married -- they
were getting hooked into something else.'" She
sighs. "I've been in a lot of therapy for all
this."
As the mother of four boys, did she ever wish for a
girl to, in some way, bind her back to her mother?
She nods. "We're thinking now about adopting
or having foster children, and if we did, I would
look for a girl without a mother because I could
relate to that. I was not an easy kid. I was sort
of bratty and a big showoff. And I fear that will
be visited upon me as karmic justice." She
smiles, but not too much, as she starts on her
creme brulee.
More Patricia
Although her husband runs the couple's production
company and is busy developing future projects, it
must still feel touchy for her to be the main
breadwinner. She nods. "It could have been a
problem," she says carefully. "But
always, from the beginning, I insisted everything
be joint accounts, not separate. God's plan for us
right now is that I'm working, but that definitely
will change. Raymond will end in two years and we
don't know what will happen then. You see people
all the time who are on hit shows and then you
never hear from them again. So I never hold that
over my husband's head. Also, there is something in
actors that looks for change and is comfortable
with instability. I know for sure that all things
come to an end."
Although her marriage, for now, at least, is not
among them. "The first year was horrible and a
couple of years ago we were having doozies of
fights," she says. "My first, brief
marriage was also to an actor, which is why at my
second wedding, when I was going down the aisle
weeping and my friends all said, 'Oh, how
beautiful,' I just knew I was making the same
friggin' mistake over again and couldn't stop it.
But my husband and I have gotten into a groove and
I hope this is really who we are. He's been going
out of his way lately, taking more responsibility
with the kids. He used to go straight to the
computer in the morning while I was trying to find
the shoes, and his pitching in makes a huge
difference. Again, I find it difficult to be taken
care of and rarely acknowledge it, and every act he
does registers, but I also just need to verbally
acknowledge him and hug him." She laughs.
"It would be helpful if we touched once in a
while."
Of course, she could just as easily be referring to
her TV husband. Heaton claims great affection for
Ray Romano with whom, in addition to the show, she
also appears in Ford Motor Company's breast cancer
awareness ads. Her methods of expressing it,
however, aren't any warmer or fuzzier than Debra's
in their often contentious on-screen marriage.
"I'm always dissing Ray and making fun of him,
talking about his money," Heaton says.
"My decorator just did his house, which is
beautiful, tasteful and elegant, and I saw his
bedroom and said, 'I cannot picture Ray in this
room.' I feel like he's my brother. At the Emmys,
when he won, I was sobbing. I ruffled his hair
before he went up there and people said I was
trying to make him look bad. But no, it was like he
was my dog -- 'Good boy!' And anyway, it was just
one piece sticking up. It made him look adorable,
actually."
That dynamic -- for better or worse -- resonates
with millions of viewers. "People say, 'You
must have a tape recorder in my bedroom, we just
had that conversation,'" Heaton says.
"And I find it very easy to memorize the
scripts, which are so close to conversations my
husband and I have." Now that she is finding
harmony in her own marriage, however, it might not
be long until it spills over to the Romanos.
"Obviously, everything is heightened for
comedy," Heaton says. "But I would like
to do at least one episode where Debra and Raymond
really get along." 
