At Frank E. Campbell's funeral chapel on Madison Avenue two weeks
ago, friends and colleagues gathered to remember the actor Peter Boyle,
who died on Dec. 12 at 71. They told stories about his impishness, his
artfulness, his liberal fervor. Judy Collins sang "Amazing Grace."
In the pews Patricia Heaton couldn't stop sobbing. For the nine seasons
she had played Debra Barone on the sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond," Mr.
Boyle had played her Neanderthal father-in-law. They passed much of
their downtime jousting about politics.
More conservative than he, she would call him a "pinko flag-burning
Commie." He would counter, "So tell me about this Christian God of
yours." Feeling unarmed for such battles, Ray Romano, the show's star,
said he usually hustled off "to see what the new doughnut was at the
craft table." He needn't have. Their differences were serious, but the
jibes were good-natured: tokens of closeness, not distance. And now he
was gone.
And not just him. In the nearly two years since "Raymond," one of
America's most popular television shows, went off the air, a lot of the
former givens have disappeared. ABC toyed with but chose not to
broadcast a new sitcom Ms. Heaton developed; a documentary that she
produced (and that her husband, David Hunt, directed) had trouble
finding a distributor.
"It was like I had been the queen of a planet where everyone loved me
and did everything I asked, and suddenly I was back home on Earth," she
said with a laugh over breakfast recently. "I wasn't worshiped anymore."
She was speaking, in part, about the instant downgrading of her
self-image from celebrity mother to plain old mom, complete with soccer
schedules and puky laundry. (She and Mr. Hunt have four boys: 13, 11, 9
and 7.) But she was also speaking about the difficulty of finding
satisfying film and television projects at 48, a difficulty that has led
her to risk a return to the theater, which she pretty much ditched 16
years ago as one might ditch an abusive lover. In defiance of the usual
Hollywood patterns, she is appearing not in a diva role, but as part of
the ensemble cast of Theresa Rebeck's new play "The Scene," which opens
off Broadway on Jan. 11 at Second Stage Theater.
For those familiar only with Ms. Heaton's light comedy or political
profile, her gale-force performance and her gleeful way with the
obscenity-packed dialogue may come as a surprise. This is, after all,
the same woman who walked out of the 2003 American Music Awards
telecast, before her scheduled appearance, in disgust over the language
and behavior of some presenters.
It's also the woman who in 1998 became honorary co-chairwoman of
Feminists for Life, a group whose goals include economic and social
support for women who "refuse to choose" abortion. Ms. Heaton's campus
speeches and Washington lobbying resulted in the occasional snub from
strangers (and the argumentative attention of friends like Mr. Boyle),
but she managed to avoid the organized wrath of the left. More recently,
however, she has found that the protective varnish of sitcom stardom
degrades very quickly and that the ideal of affection, or even civility,
among people who disagree is not widely upheld.
Her latest skirmish began several months ago when an industry friend
expressed his concerns about embryonic stem-cell research. In Missouri,
he explained, voters were considering a constitutional amendment that
would permit the harvesting of stem cells from donated eggs and aborted
fetuses. Because of the close race for control of Congress, the proposal
drew national attention; the Democratic candidate for the Senate
supported the amendment, while the Republican opposed it.
"I told my friend: 'I don't want to do anything about this. It's not
even my state,' " Ms. Heaton recalled. "But he said: 'I just feel like I
can't sit by. I have to answer for my actions at the end of my life.'
And I'm like, 'Well, thanks a lot, now I have to too, because you told
me about it.'
"In the end," she said wistfully, while nevertheless digging into a
plate of blueberry pancakes, "you're responsible for the knowledge you
have."
So she agreed to tape a 12-second message for a fund-raising video, in
which she said: "Amendment 2 actually makes it a constitutional right
for fertility clinics to pay women for eggs. Low-income women will be
seduced by big checks, and extracting donor eggs is an extremely
complicated, dangerous and painful procedure."
But the video, which also included St. Louis sports figures, turned into
a Mel Gibson-size nightmare when it got onto the Internet and, without
her knowledge, was then shown as an advertisement on television during
Game 4 of the World Series. It didn't help that it looked so cheesy or
that it began, inexplicably, with the actor Jim Caviezel (who had played
Jesus in Mr. Gibson's "Passion of the Christ") staring weirdly at the
camera and speaking in Aramaic.
"Oh my God, it was a disaster," Ms. Heaton acknowledged. "And then there
was the whole Michael J. Fox aspect."
Also unbeknownst to Ms. Heaton, Mr. Fox, his Parkinsonian tremors
clearly visible, had just appeared in an ad supporting the amendment.
Because of the timing, her comments looked like a response to his and
became associated with Rush Limbaugh's suggestion that Mr. Fox was
faking his symptoms for sympathy.
Ms. Heaton was appalled, she said. "Not only was the ad so bad, but why
was it put on? It took the focus off of what we're talking about, which
is very serious, and made it look like a feud or something, a Hollywood
tabloid subject, a media thing of pitting people against each other."
The Internet floodgates opened. Web sites weighed in on "Fox v. Heaton"
and generally eviscerated her. On YouTube.com, April Winchell, a
California radio personality, posted a 38-second remix of Ms. Heaton's
clip. It starts out saying, "I'm Patricia Heaton, and I'm a religious
zealot who thinks she knows what's best for everybody" and gets uglier
from there: "I could give you the whole story, but I'd rather beat you
over the head with my Bible. And besides it's not like stem-cell
research makes you look younger. I mean, if it did, I'd be all over it."
That last dig was a reference to Ms. Heaton's plastic surgeries, about
which she has been unusually candid. In her 2002 book, "Motherhood and
Hollywood" (Villard), less a celebrity memoir than a collection of
spiky, self-deprecating essays, she described herself as a "5-foot-2
runt" whose stomach, "after four C-sections and too many years of
nursing," had become "a big old wrinkly suede bag hanging down," and
whose breasts "had to be folded up like origami" to fit into strapless
gowns. Now she looks toned and lovely.
If Ms. Heaton has made her surgery fair game, her political views are
not so easily pigeonholed. Some derive from the "seamless garment"
doctrine of her "devout Catholic upbringing" (she opposes both abortion
and the death penalty) while others are clearly her own. (She supports
gay rights and the use of most birth control.) And she is not, in
person, prudish or judgmental. Most of her friends have had abortions,
she said, and they're still her friends.
It isn't so much her views that cause her trouble as her unwillingness
to finesse them for public consumption. She is compulsively honest,
though she feels that's not so much a virtue as "an illness, like
Tourette's." Even her more extreme positions are stated without hedging:
If it were up to her, she said, there would be no abortion for any
reason. But she offers such thoughts with a sense of helplessness, as if
she were trapped by the implications of her core principles.
And then there is her un-wingnutlike desire for conciliation. As soon as
she realized what had happened, she sent Mr. Fox a message saying that
she was sorry and that she prayed for his recovery. He responded
graciously (the amendment passed with 51 percent of the vote) and later
said, "If we can have a healthy dialogue about issues that people see
differently, that's marvelous."
That's a big if. Most of the dialogue, Ms. Heaton said, has been brutal:
"People saying they hope my kids get sick and die so I'll know what it's
like to need medical research." Colleagues have attacked her at industry
functions; gossips claiming to know her have described her as a horrible
person. A theater Web site recently ran a discussion thread on
boycotting "The Scene." And castmates have told Ms. Heaton that their
friends were saying things like: "You're working with her? You know what
her thing is, right?"
Ms. Rebeck, the playwright, knew and didn't care. "That's flawed
thinking," she said of the boycott chatter, "like what happened with the
Dixie Chicks. And I would hate to think of liberals as the new
conservatives. I don't agree with all of Patty's politics, but she's not
the kind of political thinker who drives you crazy with their solipsism,
and I think the country might be in better shape if we could engage with
each other in the way she does. Anyway, she's pretty great in the play"
- she called Ms. Heaton's comic timing "something I dream about" and her
emotional availability "staggering" - "so that's where I come down."
There's a connection between responding credibly to a fictional
situation and responding to real-world issues. But Ms. Heaton mistrusts
that connection, even in herself, because she has seen how easily actors
can manipulate emotions and turn an embarrassing need for attention into
a cause.
"Being an actor, I love what we do," she said, "but I don't have that
high a regard for it. And when embarrassing people, myself included,
talk about their views, you just have to laugh. Who cares? And yet
somebody's given you a pulpit, so you do it. On the other hand, you can
do a lot of good without going on CNN, and I totally respect actors who
never discuss their views. I wish I was one of them. Too late now. I'm
trying to get back in the box."
It's hard to see how she can do that while simultaneously exploring more
and deeper means of expression. On "Raymond" she took a character who
was something of a cipher in the pilot episode and filled her in with
despair; her anger at being stuck with all the domestic chores was so
visceral that it often seemed like a brick lobbed through the screen.
Mr. Romano said that's what got Ms. Heaton the job; it also won her two
Emmys. She says she drew that anger directly from her experience as a
wife in the middle passage - "the seething years" - of marriage.
But there was only so far she could take such insights within the
confines of the sitcom format. "The Scene," which is billed as a "brutal
comedy," is what might have happened if "Raymond" had been written for
HBO and doctored by Dickens. In it Ms. Heaton plays Stella, a talk-show
booker whose marriage to an out-of-work actor, played by Tony Shalhoub,
spirals out of control. All of Stella's carefully balanced
disappointments and color-coded accommodations collapse in the face of
something very much like evil.
Ms. Heaton knew instantly upon reading the play that she had to take the
role. She understood Stella subcutaneously; when one of the characters
described her as a "frigid Nazi priestess," she felt it was almost a
compliment. But she also understood the play's unflinching moral
outlook. Though it is set in high-rise Manhattan instead of a Cleveland
suburb, it felt like home to her, with its portrait of people who know
life is a battle between right and wrong but who don't always have the
will to join the right team.
Ms. Heaton's parents left no doubt as to which team was which. They
attended Mass every day, and their taste in interior decoration ran to
pictures of St. Lucy holding her eyeballs on a platter. There wasn't
much room for young Patty's "Look at me!" demands for attention, but her
childhood was marked by nothing much worse than benign neglect until she
was 12, when her mother died. The resulting flare of grief seemed to
etch the pattern of her mother's standards on her forever, and also her
distance from them.
In college, and especially during eight subsequent years of hapless
struggle in New York, that distance became a kind of no-man's-land she
had to traverse daily, from bad job to binge to church and back again.
The churches varied: Catholic, Calvinist, New Age cult. (She now attends
Sunday school, but not services, at a Presbyterian church.) Nothing
closed the gap, not an early marriage or quick divorce, not sinning or
atoning or jobs modeling shoes. By the time she left for Los Angeles in
1990, her "slightly annoying Ohio enthusiasm" had been expunged, and she
was "emotionally battered."
What finally helped was meaningful work, marrying Mr. Hunt and the huge
responsibility of caring for children. ("And thank God I found somebody
good to do it for me," she said. "I mean, I wouldn't hire just any
Swedish nanny.") The chaos of otherness calmed her down, brought her
closer to her parents' ideal of the sacrificial life, of "dying to
yourself." But living that ideal when you are an actor can be somewhat
contradictory, which is pretty much the heart of Ms. Heaton's artistic
and personal drama as she awakes from a "16-year coma." What is she good
for? What is she called on to do?
She knows she often flubs the answers. "But I take comfort," she said,
"in noticing that all the people that God chose had problems and
failings: David, Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene." She spoke these names
without special deference, as if they were pals from high school glee
club. "God reached out to them specifically. And I've always felt
closest to God when I'm on a stage. I guess it's really useful to be
damaged in this business, because it makes it possible for you to
express things - and get paid for it."
She laughed at herself. "Though it can," she admitted, "be inconvenient
in real life."
