By the time I started my daily calls with Roy, Lou, Sam and of course, beautiful Jackie, all knew what was up, and each of them had their own distinctive reactions to my process with Roy.
Lou was cautiously optimistic.
He seemed genuinely happy for me that things were taking this kind of a positive turn — but I remember that Lou always listened with such reserve when I’d talk to him on the phone about my sessions with Roy. I’m sure it was because I could get so defensive about Eloise, and clearly, my love for her often took me into a black hole where I didn’t see what was really happening around me. So I believe Lou was just trying to allow my experiences to unfold without his feelings or emotions mixing in too much — which I can only imagine was very difficult for him, all things considered.
But I was still in process. So I felt very guarded and fearful with Lou at times, and I felt like I had to fight with myself as much as anyone to hold on to this allusive belief that I was on the verge of something taking shape for my career. As a result, Lou could only offer up very small bits of his perspective for fear of how I might interpret his words.
I had made it very clear to Lou that I needed to do things on my own — and I know now that a lot of the defensive energy I was trying to bridle and control inside of me came from my mixed up feelings about how my career could end up impacting my marriage again. All I knew is that I wasn’t going to let myself drift back into that hiding place of mine inside of my marriage ever again… Even though pushing ahead on my own didn’t always feel right to me either.
But I could always see how hard Lou was trying to be supportive of me when we’d talk, and I could tell how deeply he wanted to believe in Roy and Ira. I loved Lou so much for that.
Lou was leading us both with his courage while everything between us was still fully loaded with fears and countless unknowns. When I think about some of our daily calls now, I’m amazed at how honest and brave we could be when we’d talk. We were living apart, and we were right in the middle of writing a new story about “us” — which was still quite complicated for either of us to imagine.
Even if you could eliminate the Sam factor, or erase the past few years of the constant struggle we’d endured, the fact is, Lou and I were practically starting over as two individuals who simply shared one very complex and tricky history. We were attempting to reinvent every part of our lives as a man and a woman – and, as husband and wife – while we were physically apart, and, while we were both still healing from some very painful life experiences.
Sam, on the other hand, was incredibly evasive.
We only communicated through texts at first — and his texts were typically awful. When I told him that Roy was talking to me nightly and that the reviews of the scripts were going really well, Sam was dismissive, and would text things like, “don’t get ur hopes up 2 much.”
While I appreciated the fact that Sam had been through his own dramas and rejections in Hollywood, it made me feel frustrated that he wasn’t willing to join me in my optimism. In fact, Sam didn’t seem to want to believe that Roy’s calls were important, or that they meant much to the overall sale of the series.
The one and only time we spoke on the phone, I remember Sam telling me that “agents don’t talk to their talent” like Roy was talking to me. He even suggested that Roy was just personally interested in me — which felt laughable to me, yet it also kind of made me sick to my stomach. I was so tired of not trusting my instincts at that point that Sam’s words about Roy’s interest in me felt like the kind of low blows my soul couldn’t take anymore…
But part of the reason I trusted Roy so much was that we seemed like the most unlikely pair, and the differences in our personalities made it clear that we found our greatest respect and admiration for one another through our love of telling stories. For me at least, my reality and my fiction didn’t blur together with Roy the way they did with Sam because Roy was just focusing on the business side of things with me in my mind. But Sam persisted on this matter.
“It should just be business,” he’d say, “because when business and personal get crossed, you can’t trust it. That’s when people get hurt.”
Ummm… Ya think?
But I often wondered if Sam was just trying to keep me from getting ahead of things. Based on conversations that we had when I was still writing the scripts, Sam repeatedly told me how you can never count on things to work out the way you think they will when you’re writing for television. He warned me that each episode I wrote could change ten times before it finally goes into production and that you simply can’t get attached to anything you do or think in Hollywood if you want to be a pro. You have to be aloof and above it all, and you have to be smart.
I recall that Sam complimented me many times on how easily I took criticisms and suggestions from him — he said I was a pleasure to work with because I was “creatively open.” But he did warn me a few times that it would be very easy to “crush” someone like me in Hollywood because I was all artist.
So I remember wondering if Sam’s flat and measured responses to my excitement over my calls with Roy were nothing more than the way that a professional writer sees the landscape. Maybe Sam was right to be cold and pessimistic. Or. Maybe Sam was trying to protect me from my fiction this time by not joining me in it anymore…
But Jackie was perfect.
She lived every moment with me as if she was connected to Eloise, too! Every time I had a great call with Roy, I’d either write Jackie an email recap, or she’d take me to lunch, and I’d jabber her ear off. She was honestly in it up to her eyeballs with me, and I remember feeling so thankful to have her friendship, support, and belief. There was nothing I couldn’t share with Jackie, and so talking to her was as free to me as saying a prayer.
Jackie was my favorite person to talk to about my calls with Roy!
So when Roy contacted me one afternoon, and said that he wanted to see if I could fly to LA to meet with his original series development partner (let’s call her “Lana”), Jackie was my first call. Roy had told me all about Lana many times, and I knew how important she was to Roy — personally and professionally. And I knew that getting Lana’s “buy-in” on the series was critical. Roy had been trying for weeks to schedule a chunk of time for Lana to meet with me, but her schedule was always crammed, and she was often flying somewhere to meet with someone important.
But Roy had discovered a tiny window in her schedule, and he wanted to fill it with a face-to-face meeting with me. Lana had already read my series summary and the pilot, and she told Roy she really liked it. But Roy believed that once Lana met me, and heard me talk about all of my thoughts and plans for Eloise, she’d completely fall in love with me – and the project.
And once Lana was in love, the next step would be meeting Ira. Lana was one of Ira’s favorite story gurus, and getting her attention almost guaranteed me a very warm and welcoming audience with Ira.
