Best of all, Matt had a great attitude about Hollywood. He got a kick out of it, but wasn’t overly impressed by it, either. It’s a unique quality that I’d been hoping to find in a partner.
When Matt moved to LA, he didn’t have a job at first, but then he found employment as an IT guy. The fact that he kept going from job to job, though—comments like “They’re all idiots” and “I can’t work in that environment anymore” kept coming up—was something I probably should not have turned a blind eye to at the time. But I was busy myself, and more and more I realized I needed somebody to be with me at events like the awards that I hosted or various stand-up gigs around the country. I’d ask Matt to come with me to these jobs, and he did because I think he sensed my need to have a supportive presence with me. But it admittedly caused problems with him keeping jobs back home.
I really felt our relationship was working, though. One day, on a wonderful vacation in Mexico, we were in a beachfront hut—romantic, calm, beautiful—when Matt turned to me and said, “You know, Kathy, I love you and you mean the world to me. I’m so happy to be with you, and I feel that you’ve made my life better.”
Matt often said loving things like that. “I love you, too,” I said.
“I’d like to know if you would be my wife.”
I was completely unprepared for this. “Are you doing a bit?” I joked.
He laughed and said, “No!”
“Seriously? You’re asking me, or is this a bit?”
“No, I am not doing a bit!”
We were both laughing hard now, and then I said, “Did you ask my dad yet?”
“No.”
“You’re supposed to ask my dad first.”
“I don’t want to call your dad.”
“Well you have to. That’s the rule.”
The whole thing was light and fun, and we just kept laughing about the formality of marriage proposals, and then I said, “Yes, I would like to marry you!” Pause. “But you have to call my dad.”
We went back to LA. Matt called my dad, and Dad made some joke about somebody finally taking me off his back, and that was the start of our engagement. Since I wasn’t inclined to have a typical wedding, I came up with an idea from an Oprah segment where a couple got a free wedding by promoting all the vendors on all the place cards at the tables. Well, I could afford a wedding, so getting a free one was pointless. But I always felt that shelling out tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, on a one-day party was a waste. What if I took the money I would have spent on a nuptials bash, donated it to charity instead, and then got people to sponsor the wedding?
I got the venue, the booze, the cake, everything donated, and in return these people got publicity because the wedding was covered by People magazine and Entertainment Tonight, and I talked about it everywhere I could. I then turned around and wrote a check to amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, for $50,000, and requested all guests donate to them directly rather than give me gifts. In addition to being romantic and fun, the day also benefited an important organization.
Again with Brooke and looking kind of gay. God help me, I married the wrong person.
I made Brooke Shields my maid of honor, because her celebrity would help the charity tie-in cause. “Are you sure you want my face to be the last face you see as a single woman?” she responded, when I asked her to play this role.
The wedding party. On the right is Matt’s best man. On the left is my best man.
“If I can get you a great loaner Richard Tyler dress, then yes, I’m sure.” What I meant was, if I could tell People magazine that model Brooke Shields would be wearing a Richard Tyler cocktail dress (People eats that shit up), then I was one step closer to getting a publication to cover it. By the way, both my beautiful wedding dress and Brooke’s black cocktail bridesmaid dress were designed by Richard Tyler. She got to keep hers. I had to give mine back.
Of course, Brooke being Brooke, she wanted to throw a bridal shower for me, even though I told her she didn’t have to do anything but show up on my wedding day looking beautiful. With only a week’s notice, she decided to host a shower for me at Chado Tea Room, with tea and scones and all things girly. Well, it was so D-list, it cracked me up. Get this: two people showed up: my hair and makeup person Lisa, and my mom. I thought it was awesome, really more a “luncheon” than anything as high and mighty as a “shower.” But Brooke felt terrible. “Everybody I invited was unavailable!” she said.
Dad walking me down the aisle. Who knows what inappropriate joke he just cracked.
I sort of couldn’t believe it. “You called people up personally and they said no?”
“I know,” she said dejectedly.
“Well, that’s a testament to how people feel about me,” I said, and we all laughed.
February 18, 2001, was the big day. We held the wedding at a restaurant on the top floor of a building in Hollywood, and it was really casual and fun, just like I’d hoped. I loved the tongue-in-cheek elements, like walking down the aisle to Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian,” and Bill Maher toasting about how he hates marriage and thought I was marrying Matthew Modine. But Brooke rocked her toast as only Brooke could, saying how she felt Matt was this great calming figure in my life, and brought out my best side. People magazine and ET were thrilled with the celebrities in attendance: Jenny McCarthy, Camryn Mannheim, Eric Idle, Jane Krakowski, the cast of Suddenly Susan. The food was wonderful—although the cliché is true, neither Matt nor I had a bite of any of it—my dad gave a funny speech, and I was surrounded by my friends and loved ones. Plus, when Matt and I got home, after hitting a drive-thru to eat something, we discovered Brooke and her husband Chris had surprised us by putting rose petals all over the bed. It was undeniably romantic and gorgeous.
The first years of married life with Matt were, I have to say, blissfully happy. We got along great, and even when we didn’t, we were able to talk about our problems and come to agreements. He wasn’t a screamer. He’d be bright and rational about it. Our disagreements were hardly fights.
There were red flags, though, that I wish I’d paid more attention to, like Matt’s work situation and his inability with money. After he quit his last job, he started expressing an interest in opening his own computer/IT consulting business. We had a pretty serious discussion about it one night. I told him it was obvious this was really his dream, and that it seemed he was better suited being in business for himself rather than working someplace for someone else.
“How about this,” I said. “I will foot the bill for your new business entirely for a year. We’ll build you an office downstairs in the house, and I’ll do everything I can to support you.”
For a year or so it didn’t bother me that he wasn’t going to a regular job job, because he was ostensibly starting his business, most of his clients being friends of mine I had hooked him up with. Plus, with Suddenly Susan in the past, I was taking more road gigs, and he could accompany me because he was making his own hours.
Matt’s mother, however, wasn’t so sure about him starting his own business. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said to me once.
“Why?” I said.
“Matt needs structure. If he’s just running his own business and accountable to no one but clients, that’s not enough structure.”
“Well, I believe in him and think he can do it.”
I thought, if it doesn’t work after a year, he could go back to an in-house job. But what was beginning to worry me was that he could never seem to amass any kind of savings. Sometimes he’d get mad that being on the road with me didn’t allow him to service his clients properly. I’d agree and then he wouldn’t go on the next trip. But after a month I’d ask him if he’d saved anything. I was covering at least 95 percent of our expenses. He’d say, “I have eighty dollars in the bank.”
He was charging his clients $100 an hour. He’d tell me he was working five hours a day. He’d have made $2,500 that week. Where was the money, I’d ask?
He never had an answer. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he’d say. “I’m not good with money.” This was such a foreign concept to me, being an adult and not knowing the basics about how to manage money.
I suppose I knew he wasn’t good with money because I had gotten a different call from his mother before we got married, about his car. She told me then that Matt didn’t have good enough credit to get a loan for his car, so she’d cosigned, but then Matt began defaulting on his car payments and it was beginning to affect her credit. This surprised me, because while I knew Matt wasn’t making much money, I certainly thought it was enough to make car payments.
“I thought you should know this,” Matt’s mother said to me, “because I don’t think Matt realizes that it made my interest payments on my house much higher. After you marry him, this is going to become your problem,” she joked.
I said, “Well, I’m sorry he did that to you, but I’m not going to co-sign a car for him. I can’t have him or anyone destroying my hard-earned credit rating.” It’s at those moments that I can’t help but hear my finance-savvy mom’s voice in my head saying, “Keep your money separate. If he’s bad with money, don’t commingle it. Use your head.” I didn’t tell Maggie about this, but I’m sure her radar would have gone off louder than mine did at the time.
When I confronted Matt about the car payments, he was remorseful, saying, “I didn’t realize,” but he also said his mother was exaggerating and being overly dramatic. But I had to stress to him, “Matt, this is a serious thing. You’re a thirty-year-old man, you shouldn’t need your mother to cosign for a car, and you never told me you’d defaulted on payments.”
He said he’d pay her back, and I believed him. His finances were never my business, anyway. We didn’t have any joint accounts. Frankly, I’ve never understood joint accounts between spouses. I can’t imagine wanting to add my name to anyone’s bank account, checking account, or credit card for any reason. Remember, folks, I was no spring chicken when I got married. I was forty. I thought the best way to make it a nonissue was to make it a nonissue and keep things separate. So I never asked to see paychecks, and I wasn’t over his shoulder micromanaging him beyond occasionally showing concern for whether he’d saved money or not. But I really thought between not paying for the house and sharing my insurance, and only having a few bills—a car, a cell phone, not much else—that there was no way he couldn’t make that work.
Those “I have only eighty dollars in the bank” conversations were worrisome, but I never saw them as the end of the world. Remember, when you’re in love with someone, you tend to overlook things. Mind you, when it came to his business, he was always getting up to go somewhere for it. He seemed to be on the phone constantly talking to clients. When I’d speak to friends I’d hooked him up with as clients, they always expressed that they liked Matt and thought he was really nice. I never got into business specifics with them.
Things started getting tense when Matt started having trouble getting clients on his own. Pretty soon he was blaming me for the failure of his business, because as he put it, if he was at Newark airport with me, how could he get to a client’s place in forty-five minutes if their computer crashed? I’d feel bad, and started thinking maybe his mother was right: Maybe he did need structure. But from what I could tell, he was always down in his office working, or going off somewhere to work. I trusted him.
The other big red flag, though, was that Matt gained about a hundred pounds in the first two years of our marriage. A hundred pounds. When I met Matt he’d been training for a marathon, so the change was striking. I don’t care about a guy having ripped abs or anything, but he was putting on the weight so rapidly that I went from thinking, Oh, he’s just getting comfortable, to me saying, “Matt, is this a sign that you’re unhappy? Is something going on?”
He always maintained, “I haven’t worked out in a while.”
“Well, I’m not always working out, either, but you seem to have quadrupled your intake of food. Is it the classic case of you stuffing down feelings? Do you need to express yourself more? What’s up? I love you, anyway. You know that. I’m attracted to you, any shape. But are you bothered by something? I would be asking you these questions if you’d had a dramatic weight loss as well. What’s upsetting you?”
His steadfast response was always, “I’ve just got to get back to running.”
I’d try to get him to go jogging with me, but he’d keep making excuses for why he couldn’t go. What could I do? I couldn’t force him to stop eating. Instead I just put faith in him coming to terms with whatever it was that was making him overeat.
When The D-List started filming in late 2004, we actually made his weight a story line, that Matt was going to have gastric bypass surgery. He never did, but I knew that filming in general would be another strain on a normal life for him—especially growing his business—so I made sure he was financially compensated by Bravo (Jessica, too), and I thought that would help him feel better about earning a living.
He seemed comfortable with the mic pack on, and I thought he was very natural on camera. Maybe this will be our life, I thought. He makes a living, whether nominal or good, and I subsidize the rest. That was fine with me. I never held it against him that he wasn’t going to become a millionaire. I never thought, I’m going to put my foot down until he makes this level of money.
Instead, I thought, You know what? We’re lucky. We’re in a position where I can carry the financial burden, and he can be the guy who’s there for me. This can work.
When D-List filmed, all those potential worries about Matt’s ways with money, his weight gain, and his struggles with business seemed to evaporate. Here we were, having fun together, but also working together, as a real team.
One afternoon, a phone call from my accountant changed everything.
Matt and I holding on, perhaps a little too long. (Photo: Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank)
It was the end of a shooting day on season one of The D-List, and the crew had just left the house. We’d been in Las Vegas that morning filming as well, so it really had been a long day.
The phone rang, and it was my accountant. He said, “Hey, I just got a call from your bank, and somebody tried to use your ATM in two different states today.”
I appreciated the concern, but I felt I was able to nip that call in the bud. “Oh well, we were shooting in Vegas this morning, so that was me,” I said.
“Well, somebody tried to use that same card this afternoon at a Universal City ATM.”
That sounded odd. “I’ve never gone to a Universal City ATM.”
“Well, I’m looking back now on your withdrawals,” he said, “and I see several from a Universal City ATM. I just assumed it was the one you went to.”
“I rarely take cash out,” I explained to him. “I’m more likely to put stuff on cards and get the miles. But actual cash, I might withdraw $500 a month at the most.”
“Well, I’m seeing two different ATM cards, used back-to-back at this machine. One has a withdrawal of a thousand dollars and one is for five hundred. Someone is using those cards approximately once every three weeks, and they’re taking out fifteen hundred dollars. With the receipts I’m looking at, it looks like whoever this was withdrew about twenty thousand. And I’ve only gone back a few months.”
I immediately got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. This wasn’t a case of my cards being missing and I call it in to the bank. This was twenty grand stolen out of my account. Shit.
“Who has your PIN number?” my accountant asked.
“The only people who have my PIN number are me, Matt, and Jessica.”
Sometimes I sent Jessica out to get cash. Other times Matt and I would be running around doing errands and if I was driving, I would pull over and ask him to go to the ATM and get cash out for me. That’s why he had my PIN number. Oh, and he was also my husband.
My mind was racing at this point. I’d have to ask Jessica point-blank if she took the money, w
hich didn’t sit well with me. Could there have been a worker in the house who might have gotten hold of the cards? While I was talking to the accountant, I went to my wallet.
“I’m holding those ATM cards,” I told my accountant. “They haven’t been stolen.”
“Well, if Matt and Jessica are the only ones who have access to your ATM cards, and they both have your PIN numbers, you’d better ask them. You’ve got twenty minutes, because I’ve called the bank, and they’re going to screen the tape of whoever the person was who went this afternoon and withdrew the fifteen hundred dollars.”
I hung up the phone, and steeled myself for an incredibly uncomfortable moment. I found Jessica walking up the stairs with a file in her hand, and I leaned over from the railing and said really off-handedly, “Jessica, I have to ask you a really weird question. I just found out somebody got my ATM cards and they’ve withdrawn twenty thousand dollars from my bank account. So I’ve just got to ask you, did you ever take my ATM cards?”
She said, “No! God no,” and I’ll never forget this, Jessica’s whole neck got this red rash instantly. She had a look on her face of utterly genuine confusion. To me it was completely the physical reaction of someone innocent. I knew it wasn’t from guilt. First of all, Jessica’s a terrible liar, thank God, and second of all, if someone wrongly accused me of something, I’d get sweaty and nervous and shake, too, probably, thinking, Oh my God, what do I have to say to defend myself? I know I would. This was a girl I’d been working with for three years, who was legitimately flipped out that this had happened. In any case, she took a beat and said, “Is there anything I can do to help you find out?” Also not something a guilty person says. I told her I’d get back to her when I found out more.
Well, being pragmatic, I couldn’t completely rule out my husband, so I decided to ask him directly, too. He could certainly ask the same of me if something like this came up. I called him into our bedroom, closed the doors, and he sat down. He was pretty large by this point, and he cut an immense figure in the chair. “Okay,” I said, “I have to ask you something, and it’s a really hard question, but just be completely honest with me, no matter what the answer is.”
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