by Leah Remini
Finally he asked, “So why aren’t you married?”
It was 2002, and Angelo and I had been together for six years, during which we supported each other in everything we did—including Scientology. Not only was he on course, but he also understood when I went to the church straight after work and was there until nine or ten o’clock most nights.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “It’s not important.”
“You don’t think it’s important to set a good example to the public? Does Angelo not want to marry you?”
“Of course he would marry me if I wanted.”
“Then get married,” he said.
I didn’t know if I wanted to get married, but I was like Eh, if it’s awful, there’s always divorce. Scientology doesn’t exactly put a premium on the sanctity of marriage. Or on relationships between parents and children, for that matter. The church demands that rather than placing value in your own future or your future as a married couple, or a family, you place value and focus only back to Scientology. Divorce is rampant among church and Sea Org members, as is the dissolution of families.
That night at home, I told Angelo what had happened during my pre-check and how it was suggested that we weren’t married because he didn’t want to marry me.
After all the complications that attended the start of our relationship, sealing the deal was as simple as saying, “Make it happen, man.”
On Christmas Eve of 2002, Angelo and I went to dinner at a restaurant down the street from our house, and after we were seated at a booth, he announced, “Baby, get anything you want on the menu.”
“Oh, okay, Angelo. Thanks.”
When the waiter came, I ordered the calamari as an appetizer and the steak. Angelo went into his pants and took out a wad of money.
“Let me just check,” he said, peeling the bills off, “because the steak is pretty expensive.”
“Let’s stop with the attempted comedy bit. Put your money away; you look crazy. You’re the looks of the operation, OK? And I’m the funny. Let’s know our lanes. Because when you step into mine, things go awry.”
“All right. I’m going to the bathroom,” he responded, but when he came back he said, “You’re right about staying in my lane, because I think I lost a hundred dollars doing my little bit.”
“Oh, Angelo.”
He knelt down on the floor and stuck his head underneath the table where I was sitting to look for the money.
“Anglo, get up. You look like you’re going down on me. We’ll get it later.”
“No, no, no, no, no.”
“We’ll just get it later. Stop.”
“Oh, here it is.”
“Grab it, babe. God.”
When Angelo came back up from under the table he wasn’t holding a hundred-dollar bill. He was holding a small black velvet box.
“Will you mar—”
“Who ordered the calamari?” the waiter interrupted.
“Bro, bro. Do me a favor? Can you give us a second?”
“Sir, are you okay?”
“Yes. Man, I’m good. I’m good,” he said in Spanish. Some “Mano, Mano” shit and “por favor.”
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” I was crying, while the waiter tried to step over Angelo’s feet to get to the table with the calamari. I took the ring box.
“I didn’t ask you yet,” Angelo said.
“I know.”
“What’s your answer?”
“I don’t know. Nobody’s ever asked me that.”
“Nobody ever asked you that! What?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying! What? You asking me to marry you?”
“Yes, baby!”
“Oh, my God.”
“Did you order the calamari?” the waiter asked.
“Yes, we ordered it,” Angelo said. “Just put it down.”
On the night of July 19, 2003, we got married outside at the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas. It was, I kid you not, 110 degrees easy.
VH-1 was shooting our wedding for a special, so when they asked us to come up with a location for the event I thought Vegas would be convenient for a lot of the guests coming from L.A. as well as make for a fun weekend. I pictured all my guests, tan and relaxed from a day around the pool, looking and feeling sexy and elegant.
What I did not picture was everyone—including me—melting under the brutal rays of a desert summer sun. I mean, had somebody told me, “Hey, dumb-ass, you know Vegas is boiling hot in July,” I wouldn’t have planned a poolside ceremony and reception. Instead I put 125 guests through sheer misery. As Kevin told People, “The best part was toweling off.”
Right before I walked down the aisle, I surveyed the landscape and the different buildings, and saw what I thought to be a paparazzo on the roof of the building. Still looking to be accepted by the Hollywood “in-crowd,” I was both delighted and disgusted. Paparazzi were a true sign of making it in this business, but what kind of fucking pig crashes a wedding? To get a picture? On my wedding day? Man, Star magazine must really want to get this exclusive. Emmy, here we come, People’s Choice…I can feel it in my hands! Kevin and I had arrived. Even so, this was not the place and time, really!
I called my security guy over and said, “There is a paparazzi piece of shit on the roof trying to grab a picture of me and I want him removed.”
“Where?” he said.
“Really? You have to get a better eye for these things. Right there!”
“That guy?” he said as he pointed directly at the stalker pig.
“Yes,” I said. “Obviously. “
“That’s your wedding photographer,” he flatly replied.
“Oh. Motherfuck…”
—
DURING THE CEREMONY, WHICH I pared down to the most nondenominational seven minutes of the Scientology wedding vows and which was officiated by Susan Watson, the former president of the Celebrity Centre, I looked over at Kevin, who gave me the wrap-it-up sign, which almost made me pee in my white lace G-string.
Even though it was so hot that later I’d have to soak my feet in the pool, I was so happy to be marrying Angelo and to have all these people I loved around me to witness it. Most especially, my mom, my sisters, and my friends, including Sherry, who had left the church when she was twenty-one.
Just like with my sister Nicole, Sherry’s departure was a slow one. When she moved to L.A., all of her friends were Scientologists and she worked at Scientology companies just like I did. But the big difference was that she wasn’t active in taking courses or getting auditing, while I was.
Even after she left the church, she remained friendly with our Scientologist community and was still invited to get-togethers. You are allowed to be friends with non- or ex-Scientologists, as long as they aren’t antagonistic toward Scientology. If they are, you are expected to disconnect or break off all ties with that member, who is considered a Suppressive Person. A person is declared by the church to be an SP for a variety of reasons, which may include going to the authorities about the church or making any kind of negative comment about it publicly or in the press. Both are considered suppressive acts that can have devastating consequences for relationships. And furthermore, if the church were to find out that you remained in contact with an SP, you would then be declared an SP as well.
Before Angelo and I were married, his ex-wife sold a story to Star magazine about her version of everything that had happened—including their Scientology marriage counseling. When the magazine hit the stands, I was called into the Ethics office at Flag, where I was doing auditing. Some random Scientologist had written a Knowledge Report on me after seeing the article.
“Leah, either you disconnect from Angelo or he disconnects from his ex.”
“Are you kidding me? You’re telling me Angelo can’t see the mother of his son? How is he going to see his six-yea
r-old boy?”
The Ethics Officer shrugged and said, “I am not telling you that. What does LRH say? The policy says what it says. Read it out loud. You can make your own decisions.”
I loved Angelo’s three sons: his oldest two boys who lived with their mom in San Jose, and his youngest, in L.A., whom we had every weekend and certain days each week. Sometimes I got to pick him up from school when his mom was busy, and he was always a real source of joy in my life and had given me a wonderful taste of motherhood.
Whenever the question of Sherry came up in one of my checks, however, I would always say that Sherry wasn’t anti-Scientology, even though she was. Unlike many Scientologists, I didn’t feel I had to give up every piece of information in my head to the church. I rationalized it to myself by saying that Sherry wasn’t pulling me out of Scientology, which is the important thing.
Since Sherry left the church, her life hadn’t become a disaster, as we are made to believe by the church. Far from it. She put herself through night school, earning a hard-won degree from UCLA at the age of thirty, then started her own tech business. She also married a nice, successful guy and had two sons.
I never dwelled too long on that contradiction. The church’s response to my question “Well, how come that one left the church and they seem to be doing okay?” was always the same:
“But are they happy, Leah, truly? What about their eternity, Leah?”
Yeah, I thought, her eternity might get fucked up, but they seemed happy and much less fucked-up than me.
Instead I chose to focus on my own happiness. No sooner were Angelo and I married than I was telling him I wanted a baby. But sex was not exactly fun for Angelo during this period. A typical “lovemaking” session between us went like this:
“Babe, it’s on,” I said.
“I’m in the middle of SportsCenter,” Angelo yelled from the other room.
“No. It’s got to happen now.”
In that moment, I predicted he had given me a girl. Angelo, who already had three boys, didn’t believe it. But I was adamant. “You’ve been so horrible to women your whole life that God is going to give you one girl that you can’t mess with, who’s going to wrap you around her finger,” I said. “I’m telling you, you’re having a girl.”
After I got pregnant, I couldn’t wait to find out that I was right about my prediction. During an early ultrasound, I pestered the doctor, who said he couldn’t really “tell if it was a girl.”
Oh, my God. Either he has the smallest penis ever or she has the biggest vagina. Either way, this is not good. If my kid has a little dick, I’ve got to tell him how to use it. And if it’s a girl with a very big vagina, we’ve got to talk about that too. I want to be prepared.
“We need to know, Doc. We need to know.”
He ordered an amnio (which was encouraged as I was close to thirty-five), which confirmed it: We were having a girl! Angelo was in trouble.
I gave the experience of being pregnant everything I had, particularly the eating part. At my four-month doctor’s visit, the OB suggested I talk to a nutritionist.
“Why, Doc?”
“Because you’ve already gained all your weight for the whole pregnancy and then some.”
I was floored. I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know they were this bad.
“I’m not asking for Big Macs. It’s this kid! I can’t control what she wants me to have!”
“You’re going to have a hard time if you keep up like this,” he said.
“You’re telling me I gained all this weight? You’re telling me all this weight is just me? She has a head, right? How many pounds does a human baby’s head weigh? That’s gotta be something! Did you take that into consideration?”
“The entire fetus is probably around five ounces.”
“Really? Jesus. A liver doesn’t mean anything, I guess.”
All told, I gained—wait for it—eighty pounds over the course of my pregnancy. And it was no mystery why—I went three-Egg-McMuffins-and-four-hash-browns crazy. I kept Stephanie, the poor craft services person on The King of Queens, busy making me food. “We just feel like mac ’n’ cheese,” I said to her. “The baby needs it.”
When Stephanie returned with a bowl of mac ’n’ cheese, I told her I would need more than just the sample portion.
“That was the whole box,” she said.
“From Kraft?”
“Yeah. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.”
“This is the WHOLE box? I just want to make sure,” I said.
“The whole box,” she said.
“Did the FDA start regulating portion sizes? I don’t understand.”
She smiled in sympathy and walked out of my room.
While a lot of actresses in Hollywood can hide their pregnancy on-screen with a strategically placed pillow or a bigger purse, on The King of Queens I had to use a couch. I was so huge that I literally had to stand behind furniture to hide my belly. Kevin relished the fact that I was so fat. “This is so great,” he said. “I look like the skinnier one here for the first time!”
At first I was really into the whole pregnancy thing. I rented a heart monitor, and I would sit there for hours listening to her heartbeat. Or I went into her little room. I loved going in there, because it already smelled like a baby. I sat in the rocking chair or folded and refolded her baby clothes about a thousand times. I would imagine her in my arms.
By the eighth month, however, I was over it. At my OB appointment, I told the doctor, “I think she needs to come out.” He replied that my request was not only crazy but also illegal.
“My feet are so swollen I can’t even wear flip-flops, man. Seriously?” I made noises during this time that I didn’t even realize were coming from me. I would wake up in a panic, looking for the wild boar that had entered my room, only to realize it was me.
The doctor had been right about gaining so much weight making things hard. Getting up from the couch left me out of breath. One guy asked me if I was having twins. Don’t ask anybody that ever. I started telling people who asked when I was due, “I already had my baby,” just to be a bitch. “Yeah. I had her nine months ago.”
When I went into labor and headed to the hospital, they put me in a room with a view of Jerry’s Deli. All I could think about was why I hadn’t gotten my tuna fish on a kaiser with fries before I went into the hospital. I was miserable.
My plan was to be a good Scientologist, and not use an epidural, but when I felt the real thing go down, I yelled, “Get that anesthesiologist in here before I kill somebody!” The doctor was on it and told me he didn’t know why I had waited so long. I didn’t even try to explain to him that the church teaches you that drugs will make the baby susceptible to what is said during labor so that it gets recorded in your child’s reactive mind, the place where pain is stored. So if I said to a nurse, “You are a horrible person,” my daughter might go through life acting out the role of a horrible person, thinking I was talking to her.
Similarly, that’s the reason Scientologists espouse the concept of “silent birth,” which LRH described in Dianetics as providing an environment where no one—not even the doctors or nurses in the room—talks during the delivery. Again, it’s because in times of pain, loss, or unconsciousness, “words, in particular, spoken during these moments, can have an adverse effect on one later in life.” Women can make sounds during birth; they just aren’t supposed to say any words.
Once the doctor gave me the epidural, I was myself again—and talking. “I’ll deliver three babies with this shit,” I boasted. “Somebody do my hair. I don’t want to be ugly when the baby comes.” Shannon started heating up the flatiron.
It took forever for me to be dilated enough to start pushing, and even then I didn’t think the baby was coming. It felt like nothing was happening. I regretted that I hadn’t planned a C-section—the celebrity thing to do.
And while someone’s already down there, they get a quick nip and tuck. I hadn’t thought this out in a celebrity way.
Then, all of a sudden, the epidural went away. It was like it erased any memory of itself, and I experienced a kind of pain that if there had been a large rock around, I would have bludgeoned myself with it. That’s how bad it was. Nobody tells you this shit. When they say it’s like your period, they’re lying. Having a head and a full body emerge from your vagina is nothing like getting your period.
“Ma!” I screamed. “Help me! Help me!”
“Lee, there’s nothing I can do.” She shrugged helplessly.
Oh, and did I mention that this entire thing was being taped for a VH-1 special about my pregnancy and childbirth? Yup. Of course they edited out this whole part where I was cursing. In the final show, I looked so serene the whole time, but in truth it was as far from a silent birth as you could get.
“Reach down, now,” my doctor said.
As soon as I could touch her, I turned primal and started to pull her out.
“Give her to me. Give her to me. Give her to me.”
I had had visions of this moment long beforehand and made it clear in no uncertain terms that when I had my baby I wanted her cleaned up before she was handed to me, preferably with Johnson and Johnson’s baby shampoo (because I like the smell), and then wrapped up in a nice white blanket. You know, like what you might find in a forties movie, with me in a white head wrap and great eyebrows.
Instead, when she actually arrived, I was sweating and fat. I reached down to grab her and pulled her right up onto my chest, and couldn’t stop kissing her. I was crying, Angelo was crying. My mom, Nicole, and Shannon—everyone.
“She’s beautiful,” my mom said.
