We didn’t talk about the fact that one day whatever money we had saved in the price would have to go toward tearing down the house and building a new one. And we also wanted a pool. The kids would die without a pool. But since we couldn’t afford to rebuild the house, much less install a pool, it would have to be a plunge pool out front. I learned that in Malibu it takes eighteen months to get building plans approved, but even that didn’t daunt me. My plan was to move our whole family, including the newborn, to the tiny, ramshackle, two-bedroom house while we waited for plans to be approved. Part of me was thinking that it would make a hell of an episode, or even an entire season, of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, McDermott-style.
Lucky for us, it turned out that until we sold our house in Encino, we had no money for the down payment. We had to back out of escrow. That would have been a great moment to let go of this fantasy, return to the Valley, and continue life on our suburban animal farm. But I was unstoppable.
A week later we found my dream house. Or what I convinced myself was my dream house. It was a single-story bungalow in Point Dume, on the beach side of the highway, with a beach access key. Take that, Kelly Wearstler! It was five minutes by golf cart from the private beach—no paparazzi!—and it was on two acres. We could certainly have a farm on two acres! What else could we possibly need?
The house, at 2,200 square feet, was about four thousand square feet smaller than our current house. There were only three bedrooms—one for us, one for Hattie and Patsy (her baby nurse), and one for Liam and Stella. Where would my stepson, Jack, sleep? Dean thought he’d like the trailer that came with the house, parked in the yard. I wasn’t so sure. But we did want to downsize.
There were a few other small issues. I didn’t like the bamboo floors—but we could replace them with reclaimed wood. There was no air-conditioning—but at the beach nobody had air-conditioning. We’d have the breeze from the ocean. There was no pool—but someday when we had fifty grand to spare, we could build a pool. The house was small—but one day we could add a second level. It was on two acres of land, much of which was wild—but one day we could clear it and have the farm of our dreams.
The house had just fallen out of escrow, and the owner’s real estate agent told us we had to act fast. It would be sold again by the end of the day. There was no need to do inspections—they’d all been done by the buyers who were pulling out. And why were the buyers pulling out? Oh, it was just a money thing for them.
I spoke to my best friend, Jenny, who is always a voice of reason. When she heard that the house was in Point Dume, prime Malibu real estate in a great school district, she said, “My dream is to live in Point Dume! It has the best school. I’d move my whole family just to send the kids there, to be near the beach, and to still be near the west side. I’m so jealous.” Jenny thought it was a good idea. That sealed the deal.
I asked my mother to lend us the money for the down payment until our house in Encino sold. I told her it was my dream house, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She agreed. We were moving to Malibu.
It’s a Boy Girl
Of all the psychic, spiritual, voodoo gurus in my world, Cindy was the most consistently accurate. A year before I got pregnant with Hattie, she had said, “You’re going to get pregnant next year with your third child.”
I said, “Really!” This came completely out of the blue. It had been two years since Stella was born.
Completely matter-of fact, she said, “You’ll get pregnant in January or February, and it’s going to be a boy.”
I had been shocked to find myself four weeks pregnant with Hattie on Valentine’s Day, and then I remembered. Cindy predicted this.
Since Dean and I had a boy and a girl at home, we told Dr. J from the start not to reveal our third baby’s gender. Besides, we already knew it was a boy. If Cindy was accurate enough to call the month of conception, then surely she was right about the gender. I was having a boy.
The entire world agreed with Cindy. When I walked down the street, strangers came up to me, patted my belly, commented on my shape or the way I was carrying, and said, “Oh, you’re so cute. Boy, right?” Every person, from close friends to car valets, was utterly confident it was a boy. The only person who thought I was having a girl was my mother, but I wasn’t about to listen to her.
As we prepared to move to Malibu, I started decorating the room that would be the baby’s nursery. I had the walls painted gray; I ordered a gray crib and a gray and white patterned chair. I was going to have yellow bedding and giraffes in the nursery. People told me I was crazy to order anything before the baby was born, but I kept saying that if it was a boy, I’d add pops of turquoise, and if it was a girl, I’d add pops of fuchsia. It would all work out. Because we were having a boy. We were going to call him Finn, a name Dean and I both loved and had planned on if we ever had another boy.
I had a Cesarean scheduled for a week before my due date. Once you’ve had two C-sections, they make you have a third, and so on. Two weeks before my due date I woke in the middle of the night. I’d had a sharp pain. Was it a contraction? I sat up to see if anything else would happen, and that’s when I felt a tiny bit of pee. Oops. I started to get out of bed to go to the bathroom.
Stella and Liam both happened to be sleeping in our room that night. We’d had some sleep issues lately. The children seemed to want more time with us in anticipation of the new baby coming soon. Often if they wanted to sleep with us we’d put two comforters and two pillows on the rug next to my side of the bed. We called it their fort. If I wanted to get out of bed in the middle of the night, I’d scoot to the end of the bed so I didn’t step on them.
Now that I was full-term, I couldn’t scoot to the end of the bed anymore. Instead, I carefully placed one tiptoe on the floor between the side of the bed and Stella. Then I put my other foot down. Just then, as I stood above her, it happened. My water broke all over Stella.
Another contraction hit me. Stella slept on, blissfully ignorant of her unfortunate baptism. I went to the bathroom. I could feel contractions, but the last time I’d been in labor was two kids ago, and even then it had been in a hospital setting. I wasn’t sure how to handle it.
Maybe I should have woken up Dean. But I’d made the switch from BlackBerry to iPhone and there was a new authority figure in my life. In a panic, I grabbed my phone to ask Siri for help. Was there an application to time my contractions? Siri told me she’d never really thought about it. I decided to find out for myself. I went to the app store, and, sure enough, there were five hundred different contraction timers. Because that is the world we live in.
I downloaded the most expensive contraction-timer app (some of them were free—how reliable could they be?) and started timing my contractions. It was fascinating. I sat in bed, tracking the length of and time between my contractions for about half an hour. At five A.M. I finally woke up Dean. He called Dr. J and told him that my contractions were four and a half minutes apart. He said he’d meet us at the hospital.
I wasn’t just a reality-show star. I was a fan, and lately I’d been watching The Rachel Zoe Project. Some women had told me that when they were pregnant they liked watching me go through my pregnancy on-screen. I felt the same way about Rachel Zoe’s pregnancy.
When Rachel Zoe was in labor, she put on jewelry and fixed her hair. That scene was seared in my brain. If Rachel Zoe bothered to primp in between contractions, I could take the time to make myself presentable.
Think about it, people. What’s the likelihood that Rachel Zoe was actually in labor when her husband filmed that scene? Hard to say. I was a reality star, watching a reality star, knowing she might have staged this scenario, but live by the sword, die by the sword. I started putting on makeup, thinking, I’m gonna do it right this time.
I wasn’t thinking clearly. I hadn’t even packed a hospital bag. Dean pulled me away from the mirror and I quickly threw together a few essentials: toiletries, a hospital gown that I designed and had made from fabric I found (wh
ich I would never get a chance to wear), pajama bottoms, T-shirt, and socks. I ran and woke up our live-in housekeeper, Susana, to ask her to get in our bed so someone would be there when Liam and Stella woke up. Then Dean threw my bag into the car and we left.
By the time we got to the hospital, I was screaming in pain and begging for an epidural. I’d definitely never had contractions like this.
Dean said, “What about your hospital gown? The gown you made? Do you want it?”
“Fuck the hospital gown,” I said.
The nurse said, “Oh my God, you had time to put on makeup?”
I managed to hold it together for a second, smiled, and said, “That’s right.” Here’s to us, Rachel Zoe.
Then they gave me an epidural and we went into surgery.
Dr. J was performing the Cesarean. At some point he said to Dean, “Dad, get the camera ready. The baby’s coming.” Dean turned on the video camera, and Dr. J lifted up the baby. “All of you were wro-ong!” he said in a singsong voice.
“It’s a girl!” Dean exclaimed.
Dr. J had known we were wrong about the baby’s gender the whole time. How long had he been planning to tease us about it?
“Oh my God!” I said. I was utterly shocked. Not one percent of me thought it was going to be a girl. One second later I added, “Oh shit, my mom was right!”
I lay in the recovery room, a little bit out of it. The baby was sleeping on my chest. A nurse came in with a clipboard and asked us the baby’s name.
Dean looked at me. I shrugged. We didn’t have a girl’s name. It was supposed to be a boy, and his name was going to be Finn. “Baby Noname McDermott,” he said.
I said to Dean, “Google ‘old-fashioned female names’ on your phone.”
Dean found a list and started reading out names, one by one. When he got to the H’s, he read, “Hattie.”
At the same time, we both said, “Hattie.” That was it. The perfect name for our baby girl.
I told Dean I wanted her middle name to be Margaret, after my nanny who had raised me and had since passed away but was like a second mother to me.
“I love that,” Dean said. “Hattie Margaret McDermott.”
WE WEREN’T THE only ones who’d been expecting a boy. Mehran was the first to arrive at the hospital. We didn’t tell him her gender. He walked into the room, saw Hattie in my arms, and looked more surprised than I’ve ever seen him. “Oh my God, it’s a girl!” he said. It was such a big, happy reaction from Mehran, who is always so closed off and guarded.
When my mom arrived, the first thing she said was, “I knew it! I told you it was going to be a girl.”
I said, “Her name is Hattie.”
Later, Patsy would observe that the most famous Hattie was the first Academy Award–winning African-American actress, Hattie McDaniel, who won for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind. Margaret—whom I called Nanny—was also black.
“She’s white on the outside, but she’s black on the inside,” Patsy said. I smiled when she said that. Having grown up with Nanny, watching The Jeffersons and Sanford & Son, eating the Southern food that she grew up with, and spending summers running around under sprinklers with her community in Crenshaw, I’ve always said the same thing about myself.
WE HAD SHIFTED the sixth season of Tori & Dean to focus on my pregnancy, so I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked when the network told me they wanted the final scene of the season to be me having the baby. I mean, it made sense. But I didn’t know if I wanted to film that. It was a little too real.
We hadn’t filmed Liam’s birth—we’d just done a montage of pictures that Dean had taken, played along with some audio from our video camera. We had filmed me going into surgery with Stella, and the rest we did on our personal video camera.
I hadn’t decided one way or the other about the birth itself, but we had planned for them to film me being wheeled into surgery again, so I wasn’t surprised when the crew went ahead and got clearance at Cedars. But the Cesarean wasn’t at its regularly scheduled time. It had all gone down quickly and unexpectedly. As I headed to the hospital I knew we could have called the crew and told them it was happening, but I made the conscious decision not to do it.
Instead, I waited until the last possible moment, when I was about to go into surgery, figuring that when they missed the heading-into-surgery shot and missed the birth, they’d just hold off and wait for us to contact them about what we wanted to film and when. But I was my own demise. When our producer got my text, he alerted the team and they all came straight to the hospital. They were waiting for me when I came out of surgery.
The personal and professional lines had blurred. If I’d contacted a friend, saying I was heading into surgery, she wouldn’t have rushed to the hospital without checking with me. But with our crew there was no question or discussion. They already had clearance at the hospital. I never had a chance to change my mind. A mere half an hour after Hattie was born the camera guy, the sound guy, and two producers, Richard and Megan, appeared in my hospital room. They started filming as if it were any other day on the set of Tori & Dean. Meanwhile, Mario, one of our camera guys, is an excellent photographer. He had offered to take still photos, just for us, so I did text him after Hattie was born. He came and took some of the first pictures of Hattie. I wanted Mario there, but I didn’t want the crew there so soon.
It wasn’t a matter of what they filmed or whether and how they used it. I had approval over the material. It was just that they were there. They were there for those first hours when it should have been just me, Dean, Hattie, and whoever we chose to have with us. The camera crew was there when the kids arrived. They were there when my mom came. They were the first people to see my baby. Before all those people and my best friends.
For the first time in six years of filming a reality show, I felt invaded. I was missing this special day. But I was so out of it and into my baby, I didn’t have the wherewithal to turn to these people and say, “Get out of here.” Even if I’d been completely clear, it would have been a hard thing to say. They had become friends, after all. I loved that we all felt like a family. We had all intentionally blurred the lines between work and friendship, and I am still close to all of those people, but in that moment I felt like I was nursing my baby in front of business associates. It all felt wrong.
As the epidural wore off, I started throwing up. I looked at Dean. He said something, and the cameras pulled back, but they were still filming from a greater distance. And they stayed. All day. Nobody checked to see if I was okay with it. Maybe at some point I’d said it was fine; I’m not sure. I’d let them film me fighting with Dean. I had let them film my kids having temper tantrums. I had let them film me in my underwear undergoing a spiritual cleanse with a voodoo high priestess. How were they supposed to know this was any different? But it was. Things change in the moment.
I always have a bad reaction after the surgery: a migraine, vomiting, weakness, and just being out of it. I didn’t have it together to take charge of the unwanted situation with the film crew, to say the least, but when I was finally alone with Dean, I asked him to tell them to leave. I’d had enough.
It was remarkable that nothing had ever felt intrusive before. Maybe they were crossing more boundaries, or maybe I was changing. But I think of that day, Hattie’s birthday, as the beginning of the end of that chapter of Tori & Dean.
I DIDN’T HAVE any clothes for Hattie to wear when we brought her home from the hospital. The day before my water broke, Mehran and I had had a “girls’ ” before-baby day. We had sushi (nothing raw), then went to see the Anna Faris rom-com What’s Your Number? Afterward, we went to the Juvenile Shop to find something for the baby to wear home from the hospital. We picked out a pile of outfits for girls and boys. Then I looked at this huge pile of clothes and said, “What am I going to do? Buy all this stuff and then return it?” I kept some neutrals, but I put all the pink clothes back. Poor Hattie.
While I was in the hospital, my mother re
turned everything we had bought, picked up a load of pink clothes, and brought it all back to the hospital.
FROM MY HOSPITAL bed, with James’s help, I reconsidered the gray room that was on order for Hattie’s Malibu room. Pops of fuchsia? Forget it. My Hattie needed a pink room. Pink, pink, pink. Pink walls, pink bedding, a pink chair. With a gray changing table, gray carpet, and gray crib. As for the yellow bedding and giraffes? I’d find a use for that sooner than I could possibly imagine.
Fish Out of Water
Hattie was born October 10, 2011, and we immediately packed up to move to Malibu. Randy, my executive producer from World of Wonder, came over to meet Hattie. After the visit, since I was still recovering from the Cesarean, I said good-bye from the top of the stairs instead of walking him to the door. I stood holding week-old Hattie at the top of the overly grand, curved staircase in the entryway of the Encino house. Dean and I hated that staircase. Our producer was at the bottom of the stairs, leaving our house for the last time. He gave one final look around, then turned to look up at me.
“You’re going to miss this house,” he said. “It was a real family home. To a lot of people.” Then he walked out the door. That statement still haunts me. I didn’t love that house, but I had no idea what lay in store.
The first ill omen was the jumping cactus. Right before we moved, in the days just after Hattie was born, Dean had decided to prepare our new house for the arrival of our brood by building a chicken coop. It was a kick-ass chicken coop, complete with a run for the chickens and a pen for the goats and the pig. It took him ten days to make it. I was at home nursing Hattie when Dean came back from Malibu, with tiny needles sticking out all over his hands, arms, back, and legs.
Spelling It Like It Is Page 5
