The Heat on Heaton When the Culture Wars Turned Nasty, Patricia Heaton Rubbed Hollywood the Wrong Way
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ELLE READER HOLLYWOOD The Heat on Heaton WHEN thE CULTURE WARS TURNED NASTY, PATRICIA HEATON RUBBED HOLLYWOOD thE WRONG WAY. ShE’S HOPING HER NEW SITCOM, BACK TO YOU, REDUCES thE FRICTION. BY STRAWBERRY SAROYAN. PHOTOGRAPHED BY EMILY SHUR atricia Heaton looks like an overage choirgirl play the lead female on a series,” she says, and it’s a fair point in sneaking a cigarette. Dressed in a plaid Peter Pan– a town where the expiration date for actresses is as fixed as it is collared minidress and silver platforms with cork for a carton of milk. But age isn’t the only specter hovering heels, a tiny diamond cross around her neck, she over Heaton’s career. The actress recently has been embroiled asks me not to include her nicotine fit in this article. in political and religious controversies of such intensity that, Why? “Oh, because I get so much—”…she refrains she will admit, she questioned whether she’d work again. P from using the S-word. “You can’t imagine.” In 2006, Heaton had been Hollywood’s reigning sweet- Actually, I can imagine. Heaton, 49, and I are ostensibly heart-of-a-certain-age for close to a decade, known for her act- meeting on this balmy L.A. morning at her production com- ing (honed on New York stages) and her way with real women’s pany’s offices to discuss her new Fox sitcom, Back to You. It’s a woes, most famously in her portrayal of hotheaded Debra classic joke/setup/joke show with a dream team of old hands: Barone, the wife and mother on Everybody Loves Raymond. That Kelsey Grammer costars, and the show was created by Frasier wasn’t her first break in Hollywood—she’d appeared on Thirty- alums Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd; Heaton plays a something and on the short-lived sitcoms Room for Two, with newscaster who was once involved with Grammer’s fellow on- Linda Lavin, and Women of the House, with Delta Burke—but air reporter. It was picked up by Fox before they saw the pilot during Raymond ’s nine-year run, Heaton won two Emmys and has been hailed as the last great hope for the multicamera, and helped draw the show’s nearly 20 million loyal viewers. live-audience format. Considering the past year of Heaton’s Heaton had never been coy about her conservative and life, the show could be her last great hope as an actress too. “As Christian beliefs. She was flamboyant enough to announce to a woman my age, this will probably be the final opportunity to Bill O’Reilly a few years back, “[I]t will not be Barbra Streisand Styling by Alexandra Keelingfor Matrix for andAvant Dior Groupe; at celestineagency.com; hair and makeup by Brett location: Freedman Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel E L L E 318 www.elle.com I’m standing in front of when I have to make an accounting of on the wrong side of the political tracks. In 2004, Democrats my life.” She’s in her ninth year as the honorary chair of Fem- received 70 percent of the town’s political donations, and this inists for Life, the pro-life organization she says earns its time around Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Jennifer Aniston, name by fighting for social programs to help women who Will Smith, and Jodie Foster are just a few of the A-listers take their pregnancies to term. Heaton talks about limbo like who’ve donated to Democratic candidates. On the Republi- it’s a cute little neighborhood she visited while growing up in can side? Melissa Gilbert, Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts on The suburban Cleveland: “Limbo’s gone—I’m not sure you’re Sopranos), Adam Sandler, and Ben Stein—and that’s about it. aware of that,” she says, referring to Pope Benedict’s April “When it comes up that Patty is a Republican and a Chris- pronouncement that unbaptized children have a good shot of tian, people are, like, thunderstruck—I might as well have said making it to heaven rather than being stuck in the less desir- that she was a hermaphrodite,” says Heaton’s friend Megan able gateway community. Her husband and the father of her Mullally, of Will & Grace fame. “In our world, it’s staggering. four sons is fellow Christian actor/producer David Hunt, The only other taboo is if you haven’t had plastic surgery. Peo- who after screening his documentary about small-town ple look at you as if you’ve lost your mind.” Heaton says that beauty pageants at their home one night reportedly implored while she endured barbs in the past (“I’m hating you right the audience of friends and entertainment-industry types to now,” a coworker spit when she once wore a Bush/Quayle but- pray for a distribution deal. In L.A., such talk makes you ton on set), the social fallout this year at times has been almost as creepy as Mel on a bender. But when Heaton and I excruciating. “Somebody came up to me at a cocktail party, first met a little more than a year ago, she dismissed the idea and I think he’d had a little too much to drink. He kind of that her openness about her views could hurt her career. started out by saying, ‘You’re so wonderful; how can you be “The bottom line is money,” she told me. “If you’re a pro-life?’ Then he launched into—he basically ripped me a moneymaker, people don’t want to offend you.” Heaton didn’t new one about it.” Heaton still looks stunned. “My husband break a sweat even when she heard what her close friend, had to step in and start defending me. I was like, ‘I’m here with screenwriter Andrea King, told me: that when the two women the drink and the cocktail dress. God, come on.’” were shopping a project, a production executive told King, But can Christian and conservative advocacy really kill a “Forget it—there’s no way my bosses would work with Patricia career? “There’s a quiet undercurrent of, ‘Eeww,’” says Gram- Heaton. They are major Democrats and majorly pro-choice.” mer when asked about “coming out” as a Republican several That was before Heaton bumped up against another tele- years ago. And Grammer, who is also a Christian, says he’s vision icon, Parkinson’s disease sufferer Michael J. Fox, in had it easier than Heaton. “I have not heard, ‘Everybody 2006. Remember the ad that ran during the World Series that thinks he’s a nut or a loon.’ I have heard that about Patricia.” featured Heaton, along with The Passion of the Christ star Jim Producer Doug Urbanski, another Catholic conservative who Caviezel, inveighing against a Missouri bill that would make says he was “outed” in Hollywood after his film The Contender stem-cell research a state constitutional right? The spot was in came out in 2000, describes it this way: “I really went into a response to one in which a visibly quivering Fox argued for the surreal world. There were public things written about me that bill, and Heaton—claiming it would exploit women looking to weren’t true. There were people in Hollywood who said, ‘Oh, sell their eggs—was quickly lumped together with Rush Lim- we’ve got to get rid of this guy.’ I got a little bit weirded out for a baugh, who said Fox was “either off his medication or acting” few weeks.” When his telephone started ringing again, he says, for the camera. This came soon after the controversial ABC he breathed a sigh of relief, and he has since counseled others miniseries The Path to 9/11, in which Heaton played a small through the disorienting experience. part but was singled out in some media coverage as one of the As for Heaton, by the time Back to You came along, she anti-Clinton Christians who spearheaded the show. Everyone told critics at a press event over the summer, “It was not only the from bloggers to a suddenly media-friendly woman who lives funniest script I had been offered but the only one.” When I ask down Heaton’s street was calling for the professional equiva- lent of her beheading. “I guess those Albertsons commercials THE FAME GAME were still running,” Heaton says, referring to a TV campaign Everybody she’d done for the supermarket chain since 2003. “They were Loves Raymond saying they should cancel my contract.” That year, her untitled ABC pilot—a half-hour comedy in which she starred as a “There’s a part of me that loves getting my widow bonding with a Vegas showgirl played by Jenny picture taken, getting McCarthy—wasn’t picked up. She appeared in soft-lens free stuff, and having women’s fare like TNT’s The Engagement Ring, which was copro- people get me water,” Heaton says. “But duced by and costarred her and husband Hunt, and hosted a Christianity is about straight-to-DVD Christian comedy concert called Thou Shalt dying to yourself. This Laugh. When she returned to the theater for the first time in 16 business is all about worshipping yourself. I years in Theresa Rebeck’s The Scene, a virtual angry mob on a struggle with that.” theater website called for a boycott. The end looked near. Back to You THAT HOLLYWOOD IS A DEN OF LIBERALS isn’t a cliché for Since shooting was nothing. When I interviewed Heaton the first time, she admit- going so well and she ted she “didn’t know a single” celebrity who shared her pro-life loved her new castmates, Heaton position, and conservatism in general is nearly as unpopular.