Let Me Tell You Something Page 3

  This show taught me the value of staying true to myself and being real with my audience. They deserve nothing less. That’s the most important thing to me. Everything you see with my name on it, it’s me. I write every tweet and status update. I can’t answer every message I get anymore—there are too many; it would be a full-time job. But I read them all. People who write to me are my lifeline. These people let me know when I’m doing something wrong. They keep me on the right path—not some stranger writing a gossip piece hiding behind a computer, or a bunch of bullies on Twitter or Facebook. These attacks can’t hurt me. I’ve learned to never compromise my truth and to roll with the punches.

  I’ve met some amazing fans . . .

  this one touched me the most.

  One of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen happened while I was at an event down at the Jersey Shore. I was signing autographs when a bunch of nurses came up to me. They told me about a patient that they were treating nearby.

  She was suffering from seizures and depression, and had tried to take her own life after her boyfriend left her. The nurses told me that she had wanted to come to see me at this in-store appearance but she wasn’t well enough, and that had made her even more depressed.

  I listened to the nurses tell me this woman’s devastating story, and then I asked them how far away the hospital was. When I heard it was only a couple miles, I told them that I would try to visit the woman before I headed home the following day. I didn’t want them to tell anyone I was coming—least of all the patient, in case something came up and I couldn’t make it. But I made them promise they wouldn’t notify the press, that there’d be no photographers there. They agreed.

  The next morning, I went to the hospital to visit this woman. I recognized her as soon as I walked in. She was around my age, and attractive, but you could tell she’d had a hard life. She had red hair and blue eyes. She looked up and saw me come into the room, and then tears started pouring down her face.

  She didn’t speak, she just sat there crying. I went to her and I told her that I’d heard she wasn’t doing too well, and that I was sorry to hear that. She still didn’t say anything.

  I continued that I’d heard that she had also tried to hurt herself, and I asked her to talk about that with me. She and I sat for about forty-five minutes. She told me her life story—that she’d donated a kidney to her ex-husband, that she had a wonderful relationship with her sixteen-year-old son. But she had recently been dealt a bad hand. She lost her house in a foreclosure and her boyfriend had broken up with her. She told me that watching my show gave her hope that she could be as strong as me. I looked at her, and I told it to her straight.

  “You just told me that you adore your sixteen-year-old son and you gave a kidney to your husband after you divorced him and you want to end your life just because some guy broke up with you?” I asked. I told her she was stronger than me.

  I told her she was stronger than most people on this earth, and that things were going right for her. I told her that she, not me, should be out on the circuit talking to people about how to overcome difficulties in life. I told her I didn’t have half the courage that she did. I told her to own the fire that came to her naturally (she’s a natural redhead, mine is from the bottle). I told her that she was going to be OK and I made her promise me to have a better attitude when it came to her own safety.

  Then I looked her in the eye and said, “I’m going to be honest with you. I’m never going to see you again. But I know you have the power to overcome this.”

  I knew she had her own strength, but she hadn’t realized it yet. I hugged her and I said good-bye.

  A few months later, one of the nurses called to tell me that the woman was doing really well. She’d gotten a new apartment and she’d turned her life around. I can’t explain what I mean to complete strangers, but it is moments like this that make me so grateful that I can help, in a little way.

  Your kid is gay? So what?

  He’s still your kid!

  Since the show started, I have absolutely loved meeting people who watch. I’ve loved the connection that people feel; I’ve loved the stories they’ve shared with me. Some of these encounters will stay with me for the rest of my life.

  One of my favorites, which still brings tears to my eyes, was a chance meeting with a young boy last Christmas. I was out shopping by myself at Riverside Mall when a man, a typical Jersey guy, came up to me. I could tell he wanted to talk. He pointed at me, right in the chest, and told me that I was “from that show on TV” and then he lost his steam. He just stood in front of me, silently, looking at the ground.

  I waited, and I noticed that he was starting to get choked up. After a while, he got himself together and looked me in the eye. “I want to thank you,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “You gave me my son back,” he said.

  We started talking and he explained that his family watched Housewives and saw many similarities between my family and theirs.

  The man told me the episode where Albie failed law school had changed his family focus. There was a moment in the scene when I looked at my son, told him that I loved him, and believed he could do anything.

  “When my son saw that, he turned to my wife and asked her if she was just like Caroline, if she would love him no matter what he told her?” the man said.

  At this point in his story, right there in the middle of Saks, this man started to cry. But he was able to continue his story. In response to her son, his wife said that yes, she was just like me and she would love him no matter what. Their son then asked if that meant he could tell them anything, and they assured him that he could.

  This complete stranger then told me that this was a huge step for his family, to have his son talk to them like this. For the past year leading up to this moment, he had shut himself off from the world. He had become quiet and distracted, his grades had dropped, and his parents had lost the ability to communicate with him.

  But when this kid saw me tell Albie that I’d love him no matter what, it triggered something in him, and he asked his parents if their love was unconditional. When they told him that yes it was, he looked them both in their eyes and told them that he was gay. His parents hugged and kissed him and told him that that was OK.

  This guy, this complete stranger, was by now completely crying as he recounted this story to me. He said that without watching the show, without seeing me as a parent with such unconditional love, his son would not have had the confidence to come out, and he wanted to thank me. I was astounded. It was such a beautiful story that I didn’t know what to say.

  Then he explained to me that today happened to be his son’s birthday, and that his son was at a restaurant in the mall with his mother. He asked if I would come with him and meet his family.

  When we got to the restaurant, and the kid saw me standing with his dad, he literally crumbled into my arms, he was crying so hard. It was an incredible moment, I was crying my ass off. I just held his face in my hands while he cried. I kept saying “happy birthday, you’re so beautiful”—I didn’t know what else to say. I was a mess.

  Suddenly the boy looked at his father and asked how his father had found me.

  His father was crying too. “I didn’t find her, she found us,” he said.

  It’s moments like this, moments of pure, real emotion and healing, for people I don’t even know, that make everything else about doing this show completely worth it.

  Loyalty is important, but

  it’s a two-way street.

  There’s something I want to get straight with you. You’ve seen me deal with a lot of complex emotional situations over the past four years. From the mail I get, it seems that a lot of viewers are confused by my words and my actions. People write me and say I always talk about loyalty, but I haven’t shown loyalty to my fellow cast mates. I consider myself loyal to a fault, but that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.

  Loyalt
y means always telling the truth, even if someone doesn’t want to hear it. And sometimes, your loyalty demands that you walk away from somebody rather than turn on them or be a fake friend.

  First and foremost, I am loyal to myself. I cannot fake it with anyone. There’s no way on earth I can sit at a table with a person I don’t like and not let it show. I find it impossible to look at someone who’s doing something horribly, drastically wrong and say “that’s OK” when it’s not. I just can’t. Maybe if I could, things would be easier.

  I think it’s been proven that I prefer to stay quiet on the show. I have avoided as many confrontations as I can. I have tried so hard to never add any fuel to the fights or feuds that happen around me. And somehow I have gained a reputation for being forceful. I don’t understand it.

  Ask Caroline

  Hey Caroline! I’m a twenty-four-year-old college guy who is gay, but I haven’t told my mom yet. If you were my mother, how would you want your son to come out to you?

  I’m going to assume that your relationship with your mom is healthy. I understand that there’s a level of discomfort in discussing your sex life with your mother, and you might be worried that your mom may not understand or could condemn your sexuality.

  Let me tell you this: I’d be surprised if she doesn’t have a good idea that you’re gay already. A mother’s instinct is intense. She’s probably just waiting for you to bring it up.

  Wait for a time when you have her undivided attention so you can talk in private, without interruption. Speak from your heart, and be open and honest. Help her understand the emotions you’ve been dealing with on your journey, and show her what it feels like to be you.

  If your mom is in fact shocked by your admission, just give her the time she needs to absorb things and then revisit with her.

  As a parent, the one thing I want is for my children to live a life full of health, peace, and happiness. Everything else is unimpor­tant. There’s nothing worse than a parent watching their child suffer. I imagine that this secret from your mom is standing in the way of you living your life in peace and being happy. Good luck, and no matter what your mom’s reaction is, I want you to be proud of who you are. I wish you all the happiness life has to offer you.

  I can count on one hand the times I’ve stooped to confrontation on the show: I lost my temper during the first-season finale, when Danielle started attacking my family. I hated myself for getting sucked into it, but out of loyalty to myself and my family, I had to speak up. The second time was when I agreed to meet with Danielle in season two. At that meeting, as tensions rose, I called her a clown. To this day, even though “clown” is hardly the worst thing you could call someone, I regret that choice of words. I don’t like to hurt people but I’m not a coward. If something needs to be addressed, I prefer to do it without name-calling. Danielle pushed and pushed at that meeting and I called her a clown, and it hurt her. I felt horrible.

  BEHIND THE SCENES

  We have to be constantly aware of continuity while we’re filming—if we start filming a scene, we have to finish it; it’s not like we can just get up and disappear in the middle of a scene. When we were in Punta Cana, I got one of the worst migraines I’d ever had. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. But we’d been filming, so they had to incorporate my migraine into the story, and then they insisted that I drag myself out of bed to watch Teresa try on bathing suits for forty-five minutes, but I could barely see. Watch that scene again—you can tell how sick I am. When I was allowed to go back to my room, I curled up on the bathroom floor with ice packs on my head, and threw up for the entire day while everyone else was out having fun.

  The third confrontation was this past season on the show. I was forced into confrontations by Teresa over what she wrote about me in her book. This is the first time anyone has seen me gun for Teresa, but I was actually done with her in season two. We were not friends before the show started, so I didn’t see any point to try to salvage a relationship that I never had. We’re not friends, we’re not enemies, we’re cast mates. How do you feel about everyone at your work? Some people you want to hang out with, some people you don’t want to hang out with. That’s how it is on our show. Sometimes, we’re just together for work.

  Whatever I’ve gone through with this show, and whatever the future seasons have in store for me, I know that my kids and my grandkids will always be able to watch the show and see me doing the right thing.

  You have to understand that on our television show, we shoot thousands and thousands of hours of tape. This gets boiled down to forty-five-minute episodes, and each of the five or six women has a story line. Only a fraction of what they film makes it onto the air. A five-hour event makes for a two-minute segment of the show. The camera doesn’t lie, but quite often my motivation ends up on the cutting-room floor. We’ve had scenes that were so funny that the cameramen dropped their cameras they were laughing so hard. But those scenes aren’t what the public wants to see. I wish people wanted to watch us getting along and having fun, but viewers are much more likely to tune in to a train wreck.

  I sometimes miss the way things were during the first season of the show, when it was all laughing and talk of “bubbies.” Almost every scene we shot was amusing to us. I miss the fun of the first season. These days, in many scenes, you can tell by my body language that I don’t want to be sitting in the middle of that bullshit. My shoulders are slumped and I’ve got a real puss on my face. You didn’t see that look on my face during the first season.

  But let’s face it—our show wouldn’t have ever grown into what it became if we hadn’t discovered that scandal about Danielle Staub in season one. Had Teresa not flipped that table, we would never have been as big as we are. That whole drama ultimately set the benchmark for the series, and that makes me sad, because in the season leading up to that, we had fun. The show was almost a comedy at times. And these days I think the show could be so much more; it could be life lessons sprinkled with good humor and heart­break.

  The top five Real Housewives of New Jersey feuds

  1. Teresa v. me over what she said in her cookbook. You all know how that ended up.

  2. Danielle v. Teresa at the season-two reunion. That was really unpleasant and intense.

  3. Danielle v. me at the season-one reunion. That was legendary, but I couldn’t tolerate what she was doing to my sister.

  4. Jacqueline not turning up to the season-three reunion because of Teresa’s behavior. It was awful to watch Jacqueline so distraught.

  5. Teresa v. everyone in season four. We all wanted her to be accountable for what she told the press.

  I went through some stinging betrayals on this show. They were devastating to go through in my life and it was devastating to watch them on TV. Housewives is not scripted, it’s not set up. The things you watch on TV actually happened in my real life and I have to deal with them long after the cameras stop rolling.

  It’s not that I don’t like being on the show. It’s just that there are parts that are very hard at times. But I am loyal to the show, I signed up for it, and I honor my commitments. Loyalty is important to me. It means the world to me that your loyalty to my TV show has brought you to my book, and you’ve read this far. When I hear from a viewer that I’ve helped her in a positive way, it lets me know that being loyal to myself is the most important thing I can do.

  The top ten signs it’s time to break up with a friend

  1. When you lose trust in that person, and your gut reacts differently to them.

  2. When you see that there is a change in their behavioral pattern that you’re not comfortable with.

  3. When the negatives outweigh the positives.

  4. When you’re arguing more than agreeing with them.

  5. When you find yourself not thinking of that person when something good happens and you want to share it—that person’s not even on your radar.

  6. When you need to talk, they’re not the one you think of.

  7. When you’re n
ot comfortable in their presence.

  8. When communication breaks down on either side.

  9. When you try to converse and there’s no common ground.

  10. When you hear that they are bitching about you behind your back.

  BEHIND THE SCENES

  In the early days, we’d all bring our jewelry to the reunion-show taping and other public tapings. We’d share our jewelry with one another in the green room. It was fun and it helped break the tension before we went onto the set. In the first-season reunion, Teresa is wearing my necklace. Jacqueline and I still do this, but we have so many newcomers in the cast, we just don’t share as much. I still bring extra jewelry in case one of them needs it. Better to be safe than sorry!

  PART II

  TRADITIONS

  Breakfast, lunch, or dinner:

  pick one meal a day to

  have with your family.

  It’s so important to have a meal with your family every day. That’s the time you reconnect. Put your BlackBerry down, put your iPad down, and give your family your undivided attention.

  I know we’re all busy these days, so I’m not talking about a formal sit-down dinner at the table. You can eat around the kitchen island, you can stand or you can sit, you can even go to McDonald’s. The main thing is that at least one meal a day isn’t rushed, or eaten on the go. You take the time out of your day and you connect with whoever is around. It’s about a shared experience that’s fun and pleasurable for everyone.

  Al worked so much that he was never home for dinner with us. There was a time when for a few months he would try to make it home early, but it just made his day crazier. So the solution was for me to take the kids down to The Brownstone and we’d eat dinner at his desk. A couple times, we had Easter Sunday dinner with the kids at his desk.