A HOLLYWOOD ROMANCE
Where life imitates art

By JEFF HOYT
PHOTOS BY KEVIN FOLEY

It sounds like a plot from a soap opera: the beautiful, suspicious wife accuses her dear friend of sleeping with her handsome husband. But for former Melrose Place star Lisa Rinna, what began as a bad dream, became all too real.
     “Lisa had this dream that Jennifer and I were having an affair,” admits her husband, actor Harry Hamlin of L.A. Law fame. The other woman was Jennifer Grant, one of Rinna’s attendants at their 1997 wedding. “It was a premonition.”
     Rinna corrects him, explaining that in the dream, her husband and best friend were married. “The dream was so powerful, though, in real life, I started to get a little jealous. I‘d see them talking, and I started to fantasize and create in my mind that there was something going on between them.”
     So Rinna, who also starred in the daytime soap Days of Our Lives, took action. “I was at a girl’s night, and I just said, ‘Jen, OK, I just gotta say this, because we’re so open and honest. I’m jealous. I think that you and Harry might be having an affair. Is it true?’”
     Rinna’s dream eventually did come true, but more along the lines of a situation comedy than a soap. A year later, Jennifer Grant is Hamlin’s wife — on the WB sitcom Movie Stars. Grant, the daughter of Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon, and Hamlin, play famous actors trying to raise their kids amid the glitz of modern-day Hollywood.
     As Hamlin remembers, “They told me that they had found this great girl to play my wife. At first they wouldn’t tell me who it was. When they told me it was Jennifer Grant, I said, ‘Jennifer? She was at my house for dinner Saturday.’”
     Like an old married couple, Hamlin and Rinna finish each other’s stories as they open up about their lives and their love for each other from the sun-drenched patio of their beautiful Hollywood hilltop home. The views are magnificent, but on this day, the prime location comes at a price: a windstorm knocked out the electricity the night before, and has yet to be restored.
     Hamlin sets the scene: “It was very romantic last night with no electricity. We had candlelight.” Rinna remembers candles on another occasion: “The first date we had here, the entire house was lit with candles.” “And there was no power outage,” Hamlin hastens to add.
     “I remember driving up the driveway, and I could see through the window like 60 candles lit,” recalls Rinna. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’ It made me nervous.”
     Just as Hamlin’s candlelit attempt at romance initially unnerved her, so did the seemingly benign reality predicted by her dream. “I think in the beginning, it was an interesting triangle: best friends, Jen playing my husband’s wife. It was weird.”
     “It turned out to be a great thing,” Hamlin concedes. “We see each other all the time socially, and I get to see her on the set. We already have a chemistry; we already have a relationship, so it makes it a lot easier.”
     But there is more to the story than even Hamlin knows: Rinna was tipping off her friend as to how to best play Mrs. Harry Hamlin. “There were some moments when they first started working together, when they were just finding their way, when I could offer her insights.”
     In a case of art imitating life imitating a dream, Hamlin’s character Reese Hardin is quite similar to the real actor in many ways. “The whole thing about this show is we get to be who we are, which doesn’t happen very often. We get to live out the lives that we live out on a daily basis on this television show,” explains the television and movie star who plays a movie star on television in Movie Stars.
     “Plus what’s funny about it is it crosses the line of reality,” adds Rinna. “Harry will be talking about himself as the character. He’ll relate a story about Clash of the Titans or being named the Sexiest Man Alive, which he has experienced. It’s from Harry’s life, but he is saying it as Reese Hardin the character. So there are really interesting crossovers to reality.”
     Hamlin concurs, “In one scene, my estranged daughter says she’s seen all of my movies, saying, ‘Yeah, I have posters for all of them, except for that lame Clash of the Titans.’”
     Rinna not only dreamed of her husband’s onscreen marriage, she actually suggested that he and Grant work together before the network decided they would make a good couple. She was also the force behind Hamlin reading the pilot for Movie Stars, when he was more interested in doing an hour-long drama like the Emmy-Award-winning L.A. Law, which first propelled him to fame.
     As Hamlin remembers: “Lisa read the script and put a post-it on it that said, ‘You gotta read this, it’s funny.’ I just looked at that post-it for two weeks, and kept reading the hour-longs.”
     Although Hamlin’s first film, Movie, Movie, in 1978, was a comedy, and the 48-year-old had a recurring comedic role in the short-lived Ted Danson sitcom, Ink, he didn’t seem interested in going for laughs. “He was pretty much against doing a sitcom,” Rinna recalls. “A lot of people had said to him, ‘You really should do one. You were really good in Ink. You really should think about it.’ And I kept saying, ‘I think it would be a really great turn for your career.’ But he just wasn’t ready for that yet. So I kept saying, ‘Read this, it’s good.’”
     Hamlin finally gave in to his wife’s urging, and he liked what he read. “It was actually pretty funny. The thing that I liked about it was that it’s about this business. It gives us the chance to make fun of everything we took seriously for so long. And make fun of people who take themselves seriously in this business.”
     “And make fun of yourself,” Rinna interjects. “It’s very self-deprecating, which I think is so nice.”
     Once Hamlin was certain that he wanted to do a comedy, he had to convince the network. “They didn’t have experience with me doing comedy. I had to do something that I rarely do, which is to go in and read. I had to go into a room with about 30 people there. They’re all stone-faced. You have to do your five minutes of the show. Thank God, by the end of the five minutes, they were all rolling and howling with laughter. I came up with something at the last moment.”
     “You took your pants off,” reveals Rinna. “You pulled your pants down. That’s what you did. But you had underwear on.” “It was really kind of a visual,” explains Hamlin, sheepishly. Rinna reveals Hamlin’s secret to getting laughs. “It was funny. You had heart boxers on.”
     Heart boxers are more than Rinna was wearing when she posed nude in Playboy in 1998. What made the layout even more controversial was the fact she was six and a half months pregnant with their first child, Delilah Belle. “I’m really glad I did it,” reflects Rinna. “I think that pregnancy is the most beautiful time for a woman. It’s when you are the most woman that you ever are. You’re giving life. But there’s such a stigma on [appearing nude].
     “When you get pregnant, you’re supposed to hide for 9 months, then have the baby, then get your shape back within the next month. I was so moved by the changes in my body and by how beautiful I thought it was. I felt like it was the right thing to do, to express that and show it’s a beautiful thing, as opposed to something to be ashamed of. It was one of those visions, something that I needed to do.”
     Hamlin didn’t see it the same way at first. “My first reaction was, ‘Why?’ Why take something that is luminescent, a buoyant event in our lives and put it there? As we discussed it, and discussed what it meant to her to make this statement, which in a way, thumbed its nose at the whole paradigm of Playboy.”
     Hamlin, who admits leafing through the magazine on occasion “to read the articles,” explains: “You see these beautiful women paraded on the pages of Playboy. The idea, supposedly, is you have a romp with them, you have a few drinks and you listen to jazz, and the next day there are no repercussions. It’s just recreational. What Lisa wanted to do was show the procreational side of that whole event that Playboy had been selling for so long.”
     Hamlin, who has been married twice before, adds, “I didn’t think Playboy would go for it. I think it was very bold of them.”
     The pictorial got a lot of positive feedback, especially from women. “It was definitely memorable,” says Hamlin. “Yesterday, I was with Delilah at the equestrian center looking at horses. A woman came up to me and said, ‘Are you Mr. Rinna?’
     “I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Gosh, because I saw your wife’s layout in Playboy. What a wonderful, courageous thing for her to do. It made me and my husband think about not being embarrassed when I’m pregnant, not having to cover up.’”
     Rinna says she never would have posed without clothes if Hamlin had objected. “It was just something that I was supposed to do, something that I was supposed to show the world. But if he had really put his foot down, I never would have done it.”
     Hamlin clarifies, “We don’t have a relationship where we put [our] feet down. We definitely went through a lot of discussion about it that brought us much closer together as a result of her doing that.”
     Rinna adds, “Because that was a big deal. It wasn’t just a little thing. ‘Oh, hey, honey, by the way, I’m going to pose nude six and a half months pregnant for Playboy, you okay with that?’ It was a very deep issue. I think going through the depths of it as we did—it did bring us closer. It was a good experience. Painful at times, but really good.”
     Rinna has already shown the pictorial to her prenatal co-star, now one-and-a-half year-old Delilah. “She certainly sees me naked and knows what everything is. I think if I have shame about it, then she will. If I don’t, she won’t.”
     Hamlin proudly does his impression of their daughter’s reaction: “She goes, ‘Momma!’” But the Hollywood couple admits Delilah does not always have a discerning eye.
     Rinna explains, “Anyone that resembles or sort of looks like us, she thinks is us.” As a result, Delilah has been known to shout "Momma!" at a picture of Rene Russo. Adds Hamlin, “Harrison Ford gets ‘Poppa!’”
     Hamlin, whose son Dmitri (with Ursula Andress) is currently attending Yale, says it’s great having a baby in the house. Adds Rinna, “She brings such joy to our lives. You learn a new thing every minute.”
     But Rinna, who will soon be seen in a Lifetime movie called Swimming Lessons, was happy to get back to acting after playing the role of full-time mother. “I had taken 15 months off — which was really wonderful — to spend that time with Delilah. It was really easy to go back to work. It seemed to flow smoothly.”
     “Delilah would come to the set to visit. It was a great group of people. We got to film here in L.A., which rarely happens. It was wonderful. I can’t wait to go back again.”
     Hamlin also has a TV movie in the can called Quarantine, in which he plays the President and saves the world from a deadly viral outbreak. “I think it’s a milestone in any actor’s career to play the president.”
     “He loved every minute of it, too,” adds Rinna, teasingly. Apparently the power went to his head a little. “He loved playing the president — oh, boy. That was a little tough to get through, but we got through it.”
     Hamlin and Rinna want other couples to know the secret to their happy marriage: acceptance. Explains Rinna, “Then it’s a lot less struggle. You just have to accept everything without becoming a victim. You just accept what the other person is about, and then you don’t get angry, and then you’re not living in misery. You have a good time. I think that that’s the key to making any relationship work. You can’t change the person, and you can somehow accept, which you need to do in life anyway, just accept it, let it be, allow it. Then that’s pretty great.”
     Adds Hamlin, “You create expectations in your mind what your ‘ideal love partner’ should be like. The person you’re with never lives up to that. If you hold up that grid up to your mate, you’ll be disappointed a lot of the time. We have found a way to accept everything, without having to have expectations like, you gotta do this, or look like this or that.”
     With both parents working, it can be difficult to make time for each other. But Rinna reflects, “You really have to work hard. You have to allow those times to happen when there is no time. There are those times when you can’t even make the time. That can get hard. But if you can just see the end of the tunnel, and know it’s not going to last forever, you’ll get through that. That’s what kind of happened with us.”
     Hamlin agrees. “Once again, it’s not having expectations that it should look any certain way, that we should be taking time, we should be doing this way or that way in order for it to be real or deep or whatever. It is what it is. Without those expectations, you can go for a couple of weeks, and look at each other, and go, ‘We haven’t had a relationship for a couple of weeks. That’s OK, then let’s do it now.’ Instead of blaming the other person for something you would have liked to have happened but didn’t.”