1 Non Sono Francese
ONE
Non Sono Francese
I’m going to let you in on a secret right here, right now, in the first chapter of this book.
Ready?
I’m not French.
My great-grandparents came to America from Italy—specifically Bari, a midsize city right at the tip of the heel.
When they arrived at Ellis Island, someone there misspelled their name “Panettiere” instead of “Panettieri,” and it stuck.
They made their way to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn—home to a huge population of Italian immigrants at the time—and settled into an apartment.
Then they had eight kids, one of whom was my Poppa.
Poppa met and married my grandma in the early 1960s, and he adopted her curly-haired toddler son. That was my dad, Alan, aka Skip.
Grandma, Poppa, and all our friends and family pronounce our last name “Pan-a-TEERY,” not “Pan-a-TEE-air,” which is the pseudo-French pronunciation my mom, Lesley, came up with after listening to people butcher my name for years.
But I’m never offended. Regis Philbin even referred to me as “Hayden Planetarium.” Poppa sure cared, though.
When he watched me make my first talk show appearance in the nineties and learned that I was calling myself Pan-a-TEE-air, he stood up, started waving his arms, and ranted in Italian.
Poppa did that anytime he was mad. But trust me, no one was afraid of him.
After my dad graduated high school, Grandma and Poppa expected him to get a job, so he took the NYPD entrance exam and became a cop.
Mom’s path was different; every member of her family went to college, including fifteen of them who graduated from Duke.
Mom’s mom had Northern Italian roots, and she, Mom, my Grampy, and Mom’s older sister, Jana, lived in a small town in Indiana, where Grampy was a well-respected internist, specializing in heart conditions.
But Mom was artistic and felt like a fish out of water in the middle of Indiana, and she couldn’t wait to get out and do something radical.
She finished high school early, went off to college and then grad school, and set her sights on becoming a professional actor.
Mom was forced to become independent early on, so it was no surprise that she was determined to do her own thing.
When she was in seventh grade, Jana developed such severe anorexia that my grandparents checked her into a hospital in Michigan.
Aunt Jana stayed there over a year, and Nonna and Grampy drove five hours each way to see her on the weekends, leaving Mom on her own.
With her parents so focused on Aunt Jana, Mom was lonely, but it forced her to become self-sufficient very early in life.
Her fearless self-reliance took her from Indiana to Missouri for college to Seattle for grad school to LA…
for Hollywood. Finally, she landed in New York City, where her acting career really took off.
Mom has a big, magnetic smile, high cheekbones, and sparkling brown eyes, and I always told her she was so beautiful that she didn’t need to wear much makeup.
But to this day she never leaves the house without her coral-red lipstick on, and she reapplies it all day, every day.
Her favorite color eyeshadow is purple, and her hair is naturally dark, but she used to color it honey blond, with highlights my little brother once said made her look “tie-dyed.” For a little flourish, she teased her hair up high toward the back of her head, and before acrylic nails were everywhere, Mom had them.
She’s always had a great figure and watches what she eats, but once I crept downstairs in my pj’s late at night and saw Mom’s back end sticking out from the open refrigerator.
I yelled “Mom!”, her backside jumped, and her head popped out from behind the door.
Mom’s eyes were as wide as saucers, she had a spoon in her mouth, and she was holding an open, half-empty tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
In the early 1980s, Mom lived in Manhattan and worked temp jobs to support herself when she wasn’t acting.
She booked some small film parts and did regional theater until she landed her first big role: Edy Lester Donovan, Bryan Cranston’s wife on ABC’s Loving.
Their wedding, where Edy wore a white flapper dress, was the soap opera’s most-watched episode in its second season.
One day, Mom and a girlfriend walked into the subway station at Ninety-Sixth and Broadway and passed a cute, blond, curly-haired, baby-faced transit cop named Skip.
Dad had his eyes on Mom, but his immature yet well-intentioned strategy was to hit on her friend to get Mom’s attention.
He did, and they both ignored him. Never one to give up easily, Dad changed directions and hit on Mom the following week. Success! She gave him her number.
A few years later, Mom and Dad got married at a place called Boulderberg Manor in Tomkins Cove, New York, about forty minutes north of Manhattan.
“Cops spend ninety percent of their time dealing with assholes,” Dad once told me. “When you’re a firefighter, nobody ever treats you like that.”
Dad was no asshole, nor was he stupid, so after a few hard years as a cop in Harlem, he joined the New York City Fire Department.
When he wasn’t working, Dad liked to golf in Rockland County, a wooded, suburban area a short drive north of Manhattan and across the Hudson River, so he and Mom decided to look for houses there.
The area was quiet and scenic, and on its eastern side was the Palisades, a long line of steep, dramatic cliffs with incredible views of the Hudson.
Rockland County has a diverse combination of service workers like Dad, artists like Mom, and families who don’t mind that a commute into the city means taking a bus or driving.
There are no trains from Rockland County, making it feel both close to and far away from New York.
Crucial to my newlywed parents, where they settled was a lot more affordable than the City.
In fact, it was so livable that Mom and Dad realized they could have a pretty great life there raising a family.
Dad’s job made the idea even more attractive.
Like most firefighters in the FDNY, he worked in twenty-four-hour shifts a few days a week, which meant he had uninterrupted stretches at home.
It was a no-brainer; Mom could have her career and Dad could have his, and one of them would always be present for me and my brother.
The year was 1989. George H. W. Bush was president and the economy was good. Sitcoms like Family Ties reigned on TV, and the US was at peace. It was the perfect time to put down roots and Mom and Dad were ready to make it happen.
That’s when I entered the scene.
Mom didn’t let pregnancy slow her down. If anything, it motivated her, and she was onstage as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream right when she started to show.
The play was so popular the producers extended it through Mom’s ninth month, so the costume designers altered her dress to focus on the upstairs rather than the downstairs.
The producer was afraid her water might break on the stage (considering the life I’ve had, this would have been hilariously poetic) but Mom finished the run to standing ovations, wearing a dress that was bursting at the seams.
By the end of the summer of 1989, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was over, and so was Mom’s pregnancy.
On August 21, after twenty-four hours of labor, I, Hayden Lesley Panettiere came into the world with light, almond-shaped eyes, a halo of strawberry blond hair, big, rosy cheeks, and creamy white skin.
I also had a giant, round head, which Dad’s brother, Uncle Donny, joked was going to snap my neck if Mom and Dad weren’t careful.
Mom claims that I came out of the womb, looked at her, and said, “Thanks, but I’ve got it from here.
” Mom can embellish stories, but she understands independence better than anybody, so I’ll take her word for it.
She also says that everyone commented on what a bright-eyed, unusually happy baby I was, smiling and laughing when I was held or when something excited me.
I’d kick and babble like I was trying to put on a show, and maybe I was.
I was a tiny firecracker, popping to life as if on cue.
Soon, Mom’s friends and colleagues started telling her that if Lesley Vogel didn’t get this happy baby into modeling as quickly as she possibly could, she was missing the opportunity of a lifetime.
Mom figured what the heck. At the very least, she’d get some good baby pictures out of the whole experience. Maybe I’d even earn a little money for college. So, Mom and I hit the ground running.