2 Mornings with Michelin
TWO
Mornings with Michelin
This audition—if you could call it that—was for Michelin Tires.
Michelin had a long-running ad campaign that featured chubby, shirtless babies sitting inside a tire, so at the casting call Mom stripped me down to my diaper and placed me at a designated spot.
My giant head bobbed like a balloon on a string, and my body began swaying back, then forth, then side to side.
“Please, don’t let her fall and hit her head on the tire,” Mom whispered to herself.
I didn’t topple over, but I also didn’t get the part. Tires and I weren’t ready for each other just yet.
At eleven months old, when my head fit my body a bit better, I auditioned for a Playskool toy train commercial.
I sat straight up, smiled, and lit up like a Christmas tree when the casting director made funny faces.
Mom and the director loved it, and I got the part.
My first memory is watching a miniature Playskool train circle its tracks over and over and over, but that could be because the Playskool ad ran for years.
Dad claims checks arrived in the mail all the time, but baby modeling is not a job that’s going to make you rich.
At best, I’d make a few hundred dollars at each shoot, and if I was lucky, I might someday receive a residual check that hovered around two figures.
Fifteen percent of that went from my employer into a trust I couldn’t touch until I was eighteen.
These specifications were part of the Coogan Act—named after poor Jackie Coogan, a 1920s child actor whose parents squandered his money—and it was meant to safeguard children against abuse by employers or their parents.
I don’t remember much of anything about my early commercials, but I know my parents did a great job protecting me, so exploitation was never on the table.
I apparently enjoyed auditions and commercial shoots and never whined or squirmed on set.
“Besides,” Mom says, “you can’t force a child to do something they’re not comfortable with. Especially Hayden.” As my godmother said, I was a “willful child.”
Once in a while Dad would take me to auditions, but his most notable contribution was the near impossible: getting parking in the City.
He was stationed at a busy firehouse in Harlem, which he loved because a busy firehouse is the best firehouse.
(Dad didn’t enjoy the danger, but he was passionate about saving lives.) On days off, Dad didn’t need his FDNY parking placard, so Mom used it to park next to any New York City firehouse knowing she wouldn’t get ticketed or towed.
Suddenly, driving and parking in the City wasn’t torture.
One booking led to another, then another.
I like to think that casting directors kept hiring me because I seemed as professional as a baby could be, but part of me thinks it was because I never cried.
Crying on set means an hour of snot, drool, costume changes, and cleaning up a red, blotchy face, so a fussy baby very quickly becomes a baby without a job.
I guess I just liked people. I was comfortable around strangers because they said nice things to me and made funny faces. I was also happy, confident, and eager to please, unbothered by cold rooms and strangers’ hands and early morning wakeups. None of that made me cry.
Or, maybe, even as a baby, I could sense when people were proud of me—especially Mom.
Dad went with it partly because acting was Mom’s thing.
Dad occupied his own sphere in our world: the dependable jack-of-all-trades, the scrappy extrovert who made good money at an honorable job, and the golf junkie who was always playing a few holes or watching a tournament on TV.
Mom was Work, and Dad was Play, but they filled in each other’s gaps and shortcomings, at least in the first part of their marriage.
Dad’s biggest weakness was that he didn’t want to rock the boat when Mom was onto something.
Dad was a softie on the inside, and Mom was a force to be reckoned with.
I know Dad had arguments between his head and his heart, with his heart questioning whether it was right to have his baby girl so busy all the time, being shuttled around from one audition to another.
Dad was a grounded guy, and child acting was anything but normal.
But he justified it. He said to himself, “Maybe she’s smiling because she loves it.
She’s not missing out on having fun because there are so many other kids at auditions.
And maybe baby modeling will give her a brilliant career, and she’ll never have to worry about money. ”
Besides, just before my little brother came along, Mom was completely in her groove.
She juggled my schedule, spoke up for me on set, and kept the wolves at bay.
With her leading the charge, there was no stopping us as we barreled toward my next gig.
I kept getting callbacks, and Mom and Dad kept saying yes.
I was given great opportunities, and there was no saying no to Mom’s drive.
The abnormal had become entirely normal.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was standing in the living room of our house, staring through the dining room toward the kitchen.
Mom and Dad were at the kitchen table, which was a good twenty feet away from me, and they were talking about Dad’s new business.
Dad had just started a flooring company called J & H Wood Flooring, with the “H” for Hayden and the “J” for his business partner’s daughter.
When he wasn’t in the City at the firehouse, hardwood flooring was what he did.
Some sixth sense came over me, and a light popped on in my head. “Mom!” I blurted out.
“Yes, honey?”
“You’re pregnant,” I said. No filter, no hesitation.
Mom turned to me and scoffed. “What are you talking about? I am not pregnant.”
“Yes, you are,” I answered, crossing my arms. I don’t know why I knew, but I just knew. Not long after, Mom and Dad told me I was going to be a big sister. On the night that I confronted her, Mom was indeed pregnant, but she had no idea.