She Was Nine. Her Brother Had Just Died.
And She Told the Whole Town She'd Been Cast in a Movie With Goldie Hawn.
One Adult Knew Exactly What That Lie Was About.

The Chelsea Handler Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"For someone to tell you you're special... You need that if you're gonna become something. You need somebody to tell you they believe in you and that you have something that no one else has. And she did that in the most beautiful way."

- Chelsea Handler

A Third Grade Teacher Started Showing Up at the House on Tuesday Nights. It Took Chelsea Thirty Years to Appreciate Why.

Carol Schectman was born in Brooklyn, went to NYU, and taught third grade in Livingston, New Jersey. Chelsea was the youngest of six. That year - the year she was in Mrs. Schectman's class - her oldest brother Chet died while hiking. "She was the best teacher I've ever had. And it made me believe and understand how impactful it is as a kid to have one person."

Her parents were not sending anyone to a therapist. "We all kind of retreated to our own sections of grief. And nobody was really checking on me." Her father got embroiled in lawsuits against the people her brother had been hiking with. "Not only my brother died, it was like my father went away too." So Mrs. Schectman kept the friendship going through fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade. She had a house down the shore, and she would ask Chelsea's parents whether Chelsea could come for the weekend. They said yes. Chelsea describes her parents in those years as whatever the opposite of a helicopter parent is.

Then there is the Tuesday night when Chelsea was lying on the couch with her head in her mother's lap - there had been a lice outbreak at school, and her mom was checking her hair - and Mrs. Schectman just came over to the house. At nine, Chelsea thought nothing of it. Years later, after she and Mrs. Schectman had reconnected as adults, she understood: her teacher had come by to take the temperature of the household. To see what was actually going on in there.

A passing comment on Chelsea's Netflix show led them back to each other decades later - Mrs. Schectman was still alive, living in Florida - and she came on the show. They stayed in touch for another eight years. At dinner, she finally told Chelsea what she had seen in that classroom: "You have such a big spirit, and you just needed more than they could give you. Your parents didn't have enough bandwidth for you, especially." So she came in to supplement. Chelsea is careful about the credit. "I wanna believe that she did that for a lot of people, and I do believe that." She wonders out loud how many other Chelseas there were. She also knows what that era allowed and what it doesn't anymore: "Teachers can't do that now, take you home for the weekend to their house. That was like the last era of that happening. And she did that."

▶ Watch on YouTube: Why she chose her third grade teacher - ~1:55

She Was Nine, So She Did Not Grieve Him. She Was Furious at Him. It Took Thirty-One Years and a Therapist to Name That.

Chet was twenty-one, the oldest of the six, studying to be an engineer. He was the one you went to before you went to the parents. He drove Chelsea the five hours from New Jersey to the ferry at Woods Hole every summer with the windows down because she liked the cold, bundling her in blankets. On the way home she would fake sleep so he'd carry her up the driveway, and he'd catch her at it every time - I know you're not sleeping - and put her to bed with the window open, in winter, because she likes it cold. When he came in late from work she'd get up and pour him a bowl of cereal at ten at night. "Nobody makes me cereal like Chelsea."

He went hiking in the Grand Tetons. She had asked him not to leave. He told her he was coming right back. On July tenth, Chelsea and her sisters were on Martha's Vineyard; her sister had taken them out for ice cream as a consolation prize for not being allowed at the bonfire party. On the way home they stopped at a gas station and someone asked if Chet had gotten to the island yet. No - he's on a hiking trip, he'll be here in a week. They walked into the house and their mother was at the top of the stairs with a face Chelsea describes as unrecognizable. Her sister spoke before her mother did. "Throw away the ice cream."

What she remembers about the next morning is the birds. Why are there birds out? My brother is dead. Why is anything still happening? People were driving to the beach while her family was getting on the ferry to go home. For years afterward she would go sit in his room and smell his clothes. She thinks all of them did.

She did not go into therapy until she was forty. "It's not pleasant. It's not fun. Nobody wants to do that. But it's the best gift you could ever give yourself." What her therapist gave her was the sentence she had never been able to construct: the two men she trusted both left, so of course she does not trust men to do what they say they will do. Now she talks to Chet and to her mother before she walks on stage - she pictures them together as flying nymphs, and she keeps a system of signs. Two birds on the balcony, never one. An orange out of place when she needs to know she's making the right call. On her birthday one February she was skiing fresh tracks in the trees at Whistler, having asked her mother that morning to show her something, and she skied straight into an orange.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Chet, the ice cream, and the birds the next morning - ~26:16

Her Father Wanted to Send Her Away. Her Mother Said: She's Just Shaking It Out. Leave Her Alone.

The Handler house was, by Chelsea's own accounting, a mess. Six kids. A father who ran a used car lot out of the driveway - picture Sanford and Son in a Jewish Italian neighborhood, she says - with car batteries strewn across it and the family fleet running on flat tires and permanent check engine lights. The phone got shut off sometimes. She was asking to see a financial statement at eight or nine. Her mother forgot to sign her out of school on her eighth birthday and waited outside the chains, not understanding that a child cannot simply walk off the property. "This is your sixth child. You didn't know you had to sign me out of school?"

And yet. Chelsea is precise about the distinction, and it's the most useful thing she says all hour: there was neglect, but there was never a shortage of love. She never wondered whether she was worthy. She just could not get anybody to pick her up on time. Her high school best friend Robin told her years after Rita died that Chelsea's mother was the first person who ever said she loved her - that the two of them had spent enormous amounts of time together without Chelsea, that Rita had been picking her up from school. Chelsea once came downstairs and found her mother on the couch holding Robin, and thought: that's not one of us. Rita had spotted in Robin exactly what Mrs. Schectman had spotted in Chelsea, and did the same thing about it.

Chelsea was, by her own description, a tumult from about ten to nineteen. Pissed at the world. Her father wanted her sent away somewhere. Her mother refused, and she kept refusing - she's in pain, she's upset, she just has to shake it out, and at some point she'll stop shaking. When Chelsea moved to Los Angeles at nineteen and her aunt Gabby called Rita to say she couldn't have her in the house anymore, Rita's advice was to kick her out. She always lands on her feet. She's not your problem.

Rita's death was the opposite of Chet's - long, slow, in and out of consciousness, six nights of Chelsea sleeping in the hospital room before hospice. Chelsea has thought hard about which is worse and lands somewhere honest and unsatisfying: the sudden one is better for the person who dies and close to unrecoverable for everyone else. In the hospital her mother gave her an assignment. I know you're going to be successful, I know you're going to have a big, huge life - but you have to keep the family together. She named the two siblings who would need her most. Chelsea said, I got it. Then Rita added a coda: when you find out about your father after I'm dead, I want you to know I'll be laughing at you in heaven. She had, it turned out, been keeping him "in a box." Chelsea says every medium she has sat with since has opened with some version of the same line - your mom is laughing - and her answer is always, yeah, she told me she'd be laughing.

She says she talks to her mother more now than she did when Rita was alive. "I don't think I really respected her in the way that I respect her now."

▶ Watch on YouTube: "Just let her shake it out," and what Rita said in the hospital - ~46:15

She Told Her School She Was Playing Goldie Hawn's Daughter. Then She Wrote to Goldie Hawn for Proof.

Come back to that third grade classroom, because there is a second thing happening in it. Chelsea came back from the summer her brother died into a school full of parents and kids asking whether she was okay. She hated it. She did not want pity and had no tools for it. "So I was like, let me flip this around. I'm gonna do a little whoopsie doodle on this." She gave them a different story to focus on - a positive, bright, happy one. She had been cast as Goldie Hawn's daughter in the sequel to Private Benjamin.

Kids started asking for her autograph. She doubled down. Then she doubled down again - she wrote to Goldie Hawn and asked for a picture, and Goldie Hawn sent one back, signed. The high, she says, was enormous, and it was pure reverse engineering: I don't want the attention I'm getting about my brother dying, I'd like this attention instead. What she remembers most clearly, though, is the crash. There was no movie. The lie had no legs, and she had to live inside it while it collapsed.

David's summary of the year: Mrs. Schectman was there for all of it. Chelsea's, immediately: "She was like, okay, here's a bird's eye view of an actual crisis." Meanwhile the other thing was forming. She is careful with David about what the humor was and wasn't - the funny was innate, a genetic component she shares with all five siblings, and it was not a reaction to the bullying that came later, when kids called her poor and then ugly and then barked at her in the hallway. She didn't reach for jokes there. She got harder. But the outrageousness - the thing that lets her say what other people have the manners not to say - that part she is willing to trace. "Me being bolder and stronger was to gain control of a situation where I didn't feel like I had control." The outrageous got rewarded. She could see the results.

Postscript: she and Goldie Hawn are friends now. She has been to her house. She told the whole story from a stage in Aspen while honoring her for MindUP, the charity Hawn founded, because Hawn loves how ridiculous it is.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The Private Benjamin lie, and the autographed photo - ~1:01:03

She Doesn't Want Kids. She Took Weekly Parenting Classes for Three Girls Who Aren't Hers. "That's a Mrs. Scheckman Move."

In her most recent book, I'll Have What She's Having, Chelsea writes about dating a man whose daughters were largely raising themselves while the parents were gone. She stepped in - dance practice, school plays, books. Then the relationship ended, and a parenting expert told her the healthiest thing she could do was walk away. The kids are resilient. They'll get over it. She went back. She hired a family psychologist. She took weekly parenting classes. That was five years ago and she is still in those girls' lives; on the page they appear as Poopsie, Whoopsie and Oopsie, a composite of three real girls from two relationships, and one of them calls her Father - not Mother, because they had one, and not Dad, because their dad was Dad. Chelsea says the title fits: she has never felt like a stepmom, she feels like a stepdad, and she does not fully know why.

When David asked why she went back, she did not reach for a theory.

The pattern runs everywhere once you see it. She has sent her nieces and nephews to college, and twenty kids she has never met. She wanted to be the patriarch of the family - her word, and she is specific that she means patriarch, not matriarch - since she was small enough to be told to sit down. She stays on stage for twenty or thirty minutes after her shows to take photos and hug people, which she says she was not gracious enough to do in her early years. And she connects the reliability directly to its source: "Because of the unreliability of my childhood, I am the most reliable person I know. If I say I'm doing something, I do it."

David's last question was whether she is the woman Mrs. Schectman - who died at ninety-eight - hoped she would become. Chelsea didn't hedge. "She had a lot to do with it. I know she was proud, because she told me she was. I'm better because of her."

▶ Watch on YouTube: The three girls, and becoming a Mrs. Schectman - ~1:07:06

"I'm Chelsea Handler, and the person who believed in me was my third grade teacher, Mrs. Schectman."