I was on the corner of Forty-Second and Eighth Avenue, in front of the Auntie Anne’s pretzel place, when my agent, Steven, called.
“Have you heard?” he asked.
“Heard what?”
“There’s a mention in Page Six about you and Christian.”
It was a drizzly day, and this news stopped me midstride. I looked down, and at that very moment, saw the New York Post open to the page with my photo on it, lying in a dirty puddle. (You can’t make this stuff up.) The headline was something like: “Sutton Foster’s Roll in the Hay Is Going to Ruin Her Marriage.”
There was no need for me to look any closer. I knew exactly what it was referring to.
“Roll in the Hay” was one of my numbers in Young Frankenstein, the Mel Brooks musical I was doing on Broadway. I played Inga, the sexy German fräulein that Teri Garr originated in the movie. The titillating tabloid story insinuated that I had cheated on Christian—and pinned our failed marriage on me. I felt like my purse had been dumped on the sidewalk.
As I headed into a rehearsal for Shrek the Musical—the next musical I was joining once I finished my Young Frankenstein commitment—my mind was racing.
Christian and I had been separated for six months and were both dating other people. This was a very painful agreement we had made, as shortly after we got married, we realized that we both wanted more from our relationship. We were best friends and frankly more like roommates than partners.
The gossips tried to sum up our demise as simply and salaciously as they could, but it wasn’t that clear-cut. The only two people who really know what happened are Christian and me. And I’m going to keep it that way. I will say that Christian and I were brutally honest with each other the entire time. There were no secrets. No one cheated. Our separation was actually fueled by love for each other. But that type of story doesn’t make for a good headline.
To make matters worse, my mother, who read everything online, called me, seething: “How could you do such a thing?”
It was shocking to me that someone who seemed to care so little about Christian while I was with him suddenly took such a rabid interest in his well-being.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” I fired back, furious.
I had already told my mother that Christian and I had separated, but she was reading and believing all the message board gossip that the story generated. I had to spend the next hour defending myself, in my most vulnerable moment, to my mother, who had never accepted Christian in the first place. That was crushing. After I hung up with her, I again felt this all-consuming emptiness. But this time, there was no Christian to pull out the sofa bed and order pizza. That realization sent me spiraling.
All I wanted to do was run away. Leave New York. Get the hell out of there! But I was still playing Inga and had to figure out how to quiet the cacophony in my brain. I decided to pick up my crochet hook again.
This time, I wanted to make a granny-square blanket similar to the one my mother had kept at the foot of her bed for as long as I can remember. It looked like something you might find at a garage sale: a classic seventies olive-green-and-brown afghan throw that smelled of cigarette smoke and was neither soft nor cozy. It reminded me of my mother—and was the one thing I identified with the idea of home. It was the base for my handstand and front walkover practice when I was a kid in Augusta, when my parents still shared a bedroom, and it moved with my mother to her room when they started sleeping in separate quarters in Michigan. It came to Memphis, and the last time I spotted it was at the foot of her bed in Cape Canaveral.
I’m still not sure why I was so compelled to make my own version of that blanket at that point in my life other than because I felt untethered. I couldn’t control what people said about me and Christian, whether in the tabloids or even in the theaters where we both worked. But I could choose the colors that went into each granny square, and I could choose the pattern I wanted to make. I found one with a beautiful flower design. Onstage, I had to sing and speak with a thick German accent, wear a corset, and yodel. Backstage in my dressing room, I was obsessively crocheting 4-by-4-inch granny squares, each with a flower blooming from its center.
The first square was like solving a puzzle. You begin in the center, making a magic ring, which is basically a loop that can expand and contract. You crochet your first stitches into that ring and continue working in a circle. As I finished the first flower, an intricate design of petals three layers deep in a beautiful hot-pink wool yarn, I wondered…how did our marriage dissolve so fast? What went wrong?
I thought we had followed the right pattern. Our lives were so deeply intertwined: we shared friends, our dog Linus, and even the stage in Millie when Christian replaced Gavin Creel as my love interest, which meant we both worked and lived together. And we did it well.
I grabbed a light-pink yarn of the same scratchy wool and began to crochet into the flower to build the background, each stitch helping me begin to untangle what possibly went wrong. And yet, there were no early warning signs. No major red flags. No big fights. As the pink border began to grow, I noticed that my finger was also growing red; I had wound the yarn too tightly around it, working it with my hook, making tight loops as I went.
Christian and I were best friends, who had created a good life together—and we both realized we needed more than either one of us could give. But neither of us could define what that was. All these thoughts tumbled through my head as I grabbed my scissors and snipped the pale-pink yarn off, disconnecting it from the ball. I added an olive-green wool to the edge of the background and began to make the border.
We tried couples’ therapy. I wanted to fight for our marriage, but Christian had already fallen for someone else. When I watched him take off his wedding ring in one session, I knew it was really over.
I held the finished square in my hands. This hot-pink flower, rimmed with a dull green. A promise of something blooming. It gave me a small burst of hope, possibility, even though the ground around it seemed infertile. Dead.
Christian moved out of our apartment and got a place about a block away. And yet for months, I kept unscrewing my brush tip from the electric toothbrush we had once shared, as I had done every morning and night for five years, before realizing that it was no longer necessary.
I also began focusing more on my friends. I realized so many of my friendships had taken a back seat to Christian and his friends. (I’m a Pisces, which means I am a great absorber of people—great on the stage, but tough in relationships.) When he moved out, there was this big void I needed to fill. My friend Megan would come over to watch a movie and then wind up sleeping over, or my friend Kevin Covert would just show up with a bottle of white wine and we’d watch America’s Next Top Model. Stephanie had moved to LA, but we spoke on the phone almost every day. Through the pain of the breakup, real and lasting relationships were forming.
And all the while, I was obsessively crocheting—and also eating too much chicken salad, which I’d pick up on my way to work from a health-food joint called Green Symphony. When my corset started to dig into my belly, I asked Julien, “Did they dry clean my costume?”
“Um…probably?” he’d lie, as he grunted while attempting to pull the corset tighter and tighter.
I’d suck in my gut as much as I could—often while crocheting at the same time—and soon started standing because the corset dug into my stomach if I tried to sit down.
“What are you going to make with all of those squares?” Julien asked one day, while watching me stand in the doorway crocheting away.
I had a stack of at least twenty beautiful squares. Each one with a perfect flower, in varying jewel-tone colors.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just making them.”
It felt like I was pouring all of my heartache into each and every stitch. All of my regret and shame and mistakes and fear. All of it was going into each square. The life I had been building for the last five years had completely unraveled.
I made stacks and stacks of squares. And that became a visual reminder that I was making progress. That even though my heart was broken, I was still moving forward. Each time I placed a finished square on one of the piles, it reminded me that I was healing. My garden was growing. Even if it didn’t feel that way on the inside.
Slowly but surely, those crochet piles multiplied.
After nine months playing a sexy fräulein, I was slated to play Princess Fiona in Broadway-bound Shrek. By then, I had made close to one hundred squares. I still didn’t know what to do with them—I had more than enough to make one gigantic blanket, or two twin bed covers, but I wasn’t ready to stitch them all together. I didn’t know what their purpose was. Not yet.
As I was packing up my dressing room, getting ready to go on the road with Shrek, I simply shoved them all in a black Hefty garbage bag and stored them in my closet. Or rather, Christian’s old closet, which I had turned into my craft storage.
I would figure out what to do with them one day.
I played Fiona, the burping and farting ogre princess in Shrek, for a year—and crocheted seven blankets. When the musical closed in January 2010, I was ready for something totally different.
Joe Machota, an agent who was courting me, suggested me for the role of a dominatrix in a play called Trust, by Paul Weitz. I had never done a play, only musicals, and I was looking for a challenge. Going from Millie to Fiona to a woman who dressed in a pleather corset and walked around onstage cracking a whip was intriguing to me. It was exactly the type of left turn I wanted to make in my career. It was sexy and a bit dangerous, and those were things I felt might be exciting to explore both onstage and on a personal level.
The play was all about role-playing. My trademark had been spunky, people-pleasing Southern charm: “Don’t forget to smile! Yes, ma’am! No, ma’am!” I had always been able to hide behind my tap dancing, high notes, and humor. Trust forced me to survive on a stage without song, and with my own sexuality in the forefront.
My audition was with Zach Braff. I knew him from watching Scrubs though I had never met him before. For the audition, I’d have to crawl on top of Zach. It was a very sexy scene, and I asked Megan to help me prepare. I made her sit on my bed and did the whole scene with her first, thinking, If I can seduce Megan, I can seduce anyone. I even went around dominating poor Linus the dog.
Trust was how I met Bobby Cannavale. He was also in the play, and in real life, he was a dark, brooding, gorgeous, but also goofy movie star. Earlier that year, I’d bought a lake house an hour outside the city, close to where my brother and Jen also had a weekend home. That felt like another bold move: I had saved enough money to buy a house. So I did.
I invited the play’s cast up to the lake house for a night. The four of us—me, Zach, Bobby, and Ari Graynor—all drank wine around a bonfire. That was when my romance with Bobby started: we shared glances over the flames, and he lingered at my bedroom door before heading to bed.
A week later, we started dating. He invited himself to my lake house. I said yes. He was the perfect combo for me at that moment in my life: it was summer, I was single, and I had a role in this weirdly sexy play. It was super flirty and fun and unlike anything I had ever experienced before. He drove me crazy in the best way. I felt like a teenager, giddy and excited. We’d meet in the afternoons before our shows, and it was a mix of romantic and hot and something that I had been missing. I craved him. We fell in love and couldn’t get enough of each other.
On the Fourth of July, I invited him up to the lake for a boat trip with Hunter and Jen and some of their friends. I have this photo of Bobby and me napping on the boat, our bodies intertwined. So in love and happy.
That fall, I was offered the part of Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes. As he had done with Trust, Joe Machota planted a seed with Kathleen Marshall, the director and choreographer, that I could be a Reno who sings and dances. Ethel Merman originated the role, and Patti LuPone did a revival in 1987. Both of their Renos sang while the ensemble danced. In this production, I was going to get to do both. I was flattered. And so naïve. I didn’t know it yet, but I was leaping into the pool and had no idea how to swim.
Bobby and I went to visit his family in Miami over Christmas. We drove down in his new red Prius, with his fourteen-year-old son, Jake, in the back seat, while I crocheted a Christmas tree garland in the front. His mom and sister and brother were super warm and welcoming. We left Jake with them when we went to see my parents.
I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made with Christian. I was in love with Bobby, and I wanted my mom and dad to meet him right away. So Bobby drove us the three and a half hours from Miami to Cape Canaveral. I was nervous—but this time it was different. Bobby was movie-star famous, and my mother was smitten. When I first told her Bobby and I were dating, she was excited. That was new to me. She knew nothing about him beyond the films he had been in and the stories she had read online.
We walked into the house, which of course reeked of cigarette smoke. Maggie and Mitzi, my parents’ two shih tzus, went bazonkers—they weren’t used to having people in the house. Neither were my parents. We all just stood awkwardly in the entryway while my parents paced around us, unable to settle.
“Can we please just all sit down?” I finally said.
We did, about five feet from the front door on the entryway bench and some chairs. My dad had made chocolate chip cookies, which he served. He and my mom were so nervous and awkward—it broke my heart. They were trying so hard. “The Station Agent is one of my favorite movies,” my mom said, trying to make conversation. We talked about our visit to Miami and a little bit about Trust. It was pleasant. We were there for about forty-five minutes, and I knew that was enough. I hugged them both goodbye, and then my mother shook Bobby’s hand and said, “It was very nice to meet you.”
She was smiling.
Back in the car, I burst into tears.
After the tension between Christian and my parents, I had been bracing myself for a similarly awkward experience. Bobby didn’t understand why I was crying. He had heard most of the stories about my parents, but he couldn’t really understand that what had just happened felt normal in a way that was visceral and painful for me.
Bobby and I decided to go to London to celebrate the New Year. His son Jake had just turned fourteen, and Bobby told me on that trip that he didn’t want any more children. He was adamant about it. I was thirty-five, and I was surprised at how upset I got. I had never been front-footed about having children—and had not even considered having them with Bobby yet. But I at least wanted to have the conversation! That night, I wound up crying in the bathroom. I stared at my face in the mirror. Tears streaked down my cheeks. I was so confused by my reaction.
Did I want children?
Rehearsals for Anything Goes started that January, and Bobby began rehearsals for a new Broadway play, The Motherfucker with the Hat. We were going to be on Broadway at the same time! We went to each other’s opening night parties. And then we both got nominated for Tony Awards. It was an unbelievably exciting time, and we were doing it together.
But Bobby was starting to pull away. I could feel it. Our hot and sexy romance was beginning to fizzle. Gone were the afternoon romps and stolen glances. I so badly wanted us to be perfect for each other that I had even started thinking that we were going to move in together.
That June, Bobby had to have shoulder surgery, the result of an injury he had sustained during a fight scene in Motherfucker. His accident happened onstage on my opening night, and he showed up to that party in pain. It was the biggest night of my career—the critics loved the show—and I spent it worried about him instead of being able to celebrate being in a huge hit Broadway musical. That summer, as he was healing, I signed up to be his nurse. I took him home from the hospital, shopped for food, picked up his medicine, and did my best to take care of him, which left no time to take care of myself or even ask, “What do I need?” I was still in therapy, and I remember my therapist being concerned: “Who is taking care of you?” she asked. My hairdresser said something similar: “I hope this is okay for me to say, but you already have a job.”
I had just won the Tony Award for playing Reno and was doing eight sold-out performances a week. He was recovering, looking for his next job, and suddenly had a lot of free time. We were seeing each other less and less, and I was resentful. And exhausted. And afraid of losing him.
That September, I suggested we go on a vacation. We needed time together. I had to figure out if this was going anywhere. We were on a Caribbean island when Hurricane Irene hit. If ever there was a sign! Looking back, I see how hard I was trying to make the relationship work despite the clues that it wasn’t meant to be. I even thought that me being in Anything Goes was threatening to him, and I started to think that the only way forward was for me to quit—not him, but the show! I even called a meeting with the producers, sobbing, asking them if it was possible to get out of my contract. They told me, “We love you, but you can’t quit!” I didn’t—thank goodness—and when I look back on some of the things I did in my life, I’d say to my younger self, “Don’t ever let a man get in the way of your career decisions.”
That October, I got really sick. For the first time, it wasn’t my voice. I could still sing, but I had no energy. Then I spiked a fever. I was so sick that I missed ten performances. It was bad. My mom emailed me, concerned: “Is Bobby taking care of you?”
He wasn’t.
By then, I had switched agents and was working with Joe. It was still a new relationship, and so when he set me up on a lunch with my shero Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls (my all-time favorite show), I assumed it was because he wanted to impress me with his connections. (It worked!) I had no idea that Amy had written a new series called Bunheads and was vetting me to play the lead, Michelle. She never mentioned it at lunch. It was more of a meet and greet. After that, Joe sent me the script, and I wound up flying to LA that October to screen test, and then back again in November to shoot the pilot.
I was gone for three weeks, and I gave Bobby an ultimatum: when I returned, we’d either commit and move in together, as we had been talking about for a while. Or, we’d break up. Are we committed or not? What are we doing?
I flew back to New York that December, and right before Christmas he came to my apartment. I was really fighting for the relationship. I still wanted it to work. He did not.
His last words to me were “I just want to be alone.”
And then he left.
I was devastated.
I thought that Bobby was the missing piece. But he wasn’t. He taught me something, though. That I needed to find that piece in and for myself. That meant doing it alone.
I have no idea why, but I connected that realization to the black Hefty bag of granny squares that I had shoved in my closet two years earlier.
My relationship with Christian had torn me to pieces, but I’d be damned if I let Bobby do the same. I had some unfinished business to take care of.
I dumped all one hundred pieces on the floor and started to map them out, flower by flower, into a glorious garden. It was finally time to stitch them together.