INVESTIGATING MARG HELGENBERGER
Lifetime Magazine
October 2004
By Jancee Dunn
She’s got a rowdy laugh, a salty sense of humor and a no-nonsense Midwestern attitude. No wonder Marg’s everyone’s favorite forensic investigator.
Marg Helgenberger is trying to keep her voice down, because the story she’s telling isn’t exactly appropriate for the swanky crowd at this beachside restaurant in Santa Monica. “So I showed up at the coroner’s office,” says the star of ‘CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,’ describing her real-life research for her role as a criminalist. “And the morgue is literally a chamber of horrors, because there were corpses everywhere.” She goes on to describe the autopsy she witnessed (we’ll spare you) and proudly says that she kept her composure throughout. “The coroner gave me an A-plus. He said, ‘There are some big bulky cops that come in here and just pass out.’”
Marg attempts to lower her voice again as she enthusiastically describes a special freezer for bodies, but she’s the center of attention anyway. Earlier, when she strolled in, every person in the place did the “casual head swivel” (assume nonchalant expression, scan restaurant as though for a friend, spot Marg, nod slightly to dining companion). After all, ‘CSI’ is the number-one show on television and Marg is in 26 million living rooms a week. As forensic investigator and single mom Catherine Willows, she has spent the last four years collecting body parts and blood samples from gruesome Las Vegas crime scenes. The role requires a strong stomach (in one scene she wore the removed skin of a victim’s hand like a glove in order to get fingerprints) and a stronger back. “Last year I had to rescue my daughter on the show when a car went into a ravine during a flash flood,” says the 45-year-old actress. “And it was cold water because it was February.” She brightens. “But it was also really fun. I much prefer that stuff than being in the lab. I’m always telling the producers, ‘Take me out of this lab, I can’t stand it anymore.’”
This season, the show’s fifth, Marg hopes to “explore the character a little more. I want to see different sides of Catherine. Last year I said, ‘Just give me some guy to have fun with.’” She laughs. “And there are so many shows that have just ripped us off completely that I think it’s up to us, being the one that started it all, to keep setting the bar higher.”
Her character may be all business, but the person behind Catherine is a one-woman party. Marg is lively and quick, with an honest-to-goodness belly laugh. Because the show is filmed at night (for a dark, thriller effect), it’s almost disorienting to see her in the bright sunshine. Slim and straight-backed with creamy porcelain skin and Windex-blue eyes, she wears cuffed jeans and a crisp striped shirt. She intently studies the menu as though it’s the Dead Sea Scrolls. (“Tuna nicoise. No! An omelette? Oooh, roasted beet salad.”) As the waiter sets down a giant iced cappuccino, a slightly suggestive grin crosses her face and she cracks, “Oooh, that’s supersized!” Then she breaks out laughing.
Marg is known for her raucous parties and a salty sense of humor that got her bleeped on both ‘Letterman’ and ‘Conan’ (we’d tell you what she said if we could), but she’s also a dedicated wife and mother who has managed to transfer the sturdy Midwestern values of her Nebraska youth to Hollywood. Her marriage to 54-year-old Alan Rosenberg (‘L.A. Law,’ ‘The Guardian’) is about to hit the 15-year mark – an anomaly not just in Hollywood but even among their friends. Their secret? A healthy sense of humor and a refuse to take the small stuff seriously. Marg loves that her husband “is a very passionate person in every way, whether it’s politics or work,” she says. “And he’s a really kind person. I would not describe him as a type-A personality- those kinds of ambitious, self-involved men.” She laughs. “I think with those men you’re setting yourself up for a life of insecurity. And I’m far too important.”
Alan may be kind, but Marg still believes the adage that when a man comes home, his blood pressure drops, while a woman’s jumps. When she comes home from ‘CSI,’ she plunges into homework and housework. “I think if most men have a block of time, they say, ‘Oh, I can watch TV,’” she says ruefully. “They’re more content with free time than women are. Women think, I can do this project, or that project. Women feel compelled to clean out closets.”
Alan is forced to agree. “I’m really lazy,” he admits. “I love acting, but I’ll play golf anytime, anywhere. Margie is an incredibly motivated multitasker who is serious about her work and everything she does.” He smiles. “We’re very different. And that was the attraction in the beginning. As time goes on, I imagine it becomes exasperating. But it’s worked, you know?”
It must. Marg is well known on the ‘CSI’ set for racing home afterward to be with Alan and their son, Hughie, 13. The two parents are very involved in their son’s life – Alan coaches Hughie’s basketball team, while Marg keeps in regular touch with the mothers at his school. It was important, says Marg, that he attend public school. “And it’s a great community,” she says. “The group is very tight.” She laughs. “My son is sort of negligent about telling me when things are going on, so I go behind his back and ask the parents or other kids.”
So important is her home life that Marg has had to “throw a fit” during long hours of dead time on the set. “I said, ‘Don’t be shooting a bunch of extras while I’m sitting in my trailer when I’ve got my son at home,’” she says. “They obviously try not to let anybody sit around for too long, but I have to point out that I’m the only cast member with a child at home.” Sometimes Hughie comes to her, as he did during a recent set visit in Las Vegas with a few of his buddies. “Of course kids love Vegas, especially 13-year-olds,” she says. (And especially when Hughie’s cool mother books them a room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and arranges for gondola rides at the Venetian.)
Marg notes with amusement that at home her son is known as Hughie but at school he seems to be making the transition to Hugh. “You know how they write on each others’ arms?” she says. “What’s that about? Well, he’ll come home with things on his arm that say, ‘Hugh heart Jamie.’ I’ll say, ‘So she calls you Hugh? What does that mean?’” She slouches over, imitating a churlish teen boy: “Nuthin’.” She shrugs. “I’m never gonna get any information out of him.”
Her son is starting to backtalk, as teens will. “Oh, constantly,” she sighs. “Sometimes I get into it with him, which is stupid. It’s best to just let it go.” She says that her house in Santa Monica is constantly filled with boys. “I suppose maybe someday it will be girls, too. But I have to put the limit on the boys, because they’re just big and gangly and smelly, and they’ll eat you out of house and home.”
Even with her mock complaining, it’s clear that she enjoys the fact that her home is the kids’ gathering place, because it replicates her own early years. “My parents were very involved,” she says. “And they always allowed as many kids to come over as we wanted.” Marg’s “all-American upbringing” took place in North Bend, Nebraska (population: 1,200). Her mother, Kay, was a high school nurse and her father, Hugh, who died in 1986, was a meat inspector. The two were high school sweethearts.
Marg’s childhood with siblings Ann (now a Minneapolis homemaker) and Curt (currently a meat inspector himself in Nebraska) was filled with happy memories of football games, school dances and music. “We all played horns,” says Marg, who has passed on the tradition by gifting Hughie with a drum set, a piano and a trumpet, and is encouraging him to join his school’s choir.
At an early age, Marg was steeped in the Midwestern work ethic. “I got my Social Security card at 11,” she says. “I started working in the soybean fields. They would issue you a machete! At 11!” Later, when she was a teenager, she got a summer job at her father’s meat packing plant cutting blood clots out of sides of beef – early preparation for her ‘CSI’ role.
After acting in high school plays, she was spotted in 1982 by a scout at Northwestern University who was looking for fresh talent for ABC soaps. Marg soon move to New York City after landing a gig as a cop on ‘Ryan’s Hope.’ She recalls a quintessential soap story line when “I was trailing this man for …a murder charge, maybe?” she says. “And we were both at a costume ball. They always have costume balls on soap operas. And he had on an eye mask, so of course I didn’t know who he was, right?” She lets out a loud laugh. “Se we end up doing the tango, and then I have dream sequences about the masked man.”
She also met her future husband on the ‘Ryan’s Hope’ set. It’s a touching story, really. “I went undercover as a prostitute to break up this prostitution ring,” she says. “I had to check myself into this sleazebag hotel, and Alan was the manager.” She laughs. “He was not my pimp, but we’re still really good friends with the guy who played my pimp.”
They didn’t go out then, but a few years later they bumped into each other at a bank in Los Angeles, where they had both relocated. They were so smitten that they moved in together after a few short weeks, and in 1989 they eloped in San Francisco. “Margie’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” says Alan. “When I came out to California, I was really floundering – I had gotten divorced and was fed up with my career. And she pulled me out of it by believing in me.” When he spotted her in the bank, he says, “we exchanged phone numbers, but I wasn’t going to call her up. In terms of the girls who used to go for me, I mean, Margie was totally out of my league. I had never seen someone so beautiful in my life. And she actually called me and asked me out, which amazed me, because she could have any guy she wanted. But the fact that she called meant that she was looking for some substance, rather than a boy-toy.”
In 1990, the year after her marriage, Marg won an Emmy for her portrayal of prostitute K.C. on ‘China Beach.’ She has a gift for playing life’s underdogs, including the hard-living breast cancer victim in 2000’s ‘Erin Brockovich.’ ‘Synergy,’ her next movie, filming now, is the story of a man (Dennis Quaid) who works at a sports magazine and finds that his new boss is a 25-year-old hotshot (Topher Grace) who has designs on his daughter (Scarlett Johansson). Marg plays Quaid’s wife, who discovers to her shock that she is pregnant.
It is safe to say that love scenes with Quaid have not been a problem. “Dennis is so hot,” she whoops. “Oh, my God. Hotter now than he’s ever been.”
As hot, say, as Las Vegas in August, when ‘CSI’ started taping the new season. Marg has already hashed out some future plot ideas with ‘CSI’ writers. “The show has been really collaborative since day one,” she says. “I want to do a modern day ‘Chinatown,’ because I always think of the lack of water in Vegas when I’m there.” She also proposed a story on sexual obsession, a la ‘Looking for Mr. Goodbar’ – anything, in other words, to get out of that lab. “Whereas Billy (co-star William Petersen) doesn’t ever want to leave,” she says, cackling. “He would rather just sit in his office!”
And just like last season, when each day wraps, she hurries home to the place she most likes to be. “I’m usually intimidated at parties,” she says. “I’m kind of shy. And I have a really hard time at premieres. I’m not that outgoing in terms of going up to people and introducing myself.”
As she talks contentedly about her home life, it’s easy to forget that this no-nonsense Midwesterner is a sex symbol for a large part of the male population. Marg says that her husband takes all of the attention in stride. Last year when she was offered the cover of ‘Playboy,’ her response was, “Please tell them I’m flattered, but my son would be mortified,” She shakes her head. “So when I told Alan, he says, ‘Really?’ And he starts phoning all his friends, boasting about it! And one of his friends said, ‘She should do it now because the next offer may be the cover of ‘AARP.’” Can you imagine another Hollywood star finding that remark amusing? But Marg, the one-woman party, hoots with laughter. “I love it,” she mutters, wiping tears from her eyes.
5 Questions:
1. What were you thinking about last night as you fell asleep?
I was doing a radio interview this morning about getting out the vote, and the woman who set it up e-mailed me some talking points, and I couldn’t download the files! So I was thinking, how can I sound like I know what I’m talking about? Of course they asked me all these dopey questions. They literally asked me what shampoo I use.
2. What do you nag your son about?
It’s such a battle to get him to practice piano. He hates it with a passion! But I can’t give it up just yet.
3. What makes you nostalgic?
Having grown up Catholic, certain holidays like Christmas and Easter. Also Passover – my husband’s Jewish. I love going to Seders. I just love the traditional things. That’s what I like on the rare occasions (laughs) that I go to Mass.
4. What romantic spot do you and your husband love?
On our tenth anniversary we went to a place in Mexico called La Casa Que Canta. I would love to go back there.
5. What is something we don’t know about you?
I’ve always been independent; I’m a Scorpio. Like my mother says, “You never share much. I heard you were on some program and you didn’t tell me. When you were in second grade you won a spelling bee, and I had to read about it in the paper.”
*A scan of this article can be found here.
