bRobert

The True Hollywood Story of How I Met My Wife

It was June of 1999. I had just graduated from Princeton and I wanted to be a television comedy writer. (This is not me bragging. This is an essential element of the story.)

Because of a previous summer job I was able to land an interview at Paramount Studios for a production assistant position on the hit ABC series Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.

So I put on my best jeans and tucked in my collared shirt and drove to Hollywood for a 3pm interview. Once on the lot, I followed the map that the security guard gave me and wound my way past historic soundstages until I arrived at the inspiringly-named “Modular Building.”

A framed poster of Melissa Joan Hart holding a black cat greeted me inside the double doors. Beyond it were a handful of desks and a Xerox machine spitting out script pages. This was the nerve center of a network television sitcom.

I made eye contact with Matt, the steady, thirty-something production coordinator perched behind the biggest desk of all.

”Hi, I’m here for the—”

“Yep. Have a seat,” he said, pointing to the chair in front of him.

I was nervous but confident. After all, I was a bona fide college graduate. And from the look of things, I was the only applicant!

This was when Matt reached for a six-inch stack of resumes and set them in front of him. As he leafed through it, looking for mine, I learned my first Hollywood lesson: you are always replaceable.

My confidence took another hit with his first question.

“So… what’s the deal with your name?”

Awkward pause. I had not prepared an answer to this one.

“Um, well… Smiley is Scottish. According to family lore, we were actually a band of robbers—”

Matt shook his head, still searching in the stack. “Not your last name. Your first name.”

A longer, more awkward pause.

“Oh. Um. Robert is a… family name. It’s pretty common. I think. At least… where I come from.” (i.e. the Western Hemisphere.)

Matt looked up and squinted. My answer had not satisfied him in the least.

“Hmm. Yeah, I’ve just never heard it before.”

At which point Matt found my resume in his pile and set it on top of the others.

And then I saw it.

The typo.

On my resume.

On my name.

I HAD MADE A TYPO ON MY RESUME ON MY NAME.

Instead of the beautiful header reading “Robert Smiley,” in bold, twenty-eight point font it read:

bRobert Smiley

Yes.

bRobert.

I could have gotten away with “Brobert.” Which, fair enough, is still not a name, but at least a sane person could argue it was.

But no. My first resume sent out to the world after graduating from an Ivy League university—with an English degree no less—proudly declared that my name was “bRobert.”

I have no memory of the next few minutes. I’m sure Matt asked me questions. I’m sure I gave answers. But they could not have been good ones. I was too distracted by my ego lying in a sweaty puddle on the floor of the Modular Building.

“That’s not my name,” I finally blurted out.

Matt looked up. Thrown. “What?”

I pointed to my resume. “My name’s not bRobert. It’s just Robert. Or…. Bob. That’s a typo.”

Matt stared at me blankly. Then down at the piece of paper. Then back at me. The confusion on his face morphed into a different look. Amusement. And from there, as much as he tried to conceal it… to pity.

By 3:08pm I was walking back to my car.

Eight minutes. That was all it took for the real world to humble me. For me to realize that any journey in Hollywood would not be a straight line. And that those twists and turns are quite often self-inflicted.

And then, to my surprise, I did the healthiest thing one probably can do after failing in such glorious fashion.

I laughed.

I try to laugh every time this absurd career as a writer punches me below the belt.

I’ve laughed a lot.

But like every good story, this one has a twist.

When I arrived back at my childhood home two hours later, there was a message waiting for me on the family answering machine.

“Hi Brobert. It’s Matt from Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Can you start Monday?”

Clearly, Matt had decided that the risk of hiring me as a production assistant was worth it for the joy that he and the show’s producers would take in making fun of me. Thus I spent a large part of my first few weeks explaining to the cast and crew—often in vain—that my name was neither bRobert nor bRob.

Mercifully, one person in that office was on vacation and missed the bRobert story altogether:

My future wife.

Four years younger with no fancy college degree, she was working as Melissa Joan Hart’s personal assistant.

The first time I saw her, she was on the phone and making order of a celebrity’s wild life the way she now makes sense of our four children’s and mine. I waited until she hung up then made a beeline to her desk. I smiled and stuck out my hand.

“Hi. I’m Bob.”

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