Her Life Off-Screen
Nixon has lived in New York all her life, and the Upper West Side is like a little hometown for her. In one block alone, she points out her mom's apartment, her regular place for facials, and the shop where she buys cupcakes for her kids. Here the naturally blond actress is much more likely to be recognized as the mother of 11-year-old Samantha and 5-year-old Charlie or as the impassioned spokesperson for the Alliance for Quality Education, which supports public schools across the state. "I always knew I didn't want to live anywhere else," she says. "A lot of my friends fled, and I just sat and waited. I knew they'd be back."
Nixon is the only child of an actress turned PR writer and a radio journalist who separated when she was 6: "My parents had professional jobs but certainly never a lot of money. They were a very particular kind of New Yorker that, as prices get more and more expensive here, is getting harder to find." Hunter College High School, the magnet public school she attended, "was very high-pressure and un-fashion conscious. It was the high school of nerds" -- some of whom Nixon still counts as good friends.
One day when she was 11, she and her mother ran into a director friend of her mom's. "He was trying to get a movie made of Norma Klein's book Mom, the Wolfman and Me. He wanted me to audition, and that was the beginning." Within a year, she'd done an ABC After School Special and was also cast as Sunshine, the hippie chick in Little Darlings.
If, almost 20 years later, Nixon's friends weren't terribly impressed when she got the part of Miranda (some show on cable? -- eh), playing Sunshine was a different story. "That was a really big deal," she says, still sounding incredulous that she landed the role. She got her first real taste of Hollywood on the Georgia set. "Armand Assante was going out with Dyan Cannon, and she was there. Ryan O'Neal was going out with Diana Ross, and they were down there. And Kristy McNichol's friend was Ina Liberace, as in Liberace's niece. It was unbelievable."
At Barnard College, she began a relationship with Danny Mozes, whom she'd known since junior high ("I always thought he was cute, but he was in a different crowd, so it wasn't until college that we became friends"). The couple, who never married, had Samantha and Charlie and were together 15 years. When they separated amicably in 2003, "we did this thing called Bird's Nest," Nixon says. "You make a nest where the parents fly in and out." The children stayed in the family apartment, and the parents, who had their own separate spaces, took turns visiting. "You have to stay focused on what's best for the kids: If you have a kid who's in denial about your breaking up, it can continue the denial. But it worked for our kids."
That two-year transition also helped Nixon ease out of her bond with Mozes, a college professor: "I have to say that when the time finally came to do the whose-copy-is-this with our books, I thought, wow, if I'd had to do this two years ago...." She shakes her head at the memory. "It was still such a yank, emotionally."
By that time, she had also weathered a celebrity rite of passage: headlines over a new romance. Nixon met Christine Marinoni, then New York City director of the Alliance for Quality Education, when she got involved with the group because of budget cuts at her daughter's school. She marched on city hall; she toured the state in a school bus to raise awareness; and she quietly began dating Marinoni. When their relationship was splashed across the pages of two New York tabloids in September 2004, Nixon simply commented, "My private life is private. But at the same time, I have nothing to hide. So what I will say is that I am very happy," and the story pretty much evaporated -- give or take a few paparazzi incidents.
When Nixon talks about Marinoni these days, it is simply as a matter of course, the way anyone talks about the person who shares his or her life. Marinoni left her job last fall to help manage the household while Nixon spent long hours filming. "Christine had been toying with taking a leave of absence, and when the movie started, it made her jump off the cliff. We had been living together for a while at that point, and it was a time for her to figure out what she wants to do next. She said that she always thought a big part of my personality was being a housewife, doing all the things and running here and there," she says, spreading her arms and wriggling her fingers as if life's myriad details are like those mousetraps loaded with Ping-Pong balls that set off a chain reaction. "And now, of course, she's totally taken on that personality trait."
