Our guest, David Fineman, is the father of three accomplished daughters: Leka, Chloe, & Emma Fineman.
Leka Fineman is a CrossFit Champion and Fitness, Nutrition, and Lifestyle Coach. Her CrossFit accomplishments include, in her age group:
- Northern California Classic Champion in 2019
- NorCal Masters Champion in 2015, 17, & 18
- National CrossFit Games: 7th, 8th, & 11th place in 2017, ’18, & ’19 respectively
Incredible, especially considering that Leka couldn’t do a single pull-up ~12 years ago
Chloe is a comedian, actor, and impressionist most well-known for her role as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, where she is starting her second season on the show. Her impressions include Drew Barrymore, Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Timothee Chalamet, Britney Spears and many others. You can find many of her impersonations, clips from SNL performances, and other great content on her Instagram feed, @ChloeIsCrazy.
Emma is an artist who does much of her painting is oil on canvas, but also works with other mediums such as charcoal and gold leaf. And, she’s done some photography and sculpting as well, including at the revered Porthmeor Studios in St. Ives. Her many exhibitions include Bloomberg New Contemporaries, the Federation of British Artists Futures show and two recent solo shows in London.
Leka, Chloe, & Emma are fortunate to have David Fineman as their father. David and I had a wide-ranging and interesting conversation. In this episode, he shares some terrific stories, parenting advice, and philosophies on a variety of topics, including some acting advice that Steve Martin gave to Chloe when she was a teenager, the importance of being a person of your own self-invention, and the Japanese concept of Ikigai.
Leka can be found at:
- Instagram: @lekafineman
- Website: www.lekafineman.com
Chloe can be found at:
- Instagram: @ChloeIsCrazy
- SNL Bio: www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/credits/featured-player/chloe-fineman
Emma can be found at:
- Instagram: @emmafineman
- Website: www.emmafineman.com
David Fineman
Open Thoughts with Leka Fineman and Shannon Aiken (~3 min)
Emma Fineman: Works From Porthmeor Studio 5 (~7 min)
Chloe Fineman on Saturday Night Live: The Drew Barrymore Show (~3 min)
Please forgive the errors in the transcript! Enjoy the episode!
Jonathan V.: Hey, David, thank you so much for being here today. I am so excited to be talking with you. You have three incredible daughters, Chloe, Leka, and Emma, correct?
David Fineman: Yes.
Jonathan V.: And Leka is I understand, 12 years ago, couldn’t do a single pull up and now has been a top 10 CrossFit athlete, three times in her age group.
David Fineman: I think it’s more than that.
Jonathan V.: Is that right?
David Fineman: Yeah. She was number one in California in her age group for a few years, a number of years. And then I think she was, she was number seven in the world.
Jonathan V.: Wow. That’s incredible. And she’s also, as I understand, a coach and an author?
David Fineman: Yes. And she’s a fabulous person and a terrific mother to two spectacular daughters. My granddaughters, Kaia and Ruby Dobbs. They’re just lovely, wonderful young ladies.
Jonathan V.: So, what wisdom did you impart to Leka that led to her becoming such an amazing person?
David Fineman: When she was, I don’t know, maybe two or three, I told her like these four things that you need to know in life. And these four things are really, really important.
And the first thing is never give up. Never give up, never ever give up. And it’s not me telling you that this comes from Billy Graham, so never give up. And then the second thing I told her was eat when you’re hungry, and then number three was go to sleep when you’re tired. And then the fourth thing I told her, I said, most importantly, do not hang around in a wet bathing suit.
And you tell kids different things at different ages. She was about three years old, and her mother and I had gotten divorced, maybe when she was two, she was real little and personally it was extremely upsetting to me. And it was obviously, it was difficult all the way around. And so, you know, it’s just trying to make the best of time that we spent together.
Jonathan V.: And how was your relationship with Leka’s mom?
David Fineman: Well, it was difficult. It was just difficult because of my immaturity and really wasn’t ready to get married at all then, and then, wound up with a baby. And so, a lot of that change, and wound up going into the stock market, the fall after I graduated And in Baltimore, and then moved to New York with Andrea and then our relationship just, it just didn’t go well. So went to Mexico for divorce and came back and then she and Leka took off. So after they went off to Mexico, they did this and that, and moved to California. And then I stayed in New York and I met Ellen there maybe four years after I got divorced.
Jonathan V.: And what were you doing in New York in the meantime – after Andrea and Leka went to California and before you met Ellen?
David Fineman: In my meantime I had been working on a trading desk on Wall Street and the market was very, very difficult then. And then they had gotten to post-Vietnam and the oil shock and you could shoot a pistol in a brokerage office and no one would move. In fact, one day I was walking on Exchange Place near Wall Street at Broad and Exchange Place, saw a guy jump off a building. And he landed on the roof of a car next to me, it’s like, it was really difficult.
And so I was and so I was miserable, overwhelmed and confused by the politics of the time. I mean, it was difficult, when Kennedy got shot in 63, it was very, very difficult. And that November, it sort of did something to me anyway, in terms of, I was always pretty sarcastic and negative and that just really iced it. So I just had a hard time in my early twenties.
Jonathan V.: And how did you meet Ellen?
David Fineman: I had gone to graduate school in psychology at The New School for Social Research and proceeded through my master’s degree into my doctoral studies, and then decided that wasn’t going to work. So Ellen and I, who I had met four years before that. And she was a student at Parsons School of Design where the graduate faculty, the school that I was at was located there.
And I remember it was December around December 12th or 13th of 1972. It’s around 5:30, six o’clock in the evening. And I’d been studying for two, three weeks and have not really a conversation with anybody. And I went upstairs and I bumped into two buddies of mine and we were talking. And then through the doorway, kind of saw this just lovely, beautiful person. And it was Ellen. And they said, “Wow, did you see her?” and I was like “Yeah, wow!” and I ran downstairs. She went down to the library and I ran back down to the library and she was going through the turnstile and I was going the other way. And I couldn’t form a sentence. I said to her, “Eat?” And she looked at me like I was completely nuts. She said, “No.”
And then I got myself together. I said, “Look, I’d really love to go out to dinner with you tonight ‘cause it’s 5:30. We could do that.” She said, “No, no, no, no, no. I’ve not had good luck on blind dates or things like this. If you call me in two weeks, maybe I’ll go out with you.”
So I called her and she agreed to go out with me and then I went over to this hair cutting salon on St. Mark’s Place in Greenwich Village. And I got this haircut. It was like a Rod Stewart haircut, where the top of my head was sort of like a short tennis ball. Like it looked like a tennis ball and then had these wings that went out to the side. And then I went to a surplus store and I bought a pair of wool Navy pants to match these blue wool pants, like you wear in the Navy, with 13 buttons on the front to match my orange cowboy boots. And then I bought a rubber raincoat. So it looked like this cartoon character, TinTin, with his arms sort of stretched out, rubber raincoat, but I have my cowboy shirt.
Jonathan V.: And how did she react when she saw that?
David Fineman: She did not know me when I showed up. She looked at me like she’d never seen me before. And she was actually, I mean, I saw fear. But somehow, I don’t know, we went out to dinner. I was very nervous. We went to Chinatown with a very good friend of mine. My friend, Ned Parker, who lives out here, been friends for almost 50 years. And his wife, Beverly, they were dating at the time we went to a Chinese restaurant, I was very nervous. Ellen ordered a gin and ginger ale. And I thought that God, it’s going to kill her. And so I drank it and then I think I ate most of her food on her plate, but somehow she agreed to go out with me again.
Jonathan V.: How long were the two of you together before you had Chloe and Emma?
David Fineman: We must have been together 15 or 16 years before we had children.
Jonathan V.: That’s nice. Did you find that that helped you as parents down the road to have had that?
David Fineman: I think it did. I mean the first two years, I looked at that as a time to get past bickering. So, you know, complain about cooking or this or that. So it was all great. But I really missed Leka and really needed to go to California, which we did.
Jonathan V.: And where in California were you?
David Fineman: Across the Bay from San Francisco. We settled in Berkeley. And we lived there for about eight years. Chloe was born there.
Jonathan V.: And Leka was about how old when you moved there?
David Fineman: Nine, I want to say. And she lived on a commune up in Albion, which is near Mendocino. So it’s North, maybe 127 miles North of San Francisco on the coast. Really beautiful, beautiful place.
Jonathan V.: So, I think there’s a lot of different flavors of communes. What did that look like?
David Fineman: There was about 170 acres, I guess it had been, not a ranch really, but more like fruit trees so that there were maybe 16 people or 30 people that lived there. Well Luna, Andrea changed her name to Luna, she lived in a Yurt. And then some people lived in little cabins that they built and then they built a school there. And so it had like a ranch house that was sort of halfway falling apart with a porch that overlooked the Apple orchard. And there were a bunch of goats there and people ate a lot of goat cheese. And, there’s like a blue haze of marijuana smoke very often.
But I loved going up there just to see my daughter, her joy and being with her. It’s so amazing. She and I, I mean, she’s, I don’t know, 53 or 54 years old now, and we’ve never had an ill word between us. There may be times – I’m sure there were times – where I was a huge disappointment to her on many, many levels, but it never came up. And, we’ve just had a very warm, I mean, she knows how much I care for her. I would do anything for her.
Jonathan V.: And then you have Emma who is a painter, countless exhibitions, from what I could tell, including Bloomberg new contemporaries, the Federation of British artists Futures show. Recently two solo shows, I think last year in London.
David Fineman: Yeah, she is in a show now in Denmark, in fact, and she’s just completed. So Emma is the middle one and Chloe is the first child of Ellen and of our union, but Emma’s the youngest. So Emma, two years ago graduated from the Royal College of Art.
Jonathan V.: Wow. She’s done so much.
David Fineman: Oh yeah, no she’s, I mean, all three, the most amazing thing is just the strength of them as people. So, when Emma was in high school, she kind of having a difficult time of it. And she, just felt that she, in terms of her art or doing anything in art, she kind of lost it, I guess. It just drifted away or something. And maybe it was the high school, maybe it was, the other kids there or whatever her feeling, she just, how she felt about herself, herself image, whatever it was.
And so when she was in her, I think it was her junior year. She went off to a school called Oxbow, which is here in Napa, California. And it’s a high school that’s all art and it’s fabulous. It’s all art. And then I think math or other stuff like that, that was done by correspondence. So that’s all that Emma did then. And it just really nailed it for her in terms of doing what she did in art.
And then she got a scholarship to the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. And so one year, I think this was her junior year, she spent about five months backpacking across the India Tibet border. And then she spent about four or five months in Florence. So she’s very adventurous. Before she went to India, she did a thing with NOLS up the Amazon River for months.
Jonathan V.: Oh, no kidding.
David Fineman: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you learn to deal with difficult personalities because some of the kids whose parents send them on those things do it because, they think that little Billy needs to toughen up or something, whatever. That wasn’t Emma’s case. So yeah, she’s, she was just fierce that way. And, so she got a tremendous amount out of that time. Did a fabulous journal and it just heightened her sensitivity to other people, other cultures, and people that are in a struggle. And so she’s quite remarkable that way. And Chloe and Lekka, in their own way, have those same characteristics that – it’s just who they are as people
Jonathan V.: Were there any values that as a father were important for you to instill in your daughters?
David Fineman: To me, the thing was you got to be a person of your own self invention, and what that means, because we’re a family of artists, really. Ellen is an artist and Leka certainly is – she was a designer in her education. You have to invent yourself not only who you are as a person, but you have to invent yourself every day. If you’re a painter, like my wife, it’s like every day she has to go and confront that canvas, whether it’s a blank canvas or work-in-process. Emma, same thing. Leka, it’s the same thing to maintain her practice because, she does yoga. She’s a fabulous cook. She’s a writer, you know, all the things she does. The meditation, the journaling, everything that she does is around, furthering her purpose. I mean the Japanese have the word – are you familiar with the word Ikigai or the concept of Ikigai?
Jonathan V.: I am not, no. And I did take a little Japanese, but that word is unfamiliar. How do you spell it?
David Fineman: I K I G A I, and it’s a concept that really has to do with purpose, but it’s basically overlapping Venn diagrams. What gets aligned is that what you really, really love in life and that what you’re also passionate about, but that what you feel that you’re really, really good at. And it’s something that the world really, really needs and that you can get paid for it. It’s taking the word purpose and just exploding it in a multidimensional way.
Jonathan V.: And is it similar in some ways to the word vocation?
David Fineman: It’s vocation, but also in terms of what the world needs and aligning that with what you love. All these Venn diagrams have to overlap. I found a diagram of it that somebody sent me. I’ll text it to you when we get off this. But that purpose is a big one – because I struggled with this myself. So my thing for my children was just be yourself, which is, to me, it’s like the hardest thing. It’s the hardest thing because you don’t have the internal vocabulary or dialogue in terms of really understanding nuances of what you’re feeling or what the gradient steps of frustration are that lead into being really frustrated or really getting angry and then really exploding or getting emotional. And so having a sense of purpose where you’re really centered as a person.
Jonathan V.: How would you describe what that looks like within the context of Chloe’s life?
David Fineman: So, Chloe in particular, what she does is extremely difficult and she went through walls to get to where she is now being on Saturday Night Live. I mean, she, I remember when she was, she must have been four or five years old at the oldest. And her best friend Erica Hellerstein, and Erica’s father Mark and I – we did a company together about 20 years ago. But Erica and Chloe were very close and Erica was a fabulous athlete, really good soccer player, father’s also a terrific athlete.
And so we’re on a soccer field and Chloe is standing there and she’s twirling her hair and looking off in space. And I said “Chloe, what’s going on? Do you want to play soccer or something else?” She said, “I want to be a dancer / actress.” I said, “then that’s it with soccer.” And that was it. And then I remember a few years later we were out with some people and a person asked Chloe said, “Chloe, do you play soccer?” And she said, “No, I’m a dancer / actress.”
Jonathan V.: That’s cool. So she was really confident in that.
David Fineman: Yeah. So Chloe’s identity in terms of that – that was clear. And she did this since she was teeny, teeny, teeny. And then when she was in high school, when she was 14, she went for a summer thing down at UCLA that was acting for the camera or something like that. And I didn’t realize it was like so inappropriate to have sent her there because the other girls there were later in high school and a lot of them had been on TV and they were these model types and here’s this 14 year old. And I just think it just scared the hell out of me.
Anyway, on the way down there. We stopped to visit Leka at the time Leka was married to Rusty Dobbs. And Rusty – Steve Martin is his uncle. So we stopped at Steve’s house in Montecito to visit the Dobbs’. Rusty had lovely, lovely parents and his sister. And we went to lunch with Steve and it came up that Chloe was going to UCLA to do this acting thing. And asked, “Is there any advice for Chloe relative to acting?” and Steve said to her, “If the part is dog, don’t think cat. Say bow, not meow.” or something to that effect.
Jonathan V.: Don’t make it something it’s not.
David Fineman: But the funny thing is it’s things like that in life – you hear snippets of stuff. Like the word Ikigai or another Japanese word Ma which pertains to the silences, but silent space in Japanese art or silence in Japanese theater. But it’s really, where does meaning come from? It comes from a state of being. Just slowing down to just be. And so, yeah, these are kind of the messages. With Chloe, the message was just be yourself.
Jonathan V.: You were always supportive regardless of what it was that she wanted to do?
David Fineman: Always totally supportive of her, anything that she wanted, crazy things. When she was really little, our sister Emma was a baby and it was too much for her mother to have these two screaming kids in the house, I would take Chloe with me. And one time we went to Target. Chloe wanted to buy a tutu and we got this tutu, and it was like eight sizes too small, but she had to have it. It was like a harlequin color. It was black and white. And, I could have gotten into a thing where it should be a temper tantrum or something. It’s like, I realized that anything that she ever wanted was so minimal compared to the overall. So I indulged her, I got the thing, we went home and Ellen was rolling in laughter Chloe squeezing herself into this thing. And I would take her with me to do improvisational comedy when she was three years old.
Jonathan V.: So, did you yourself do improv?
David Fineman: Yeah. Yeah. There’s some fabulous improvisers here. Jim Cranna, who was just a genius passed away a few years ago. He had been in a committee which performed here in the sixties. And Howard Hesseman was in that group, and Rob Reiner, and Joan Baez’s sister, Mimi Fariña, was in that group, and people who were on Cheers. A lot of tremendous, tremendous talent came out of there.
What Cranna did was it was an open workshop. And so I started doing that maybe in 1981 or ’82. When Chloe was little, I would take her with me. And I remember there was one instance where she was up on the stage with Bill Bonham, who is phenomenally funny. And it turned out when we do this thing on Saturdays, you take a number and they call it – like, all number fours get up there. So Chloe was one of the numbers, and she’s up on the stage with these guys. And she’s like three years old, standing stage-left out front.
And I remember Bonham, it just infuriated him to see this kid there taking up attention units from him. And he picked her up and moved her forward. And she started crying, which made it even funnier. And I swooped her up and took her downstairs to get her a cookie. And then I said, “Come on have your cookie and we’ll go home.” And she said, “No, no, I want my scene! I want to finish my scene!” So I took her back upstairs. And she has, it’s again, amazing force of will. Amazing force of will.
Jonathan V.: And did she continue her interest in the stage as she went into high school?
David Fineman: When she was in high school, after her experience in Los Angeles, she really buckled down. She was kind of a mediocre student, because she just wasn’t that interested, but she became really serious and she became really serious in theater.
And one day she called me and she said, “Daddy, I want to put on the Vagina Monologues.” And I said, “Well, you need to call Eve Ensler’s publisher, or whatever, to get rights to it. You can’t just do that.” And she called and they said, you cannot do the Vagina Monologues. And for some reason, either it was being performed somewhere in the area, or they’re just not going to give it to a high school kid to perform, whatever it was. So, she’s calls me, “They won’t let me do it.” She’s crying and crying, “You got to do it. You got to pay for it. You got to do it.” I said, I’m not going to do it because they’ll sue me. I said, “Look, come up with some other ideas.” So, Chloe came up with the idea to do a play called Vulva la Revolución. And they made a big red V and they did skits. And it was along the theme of Vagina Monologues, but it wasn’t.
And she went to the principal at the high school. And the principal of the high school said, “Chloe, you’ve made a wonderful name for yourself here in the drama department. Why are you going to ruin it for yourself?” And Chloe said, “Are you familiar with this play?” She said, “I’ve heard of it.” She said “Have you seen it?” She said, “No.” She said, “Have you read it?”, “No, but I’m not. You cannot do it at the theater here.”
So Chloe rented the hall above the police station here in Freemont, where we live, and she and her friends put on a play. They raised $3,500, which they donated to a woman’s shelter. And they raised that like in two nights that they did the play. And I remember one of the funniest scenes of all that they made up. The question at the scene was: if your vagina could talk, what would it say? And this little high school girl goes out there and stands in front of the stage with the lights on her face. And she says, “Where’s Bob?” And meanwhile, my mother is there. My mother was still alive and she’s doing her folding, the napkin thing and biting on it.
And a dear friend of mine, Jerry dart, he has since passed, was there. He said to me, I looked like I’d come back from a camping trip. My hair was completely, I mean, I just folded in the chair seeing my 15 year old daughter fake orgasms in this play. You know, it’s like the die was cast. The key about Chloe and Leka and Emma, these are fearless, absolutely fearless people. And they’re going to do as they do. It’s like Emma is going to be a major force in the room. She’s going to be loud, she’s going to be funny – that’s who she is. Chloe can be quiet in a room, but she’s recording and observing, and then all of a sudden “Whoa, where did that come from?” So what I celebrate is the uniqueness of what came out of this family of such strong personalities.
Jonathan V.: And their career choices suggest that as well, right? I mean, it takes a bold person to pursue a career in painting or acting or CrossFit.
David Fineman: Yeah. They really are. And for Emma, I mean, with all of them, I have what I consider a very, very intimate relationships in the sense of just, in terms of being. Just to be with them. And Chloe knows, I think she got this whole notion being unfiltered from me. When she was nine years old she went up to somebody who’s smoking at a restaurant and went, “aaach! ach, ach, ach. aaach!” I mean, yeah, she’s just fearless.
So the net result was when it came time to go to college for Chloe, she said, “I’m going to go to NYU. I want to go to Tisch.” And there was big fight in the house over it. You need months,, you need to apply to other schools, you’ve got to do this, and the high school counselor. So anyway, she applied there for early admission and she got in. She won studio actor award at Tisch and had a very successful experience there, but nobody picked her up on graduation. And then she moved to Los Angeles and she was in Los Angeles, maybe four or five years and got nothing. Absolutely nothing. She would go on auditions: zero. She’d go on to try and get a commercial. It’s either you’re too short, you’re too fat, you’re too blonde, you’re not blonde enough, you’re too waspy or not. You’re this you’re that. Zero.
Jonathan V.: Was this before or after she started with Groundlings and Upright Citizens Brigade?
David Fineman: Well, what happened, there was the idea of training and improv came a couple of ways. Tisch had a program in LA and somebody there had said to her, it would be good if you did improv for auditioning skills. And I said to her, I said, look, you have an absolutely exquisite face and you’re brilliant. You’re more brilliant than you give yourself credit for, or that you acknowledge. And you don’t, you don’t even know the effect that you have in the world on people. You just don’t know it, but I’m telling you, people cannot take their eyes off of you when you’re on the stage. And there’s some relationship between you and a camera that is totally innate. I’m saying it, you won’t believe it. I’m your father, but this is true.
Jonathan V.: And you’re telling her this when she’s in college or was this earlier?
David Fineman: I told her this after college and during college, when she was extremely insecure, I told her over and over again, don’t let anybody question your talent. These are choices. So it’s like in life, you pick up sayings from people you meet, and sometimes you meet like important people.
And so our neighbor across the street from us was Michael Murphy. Who’s a dear friend at the time. And later, we wrote scripts together and he was in a bunch of Woody Allen’s films. He was a lead in a whole bunch of Robert Altman films. And we did a script together that wound up with Sydney Pollack. And when we were talking about it with Pollack, Pollack said there’s no right or wrong in these things, it’s a matter of aesthetic choices. And I took that really seriously. And I would repeat that over and over to Chloe – that your choices matter, because they’re yours. And it’s in that theme of being a person of self invention.
So when she got out of Tisch and she was getting nothing, and by the way, not in relationship, but very, very diligent and focused. So, she did Upright Citizens Brigade. She did different programs there. Repeated them many times. And, same thing with Growling’s. And Growling’s, it’s rough. I mean, you can do the basic stuff. And then when you want to do more advanced stuff, it’s by election by the teachers. And then to get into writing lab, it’s like a two year wait before you can get, even get into it. And then the next step there is to be at the Sunday Company. She got into Sunday Company. And, she got hired on SNL.
Jonathan V.: Huge accomplishment.
David Fineman: Yeah, she was a person of self-invention and that was pure Chloe, and amazing, was through Instagram. Just taking her cell phone and doing these teeny little selfies, the first ones, maybe just 15, 20 seconds. So the beautiful thing about Instagram is it’s 59 seconds to do something. And I looked at what she’s done over the past, I guess it’s almost six years now. And, in that time period, she did about an average of 80 of these little pieces under her name on Instagram, which is: Chloe is Crazy. That’s the name she uses on Instagram. She signed up for it the first year. Maybe she got the 5,000 names. The funny thing is that Emma was a very early adopter on Instagram, and right in the beginning of it, and very quickly got up to over 50,000 followers.
Jonathan V.: So, was she posting her artwork on Instagram?
David Fineman: She was posting artwork. She was posting food things. They were posting all kinds of stuff. We have a street art studio in the house. She has friends who were making leather bags and we set up the studio to look like it was a little factory for them. They raised two and a half million dollars on a GoFundme and now they have a factory in Florence making handbags. I mean, it’s just creating stuff absolutely out of nothing. So what Chloe did was just doing just these little crazy things of herself and then began to do impressions. She did Melania Trump’s White House Christmas a few years ago. She’s done amazingly wonderful ones. A more recent one that was amazing as with Drew Barrymore.
Jonathan V.: The Drew Barrymore one is terrific.
David Fineman: Drew Barrymore has over 13 million followers and posted Chloe on her feed. Now it’s interesting to me cause I love numbers. What Chloe got hired by SNL a year ago, she had 60,000 followers. And, I think today she has about 320,000 followers.
Jonathan V.: Oh my goodness. It went up over five fold.
David Fineman: It went up over five fold, but three or four days ago she picked up close to 40,000 followers in about two and a half days off of the Drew Barrymore posting. And the amazing thing is the people who follow her, they are major, major names. So it’s interesting to me because the media business is all about numbers and eyeballs, but the sophistication that these kids have about social media is just beyond, beyond.
I remember Chloe was saying to me, Lauren Michael had asked her, “What’s with this Instagram thing?” And she said, “Oh, I, I took down everything that was really suggestive or vulgar. My parents were all over me to do that.” And he said, “No, no, what’s your target audience?” She said, “Well, I started doing it because I was doing standup. And I just wanted people to come to my shows.” But she’s got this great group – it’s like this collaborative network in addition to the people at SNL. Charles Rogers, who’s brilliant. Casey Brown, they did a fake zoom wedding. She and Casey do incredible stuff together. Or Bridey Elliot or, I mean, it’s just a whole number of people and that, the people that follow her, just wanted to know her, were the major names in film and in new media. And it’s just, it’s out of nowhere.
Jonathan V.: That’s great. She’s creating and making a name for herself instead of waiting for somebody else.
David Fineman: That’s the thing about self-invention. And I told the kids where they were at high school. I didn’t say this to Leka because I didn’t need to, but I’ve said it to Chloe and Emma – you are not in high school here because you’re going to go to law school. You know, we are artists and it’s self invention.
And I got the term self invention from a friend of mine who I had financed a couple of companies with Greg Swenson, he is a professional guitarist. And he himself said, that it’s really a matter of self invention, of becoming who you are. And I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. And so it’s an honor to do this interview with you because, Jonathan, it’s giving me time to really think about, what are the important messages? The fundamentally most important thing to me is don’t get in the child’s way. And anything that you can possibly do to further their spirit, do that.
Jonathan V.: Well, listening to you talk, it seems that you did a lot of that. You seem to have a very encouraging and supportive approach to parenting.
David Fineman: I believe very strongly that people need to experience life for themselves and come to their own conclusions about what is true for them. And because I feel it that certainly with these three amazing children of mine and my grandchildren, that they’re basically really good sound people. And the example with Chloe is a continuing one of, just feeling collaboratively like a stakeholder in her success. A stakeholder in her being funny. And so, it’s just to be supportive and know that at some point things are going to work out.
It’s that same thing with Emma. So Emma, she suffered through a very long period of being alone. She has a boyfriend, they’ve been together for many years, but they’ve actually been apart the whole time she was in India. The whole time she was on the East coast at MICA. And then now they’re together in London, but just to go through really difficult times of aloneness and just to be really encouraging with them on that. Or to be really encouraging for Leka when she had a disruption in her marriage. And yet, and to really be amazed like in her case, by what an amazing mother that she is to make sure that her children have a relationship with their father. To bend over backward for that because she knows how important it is, I guess. There are things that I don’t even have to talk to her about. It’s just obvious an thing.
Jonathan V.: A common theme among fathers of accomplished people seems to be encouragement. This might be a difficult question to answer, but what does that mean within the context of the relationship that you have with your daughters?
David Fineman: I think it’s like the Japanese concept of MA. It’s in the silence. It’s like, the clay pot is defined by the hollow part of the pot. It’s an abstract concept, but it’s just in a silent communication of really heartfelt affinity.
Jonathan V.: Oh, that’s nice. I like that. And it seems like you tried to be there to be present with your daughters so that they could feel that heartfelt affinity.
David Fineman: Yeah. With Leka, whether she was, on a horse or if she’s competing, she just knows that, that I’m there, I’m interested. And that comes back to this thing of pride. If you’re a parent, what can you do for a child so that ultimately that child can make themselves feel proud, and proud in relationship to you?
One of the things that was huge for me emotionally when I was about five or four, I was in a nursery school and it was parent’s day. And everybody’s parents were there. And, my mother and my new father were there and I just was bursting with pride. Just absolutely bursting with pride over it.
And then I remember reading one of Steve Martin’s books he was writing about when he was maybe in, in elementary school, and they had a tumbling contest. And, how proud he felt doing this tumbling – that he could tumble and that his father was there in the room. And so those moments it’s like, what happens in a nanosecond – you carry stuff like through your whole entire life and you don’t even realize how it forms you, unconsciously in ways that you don’t even know, but it’s there. And so for me, I just, my kids, they really need to know on a moment to moment basis, how it just fills me. There’s nothing like it. I mean, it’s, it’s from a child it’s amazing. And, and then to get it from your own parent, which I got very…I can count it on two fingers and one hand.
Jonathan V.: It sounds like you didn’t have the best of childhoods. What was your childhood like?
David Fineman: I never met my father to last 27 years old. It was difficult for my mother. Although, she had gotten divorced when I was about two – same time when Leka’s mom and I got divorced and that played very hard on me.
Jonathan V.: And she never remarried?
David Fineman: Oh, she did. She, she remarried a number of times. I was raised by Jerome Fineman who is a wonderful, brilliant pediatrician from Baltimore. And they were deeply in love. My biological father was also a physician. Then they went off to the war as a physician in Constantinople, which is now Istanbul Turkey. And he came back with syphilis. My mother was just heartbroken over it and he was cold to her and my mother basically fell apart over it. So she was given electric shock treatment.
Jonathan V.: Oh my goodness.
David Fineman: Yeah. We went back to Baltimore and she got them maybe two, three weeks. She would go to Johns Hopkins and they gave her electric shock treatment. I just felt like I lost my mother. I mean, she was just very, totally different.
Jonathan V.: How old were you then?
David Fineman: Two and a half. Yeah. It was about two and a half years old. My memory goes back to when I was like about maybe one, one and a half, because of the emotional upset going on. And these are the kinds of things that inform me, I think, in terms of parenting terms, in terms of my own relationship. I didn’t meet my biological father until I was 27. And it was very bittersweet because I felt this incredible connection and love with him, but also a huge deficit of not having the benefit of having grown up with them. So these kinds of things, you know, you get betrayed or things don’t work out kind of the way you hope. And so in terms of your own children, you just, you try to do better.
Jonathan V.: Yeah. That seems pretty common that we will take some things from our upbringing and purposefully avoid doing some others. Are there some things in particular that stand out to you that were things that you try to adopt and repurpose in your own parenting or things that you specifically stayed away from?
David Fineman: Yeah, for sure. Because, these kinds of events in a life are disruptive. It forces personal work too, what did I do wrong? What did they do wrong? And deal with upset or anger that’s related to it.
And so for me, key thing with my daughters has been for them to be people of their own invention. Of their own self invention. It’s very, very important to me. And with Leka, it was almost unspoken. But her courage came just in the fact of being moved around so much and just having to care for herself in certain ways. She always had a neat little suitcase or she always had a snack or something. Or, just these little basics – she’s always had that right.
And then when she got into her early teens, I remember I had no money. I had very little money. I did get her a horse. And she road that horse. And I think they have a thing here called the Tevis Cup, they’re long races, they’re 50 mile, a hundred mile races in the Sierras. And we went up to one of them and her horse was basically a cow pony. You know, people would do these races on Arabians that are really geared for that. And they go a certain distance and there was a veterinarian there and they’d take the horses pulse. I remember getting up at five o’clock in the morning and she was just totally committed to doing this. She was so nervous she vomited. Her friend, Larry Shay, was there – a woman who was involved with her horse with her – and Larry comforted her. And she completed this and it was great. It was just great.
Jonathan V.: That is incredible. And she was how old then?
David Fineman: I don’t, I don’t know, maybe, maybe 10, 11, 12. She was just young.
Jonathan V.: We touched on SNL earlier. What was that like for you? The moment that you hear “Live from New York it’s Saturday Night” and your daughter Chloe is on the show.
David Fineman: The big thing is when they brought her onto the show, we were in Venice. Emma and Ellen and I, and Emma’s friend Megan, who was like a daughter. And we got the news that she’d been hired and Emma just burst into tears. We were in this large square, people were staring at us. That was amazing.
What happened when Chloe came up on SNL, it was bittersweet because our internet in our house isn’t so great. So anyway, we go to turn the thing on and Ellen and I are there and I’m saying, “Well, I guess we don’t deserve to see Chloe on SNL” because I had been in this fight with Comcast or Xfinity over this thing and they never got it right. And I didn’t pay the money. And I didn’t do this other thing, so we don’t deserve to see SNL.
But here’s the thing about SNL – it’s really, really difficult. I would put it right up there as one of the hardest jobs in the world to get, number one. Number two, the week that people go through there… because on Tuesday night, they’re up all night till three, four or five o’clock in the morning writing. And then they have to pitch stuff. So there’s all the stress of pitching with everybody in the room. And then Friday, maybe they’ll start doing videos, they start doing stuff. And then on Saturday there’s a run-through show, like eight or 8:30 in the evening. And then at 11 o’clock New York time, they do the live show But you don’t know if your stuff’s going to be included or not. And for that matter, you don’t know if you’re going to be fired or why or what, or this or that.
So it’s very difficult, the stress, the stress on sleep and it’s Chloe, it’s just like, this is her game. And I think this second year, I’m really excited about it. I think it’ll, I hope it’ll be easier for her. And I can just see her numbers are expanding. And I think she’s bringing joy to so many people that she’s at a level now, which gives me just tremendous, unbelievable sense of grace inside to know that she’s playing her game at the highest possible level. And people really love what she does and it makes a difference in their lives. So Chloe, she makes people really, really, really laugh.
Jonathan V.: Chloe is crazy. The Drew Barrymore, Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Timothe Chalamet. My wife and I have been bent over in hysterics watching her material.
David Fineman: There’s more to come! I mean, people come back and watch her stuff over and over, over and over and over again. I know that what she put into making her Instagram little pieces that are 59 seconds, where she’ll go through a thing 30, 40, 50, 60 times to get it right. So she knows what she looks like on a camera and she has a standard. And so it’s like, to me, she’s hopefully more and more bulletproof as a person to not be shaken from her viewpoint, which is really what it’s about.
And it’s the same thing for Emma – that as she matures as an artist, the connection between her eye and her heart and her hand, and what goes onto a canvas or what is there in sculpture or what’s there, as a piece of furniture or anything that she does that there’s the authenticity of that.
And Leka, it’s a statement. It’s a full statement of a fully actualized, fully, beautifully functioning person who can ride the roller coaster of the moment to moment of emotional stuff that we go through in the course of our lives, where our spirit is struggling with interacting with this material universe.
And instead of being squashed, suppressed, or succumb to it; to wind up that they can function at a level of enthusiasm where they can make a game, and they make the game, and they know they’re making a game, and that they’re the source of that, and they’re not a piece in somebody else’s game. Because the worst possible position in life to be is to think that you’re a player, but you’re really a piece in somebody else’s game. And people get sucked into power and ego and these buttons of self-importance around that that are so incredibly toxic. I mean, they’re Maya, they’re an illusion. And so, if a person can become enlightened when they’re in their late twenties or early thirties or in their fifties, that to have to wait until you’re 77 years old. How great is that?
Jonathan V.: Yeah. Leka has been an inspiration to me – getting to that level of fitness at the age she started is incredible. It gives me hope.
David Fineman: Oh, it’s insane. Couldn’t do a pull up 10 years ago. I’ve seen her do like five sets of 20 or some insane number. It’s like, “Whoooa!” The key thing is to just get better. She was doing yoga from the time she’s been 15. It comes back to: eat when you’re hungry, go to bed when you’re tired and don’t give up.
Jonathan V.: So, I have just a couple of closing questions. First, in addition to what you’ve already shared, is there any additional parenting advice that you would offer to fathers in general, or, fathers who have kids with similar career aspirations to your own?
David Fineman: It’s just to go for it, you know, just go for it. And like my granddaughter Kaia, she’s 21 or 22. She wants to get a car and it’s a really, really hard thing and she wants to do it herself. And there’s part of me that’s like, why waste your money on a wasting asset? Oh my God, geez, please don’t use your savings and figure out some way to do it. You know, I told her all of my thoughts about it, but ultimately it boils down to, you got to do in life what sparks you and then live with the consequences of it.
Jonathan V.: And for Emma it’s painting and,…
David Fineman: Yeah and Chloe it’s her comedy and Leka it could be in simple things like preparing a week’s meal on a Sunday, or doing a meditation thing for an hour on zoom for people, or interacting with her clients in terms of their lives and coaching them, or who she is in her relationship with Shannon. I think the route to insanity is “maybe.” Maybe this, maybe that, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. No, make a choice. And if you feel like crap, get moving, be active, and it will lift your spirits.
Jonathan V.: That is great advice. So lastly, what are three words that you think your girls would use to describe your parenting style?
David Fineman: Chloe, her words would be unfiltered and supportive. And I think the word that would come through the three of them – I think they would all agree on that – and that the word fierce would be in there.
Jonathan V.: Fierce?
David Fineman: Yeah, fierce. You know, like fearless. Like what I said to Leka when she was three years old: never give up.
Jonathan V.: I got it, fearless. Yes. David, that’s all of the questions I had, is there anything else that comes to mind that you think might be helpful for the listeners?
David Fineman: Well, you know, in thinking about what we’ve just talked about in our conversation, it could seem like, well, it’s pretty loosey-goosey. You know, you have a sense of what your purpose is and then there’s this father that says, “Go for it, go for it.”
But I know that with my daughter Leka, there was a time when she said to me, “Dad, you’re so judgmental.” And I said, “Yeah, guess what, I’m your father. I get to be judgmental. And it’s important. You know, there’s things that I need to tell you as your father.” And it’s the same thing with Chloe, she once said when she was in middle school, she said, “God, I don’t think there’s any standards.” I said, “Oh, you believe me, the standards are there. You just may not see them coming in.”
And it’s not that I have a hidden standard. I’m right out front with it. And it comes from my mother, really. Because on the one hand, it goes without saying that there’s a hundred percent support and devotion from me, which my children, all of them, I think they definitely know it’s there; but there’s also checks and balances. So if something doesn’t feel right with me, or, I feel that a choice of theirs isn’t really an alignment with, I guess the word for it would be an “arc” of what’s a good fit in terms of a higher standard, then I’m going to say something. And it goes even to the level for a young girl, that to be noticed it’s not necessary to be running around in skimpy clothes or being vulgar or doing things for shock value. I mean, in Chloe’s early stuff on Instagram, I was critical that it was approaching that line. So, I’m judgmental, but I don’t think in a critical way.
I was talking to my daughter Leka about this and she felt like I’m critical more like a critique in an art class. Voicing something that maybe you just weren’t aware of in the work. But there’s another side to this too. I mean not to make it overly complicated, but I am funny. And the problem with being funny is it can be difficult for a child because humor, you know there’s nuances and there’s also judgment that’s in that. And so, I’ve tried to be sensitive to, on the one hand, this concept of no filters; but on the other hand, being sensitive to human beings. Not being vicious in humor, not using humor in a bullying way, but using it really to bring joy into people’s lives. And so all three of my daughters have a wonderful sense of humor and, it’s sort of, it’s a complete package and there’s no absolutes in terms of something being a hundred percent right or a hundred percent wrong.
Jonathan V.: Well, I have really enjoyed Chloe’s sense of humor. It’s been therapeutic during the stress of quarantine just to have a good laugh. So, I think what Chloe is doing through her Instagram feed and on Saturday Night Live is both hugely entertaining and valuable. It’s important. It really helps the many of us who are struggling during this difficult time.
David Fineman: People are really appreciative of it. She was on the Today Show, a three or four-minute piece. And it was just wonderful. She was poised and totally topical. So she’s doing her part. Leka does a free zoom yoga thing on Sunday mornings at 11 o’clock. That’s just wonderful to give people that peace of mind. And Emma puts her artwork in auctions where the proceeds go to the victims of COVID or are people who are victims of racism. So they all contribute in their way, and that’s really what’s most important. It’s what you put in. It’s not what you try to take out.
Jonathan V.: That’s so true. Well, you must be a proud dad.
David Fineman: Yes. Thank you. Yeah, Jonathan, and I’m really appreciative of this opportunity.
Jonathan V.: Well, David, thank you so much for agreeing to do this. It was a pleasure talking with you. I really enjoyed it. You’re a gentleman.
David Fineman: Sometimes! Thanks a lot. Thank you, Jonathan. And, onward & upward!