Rebecca Gayheart walks onto the set of her NewBeauty shoot in New York with a confession: She hasn’t done a photo shoot in forever, and she’s nervous. She has just flown in from Los Angeles, she didn’t sleep and, in addition to the jet lag, a big part of her mind is still back home with her two teenage daughters. It’s a very human entrance from a woman who has spent more than three decades in front of the camera, and who has had a harder year than most.
She’s in town to promote a book, but she’s quick to point out that it isn’t hers. My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments ($30), out November 3, belongs to her husband, Eric Dane, the Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria star who died of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) in February at 53. He was writing it right up to the end.
“It’s a little more difficult than I anticipated only because it’s not my book—it’s Eric’s book,” Gayheart says. “It brings up a lot of different emotions, obviously. I’m trying to really be mindful that this is his book; I’m just the one doing the promotion for it.”
She’s doing all of it while parenting two teenagers through what she calls a couple of the “tougher years” of high school. Billie is a junior, deep in the college process, and Georgia is a freshman. Gayheart reads the memoir as something meant for them. “It’s dedicated to his daughters, and it’s such a gift that he left for them, and for his legacy, and for his fans and for anyone who is curious about Eric,” she says. “It really does explain who he was and why he was the way he was.”
Dane was open about his diagnosis and became an outspoken ALS advocate in the time he had. Gayheart hopes readers living with the disease—or anyone caring for someone who is—find hope in the book and carry that work forward. She’s also candid about how hard it is to explain to her daughters why there’s still no cure. “That is the part that is hard to wrap your head around,” she says.
Still, the memoir itself is hopeful, she says. Dane tells his story through a lens of enjoying every day, staying present and taking nothing for granted. For everyone else, she sums up its message in four words: Don’t wait to live. “Be the best friend you can be. Be the best father you can be. Be the best person you can be,” she says. “We put things off, but this is not a dress rehearsal. This is life. Whatever you’re doing today is your life.”
She knew his stories, of course. What gave her pause on page was the feeling beneath them. Tales from his childhood that he’d always played for laughs, like one about hanging from a bar, read very differently in the book. “He would tell those stories in a funny way, but in the book, I think it resonates on a deeper level as things that really shaped him as a person for a long time,” she says. “I was a little surprised at maybe some of the emotions under those stories.”
At home, she and the girls are still working out how to keep his memory close, less than a year after his death. They’ve seen a medium, which she admits with a laugh might not be everyone’s first move—but her daughters were all in. “Now, they look for the signs, and we see the signs all the time,” she says. They talk to him and about him, and she encourages the girls to say out loud what they’re feeling. “I remind them that he is their protector even more so now,” she says. “I remind them that it’s okay to miss him and to feel sad, but to also not forget that what he would want is for them to feel joy.”
There’s lightness in her house, too, and a lot of it is coming out of her old closet. Gayheart’s late-’90s run, from Scream 2 to Urban Legend to Darren Stein’s cult favorite Jawbreaker, made her a defining scream queen of the era. She has a front-row view of how hard that decade is back. For reasons she can’t explain, she held on to a lot of her ’90s clothes. None of them are in her closet anymore.
“Billie and Georgia have taken all of my clothes from the ’90s, and they wear them on the daily. They’re in heavy rotation,” she says. “They’re dressing exactly how we dressed in the ’90s—and they are not pleased about the pieces I gave away!”
She has a theory about why Gen Z is so drawn to the era. “I think they are craving what they don’t have, that I so wish they had, which was just a simpler time without the phones, without the technology, where you really had freedom to just live and see where the day took you,” she says. “Everyone has everyone’s location. We just have way too much information.”
The nostalgia runs through her work right now, too. In September, she played the hilariously well-meaning but naive Principal Sherwood in the workshop production of the Jawbreaker musical at the Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles, reuniting with Darren Stein, who wrote and directed the original film. She also starred in Lifetime’s The Ocean Between Them opposite Jessica Lord, a fact-inspired survival story about a mother and daughter on vacation in Belize, with Georgia playing her younger daughter. And she co-stars with Rob Riggle and Odessa A’Zion in the supernatural indie drama Nickels, a story about grief, faith and second chances.
Long before the slasher films, the Broadway runs in Steel Magnolias and Boeing-Boeing, the TV years on Dead Like Me and Nip/Tuck, and a turn opposite Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Gayheart was the Noxzema Girl. And a whole generation has not forgotten. During the same trip to New York, she was having lunch with friends at Via Carota in the West Village. While waiting for the ladies’ room, she complimented a college-age girl, who explained she was waiting for her mom. When the mom came out, she stopped cold. “She said: ‘Oh, my God, you’re the Noxzema Girl,’” Gayheart recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, you must be 55.’ She was like, ‘Yes! I’m 54.’ Her daughter had no idea who I was. But it’s honestly shocking to me that after all these years, someone still refers to me as the Noxzema Girl.”
Back then, she was simply thrilled to be working, and she didn’t own a million products. Her daughters, raised on tutorials, are a different story. “They’re very good with how they take care of their skin, and they have hair routines, and they’re so good at doing makeup,” she says. “We had Seventeen and Sassy Magazine, and that was it.”
Her own routine is still pared down to five things. Sleep and lots of water come first, she says, followed by Shani Darden’s Retinol Reform ($75) and a lip treatment and barrier cream from Dr. Jason Diamond. As for her daughters? “My kids are trying new things every day, and it’s fun to watch them enjoy it all.”
My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments by Eric Dane is out November 3.
