Catherine Ledner Claire Scovell LaZebnik & Rob LaZebnik

Rob LaZebnik: A.B. 1984. TV Writer.
Claire Scovell LaZebnik: A.B. 1985. Author.

Right up the road from the Pacific Coast Highway, on a quiet side street in the Palisades, five-year-old Will LaZebnik is wondering what his name means. “He just figured out that it’s in the dictionary,” says his mother, Claire Scovell LaZebnik, as she sends him upstairs to do reconnaissance.

Five minutes later, Johnny, 12, pops into the living room, brandishing a pair of wire cutters. “Dad, can I use these for my science project?” he asks. “Why don’t you wait on that and let me help you with those,” his father, Rob LaZebnik, suggests. Annie, nine, should be home soon from her play date, at which point, her mother promises, “the noise level will go up”; eldest child Max is upstairs doing whatever 15-year-olds do when their parents have company.

Welcome to the glamorous life of Hollywood’s literary elite.

Rob, 44, has spent two decades as a television writer, working on hit sitcoms such as The Simpsons, Empty Nest, and Blossom. The ABC Family movie version of Claire’s first novel, Same as It Never Was, aired this spring under the title Hello Sister, Goodbye Life. Her new book, Knitting Under the Influence, is in its second printing. (Says Claire, 42, “My most subversive moment in life was knitting throughout my feminist literature class at Harvard.”)

Claire’s sister Nell Scovell, then a writer for Spy magazine, introduced the couple in 1987. “The joke that I always make to Rob is that he helped me find my first agent, and I helped him find his first wife,” Nell says, laughing. “I have since left my first agent, but he is not allowed to leave Claire.” They fell in love over a round of mini-golf in the Valley. “The important point is that I beat him,” Claire says. “I saved the scorecard for years.”

Their address book reads like a Who’s Who of comedy writing (and a Lampoon reunion guest list): Late Night host Conan O’Brien, The Office executive producer Greg Daniels, and longtime Simpsons writers Mike Reiss and Al Jean, among others. Annie, back from her play date, jabbers excitedly about a party at which she played waitress to O’Brien and Terminator 3 director Jon Mostow. “We’re name-dropping now,” Johnny quips. Spearheaded by the LaZebniks, a group of couples, mostly other writers and producers, has met for monthly potluck dinners for the past eight years. Says potluck regular David Kissinger, a television executive who runs O’Brien’s production company, “They’ve created this extended family that makes living in Los Angeles so much more bearable.”

Two dogs and a backyard pool and an adorable live-in twentysomething named Aubry complete the picture of domestic bliss with a Hollywood twist.

Suddenly, Annie turns to me. “You know what? Max has autism and I have Addison’s and Johnny has celiac.”

Three of the four LaZebnik children are living with serious diseases. Max was diagnosed at 2 1/2, beginning a struggle Claire discusses in her 2004 book Overcoming Autism, cowritten with autism specialist Lynn Kern Koegel. Celiac disease is a severe intolerance to gluten that stunted Johnny’s growth and wreaked havoc on his intestines until he adopted a special diet at age four. And if left untreated Annie’s Addison’s disease, a disorder of the adrenal glands, can be fatal. Will, the youngest, is healthy—“but we’re waiting,” Claire says with a wry smile.

Max’s battle has been the family’s most intense. “In autism it’s all about early intervention, and you have to do all this stuff before they’re five,” Rob says. “So there’s this sense of a gun to your head.” Even after a speech therapist helped him learn to talk, Max would spend hours pretending his fingers were hand puppets or repeating strings of meaningless words. On Koegel’s advice, the couple staged focused “interventions” to try to normalize his behavior. They had to demonstrate the “right” way to do everything—from playing with toys to asking questions of other children—and find ways to reward him for improvement.

The process was all-consuming—and emotionally draining. Rob often slipped in the door at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., exhausted after long days in the writers’ room. Claire, who had given birth to Johnny just two weeks before Max was diagnosed, took the day shift. “It was really my entire life for a while. The therapies, the worrying about it . . .” she recalls, trailing off.

Clearly unimpressed by the discussion, Annie interrupts. “I can pick my mom up!” she yells gleefully. Born when Max was six, Annie never saw the extremes of her brother’s disorder; by the time he finished elementary school, he showed only limited delays in his social skills. Max now seems like any other 15-year-old, albeit one facing unique obstacles. In a New York Times article last year, Claire discussed the challenges of teaching the rules of dating—and sex—to someone for whom all social behavior has to be modeled. The worrying may have been premature, however. “Literally weeks after that article came out, he got a girlfriend,” Rob says.

With each of the family diseases under control, daily life is relatively mundane. Claire is the chef with the wicked sense of humor, Rob the chauffeur and center of calm. (“If Rob even hints at the slightest bit of negativity about something, it’s tantamount to an ordinary person throwing a fit,” Kissinger says.) It’s a welcome contrast to the instability that passes for routine in the world of professional writers. Rob still mourns the 2001 demise of Icebox.com, a sketch-comedy website he launched in 2000 with King of the Hill’s John Collier and Howard Gordon of The X-Files. After three years at the recently cancelled ABC sitcom Less than Perfect, he spent a few months at home, working on pilots (one, about friend Alice Flaherty, the neurologist and compulsive writer, landed at Lifetime in October), and next month he returns to The Simpsons, which he calls “an experience not unlike being on the Lampoon.” Claire just made a deal for her third novel.

Together, they manage the interplay between work and family with equanimity—and, on most days, humor. “The thing that embarrasses the rest of us is that with all the challenges of having four children—and the health issues they’ve confronted along the way—they also manage to maintain this level of creative productivity that’s kind of flabbergasting and annoying,” Kissinger says.

To do so, they lean heavily on each other. “As writers, no matter what the medium is, there are definitely setbacks, and those are hard. And it’s definitely great to be living with another writer to help you through it,” Rob says. “Having another writer who you respect and whose opinion you like—that’s an invaluable thing.” They offer advice (when Claire needed a way to link the three women in her latest novel, it was Rob who suggested knitting) but don’t pull punches. “I have a habit of writing ‘could be funnier’ about way too many lines,” Claire says.

So maybe it’s less storybook and more sitcom. “Rob has a really good sense of humor and a really good sense of story. Not many people can walk into the next room and have that. Plus, he drives the kids everywhere,” Claire says, smiling. “Did I already mention that?”

Profile by Jody Kelman