Put yourself in David Schwimmer’s shoes for a moment. You have a new show to promote. It’s a new run of Goosebumps, the kid-friendly horror series, and you’re faced with a choice. Do you promote Goosebumps by trying to engage with the material, or do you promote it by telling the single greatest celebrity anecdote of all time?
Reader, David Schwimmer did the latter. On Colbert this week, Schwimmer revealed that he served Rod Stewart with divorce papers as a teen.
During their interview, Colbert and Schwimmer – who performed improv together at college – were discussing jobs they had pre-fame. Schwimmer revealed that when he was 18 he spent a summer working for his mother. She was a divorce lawyer, and she needed a new process server; someone to lurk around anonymously before springing out and serving people with their divorce papers.
Revealing that the job, and its furtive requirement to learn the movements of his targets, made him feel like James Bond, Schwimmer went on to explain: “Once, oh man, thank goodness I’ve never run into him since, but I served Rod Stewart. I don’t even know if he knows. I don’t think he knows.”
Now, often when a talkshow guest deploys an anecdote, it’s sensible to assume that some embellishments will be made. For instance, Graham Norton was on Seth Meyers this week, telling the story of how the BBC’s newsflash about death of Pope John Paul II directly preceded his BBC debut, and that the black screen announcing his death seamlessly merged into Norton walking on to a black background and clowning around. Which is a good story, but isn’t strictly true, because the footage of the newsflash is online and there’s clearly a 10-second BBC One ident between the news and Norton’s debut.
Amazingly, though, Schwimmer’s story does seem to check out. Schwimmer was born in November 1966, which means that the summer of his 18th year took place in 1984. And the summer of 1984 was exactly when Rod Stewart’s first wife, Alana, filed for divorce. And indeed, Schwimmer’s mother Arlene Coleman-Schwimmer was a big-time divorce lawyer, whose firm were involved in working on several celebrity splits, representing both Elizabeth Taylor and Roseanne Barr. If the LA-dwelling wife of a big rock star like Rod Stewart wanted a divorce, it would only stand to reason that she’d hire someone with as much heft as Coleman-Schwimmer.
Still, questions remain. Does Rod Stewart know? Although the act of being served divorce papers must be such a jolt you probably don’t remember the name of the server, you have to remember that Friends was a sensation. Just a decade on from a stinging divorce, it’s genuinely unfathomable to think that Rod Stewart never watched it. Was there a glimmer, a hint of something approaching recognition, when he first clapped eyes on Ross?
More than that, Schwimmer is such a recognisable surname that Stewart must have put two and two together at some point. The man on TV had the same name as the woman he’d been facing off against through the divorce courts. There’s a strong family resemblance, too. Surely he knew. Surely.
Similarly, there is no way this is the first time Schwimmer has told this story. For a while he was one of the most famous people on the planet, giving interview after interview. Would it never occur to him to break up the monotony of the press treadmill by blurting out that he once served Rod Stewart divorce papers? Why has it taken him three decades in the public eye to do it?
If nothing else, he has definitely told other people privately. Twenty years ago, Rod and Alana’s daughter Kimberly was forced to send Jennifer Aniston a bouquet of flowers after an interview in Blender magazine where she described Jennifer Aniston as “homely”, adding that “it’s not like she’s gorgeous or anything”. If you were David Schwimmer, and you heard about this, wouldn’t you sidle up to Aniston and mention that you helped to split Kimberly’s parents up? Of course you would. You’re only human.
Incredibly, Stephen Colbert didn’t follow up on the anecdote, and so much remains to be discovered. How and where did Schwimmer serve the papers? How did Stewart react? Has there been any lingering resentment since? These questions deserve to be answered, and they must the next time either of them have something to promote. I’ve never wanted a third series of Goosebumps, or a new Rod Stewart album, more.
