Author Gary Janetti had a sweet moment with actress Jennifer Connelly 29 years ago — and he’s still thinking about it.
“I talk in the book about how I was a bellman at the Paramount Hotel in New York,” Janetti, 58, told Us Weekly while promoting his new book We Are Experiencing a Slight Delay. “It’s so funny when you’re 25, you don’t realize something that you might remember.”
In the final chapter of this collection of travel essays, Janetti shares his tips of things to “always” remember. “Tip your bellman,” was one reminder, before the television writer shared his story about Connelly.
“Once, the actress Jennifer Connelly said to me, ‘Hold on, I’m going to get some cash. I’ll be right back. Then she left the hotel and returned a few minutes later, and gave me twenty dollars,” he wrote. “I will always love her for that.”
Janetti explained to Us that “if they didn’t have the money to tip you” people would say, “I’ll catch you later” but never come back with a tip.
“Jennifer Connelly, she was very famous at the time,” he recalled. “She was, I think, with Billy Campbell — the actor who played The Rocketeer and on Once and Again — they came down together and she said, ‘I don’t have anything. I’m sorry, I’ll come back.’ I was like, ‘Sure. I was like, you’re Jennifer Connelly, so you don’t have to come back.’ And she came back five minutes later and gave me 20 bucks. Never forgot it.”
Janetti thinks it “made an impression” because he tries to always keep his word.
“It was so gracious,,” he continued. “So, thank you Jennifer Connelly, one more time here in Us Magazine, you’re a class act. … Any movie, whenever she comes on screen, I smile. I’m like, ‘Oh, Jennifer Connelly. She’s a good egg.’”
While Janetti has this great memory of Connelly, they haven’t crossed paths in Hollywood.
“Hopefully, somebody will tell her, or she’ll see it in the book,” he said.
Janetti, who was famously a writer for Will & Grace and Family Guy, made the transition to author in 2019 with his first collection of essays, Do You Mind If I Cancel? His second nonfiction book, Start Without Me, was released in 2022.
His new book, We Are Experiencing a Slight Delay, officially hit shelves on Tuesday, July 9 — and marks the first time Janetti has really delved into his relationship with husband Brad Goreski. The book opens with an essay — more of a journal entry really — recounting a wellness retreat the couple went on in Italy last year.
“It revealed a lot about me and Brad, our relationship,” Janetti told Us of the retreat. “So, I started talking about our relationship more in the book than I had anticipated. I hadn’t previously, in my previous books. But this book to me became much more about Brad than I had intended.”
One chapter, titled Mykonos, reveals how a chance meeting kicked off their longtime romance. (Janetti and Goreski celebrated their 23-year anniversary earlier this month.)
“People have asked us about how we met, and I’ve talked about Mykonos. It just feels like it’s always been a one sentence thing,” he explained. “When I was writing this essay, Brad happened to be in the other room. I just was shouting to him from room to room. … We never went back really and excavated that weird week [until now]. Not weird, but wonderful — wonderful and weird. It’s weird if you go on vacation and then you come back with a person, and he is still with you 23 years later. It’s not very common. We never really discussed it strangely, so we did. It was a nice opportunity to kind of do that.”
We Are Experiencing a Slight Delay is out now.
