- This and more coming up on the Whitney Reynolds show.

- And I said, "We have some research to do.

There's something going on here."

We really uncovered it that my father had a double life.

- Oh my gosh, this is amazing because I knew that I was playing gonna play an orphan and I myself was a real orphan.

- 'Cause I think we all, when we're young, at a very early age, we know what we wanna do, but it kind of gets beaten out of us 'cause it just doesn't seem like a reality.

- The Whitney Reynolds show is made possible by Together at Peace, a foundation supporting hopeful bereavement care for the world by inspiring people to find ways to live with honor and share the unique love they carry.

Spreading the light that still shines bright.

Together at Peace.

Children's Learning Place, dedicated to empowering young students with the confidence to overcome present and future challenges to promote a brighter future for all.

Kevin O'Connor Law Firm.

When it comes to your injuries, we take it personally.

Joeperillo.com where you can browse their selection of pre-owned luxury vehicles.

Based in Chicago shipping all over the country.

Simple Modern, drinkware with unique styles for adults and kids.

Take us with you.

"The Adventures of Harry Moon" book series for kids.

Focusing on becoming your best self with themes of friendship, anti-bullying and responsibility.

At harrymoon.org.

Kevin Kelly, Filme Claire, Midwest Moving in storage, Mike Dyer, Brendan Stadanski And by these funders.

(bright music) - Reality, what does that mean to you?

Well today, we're looking at the real reality behind stories and the layers that brought them to life.

(audience cheering and applauding) (bright music) - It was then that the reality really sunk in for me.

That the family was gone, we were fractured.

The relationship with my father had started to crumble at that point.

And I was still trying to navigate what kind of relationship I could still have with him.

- When I started working there, he was married to his wife and they had two sons, Michael and Alan.

And that's all I ever knew of him having a family.

I worked for him for over 20 years.

Never had any inkling there was any problems in the family.

- Our immediate family was very close.

I had a great relationship with both my parents, my brother included, just the four of us.

- This is the story of a son on a quest to better understand his true reality.

He grew up in a wealthy Chicago suburb.

However, the tale of two lives was born after a call from the hospital.

It was a stroke that changed everything.

When you got a call from your mother that your dad had had a stroke and what did she say to you on the phone that prompted your next call?

- She had a really interesting experience, not only in the conversation with my father when he revealed the details around his stroke and then the aftermath, but the conversation raised curiosity on my mother's part.

- Before we go any further, why was your mom in Arizona?

- So around 2001, my mother had moved to Sedona.

Prior to that, they had vacationed in Arizona and my mother really loved the dry climate and she was getting older, she wanted to spend more time there.

And my father was on board with building a house out there.

And I think my mother thought at the time, eventually he would retire out there with her.

So she went ahead, built a house out there and then they were- - Together?

Did they together, they built a house?

- They built a house.

- They're still married?

- Absolutely.

Still married, together.

That became the focal point for our Christmas holiday time together we'd go out there and share that as a family.

And that was really where we spent a lot of fun time in last 20 years for instance.

- So she was out there when your dad had the stroke?

- She was.

I called the hospital really just trying to find out about my father's condition.

I got a nurse on the phone and I identified myself and asked about how he was doing and the nurse gave me all the details.

She said that he actually went into the hospital for an elective heart valve replacement.

And it was during that procedure that he had mild strokes.

And as I approached the end of the conversation I said, "Hey, I just wanna make sure someone's checking on him.

Can you let me know if anybody's been there to visit him and see how he's doing?"

And she said, "Yes, your mother, your sister and her baby have been there to visit him."

And I said, "Oh, I don't think those are my relatives, but thank you.

I'm glad someone's checking on him."

Called my mother.

And I said, "We have some research to do.

There's something going on here."

We really uncovered it that my father had a double life.

- One of the really interesting features of this story is that Mike was able to track down a lot of actual legal documents in order to piece together the timeline and everything that he needed to know or at least try to know in order to determine when his father was where and who he was with and what he was doing.

Mike looked over marriage certificates, divorce decrees.

He looked through the help of investigators through other public filings involved with his estate, probate filings for example.

So before he came to us we said, "Well, how do you know a lot of these things happen?"

And he said, "It's been my life's mission to figure everything out."

- I thought that he was a normal family man.

When I found out, I was surprised.

It was like first, he was staying with this friend and that happened to have been the second wife.

And then from there, everything got exposed slowly.

- Complete shock.

'Cause it shattered the image you had of who your father was and the relationship you thought you had with this man.

This individual who had been a really big part of our lives.

We had great memories growing up.

Cub scouts, boy scouts, fishing with my father, family outings, cubs were a big part of it.

Bulls, black hawks, bears, all of that.

It was really what you'd think of with an ideal kind of childhood in the Chicago suburbs.

- What made this feel like just not your normal affair?

- Right, well we dug into it and of course, we jumped on the internet and started doing searches on my father's name.

And all of our names would come up associated with him.

But then there were some other names that would also appear.

We'd go to different sites and do different searches, same names would come up.

So then we started searching on those names and it would start to put a picture together.

And because of the ages of the other individuals, we began to put realize that this wasn't a recent relationship.

That these were long-term relationships.

So there was overlapping timelines from the perspective of children almost the same age.

Going back that full duration of time.

- Did your father father those children?

- He did.

- You've checked the birth certificates?

- We've checked everything.

In fact, my half brother is 14 months older than I am.

- Did you hire a private investigator?

- We did.

It's fascinating.

For much of, not the whole time, but a lot of the time they were about 6 1/2 miles away in other suburbs, in other school districts.

And I think about that period of time in the '70s and '80s and early '90s before the internet and smartphones.

We were much more siloed in our communities.

Whereas today's social media, we overlap communities.

- I mean, we're our own private investigators.

- Sure.

- With the other family and this tale of the two lives, do you think maybe someone else had to know?

- We realized this was such a huge secret that he had to only keep it to himself for risk of being exposed.

- When you uncovered this, did you approach him to talk about it?

- It's interesting, the strategy we took.

'cause my mother decided right after we uncovered it and put the story together, she wanted to divorce him.

And we knew he was gonna be staying in the hospital to do some physical rehabilitation after his stroke.

So we knew he had a window of time in which he could be served before he went back home.

So she had him served with divorce papers while he was still at Northwestern Hospital.

And the first call that was made after he was served was to me, not my mother.

And he called me and he said, "Hey Mike, did you know your mother was divorcing me?"

And I said, "I did."

And he said, "Well, what's going on?"

And I said, "Well dad, we found out you had a secret double life."

And he said, "Oh, I better call your mother."

And that was, he hung up, called my mother.

And about an hour later then she called me and she said, "I just spoke to your father.

He admitted that there was gonna be revelations and now he has to proceed with dealing with things."

He had two things to say in that conversation.

He said to her, "How much money do you want?

And I guess this ends my relationship with the boys," which was in reference to my brother and I.

And my mother said, "Well, I don't know how much money you have.

I obviously can't trust anything you say now.

And whether you continue to have a relationship with the boys is really up to you."

The first year after we uncovered everything, I spent a lot of time supporting my mother emotionally, talking with her daily, supporting her through the whole year that took place.

- His mom wasn't the only person that took this discovery hard.

Mike himself spiraled.

- It's a really, it's an emotional topic.

It was a really challenging experience.

There's no blueprint for it.

You don't wake up and say, "Hey, I can navigate this.'

I hadn't reconciled the loss.

It took years because- - Therapy?

- There was therapy, there was a long downward word spiral.

There was binge drinking was an outlet partying, just letting loose and having fun.

- Trying to forget stuff.

- Trying to forget your reality.

And then in reality, you weren't forgetting anything 'cause you woke up the next day and you were there.

The betrayal was so deep.

But on the other side of that, I loved my father.

I had prior to the year that we'd just gone through unraveling this thing, I had no reason to ever doubt that he was a great guy and my best friend.

And so as that unraveled, there's all the emotions that go with the betrayal and then trying to reconcile how you feel about your past with him versus who you now found out he was.

But I think as an adult, looking back now, knowing what I know, it's natural to question, well gosh, was he just fulfilling obligations?

Or was there this genuine desire to be there as our father?

- Did you ever ask him that?

- I never got an opportunity to.

So that goes unreconciled.

But I think I can just in my mind try to reconcile it.

And you just feel differently.

You had good experiences growing up, but the warmth isn't there the way it was all along because the person, he's just not the person you knew.

- What made you want to take it to book form?

- Whenever I would tell confide in friends and let them know what was happening, they all were like, "Whoa, this is a crazy story and this is a lifetime movie."

people make that remark and I'd say, "Gosh, it is really crazy.

Maybe I'll write about it."

And it was just part of it was healing.

But there was another part of it that was like, it's an interesting story to share.

It's something that happened.

I can't run from it.

- As an entertainment lawyer, we regularly counsel various authors about the legalities of their book.

But when Mike's book came across my desk, we all kind of gasped.

And in speaking with Mike, it was clear that in writing this book before he embarked on this journey, the only thing he knew about himself and his family was his mom, his dad and his brother.

And they lived in this nice idyllic life in the north shore of Chicago.

- What do you hope people take away from your book?

And also like it's not just your book, it's your very personal life.

- Anybody could relate to it 'cause it's all about family.

Mothers, fathers, siblings.

And then there's also the stuff that we're all aware of with betrayal and heartache and disappointment.

And I think about that five year span when I was really at rock bottom and it felt like there was no getting out of it and I didn't know how to get out of it.

And then it pieced itself back together and life got better and I made some better choices around the people I was surrounding myself with that helped me continue to recover.

I, I think he really missed out.

He missed out on the life he could have had.

And what I mean by that is this was a guy who couldn't commit but at the same time spent his whole adult life over committed.

And he was never really in one place.

He was always in between two places or more.

But one thing that I'm really happy about as being a father.

Because this was a father son thing for me and my dad, it's been great and rewarding to now be a father to a son and go through this stuff with my son thinking about where my dad missed and where I can do it right.

And I wish he was around to see his grandson and know that that's happening.

- And you're okay.

- And that I'm okay and that I'm doing great things with my son better than he did with my brother and I.

So that's a really big part of it.

- Our next guest is an actor that was cast in a play very similar to her real reality.

Let's take a look.

- You'll stay up till this dump shines like the top of the Chrysler building.

- Don't stay up till this dump shines like the top of the Chrysler building.

- I felt like I was right there on stage with you.

This is Bronte, and 11-year-old from Austin, Texas.

She plays Molly in the Broadway national tour of Annie anf just like her lines repeat the main characters on stage, so does her actual life story.

My character is fun and a little bit upset sometimes and has bad dreams, but sometimes, she likes to just have fun and she's a little bit mystic.

Annie was the first show I saw on, I think when it ever came to Austin or whenever I saw first.

But I saw and I was like, "Oh my gosh, I really wanna be on stage.

It looks so fun."

And so when I heard about the audition I was looking at and I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing."

Because I knew that I was playing gonna play an orphan.

And I myself was a real orphan.

So I was born in China and when I was I think 15 months old, my mom adopted me and she brought me to America.

- For all of our young dreamers out there that are watching you right now that say, "Oh my goodness, I see myself in Bronte," what would you tell them?

- I would say to just try hard and believe in yourself and anything can come true.

- She is a reminder, the sun will certainly come out tomorrow.

- I'm proud of like who my kids see me being and I'm proud of the example I'm setting for them.

And I wish there'd been someone like me for me and that gives me like a lot of hope.

- Heather Gay is known for keeping it real.

In wrote a book unlocking even more of her secrets.

However, this reality star sat down with us for a candid, real reality interview.

Outside of her glamorized Salt Lake City Life that's recorded for all to see.

- I grew up just always thinking that things were good or bad and there was really nothing in between.

It was really binary way to think.

My entire world was being a wife and mother.

That's all I like went to school for.

That's all I was trained to be.

That's all I wanted.

And it was my version of success, a successful complete family.

My identity was rooted in being a wife and mother.

When that like broke apart, it just felt like I lost my identity.

I didn't know who I was, I didn't know what I was supposed to do.

- Well and at this point you said like Real Housewives was not even a thing for you to even think about.

- I mean, Whitney, "Real Housewives' wasn't even a thing when after I had filmed the sizzle reel I thought I still can't do it.

I can pretend that I'm gonna be a housewife, but if they really cast me, I'm gonna have to walk away because it was totally something that I would never have considered doing.

It just fell in my lap.

This opportunity came and I thought, oh wouldn't this be great?

- Heather, who was once extremely religious, made a shift.

She's now in the throes of raising three girls, is an entrepreneur and a TV star.

- You have to have thick skin to go on television.

People are mean and cruel and I think it makes a lot of housewives mean and cruel.

- Did it take a little bit of therapy though?

'cause what I'm, when I am untethered is what I say.

Whenever I'm kind of in between moving here to go there?

I feel very like, oh my goodness, what am I doing?

It sounds like you just took the leap.

- Well I'd been in therapy since my divorce just so I could be a functioning mom and just sort through everything I was working through and I believe in therapy.

But I think it was the mixture of like being prepared, but having the opportunity.

It was luck.

Like why would housewives come to Salt Lake City?

Why would they call me?

I was just- - Why did they call you?

Let's go back there now.

- I had started this business and started a med spa and our demographic was like young movers and shakers in Salt Lake City.

So I was a source for casting and I saw myself as kind of the madam, like I can give you names of all the hot movers and shakers in Salt Lake City, but I was just the conduit for it.

I didn't think it was really gonna be me that would ever like get the call.

- Was that any reason of insecurity or was it, you kinda your world being shaken because I look at you and I see you in here and I can literally see, I mean, when you came in, the energy in our studio went through the roof.

It was like the lights went on even brighter.

And I see that.

When did you start seeing yourself for all you are?

- I think I always have been overly confident in my abilities but the confines of my life did not allow for that.

- Did you do a deep dive on what made your heart sing in order to start the entrepreneurial journey?

- I mean, no, I just was again like opportunity and luck and circumstance.

But I've always kind of been like a side gig girl.

Like I was doing photography, I was doing Instagram posts, I had a jewelry business in college.

And do so I think that was just something that fulfilled me that I tried to do like side gigs as a stay-at-home mom.

But it's really when you just get desperate enough to claw your way through it and to be persistent, it's really hard to want to make your own money when you have food on the table and a roof over your head.

And I just think that for so long, I just realized I don't have to do anything" but just make dinner look pretty and make sure my kids do their homework.

And that feels safe too in a lot of ways, you know?

But then once I got divorced and I realized this is just it, it changed everything and I just had to like find a way to carve out a new future that I had no real example of.

- So sometimes they say when you're going deep, you may be writing a book or looking very much inward, which is what this book did.

It can be hard.

It can open up wounds you didn't know were still there.

Did you experience that?

- Yeah for sure.

It conjured up so many emotions.

I think it's why I had a really hard time filming season three for housewives.

I mean, I felt such a weight off of my like heart and chest now.

I'm just like, feel happy to be alive, but in the process of it.

It definitely triggered me.

It definitely made me wrestle with like the expectations I'd been taught my entire life and kind of how I was disappointing everyone by writing this book, and then putting my face on it.

It so it was cathartic for sure and very therapeutic, but I feel free now that I've written it.

Like it's out there, there's no going back.

Come what may and finally, like I could look at my whole life and be like, "I'm really not sorry."

'cause that that broken road led me here and I'm living a life that I'm proud of now.

- I love it.

Well thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you for having me.

(lively music) - And now we pivot to an animation and the show is a reminder that we all have decisions in our current situation that impact our reality.

- 52 hope People look at my story and say, "All right.

she had no encouragement and maybe I'm not having any encouragement, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't go forward with what I may want to do.

'cause I think we all, when we're young, at a very early age, we know what we wanna do, but it kind of gets beaten out of us or we talk ourselves out of it 'cause it just doesn't seem like a reality.

But why not you for that thing?

So just take little steps.

You don't have to jump from the ground floor to the top floor in one fell swoop.

No, you have to take the steps and take just a few steps every day and you will get to where you're going.

- Wendy McClendon Covey candidly shares her experience as an actor and the resilience behind her work.

You may recognize her from her roles in the Goldbergs and Bridesmaides.

However, today, we chat about her powerful voice and the message behind Pixar's movie, "Elemental."

- Meet the residents of Element City.

- I really hope people, you well, I want them to love the luscious animation and the scenery and the music and all of that, but I really want them to take the message home, which is that these are all different elements and they all find a way to live together in harmony.

The fire people came from a different land to set up shop in fire town in Element City and done this so that they can give their daughter a better life.

She wants to go do other things and that's okay.

'cause ultimately that's what your parents want, is for you to be happy.

Your parents have their ways and they have their traditions, but you have your own mind and your own talents so you can honor your parents and keep your traditions and still be yourself.

- So I just wanna understand the process of becoming this character.

How does that work?

- You just keep changing your take until they say yes.

And a lot of times, I'm not sure really what they want, so I just try to do it differently every time.

'cause not sometimes, they don't even know what they want.

They just know it's not what you're doing.

So you just have to keep digging in and finding different ways to do it, and eventually you'll land on something.

- This animation shows us how different elements can thrive and struggle, yet still live together.

Something that could remind you of your own reality and what different elements you bring wherever you go.

What would you say like, was the hardest, most challenging situation with lending your voice to such a strong, fun character?

- Oh gosh, well, the fact that Pixar sets the bar so high, You wanna give the best performance that you can and it's a little dicey when you don't really know what your character looks like yet.

And you can't really envision the action.

I mean, luckily they can, so they're directing you, but it's just a different muscle to work and it makes you use your imagination.

It makes you revert back to your childhood.

So it is a different way of working, but it's really fun.

- We hope that you know your story matters.

(bright music) - The Whitney Reynolds Show is made possible by Together at Peace, a foundation supporting hopeful bereavement care for the world by inspiring people to find ways to live with, honor, and share the unique love they carry.

Spreading the light that still shines bright, Together at Peace.

Children's Learning Place.

Dedicated to empowering young students with the confidence to overcome, present and future challenges to promote a brighter future for all.

Kevin O'Connor Law Firm.

When it comes to your injuries, we take it personally, joeperillo.com, where you can browse their selection of pre-owned luxury vehicles based in Chicago shipping all over the country.

Simple Modern.

Drinkware with unique styles for adults and kids.

Take us with you.

The Adventures of Harry Moon book series for Kids, focusing on becoming your best self with themes of friendship, anti-bullying, and responsibility.

At Harrymoon.org.

Kevin Kelly fume Claire Midwest Moving and Storage, Mike Dyer, Brendan Stadanski, and by these funders.

- For more information on today's program, visit whitneyreynolds.com or get social with us.

Facebook, Whitney Reynolds Show.

Twitter, Whitney Reynolds or on TikTok and Instagram, Whitney-_Reynolds.

- Armani.

(gentle music)