Hilarie Burton Gets Real About Fertility Struggles, ‘One Tree Hill’ Exit and More in ‘The Rural Diaries’

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Hilarie Burton Gets Real About Fertility Struggles, 'One Tree Hill' Exit and More in 'The Rural Diaries'

Getting real — and not leaving anything out. When Hilarie Burton Morgan set out to write a book, she didn't intend to get so personal. Instead, The Rural Diaries turned into "a love letter to a town, to a farm, to a man." The actress, 37, opened up about her marriage to Jeffrey Dean Morgan, her life as a VJ, a lead actor on One Tree Hill and later, a mother and a farmer. However, it wasn't an easy journey. One of the biggest parts of the book is the couple’s struggle to have children and she emotionally recounts multiple miscarriages — and how it affected the family. "He and I handle stress and grief very differently,” the White Collar star writes. “He gets quiet and leaves the room, but I need interaction. I need to talk about it, to sort s—t out." [sendtonews type="float" key="d67d1MPQB2-3111398-14453"] She also explains that she follows a lot of celebrities on social media and felt a bit turned off by their details of losing children. “I often read social media posts from couples announcing, ‘Hey, we miscarried but it brought us closer together.’ I think it’s safe to say that miscarriage did not bring Jeffrey and me closer together," Hilarie writes. "We were living in the same space but leading parallel lives. To be honest, most of the time, we weren’t even living in the same place.” However, she and The Walking Dead star, 54, stuck through it and learned to communicate. “The distance between who we had been the first time we miscarried versus who we were now helped tremendously,” she says about their relationship after their third miscarriage. “I had my partner back. He said the things I needed to hear. We'd lost again, but we'd also won somehow in the midst of that." Scroll through the gallery below for more revelations from The Rural Diaries. [podcast_block]

Credit:

Hilarie Burton Gets Real About Fertility Struggles, 'One Tree Hill' Exit and More in 'The Rural Diaries'

Getting real — and not leaving anything out. When Hilarie Burton Morgan set out to write a book, she didn't intend to get so personal. Instead, The Rural Diaries turned into "a love letter to a town, to a farm, to a man." The actress, 37, opened up about her marriage to Jeffrey Dean Morgan, her life as a VJ, a lead actor on One Tree Hill and later, a mother and a farmer. However, it wasn't an easy journey. One of the biggest parts of the book is the couple’s struggle to have children and she emotionally recounts multiple miscarriages — and how it affected the family. "He and I handle stress and grief very differently,” the White Collar star writes. “He gets quiet and leaves the room, but I need interaction. I need to talk about it, to sort s—t out." [sendtonews type="float" key="d67d1MPQB2-3111398-14453"] She also explains that she follows a lot of celebrities on social media and felt a bit turned off by their details of losing children. “I often read social media posts from couples announcing, ‘Hey, we miscarried but it brought us closer together.’ I think it’s safe to say that miscarriage did not bring Jeffrey and me closer together," Hilarie writes. "We were living in the same space but leading parallel lives. To be honest, most of the time, we weren’t even living in the same place.” However, she and The Walking Dead star, 54, stuck through it and learned to communicate. “The distance between who we had been the first time we miscarried versus who we were now helped tremendously,” she says about their relationship after their third miscarriage. “I had my partner back. He said the things I needed to hear. We'd lost again, but we'd also won somehow in the midst of that." Scroll through the gallery below for more revelations from The Rural Diaries. [podcast_block]

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Being a VJ

While working on TRL, Carson Daly asked Hilarie what she’d buy if she had $1 million. She answered a Christmas tree farm. “My segment producer pulled me backstage. ‘You can’t say stuff like that. It’s not cool,’” she writes.

Credit: Gregory Pace/Shutterstock

Friendship With Bill Paxton

Jeffrey and Bill Paxton worked on a movie in Durango, Colorado, and they became close friends. The couple's son Gus even called him Uncle Bill and was so excited to watch Titanic.

“I texted Bill: ‘I’m watching Titanic with Gus for the first time and he’s f—king obsessed. You’re the coolest person in his book right now.’ Gus watched the movie every day from then on. We fast-forwarded through the sexy parts; then he wanted to watch it three times a day forever, so I thought, dammit, if Jack and Rose are his first window into romance, that’s fine. I hope he lives up to that standard: he’ll like brassy chicks.”

The next week, the family received a package from Paxton, who had sent Gus a copy of the journal filled with drawings and entries from when he went down in a submarine to see the actual shipwreck. “The kid walked around telling everyone, ‘I’m friends with the guy who found the Titanic,’” she reveals.

Shortly after suffering her third miscarriage, she learned of Paxton’s death and had to tell Jeffrey over the phone, who was at a convention.

“Bill was a guy who lived life right. He adored this wife. He delighted in his children. He loved his industry,” Hilarie recalls. “He spread joy with such ease.” Years later, Hilarie and Jeffrey named one of their donkeys Paxton.

Credit: MTV

That TRL Video

Hilarie recounted the day in 2017 when a fan pointed out that Ben Affleck had allegedly “groped” her on TRL. “I found myself watching old footage of a 19-year-old me trying too hard to laugh off the ugliness of being a girl,” she remembers. “I let the old footage speak for itself, staying silent and fuming that the real story — the bigger trauma of my years on One Tree Hill — was of interest to no one.” (Affleck later tweeted: “I acted inappropriately toward Ms. Burton and I sincerely apologize.")

Credit: The WB/Fred Norris

One Tree Hill

“The trajectory of my life changed in 2007. At the time, I was working on One Tree Hill and feeling a bit lost," she recalls. "I worked hard all day, then went out and sang karaoke in bars with my friends till closing, then got up early the next day and worked again. … I was a miserable girl. My whole life had been an ambitious climb to become a working actor and I'd done it. So why was I so damn disappointed?"

After the 2003 Affleck video resurfaced online, she wondered when the Mark Schwahn claims would surface. “I was the loudest and rough around the edges, and I feigned an ‘I don’t give a s—t ‘ attitude. But in the end, I was a young girl who wanted approval and was assaulted anyway,” she reveals. “I never tried to tell the truth to the media after I left One Tree Hill because I believed it was a lost cause. And I was a coward. I had walked away from jobs I loved just to remove myself from toxic situations. I stopped auditioning. I abandoned my childhood dreams of being an actress because playing the game was simply not worth it to me.”

Hilarie was also “weary of being labeled a troublemaker" after the Affleck story.

“Mark could be incredibly malicious, and I was afraid to be the one to strike first,” she says. However, once writer Audrey Wauchope began tweeting about it, they all banned together and wrote a letter for Variety. “He was put on probation,” she recalls, noting that they needed “gory details” for it to go further. With that, she and other women agreed to tell the full story — she recounted it all to Variety in a five-hour phone call.

“Worse had happened to other women. When he tried to follow up with some of the others, they were reprimanded by their management firms, their publicists and their agents and told that doing this was career suicide,” Hilarie explains. “I looked around at my life and thought, If I never work on another show or film, I'll be okay. Mischief Farm was in the middle of its full autumn display, similar to the way it had looked when we’d seen it for the first time. This is real, I thought. This is who I am.” Ultimately, Schwahn was fired from E!’s The Royals and the show was later canceled.

Credit: Picture Perfect/Shutterstock

Falling Fast W/ Jeffrey Dean

After leaving One Tree Hill in 2007, she bought a one-way ticket to Paris but first took one last trip to L.A. and went out with Danneel and Jensen Ackles. That night, they set her up with Jeffrey: “He had bracelets stacked to his elbows and large silver rings on damn near every finger. I leaned into Danneel [and said], ‘Good lord, D. You invited a midlife crisis to dinner.’”

Hours later, they all went back to Jeffrey’s new home and they connected — he even kissed her rib tattoo of Old Betsy when it peaked out of her dress! Two days later, she received a package. “I tore off the seal and out tumbled guidebooks on Paris, Raymond Carver anthologies and a beautiful, red, leather-bound, which Jeffrey had inscribed: ‘Go nuts. Xoxo jdm. Miss your face,’" Hilarie remembers. "There was also a note that read, ‘For someone I just met, I can’t stop thinking about you.'"

A day later, he flew her from Wilmington to New Mexico for a date before her Paris trip. “Jeffrey and I weren’t made for dating. He was the man I was gonna get old and boring with. Instead of late nights out at clubs or wining and dining, at night we’d settle in and watch an episode of Lonesome Dove. We decided that when we had a kid, we’d name him Gus after Robert DuVall’s character,” she writes. “As the credits rolled, Jeffrey turned to me and asked, ‘Do you just want to do this? Do you want to try and have a family?’ We’d known each other less than a month.”

She didn’t go to Paris.

Credit: Gregory Pace/Shutterstock; Matt Baron/Shutterstock

Ups and Downs

Hilarie and Jeffrey also had some struggles throughout their relationship, especially after having their child so quickly and moving in together while he was away working. "I felt like Jeff was scared to be alone with me. Sometimes I was afraid he just wasn’t that into me. We’d known each other for only a year. Even when he wasn’t working, he busied himself at home," she writes. "He hadn’t lived with a woman for a long time, and I’m a handful. That’s not a mystery to me."

Credit: Stephen Lovekin/Shutterstock

A One Tree Hill Connection

Jeffrey “has a thing about red bedrooms,” much like Hilarie’s character, Peyton Sawyer, did. So, when they painted their place, he chose red for their room.

Credit: Courtesy of Lifetime

Christmas Movies

It’s no secret Hilarie loves working on Christmas movies now, but she was hesitant at first — until her friends, Julie and Paul Rudd, convinced her to, as their kids were friends. “When I told them I couldn’t do it, I thought they were going to climb over the table, snatch my phone, and accept the offer for me,” she writes. “Paul said, ‘I dare you to do.’”

Plus, she realized that it made sense with her schedule and the script was respectful to women. “In this odd little holiday genre, I unexpectedly found my power-woman roles. I had control in casting and script changes and how my character looked and dressed. This was a revelation,” she pens. “My feminist manifesto came in the form of an elf costume.”

Credit: Matt Baron/Shutterstock

Fertility Battle

When Hilaire decided she wanted to start trying for a second child, Jeffrey wasn’t as on board, telling her that Gus was a “miracle baby” since she always knew she’d struggle to get pregnant. In turn, she felt “rejected” because they had agreed to having more kids before. “I wanted to be pregnant again. I loved feeling like my body was a science experiment, and choosing natural childbirth had given me a lot of confidence. That was really empowering,” she writes. “Not to mention, I found something I was good at, and it seems crazy to do it only once.”

When he later decided he wanted another baby, they tried for a year and considered doing fertility treatments. They also were scheduling their sex and it wasn’t good for their relationship. “It wasn’t very romantic, and understandably, Jeff became resistant to the whole situation. He felt like cattle and retreated. For my part, I felt like I’d earned the right to have another baby,” she says. “It was my body. The least he could do was put out. … Jeff wanted me to wine and dine him. He wanted to go on a date. He is a narrative-oriented person, and the narrative of peeing on a stick and fishing to have sex was not attractive to him. He wanted another beautiful story, like how we had lucked into Gus’s pregnancy. He’d feel used and wouldn’t respond to me, and then I’d feel hurt and rejected. It was a vicious, unhappy cycle. Every single month felt like a tiny funeral.”

Credit: John Photography/Shutterstock

Standing Up for Herself

While shooting Lethal Weapon, Burton was not making enough money and was pregnant again after two miscarriages. “I’m doing all the work the boys are doing but not making near as much money. I want to do it, but can’t afford to do it,” she recalls telling creator Matt Miller. Miller then went to bat for her and got her even more than she had asked for.

Credit: Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock

Wedding Planning — and Canceling

Although the pair didn’t officially get married until 2019, they had planned a destination wedding in St. Maarten for January 2018. However, in June 2017, she got pregnant again and was officially expecting a daughter. Since she was due in February and the Zika virus hit the Caribbean, she had to call her planner and cancel.

“Jeff said, ‘I’m out a s—t ton of money aren’t I? And all our friends are out thousands of dollars.’ I felt sick about it, but I had to send an email to all our friends,” she recalls. “‘There’s good news and bad news. Good news is we’re having a girl! Bad news is St. Maarten has Zika. We are so grateful that every single one of you was willing to celebrate our wedding with us. Jeff and I will absolutely cover any costs form the resort that won’t be reimbursed.’ I groveled.”

They agreed to go to the island and get married there after the baby arrived, but it was decimated by Hurricane Irma.

The Rural Diaries is available now.