smbet A Hollywood Actress Finds a Farm, and Her Leading Man, in the Midwest
The day after Jared Taylor LaPine graduated from Western Michigan University in 2012, he loaded his car and drove to Los Angeles, his sights set on a career in show business. Eight years later, he was back in his native Kalamazoo, Mich., the glamour
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The day after Jared Taylor LaPine graduated from Western Michigan University in 2012, he loaded his car and drove to Los Angeles, his sights set on a career in show business. Eight years later, he was back in his native Kalamazoo, Mich., the glamour of Hollywood thoroughly out of his system.
Or at least that’s what he thought until April 2023, when he was randomly set up by a woman he barely knew with Torrey Joël DeVitto.
Ms. DeVitto, 40, is an actress who most recently starred in the NBC drama series “Chicago Med.” When she met Mr. LaPine, 34, she had recently moved to Chicago from Los Angeles, but had been spending more time in Michigan at a farm she bought in 2020 in leafy Fennville, about 40 miles southwest of Grand Rapids.
The place she considered a vacation house was starting to feel more like home than Southern California, where she had rooted herself in neighborhoods like Hollywood since 2002. Her mother, Mary DeVitto, lived 15 minutes away, in Saugatuck, and her cousin Alexandra Ferenc was nearby, in Chicago.
“I loved it,” she said of the eight-acre farm, where she and Mr. LaPine now live part time with goats and ducks. “I realized I wanted to stay in Michigan.” Staying single was another matter: In 2023, when Ms. Ferenc offered to set her up with someone from Michigan, she took the bait.
Fame has been a fixture in Ms. DeVitto’s life since birth. Her father, Liberty DeVitto, was Billy Joel’s longtime drummer; she spent much of her childhood on the road with the band. Her mother’s best friend and onetime roommate is Stevie Nicks. (The two women met when Mary DeVitto worked at the offices of Mann Theaters in Los Angeles; they looked so much alike people asked them if they were related.) “That’s how my mom met my dad,” she said. In 1983, when Mr. Joel’s band was on hiatus, Ms. Nicks hired him to drum on her first solo tour.
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