President Clinton was holding court at a Hollywood dinner party in his honor last March, but at least one guest, Calista Flockhart, had something other than politics on her mind. Seated near the event's hostess, film producer Daphna Edwards, the Ally McBeal star began asking what Edwards, an adoptive parent of two (with attorney husband Richard Ziman), recalls were "probing questions." For instance, "Calista asked me, how does it work? How does it happen [that birth mothers choose to pursue adoption] and why?" And what is the relationship, Flockhart wanted to know, between the birth mother and the adoptive parents? "[She] seemed like a very thoughtful woman," says Edwards, "who weighs everything carefully."

And waits very patiently. In the wee hours of Jan. 1, Flockhart, 36, accompanied by two close friends, stood in the delivery room of a San Diego hospital and witnessed the arrival of the baby boy she would soon adopt. Then, as the child's birth mother, a medical technician and mother of four, looked on, the actress cuddled the tiny bundle and reportedly said, "Happy New Year, my darling baby boy."

Flockhart, who as single career woman Ally had been bewildered, then bewitched by the hallucinatory vision of a Dancing Baby back in the show's first season, said in a statement that she was "completely enchanted and awestruck" by her real-life newborn. "I am overjoyed that I have been blessed with a beautiful, healthy son." So were her castmates, whom she called into her dressing-room trailer in L.A. a few at a time on Jan. 10 to break the happy news. "This is a total surprise," says Chris Alexander, media relations manager at 20th Century Fox, the show's producer. "She has always talked about wanting to be a mom, but I don't know that she's ever mentioned that she wanted to adopt."

Some of Flockhart's previous public musings had made the prospect of motherhood appear dubious at best. "I wouldn't be able to have a child now," she told Harper's Bazaar in 1998. "When I have a baby I want to be there with it. I want to watch it grow up."

That didn't seem likely with 14-hour workdays, three to five days a week. "She probably works more than any other actor on the show," says Alexander. Indeed, on Dec. 13, Flockhart was admitted to a local hospital to be treated for dehydration and exhaustion after collapsing on the McBeal set. She was back at work two days later. Still, her heavy work schedule hasn't derailed her from the mommy track. Nor has the lack of a significant other (she has dated actor Ben Stiller and American Beauty director Sam Mendes and McBeal co-executive producer Jeffrey Kramer, among others, and has lately been seen with comedian Garry Shandling, whose spokesperson says they are just friends). A relationship, she told PEOPLE in 1998, was "not a priority."

Motherhood obviously is. Last April she told W magazine that she "might want to have a baby." Then, in October, she met the birth mother, who was reportedly delighted to learn that Flockhart wanted to adopt her child. Now Flockhart is intent on getting the baby (whose name she has not yet made public) settled on the set, which has its own child-care facility, and in the four-bedroom Cape Cod-style home Flockhart shares with her 9-year-old terrier mix, Webster, in Los Angeles. "I'm going to baby-proof her home for her," says one friend, Josh Ryan Evans, the 3'2" actor who was the model for the show's Dancing Baby and later guest-starred as a child-prodigy lawyer on McBeal. "I've had a lot of accidents because of my size, things that might happen to a baby or a toddler." Make that toddlers. Flockhart, through her representatives, says that she may adopt again and "plans on giving birth someday."

Elizabeth O'Brien
Michelle Caruso, Ulrica Wihlborg and Pamela Warrick in Los Angeles

  • Contributors:
  • Michelle Caruso,
  • Ulrica Wihlborg,
  • Pamela Warrick.