Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

  Martin, sixty-seven when he joined Seinfeld, was a former New York Police Department detective who launched his comedy career by giving funny presentations to deputy commissioners. He got his start in show business moonlighting as Jackie Gleason’s stand-in on The Honeymooners in the 1950s and as a writer for Name That Tune and The Steve Allen Show. He eventually left police work altogether and went on to pursue a real acting career, appearing in the 1968 Mel Brooks movie The Producers (as Hermann Goering) and the 1981 Dudley Moore comedy Arthur. In between, he enjoyed a robust Broadway career that included originating the role of cuckolded husband Amos Hart in the musical Chicago. Before Seinfeld, he appeared in character parts on shows from The Odd Couple to 21 Jump Street.

  Actress Liz Sheridan played Jerry’s mother, Helen, from the beginning. At sixty-one, she came to the show with experience on sitcoms (Alf and Family Ties), dramas (Cagney & Lacey and Remington Steele), and soaps (Santa Barbara). She’d spent the early years of her career as a dancer in New York City, where she grew up, and she had a youthful affair with James Dean before he was famous.

  Seinfeld was bemused when he heard about his on-screen mom’s steamy past: “So, you were a friend of James Dean, huh?” he asked after he heard of her rumored paramour. She explained that, yes, she and Dean had been each other’s first loves before he went off to become a star in the films East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, then died in a car crash at twenty-four.

  From then on, Seinfeld would periodically ask her, “Got any good Dean stories?” She spoke of the January 1952 night when she and Dean first met. At the time, she was a dancer on The Milton Berle Show. She said Dean had lived on shredded wheat and tapioca pudding while trying to land parts. She recalled their shared love of bullfighting and the apartment they lived in together on the Upper West Side.

  The actors playing Jerry’s parents in particular gave Seinfeld a sense of his show’s place in greater Hollywood history. Dean-like brooding may not have been Seinfeld’s thing, but his rebel spirit certainly was.

  WITH EVEN HIS TV PARENTS becoming celebrities, Jerry Seinfeld was everywhere, the object of fascination and scorn. In 1993, he released his book SeinLanguage, a compilation of stand-up routines, and had to answer to rumors that he’d been paid $1.6 million for it. (“Ludicrous,” he said, though he gave no alternative figure.) He parodied himself on HBO’s showbiz-satire The Larry Sanders Show. The nation hung on Seinfeld’s every word about his show, which he called “TV for the bored” in an interview with USA Weekend. “We’ll do two more seasons,” he teased a viewership now desperate for reassurances that there would be many years to come. “I will walk away from unbelievable bucks.”

  Seinfeld showed up in a tux for the Emmys and found his name mentioned as a possible Oscar host, but he continued to spurn Hollywood trappings like A-list parties. He didn’t even love the idea of emceeing show business’s biggest night. It was too controlled an environment for his taste. The Oscars weren’t supposed to be good—weren’t supposed to be funny, not really. People watch the Oscars because they’re the Oscars, not for groundbreaking comedy from the host. In other words, Seinfeld still wasn’t interested in gigs that didn’t give him total artistic control.

  The Emmys, however, wasn’t an event he planned to shun. In September 1993, Seinfeld was up for an acting Emmy, an acknowledgment that he’d come a long way since he’d been so uncomfortable in the pilot. Seinfeld was nominated for nine major awards that night, and it won for Outstanding Comedy Series, beating Home Improvement and Cheers for what was its true breakthrough season, its fourth. Michael Richards won a Supporting Actor award, as usual beating out Jason Alexander as George. Larry David took home a writing award for “The Contest.” In subsequent years, the show would find itself snubbed much more often than it was victorious; nominations were plentiful, but only Michael Richards and Julia Louis-Dreyfus took home major awards for the show. (Richards won three; Louis-Dreyfus won one.) Frasier beat Seinfeld for Outstanding Comedy Series every remaining year of Seinfeld’s run.

  Seinfeld accepted the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Comedy in January 1994, presented by actors Jeff Conaway and Tia Carrere. “Wow,” he began his acceptance speech, “there’s a lot of cleavage in this room. And that’s why the Golden Globe award is the highest honor you can receive on a night like this.” He did, however, add a touch of sincerity: “I love doing the show. It’s really just having fun that makes it look like you’re good. And I have to thank for that my wonderful pals, Michael Richards and Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander. And Larry David, who writes all the great stuff that we do.”

  Any doubt as to whether the show had arrived disappeared when Warren Littlefield showed up on set one day to cook breakfast for the entire cast and crew. There was the president of entertainment, flipping pancakes, making waffles and eggs, and sweating for their benefit.

  SEINFELD, WHO WAS ABOUT TO turn forty, continued to see the show as his primary relationship, but it wasn’t his only relationship—a well-documented fact, according to the tabloid attention paid to the sitcom world’s most eligible bachelor. Just as the show was becoming a sensation going into its fifth season, Seinfeld met seventeen-year-old high school senior Shoshanna Lonstein, a shapely brunette, in Central Park one spring day and started dating her. He had remained staunchly single throughout the show’s run thus far because he always put his work first. Now that he was dating publicly, and had chosen a teenager as his paramour, the tabloids couldn’t contain themselves.

  Seinfeld had little choice but to acknowledge his new love publicly, calling her “the most wonderful girl in the world. . . . Shoshanna is a person, not an age. We just get along.” More important, he said, the gossip pages’ interest in his love life showed how far he’d come: “It’s like winning an Oscar.”

  Julia Louis-Dreyfus won another dubious sign of success: her very own public spat with Roseanne Barr.

  Louis-Dreyfus inadvertently parked in a spot designated for Barr’s then husband, Tom Arnold, who at the time—March 1993—starred in his own show, The Jackie Thomas Show, also filmed at CBS Studio Center. Louis-Dreyfus later said that she was instructed to park there by the parking attendants. Arnold left a note on Louis-Dreyfus’s car: “How stupid are you? Move your fucking car, you asshole!”

  Alexander, David, and Louis-Dreyfus confronted Arnold about the note, after which followed a Polaroid of someone’s buttocks left on her windshield, and the word CUNT written in soap on her windshield. The incident went public, and Barr sort of apologized, but mostly, she called Louis-Dreyfus a bitch on Letterman, then added derisively, “They think they’re doing Samuel Beckett instead of a sitcom.” The Seinfeld cast tried not to talk about it in interviews afterward, hoping to take the high road, but sometimes they couldn’t help themselves. “I am willing to make a bet that she has never read anything Beckett ever wrote,” Alexander said to Rolling Stone.

  The subtext of that exchange perhaps explained the entire dustup best. Seinfeld was even more popular than Roseanne now, and more artistically respected as well. It was about New York elites and attracted the elite audiences that advertisers paid the highest prices for. It was the sitcom that had it all. The spat in the parking lot was pure Roseanne: She was proud of her working-class crassness and would shove it in the face of any elite who crossed her. It was also pure Seinfeld: Could the queen of populism possibly know Beckett as well as they did?

  BARR WASN’T ALONE, HOWEVER, IN her disdain for this show that 30 million viewers now watched every week. With great popularity comes great criticism, and according to some critics, society was unraveling at a rate directly proportional to Seinfeld’s growth. “Call me a hopeless Puritan,” wrote the Progressive’s Elayne Rapping, “but I see, in this airwave invasion of sitcoms about young Manhattanites with no real family or work responsibilities and nothing to do but hang out and talk about it, an insidious message about the future of Western civilization.” Added Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, �
��Seinfeld is the worst, last gasp of Reaganite, grasping, materialistic, narcissistic, banal self-absorption.”

  Seinfeld had become the hot item for overanalyzers. Scholars opined that it represented modern male anxiety, Jewish cultural assimilation, the rise of irony and intertextuality, and the self-centeredness of the 1990s. Seinfeld’s real-life effects on fans made national news: When Florida high school student Dan Cassill fell into a coma after a 1996 car accident, he first awoke when his mother turned on his favorite show—and the media ate the story up. Jerold Mackenzie, a manager at Miller Brewing Co. in Milwaukee, lost his job for discussing “The Junior Mint”—specifically, the body part with which the name “Dolores” rhymes—with a female employee. He won a much-publicized wrongful termination lawsuit.

  Thus began an almost comic roller coaster of melodramatic public and critical reaction to a show that nearly everyone had once been prepared to ignore. No sooner did one critic declare its return to form, hurrah!, than another would declare it better off dead.

  EVEN IN THE MIDDLE OF the chaos and hype, there were occasional quiet, touching moments that reminded the cast and crew that they were just a lucky team of people working at what would likely be the best job of their lives. Seinfeld loved filming the seventh-season episode “The Rye.” The elaborate staging involved pulling a rye up to George’s potential in-laws’ third-floor brownstone apartment with a fishing pole and required shooting on a large, outdoor set normally used for movies at Paramount Studios. The budget came in at almost a million dollars, as writer Carol Leifer remembers it, after accounting for the fake snow and the hansom cab Kramer drives. The cast and crew broke out into an impromptu fake-snowball fight.

  Somehow it wasn’t until that moment that Seinfeld stopped to realize, Wow, this is almost like a real TV show. The series had scraped by for so long on so little—so little attention, support, audience, budget—that the reality hit on time delay. The New York set looked so real, he thought, This is where the adult shows are, the real shows like Murphy Brown.

  It proved difficult to shoot, but fun. They stayed on the set all night taping, and loved every minute—immersed in their work, immune to the churning publicity of the outside world. Shooting ended right before they broke for Thanksgiving, and as they wrapped, a truck pulled up to distribute HoneyBaked hams and turkeys to the cast and crew, courtesy of David and Seinfeld. That episode would become one of fans’ favorites, and one of the best memories for those involved.

  Even Frances Bay—the tiny, gray-haired woman robbed of her rye on the set that night—felt the instant celebrity that Seinfeld could now confer upon anyone in its orbit. Once the episode aired, all she ever heard was, “Oh, you’re the Marble Rye Lady!” Her rabbi went out of his way to greet her now, she told People magazine, and he had a sizable congregation. This was no small show.

  9

  The Show About Something

  IN 1994, EVEN THE NEWS started seeming Seinfeldian. Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was attacked by a man who clubbed her in the right knee as she left a practice facility in Detroit, an attack orchestrated by her competitor Tonya Harding and Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly. Major League Baseball players went on strike, putting a halt to the World Series. Newt Gingrich became the Speaker of the House of Representatives. And 95 million people watched former pro football player O. J. Simpson and his friend Al Cowlings lead Los Angeles police on a low-speed chase across the city’s morass of freeways before Simpson was arrested on suspicion of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a visitor at her Brentwood home, Ron Goldman.

  While some of these events had serious underpinnings and repercussions, everything could be seen through David and Seinfeld’s skewed vision now. A conspiracy to club a figure skater’s leg? Guys named Jeff Gillooly and Newt Gingrich? Millionaires on strike? Most of America glued to footage of a Ford Bronco on what appeared to be a leisurely drive, trailed by a cadre of cop cars? Had everything always been so absurd, or had Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld willed a new era of ridiculousness into existence? Somehow, a brave new order had emerged, in which the revelation of Kramer’s first name—Cosmo—got the same amount of media attention as a devastating earthquake in Japan. One could wonder if the pundits who blamed Seinfeld for the degradation of society were onto something. Seinfeldia had seeped into real life just as much as real life had infused Seinfeldia.

  In this spirit, Seinfeld celebrated its hundredth episode with a one-hour retrospective special on February 2, 1995. At the hundredth-episode party stood a centerpiece, a ten-foot-tall blowup of NBC executives’ list of requested changes to the pilot way back when. Almost none of them had been made.

  THE SHOW HAD COURTED STRONG reactions from its earliest seasons; the difference then was that few watched, and fewer wrote in national publications about it.

  Season four’s “The Contest” marked a turning point. The network let the infamous masturbation episode air as written. Whether shocked by it, thrilled, or a little bit of both, millions had discussed it the next day, media attention had followed, and NBC remembered the power of television that sparked discussion. Nine advertisers pulled their spots from the broadcast, but in the end that loss was worth it. The episode was one of the highest rated of the season, and several advertisers who originally balked wanted to run spots when it re-aired over the summer.

  From there, Seinfeld roamed ever freer in choosing its subject matter, whether sexual, politically incorrect, or otherwise controversial.

  In the “Fusilli Jerry” episode, the script references “the Move,” a sexual technique Jerry once bragged about to Elaine’s boyfriend Puddy. However, Elaine notices that her new beau—Jerry’s mechanic—uses the same move as her ex, Jerry. ( Jerry’s not happy: “It’s like another comedian stealing my material.” Elaine: “It’s not even the same. He uses a pinch at the end.” Jerry, on the other hand, favored a clockwise swirl.) In other episodes, Elaine bemoans her sax-player boyfriend who “doesn’t really like to do everything” and George tries to persuade a girlfriend to let him eat pastrami sandwiches during the act.

  In the fourth-season episode “The Handicap Spot,” the foursome stops at a mall in the suburb of Lynbrook, New York, to buy a present on the way to an engagement party and can’t find a parking spot. “Why don’t you take the handicap spot?” Kramer suggests to George, who’s driving his father’s late-’70s Mercury Monarch.

  “You think?” George asks. They’ll be in the mall for only a few minutes, they’re sure.

  Elaine protests. “What if a handicapped person needs it?”

  Kramer responds, “They don’t drive. Have you ever seen a handicapped person pull into a space and park?”

  Jerry answers with a tautology. “Well, there’s spaces there, they must drive.”

  Kramer one-ups him on nonsensical logic. “If they could drive, they wouldn’t be handicapped. . . . I got news for you. Handicapped people, they don’t even want to park there. They want to be treated just like everybody else. Those spaces are always empty.”

  George concludes: “He’s right. It’s the same thing with the feminists. They want everything to be equal, everything. But when the check comes, where are they?”

  Elaine won’t let that one stand. “What does that mean?”

  George ignores her and parks in the spot. They stay inside much longer than a few minutes, and return to find an angry mob trashing the car because a woman in a wheelchair was injured in an accident after having to park far away. This story line eventually culminates in Kramer buying the woman a replacement wheelchair that’s used, and she ends up careening, out of control, down a hill.

  This was exactly the sort of episode Seinfeld became known for—the kind no one was quite sure was okay to laugh at. But they laughed anyway, and talked about it the next day. As NBC found it increasingly difficult to hold on to its top ratings spot, it saw a savior in Seinfeld and its cultural antagonism.

  Even Seinfeld had its limits, though. David and Seinfeld fo
und their furthest edge when they attempted, and then scrapped, a script in 1990 called “The Bet,” in which Elaine considered buying a handgun. The bet in question was about whether she’d go through with her plans to purchase a firearm for self-protection, based on the experiences of one of the show’s writers, Elaine Pope. They got the script as far as a read-through. But several of those involved balked as they performed it for the first time, particularly at a line about Elaine shooting herself in the head and calling it “the Kennedy,” gesturing to the entry point of the bullet that killed the president.

  It offended director Tom Cherones (a former gunnery officer in the United States Navy) and the cast enough to stop things cold. The actors said they didn’t want to do it. Cherones agreed.

  The writer of the episode, Larry Charles, gave in. The episode was killed. (The script also, incidentally, revealed Kramer’s first name to be Conrad, inspired by Bye Bye Birdie. His name would remain a secret until years later, when he was christened Cosmo instead.) David and Seinfeld rushed a replacement episode, “The Phone Message,” in which George tries to erase an answering machine message he regrets. Guns, they realized, were just not funny.

  Death, on the other hand . . .

  In the summer of 1995, Larry David called Jason Alexander. “We’ve got a great arc for George,” he said. “He’s going to get engaged.”

  “To what character?”

  “Susan.”

  “Who’s playing Susan?” Alexander asked, though surely he knew.

  “Heidi.”

  “Who’s playing George?” Alexander cracked.

  Alexander and Heidi Swedberg, who played George’s ex, never worked on the same wavelength. While Alexander found it easy to play off of his regular costars, he always felt like he was fighting Swedberg in their shared scenes, even though he liked her as a person offscreen. He found her comic instincts to be “the complete opposite” of his own. “I always felt like I was punching into Jell-O,” he later said. He’d do something in a scene with her, and it would fall flat. So in the next take, he’d do something else, and then David would tell him to go back to the original choice. Then in the next take, Swedberg would do something totally different. Alexander couldn’t win.