Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

  “Don’t you understand how perfect she is for you?” David continued. “You’ve driven her to lesbianism. You burned her father’s shack down. You’ve practically shit on her, and nobody feels bad for her. They’re all on your side. She’s the greatest foil for you.”

  True enough, her character had been through even more than that thanks to George and his friends. Kramer threw up on her. She lost her job at NBC when George kissed her mid-meeting. Kramer stole her girlfriend.

  Swedberg saw her role on the show as being the straight woman to the insanity. Susan was the stiffest of the stiff, unlike Swedberg herself, who rebelled against her uptight upbringing by threatening to join the circus when she was a kid in Albuquerque. Instead, she became an actress, took up the ukulele, and bought an Airstream trailer for her and her husband to hang out in—and keep in the yard at their Los Angeles home.

  Her girl-next-door looks had gotten her onetime guest spots on shows such as Matlock, Grace Under Fire, and Murder, She Wrote. Eventually, those all-American looks also got her what was originally a bit part on Seinfeld as one of a group of fictional NBC executives who take George and Jerry’s pitch for a sitcom. George’s throwaway line that she had seemed to like him inspired producers to bring her back several times as George’s on-again, off-again love interest. As a coworker on the set, Swedberg was an unassuming professional who caused neither trouble nor spectacle. She’d do her scenes, then retreat to a corner to read a book until she was needed again.

  Now, Susan and George were the closest Seinfeld had ever gotten to a stable couple.

  David had no idea where the plotline would end, but he was committed to seeing it through. About halfway through the next season, an episode required Jerry and Elaine to hang out with Susan, the first time either Seinfeld or Louis-Dreyfus had to work extensively with Swedberg. After the taping, the four lead actors gathered with David at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City, as usual.

  “You know, it’s hard to figure out where to go with what she gives you,” Seinfeld said.

  “Don’t even talk to me,” Alexander snapped. “I don’t want to hear your bullshit.”

  Louis-Dreyfus added, “I just want to kill her.”

  And David said, “Wait a minute.”

  The conversation led to what Alexander called “the single coldest moment in the history of television”: when Susan’s death is met with what could generously be called an apathetic shrug . . . from her own fiancé. Warren Littlefield saw it as “the boldest comedy move I had ever seen,” even though his kids’ pediatrician wouldn’t talk to him afterward.

  One hopes this was as distant as George Costanza could get from his real-life inspiration, Larry David. “It would have been dishonest to make him upset, and that’s why it’s funny,” David said afterward. “Somebody showed me something in some magazine where they wrote that this was a ‘fuck you’ to the network. Why would I do something like that? Why a fuck you, when all they did was let me do whatever I wanted for seven years?”

  EVERYTHING SEINFELD DID NOW TOOK on grand significance.

  Given the show’s precarious early life—and NBC’s specific concerns about its Jewishness—David and Seinfeld didn’t go out of their way to send their main characters to synagogue or quote the Torah every week. But the Floridian parents, the marble ryes, the Jewish singles events—one couldn’t miss that the title star of the show and more than half of its writers were Jewish. But as the series gained more viewers, the criticisms mounted: Too Jewish. Not Jewish enough. Even “too self-hatingly Jewish,” according to Washington Post critic Tom Shales. Shales cited the show’s parade of nefarious Jewish characters. Elaine’s rabbi neighbor spills his confidants’ secrets. Jerry and his girlfriend make out during Schindler’s List. Elaine, a non-Jewish character, discovers her “shiksappeal” that attracts Jewish men.

  In 1996, scholars at a Stanford University Jewish Studies symposium debated the show’s merits for their own culture. Any Jewish identity in mainstream culture was a positive development, said Richard Siegel, the executive director of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. For author of New York Jew Alfred Kazin, however, neither Seinfeld nor novelist Philip Roth made the cut in terms of representing true Jewish culture. To him, a representation wasn’t sufficiently Jewish unless it dealt with a relationship to God. Stanford religious studies professor Arnold Eisen agreed, comparing Seinfeld to “bagels and lox, which are no longer Jewish.” In an interview at another time, Rabbi Jonathan Pearl of the Jewish Televimages Resource Center complained that Seinfeld became “unfunny” whenever it dealt with Jewish issues.

  Alexander, who’s also Jewish, didn’t disagree when it came to one fifth-season episode called “The Bris.” He hated the character of the mohel who circumcises Elaine’s friend’s child. Alexander said, “You have to go a long way to hit my Jew button. To me, this was anti-Semitic in a hurtful way.” He told David he’d have to boycott the episode and persuaded David to soften the portrayal. (In the end, the mohel was merely incompetent, rather than blatantly offensive.) Alexander was never comfortable with the episode, but he could live with it.

  Still, the show did bring bits of Jewish culture to the masses in America, many of whom—particularly in the Midwest—barely knew what Hanukkah was.

  Writer Steve Koren worked a story line into one of his first scripts about a kid trying to kiss Elaine at his bar mitzvah because he’s “a man now.” Unlike at Saturday Night Live, however, Koren knew this wasn’t enough to support an episode. He was right: Seinfeld liked the concept but said, “What else, what else?” Koren came up with several versions of the story, but none quite worked. He had that story on the bulletin board in his office for a year before he realized: The kid renounces Judaism for Elaine.

  With that, the bar mitzvah kid made it into Koren’s favorite of the episodes he wrote, “The Serenity Now.” It was, if anything, Seinfeld doing the exact opposite of renouncing Judaism; for one of the few times in its run, it was unequivocally embracing its Jewishness, no matter whom you asked, with a traditional Jewish ceremony front and center for all of America to see.

  CULTURAL DIVERSITY OVERALL WAS SEINFELD’S blessing and curse. Seinfeld was outspoken about prioritizing comedy over all other concerns, including the show’s representations of all races. But several plotlines took on racial issues: George desperately searches for a black friend to prove to his African American boss that he’s not racist. Kramer has visiting Japanese tourists sleeping in his chest of drawers. (“Jerry, have you ever seen the business hotels in Tokyo? They sleep in tiny stacked cubicles all the time. They feel right at home.”) Jerry buys Elaine a cigar-store Indian figure and thus inadvertently offends a woman he wants to date. Elaine dates a guy she thinks is black, enjoying the cultural cachet; it turns out he isn’t, and he had referred to their relationship as “interracial” because he thought she was Hispanic.

  While Seinfeld’s neighbor in fictitious New York, Friends, ignored minority characters almost entirely despite being set in America’s most diverse city, such plotlines allowed Seinfeld to include many guest actors of color. Some of those notable portrayals were small, such as the black family whose Breakfast at Tiffany’s viewing George crashes. Some were large: Phil Morris made several memorable appearances as a bossy send-up of O. J. Simpson lawyer Johnnie Cochran with the recurring Jackie Chiles character. (Barking in Cochran’s then-famous cadence at Kramer for soothing the injury for which he’s suing a fast-food chain: “You put the balm on? Who told you to put the balm on? I didn’t tell you to put the balm on. Why’d you put the balm on? You haven’t even been to see the doctor. If you’re gonna put a balm on, let a doctor put a balm on.”) Seinfeld was also one of the few New York–set shows at the time with nonwhite actors consistently appearing in prominent onetime roles and smaller recurring roles: Sid, the parking guy in “The Alternate Side” (played by Jay Brooks); Larry, the cook at Monk’s Café (Lawrence Mandley); charity worker Rebecca De Mornay (named after the white actress, bu
t played by black actress Sonya Eddy); and Mr. Morgan, one of George’s bosses (Tom Wright).

  But anytime a minority ended up the butt of a joke, it could turn problematic in a way that the show’s white characters’ foibles never did. The Chinese restaurant host who doesn’t know the difference between “Costanza” and “Cartwright” and the gay Latino armoire thieves did nothing to assuage criticisms of Seinfeld’s lack of diversity. Even Chiles came in for criticism that he reinforced racial stereotypes, although he was clearly based on a public figure.

  Adding fuel to the fire, in 1997, performance artist Danny Hoch spent a huge portion of his touring act calling Seinfeld “the enemy.” The lengthy monologue recounted Hoch’s experience in a 1995 guest role on the show, in which he refused Seinfeld’s requests to play a pool boy as a heavily accented Latino.

  Before being cast on Seinfeld, Hoch did a stage show in which he told the history of his Brooklyn neighborhood. He played ethnic characters with accents—Cuban, Jamaican, Trinidadian. (His ancestors, however, were Jewish.) He’d long resisted sitcom work, but he figured an appearance could bring audiences to his one-man show. But when he received the script for “The Pool Guy,” he worried about how it might go. According to his account, he called and asked one of the producers, “This isn’t your stereotypically Spanish-speaking pool guy, is it?” He was assured the character could be “whoever you want it to be.”

  When Hoch got to the table read on set, he did his lines as a “higher strung” version of himself. Afterward, at rehearsal, he found himself alone with Alexander, Louis-Dreyfus, Richards, Seinfeld, and director Andy Ackerman. Ackerman or Seinfeld asked him to do the part in a Spanish accent. He refused. “The role is stupid and it’s a clown and I have no problem doing it and it’s funny,” Hoch said. “But I can’t do the Spanish accent because it’s one-dimensional. Why does it have to be in Spanish? Why can’t it be Israeli?”

  Seinfeld answered, “Because it’s funnier that way.” After talking to David on the phone for about ten minutes, Seinfeld returned. “It’s just a half-hour comedy show,” he pressed. “What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s a big deal to me because there’s too many friends of mine who are highly trained actors that are Cuban and Puerto Rican and Dominican,” Hoch said. “All they get asked to do are one-dimensional roles, and here I am, not even Latino, and you’re asking me to play a clown, and I can’t.” Alexander and Louis-Dreyfus supported him, he said, encouraging him to follow his instincts. Richards warned him that he’d be replaced if he didn’t go with the direction.

  When Hoch returned to his Los Angeles hotel that night, he got a message from the production office: They’d find someone else. He flew home and was never paid for his work on the show. They got a different, white actor to play the role instead, with no accent.

  The incident made its way into Hoch’s next show, and he began telling the story to audiences throughout the country. This served as part of the inspiration for a story line on a ninth-season episode in which Sally Weaver (played by Kathy Griffin) becomes famous when she builds a one-woman show around calling Jerry “the devil.”

  That plot wasn’t just based on Hoch’s rant, though. It also mixed in an incident from Griffin’s own life. She had previously appeared on Seinfeld in the seventh season as Susan’s old roommate. She asks Jerry to deliver a doormat as an engagement gift to George and Susan. While filming the episode, Griffin, a stand-up, wanted to get Seinfeld’s autograph for a party she was attending that night at a friend’s house to watch the Golden Globes. But when she approached him to ask, he was in the middle of telling director Andy Ackerman all the things he still wanted to change about that week’s script. As Seinfeld got more worked up, Griffin realized she’d picked the worst possible moment—but was now stuck a few feet away, holding a pen and paper. Finally, he turned to her and snapped, “You had a question?”

  She stammered, “Oh, yes, Jerry, glad to be on the show. My friend Dennis is having a Golden Globes party tonight, and I thought it would be really great since you’re nominated for a Golden Globe, if you could write a little note to the party, like, ‘Dear Dennis’s party, Vote for me, Jerry Seinfeld!’ ”

  “What?” She could feel herself flush at his confusion. “I’m going to the Golden Globes, I’ll just see you at the party.”

  She explained that, no, she’d be at someone’s private home, as she was not invited to the ceremony, but she thought it would be fun if . . .

  “That’s about the last thing I have time for right now,” he said before he walked away.

  The script girl cast a sympathetic eye at Griffin. “He’s cranky,” she explained.

  After about an hour of work, Seinfeld was leaving to get ready for the Globes. As the crew wished him good luck, he turned to Griffin. “And you. You wanted me to sign something?” He did it this time, and Griffin was the hit of her party.

  Griffin could tell Seinfeld tried to be extra-friendly to her the next day, acknowledging on some level that he’d been testy. Still, like Hoch, she told the entire story as part of her act, which became her first stand-up special on HBO the following year. She was cast in NBC’s new Brooke Shields sitcom Suddenly Susan soon afterward. Then she heard that Seinfeld had seen her bit. Could he somehow get her fired? Didn’t he rule that network now? Soon, Griffin’s agent called her and said, “Jerry Seinfeld is sending you something.”

  Terrified, she waited for the package, sure it would be a box of excrement, if not a letter of termination. When it arrived, it was a box of SnackWell’s cookies—a low-calorie treat once consumed on Seinfeld—with a note. “I was, up until your recent monologue on some obscure cable channel, unaware that you had ever appeared on my number-one hit television series that is named after me,” Seinfeld wrote. “I nonetheless very much enjoyed your little skit. . . . Enclosed please find a box of SnackWell’s for you to enjoy with my compliments.”

  He had even been having a tape of her stand-up played during the audience warm-ups on Seinfeld’s studio-audience nights. A year later, Seinfeld invited her back on the show to play some strange amalgam of Sally Weaver, Danny Hoch, and herself.

  DESPITE THE CRITICISM SEINFELD WEATHERED at its heights, it also won accolades, particularly for its treatment of gay issues. The fourth-season episode “The Outing,” in which George and Jerry try to persuade a college newspaper reporter who overhears a misleading conversation that they’re not gay, won an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. David and Seinfeld almost abandoned an earlier version of Larry Charles’s script for the episode due to fears of offending the gay community, but during the discussion, Charles uttered what would become one of the show’s stickiest catchphrases—“not that there’s anything wrong with that.” Once David and Seinfeld asked him to put that in as a recurring joke, it became a satire of homophobia, skewering straight, liberal men’s desire to emphasize their heterosexuality while maintaining their image as enlightened beings. It was a perfect depiction of ’90s political correctness.

  This came at a time when gay characters were never main characters, and were mostly relegated to quirky, cult shows (Northern Exposure), cable (Dream On), soap operas (One Life to Live), reality shows (The Real World), silly dramas (Melrose Place), and teen shows (My So-Called Life). They were on the sidelines of the sidelines, and almost always treated with deadly seriousness. They were either a “very special episode” topic or, on the vast majority of shows, ignored. Bringing a gay discussion into the mainstream with humor constituted a major breakthrough.

  Later that same season, Seinfeld casually brought another gay discussion into an episode: George ran into Susan, then his ex, at the video store and discovered that she was dating a woman. Peter Mehlman, who cowrote that episode—in which George praises Susan for her “hip” choice and frets that he’s driven her to lesbianism—didn’t feel like the show deserved a GLAAD award for such things. But he was proud to be on a show that took on issue after issue; he loved to argue that Seinfe
ld, of all shows, was hardly a “show about nothing.” It was, in fact, among the few comedies that were about something.

  AS SEINFELD REACHED NEW HEIGHTS of popularity, David didn’t feel the same way about it that Seinfeld did—it wasn’t David’s “primary relationship.” David married his talent manager, Laurie Lennard, on the spur of the moment during a trip to Las Vegas in March 1993. Soon, the couple was expecting their first child, and they moved into a new house in Malibu that had narrowly escaped destruction by a brush fire the day before. There was no denying it anymore: David couldn’t claim to be his former sad-sack, unlucky self.

  But that didn’t mean he wanted to continue dedicating so much time and energy to Seinfeld. The whole thing was exhausting. He’d gone grayer and balder in the time the show had been on the air, which led him to choose a more neatly trimmed hairstyle, with rampant sideburns the only hint of his former wild look. Meanwhile, the script schedule fell further and further behind as each season progressed. The set construction crews and extras made massive overtime pay for rush jobs and last-minute rehearsals. Often rehearsals and rewrites took up weekends. “People won a lot of acclaim and a lot of awards for Larry’s work,” writer Alec Berg said of the scores of scripts credited to staffers but heavily revised by David. “That’s the job of executive producer.” David, however, wasn’t sure how much longer he could handle that job.