Because of the company’s Seinfeld-fueled fame, its disintegration attracted more press than that of another company of its size would. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines chronicled its bankruptcy proceedings and the Kentucky office’s closing. The Harvard Business Review published a thorough case study on the company’s rise and fall. In The New Yorker, a humor piece imagined used office equipment being sold via Peterman-esque dramatic vignettes. “Is it possible to love a water cooler? Somewhere it is 1947. The country is back to work. The war is over. The ‘boys’ are home. Everyone’s wearing hats, even children. People eat lunch at Automats. Things are ‘Martinized.’ Cars are huge. Gravy is put on everything. And water coolers. Down at the end of the hall. In every office in America. Big, blue-green glass bottles holding clean, cold, crisp water. And by its side a long metal tube dispensing delicate conical paper cups so small you have to fill one six or eight times for a satisfying drink. No matter. We’ve found one exactly like those old ones. Only in plastic. And empty. But you can fill it. How, we don’t know. But good luck to you. Price: $450.”
Peterman began drafting plans to launch a new Internet venture using the name “John Peterman,” which was still legally his. But the Paul Harris Company itself went bankrupt a year later, and Peterman now had the chance to buy his own company back—if he got enough investors.
“We’re putting the company back together,” Peterman told O’Hurley as they stood in the actor’s backyard. “Do you want to invest?”
He agreed. Thanks to O’Hurley’s and others’ contributions, Peterman continued to sell huaraches, paille-maille dresses, and the like. (“Soft leather Mexican huaraches comforting your delicate feet through Japan’s greatest garden on a sun-drenched breezy afternoon. Glorious.”) Peterman kept things simpler this time: catalog and online only, sales of about $20 million.
SINCE ITS DEBUT ON SEINFELD, Festivus had infiltrated reality far beyond its bizarre origins in writer Dan O’Keefe’s family. Companies sold Festivus poles and beer flavors. Virginia congressman and House majority leader Eric Cantor threw Festivus fund-raisers, and many more celebrations sprung up throughout the country in homes and on college campuses. In 2012, Google gave Seinfeld fans their own electronic “Easter egg”: The search engine programmed its results screen to display a Festivus pole down the left margin of the screen to anyone looking for “Festivus” from then on.
But in 2013, Festivus reached new levels of absurdity when Fox News launched its War on Festivus, apparently a new tactic in the network’s nine-years-running campaign to convince America that there is such a thing as a “War on Christmas.”
Atheist activist Chaz Stevens built a six-foot-tall Festivus pole made of empty Pabst beer cans at the Florida state capitol building in Tallahassee to protest a privately funded Nativity scene on display there. “Is this how PC we’ve gotten in our society, really?” Fox News host Gretchen Carlson raged. “Why do I have to drive around with my kids to look for Nativity scenes and be like, ‘Oh, yeah, kids, look. There’s baby Jesus behind the Festivus pole made out of beer cans!’ ” She called the holiday “fake” several times during the segment, but, as O’Keefe could attest, that wasn’t quite right. (Besides which, what makes a holiday “fake” or “real”? The mind reels at the philosophical implications.) “I mean, the episode was funny,” Carlson added, wandering off the edge of reason, “but not Festivus.” The same Christmas season, Fox News anchors also flipped out over an online essay that suggested Santa didn’t have to be white.
O’Keefe couldn’t believe, as he told Mother Jones magazine at the time, that “anyone gave a flying fuck” about Festivus. He wasn’t sure how it became an atheist flash point, since his father, who invented the holiday, was raised Catholic and briefly studied to be a Jesuit priest; his family celebrated both Christmas and Festivus. “By the time I met my father,” he said to me later, “he was at least agnostic.”
O’Keefe’s father died at eighty-four, just a year before the uproar, content in the knowledge that he had done something few can claim: He had invented a holiday. A real holiday.
THE LINE FOR SOUP STRETCHED around the block in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Larry Thomas signed photos and soup ladles and anything else with a flat surface, chatting with fans and barking, “No soup for you!” over and over. Two hours in, however, the flow of fans stopped. Thomas hadn’t expected to be done already.
When he looked up for the first time since he’d settled in at his signing table, he saw a couple locked in an embrace, making out. Hundreds of appearances as the Soup Nazi, thousands of strangers yelling, “No soup for you!” at him, and somehow, this had never happened. No one had ever thought to reenact the scene in which Jerry and his girlfriend get kicked out of the soup shop for kissing in line and missing their turn.
Thomas picked up the cue, roaring: “You’re making out in my line? Nobody kisses in my line!”
The couple jumped up and down with excitement. Thomas was equally excited: “You guys are true originals,” he told them. “You made my day.”
Like everyone in line before them, the couple got free soup, Junior Mints, muffin tops, and a photo op with Thomas, who’d now been playing the dictatorial food stand proprietor for seventeen years. This particular appearance came as part of a 2012 road tour, in which Thomas traveled across the country in his white chef’s coat, with a truck full of soup. He was back in what had turned out to be the role of his life, making stops in Albuquerque, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities to promote Seinfeld reruns.
Playing the Soup Nazi had long ago morphed from a onetime guest appearance (pay: $2,610) into a living for the actor. Even after the episode’s surprising success, the career path to lifelong Soup Nazism did not immediately present itself when the show first ran. Through syndication, however, his staying power became more apparent. While on a touring production of a female version of The Odd Couple starring Barbara Eden in 2001, he and his onstage brother, David Castro, visited a Subway sandwich shop in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “You look like the Soup Nazi,” the sandwich maker said to Thomas.
“He is,” Castro answered. “We’re doing a play at the Parker Playhouse.”
The sandwich maker couldn’t contain his excitement. He ran out of the store to grab a friend hanging out at another place in the strip mall to bring him back and show him: The Soup Nazi! In their Subway!
As the two actors headed back to the playhouse, Castro, who was living in El Salvador at the time and thus not privy to Seinfeld fever during its original ’90s run, said, “I had no idea your thing was like that! How do you handle it?”
“Like President Clinton said,” Thomas replied, “I don’t inhale it.”
He knew he had done better work in his life than what was on display during that one Seinfeld episode. But he was also realizing that he wasn’t going to shake this Soup Nazi thing, and he had come to terms with it. This reveals an impressive reserve of equanimity on Thomas’s part: Many actors before him had lashed out at those who wanted to keep them stuck in the role that made them famous. Julie Kavner, the voice of Marge on The Simpsons, refused to ever do the voice in public. Hill Street Blues star Daniel J. Travanti avoided any mention of the show or his character in interviews just a few years after it went off the air. James Spader wouldn’t discuss his breakout role as smarmy, rich jerk Steff in the 1986 film Pretty in Pink. Fred Gwynne shot down all questions regarding his part on The Munsters.
Thomas had learned to embrace his Soup Nazism with an extra helping of good cheer. When people pointed this out to him, he would say, “For me, the Soup Nazi is so cool that I feel honored to be attached to it in any way. I guess when your character is cooler than yourself, why be Larry Thomas when you can be the Soup Nazi?”
By 2012, he spent most of his time traveling to promotional appearances, corporate events, and autograph conventions. Autograph conventions were a particular boon to him, since they favor stars who are famous enough to draw fans willing to pay $20 for an autograph
, but not so famous that they won’t sit in a suburban conference room all day, signing their names and chatting up fans. He was a perfect fit. The convention circuit—at least a dozen of these things happen every month across America—could keep any such person willing to travel and schmooze in decent money. Thomas spent a lot of time in booths across the country signing autographs, surrounded by figures of late-twentieth-century pop culture: the guy who played Robin on the 1960s Batman TV series, the guy who played Peter Brady on The Brady Bunch, second-tier cast members from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the guy who played the principal in Back to the Future, Lou Ferrigno of TV’s Hulk.
Thomas knew every quirk of fan behavior. So many times, fans wanted to do something, to ritually reenact the Seinfeld episode they knew him from, but they weren’t sure how to approach it. So many times, he sat at a table signing autographs, and a guy stepped up to say something, but struggled under the pressure to come up with something good.
Instead, the guy would end up standing and staring at Thomas, mute. Finally, Thomas would say, “Hey, how are you doing?” The guy’s mouth would start to move, but nothing would come out. Thomas would help him out by barking, “No soup for you!” Thomas had come to understand that fans just wanted an experience, something special, but they weren’t always sure what to do. That’s why he loved it when the couple kissed in front of him.
Thomas had long ago gotten over qualms about playing the same one-note character for decades. Being the Soup Nazi on demand paid his bills, and he couldn’t say the same for acting roles. If he put in a few Seinfeld-related appearances, he could take a low-paying role in an independent film to satisfy his artistic impulses. Before Seinfeld, he had spent fifteen years doing what he called “ ‘beg, borrow, and steal’ theater.” He appreciated being known for something. And he preferred playing the Soup Nazi to scraping together onetime guest spots on television.
As the Soup Nazi, he got to travel around the world to delight the show’s international fans: In Oslo, Norwegian fans at a soup-company promotional event yelled, “No soup for you!” in perfect English. He has sold autographed photos and soup ladles to fans in Bosnia, Croatia, the Netherlands, Australia, England, and Venezuela. He was invited to autograph conventions in Iran, Bangladesh, and the United Arab Emirates.
By continuing to play the Soup Nazi, Thomas even got one of the highest-profile gigs possible: appearing with Seinfeld in a 2012 Acura commercial during the Super Bowl. After the shoot, when Seinfeld thanked him for doing it, Thomas said, “Well, health care and pension points.” Seinfeld, who had likely stopped worrying about his health care and retirement funds through the Screen Actors Guild some time before, looked a bit mystified.
The job had its challenges. In 2013, for instance, Thomas saw a T-shirt online bearing an image of him with a rifle for a campaign against New York’s gun laws. The NO SERBU FOR YOU! tagline was directed at the New York Police Department, which the company’s owner, Mark Serbu, was refusing to sell his equipment to, given the state’s ban on certain assault rifles.
Thomas got in touch with Serbu and asked the gun merchant to pull the image off his websites and Facebook page. Serbu apologized and offered Thomas compensation, but Thomas felt too strongly in favor of gun control to sell out for a couple grand. Serbu suggested Thomas put out a press release denouncing the use of his image to make up for the breach—and, not coincidentally, get some “controversy” press for Serbu’s company. Thomas went along with this much of the plan. He called a contact at the New York Post, and as soon as the item ran on Page Six, it made national news. The Huffington Post, TMZ, and MSNBC called to interview Thomas; Serbu switched the image to his own face. Everyone came out happy.
Al Yeganeh, Thomas’s real-life inspiration, appeared to spend most of his post-Seinfeld fame struggling to capitalize on his renown while still resisting the source of it. In 1997, he signed a deal to open soup kiosks in New York and Canada, but the plan never came to fruition. A year later, he sold a line of frozen soups on the Home Shopping Network, netting 1,600 orders in just the first eight minutes.
But by 2004, Yeganeh’s original Fifty-Fifth Street shop in Manhattan had closed; he reopened on Forty-Second Street a year later and expanded to forty locations, but Soup Kitchen International struggled and folded. By 2010, he’d reopened his Fifty-Fifth Street spot as Original Soup Man—renamed from Soup Kitchen International, and a nod to his identity as the “Soup Nazi.” Though Yeganeh continued to denounce the show and its star when given a chance, his Original Soup Man company, using the tagline “Soup for You!,” had expanded to thirteen locations by 2013. His lobster bisque, chicken noodle, and other flavors of soup were available for order online and at grocery stores. The company also operated food trucks around the country, and Yeganeh opened Al’s Famous New York Delicatessen & Restaurant in Atlantic City.
Only once did Thomas get the urge to make like Yeganeh and deny his Soup Nazi connection. He was riding the Los Angeles subway, playing solitaire on his phone, and a few young men were looking at him. Finally one said, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look like the Soup Nazi?”
He was in the middle of a really good game, so he said simply, “Yeah, I get that all the time.” He went back to his phone and won.
14
The Legend of the Curse
LARRY DAVID HAD BECOME THE ultimate cult celebrity, his name uttered like an incantation to invoke in-the-know-ness. All of America had come to love Seinfeld, as improbable as that seemed back in 1989, and the show was adding fans every year following its syndication across the country. By 1998, the way to separate yourself from the ignorant masses of fans, to indicate that you were a true fan, was to drop David’s name into your cocktail party banter about Seinfeld. You weren’t one of those idiots who knew only of Jerry Seinfeld—you knew who’d cocreated Seinfeld, maybe even truly created Seinfeld, or at least all that was innovative about it. You knew David was the one who came up with the idea of intertwining all four characters’ plotlines at the end of each episode, the one who uttered the commandment, “No hugging, no learning,” the one who was “the real George.” You pored over profiles of David in the New York Observer and The New Yorker. You knew, for God’s sake, what a showrunner was.
Curb Your Enthusiasm started as an HBO special in 1999, a mockumentary in which Larry goes about his daily business, preparing for a stand-up concert film, with extensive footage of him working on his act at small clubs. It did well enough that the cable network signed David to star in a ten-episode series, as a fictionalized version of himself, in January 2000. The improvised sitcom premiered on October 15, 2000. Cheryl Hines played Larry’s wife, Cheryl; comedian Jeff Garlin played his manager, Jeff.
If a show could be more about nothing than Seinfeld, this was it. The series mimicked Seinfeld in several ways, obsessing over the minutiae of daily life—the difference was its far less affable, often bumbling, and irritable protagonist. One could see it as a sort of sequel to Seinfeld, following George Costanza after he got rich and famous making Jerry the sitcom and settling in Los Angeles. Indeed, there may be no bigger contributor to Seinfeldia’s longevity than the links between Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The newer show’s title addressed such comparisons head-on, urging viewers not to get their hopes up too much about the show just because of its relationship to Seinfeld. The approach mostly worked. Curb Your Enthusiasm stoked many critics’ Seinfeld adoration anew, winning dozens of Emmy nominations as it progressed past its first season. Richard Lewis, Alanis Morissette, Ted Danson, and Mary Steenburgen were among the famous names to show up to play versions of themselves on the show. But its viewpoint, dyspeptic in comparison with Seinfeld’s, put some off. “David’s anger . . . is merely the anger of frustrated entitlement,” the New Republic’s Lee Siegel wrote. “[He] has perfected Seinfeld’s superior, uninviting stare into a cold, cruel sneer. The reason that so many people like it is that they want it to like them.”
Several former Seinfeld writ
ers—including Alec Berg, Dave Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer—brought their lists full of unrealized Seinfeld story ideas when they joined the Curb staff. Some had held on to them for quite some time: An eighth-season episode, “The Palestinian Chicken,” contained a nugget of story that Steve Koren had intended for Seinfeld, thirteen years earlier—about a chicken restaurant so delicious that the characters are all willing to endure its discomfiting pro-Palestinian artwork.
Curb’s infamy made for a funny reversal: Suddenly people were asking Jerry Seinfeld what Larry David was like in real life. Was he as cranky and obnoxious as the way he played himself on TV? Seinfeld would say, “I find his character on Curb to be the most reasonable and logical person. And I’ve never understood why people think of him any other way. To me he is one of the most intelligent and perceptive people, and our minds are very synchronous. So I think he is very much like that character. Maybe not as nice all the time.”
“WHAT AM I DOING HERE?” Jerry Seinfeld asks an audience at the tiny Comedy Cellar, a club in New York City’s West Village tucked underneath the Olive Tree Cafe. “I made it! I had my own show! What did I do? I’m back here now.” He was, in fact, making good on the promise of his HBO special. He was starting over, working on new material and testing it out in front of every comedy-club brick wall he could find.
“I’ve got like two bits,” he told the camera crew following him for a 2002 documentary called Comedian, the distinctive comedy-club smell of wood, alcohol, and cigarettes permeating the air. “The rest is shit.”
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