Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star (18 page)

“What a coincidence. I’m going to be around Boston just at that time!”

“Oh, that might help us a little.”

“No, I’m no problem. You won’t have to fly me there or put me up. I’ll already be there visiting friends!”

I lied, of course. I had decided to spend whatever it cost because I pathetically thought that this was my shot. But there were other problems besides flying myself out there and putting myself up. According to the shooting schedule, my four scenes were not going to be shot in a row. They were not even going to be filmed in the same week or two. So, if I still wanted to do this, I had to fly East, work a day, hang out for two weeks, do another day, and then wait another two weeks to do my last scene. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

Late July wasn’t the best time to be away from Los Angeles for so long. Why couldn’t this complicated situation have been in May or June? The sitcom season starts in August and goes until April. From February to April is the bulk of pilot season. If you’re someone who mostly lives and dies by the sitcom schedule, the down time from April to August is brutal. I could hope to get into a movie, but those opportunities had been very scarce for me. And not only was I going to miss some opportunities being away, but an actual specific one had come along with
Suddenly Susan
.

After failing to get the movie’s producer to change the schedule around so I could be available for that
Suddenly Susan
role, I called back my agent to ask again if I were missing out on an unbelievable opportunity and if I should try hard to extricate myself from my prior commitment. The agent was a little too lax about it. A few days later, after bugging him some more for the details, he finally got back to me and said, “Don’t worry about it. They went ahead and cast someone else. You said you weren’t available.”

“But I could’ve made myself available if you would’ve gotten back to me!”

All I could do was hope the part I missed out on wasn’t the equivalent of Mimi on
The Drew Carey Show
so I just took the plunge and went ahead with this crazy independent film venture.

It might have not been too much of a hassle if I had places to stay while back East waiting around for my four spread out days of filming. Hotel prices in the New York area are obscenely high. That was out of the question. My friend Joel in Brooklyn was married and lived in a little studio apartment with no room for me. Other friends had moved West. The options weren’t good.

I flew into JFK and stayed at a terrible motel right by the airport. In the morning I got a ride from one of the film’s production assistants up to the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts where the movie was being filmed.

In my first scene, my character is supposed to kiss and grope his girlfriend right in front of her sister and her sister’s friend. None of my guest star parts had ever called for kissing. Suzanne Cryer, who ended up getting a nice three-year stint on the ABC show
Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place,
played my attractive girlfriend.

After our first take, clawing each other all over, I apologized for accidentally touching her breast. She told me I could absolutely touch her anywhere at all. She felt it was most important to stay true to the characters, and these characters were always all over each other. The first-time director, a twenty-three-year-old woman, agreed and called “action.” We went back to kissing and touching until she suddenly stopped the scene, annoyed. “What’s wrong with you!? Don’t touch my hair! It’s all set. Touch me anywhere else!”

After that half a day of filming, I flew back to Los Angeles for a few days, then returned East and filmed a scene where all I did was climb out of a limousine. After my wonderful performance descending from that limo, I didn’t want to spend the money to fly back home again, so I had to kill time for a few weeks before my final two scenes.

I first tried staying with my parents in Brooklyn. It had been almost three years since I had been back. We were never much of a close holiday family, so killing myself to get back for the holidays had never been an issue. My parents actually probably preferred that I stayed away, because they weren’t good with gifts. They were generous, but they didn’t know how to pick things out. My mother had gotten a little defensive about it. When I graduated from high school, they took me to the Broadway musical
The Wiz
. During the show, my mother kept saying, “Freddie, isn’t the sceneer-eee beautiful?! Isn’t this great!?” People, including me, were telling her to keep it down, but she was very angry that I wasn’t into the play. From that day on, she’d say at obligatory holidays, “We don’t know what to get you. Remember we took you to the
The Wiz
and you didn’t like it? That’s it; we tried. Never again.”

I came home during another holiday season and again, she kindly said she didn’t know what to get me. But I could tell she felt bad not getting me a gift, so as I was leaving she said, “Freddie, take the singles from my pocketbook, that’ll be your gift!”

Being back in the house where I grew up felt like no time had passed at all. Just like when I was a kid, my mother had notes plastered everywhere, reminding me what to do and when to do it. There was a note on the kitchen table telling me that there were apples in the refrigerator. She put up a sticky note reminding me to lock the door if I went out. I found a note reminding me to shut the lights off when I left a room. In the refrigerator, there were notes on containers describing the foods inside, including “applesauce,” still in the original store-labeled jar. That’s because her notes went a bit further. The note on the applesauce told me not only to eat it but when to eat it. She obviously felt that me just knowing it was applesauce wasn’t quite enough information.

My mother and I didn’t fight. I just found it draining having to tell all the half-truths about why I was there. She kept asking over and over, “How much are you getting? When will this come out?” I knew I couldn’t say that I was making no money and flying myself back East twice just to do this little part. I’d take long train rides to Manhattan to see old friends and get away from that house.

22

KRAMER REALITY

T
o get out of my parents’ house during filming, I would have to endure one of the more humiliating experiences of my new
Seinfeld
fame: In exchange for housing, I found myself on a tour bus full of
Seinfeld
nuts, touring sites the show had made famous. It was all Kramer’s fault—the real Kramer, Kenny.

Kenny Kramer had heard I was in town. Larry David, co-creator of
Seinfeld
, had lived down the hall from Kenny in New York City and had based the character played by Michael Richards on him. The real Kramer had the same lanky build as the fictional Kramer and the same sort of wild hair. I had only met him a few times hanging out at The Improv, which is why I was surprised when he offered me the extra bedroom in his modern, air-conditioned apartment in Midtown. He lived in Manhattan Plaza, a government subsidized complex for people in the entertainment field. Like the TV character, Kenny Kramer was a crafty fellow who never seemed to have a real job and was able to score this apartment despite having, as far as I knew, little connection to anything close to legitimate entertainment.

An admitted opportunist, he was not as innocent and goofy as the TV character, and I’d soon discover that he had a little bit of an agenda for me. By 1996, he had found a sly way to cash in on the enormous popularity of
Seinfeld
. For thirty-seven dollars, he and a sidekick would take sightseers on a two-hour “Seinfeld Reality” bus tour. Even though the show was filmed in Los Angeles, Kramer would stop at sites in Manhattan where certain scenes supposedly took place. The tour ended at the Upper West Side diner, which had just been used as a stock exterior shot representing the famous Monk’s Diner, where Jerry and his friends spent so much time.

He told me right off the bat that he wanted to exploit my writing and acting connection with
Seinfeld
. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but figured it couldn’t be as exhausting as staying with my parents. All I’d have to do was go on his tour once and answer a few questions on the bus. That seemed worth the free stay in Manhattan.

As soon as I arrived, he videotaped me telling all my stories of working with the
Seinfeld
characters. He milked as much information as he could from me. A constant rotation of cronies came in and out of his apartment, hoping to be part of whatever fringe success Kramer had promised them. A struggling actress and part-time clown showed me the photo from
People
magazine with her standing next to the great “real Kramer.” Sitting at his desk was this guy, who worked for free as Kramer’s publicity agent. Kramer chided him for not being professional in the way he answered the phone, reminding him about all the movies, TV spots, and merchandising he could be part of if he stuck with the booming company.

“You should do it like Bobby. Listen how Bobby answers the phone.”

Bobby was the sidekick on the “reality” tour, a bulky fifty-year-old with a big round face, always smiling, and a little too excited about everything. Being Kramer’s bus sidekick was his biggest showbiz break. He helped run the operation, made some money, and got the chance to entertain a captive audience.

On the tour the next day, I had to watch as Bobby ran around the crowded bus for over two hours, trying to keep the tourists excited by screaming out famous lines from
Seinfeld
.

“Everyone, say it together, ‘No soup for you!’”

Then he’d point to a bum and say, “Everyone, he is picking his nose. Or as Jerry would say, ‘The Pick! The Pick!’”

Bobby had a slight lisp which caused him to spit on me when he led the crowd in a hearty chant of, “Hell-oooo Newman!”

In spite of my distaste for the whole thing, Kramer prodded me to sit in on the tour again. For the second day in a row, I had to hear Bobby scream out all of the catch phrases by all of the same places. I’m sure the tourists were wondering why the
Seinfeld
special guest star was covering his ears.

I just shook my head, amazed that a show as brilliant as
Seinfeld
could be so lamed down. In the gay-dominated Greenwich Village, I had to hear Bobby make everyone scream out, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” Once wasn’t embarrassing enough, so he’d scream it out again like some sort of deranged cheerleader, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”

Many of the bus riders had seen me on the show and seemed excited that I was on the tour. I was happy to tell them some of my stories before getting on the bus, but once the tour started, I just couldn’t hide the pain I was in. I rode with my hands pressed hard against the side of my head to drown out Kramer and Bobby’s shtick. I was also agitated because I had arranged to meet my parents and was running late. When the bus stopped at a bakery and Kramer bought everyone black and white cookies, just like the ones that were eaten on the show, I tried to escape. The tourists watched as I pleaded with Kramer to let me go, but he talked me into getting back on. Everyone stared at me as I slinked to the back of the bus. When the tour mercifully ended at Tom’s, the real name of the fictional diner, my parents were waiting for me. I apologized for making them wait for over forty minutes, but they seemed to get a kick out of the fact that several tourists were eagerly snapping photos of me with them.

That week, Kramer also found a way of using me for a free meal. In the episode I wrote about Jerry taking the annoying comedian, Kenny Bania, for a free meal, I had named the restaurant Mendy’s. As far as I knew, there was no place named Mendy’s. I just made it up because I always thought Mendy was a funny name, sort of demented. The late NBA basketball referee, Mendy Rudolph, was the only person I had ever heard of with that name. When a writer handed his draft in to Jerry and Larry, names were always vulnerable to change. I called the annoying comedian Rory Feldman, but for reasons unknown to me, they changed it to Kenny Bania. And for some reason they changed the name of the monkey that got into the altercation with Kramer from Mitchell to Barry. But lo and behold, somehow “Mendy’s” prevailed!

As it turned out, there happened to be a kosher restaurant in Manhattan also called Mendy’s. Mendy, the owner, also tried to cash in on the show’s immense New York popularity. I saw in magazines and on billboards all over town: “Come to Mendy’s from
Seinfeld
. Where soup is really a meal.” He was being deceptive. Jerry and Bania didn’t go to a kosher deli. How could he say that his restaurant was the one they used on
Seinfeld
? At least the Soup Nazi place was based on a real guy and a real soup restaurant.

But Kenny Kramer, master of manipulation, paid a visit to “Mendy from
Seinfeld
” to tell him that he knew the guy who wrote the episode that mentioned his restaurant. Mendy told him to bring me over, and we’d get a free meal. So now, one opportunist was taking advantage of another opportunist.

Add to that a third opportunist: me. I sat in that restaurant with Kramer and Mendy and lied about it being my favorite just so we could get that stupid free meal. What was I going to say? “You idiot, take your ads down. Do you really think Jerry was eating at your restaurant? Does it look anything like your place?!”

No, I couldn’t ruin his plans. He had photos of the cast and wanted to have
Seinfeld
theme nights. If you dressed up as one of the characters, soup was free. And Kramer tried to think of ways to merge his shtick with Mendy’s. Maybe his tour could make a stop there. Maybe he could host “Mendy’s Soup Night.”

All week, in addition to being a living attraction on the “
Seinfeld
Reality Tour,” as part of the price I paid for freeloading, I also had to hear tons of Kramer’s unsolicited advice. He was not shy about reminding me of all my social flaws, how wimpy I was, how I had to be more confident, and how I would never attract a woman if I didn’t completely overhaul my personality.