Authors: Jerry Stiller
“Of course, yes, that’s what painkillers are for. Just fax me the script.”
Anne was reluctant to let me leave.
“I love your body. I want you in one piece,” she said. “You need to get a new hip.”
“I gotta go out there, Anne.”
Seinfeld
, here I come. The script arrived, and I planned to learn my lines in the air, as I always did. The first
Seinfeld
episode of that next-to-last season was to be shot without an audience. The cortisone shot was working as I boarded the aircraft.
What happened en route changed everything. After three hours aloft the pilot announced we would be landing in Cleveland. No explanation. A chill went through me. A few minutes later a stewardess informed us it was not a mechanical problem; a woman had confided to a flight attendant that she had packed firecrackers in her baggage. She was escorted off the plane in Cleveland.
The flight arrived in Los Angeles eight hours later, my hip killing me. I couldn’t walk a step. I needed a wheelchair to get to baggage claim, and had to crawl into my rented car. When I arrived at the hotel I needed help. I could not walk. Once in my room, I made it to the bathroom on all fours. I wondered how I would get to the set the next morning. I called the actor Ron Guillory, who would be cueing me the next day. I asked him to pick me up in the morning and to bring some crutches.
Ron came through. I arrived on the set on crutches. “Bad hip,” I said. Andy Ackerman, our gifted director, finessed every move. We were to shoot my scenes as I sat in a car. We rehearsed, blocked, and shot the scene.
The next day I visited a doctor in Beverly Hills, who gave me kind words and a cortisone shot. I worked the rest of the week—as they say, very gingerly. After shooting my final scene, I left L.A. on an early flight to New York and went on in
After-Play
that night.
The
Seinfeld
episode we had just filmed was “The Rye,” in which I steal back the Schnitzers’ marble rye, and it became the kickoff hit for the new season. It seemed incredible. Here I was performing Anne’s play in New York twenty-four hours after shooting
Seinfeld
in L.A. Being in a hit TV series, a hit play, and hearing laughter take away pain.
Three weeks later. I checked into the hospital to receive a new hip. As I was being wheeled into the operating room on the gurney, a medical assistant handed me an audio cassette and said, “Mr. Stiller, I do voice-overs. Can you get this to your agent?” I stuck it in between my thighs and waited for the epidural.
· · ·
On a winter morning in 1998, I had just gotten up and was in the kitchen preparing my coffee. From the breakfast table Anne said, “Look at the front page of
The New York Times
.” Her words had a strange ring—something less than ominous, but still with a hint of foreboding.
This particular morning we were getting ready to go to the funeral of my ninety-seven-year-old Aunt Sarah. Three days earlier my cousin Eileen had died. Too much was happening.
“You’ve got to read the story in the
Times
,” Anne said once more. How could a headline be that important when you lose two members of your family, I wondered, as I sipped my coffee.
“You’ve got to read about
Seinfeld
,” Anne said. “It affects you.” Her words still made no impact. “It’s over,” she said. I continued drinking my coffee, blocking out my feelings over the loss of my aunt and my cousin.
“Read it,” she repeated. I finally did. There it was on the front page of
The New York Times:
SEINFELD QUITS
. How often does the termination of a television show take precedence over world events? I read the story and realized that the show was really over. And so was a part of my life.
That part of my life—a television series—had given me instant recognition among people on the street everywhere. A woman stopped her car and shouted through the window, “Serenity now, you’re a very sick man.” Girls in the Hamburg airport ran up and asked me if I could get them a date with Jerry Seinfeld.
“Sorry, I can’t.”
“Then how about you?”
Israeli soldiers on the Golan Heights recognized me.
“
Shalom
, we love you,” they cried out.
I finally got it through my head that
Seinfeld
was over, but what I couldn’t fully understand was how big the ending of a TV series was in the eyes of the public. I soon knew. The press coverage said it all. It finally occurred to me that Estelle Harris and I were actually part of the Seinfeld phenomenon.
Seinfeld
is over. Aside from the laughs, the show was saying something about America’s changing attitudes about watching Jewish characters on television. Every character on Seinfeld was out of the closet except for maybe the Costanzas. How could a family that noshes on bagels and loves kasha have the name Costanza? They had to be a Jewish family in the witness protection program.
The show was successful because it never apologized for the behavior of its characters. Nor do most people in real life apologize when they step over the line. The show mirrored not just Jewish behavior, but everyone’s.
Each
Seinfeld
episode had added to my feelings of self-esteem, and now it was over. What a way to feel good about myself, playing the role of a deranged father. Am I going to miss being Mr. Costanza, the fictional me? Will people once again know me as Jerry Stiller the actor or am I forever George’s father? Who am I in my mind? It suddenly hit me that I’dbeen on a great trip. I’d been given something few actors get. Jerry, Jason, Michael, and Julia were the greatest ensemble since the Marx Brothers, in my opinion. Estelle Harris could have been Margaret Dumont. In performance there was no air between us. And those kids did it for nine years—what an achievement.
I needed to get in touch with myself so I told Anne I had to get to Nantucket.
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“I’ve got to be by myself.”
It was a bumpy flight in the small plane. Whenever I’m in a small plane and there’s turbulence, I wonder if the next air pocket we hit will be the last. Has the plane been inspected recently? Is the pilot qualified? What if we crash? Will Anne miss me? What did we have together? Sure we had the act, but what did we have
between us?
I remembered when Anne and I were invited to be on a special in Vegas honoring Jackie Gleason. George Burns was also on the show. Burns was standing nearby when we taped. I had never met him so I figured why not introduce myself.
“Mr. Burns, I’m Jerry Stiller.”
“I know you,” he said. “You work with your wife.”
I felt a little strange conversing with half of America’s most popular husband-and-wife comedy team. Did he think Anne and I were some kind of interlopers comparing ourselves to George and Gracie?
“I like your work,” he said. I was flattered.
I suddenly remembered something Artie Shaw had said when we’d first met, a few years earlier at the pool of the Sunset Marquis in Hollywood. He said, “Who do you think is the happiest married couple in Hollywood?” This coming from a man who’d been married ten times.
I thought for a moment. “Is it Burns and Allen?” I asked.
“How’d you know?” he replied.
“I don’t know, I just guessed.”
“You’re right. Come on, let’s get wet.” We both jumped in the pool.
So here I was talking to George Burns, now a widower.
“Artie Shaw said you and Gracie were the happiest married couple in Hollywood.”
“That’s right,” George replied. “It’s because we were never married.”
“What?!”
“We were married to the business.” He smiled. “Keep up the good work.”
His words, although shocking, had an impact on me. I knew he was being truthful and I wanted to kiss him for sharing something that one revealed only to an intimate. I had seen and listened to Burns and Allen over the years. Besides enjoying them and laughing at their comedy, I always wondered how they came up with their material.
How did they rehearse? I knew they started in vaudeville, probably doing five shows a day between showings of movies. What did they do during the breaks? Were they in the dressing room writing? They had to be writing down things they said that were funny. Who did the writing? Did they argue about a line or a premise? Their timing was great. What went into it? Did they have a life? They had had children, so they were parents. What did they do together besides make people laugh? Suddenly George Burns’s words made sense. “We were married to the business.” I could only interpret this to mean the love of show business brought them closer. It created love for each other.
I asked myself if Anne and I were married to the business like George and Gracie. Me, I’d figured we could do it all—have kids and a career. Bring Amy and Ben on the road with us so we’d never be apart.
Anne never saw it that way.
“You want us to be another Burns and Allen,” she had remarked.
“Sure, why not. They were great.”
“Just remember, Jerry, Gracie’s dead.”
Her message was simple: “Don’t make me do this for the rest of our lives—if you want me alive.”
“But you’re great in front of an audience,” I said.
“Yeah, I learned that from being with you.”
Anne and I had spent most of our married life working in front of people. On stage we had intimacy, a connection that made us feel whole, gave me a sense of being somebody. When a show ended I felt a void. I
needed the audience to make me feel whole again. I can only guess that Anne loved making people laugh, but it wasn’t her whole life. Maybe that’s why she was so loose and funny.
Now we didn’t have an act. The sketches were thirty years old. We no longer went out on the road, although there were offers. Without the act our lives were different. We needed to keep our lives together. We both wanted a closeness. We needed to keep something alive between us. No act, the kids grown and on their own—what did we have in common now? I asked myself. What a question after so many years.
I wanted us to hold hands and skip down life’s garden path together. Travel, go to concerts, museums. But Anne liked to stay home.
“I like to read,” she’d say, looking up from a book.
I’d rather watch the Knicks, see some jazz, go to shows, but I wanted more than anything to be closer to Anne. I tried to get on her wavelength, get her on mine. I didn’t want us to lose each other.
Amy had picked up on our problems and suggested Barbara Buloff, a therapist she had heard about.
Amy knew that Barbara, who had been brought up by two actors, could understand the bond Anne and I had. With this background Barbara had an awareness that Anne and I truly loved each other and belonged together. During ten years of therapy, Barbara melted the walls that separated Anne and me. What a gift. In that time the freeze thawed between us and so had my freeze on stage. We grew incredibly close. It wasn’t like the sudden mysterious healing that took place in the film
Spellbound
, where Gregory Peck is suddenly enlightened by the psychiatrist. It happened gradually. We started communicating with each other.
I think it started in our living room, overlooking the Hudson River. In the morning Anne would usually be doing
The New York Times
crossword puzzle. I hated this puzzle. It intimidated me, although I loved it when my name was mentioned.
On one occasion I put on some coffee and played a CD. It was Chopin. Anne put down the puzzle.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“I love music,” I said. “All kinds. Chopin, Ellington.
“You like Scott Joplin?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I love Jim Croce,
Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown
.” She started to sing the words, moving her body the way she did in the ‘70s.
“I’ll play it,” I said.
“No, play what you like. You love Bill Evans, don’t you? Put him on.”
I put on Bill Evans’s Paris Concert. We had been on the bill with him at the Village Vanguard. I loved listening to him between our sets.
“I don’t understand jazz,” Anne said. “Bill Evans used to lean over the keyboard like he was falling asleep.”
“Yeah, he was making love to the piano…. What are you reading?” I asked.
“Seth Speaks.”
Hooley wooley stuff
, I thought.
This was the beginning of our many morning talks. It usually started with my playing music and asking what Anne was reading. It was the opening to get into each other’s heads.
We were like people just getting to know one another.
“I’ve never understood jazz. Why don’t I understand it?”
“Because you’re orderly. Jazz can be chaotic. It’s like some storm that suddenly erupts spontaneously in a musician’s soul. It’s somebody else’s sunset—someone else’s terror. Who wants to hear the musical version of someone else’s problems? A lot of dissonance. Just when you’re ready to say ‘I’ve heard enough,’ you hear the thread of a melody. It falls easily on the ears. The storm has subsided. You’re suddenly caught up and now you’re listening to Bill Evans’s inner voice. He’s taken us on a trip we’ve all been on ourselves at one time or another. Now he’s out of his wilderness. The search for life’s golden path is over.” I was starting to sound like a poet.
“What about basketball?” Anne asked. “Why do you love it?”
“Because I can’t play it. I love watching a sport where the outcome can change in seconds, where one player can take over and change the outcome of a game. What happens on a basketball court happens in life. On the court it happens in seconds. To me it’s inspirational watching forty-eight minutes mirror life.”
“I love Jorge Luis Borges,” Anne said. “You’ve got to read him. He was blind, you know. He wrote about paths not taken. Short pieces, mystical, beautiful.”
“Like if we hadn’t married each other, what would we be doing now?”
“Yeah, something like that. Also like there are many Jerrys and many Annes out there taking those paths.”
“That I don’t understand,” I said.
“Quantum probabilities.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Come on,” Anne said. “Let’s finish this conversation in the bedroom.”