Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star (20 page)

“Why can’t we talk about this? What’s the problem?”

He couldn’t deal with it and put my mother on. I asked her what she thought and she said, “You were a gay! Freddie, you were a gay.”

I’m sure my parents thought I might be gay. Year after year they would ask if I was seeing someone. Sometimes, I used to lie and say I was, but I think they knew when I was making it up. I don’t know why they were so shocked. Maybe it was because it was around the same time Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet by announcing that her character on her show was gay. Maybe they thought that’s what I was doing. As if I had the power to say, “I’m gay, so now I am going to play someone gay.”

Maybe because I always played schnooks, they thought actors are who they play. I was honestly a bit annoyed that they were so put off by it. But in a way, they probably would rather I was gay than whatever it is I am. In their retirement community in Florida, my father takes many crafts courses, but my mother has no hobbies. Once in a while she goes to a lecture. One time she went to a lecture about Frank Sinatra and on another occasion, before my appearance on
Suddenly Susan
, she took a course on homosexuality. At least if I were gay, it would give me a label.

I don’t know why trying to click with a woman is more elusive than trying to find that steady home in show business. They might even be connected. In show business, either I’m all over the place or in no place at all. And maybe I carry myself like this lost dizzy guy waiting to leap onto another short merry-go-round ride. But it’s always been hard for me, showbiz or relationships. I’ve always been a little off.

Maybe the truth is I’m not cut out to be in a steady relationship with a woman. It’s not my field. Maybe I’ve been blessed in some other way to make up for that. Perhaps my whole life I’ve been blessed with the gift of being the best scuba diver or the best at fixing rulers and have had no idea.

After I hung up the phone with my parents that day I felt a little sad because their reaction to my
Suddenly Susan
role made me question my life. I then wondered: What if I got what I wished for? What if the producers did find ways to bring me back on? Would that only subject me to more of my parents’ scorn? Would a good thing be turned into a headache? Maybe so. That’s what my mother’s best at.

A few months later came the dreaded wedding scene. It was actually going to be a double wedding. Vicki (Kathy Griffin), Susan’s kooky coworker and sidekick, would also be marrying her boyfriend in the same ceremony.

Joan Rivers played Kathy Griffin’s mother, and I expected her to be a bitchy prima donna. Though I had liked her when I was a kid and liked her book,
Still Talking
, about her comeback after her failed Fox show and the suicide of her husband, she was mostly known now for her snippy red carpet remarks. I expected a pampered whiny woman. But I was wrong. When I told Joan that my mother was unhappy that I was portraying “a gay,” she demanded to have her phone number. She took out her cell phone and wanted to call her right there on the spot and talk sense to her. She wanted to tell her how proud she should be of me and how silly she was being. My mother would have been so thrilled to get a call from Joan Rivers. Sadly, I didn’t have her number memorized, nor did I have a cell phone at the time it was programmed into.

Instead, the person I had problems with on set was Kathy Griffin. After rehearsals, she’d come up to me and say, “Me and Brooke see you and Bill aren’t holding hands. You’re being so homophobic. You should be holding his hand more.”

I couldn’t believe it. I knew this wasn’t an issue at all with Brooke Shields. Kathy was implicating her just to be more of a pain in the ass. It was like when my mother used to say to me, “You’re so fresh, even Aunt Faye says you’re fresh, even your father says that, even . . .”

I wasted several moments of my time defending myself. “Of course we were holding hands. We’re slow dancing. You have to hold hands when you slow dance.”

“No, you weren’t holding his hand. You let it go.”

I was amazed. She had to be making about thirty grand a show and she had nothing better to do than watch the guest actors to make sure they were being as gay as they should be. But she kept looking at me. “Hold his hand!” she’d yell across the stage in front of everyone. “I am,” I’d say, showing my grip around my partner’s hand. “Give me a break, will you?” I said as I walked away.

I had enough of her. We actually had two dates just a few years before that. She seemed to have gone out of her way to make me miserable on our dates, and also found ways to keep battering me on
Suddenly Susan
.

Back in 1992, after doing my best to socialize at a crowded party spilling with scores of comedians and comedy writers, I did what I usually do, being chronically socially awkward: I looked for the host’s pets to connect with. They were hiding, so the next best thing was to stare at photos of the cat that were stuck to the refrigerator. After a few minutes, this redheaded woman asked who I was. I was actually excited to meet her in person because I had just seen her as a dancer in a comedic parody,
Madonna: Truth or Dare
, on Comedy Central and remembered thinking she was cute. After some small talk I don’t recall, Kathy Griffin asked me to drive her to her car where she made it easy for me to make out with her. The next night I showed up at her apartment for a date. We stood there not even two minutes deciding what we should do, when she announced, “I’m wet.”

Hearing that made it seem appropriate to make a pass at that moment. I suppose I wasn’t that good in bed, because after we slept together, she kept pestering me to allow her to hit me in the face. Apparently she had just seen a TV movie about a woman who battered her husband, which gave her a craving to do the same.

“Why do you want to do that?” I asked.

“I have hostility towards men. They rape, watch porn, and go to strip clubs.”

“I only do two out of three of those,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. I thought I diffused the tension. We lay together peacefully for a few moments until she yelled, “Stop looking at my ass!”

We had just one date a few days after that. It happened to be my birthday. We were at a restaurant with about five of my friends and she refused to engage with any of them. She sat bored, exclaiming, “Why am I here? I usually hang out with cool people like Ben Stiller!” As her lover I’d failed, and now, I wasn’t gay enough for her either.

My visits to
Suddenly Susan
were enlivened by other celebrity guest stars. I got to commiserate with Tommy Smothers about what it was like to feel second-best to your older sibling. When I was a kid, I would ask my older sister why she got a middle name and I didn’t. I also felt slighted that there were dozens more baby photos of her than of me. “Don’t give me your
Smothers Brothers
crap!” she’d say. She was referring to their classic bit: “Mom always liked you best.”

The week Dr. Joyce Brothers guested on
Suddenly Susan
, I’d just had an unhealthy fling with an old girlfriend from New York City who happened to be in L.A. for a short visit, which stirred up a lot of old bad feelings. On a break from filming scenes, I went over to Dr. Brothers and started to talk to her about my feelings.

“I’ve been depressed. When I’m depressed, when I get really depressed, I can’t eat. I haven’t been able to eat more than a banana for a few days. Is that common?”

“Sometimes people go the other extreme. They can eat too much when they’re depressed.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, that is true.”

And that was it. I walked away and stopped pandering for free therapy because I realized it was kind of crazy—she was like a cartoon character of a therapist, a punch line. In fact the show was using her as a joke. In the plot, one of the regulars goes to a costume party dressed up as Dr. Brothers and the joke was that the costume looked amazingly lifelike—the cast member dubbed his voice in synch as she moved her mouth. Asking her advice seemed like asking Will Ferrell playing President Bush on
Saturday Night Live
if he could help you get a bill passed.

Suddenly Susan
was actually nominated for a GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) award for its positive portrayal of homosexuals. It was a little ahead of its time before the explosion of gays on sitcoms. What Bill and I did was different than the usually flashy flamboyant way gays were portrayed. I played it the only way I play anything. I held back. I was pleased it got that little bit of recognition.

But we lost to Ellen DeGeneres.

A short while later, someone at Ruffles Potato Chips liked me and wanted me to be in a commercial playing Kathy Griffin’s boyfriend. However, my agent informed me that Kathy nixed me from the role, because she wanted someone “more macho” playing her boyfriend.

25

WHY DOESN’T RAYMOND LOVE ME?

I
learned a brutal lesson after my first
Everybody Loves Raymond
appearance: call the show’s production office to make sure you weren’t cut from the episode before having an embarrassing “I’m on TV” get-together with your buddies, and especially before telling any family members.

After a rocky start because of a bad Friday night time slot,
Everybody Loves Raymond
started to slowly take off thanks to rave reviews and viewer word-of-mouth. Ray and I had crossed paths only a few times on the New York comedy club scene. We were regulars at different clubs and I was heading out to L.A. when he was emerging. But I had heard that several people referred to him as a more normal and healthier-looking Fred Stoller. There have been others that have mistaken us for one another, but I never heard about it so much until Ray’s show.

I was warned about the
Everybody Loves Raymond
conspiracy against me in the early stages of the series by Perry, my old
Seinfeld
war “comrade.” I bumped into him at Koo Koo Roo, one of my favorite fast-food chicken restaurants. Perry was disheveled with a wild bushy beard, looking like a crazy street person. He came over to me and shook his head sadly. He closed his eyes a moment and could barely look at me.

“Sorry, bro. Sorry what happened to you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Have you seen Ray’s show?! He totally is doing you! He looks like you and he has all of your inflections. What are you going to do about it?”

Perry smirked. “I know that sucks that he did that. I know you hate him.” It’s as if he wanted me to curse out Ray Romano. “Yeah, that bastard does piss me off. How dare he, knowing very well that we look and sound similar, become very big and get his own TV series! He easily could have pursued another career, but no, he did it all to mess me up.”

Many other people seemed to think our similarities were a good thing and would ask why I wasn’t on
Everybody Loves Raymond
. Usually, someone would grill me, demanding a reason why I was not on this show for which I was so right. “I don’t know. It just hasn’t happened yet” is all I could tell them. But they’d keep pressing, “You should. You really should be on the show.”

When I did get my shot at a guest star appearance on
Raymond
, I was relieved that finally all of these suspicious people would stop thinking I was somehow holding out.

I had first auditioned for the role of a schmucky guy at Ray’s high school reunion. At the audition were Ray, Lew Schneider, a former stand-up comic and one of the writers, and Phil Rosenthal, the show’s creator. Before I read, the four of us had a few moments of small talk.

As I was talking, Phil and Lew laughed when they noticed that I pronounced some words similarly to Ray and had lots of the same inflections. For instance, we both pronounced the word “now” as “neow.” I didn’t get that part, but I heard that if there ever were a story for Ray’s cousin, that role would be mine. I suppose all those people that said I absolutely had to appear on
Everybody Loves Raymond
weren’t so off after all.

Almost a year and a half later, I got booked to play Ray’s cousin Gerard. The episode was a flashback recreation of Ray and Debra’s wedding. Ray’s mother Marie (Doris Roberts) owed her sister a favor and persuaded Ray to let me play my accordion at his wedding. Brad Garrett, who played Ray’s less-pampered brother Robert, played up a similar relationship off the set. Brad would kid about how Ray was the whole show and how he was a distant afterthought. If Ray came onto the set a few minutes late, Brad would joke, “Oh, it’s okay. Ray’s late. It’s all about Raymond. Where were you, counting your money again?” He made lots of jokes about Ray’s wallet. If Ray stumbled, Brad would say, “It’s okay, he landed on his wallet.” Or “Ray needs a forklift to carry his wallet now.” Once an alarm sounded and Brad commented, “Ray’s wallet set off the sprinkler system.”

I didn’t quite understand that one. But that was Brad’s style. I suppose he felt if the gag had the word “wallet” in it and was spouted out quickly, no one would question the logic. It’s always an awkward feeling being on a set and hearing the regulars joke, complain, or talk in any way about their salary or another of their co-regulars’ right in front of you. I guess it would have been out of line for me to rib Garrett about his $300,000 an episode salary the whole week I was guesting.

Hearing the series regulars discuss their salaries in front of me was not unique in my guest star travels. I had made three appearances on the NBC series
The Naked Truth
during its third and last chaotic season. By then, it had had its third cast change. When I arrived, three of the original cast members weren’t hanging out with the four newest members. There was resentment. I was told that the very first day; Téa Leoni and the other two original cast members set the tone by completely snubbing the four new ones.

Comic-actor Chris Elliott was among the newer members dreading his time on the show. On all my appearances, he had invited me to retreat on all breaks to hang out at the dressing room with him and the other guys I had bonded with. This bond came to an end when a newcomer decided it would be fun if they all confessed how much they were earning. The newest guy on the show was prodded to say what he was earning. It was his first regular gig so he was “only” earning $10,000 an episode. The guy who played the stud had been on some other shows so his quote was close to $25,000 an episode. Chris Elliott hated this stupid truth or dare game and only admitted to a ballpark figure in the low thirties per show.