For the first time since Rhoda,' a TV show has an openly Jewish female as its lead character. But Fran Drescher thinks that gentiles are more comfortable with her role than Jews. Funny thing about "The Nanny," the new CBS sitcom that features ac-tress Fran Drescher as Fran Fine, a Queens-accented tzatzkela who plays a babysitter for a widowed British Broadway producer and his three golden-haired children.
The show, which Drescher, 36, conceived, co-produces and writes with her husband of 15 years, Peter Marc Jacobson, does boffo business in the Midwest and the Southwest. Gentiles love it. Drescher has even received fan mail from a tattooed, 6-foot 3-inch, 240-pound Harley Davidson rider from Pennsylvania who says that "The Nanny" made him reconsider a lifelong penchant for collecting Nazi memorabilia.
"One night I was watching your show," wrote the 37-year-old collector from Berlin, Pennsylvania, "the one where you went to the wedding, and I had a revelation… All of a sudden it dawned on me that the Nazis would have loved to have found a wedding like the one on TV, and dragged all these good people off to their doom. All these nice, laughing people eating, dancing and loving life were what they wanted to destroy. Now I don't enjoy my things so much anymore."
But though she's nearly single-handedly turned the Yiddish word "oy" into a catchphrase for the 90s, Drescher seems not to be fully appreciated by her co-religionist TV viewers. In New York and Miami, where Jewish viewers comprise a key segment of the TV market, "The Nanny" can't even seem to get its foot into the lucrative Wednesday night prime-time ratings door. The Jews in these cities, it would seem, remain stuck on ABC's "Home Improvement," the whitest of the current crop of white-bread sitcoms, and a veritable ratings behemoth.
Certainly Drescher's show deals with material that some Jews could find alienating. In a Christmas episode, for example, Fran Fine buys into the Yuletide spirit big time. In the course of a single half hour she sings the praises of Christmas endlessly while hocking her heirlooms to buy gifts. She even attends a midnight mass, and takes confession.
In an interview in her trailer outside a sound stage in Culver City, I asked Drescher whether her characterization of a loud, saucy, sharp-tongued Jewish woman, one who embraces Christmas, no less, may offend her fellow Jews, even as it seems to be enticing gentile audiences whose exposure to Jews of any kind remains limited.
"Nah, everyone likes The Nanny,'" she answered while eating a brown-rice lunch and applying makeup for her afternoon rehearsal. "So much that sometimes I feel just like Sara Lee. I work very hard to infuse warmth and likability into my character. I don't really feel like I play a stereotype. I play someone very close to the people I grew up with my family, my relatives, me before I moved out of Queens.
"I'm the only Jew on TV who isn't afraid to say I'm Jewish or talk about being Jewish. I'm the one who teaches these people (the show's non-Jewish family) how to have a real Christmas. I'm the one that shows them that family and togetherness are what's important. This was a show about a Jew who is having a Christmas every Jew dreams of. To deny that growing up, it seemed like Christmas was a more fun holiday if anybody wasn't honest about that, they're bullshitting themselves."
If Jews do have a problem with the character of Fran Fine, says Drescher, "I would suggest the problem lay within themselves and their desire to assimilate." Fran Drescher grew up in a modest middle-class part of Queens. Her father worked in computers, her mother worked part-time in a nearby store. They are now retired in Florida. Raised as a Reform Jew, she attended a high school she characterizes as a Jewish ghetto, and met her husband-to-be, who's also Jewish, when she was 15, in the school's theater career program. Weaned on reruns of "I Love Lucy," Drescher and Jacobson aspired from the outset to forge "the next Desilu-type empire."
In her sophomore year, Drescher asked her mother to use the money earmarked for a driver's-ed course to fund her photo portfolio. In 1976, she placed as first runner-up in the Miss New York Teenager pageant, but she told people she won, hoping she might get an agent. This ploy worked, and after working in commercials, she landed a small part in the 1977 John Travolta movie "Saturday Night Fever." Following that, she moved out with Jacobson to Los Angeles, where Paramount cast her in "American Hot Wax" (1978), director Floyd Mutrux's feature about New York disk jockey Alan Freed and the 1950s payola scandals.
But Drescher put up with her share of dross too. Most notably, in 1980, she appeared in an "Animal House" rip-off called "Gorp" and in "Hollywood Knights," the latter with Tony Danza and Michelle Pfeiffer. Later, however, she landed small but memorable parts in Milos Forman's adaptation of "Ragtime" (1981) and in "Doctor Detroit," with Dan Aykroyd. Her performance as an irate record company flack in Rob Reiner's hilarious 1984 "rockumentary," "This Is Spinal Tap," cemented Drescher's hard-won position as the quintessential "New Yawk" Jewish loudmouth.
"I almost always play Jewish women," she acknowledges. "It makes me a rarity in the business, sure. I've come to realize that I'm not going to have Meryl Streep's career not with this accent. But I also get all the Jewish parts."
Drescher says that it was her work in the 1990 "Cadillac Man," opposite Robin Williams and Tim Robbins, that "gave me the credibility I needed to star in a TV series." Unfortunately, "Princesses," that first series, in which she and co-stars Twiggy and Julie Hagerty played ill-suited roomies on the make, foundered after only eight episodes.
"We were living in a fool's paradise," recalls Drescher, who believed at the time, 1991, that she had finally made it big in TV. "Afterwards, I told (my husband) Peter that I had to get on the inside as a producer. The money (in TV) is great, but I'm a control freak, and I just needed to be in control."
Luckily for Drescher, though, CBS liked her portrayal of an oversexed Jewish American Princess, however distasteful it may have been to some Jewish feminists. And the network indicated it was only a matter of time before the right vehicle was found for her. It was when Drescher found herself sitting next to CBS network president Jeff Sagansky on a nine-hour flight to France in 1992, she says, that she realized her time had come to "seize the day."
"I said, Thank you, Lord,'" she recounts, "and ran to the bathroom to put some makeup on. He was my captive I mean, where was he going to go, coach?"
By the time Sagansky and Drescher parted company in Paris, she says, she had convinced him that she would only succeed in a sitcom if she and Jacobson were given creative control over her character. He told her to pitch away upon their return to Los Angeles. Drescher wasn't sure what such a series might be about, but after spending several weeks in London palling about with Twiggy's husband and their teenage children the former fashion plate was off on a project she called her husband in Los Angeles, where he was working on a TV pilot with Dan Aykroyd.
"I said, You know Peter, I feel so funny in this environment. What would you think about doing a spin on "The Sound of Music," only instead of Julie Andrews, I come to the door?'" Thus was begat "The Nanny," the first TV show since Valerie Harper's "Rhoda" to feature an avowedly Jewish female protagonist. Drescher says she has "pushed the envelope" in this regard, ending long years in which, in contrast to other sitcoms like "Northern Exposure" and "Seinfeld," whose male leads were openly Jewish characters, such women were distinguished only by their absence. She notes that soon, Jewish comic Rita Rudner will follow suit, appearing in a pilot one inspired by her own marital situation as a Jewish woman married to an Englishman.
Drescher expects "The Nanny" to weather that show, and the continued onslaught by the seemingly invincible "Home Improvement" too. She says that Sagansky has already assured her, unofficially, that "The Nanny," which has not yet placed among the 20 top-rated network shows, will be picked up for another 25 episodes after its first season ends in May.
"I mean, they'd have to be crazy to dump the show that's giving them their best Wednesday night numbers in 20 years," she says. "We're riding a monster here." o Tzatzkela of the airwaves: Nanny' star and creator Fran Drescher, pictured with co-star Charles Shaughnessey Drescher: I'm the only Jew on TV who isn't afraid to say I'm Jewish'