Being Frank with Jerry Stiller
How the other Jerry beat the 'Seinfeld Curse'
Sheli Teitelbaum Los Angeles
MICHAEL RICHARDS - Kramer - bombed with "The Michael Richards Show." Jason Alexander - George - went the same route with "Bob Patterson." And now Julia Louis-Dreyfus - Elaine - has had her ambitious "Watching Ellie" what is kindly described as "shelved" by NBC.
That leaves Jerry Stiller - George's bellicose, irascible father, Frank Costanza - alone among the alumni to have beaten the "Seinfeld Curse." While those other graduates of the epically successful, nine-season series, which closed in 1998 with 10 Emmys, have seen the speedy demise of their subsequent sitcoms, Stiller is riding high with "The King of Queens," now in its fourth season and placing a respectable 27 out of 125 in recent Nielsen ratings of prime time TV series, with a 7.5 share of the highly fragmented non-cable watching audience.
In person, Stiller, 74, is nothing like the characters he plays. Over breakfast poolside at Hollywood's famed Chateau Marmont, he is quick to smile, soft-spoken, gracious, eminently satisfied with his life and lot, and grateful as well for the successes enjoyed by his children, actors Ben and Amy.
Stiller has nevertheless preserved his edge in "The King of Queens," which revolves around comedian Kevin James's character, Doug Hefferman, a Queens, N.Y., parcel deliveryman married to Carrie, played by Leah Remini, and devoted to a 70-inch television. Last year, however, the TV was relegated to the garage to make room for Stiller, who arrived as Doug's recently widowed and pronouncedly eccentric father-in-law, Arthur.
"Seinfeld" it isn't, but as Stiller observes, "Who or what else is? If you hit 60 home runs this year, does that mean you're a failure if you don't hit 65 the next? 'Seinfeld' was one of those incredible combinations, largely because of the vision of Jerry and Larry (David, co-creator, writer and producer). But when something works that great, to make it happen again right off the bat is not that simple."
Stiller himself was no sure bet for the part of Frank Costanza. Replacing actor John Randolph in Episode 63 in 1994 (and appearing in 29 of 180 episodes), he was conceived as an inarticulate nebbish destined to always be upstaged by his shrill wife, portrayed by Estelle Harris. "She was like a parrot," he says, "or like an alarm clock that won't stop ringing. And they wanted me to tone down my performance by letting her overpower me. But something told me if I went that way they'd soon replace me too, so I started screaming back. It must have worked, because they didn't fire me."
STILLER'S RANTS AS FRANK established him as a fixture for generations of TV viewers who were not alive to see him the 35 times he appeared on the "Ed Sullivan Show" between 1963 and 1971. Partnering Anne Meara, his lifelong love, their specialty was doing Irish-Jewish skits. And to produce the tirades he first used back then, he drew upon his own painful recollections of the raging cacophony he says characterized his own formative family life.
Stiller grew up on New York's Lower East Side and, from the age of 13, in Brooklyn, within a family of Polish immigrants hard-pressed by the Great Depression. His mother Belle's side of the family, the Citrons, hailed from Frampol, a town made famous in the tales of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Most were brought to the United States by Stiller's aunt, Tanta Faiga, a very observant woman who peddled towels door to door. Stiller's father, William, was born in the U.S. to parents from Chijika, in Galicia.
His mother mastered English fairly quickly, but his father, despite being born in America, was "not much of a go-getter." That trait may have contributed to his 101-year life span but, says Stiller, it provoked his mother, who would die at 55, into periodic bouts of verbal and physical violence so severe the police were called in. "What a "shonda!" Stiller recounts. "Jewish parents didn't fight until the police arrived. Physical violence was not what we Jews did, I used to think. Of course, I was thinking this while hiding with my younger brother and sister under the table."
Like many first-generation offspring of Jewish immigrants, Stiller grew up with definite, if sometimes peculiar, ideas of what was and was not Jewish. Eating Chinese food was Jewish, as long as you didn't do it at home. Stickball and (later) handball were Jewish, "unless played against "shtarkers" from the YMCA, in which case Jews were relegated to the corner and instructed to stay out of the way. Steam heat, whose disappearance - as his family moved further down the economic ladder in the downtrodden neighborhood of Williamsburg - sparked within the young Stiller a sudden frisson of religious revelation, was as fundamentally Jewish as boiled chicken.
"At that moment," he writes in a touching memoir, "Married to Laughter: A Love Story Featuring Anne Meara" (Simon & Schuster, 2000), "I knew we were no longer the chosen people. It was as if God had decided to put us out of His Kingdom. Jews had always had steam heat."
How did Stiller develop his notions of what was or wasn't Jewish? "I don't know, exactly," he says. "We had this strong feeling of being Jewish. It was this bizarre, yet wide-spread feeling of exaltation. And therefore everyone around you seemed less fortunate, obviously being punished for not being Jewish."
Though Stiller's early family life remained generally bereft of joy, he and his father, a frustrated saxophone player whose wife only tolerated his practicing in the bathroom, found some small shared relief at the Vaudeville acts that in those days often followed feature movies.
But it wasn't until Stiller wrote away for free family tickets to an Eddie Cantor radio show at Rockefeller Center, and until he witnessed his parents smiling together in enjoyment, that he realized that laughter could potentially bring his family together. "From that moment, I really wanted to be a comedian," Stiller writes in "Married to Laughter."
"And not just a comedian, but like Eddie Cantor, a Jewish comedian," he tells The Report. "Listening to guys like Jack Benny, Fred Allan and Eddie Cantor on the radio, these guys, to me, were social commentators. They were connected to what was going on, and Jewish or not, they had status in America. Eddie Cantor, in particular, never clouded over his own Jewishness, but would somehow always work it into his act. He had this song, "If I Were President." And the idea of it, a Jewish president, would just boggle my mind."
Not yet 17, in 1944 Stiller persuaded his parents to allow him to join a new U.S. Army training program that promised free college instruction and officer training for men destined, or so they thought, to work as translators in the invasion of Japan.
Stiller says he thought he was a shoo-in for Yale or Harvard, but for some strange reason ended up in New York's City College, where, he recalls, "we broke our asses" on math, calculus, engineering, and all of the standard army training. The only thing we didn't learn was Japanese - apparently they had already decided to drop the Bomb."
AFTER HIS FIRST YEAR, Stiller set sail to Italy to join the army of occupation. Most of his fellow soldiers, he recalled, killed timeon board playing craps, but Stiller found himself plagued by an anti-Semitic sergeant. At first, he considered challenging his tormentor to a boxing match, but after watching a few fights he realized he'd be pulverized.
"That's when I decided I'm not going to jump into the ring on Friday night, Erev Shabbes," he recalls. Instead, in a fit of rage, Stiller pulled his nemesis to the ship's stern and started to strip him and himself of their uniforms. "Now we'll see what kind of guts you have," Stiller told the stunned sergeant. "You and I are going to jump into the propeller. We were down to our boots and shorts when, thank God, the Officer of the Deck ran over to break it up. The guy never bothered me again."
Back from the war, Stiller still wanted to be a comedian. But jumping into the churn of a ship's propeller seemed easier than stand-up, so he availed himself of the GI Bill to return to college, this time studying drama at Syracuse University. "I took the coward's way out," Stiller says, "or so it seemed to me at the time.
"In those days, if you wanted to be a stand-up comedian, you went to the Catskills and took a job as a bus boy and performed at night. I just couldn't go that route. Early in my career as an actor, I didn't even like looking for work on my own. I used to do the rounds with John Cassavettes and Harry Mastergeorge. Rejection divided by three was just a lot easier."
Stiller garnered positive notices at school and in summer stock, often playing Shakespearean clowns, and later won small parts on Broadway. His comedic career, however, took off only after meeting, marrying and matching up professionally with Anne Meara, whom he met at a cattle call in 1953.
"We started off not as partners in comedy, but as partners in crime," Stiller recounts. "I took her out for coffee, but when I offered to pay the bill, she said, 'Forget about the bill, but put some silverware in your pocket 'cause I'm running low.'"
Meara hailed from an Irish-Catholic background, but gained quick acceptance into the family and converted to Judaism in 1961. She began appearing with her husband in the free Shakespeare in the Park festival launched by Joseph Papp in the mid-50s. As the decade progressed, however, the two perfected a riff on the "Abie's Irish Rose" series, with a routine about a Jewish boy and an Irish girl mismatched by a haywire computer. Variations of that gag served them well on the Ed Sullivan Show, which established them as household names.
The couple appeared together in nightclubs and on variety and TV shows (including "Archie Bunker's Place" and "The Tattingers") for many years. Stiller eventually returned to a solo acting career, appearing in such films as "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), "Airport" (1975), "The Ritz" (1976), "Nasty Habits" (1976), "Seize the Day" (1987), and "Hairspray" (1988), where he portrayed Ricki Lake's dad. He and Lake have been reunited on "King of Queens," where the talk show host plays Doug's younger sister. Stiller's most recent film is "Zoolander," opposite son Ben.
Ironically, it is probably as Frank Costanza that Stiller will be best remembered - mostly, he says, by the kind of people who come up to him and say, "Costanza, what kind of name is Costanza?"
"I couldn't even get on a plane without the pilot coming over and asking me. I mean, they ate kasha and bagels, they yelled and talked with their hands. By the time the show was over I decided either they were Marranos or a Jewish family in the Witness Protection Program."
Still, he cheerfully acknowledges, "In my world it's nice to be recognized. When I was serving in Italy during the war, an old Jewish man came up to me and said, 'You have the face of Jerusalem.' Many years later, when I was visiting the Golan Heights, these big IDF guys came over and never mentioned Jerusalem. "Costanza, Frank," they said, "we love you!"