He's the voice behind Mr. Burns and Smithers on 'The Simpsons,' but there's a lot more to Harry Shearer than versatile vocal chords
Los Angeles
WHEN PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu confided to Arnold Schwarzenegger, during his tour last fall of the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, that he sometimes wished he could emulate the Austrian-born action-hero's ways, the richness of the remark was not lost on satirist, performer, journalist and cultural commentator Harry Shearer. Never one to pass up an opportunity to make fun of the powerful and ridiculous, Shearer - a polymath of talent who may be most-heard, but least-famous, as the voices of Mr. Burns, Smithers and others on "The Simpsons" - used the Netanyahu comment on his weekly nationally syndicated radio program, "Le Show."
Shearer cooked up a media preview for Bibi's first action pic, "Total Settlement." The sketch depicts Bibi dispatching Yasser Arafat, Hanan Ashrawi and Saddam Hussein and glibly bidding them "Shalom (instead of Schwarzenegger's 'Hasta la vista'), Baby."
"Netanyahu's back," intones Shearer in his mock-serious radio announcer's voice as the Beeb blows each of them away, "...and this time, he's never Left." A few weeks later, Shearer - in what he said was an attempt to redress incessant American media demonization of Saddam Hussein - came up with a genuine outtake from an Iraqi phone-in radio show offering the man-in-the-street's perspective on Saddam's latest scuffle. Of course, it might have helped listeners unschooled in spoken Arabic had Shearer provided a translation for the three-minute screed that greeted their ears. "I guess to be charitable you could say I make good fun," Shearer told me on a hotel porch overlooking the Santa Monica beach. I'd asked him to characterize the kind of career that could only have been fashioned by a rare variety of the luftmensch - one who thrives solely on his wit, imagination and bluster.
Among other unlikely ingredients, that career has included two seasons on "Saturday Night Live"; a definitive stint as ultra-dim heavy-metalist Derek Smalls in Rob Reiner's 1984 mock rockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap"; more luminous freelance journalism and social and political commentary for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times; a smattering of minor parts in such feature films as "The Right Stuff," "The Fisher King," "My Best Friend's Wedding" and the upcoming remake of "Godzilla"; two years covering and commenting on both O.J. trials for "Le Show," and of course his ongoing presence in "The Simpsons," now in its ninth season on Fox TV.
"Unfortunately, the intractability of the Arab-Israeli conflict strikes me more as the stuff of tragedy than comedy," says Shearer. "In what passes for news about Israel in this country, we're only exposed to the large strokes of the situation. And since I can't educate my listeners to the details and subtleties of both sides, I only rarely address them. Still, if I were living in Israel instead of Los Angeles, I'm sure I'd be having a field day."
But then, as Shearer quickly confides, he's been having a field day pretty much since his birth to Austrian-Jewish refugee parents in L.A. 54 years ago. School came easy to him, as did growing up Jewish in a racially mixed downtown area, where his father, an opera singer by training, ran a gas station.
"Apart from being called a kike once in school, it's never really been an issue," he says. Indeed, boasting a talent for languages, Shearer didn't even have to stretch learning the Hebrew required for what he recalls was "the most cheeseball bar mitzvah this town has seen."
"My dad died when I was quite young," Shearer recounts, "so I can't tell you what his attitude toward religion was. My mom, though, wanted me to be raised in the tradition, hence the bar mitzvah. The funny thing is, I later discovered she wasn't a believer either."
Shearer's acumen as a reader stood him in good stead as a child actor, which he became when his piano teacher became an agent for child performers. Shearer, who likes to think that his reluctance to practice helped propel this career change, eventually received an invitation to audition for Jack Benny's radio show, which in turn landed him a regular slot on the show at the age of 7. He would portray either Benny as a kid or a member of Benny's scout troup, the Beverly Hill Beavers.
"It was a gift from the heavens for me," Shearer recalls, "because all I really wanted to do as a kid was hang out with the grownups. Childhood was the waiting room."
Expounding, Shearer says: "I don't look back with excessive nostalgia on the stuff of childhood. To spend your time as an adult looking back on the prep days strikes me as completely missing the point. There's this peculiar American concept that childhood is a time of innocence, when really, it requires such monstrous forgetting."
Shearer continued to perform, first in radio's "G.E. Theater" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," and in 1953 in small parts in the films "Abbott and Costello Go to Mars" and "The Robe." He also played Eddie Haskell in the pilot episode of "Leave It to Beaver," though not, alas, in the landmark series.
But his mother urged him to find other means to make a living should this one ever prove inadequate. So Shearer attended UCLA, completing a BA in political science. He subsequently spent a year working at the California State Legislature in Sacramento, and also earned a teaching certificate. It was while covering the Watts riots of 1965 for Newsweek that he first discovered his lifelong aversion to places where people shoot at each other. Hence, he offers, his failure, so far, to visit Israel.
"I don't have any interest in going to any country where the rabbinate or its equivalent has a role in public policy," Shearer explains further. "My standard of a reasonably well-run civil society is one where if people throw rocks or feces at people over a religious disagreement, the rock-throwers are arrested, not their targets.
"I don't see in the little news we get out of Israel in the mainstream media that anyone is fighting back. It seems as if secular society is surrendering. I'm perfectly willing to support them if they do decide to resist, but you can't lead them from here. It ain't where I live."
SHEARER CREDITS HIS WORK on the Benny Show with inspiring his most memorable role to date - that of the mutton-chopped bassist in "Spinal Tap."
"I had never seen a big band like the one Benny shared the stage with," says Shearer. "And I just could not believe how loud the drums were. You could say that Sammy the drummer in the Phil Harris orchestra presaged my work in 'Spinal Tap.'"
The film is a mock documentary on a profoundly execrable British heavy-metal band, fueled by a minor hit ("Smell the Glove"), that is in the process of imploding during an American tour. "The rock group doesn't exist," wrote critic Roger Ebert in a rave review of the movie, "but the best thing about the film is that they could. The music, the staging, the spe-cial effects, the backstage feuding, and the pseudo-profound philosophizing are right out of a hundred other rock groups and a dozen other documentaries… ("This Is Spinal Tap") simply, slyly, destroys one level of rock pomposity after another."
"I'm very proud of how that movie has entered the culture," says Shearer, recalling that it took two years of enduring blank looks from clueless studio executives after they had seen a 20-minute demo of "Spinal Tap" before Norman Lear was induced to produce the movie. "If you can enter the language as a landmark against which a certain form of badness is measured, you've achieved something major - especially given the state of this culture."
It is by constantly probing the nether regions of American popular culture with the digital thermometer embedded in his own quintessential Jewish sensibility as "an outsider with insider knowledge" that Shearer is making his most lasting mark, both on his own radio show, and as a regular guest first on the David Letterman show and, more recently, Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect."
Having covered the O.J. Simpson criminal and civil trials, for instance, Shearer is now convinced that future historians will eventually regard them both as the defining event of fin de si_cle American life.
"They really did sum up all the major themes of America in the 20th century, notably celebrity, race, violence and sex," he says. "The real question was how you rated the primacy of those components. Unlike rabble rousers like Geraldo (Rivera), I always felt that celebrity was more salient than race. And though I was stunned when the first verdict was announced, with time I have come to believe that both verdicts were correct.
"O.J. didn't go to jail because the prosecution didn't do its job of establishing his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. But the civil jury quite properly affixed responsibility and liability. As a result, the guy's a pariah. Yes, he spends his days playing golf. But he plays on public courses. He's having the real 'being nibbled to death by ducks' punishment. And as time goes on, the ducks will become more persistent."
Shearer doubts the Monica Lewinsky scandal will sprout anywhere near the legs that the O.J. case did. Ultimately, however, "the story Monicagate embodies is that of the fat Southern kid who grows up to get the women he wants with power, and the fat Jewish girl who fantasized about power and wealth, and whose mother actually wrote a book in which she fantasized about having an affair with a celebrity of power and wealth.
"I don't think it's original with me to say that Hollywood yearns to be Washington and Washington Hollywood," Shearer concludes. "The tragedy for America, though, is that they both seem to be getting their wish."