Seinfeldia

by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

  IN THE 1890S, ARTIST CHARLES Dana Gibson made a series of black-and-white, pen-and-ink illustrations of women he thought represented the ideal of feminine beauty, his composite view of “thousands of American girls.” Gibson girls had thick, wavy, dark hair that they piled into gigantic, messy bouffants atop their heads. They were thin and youthful, with delicate features.

  They were also stylish and modern, imagined to have jobs and some sense of independence. They were single, and often dominant in relationships with men. One drawing, called The Weaker Sex, shows four Gibson girls examining a tiny man under a magnifying glass as if he’s an insect. In The Crush, a Gibson girl looks bored by a young man trying to woo her. In Love in a Garden, two men faithfully follow a Gibson girl’s instructions to plant a tree root-side up.

  The model and inspiration for the Gibson girls, Gibson’s wife, Irene Langhorne, was a society girl who’d gotten more than sixty marriage proposals before she accepted his. Langhorne met and married Gibson in New York, where they settled into a home designed for them on East Seventy-Third Street. Langhorne was “a proper lady who also could hail a taxi with a sharp whistle, play a rousing piano tune, and hike up a mountainside in long skirts,” according to the magazine at Hollins University, which proudly advertised even her brief ten-day stay at the school in 1889 before she decided to drop out.

  Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum once referred to Elaine’s “sexy modified Gibson girl coif,” but the similarity went beyond hair. (Though hair was certainly important: The style George once described as “a wall of hair,” that pouf atop cascading curls, was becoming a signature ’90s trend that would be eclipsed only by the Friends-inspired Rachel haircut a few years later.) With her wit, obvious intelligence, and liberated sensibilities—not to mention a combination of physical comedy skill and sex appeal—Louis-Dreyfus became the sitcom’s biggest step forward for womankind since Mary Tyler Moore and Lucille Ball.

  Elaine wasn’t perfect, which was why she could hang not only with boys but also with these particular dysfunctional boys. She rejected dates almost as often as Jerry did, and for equally superficial reasons—when her hunky boyfriend Tony, for instance, is mangled in a rock-climbing accident, she wonders how long she must wait before she can break up with him. Her inspiration, Monica Yates, saw her as a rare “male-minded” female character.

  Over time, Monica found Elaine “too feministy” for her own taste, or at least for Elaine to be truly “based on” herself. Whenever Seinfeld writers heard about a liberal cause they thought could spark a good story line, it went to Elaine: David wrote the sixth-season episode “The Couch” after he heard that the Domino’s pizza chain was owned by a supporter of the extreme pro-life group Operation Rescue. Thus was born Elaine’s avoidance of pro-life foodstuffs—she refuses to order from a similar chain—and her reluctant breakup with a hot boyfriend who doesn’t share her principles. “I’m sure he’s pro-choice,” she says before she confirms the truth. “He’s just so good-looking.”

  Her liberal politics, in particular, came from one of the women who helped shape her behind the scenes, comedian Carol Leifer. Used to the male-dominated world of comedy, Leifer knew what it was like to be surrounded by men. She had written a well-received Showtime special called Gaudy, Bawdy, and Blue in 1992, in which she played a foul-mouthed comedian looking back on her ’60s career, featuring a cameo by Seinfeld. When Leifer joined the Seinfeld writing staff in season five, she pitched many of Elaine’s most memorable story lines, giving the character her own neurotic-girl twist and giving rise to the commonly cited idea that Elaine was “based on” Leifer.

  Leifer used her status as an inspiration for Elaine—that is, her gender—as an advantage over her male colleagues. Leifer trafficked so well in “girly” Seinfeld stories, in fact, that she was often asked if she’d written “The Sponge,” the episode (actually written by Peter Mehlman) in which Elaine hoards her favorite form of birth control when she hears it’s being discontinued. Luckily, being accidentally credited with a Mehlman episode wasn’t a bad thing.

  Leifer also learned that she should look to her own life for material. She was, after all, one of the few women on the writing staff, the Mary Richards of this newsroom, and Elaine needed stories every week. Leifer struck gold, for example, with: “Elaine thinks the manicurists at her nail salon are talking about her in Korean behind her back.” As a bonus, Leifer got free mani-pedis at her own salon from then on, after the show used the establishment’s real name in the episode.

  She had more where that came from: “Elaine thinks that the mirrors at Barneys are skinny mirrors.” Leifer had to explain the concept of skinny mirrors to the guys, a good sign—this would be a plot. Similarly, she went as a fake date with a gay banker friend on an outing with his boss to the Hollywood Bowl and came up with the plotline for the episode “The Beard.”

  Of course, Louis-Dreyfus injected plenty of her own personality into Elaine—like Jason Alexander, she had a real-life warmth that offset some of her character’s brutality.

  When I met her for an interview once, she arrived at the designated restaurant first, and called my cell to thoughtfully ask if she could order me something; I insisted I wasn’t hungry, but when she heard I’d been driving for several hours when I arrived, she begged me to share her turkey sandwich with her. It was delicious, and I was starving.

  This was her good-mom instinct coming out: Though Elaine was a new model of single-womanhood who hated the idea of having children, Louis-Dreyfus gave birth to both of her sons during the show’s run (Henry in 1992, Charles in 1997), spending months hiding her growing belly behind cushions, pillows, boxes, furniture, and oversize clothes while on camera. Because of Elaine’s aggressive singlehood, Louis-Dreyfus reported that fans were flummoxed when they saw her out and about with her young son. “Oh my God,” they’d gasp. “I had no idea.”

  Costars often cited Louis-Dreyfus’s gutsy approach to comedy, her willingness to do anything or look ridiculous to get a laugh. But her pregnancies pushed her limits. When she was about four months pregnant with Charles, Seinfeld told her, “I have an idea for how to play this out. What if Elaine gets fat?” Louis-Dreyfus burst into tears.

  Years later, she acknowledged that it could’ve been a great plotline, but it would have “taken a few lunches” to talk her into it.

  As the show took off, Louis-Dreyfus also found herself balancing moments of stardom—taking interviews with the New York Times as she visited her wealthy father at his estate—with feeding her ten-month-old son, Henry, mashed peas.

  AS THE THIRD SEASON PROGRESSED, the production grew. While Seinfeld still tended to focus on the inner annoyances of life, its budget allowed for larger expressions of those feelings. “The Parking Garage,” in which Jerry and the gang visit a mall and forget where they left the car for an entire episode, required the construction of a fake garage building. It marked the first time of many that they’d shoot off set, away from a studio audience. Seinfeld, David, and the rest of the crew were amazed by how good it looked when it came time to edit the tape.

  A more typical taping night would begin with about two hundred people—recruited by the studio in the early days, lucky ticket-holders as the show got more popular—filing into the audience bleachers on the soundstage. No matter how in-demand the tickets were, they were always free. There, the studio audience would sit and wait an hour or so for the production to begin, though they were entertained with thematically resonant treats—Snickers bars, for instance, after Elaine caught her boss Mr. Pitt eating one with a knife and fork. There was always a “warm-up” comedian who performed, to get the audience in a laughing mood; Seinfeld often came out and chatted the audience up a bit, too.

  This made the warm-up comedians’ jobs extra-hard, since the audiences had come to see Jerry’s stand-up, not some guy they’d never heard of. Comedian Pat Hazell said that “sometimes it’s like being on a cruise ship all alone with a bunch of people who don’t like you.” He
did try to tailor his jokes to the audience, using a Seinfeldian conversational approach and taking audience questions. An older woman once, hilariously, asked if the episode being taped was a rerun. For the rest of the evening Hazell kept asking her, “So what’s coming next?”

  Watching Seinfeld, or any other show, being filmed was very different from watching the zippy, twenty-two-minute final product. Scenes might be repeated two, three times or more. Breaks might ensue as writers and producers made adjustments to the script or wrote entirely new lines and scenes. A taping could last up to three hours, making the audience restless.

  For off-site episodes like “The Parking Garage,” Cherones and the producers devised an innovative system wherein they showed tapes of the location footage to the next week’s studio audience to record “live” laughs. They were pioneering a middle ground between live taping and the more filmic “single-camera” approach. So they’d act out some sequences and show others on tape, in the sequence in which they would appear in the final cut. Other times—if there was a car scene, for instance—the actors would shoot it away from the audience for the final cut, but then reenact it onstage for the crowd, sitting in chairs and pretending to be in a car, like a little play for the live viewers. The on-location, off-set shooting would become one of the show’s most distinctive hallmarks, and would help to usher in an age of “single-camera” comedies, shot cinematically and without an audience or laugh track, the way David had intended Seinfeld to be.

  The snippets were shot in front of different live audiences but they were cobbled together. But Seinfeld often shot far more than required for a twenty-two-minute episode. Seinfeld tended to shoot at least eight minutes more material than it could use in the final cut. Even the episodes shot in front of one, consistent audience required editing together various takes. All of this made Seinfeld a particular challenge for the postproduction sound mixer—that is, the “laugh track guy.” Even though the writers and producers proudly emphasize that they didn’t have to add laugh tracks, they did need technical smoothing of the laughs recorded at the taping.

  One of their favorite laugh track guys, writer Jeff Schaffer told me, was “a very sour man.” All day, this guy sat at his custom-built laugh-editing machine, complete with foot pedals, like a court stenographer’s contraption. When Schaffer and his partner, Alec Berg, arrived for editing, he’d say, “Oh, it’s you two. I thought it’d be Fucko and What’s-His-Name.” They would ask him to bring the laughs down a little in one part, and he’d say, “I thought this was a comedy!” If they asked to bring the laughs up a bit in another part, he’d crack, “They can’t all be winners!”

  AT THIS POINT, SEINFELD HAD survived the part of a normal show’s life cycle during which the network seemingly tries to kill it. Even the network notes were now less intrusive than before. After a table read, Ludwin would say, “Great script, guys!” and then be off. David and Seinfeld could execute their own vision, without even the cursory network notes they’d experienced in the beginning. Because they hadn’t worked in television before, they had no idea how rare this was.

  The actors had settled into their roles to the point where they embodied their characters and nearly directed their own performances. Richards worked out his own, distinctive physical comedy bits to add to what was written in the script—sliding through Jerry’s door to make an entrance or falling down and bumping into things. Alexander stopped worrying so much about Louis-Dreyfus stealing the show from him. Seinfeld, David, and Cherones started to see themselves less as producers and director and more as facilitators of the actors’ talents.

  By halfway through the third season, in February 1992, New York magazine called Seinfeld “TV’s funniest, smartest sitcom” and “the purest New York show in years.” Seinfeld’s managers were receiving movie offers for their client, envisioning him in Billy Crystal–type roles, even though Seinfeld insisted he’d return to stand-up when the show ended. David and Seinfeld had either perfected their marriage-of-opposites shtick or had very different visions for their shared show. Seinfeld told New York that it was “about two idiots trying to figure out the world.” David cautioned, “A lot of people don’t understand that Seinfeld is a dark show. If you examine the premises, terrible things happen to people. They lose jobs; somebody breaks up with a stroke victim; somebody’s told they need a nose job. That’s my sensibility.”

  The Atlantic, meanwhile, opined that “Seinfeld shows why television is today’s best medium for comedy.”

  As buzz built for Seinfeld, NBC announced that The Cosby Show would end that spring, at the end of the 1991–92 season. Hollywood started to take even more notice of NBC’s stealth comedy weapon. Agents showed up on the set, and, still oblivious to how these things should work, David and Seinfeld just let them hang out. The floor of the Seinfeld set became a showbiz scene as big-name agents waited around to poach writers from the smaller agents who’d originally represented them.

  Many agents were after Mehlman, because, as he said, “I was with a boutique agency, almost more like a bodega agency.” He later found out that the Creative Artists Agency and ICM Partners—two of the biggest in the business—had agents assigned to him, to tail him and persuade him to leave his agency for them.

  He resisted. The little bit of New Yorker left in him preferred the bodega.

  JERRY AND LARRY’S CREATION HAD ranked forty-sixth for its third season but was gaining viewers. For the first time in Seinfeld’s history, the question was not whether the show would get picked up for another season but how NBC would use it to its advantage.

  In the first week of June 1992, loyal TV viewers pored over the grids in newspapers across the country that laid out the networks’ new fall schedules. And many of them faced a dilemma come September: ABC had moved its hit family sitcom Home Improvement—the nation’s fourth-most-popular show and the highest-rated new series of the year—from 8:30 P.M. on Tuesdays to 9:00 P.M. on Wednesdays. That is, opposite the rising favorite on NBC, Seinfeld. Home Improvement had done well, but it had succeeded with the help of a cushy slot on the schedule between hits Full House and Roseanne. The face-off would pit two former stand-ups, Tim Allen and Jerry Seinfeld, against each other. Sun Sentinel TV writer Tom Jicha called it “the most intriguing showdown since Fox sicked The Simpsons on Cosby.”

  The Wednesday-night battle meant a lot to the networks because so many other nights were locked down. CBS ruled Sunday and Monday, ABC Tuesday and Friday, NBC Thursday. Whoever took Wednesday could win the season, and NBC needed a win to prove it could survive the loss of The Cosby Show and the impending ending of Cheers the following year.

  Tim Allen expressed his disapproval of making his show cannon fodder. “They tell us it will work out fine,” he told reporters through gritted teeth. Then he added a sarcastic, “Yeah, we’re just thrilled.”

  Seinfeld shrugged it off, more used to fighting for his show’s life. “I mean, what are you supposed to do?” he said. “Do anti-tool jokes? There’s really nothing we can do but do our best work, which is what we would have done anyway.”

  NBC recognized Seinfeld’s growing potential and had given it a promotion, but this came with a huge responsibility: winning the battle for Wednesday night.

  The cast now found themselves treated as stars—photographed in punk drag for the cover of Rolling Stone and in an homage to the Beatles on the cover of Entertainment Weekly—but the adjustment wasn’t easy. Alexander and Richards still drove practical cars: Alexander a 1988 Toyota, Richards a slightly nicer Lexus, but certainly nothing near Seinfeld’s two Porsches. (Alexander and Richards were known to freak Seinfeld out by sprinkling a few fall leaves on the roof of Seinfeld’s midnight-blue Carrera in the studio parking lot.) Richards was often surrounded by men yelling “Kramer!” at him, and women wanting to touch his hair.

  Alexander realized he couldn’t tell fans to “blow off” when they wanted an autograph, but as an introvert, he also craved a sense of boundaries. Even as he grocery shopped, he f
aced constant cries of, “George Costanza! Can’t stand ya!”—in reference to a flashback to Jerry and George’s high school days in the third-season episode “The Library.” He felt himself creating a kind of public persona: actor Jason Alexander, who could deal with this sort of thing affably, not Jay Scott Greenspan (his given name), who could not.

  He really knew the show was taking off, though, when he did an interview for Entertainment Tonight, during which a van drove by with an African American family inside. A nine-year-old girl shot her head out the window and yelled, “I love you, George!” The show had reached far beyond the audience he’d anticipated for this little show about white, Jewish, thirtysomethings men in New York.

  That said, there was no better crowd to keep the Seinfeld cast humble than uninterested New Yorkers themselves. After shooting their Rolling Stone cover in 1993 in New York, the four core cast members decided to go out for dinner. They wanted to sit outside, and they figured people were going to freak out when they saw the four of them together, outside, in New York, right on Columbus Avenue. But no one stopped except for a homeless man asking for money.

  FINALLY, FALL CAME, THE TIME for the ratings showdown. Within weeks, it was clear: Home Improvement had destroyed Seinfeld.

  And it mattered not one bit.

  NBC, happy with Seinfeld’s upward trajectory and the demographics of its young, wealthy audience, moved the show to the big leagues by the middle of the 1992–93 season: Thursday nights, just after Cheers, which was entering its final days after lead Ted Danson had decided to quit. At first, network executives viewed the move as an emergency extraction of Seinfeld, its critically admired cult hit. With Cheers still doing great numbers, it wasn’t like Seinfeld could ruin NBC’s Thursday. NBC’s programming vice president, Preston Beckman, said of the show’s ratings, “Seinfeld wasn’t showing signs of improving. It was literally wallowing. We had to get it out of there. It wasn’t a time to be proud.”