In a double loop from reality to fiction to reality again, Balaban landed a role as NBC president Warren Littlefield in a separate production, an HBO adaptation of Bill Carter’s book about the late-night television wars, The Late Shift. Then, in a denouement of the meta joke, the actor made an appearance at the NBC up-front presentations to advertisers during the heights of the Must See TV era. Littlefield hired Balaban himself, over the objections of his fellow executives, who thought the gag would be too insidery.
When announcer Don Pardo proclaimed the arrival of Littlefield, Balaban took the stage in a new Armani suit Littlefield had bought for him. The crowd roared as Balaban talked through NBC’s corporate achievements. Eventually, Littlefield joined him onstage. “Bob, what are you doing? You’re a wonderful actor, but I’m Warren.”
JOHN PETERMAN TOOK A RED-EYE flight from California back home to Lexington, Kentucky, after a business trip. Operating on no sleep, he stumbled into the office from which he operated his clothing catalog company. All anyone would say to him was, “You were on Seinfeld.” It felt like the strangest of dreams. He kept replying, “I was on an airplane. I wasn’t on Seinfeld.”
But one of his employees had taped the TV show that aired the previous night. He popped the videocassette into the VCR and watched. Sure enough, a character named Peterman appeared, and he said he operated a clothing catalog company. He met Elaine on a rainy night in New York City and offered her a job writing for his catalog, famous for its literary descriptions of clothes. It wasn’t Peterman himself, though. The real John Peterman was a good-old-boy Kentuckian with thinning gray hair, wire-framed glasses, and a mustache. This TV version was a chiseled, silver-haired actor who was playing “him,” or at least some character with his name and profession, with the booming voice of a television announcer and a dramatic flair for storytelling.
Peterman’s employees fretted. The character was a buffoon, bombastic, nothing like the real Peterman. But Peterman, despite his lack of sleep, had pulled out ahead of his employees. “It’s a good thing he’s nothing like me,” Peterman said, “because then he wouldn’t be on Seinfeld.” He looked up the ratings: Thirty million viewers now watched the show every week. Tens of millions of people were suddenly aware of the J. Peterman Company.
Soon, Peterman was getting Seinfeld scripts to vet before they aired. This character would continue to appear, and NBC’s lawyers didn’t want to take any more chances. David and Seinfeld had gotten a particular kick out of Peterman’s catalog, of which they were sometimes customers, and they loved the idea of having this obscure, unusual little company involved with their show. The catalog was known for its stylized writing about such items as chambray shirts and moleskin trousers. To wit, from the real J. Peterman catalog: “When a man puts on this authentic French farmer’s shirt he may very well find that his hands look bigger. . . . Is that woman over there giving him the eye and nodding toward the haystack? Yes, and he knows what to do.”
Whatever anyone else thought of his catalog’s prose, Peterman knew from experience with his own staff writers that he shouldn’t try to interfere too much in the Seinfeld writers’ process. He’d sign off on the scripts and send them back without question. Only once did a script preview cause him to take any action at all. When he read the one in which Peterman’s mother dies, he called his sister to prevent any panic from his own mom, who was in her eighties. “Does Mother watch Seinfeld?” he asked. Yes, and she was adequately forewarned of “her” coming death.
As the Peterman character caught on with viewers, Peterman and John O’Hurley, the actor who played him, did a flurry of publicity together. When the two did their very first news show together, a talk show called Fox After Breakfast—meeting for the first time on camera—all Peterman could think was, What the fuck am I doing here? The two looked at each other for several moments in silence. Peterman saw the host starting to sweat the moment. Would this be okay?
Soon the two started talking, though. They became friends. Peterman sent O’Hurley clothes and wine. Sometimes they traveled together to do promotional appearances, and often fans would approach and say, “Hey, J. Peterman, how are you doing?” Peterman himself soon learned to ignore such greetings; they were for O’Hurley, not for him.
Further blurring the lines between reality and fiction, O’Hurley often hung out between scenes on the set of Peterman’s fictional office simply because he liked the décor. He leaned back in Peterman’s comfy black leather desk chair and put his feet up on the glossy, knotted-pine desk, feeling at home among the African masks and mounted butterflies adorning the walls as he watched scenes being filmed on other parts of the set. He even took a few of the masks from the set, once the show was over, to hang in his home in Vermont. He also kept several of the real J. Peterman Company’s jackets in his closet there.
Surprisingly, however, the show had little positive effect on J. Peterman’s real-life business. Betting on the increased name recognition, Peterman opened several stores across the country, with plans for up to fifty locations. Peterman sat outside his first West Coast retail store in Newport Beach, California, and watched customers coming and going on its opening night in 1998. Over and over, he heard passersby saying, “I didn’t know that was a real company!” Most Seinfeld viewers didn’t realize it, either. (Some still don’t.) Most of those who did know were already customers, and they enjoyed the joke, but they didn’t buy more clothing because of it.
A year later, that discrepancy between name recognition and real business became apparent. J. Peterman filed for bankruptcy after expanding too much, too quickly, listing debts of more than $14 million.
DAN O’KEEFE HAD GROWN UP in mount pleasant, a Westchester County suburb of New York City, celebrating a holiday that his father invented in 1966. His father—Daniel O’Keefe Sr.—was an editor at Reader’s Digest, a scholarly writer (he published Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic in 1982), and a man of many odd ideas. Festivus was meant to be an alternative to other holidays that were over-commercialized or just “some dead guy’s birthday,” as Dan O’Keefe explained to me. It began as nothing more than a celebration of the first anniversary of O’Keefe’s parents’ first date. After their kids were born, it became an annual tradition that involved looking at old photos and taping everyone in the family talking about the previous year, usually centered on a theme. (Theme in 1976: “Are We Scared? Yes!” Theme in 1977: “Are We Depressed? Yes!”) Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape—a copy of which Mr. O’Keefe had lent Mrs. O’Keefe on that first date—the holiday was built around an annual “airing of grievances.”
The name for the holiday came from a derivation of “feast” in Latin (festum). Strange hats and dress-up clothes served as the traditional garments. The decorations included a FUCK FASCISM! sign, handwritten on cardboard and displayed on the mantel. Bowing to Mrs. O’Keefe’s objections, Mr. O’Keefe changed it one year to SCREW FASCISM! The American flag went out on its front-porch perch. Poems were read. (“To which we sing, each Festivus, which we hold for the Rest of Us.”) There were songs, like the “Bird and Duck Chorus,” quacks sung to the tune of “The Mirlitons” from The Nutcracker Suite; a German song about pigs; and an Irish song about the hanging of a terrorist. Plate licking and talking with one’s mouth full were encouraged.
Though O’Keefe and his two brothers agreed not to talk about “that strange piece of psychodrama,” as he called Festivus, to outsiders, one of the brothers eventually described it to O’Keefe’s colleague, Jeff Schaffer.
Unfortunately for O’Keefe, he and Schaffer worked together as writers for Seinfeld. Next thing he knew, Schaffer and Schaffer’s writing partner, Alec Berg, cornered him over dinner at a diner and said, “We want to do this on the show.” O’Keefe stood his ground, even though Berg and Schaffer had seniority over him as executive producers at the time: No way. Well, they’d already told Seinfeld about it, and he wanted it. So that was settled.
Writing this script, O’Keefe
felt like he was writing a tell-all about growing up in a cult.
The Seinfeld version of the holiday evolved during the drafting of the episode to include a ceremonial pole, something never involved in the O’Keefes’ Festivus. The main harbingers of Festivus in the O’Keefe household were a clock and a bag, the significance of which the children never knew. The fictionalized version of the holiday also evolved to include father-son wrestling. On Seinfeld, it took December 23 as an official date, though in the O’Keefe household, Festivus could come at any time, and was most likely to occur in March, October, or November. Mr. O’Keefe felt the uncertainty made it more exciting.
Shooting the three-minute Festivus scene itself, in the December 1997 episode “The Strike,” became a six-hour ordeal. Jerry Stiller, as George’s father, Frank, had almost all the lines, and he was having a hard time, as usual, remembering the longer soliloquies. He had to do all of them in small chunks, over and over again. The more this happened, the more the others messed up their lines and erupted into laughter. O’Keefe described it as “like rapture of the deep” by the final hours, with the actors losing oxygen to their brains.
Dan O’Keefe waited as long as possible—until the week before the episode aired—to tell his dad that Festivus would soon make its prime-time debut. He wasn’t sure his dad grasped what he was saying at first.
O’Keefe was astonished when the episode ran and fans embraced the holiday. He was stunned that anyone reacted with anything but scorn. At first, his father was uncomfortable with his secret reaching the masses. Then he began to embrace it: Maybe this was vindication for every odd idea he’d ever had! Perhaps he should revive his idea for a book called The Accursed Corporation, about how the rights of big business must be curtailed to save us all from certain doom. Perhaps Dan should spend his summer hiatus learning Vietnamese, American Sign Language, and Romanian from his father in a ramshackle Vermont cabin.
Strangers began celebrating it across the country. Wagner Collaborative Metal Works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, launched a Festivus-pole division. For some reason, Pennsylvania’s Full Pint Brewing Company made a caramel-flavored beer called Festivus. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream launched a Festivus flavor—brown sugar cinnamon with gingerbread cookies and ginger-caramel swirl—that Dan O’Keefe hated, even though he loved the brand’s other ice creams. One guesses there was, perhaps, a psychological element to his hatred.
A SLIGHT, REDHEADED TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD GIRL sat one morning in a standard New York diner on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, waiting for her coffee at the counter. The waiter had filled her cup halfway when he noticed someone coming in. “It is always nice to see you,” he said, not to the girl, but to the woman coming in, who was shaking her umbrella. He rushed to kiss the woman hello while the girl poured milk into her cup.
This was the scene that emerged from a morning in the early 1980s that singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega spent in Tom’s Restaurant at the corner of Broadway and 112th Street. The diner had sat in that location for more than thirty years, operated by the Greek-American family of Minas Zoulis dating back to the 1950s. The building was owned by Columbia University and housed some of the school’s programs, along with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. It fed affordable eggs, pancakes, coffee, tea, and the dozens of other standard Greek diner offerings to hungry students, professors, administrators, scientists, and Upper West Siders. But on this morning, Tom’s Restaurant—its name spelled out in all-capital, red neon lights across its front, seen only as RESTAURANT on its north-facing side, the TOM’S hidden—got its first big break when Vega visited.
Vega’s smoky alto would narrate her disconnection that day, a cappella, in a song called (misnamed, slightly) “Tom’s Diner,” a track that first appeared on a January 1984 compilation album from Fast Folk Musical Magazine. It popped up again three years later on Vega’s own Solitude Standing album, though her record company released two different songs, “Luka” and “Solitude Standing,” as singles in the United States.
In 1990, “Tom’s Diner” became a surprise radio hit, this time as a dance remix by British producers DNA. The producers combined Vega’s a cappella vocals with a Soul II Soul beat and repeated Vega’s original outro—“doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo”—throughout as a hook.
The song and Vega had secured their place in music history. Tom’s wasn’t quite as famous—there was that confusing switch from “restaurant” to “diner,” and the song didn’t make the location clear. Soon it would have another, even bigger, shot at fame.
TOM’S WAS AN UNLIKELY CANDIDATE for any kind of notoriety beyond its Upper West Side neighborhood. Its cramped space, even by New York City diner standards, contained only two rows of dark brown wooden booths with red and tan upholstered seats. Its continuous rows of windows on both sides of the restaurant did make it feel more spacious, though. And it had its special qualities: Among the clanking dishes, friendly Greek chatter was a constant among its staff and even some of its customers, giving it a warm, family-run atmosphere. It smelled of its exceptionally good French fries.
A location scout from some Los Angeles studio called Castle Rock came in one day in 1989 and asked about shooting the outside of the place for a sitcom. Somebody involved in the production had been there years earlier and wanted to use it as the exterior shot of a restaurant where the characters hung out. The owner, Mike Zoulis, didn’t understand what this show was, but he figured it couldn’t hurt and signed the release papers.
Seinfeld turned Tom’s Restaurant into a household sight, if not a household name. The RESTAURANT sign that wrapped around the corner building grew recognizable to millions as the place where Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer gathered to obsess over the minutiae of their lives. Though the fictional setting was known as Monk’s Café on the show, word spread that the “real” Monk’s sat on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where it had served Columbia students and staff for decades. The urbane New Yorkers who identified so strongly with Jerry and his friends now realized there was a place they could actually go to commune more deeply with their favorite characters, to eat fries in a place where those heroes of Manhattan living (sort of ) hung out.
As the show grew in popularity, then exploded in syndicated reruns across the world, Zoulis saw more and more tourist traffic, from photo-taking outside its wraparound windows to Midwestern families seeking to sample some fries from “Monk’s.” Offers to franchise or sell the place poured in, but the Zoulis family declined. “We feel that we have a successful formula here,” Zoulis told filmmakers Gian Franco Morini and Jesse McDowell, who gave the diner the star treatment in an unreleased 2014 documentary, Tom’s Restaurant. “Maybe we’re old-fashioned. Maybe we’re afraid of change.”
Maybe. They decided not to even pursue smaller tweaks to capitalize on their new level of recognition. Renovation? Nope. Maybe just a menu item or two, like “Elaine’s Big Salad,” or “Kramer’s Burger”? No, thank you. “You can sit down, you can have a cup of coffee, you leave here with your wallet intact. What more could you ask for?” Zoulis said. “It’s not like we were seeking fame and fortune.”
MEANWHILE, IN MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, SEINFELD’S original real-life crossover, Kenny Kramer, figured out how to get the role he’d wanted since Seinfeld began. That is, the role of himself.
He’d made peace with not being the Kramer America knew, even as the show became more popular. He met Michael Richards during the show’s third season and liked him, even though others who spent almost every day on the set with Richards felt as though they didn’t know him. The two bonded over being single fathers to teenage daughters. But as Seinfeld’s fan base grew and grew, Kramer couldn’t shake the idea that there was some way for him to get a piece of this, even though he’d long ago signed away the rights to his name. In the spring of 1995, he wrote a proposal for a Kramer CD-ROM—then a popular emerging technology that stored computer programs, games, and other software on a compact disc—which would explain how to
explore New York City without paying for anything. (He had done some voice-overs for X-rated cartoons on CD-ROM, and he thought the market showed promise.) But the companies he pitched said the project needed “entertainment value.” That’s when he thought about shooting some footage, and perhaps putting together a real-life tour of New York sites from Seinfeld.
He hired comedian Bobby Allen Brooks—also his neighbor—as his director. He passed a special exam to earn a city tour guide license. Then, in 1996, Kramer and Brooks launched Kramer’s Reality Tour, which started with a stage show at the John Houseman Theater in Midtown, then proceeded to a three-hour bus ride past some of Seinfeld’s most recognizable landmarks: Tom’s Restaurant, the New York Health & Racquet Club that served as the characters’ gym, and Jerry’s supposed building at 129 West Eighty-First Street (his address on the show, though the exterior shot features a building in Los Angeles).
Kramer even invited tour-goers to visit his own apartment at Manhattan Plaza, embracing his every Kramer-like quirk: sumo wrestling posters on the walls, two pairs of binoculars resting on the windowsill that he used to spy on the nearby headquarters of local news station NY1.
The demand was instant. The 800 number for bookings, which Kramer answered himself, rang eighteen hours a day. His website attracted hundreds of visitors every day. His first ten tours sold out. They ditched the CD-ROM idea as the tour took off.
BECAUSE OF SEINFELD’S PREOCCUPATION WITH real-life inspiration, New York stories were at a premium in the writers’ offices, and Spike Feresten showed up with a suitcase full of them.
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