Jimmy is notorious for giving actors comedy bits:
“Hey Woody, pretend like you slam your hand in the cash register.”
“Hey Ted, when she kisses you, fall against the door.”
“Hey Kirstie, when the Righteous Brothers walk in, fall on your knees, then faint.”
Jimmy is in love with his bits. They make him giggle like a lovesick schoolboy. His arms start flailing around. And he sorta bobs up and down, consumed with exhilaration.
Then the actor does the bit, and Jimmy goes into convulsions, laughing. He is by far the best audience a comedy actor will ever have.
If you know what Jimmy’s laugh sounds like, you can hear it in every show he directs. When I watch Will & Grace, I hear that crazy Jimmy laugh. It’s unmistakable and inspires the actors to carry on and know they are funny.
I learned something about the subject of “hire slowly and fire fast” from Jimmy. When guest stars came on the show (the ones hired by the casting director—not celebs, politicians, or sports figures, but just the run-of-the-mill actors who were hired as “guest stars”), they were either funny . . . or gone in a heartbeat. They had one shot in the first run-through to be funny.
The most shocking one was an actress who was hired to play my sister in a few episodes. A model/actress got the highly publicized role. She looked a lot like me, except far prettier. Lots of actresses had tried out for the role, and unfortunately, the one who got the role was publicized in the trade magazines. I’ll never forget the fateful day when we had our first run-through and I heard Jimmy utter, “Not funny.” I pleaded with him. “Give her another shot. She’s a model. Tell her to talk louder. Hell, you can’t even hear her.”
Jimmy just calmly said, “Not funny, Kirstie. She’s just not funny.” I can’t imagine how embarrassing it must have been for her to be fired and replaced. Marcia Cross eventually was cast as my sister. But, you know what? She wasn’t funny. Jimmy is the master of comedy and hastened the inevitable by firing her five minutes in.
That taught me a lot about funny and taking the time to cast properly and not trying to make someone funny. It doesn’t exist, nor does it work. Funny, as Jimmy showed me time and time again, is a combination of timing and an innate ability to make people love you, hate you, wanna sex you up, but mostly just laugh.
Jimmy Burrows made me fall in love with being funny. He validated our cast’s comedic abilities to the point that we had certainty in our craft. Certainty is the single most valuable quality an actor can have, especially when it’s founded in truth. Jimmy gave me a lifelong confidence that I could and should continue to make people laugh.
The Charles Brothers
I don’t think in all of my six years on Cheers I ever saw Glen or Les Charles alone. Sometimes—most of the time, I must confess—I didn’t know Glen from Les. They were just “The Charles Brothers.” I tried to make up mnemonics: Glen, glasses; Les, not. Or was it Glen, no glasses, Les, yes?
They were intimidating! The duo happens to be a set of highly intelligent, friendly, yet not giddy men. Glen and Les were the writer/producer cocreators of Cheers. When you do a sitcom, you see the director all day every day. The writer/producers are holed up in some windowless room banging out the episodes and punching up the jokes. At the end of a sitcom day, you do a run-through. It’s what the audience sees when they watch a sitcom, but no one is in hair or makeup or costumes and the actors are walking around the set holding scripts. Except if your name happens to be Rhea Perlman and you can learn lines via telepathy, so you won’t need the script for run-throughs.
There are many writers in a show like Cheers. Then there are the network execs and the studio execs. Our network was NBC and our studio was Paramount.
At day’s end some assistant director, spelled “g-o-f-e-r,” would line up about 30 director’s chairs in front of the set. Then all the writer/producers and execs would file in and sit in the chairs and the remaining crew would stand in crowds behind the chairs. All of them had notepads to make notes, even if their job was to get coffee. Glen and Les were always center stage. Glen and Les couldn’t have been nicer and more welcoming to me. They were always cordial and conversational. These two Latter-day Saints, Mormon-raised men, were not giddy or ridiculous or loony like our acting troop or like Jimmy.
I was on the show six years and always thought there was a chance that one week the words “Lose the chick with all the long curly hair” would be scribbled on either Glen’s or Les’s notepad.
I ran around muttering, before I’d say hi to Glen-glasses, Les-not, “Oh, lord, or is it the other way around?”
They flustered me! The stupid thing is they actually look nothing alike. Oh hell, maybe they were identical twins. To me they were like black people are to the KKK: “they all look alike.” Of course by this time I could never ask, “What’s your name again?” and Rhea had pointed out who was who a bazillion times. To this day I can’t figure out why or how I constantly confused them. They were sort of like the mighty and powerful Wizard of Oz to me. They are a team, a pair, a couple. They are one entity, which is about the worst thing you could ever say about anyone.
I loved them. I went to parties and celebrations and funerals and events with them. They wrote thousands of lines I ended up speaking, and I’m eternally grateful to them. I still just wish I could figure out which is which. I guess I can say among hundreds of things, the thing that Glen and Les inspired me most to do was to learn how to differentiate and to wear name tags at parties. I’m so glad I’m not the mother of identical twins. I would have to tattoo my children at birth.
Ted
God, I love Ted!! How he didn’t have seizures when I replaced Shelley Long is beyond me. They were the Lunt and Fontanne, the Astaire and Rogers of sitcom world. Beloved by, what, 30 million people a week or more?
God bless Ted Danson for his patience, confidence, and stability during my first episodes. I think Ted had input into me being hired. How much, I never asked. Oh, here’s the kicker! I’d never done a sitcom! Or a comedy.
Sitcoms are hybrids of plays and television with four cameras whizzing around the stage like bumper cars (without the collisions, usually). I’d only done one play, and movies. No live audience, no having to speak up, or the hardest part: wait for the laughs. You have an entire audience sitting at the edge of the stage. If they think something is funny, they laugh; then you, as an actor, need to hold just long enough for the laugh but not so long that you leave a hole in the entire production. You couldn’t mumble, as I’d been accustomed to doing in movies, or speak so quietly as to hear a pin drop. Movie actors can become incredibly self-indulgent. There’s no group in front of that camera, no audience reacting to your every move, just you in close-up with one camera pointed at your face. Motionless. Deafening silence is the atmosphere of a movie when the director yells “Action.” No one dares to speak or move or laugh, god forbid, even when you’re shooting a comedy—just dead calm. Not a bunch of sugar-pumped yahoos sitting up in the peanut gallery laughing, twitching, squirming, leaving for the restroom, opening the candy the hype-boy throws into their waiting hands. No, no, no, a sitcom is a three-ring circus, and it was all foreign to me!
But Ted, Ted Danson, was a pro! He never let me see him sweat, if he did. I was never party to his possible late-night calls to Jimmy or the Charles Brothers (lying in the same bed, because in my universe they both answer the phone simultaneously), “Will they please, please fire this girl, please!” I would surely have fainted at his feet if he ever so much as hinted that I wasn’t funny or talented.
Ted Danson is the most generous actor I’ve come across in my career. He is so egoless when you’re working with him that it seems he must be . . . acting. But he’s not. In the comedy world, actors vie for the jokes. They can get snarky and cunning in the ways they go about getting the jokes. The nasty ones will ruin the timing of a joke so that when you say the punch line, it’s not funny. The evil ones will cry to the producer or director, “Fuck! she’s
not funny, give me the joke, I’ll make it work.” All sorts of shenanigans exist on sets, not just in comedies but in all genres of acting. I’m sure you’ve heard the term “upstaging.” Same thing. It came from the theater, when an actor would move behind the other actors, in which case the others would have to turn their heads to the upstage actor and their backs to the audience. Many actors are selfish and relish the opportunity to upstage other actors, and Cheers was Ted’s show, for crying out loud. He’d been the star of it for five award-winning years. He never once, for one day, minute, or second acted like Hi, I’m Ted Danson, handsome, talented, and head-honcho leading man of Cheers.
Ted taught me humility and generosity as an actor. Ted is a true renaissance man. He’s gentle. And he also has a very big dick.
One of our weekly games before shooting on show night was to see who could get shots of whom naked in the shower. Woody used a butter knife to unlock the bathroom door while Ted was showering. I manned the camera. George kicked the door open. Woody flung the shower door open. I snapped the photo of naked Ted. I swear to God he was well endowed. I would show you the picture, but my hands were shaky and I decapitated him in the photo.
There was never a nude photo snapped of me, but not for lack of conspiring and attempting. One night while I was showering, Woody came down through the acoustic tiles in the ceiling. But by the time he’d plummeted to the floor and stood up, I’d grabbed a towel.
I secretly think Ted kinda liked us girls giggly and ogling his impressive member—what guy wouldn’t?
The thing about the Cheers men that was superlative was the way they took care of Rhea and me and Bebe Neuwirth. They were always playful and bawdy, but gentle with us, like they were holding kittens. Ted led the pack, he set the tone of the other men. He could have set it any way he wanted, but chose to be a pro and make it all look easy. Believe me, it’s not easy being the lead of any production. All eyes look to the lead to set the pace and the tone. Ted makes it look so fucking easy that I feel he’s been overlooked for blockbuster leads in many movies. He is an exquisite actor in both drama and comedy. He has impeccable timing and never pushes jokes or mugs (makes faces) like the rest of us on Cheers would do when a joke wouldn’t work.
He was swag long before the word was coined, and he dances like a dream. Any actor in Hollywood would be lucky and honored to work with Ted. I know I was. Although Ted and I had countless hilarious encounters, series talks, and six years of shared stories with each other, on and off the Cheers set, my happiest professional moment with Ted came in 1990 when he finally won an Emmy for Cheers after nine years of nominations! 1990! Halla-fuckin-lujah! Finally, the comedy boy-genius of the 1980s–’90s was validated for making it all just look so simple. Kudos to him for sitting there in the audience for nine long years watching Cheers being awarded 28 Emmys, including one to his comedy-novice girl Friday, Rebecca Howe. Now Ted had finally received his just desserts. My heart sang for him, America’s hearts sang for him! There was finally justice in TV land.
Kelsey
There are few times in one’s life when you run head-on into genius. If you have ever, or should ever, smack into Kelsey Grammer, that’s what you’ve collided with—genius. Kelsey is a dichotomy. He is, was, a bad-boy blend of a very naughty boy and a Rhodes scholar. You will never find a quicker, more articulate wit than Kelsey’s, no matter what any of his idiot ex-wives portray him as. He is nothing as he seems or they prattle on about.
Kelsey’s intellectual persona is indeed real. He is infinitely talented and ridiculously hilarious. Humor like Kelsey’s could only stem from intelligence.
Kelsey’s drug and alcohol history is public knowledge. Because I also had drug problems in my past, it gave us a common reality. Not that no one else in the cast ever did any drugs, but Kelsey and I seemed to be the unfortunate ones to make it our life’s work for several years. I hadn’t done drugs for eight years when I joined the cast of Cheers, so my drug past was far behind me. Kelsey’s drug and alcohol use was right on top of him.
I made it my unsolicited mission to get him clean. Before he was put in jail for a DUI, I went to court to plead his case before the judge to send him to a rehab instead of jail. A group of 20 Mothers Against Drunk Drivers peppered the courtroom. Their goal is to put all DUI drivers in jail. I understood this goal; my own mother was killed by a drunk driver. I differ with MADD in that I don’t see 30 days in jail as a solution to drunk driving. Maybe 365 days of jail might do the trick. But since many accumulate double and triple DUIs, not including the hundreds of times they’ve driven drunk or high without getting caught, I don’t see the 10-to-30-day jail stay as a solution.
I pled my case and Kelsey’s case, but to no avail. His sentence was not rehab, it was the pokey.
I came to visit him in jail. I must admit, it was sorta star studded. Those in residence included Marlon Brando’s son, who had killed Marlon’s daughter’s lover.
I don’t know if I had any influence on Kelsey’s sobriety, which he later attained. I guess I don’t really care. I’m just glad he’s over that monumental hump.
I wish you could all personally know Kelsey. He is such a sweet, insightful person. He is a deep thinker and a genuinely caring person. He is a vulnerable soul and he has lived a very painful and bizarre life, full of losses and strange deaths before he became a star.
Kelsey is as strong as he is fragile. As wild as he is tame. He is a survivor extraordinaire, and I will always be thankful for his vastly different colors. Kelsey makes a Sherwin-Williams paint deck look like a six-color box of Crayolas.
George and John
Lumping George Wendt and John Ratzenberger together does them both a tremendous injustice. However, I, like the rest of America, got accustomed to seeing them sit side by side at the end of the Cheers bar. Although they are night and day from each other, day in day out for six years I chatted with them across the highly varnished bar top, so these are my most vivid memories of the dynamic duo.
The location where John and George perched was the hub of the Cheers set. It’s where we all hung out, hovering around George and John like flies. Get it? Barflies? Ugh, I digress.
Like his character Cliff, John is a fount of stories and information. Unlike Cliff, among other things, John does not have a Boston accent. George, in my opinion, was the pathos of Cheers: the gentle giant who filled the TV with shy intelligence and sweetness. George is exactly like Norm, but with a lot more sex appeal and charisma.
Whether we were sitting on the bar, hanging on the bar, or leaning over the bar, we all hung in that exact location, in front of George and John. If you think it felt warm and cozy when you watched the show, you should have experienced the love when you were in the show, at the bar where everyone not only “knew your name” but wanted to stand and laugh and talk to you for 218 episodes.
When I think of George and John and all of us nestled around them, I have the distinct feeling of being wanted. I have the feeling of well-being a person has when she has found her home, her location in the vast universe. No other men have ever made me feel that safe and wanted.
The night we shot my first episode, while we were all in hair and makeup, John and George gave me a gift. It was a 12-gauge shotgun with a card that read, “If you ever want to leave us, you’re going to have to shoot your way outta here.”
Can you fathom anything more heartwarming?
I was deeply touched and did what I always do when I’m touched: I cried and fucked up my makeup.
Woody
Woody made me feel like I was in the middle of the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy had to say good-bye to the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow.
I had, and have had, a soft spot for Woody Harrelson. Saying good-bye to him the last night of Cheers was painful. “And you, I’ll miss you most of all,” wept Dorothy to the Scarecrow. Woody and I had a very special bond with each other. Come to think of it, Woody called me “Kirst”—perhaps the only man I would let utter that word with
out me rolling my eyes or slugging him.
Woody felt like half-brother, half-lover to me, although we were neither. Not because he wasn’t willing. Woody spent several nights sleeping at my house in the downstairs floral guest room. Once with a girl named Penelope. He was tired of her and didn’t want much to do with her, so he came knocking on my door around midnight. “Kirst,” he whispered at the door, “can I talk to you?” I threw a robe on and met him in the kitchen. Woody was single, but he would incessantly insist we sleep together, half joking, half serious. He liked to startle me with the suggestion.
“Oh shut the fuck up, Woody, we’re not sleeping together!” I would say, half joking, half wishing I wasn’t married that night and could bang his brains out.
Woody is a wild child, a flower child, a redneck, and a poet. He is a dichotomy, a walking contradiction. But Woody would laugh that infectious Woody laugh, and we would talk.
He’s like my son, True, always giving me too much information. He talked about that Penelope girl who was down the hall sleeping or pouting or whatever she was doing because he had decided he didn’t want to have sex with her.
“Woody, why the hell would you bring a girl over here to spend the night in the same bed with you if you didn’t want to sleep with her?”
The bigger question was what the hell Woody was doing at my house in the first place. We hadn’t gone out earlier that night. He hadn’t brought Penelope by to visit us. As I recall, he just showed up to sleep at our Encino estate, twice owned by Al Jolson. He’d done this before alone, but never with a date.
Funny how you never ask, “What are you doing here?” and only give thought to it 20 years after the fact.
When Parker wasn’t available, out of town working and such, Woody and I would go to premieres, parties, and other social engagements together. We did this up until not too long ago, even when I was divorced from Parker and Woody was married to Laura and had kids.
The Art of Men [I Prefer Mine al Dente] Page 16