by John Ortved
Beginning with the fact that Fox paid for the show, nowhere is the notion of The Simpsons as a collaboration stronger than in its relationship with the network; the two were a match made in heaven. Fox was young enough, edgy enough, and smart enough to let The Simpsons run wild in its earliest, most successful, years; in turn The Simpsons became synonymous with Fox. That brand would become so inextricable from the network (and probably just as important financially) that, at different times, Fox would need to concede huge amounts of money and battles over content to keep different elements of the collaboration happy. But those concessions don’t mean that the actors or the writers somehow beat out the network. The question of whether the voices are worth what they’re paid, or whether it made sense for Fox to let The Simpsons writers do whatever they wanted was best answered by Rupert Murdoch. When I asked Murdoch how much The Simpsons has made him, in total, he smiled and said, “Let’s just say it’s a lot.”
SIXTEEN
The Guest Stars
In which Albert Brooks finds himself in the trunk of a stranger’s car … The Simpsons depresses Tom Wolfe … and Mel Gibson is nice to Jews.
A pleasant side effect of being everyone’s favorite show is that “everyone” includes celebrities. No other series has had as many guest stars or featured guests as extraordinarily famous as The Simpsons has. During the first season, the show relied on friends of Jim Brooks (Penny Marshall, Al Brooks) for guest voices, but as the show hit it big with the kids, Hollywood parents (and Michael Jackson) soon came clamoring.
ALBERT BROOKS, guest voice, The Simpsons; comedian: I think it’s different once you have children. You’re sitting alone as an adult, watching yourself as a cartoon, and you don’t have much feeling for it. But if you can watch any cartoon with a child, it’s always fifty times better.
Season 2 guests included Tracey Ullman, Danny DeVito, and Dustin Hoffman (who played Lisa’s substitute teacher crush, in one of the single greatest episodes ever written). Since then, The Simpsons’ writers have gone to town, pulling everyone from legends of television (Johnny Carson) to their favorite athletes (Ken Griffey Jr., Mark McGwire) to musicians (two Rolling Stones and the three living Beatles, though not all at once) to a prime minister of Great Britain (Tony Blair). Stories of these appearances range from the absurd—Elizabeth Taylor saying “fuck you” to Matt Groening—to the downright cool—the Ramones calling David Mirkin up several times, after their appearance, with detailed questions about the show.1
By the fourth season, guest appearances on The Simpsons were already an institution in their own right. In December 1993, Spy magazine published an article called “Homerphobic—The Simpsons Voice-Over Curse.” The article pointed to the post-appearance career nosedives of Michael Jackson (poor album sales, accusations of pedophilia), Dustin Hoffman (he made the film Hero), and Darryl Strawberry (arrested for hitting his pregnant girlfriend). Never one to pull its punches, Spy added Liz Taylor to the list. Their evidence that she was cursed: “Remains married to Larry Fortensky.”2
ALBERT BROOKS: I had been friends with Jim Brooks forever and Broadcast News was 1987 and he and I would speak often during that period and at some point he asked, “Would you come over and do this?” And I think that’s really how it happened, just as a friendship thing, in the first year.
BRIAN ROBERTS, editor, The Simpsons (1989–92): He was the RV salesman. That was his first role. And then he was the bowling instructor [whom Marge almost has an affair with].
Al Brooks has returned to play motivational speaker Brad Goodman, gentle but power-mad supervillain Hank Scorpio, former fast-food addict and fat-camp supervisor Tab Spangler, and EPA head Russ Cargill in The Simpsons Movie.
ALBERT BROOKS: The favorite one I did, just in terms of voice, and the one I think I liked the most was the bowling instructor. I like it because there had never been—and I don’t know if there’s ever been since—a cartoon character who might have had an affair. And that was just “Whoa.” That was unusual. That was a great story line, “Gee, is she going to leave her cartoon husband for this guy?”
BRIAN ROBERTS: Mike Mendel went out to Brooks’s house with a DAT machine, and it was him and Julie Kavner, and they basically riffed on this character. I had three hours of material for what amounted to two scenes. I remember turning to Sam and saying, “Somebody should release an album. This is the funniest three hours of material.” I had real trouble because I couldn’t cut it down. We sat around and took different swipes at it until he came down to the minute or so he’s on screen.
ALBERT BROOKS: I don’t know where all that stuff is, probably in the same room as the music from I’ll Do Anything [Jim Brooks’s failed musical starring Nick Nolte, from which he removed all the musical numbers before releasing it].
Dan Castellaneta also get special kudos from masters like Albert Brooks for his ability to improvise with the best.
ALBERT BROOKS: Dan’s great … they’re all great. They know their characters and, you know, you’re just riffing. These guys can go with you. Dan doesn’t shy away; if you throw something out, Dan will answer that new thing you give him as Homer. You’re not going to be able to throw him. So that part’s fun.
I like all those people. I’ve known them forever. As a matter of fact, one of the most fun things about the movie was actually working again with Harry Shearer, whom I hadn’t worked with for years and years. That was the high point of the movie for me, just to be in a room with Harry.
Hank Azaria, another master improviser, also gets his props, in some cases making the showrunners second-guess their need for a guest star at all.
NANCY CARTWRIGHT, voice of Bart, The Simpsons (in My Life as a Ten-Year-Old Boy): We were going to have a guest star play Frank Grimes in “Homer’s Enemy.” Hank, at the table read, just filling in, created such a beautifully crafted character, beautifully psychotic, that no one was used to replace him.
Recurring guests like Al Brooks, Phil Hartman, and Kelsey Grammer were always welcome additions. Hartman, who was shot and killed by his wife in a freak incident in 1998, voiced two of The Simpsons’ most memorable recurring characters: the slimy, incompetent, yet affable discount lawyer Lionel Hutz, and the washed-up actor Troy McClure. The versatility, comic timing, and understated brilliance of the characters that he’d brought to Saturday Night Live and Newsradio were on full display at The Simpsons. From Season 3 to 9, McClure and Hutz provided the series with some of its best moments. No one could lampoon the moral indifference of an ambulance chaser, or the desperate shilling of a has-been like the genial and gently ironic Hartman. When he died, Hartman was sincerely mourned in and outside of Hollywood; Steve Martin called him “deeply funny.”3
RICHARD APPEL, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1995–99): We all got into the table read, and about half the people were in a really good mood and half the people in the room were seemingly in a terrible mood. And then Mike Scully came in and said that Phil Hartman had just been murdered. So the table read was canceled. Everybody loved Phil. He was great.
Kelsey Grammer has had two successful sitcom runs with his sophisticated and snobbish character Dr. Frasier Crane, first on Cheers and then with his own show, Frasier, which ran from 1993 to 2004 and won thirty-seven Emmys. Yet Grammer brought bombast to a level of near perfection on The Simpsons, giving voice to Krusty’s revenge-obsessed former assistant, the maniacal, faultlessly refined Yalee, Sideshow Bob. One annoying facet of Sideshow Bob’s highbrow wit is that Grammer actually is that smart. The writers pen many incredibly high-minded, obscure references for Sideshow Bob, and according to one writer, Grammer gets them all.
The most famous Simpsons guest is also its oddest. Michael Jackson was a huge Simpsons fan and was eager to do the show. When celebrities first started coming on the show, they didn’t appear as themselves in the credits, as they did in later shows. (Dustin Hoffman was Sam Etic. Semitic. Get it? It’s a Jewish thing.) Jackson (credited as John Jay Smith) was depicted as a four-hundred-pound bald white mental
patient who is convinced he is Michael Jackson and who shares Homer’s room in a mental hospital when Homer is deemed mentally unfit after wearing a pink shirt to work. The King of Pop had some ideas of his own, which made for a very unusual table read.
It all started with a phone call. According to Brooks, Michael Jackson called him, told him that he loved Bart, and said he wanted to give the youngster a number one single.4 (Jackson ended up writing “Do the Bartman.”)
BRIAN ROBERTS: So Michael Jackson agrees to do this show and he wants to play himself. And whatever anybody sort of says, I think Sam just sort of goes the other way. He’s like, “No, you can’t play yourself. You have to play another character.” So they came up with this idea that Michael Jackson would play an insane asylum guy who thinks he’s Michael Jackson.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): We did the table read at Jackson’s manager’s house, which was unheard of—we never left the studio—and it was a crazy environment where we were all served food by Sikhs in white robes and turbans.
HANK AZARIA, voice actor, The Simpsons (1989–): I remember having to make conversation with Michael Jackson. That had to be one of the freakiest moments of my life. This was more than fifteen years ago, so he wasn’t quite the figure he’s become today, but still, I remember even then, staring at his nose, and it was all about Don’t Stare at His Nose.
Back in the early days, they did a second table read before the record. This one took place on the Fox lot.
BRIAN ROBERTS: Michael walked in, dressed in the big epaulettes, the whole nine yards. And as luck would have it, the only available seat is right next to me. I literally didn’t want to look at him. I just sort of had my head in my script. We were touching elbows and shit. So I get my head buried in the script, and then at one point in the script he sang “Man in the Mirror,” and I said, “All right.” How many times in your life are you sitting right next to Michael Jackson and he’s singing “Man in the Mirror”? I just gotta look.
So I looked over to Michael Jackson, and he wasn’t singing. He had a sing-along guy next to him who was actually singing for him. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, What kinda weird shit is this?
So they did the table read. Michael goes whatever, and later on the story is that Michael did sing some of the parts in the show, but to this day, I don’t know whether it was actually Michael Jackson singing the “Man in the Mirror” part. I know that he did the “Happy Birthday, Lisa.”
Matt Groening claims to have heard versions of the song that Jackson did himself, and that Jackson’s version may be the one in the episode, but Al Jean says that The Simpsons’ music editor assured him it was the imitator’s version that made it on to the show.5
Jackson’s appearance wouldn’t be the only surprising encounter with a megastar. In 1992, Elizabeth Taylor agreed to speak Maggie Simpson’s first word—“Daddy.” “We did twenty-four takes, but they were always too sexual,” Matt Groening told Playboy. “Finally Liz said, ‘Fuck you,’ and walked out.”6
The first of these guest appearances gave the writers some opportunities to take the show to some different places and cover some of the parts of everyday life, like infidelity and gay issues, that regular shows refused to portray. In Season 2, when Homer grew hair and became an executive, openly gay Broadway and film star Harvey Fierstein played his assistant—dashing, competent, statuesque Karl.
HARVEY FIERSTEIN, actor; guest voice, The Simpsons: I think what we played with was that he was the first openly gay cartoon character. He was also Homer’s first male kiss. Also, did I slap his ass or something? [Before a big presentation to Mr. Burns and his fellow execs, Karl gives Homer a motivational speech, kisses him, and slaps him on the behind.]
Right, well the thing was, Matt Groening was sketching me a little bit. And I said to him, “What are you doing?” He said, “You’re gonna look wonderful as a Simpson.” And I said, “No, don’t make it look like me.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “No, no, no, no, no,” I said. “You need to make him”—cuz I’m often called a caricature of homosexuality. I’ve been accused of that, but let’s face it, I’m the exact opposite of a gay caricature. “Make him blond, and tall, and gorgeous, and skinny, and give him a beautiful place to live. If you’re gonna do a gay cartoon character, make him a gay cartoon character.” So that’s why Karl is tall and blond. I mean, if a Simpsons character can be said to be good-looking, I guess he’s sort of good-looking, and he lives in this beautiful apartment and has beautiful things around him, but that was because I said, “Don’t make it look like me. I don’t look like gay people, how they’re supposed to look. I’m Jewish and fat and …”
When we were actually doing the recording, I got so into everybody’s acting that I actually started to make a suggestion, and then caught myself. And everybody’s staring at me, like, What’s the new guy over there giving notes for? It’s one of those embarrassing memories that actually make you clench your fist. But I was so excited by the incredible amount of talent in that one circle. I mean, those people are all so wonderful, each in his own way. A cartoon is a cartoon, but as I stood in that circle of actors reading the script, what struck me is that these writers could do absolutely anything, and these talented people, these voices, would pull it off. There’s a certain morality in those performances. They don’t question those characters; they just accept them exactly as they are.
Years later they contacted me when they wanted Karl to return. But I didn’t really like their approach. It had nothing to do with my character. Homer and Marge have a fight, and she throws him out and he has no place to stay, and he runs into Karl, who sets him up with a pair of gay men. All they needed me for was to introduce him to these gay guys. But the script was basically just a lot of very clever gay jokes, and there wasn’t that Simpsons twist. Jim Brooks and Matt Groening and those writers have always added that extra something beneath the surface, and it just wasn’t there. Basically, Homer just had a lot of fun hanging out with gay men, and drinking in bars, and dancing at discos, and all that, and there was nothing—there was no commentary there. Every restaurant had a silly gay name. The gym had a silly gay name. They were all double entendres, obviously. And I said, “Anybody could do this. You’re the fucking Simpsons. Do something we have never seen before.”
And let me say that it was very flattering that they asked me to do it. Jim Brooks said, “You know, you’re the very first voice we ever asked to come back and do it again.” I was surprised. I asked, “Why do they need me to introduce them to this gay couple? Why wouldn’t he move in with Karl and his partner?” Then I started thinking, Maybe they just wanted my stamp of approval on it because it was just a bunch of clichés.
So I called Jim Brooks and said, “You know, it looks to me like you’re only asking me to do this to okay this episode, since my character doesn’t do anything. I don’t understand why you want my okay unless you think there’s something wrong with it. But it seems to me that it might be more interesting if this gay couple he got set up to live with”—I think it was sort of a take on when Giuliani got thrown out of his home and lived with a gay couple—“are raising children, a parallel of him and Marge, and that he learned from this gay couple how to be a better parent and a better partner to his wife. Wouldn’t it be funny if it took a gay couple to teach them family values?”
Jim Brooks said, “I think that’s an interesting, fun idea. Would you mind telling it to one of our head writers?” And so I did, and he said, “Oh, thank you so much,” and I never heard from them again.p
Musical guests have been popular throughout the show’s history. (Writers are also music dorks, who would have known?) Aerosmith was the first.
STEVEN TYLER, lead singer, Aerosmith; guest voice, The Simpsons: The Simpsons was one of the first comedic endeavors to be a little risqué. They took the piss out of people and situations. And when they asked Aerosmith to be there, with Moe, to drink a Flaming Moe, it was perfect. I had done overlays
and shit for movies in the past, but when the actual voicing cast came in, I freaked! I heard all these voices, like Marge Simpson, so I was pretty blissed out. Hank came in, and when I did my speaking part—it wasn’t a hell of a lot—he was on one microphone, and I was on another one, and it was fuckin’ hilarious.
Believe me, I riffed a little, and they didn’t use everything I did, but I said, “Keep it in the tank.” What was written, of course, we elaborated on with voice, because you can say everything nine ways, “What the hell are you talking about? What the hell are you talking about? What the hell are …” And then when they drew me, you don’t have to guess what appendages they would make bigger on my face. Looking back at the characters [on TV], I’m not dead, I’m just drawn that way, you know what I’m saying?