“Tina is not clay,” says Lorne Michaels, the impresario of Saturday Night Live, Mean Girls, and 30 Rock, when I ask him how he helped shape her career. Steve Higgins, an S.N.L. producer, observes, “When she got here she was kind of goofy-looking, but everyone had a crush on her because she was so funny and bitingly mean. How did she go from ugly duckling into swan? It’s the Leni Riefenstahl in her. She has such a German work ethic even though she’s half Greek. It’s superhuman, the German thing of ‘This will happen and I am going to make this happen.’ It’s just sheer force of will.”
As it turns out, the 669-page autobiography of Leni Riefenstahl—chronicling her time as Hitler’s favorite filmmaker and the creation of the propaganda movie Triumph of the Will—is one of Fey’s favorite (cautionary) books. “If she hadn’t been so brilliant at what she did, she wouldn’t have been so evil,” Fey says. “She was like, in the book, ‘He was the leader of the country. Who was I not to go?’ And it’s like, Note to self: Think through the invite from the leader of your country.”
Tina Fey speaks what she calls “less than first-grade” German and so does Liz Lemon of 30 Rock, which Fey thinks is fun because German is “so uncool.” (Lemon’s cell-phone ring is the Wagnerian “Kill da Wabbit” from Bugs Bunny’s What’s Opera, Doc?) Fey is a rules girl—“I don’t like assertions of status or line cutting”—and she’s made Lemon one, too. Far from the John Belushi model—the only drug packets scattered around S.N.L. these days are Emergen-C—Fey drinks sparingly, is proud that she has never taken drugs, and calls her husband’s ex–smoking habit “disgusting.”
Her true vice is cupcakes. I’ve brought her a box, one frosted with the face of Sarah Palin. She chooses that one, which is bigger, joking that it’s O.K. if she gains weight before her Annie Leibovitz photo shoot in a few days, because “Annie’s going to photograph my soul, right?” When it comes to her looks, she’s both forgiving and self-deprecating. “The most I’ve changed pictures out of vanity was to edit around any shot where you can see my butt,” she says. “I like to look goofy, but I also don’t want to get canceled because of my big old butt.” Frowning and rubbing the lines between her eyes, she adds that she might also tell the 30 Rock postproduction team, “‘Can you digitally take this out?’ Because I don’t have Botox or anything.”
Fey’s friend Kay Cannon, a 30 Rock writer, says that Tina has remained self-deprecating even as she has glammed up. “She’ll always see herself as that other, the thing she came from.”
Rules are Tina’s “Achilles’ heel in some ways,” Richmond says. “She’s half German, half Greek. That is just like loosey-goosey-crazy, and then you get, ‘Do the trains run on time?’” It is Fey’s fierce clarity about rules that allows Richmond to feel secure now that he’s suddenly in celebrity-magazine features with titles such as “I Married a Star” and is living with the woman the New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter calls “the sex symbol for every man who reads without moving his lips.”
“I know how she feels about some things,” Richmond tells me over coffee one day at an Italian place around the corner from his house. “Like, we never had to deal with any of this, but: adultery. Just looking at examples from other people’s lives, we know that anything like that, messing around, is just such a complete ‘No’ to her. And she has her principles and she sticks to her principles more than anybody I’ve ever met in my life. Like that whole idea of, if you are in a relationship, there are deal breakers. There’s not a lot of gray area in being flirty with somebody. She’s very black-and-white: ‘We’re married—you can’t.’” He calls their marriage “borderline boring—in a good way.” And she concurs: “I don’t enjoy any kind of danger or volatility. I don’t have that kind of ‘I love the bad guys’ thing. No, no thank you. I like nice people.”
“She used to wear crazy boots,” Richmond recalls, “knee-length frumpy dresses with thrift-store sweaters.”
Rip Torn, the wonderful 77-year-old actor who plays the C.E.O. of G.E. on 30 Rock, told me he was “gazing admiringly” at Fey one day, and she said, “I’m married, you know. I love my husband and I have a child.”
S.N.L.’s Amy Poehler has described Fey as “monastic,” the type who sits on the side and watches everybody else belly-flop in the pool, and then writes about it.
During cocktails at her apartment, I ask Fey, What’s the wildest thing you’ve ever done?
“Nothing,” she replies blithely.
Did she ever use the Sarah Palin voice to entice her own First Dude?
No, she said, but once, when she did a voice-over for a pinball machine in Chicago, she used an Elly May Clampett voice. “These critters need some attention,” she says in a soft southern drawl, giving her husband a sexy glance. She’s as pitch-perfect channeling Elly May as she is channeling Palin. “And that was the only time Jeff has kind of hinted that maybe I should talk like that all the time.”
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Last September, when Fey saw Mary Tyler Moore and Betty White giving out the Emmy for outstanding comedy series, she says, “I had this visceral thing of, like, I want them to gimme that! I want to get that from those ladies!”
And within moments 30 Rock was called and she went up onstage, glowing in a strapless eggplant mermaid David Meister gown, to take the Emmy from the two women who had provided the template for her own show. In fact, 30 Rock would rock the Emmys, tying the record held by All in the Family. Given her frumpy start in comedy and her wooden start on 30 Rock, it was a dazzling Cinderella moment (except for Fey’s purse getting stolen while she was onstage). She got her own slipper, writing and willing herself into the role, and the shoe wasn’t glass. It was a silver Manolo Blahnik.
“I don’t like my feet,” she says. “I’m not crazy about anybody’s feet. But I have flat feet.”
Liz Lemon sleeps in socks and tells Oprah she hates her feet. Robert Carlock, who wrote for S.N.L. and now is co-show-runner of 30 Rock, told me that Fey, too, is “not willing to have people see her feet. I come in to talk about scripts when she’s getting pedicures and have been summarily dismissed.” Jack McBrayer, the former Second City comic who plays Kenneth, the Goody Two-Shoes NBC page, laughs: “They’re normal feet. She’s just a loony bird.”
Fey has unleashed her inner Sally Bowles, the role she played in a student production of Cabaret at the University of Virginia. (Yes, she sings, too, with what she calls “a birthday-party-quality voice.”) Her makeover is the stuff of legend. The Hollywood agent Sue Mengers warned her pal Lorne Michaels that he simply could not bring Fey out of the writers’ room and put her on-air for “Weekend Update.”
“She doesn’t have the looks,” Mengers told him.
“Lorne brought her over to my house when she was head writer,” Mengers recalls. “She was very mousy. I thought, Well, they gotta be having an affair. But they weren’t. He just appreciated her talent. And now, suddenly, she’s become this sexy, showing-tit, hot-looking woman. I said to Lorne, ‘What the fuck did she do?’”
Far from holding Mengers’s brutal candor against her, Tina spent the Friday night before the Emmys hanging at Mengers’s house, thanked her when she won, and came back with Jeff the next day for a celebratory brunch. “She’s quietly smart,” Mengers says. “You know that she doesn’t miss anything, right down to the buckle on your shoe.”
Fey’s father (the German side) is an affable Clint Eastwood look-alike who loves reading books about comedy and often drives up from the Philly area to visit Tina and Alice on the set. (His artwork fills their apartment.) Fey’s acerbity comes from her mother (the Greek side), who has what Richmond calls “drag-queen humor—that bitter, extremely caustic kind of stab-you-in-the-heart humor.” Mrs. Fey played a weekly poker game with her friends. “I loved hanging out with the ladies, because they were very funny, and a little bit mean, and had lots of Entenmann’s products,” Fey says. There’s an additional legacy: “Because
of the Greek-girl thing, I have, like, boobs and butt,” so “I only have two speeds—either matronly or a little too slutty. I have to be steered away from cheetah print.”
30 Rock features many shots of Liz Lemon’s younger life, when she looks like a nerd in goofy clothes and frizzy hair. “I really wasn’t heavy in high school,” Fey recalls over lunch one afternoon at Café Luxembourg, where she dutifully switches her order from a B.L.T. to a salad. “But no one feels right in their own skin, particularly in high school.” Her love life in school was, she says, a “famine”: “I really didn’t have very many dates at all. And that’s not an exaggeration. But also, I don’t think we should discount the fact that unplucked eyebrows and short hair with a perm may not have been the best offering, either.” Liz Lemon tells Oprah on 30 Rock that she was a virgin until she was 25. Tina Fey confesses much the same to me, noting, “I remember bringing people over in high school to play—that’s how cool I am—that game Celebrity. That’s how I successfully remained a virgin well into my 20s, bringing gay boys over to play Celebrity.”
Adam McKay, the former S.N.L. head writer who hired Fey and taught her first improv class in Chicago, remembers one night when a bunch of comics were having drinks after a performance at the Upright Citizens Brigade. “I asked her who she lost her virginity to and she blushed, and I said, ‘Tina, I’m really surprised, who cares?’” He loved her “prim and proper” Philly reserve combined with the “chord of anger running through her humor,” the way she could throw down the fastest, meanest joke referencing everything from Allen Ginsberg to poop and still be shy.
That prude/lewd split personality had already been defined during her adolescence in Upper Darby, a suburb of Philadelphia, where, Fey says, she had “a dash of high-school bitchy,” as one of her S.N.L. skits described Palin. Her friend Damian Holbrook, a TV Guide writer who attended a nearby high school and whose first name she took for the gay character in Mean Girls, says she was like the Janis character in that movie, the sweet girl in an oversize Shaker sweater who didn’t run with the cool crowd or strut around to get guys, yet had the wit to burn the mean girls if she wanted to. Fey liked to watch The Love Boat and old Gene Kelly movies; she was involved in choir, theater, and the newspaper, for which she wrote a tart, anonymous column under the byline “The Colonel.” In middle school, she was a flutist, which came in handy for her imitation of Sarah Palin’s beauty-contest skills. She didn’t have great athletic ability but played tennis, and, citing Kay Cannon, says that team sports breed “a different kind of woman,” with a “game-on, let’s-do-it work ethic”; she hopes her daughter will grow up to play sports. (“I want Alice to play professional football.”) She also wants her daughter to go through “a character-building puberty” with some frizzy, zit-filled years. (“It’s going to be heartbreaking when we have to see that kid with a unibrow, when all that Greek stuff kicks in,” Richmond observes.)
Liz Lemon favors her right side. That’s because a faint scar runs across Tina Fey’s left cheek, the result of a violent cutting attack by a stranger when Fey was five. Her husband says, “It was in, like, the front yard of her house, and somebody who just came up, and she just thought somebody marked her with a pen.” You can hardly see the scar in person. But I agree with Richmond that it makes Fey more lovely, like a hint of Marlene Dietrich noir glamour in a Preston Sturges heroine.
“That scar was fascinating to me,” Richmond recalls. “This is somebody who, no matter what it was, has gone through something. And I think it really informs the way she thinks about her life. When you have that kind of thing happen to you, that makes you scared of certain things, that makes you frightened of different things, your comedy comes out in a different kind of way, and it also makes you feel for people.”
I wonder how the scar affected Fey in high school. “She wasn’t Rocky Dennis developing a sense of humor because of her looks, like in Mask,” says Damian Holbrook, laughing. Liz Lemon’s blustery Republican boss, Jack Donaghy, played with comic genius by Alec Baldwin, tells Lemon, “I don’t know what happened in your life that caused you to develop a sense of humor as a coping mechanism. Maybe it was some sort of brace or corrective boot you wore during childhood, but in any case I’m glad you’re on my team.”
Marci Klein—the cool, tall, blond executive producer of 30 Rock and producer of S.N.L., and the daughter of Calvin Klein—who was kidnapped for 10 hours when she was 11, remembers, “Tina said to me, ‘Well, you know, Marci, we had the Bad Thing happen to us. We know what it’s like.’”
Fey herself rarely mentions the episode. “It’s impossible to talk about it without somehow seemingly exploiting it and glorifying it,” she says. Did she feel less attractive growing up because of it? “I don’t think so,” she says. “Because I proceeded unaware of it. I was a very confident little kid. It’s really almost like I’m kind of able to forget about it, until I was on-camera, and it became a thing of ‘Oh, I guess we should use this side’ or whatever. Everybody’s got a better side.”
She used therapy to cope with her extremely fearful reaction to the anthrax attack at 30 Rock shortly after 9/11—the first time her co-workers had seen her vulnerable. The therapist talked to her about 9/11 and the anthrax delivered to Tom Brokaw’s office, linking them to the crime against her when she was little. “It’s the attack out of nowhere,” Fey says. “Something comes out of nowhere, it’s horrifying.”
I asked her how the childhood attack affected her as a mother.
“Supposedly, I will go crazy,” she replies evenly. “My therapist says, ‘When Alice is the age that you were, you may go crazy.’”
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Over coffee with Richmond, I ask him to describe Fey in her pre-glamour-puss days, back in Chicago. “She was quite round,” he says, “in a lovely, turn-of-the-century kind of round—that beautiful, Rubenesque kind of beauty.” And as for her clothes: “Things that didn’t match. She used to wear crazy boots. She would wear just a lot of knee-length frumpy dresses with thrift-store sweaters and kind of what was comfortable. It still looked kind of cool on her. I used to get all my suits in thrift stores, because I realized I was the size of little old men who were dying.” The five-foot-three-and-a-half Richmond says they bonded over hot veal sandwiches and their appreciation of “sarcastic humor and Garry Shandling shows.”
Fey recalls she was at her heaviest in Chicago and, later, sitting at a desk at S.N.L. “I’m five four and a half, and I think I was maxing out at just short of 150 pounds, which isn’t so big. But when you move to New York from Chicago, you feel really big. Because everyone is pulled together, small, and Asian. Everyone’s Asian.”
She saw herself on an S.N.L. monitor as an extra, “and I was like, ‘Ooogh.’ I was starting to look unhealthy. I looked like a behemoth, a little bit. It was probably a bad sweater or something. Maybe cutting from Gwyneth Paltrow to me.” She wanted to be “PBS pretty”—pretty for a smart writer. She called Jeff, who was directing a show at Second City in Chicago, and said, “O.K., I’m starting Weight Watchers.”
Fey says, “I got to that thing that’s so enjoyable where people tell you, ‘Oh, you’re thin, you’ve gotten too thin.’ Lorne was like, ‘Please, please make sure you’re eating.’” McKay recalls Fey telling a story about her heavier days. “Steve Martin walked right past her at the coffee table, and then, after the makeover, he was like, ‘Well, hel-looo—who are you?’”
The newly svelte Fey took over the “Weekend Update” anchor desk with Jimmy Fallon and made her name writing zingers for herself and jokes for Fallon, like this one about Demi Moore going with Ashton Kutcher: “Actress Demi Moore turned 40 on Tuesday, but she feels like a 25-year-old inside.”
30 Rock made its debut in 2006, with Washington Post critic Tom Shales acidly noting that Fey was “not Orson Welles.” I ask Baldwin if he coached Fey, whose acting background was improv and “Weekend Update,” on how to do longer-form comedy.
No, he says, only on what Richmond dryly calls “knockers shots.” “I would say things to her, never giving advice: she’s a woman you don’t easily give advice to—she’s very self-reliant. I’d say to her, ‘You know, you’re a really beautiful girl. You’ve got to play that. It’s a visual medium. This is not Upright Citizens Brigade, where we’re doing sketch comedy at nine o’clock at night on a Sunday for a bunch of drunken college graduate students. You are a very attractive woman and you’ve got to work that. You’ve got to pop one more button on that blouse and you’ve got to get that hair done and you’ve got to go! Glamour it up.’”
Ah, I say, so you’re the one who encouraged Fey to wear so many low-cut tops, even though Lemon seems like the crewneck-sweater type. “There is Liz Lemon and there is Liz Lemon as portrayed by a leading actress in a TV show,” Baldwin responds with amused and amusing disdain. “It’s not a documentary. Tina’s a beautiful girl. We needed to get the pillows fluffed on the sofa and we needed to get the drapes steamed, and we needed to get everything all nice and get the presentation just right. Tina always played the cute, nerdy girl. Tina on the news, the glasses. There was not a big glamour quotient for her. Now there is.
“The collective consciousness has said, ‘Tina, dahling, where have you been? Where on earth have you been?’”
30 Rock struggled at first. The network made Fey drop her old friend Rachel Dratch from one of the leads, and the show was locked in a sibling rivalry with NBC’s other show-within-a-show, Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Fey lured the viewers she craved only when she started moonlighting on S.N.L. as the look-alike Alaska governor who sometimes talks, as Fey puts it, as if she’s lost in a corn maze. Sarah Palin’s debut left conservative men salivating—“Babies, guns, Jesus: hot damn!” Rush Limbaugh thundered—and left Fey little choice. There had not been such a unanimous national casting decision since Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. Besides, she and Michaels knew it could be good for 30 Rock and S.N.L. Her Palin mimicry—with sketches written mainly by Seth Meyers—convulsed the nation and propelled S.N.L. into relevance again. The show got its biggest ratings since Nancy Kerrigan hosted in 1994, after having had her leg busted up by Tonya Harding’s henchman.
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