Maybe We'll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star (2 page)

It’s not the kind of career most people think of when they decide they want to be actors. And it’s not the kind of career I expected when I started. But hey, it’s a living. In what other profession could I profit from being nervous and nebbishy?

What’s scary is how naturally these off-kilter parts come to me. On several auditions, directors have said to me, “Don’t be so pathetic,” when I had no idea I was being that. On more than one occasion, a show’s wardrobe person has said, “Okay, you’re playing the annoying, nervous guy,” looked at their racks of possible choices and then back at me and asked, “Could we use your own clothes? The way you are is perfect for the character.”

My knack for knowing how to dress like myself has an economic benefit: it entitles me to collect the union’s mandatory wardrobe fee. The first time this happened, I worried that I was costing the producers more money, but then I found out this fee was $11. I don’t know how they came up with the number eleven, but I’m sure negotiating that issue is what kept the entertainment industry shut down during the last brutal Screen Actors Guild strike. Now, whenever someone makes some snide comment to me that I don’t dress cool, I reply, “Thirty-three bucks it’s earned me, baby! Thirty-three bucks and counting!”

Getting cast on these shows is always a thrill, but I’m never around long enough to truly revel in it. Partly it’s because I’m not the kind of guy who gets cast as a genuine love interest for a main character. If I am connected romantically, it’s usually as a joke.

For me, being asked back isn’t a pipe dream. It has happened several times, including
The Nanny
(four times over four seasons),
Murphy Brown
(five times over six seasons),
Everybody Loves Raymond
(six times in six seasons), and
Suddenly Susan
(five times in two seasons).

But my longest consecutive stint was back in 1992 when I worked five weeks in a row on the little known show
Vinnie & Bobby
. That show starred a pre-
Friends
Matt LeBlanc in the role of Vinnie.

I’m well aware that not every actor can be Matt LeBlanc. To be out of work is to be in quite a massive company. In the Screen Actors Guild, 90 percent of the active members are out of work at any given time and 10 percent work for less than eight weeks a year. I consider myself lucky for the work that I’ve had. In baseball analogies, I’ve had lots of singles, but never hit that big home run.

To outsiders, not to mention most fellow comedians and actors, it looks like I’ve got it made. My credits are several pages long and every so often I get diminishing checks in the mail when my episodes are rerun. I’m thrilled to be working in a union where only 2 percent of the members work.

I have had some years where I have only worked once or twice. I am lucky (mostly in the last fifteen years) to have stayed afloat, but am still looking for that one situation that sticks, that one good working environment that will shelter me from the humiliation and rejection of auditioning or from the despair of not having any auditions at all. I’m trapped in a weird kind of showbiz sitcom purgatory—I get enough work not to quit, but never enough to feel I can take a deep breath and stop
struggling.

But, more than in almost any other profession, steady employment is hard to come by. After being around awhile I realized it’s completely out of my control. No matter how hilarious my guest spot is, I’m just servicing the show, and there’s a whole family of regular cast members, who have expensive contracts and story lines mapped out for them. So, now after I do a show, I try to forget about it and not worry whether the producers will bring me back. I try to relax, but I never do.

Being a perennial guest star is like being a foster kid being passed around some really great foster homes. I would love for one of them to keep me, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being abandoned.

It only began to dawn on me that I had a story to tell when I was trying to live through a horrible date, at which my patchy career and life were put under uncomfortable scrutiny. We weren’t really having any fun, and I couldn’t figure out why she had even agreed to go out with me, until she started her litany of questions.

“According to IMDb you’ve been on many different TV shows.”

I was weirded out. Sure, everyone researches prospective dates on the Internet—I’ve done it myself—but why was she broadcasting the fact?

“I saw you worked on
The Nanny
,” she continued. “Was Fran Drescher difficult to work with? I have heard that about her.”

I told her that Fran Drescher was very nice and tried to shift the conversation onto other things. Instead, she went right back to her research, as if I were an interview assignment. I don’t usually mind questions, but she was asking them in a clinical way. To her, I was just a private Learning Annex seminar on the sitcom guest star life. Her course was free and included the meal she was eating, a little too slowly for my comfort.

The topics I was asked to cover included: How do you become a guest star actor? How much money can someone make if he’s never been a regular on a show but has been on a lot of them? And most importantly, what’s it like to be near more interesting and famous people than myself? And of course, she wanted to know as much as possible about
Seinfeld
. Whether my answers were true or jokes, she just kept plowing ahead.

“On IMDb, I saw that in 1994 you wrote on
Seinfeld
. Why didn’t you continue there?”

“I wasn’t very good.”

“You have so many credits. I saw about sixty. But are you famous?”

“I’m actually seven credits short of being famous.”

But the Chinese restaurant interview still wasn’t over. She proceeded to assault me with such a barrage of questions I no longer even had time to answer.

“So, is this where you want to be in your career?”

“Why didn’t you pursue the writing? Can’t you make more money from that?”

“What TV show was your favorite to be on?”

“How’d you get into this?”

“Why weren’t you on
Raymond
more than you were?”

“Were you always funny? You don’t seem that funny now.”

“Do you have a time limit before you give up on show
business?”

Though I do have something of a masochistic streak when it comes to dating, even I have a time limit. So I got up, found the waitress and paid the check.

But a few days later, when surfing the net, memories of the date-interview spurred me to look up my page on IMDb (Internet Movie Database). There in chronological order were the seventy-plus appearances and my character names. I smiled as I recalled some of my favorite stops and cringed at some of the worst. There were a lot of stories to tell—and other stories that hadn’t made it to the official résumé: the great parts I didn’t get, the shows that never saw the light of day, all of the excruciating downtime, the tyrannical acting teachers, or all of the bizarre auditions. In a way, I started to understand why that woman had asked me all of those questions. I began wondering “How did I end up being this wandering TV actor?” And I realized when I stepped back from the daily anxiety that it’s been an amazing and hilarious journey through many of the best and worst shows of the past twenty years.

2

THE MAKING OF
A GUEST STAR

I
t isn’t hard to figure out how I ended up with a career as TV’s go-to schnook; it’s a role I was born to play. Looks-wise, I was always a stick figure. Even when I stopped growing at 6’1” I still weighed only 130 pounds. Picture a skinnier Jughead, only with
no
confidence. Anytime anyone passed me, I always flinched like I was going to get hit. Throughout my life people have had loads of fun raising their hand in the air to see me flinch—including my demented math tutor and a TV repairman. I was so shy I could barely make eye contact with a cat, or a photograph.

I loved TV and movies, but the world of show business was galaxies away from mine. I thought to be on TV you had to start real young, like the kids from
The Brady Bunch
. I envied these actors. I’d see the cast of
Welcome Back, Kotter
or
The Partridge Family
having fun and kidding around with each other on talk shows and
Battle of the Network Stars
. They seemed like they were a part of something important together and I wanted to have that too.

Truth is, I wasn’t brought up to dream big. I was raised in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, in a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood that consisted of rows and rows of identical two-family houses. On more than one occasion we’d hear drunken neighbors trying to insert keys into our door, thinking it was their home. The neighborhood was reminiscent of the one in
Saturday Night Fever
. I remember when the film came out that instead of everyone seeing how racist and small-minded it made them all seem, they strived to emulate the strutting, goombah-type it depicted, seeing it not as an indictment but as something to aspire to.

Growing up, there weren’t a lot of expectations for me to excel in life, especially from my mother who was constantly panicked, like a hooked fish flapping around on the dock. All I heard from her my whole life was: “It’s almost over,” which would often be followed up with: “What do I have left, fifteen, twenty years? It’s almost over!”

I’m pretty sure I’m the only nine-year-old who set up a lemonade stand and his mother reacted by panicking: “What if it goes under? Don’t do it, Freddie.”

She also panicked about my imminent rejection when I wanted to work at Burger King to earn my own spending money. “Yeah, right! Like they’re waiting for you!” she brutally informed me.

My mother never gave me any responsibilities. She wouldn’t even let me walk the dog, but then she’d make me feel guilty that my father was certainly going to have a massive heart attack for walking Bon-Bon, our neurotic French Poodle, in the cold. So once, when I was about twelve, I insisted that I walk Bon-Bon, but she blocked me at the door, yelling, “No, you don’t know how! It’s too hard for you.”

My one sibling Cindy, who’s six years older, was so detached from my parents that she never could bring herself to call them Mom and Dad; they were always Pearl and Morris. Cindy recently gave me her thoughts on why Pearl had such low expectations of me, but not of her. She theorized that since she did so well in school, Pearl figured, what was the chance that someone could have
two
children that were okay? “There has to be something wrong with one of them. I mean, what are the odds?” It was as if my mother had made up her mind before I was born that there’d be something defective with me.

I grew up petrified about my future. I had no faith that I had the necessary skills to become a grown-up with a daily job. My father’s life did not inspire confidence. He was a commercial artist who designed displays for department stores and each day he’d spend almost two hours in rush hour traffic driving to work from the outskirts of Brooklyn to Manhattan and back. He’d always come home and sit two feet away from the TV with a martini in his hand. But, for some reason, he never sat facing the TV. He always sat parallel to it. It looked to me like he was going to have a drag race with the set.

My father never talked. He was able to. He wasn’t mute, but he hardly spoke more than two sentences in a row. When my mother would go hysterical, my father would just withdraw by pretending he was reading. One time he just stared at a blank calendar for about fifteen minutes. Another time, I swear he spent ten minutes reading a matchbook cover. My mother, on the other hand, talked and screamed more than enough for both of them. I’d tell her I was going to Coney Island and she’d scream “It’s so rough there! You’ll come home in a box! Morris, say something! Say something to him!”

For the longest time I took her words literally and really believed that if you were murdered, they’d bring you back home in a coffin. I then wondered, if your parents weren’t home, would they leave you by the door waiting for them to return?

Truth is, I favored the non-entity of my father over the constant noise of my mother. The most I ever saw him stand up to my mother was one night when my family was walking home after seeing the movie,
Charly
, about a mentally challenged man who is only briefly cured with an experimental drug. We stopped at a newsstand so my parents could buy the Sunday
New York Times
. (I’ve never understood why the Sunday
Times
kept coming out earlier and earlier on a Saturday night.) But anyway, we waited on line and, for some reason, I was handed the big, bulky paper. And then, for some reason, I dropped it. It didn’t fall apart or anything disastrous. But as the paper hit the ground my mother screamed at me, “You’re just like Charly!” I saw my father flinch and his face scrunched in distaste at my mother’s comment. This was the best stance I’d seen from him, and as inconsequential as it seemed, I appreciated it.

It’s unfortunate I never had the over-compensating “
I’ll show them! I can do anything in the world!”
instinct. Instead, I just bought into all of my mother’s fears and self-doubt. She resented pushy, nervy people, and later admitted it was because she secretly wished she could be more pushy and nervy. I may have inherited that same disdain/envy for the annoying pushy go-getters.

I don’t mean this to be an indictment of my mother. She tried her best, but she was saddled with many worries that she passed onto me with the highest anxiety. There were some incidents of generosity and support that I did appreciate. I feel it’s only fair I mention some of those. Although she put up a fight, I did get to keep up with the fad of high-end sneakers my peers were buying. It must have been hard for her to understand. I was part of the generation that had that sudden expensive jump from regular Converse sneakers to $40 Walt Frazier Puma
Clydes.

And she had a jovial side. It might have been something that tickled her that she displaced on me, but anytime a monkey came on TV, she’d scream for me to watch it and laugh hysterically how much the monkey amused me, even though I don’t remember loving the monkey as much as she did. And she stuck up for me when I was literally left out in the cold. One day, when I was around fifteen, I came home from school and realized I’d forgotten my key. It was winter and I’d also forgotten my gloves. I headed down the street thinking my friend Hal would be home and we could hang out until my mother returned. Hal’s mother opened the door and told me Hal wasn’t there. “Okay, can I hang out in his room till he gets back?” I asked.

“No,” she answered without a thought and closed the door.

I walked home and paced in front of my house, trying to keep warm. When my mother got back, she was livid when I told her Hal’s mother wouldn’t let me wait there.