It's All About Timing

By BRUCE HANDY/LOS ANGELES

Visiting Jerry Seinfeld's home in the Hollywood Hills, one finds that the benefits of being a top television performer are readily apparent: even the three Porsches in his smartly tiled garage--two vintage, one a 1997 Turbo S--have a view of all Los Angeles. This is thanks to a picture window cut into the garage's wall. Yes, it's nice to be a TV star's car, just as it's nice to be a TV star (Seinfeld owns an additional 60 or so cars, not all of them Porsches, which he warehouses in an airport hangar in Santa Monica). And now that even Mikhail Gorbachev has begun doing commercials for Pizza Hut, it seems pointless to argue with the medium that so dominates our lives and culture. Most of us threw in the towel long ago. But not Jerry Seinfeld. While the rest of America has been off getting college credit for studying Silver Spoons, the star, one of the executive producers of the situation comedy that bears his last name, is unafraid to bite the hand that feeds him.

"It's a habitual medium," he says matter-of-factly during the course of a long afternoon and evening's interview. "Most people aren't really entertained. What they need is they need to watch TV. Entertainment is almost a luxury item." As the day wears on, Seinfeld returns to the subject, this time even more adamantly: "Television is like a flyer somebody sticks on your windshield. Who gives a damn what's on it? It's iridescent wallpaper. Sometimes I think people just like the light on their faces."

That last comment comes in the context of Seinfeld's irritation with critics who have complained that the show is "off" this season; the fact that critics care enough to carp about a mere TV show, he feels, is both ridiculous and a tribute to the level of quality Seinfeld, the show, has maintained over its nine seasons. Consequently, Seinfeld, the person, has been even more perplexed and flattered by the outpouring of national grief that came with the Christmas announcement that his show would be pulling its plug even though it is currently the nation's top-rated sitcom, even though it is as popular and lucrative as ever, even though the audience has not yet tired of the self-absorbed lives of Jerry, Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), George (Jason Alexander) and Kramer (Michael Richards). This, of course, is not the way successful television shows are supposed to end.

Everyone knows they usually wind up sliding into irrelevancy and dwindling ratings amid desperate plot contrivances, like marriages and multiple births, and, in some sad cases, an irritating self-importance that increases in opposite proportion to the shows' declining popularity (bye, Roseanne). But here was someone who could have been paid regally for just phoning it in for another year or two willing instead to throw that all away--astounding in the same world that won't stop giving us Family Matters.

Aided by the dearth of much real news over the holidays, the nation's papers and airwaves filled themselves with pleas from mourning fans for Seinfeld to reconsider and speculation from any media buyers still in their offices about how NBC would survive the loss of the most profitable show on television. SAY IT AIN'T SO! reads the cover of this week's PEOPLE, which goes on to add, with only half-mock portentousness: "A stunned nation prepares for life without Seinfeld." In New York City, where the show is set and where numerous cottage industries--indeed, a whole Seinfeld-based economy--have sprung up around real-life counterparts to the show's fictional characters and locations, grief was especially poignant.

NBC knew it would eventually lose the show (see following story), but executives had hoped to persuade Seinfeld to stick with it for one more year. Though the comedian had already told his co-stars of his intentions, Seinfeld and his managers, Howard West and George Shapiro, gathered in New York City the Sunday before Christmas for a final hearing with Robert Wright, president and CEO of NBC, and Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of General Electric, NBC's parent company. The discussion lasted two hours at Wright's Central Park West apartment. "What made me want to come back," Seinfeld says, "was how much they believed in me. That was the sum and substance of our meetings. Because they know that's all I care about, the quality of the show."

In an effort to prove Seinfeld still had creative life in it, Wright and Welch gave Seinfeld a formal presentation titled "Seinfeld: A Broadcast Phenomenon," full of neat and colorful charts--SEINFELD MORE DOMINANT THAN EVER--demonstrating that, unlike most shows that reach a ninth season, Seinfeld's audience was still growing, at least in the only demographic category that matters, adults ages 18 to 49. In a particularly sneaky appeal to Seinfeld's ego, the presentation included a graph showing his show's gains over the past five seasons, in contrast to the losses for fellow stand-up Tim Allen's Home Improvement on ABC.

There were carefully calibrated emotional appeals too. "Jack Welch told me this was one of the products GE is most proud of," Seinfeld says. Rather than be concerned that his show was being lumped in with light bulbs and missile parts, the comedian was moved. "That affects me," he says. "I like that the people who own the show take pride in it." The meeting ended warmly but inconclusively. Seinfeld and his managers continued to talk, walking around the city's Upper West Side, discussing pros and cons. They returned to Los Angeles that night without having made a final decision.

Despite the many interested parties, everyone says the answer rested solely with Seinfeld--as he puts it, "This was between me and the show." The decision, when it finally came, was based on one of those peculiar divinations that Seinfeld thrives on. "I felt ... the Moment. That's the only way I can describe it," Seinfeld explains in the tone of voice the TV Jerry might use to delineate a date's faux pas. "I just know from being onstage for years and years and years, there's one moment where you have to feel the audience is still having a great time, and if you get off right there, they walk out of the theater excited. And yet, if you wait a little bit longer and try to give them more for their money, they walk out feeling not as good. If I get off now I have a chance at a standing ovation. That's what you go for."

Most times, of course, you also go for money. But Seinfeld insists recompense was not a consideration despite NBC's reported offer of an unprecedented $5 million a show if he would return for another season. Seinfeld refuses to confirm the figure. "I don't really care about the money," he insists. "In my business, the only way you get as much money as I have"--Forbes put his earnings last year at $66 million--"is if you don't care about money and you care about comedy; then somehow you end up with money. I'm not the kind of person who could do a show and think, 'Well, we've kind of run out of gas here, but the money's great and the ratings are still good, so let's keep grinding them out.' It would break my heart."

Two days after his meeting with Welch and Wright, Seinfeld phoned Wright and gave him the news personally. Telling his co-stars had been a more loaded proposition, given their bonds as an ensemble and the fact that while Robert Wright still has a job, Michael Richards, for one, soon won't. Complicating things further was the fact that Richards, Alexander and Louis-Dreyfus had only recently received huge raises after a much publicized and, by some accounts, bitter holdout before the start of the current season. Their meeting took place Dec. 17 in Seinfeld's dressing room, where the cast traditionally assembles before the last taping of the calendar year to take stock of things. "It was pretty heavy, pretty wild," recalls Louis-Dreyfus. "There were no tears shed, but there was a lot of heart thumping." Seinfeld was relieved to find the cast agreed with him: "They just started making good money last year, but they were generous enough to respect the timing of the curve--not that they could have talked me out of it, I don't think."

There was no question in anybody's mind when the four of us sat down that it was time to go," agrees Alexander. Richards says the sheer exhaustion involved in making the labor-intensive show was a factor: "I've been taking note of how everyone was working and the difficulties of maintaining the show each week. It was becoming work, real work, and we were losing our sense of play. After 12 episodes, Jerry was weary. To think about coming back and doing another year--he doubted he could. And he never wanted that weariness to affect the show. That was his greatest fear."

As Seinfeld is the first to admit, it's been an impressive and improbable run for a show he has famously said is about nothing, which, of course, is charmingly disingenuous. Because if Seinfeld--arguably television's first genuine comedy of manners since Leave It to Beaver--is about nothing, then so are the works of Jane Austen and Noel Coward. If Seinfeld seems trivial, it is only because manners have so devolved over the course of our century. Like the rest of us, the show's overly analytic foursome must pick their way through an increasingly chaotic social battlefield, forced to write their own etiquette for even the most insignificant encounters. And then there are the big questions, like what do you do when your girlfriend suggests sharing a toothbrush?

But aside from jokes about masturbation and oral sex, the fundamental difference between Seinfeld and Pride and Prejudice, say, is that Seinfeld in its heart of hearts is concerned with avoiding romantic attachment, with repulsion (and its twin, self-loathing)--the starkest example being George's relief when his fiance dies licking the envelopes of cheap wedding invitations. The supposed callousness of that episode, a season finale, received more criticism than any other, but Seinfeld is unrepentant. "I think if I had to do it again," he confesses, " I would have had George do a worse job of containing his glee. It would have been funnier if he'd really lost it." Never before has television been host to such unreconstructed misanthropy. As Larry David, the show's co-creator and longtime guiding light, once quipped, if the show had a motto it was "no learning, no hugging."

Just as Seinfeld is quick to give his co-stars and collaborators the lion's share of credit for the show's success ("My real talent," he says, "is in picking people"), he is loath to ascribe any cultural significance to Seinfeld, even while in a somewhat valedictory mood. The show's aims, he insists, are entirely unpretentious: "I really aspire to The Abbott and Costello Show. That's my favorite sitcom. We walk down the street and bump into Bania, the bad comedian, the way Lou Costello would bump into Stinky, and then a scene comes out of it. That's classic. It's burlesque." One quickly learns that Seinfeld, like most comedians, can talk about comedy endlessly and with great depth of knowledge of both its history and its craft. He refers almost mystically to "the funny" and cites old masters: "Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the purest element. It can't be improved upon as a substance. It's impervious to style, to time. That's the only significant thing about this show: it's funny."

Because of that one undeniable truth, Seinfeld finds himself in the curious position of facing, at a relatively tender age (43), a sort of retirement. In this regard, you could say Jerry Seinfeld is the Bill Clinton of comedy, the boy wonder as lame duck, if only, that is, Seinfeld were more desperate to be loved. Instead, he is the same affable fellow with the slightly snarky finish that he plays on TV. "I've never had much interest in being liked," he offers. "And I think people like that. It's a relief. So many people want to be liked." Sitting on a large green sofa in his living room, dressed in the professional funny person's uniform of jeans, sneakers, T shirt (and optional Oxford shirt, unbuttoned), surrounded by exactly the kind of stuff a Long Island high school kid from the '60s might buy if he grew up to be a multimillionaire--car models, superhero models, Mets memorabilia, a mint-condition Schwinn Sting-Ray--Seinfeld comes across as a relatively contented man, perhaps the first self-actualized comic in history.

With 10 shows left to shoot, Seinfeld won't reveal much about how he plans to end Seinfeld--indeed he claims not to have figured it out himself except that he knows what the final episode's final moment will be. "It's not a big thing," he says of the finale. "It's the shoelace that comes undone in the men's room and touches the floor. That's the kind of mood I'm looking for." So Jerry and Elaine won't be getting married, as some fans have speculated. "Nah," Seinfeld says, pained, "that's not the show." (David, who left after the 1995-96 season, has been asked to come back and write the finale.) One surprise Seinfeld will reveal is that the last half-hour episode will be paired with a one-hour mock documentary about its making. Another concrete plan is that one of the final episodes will be shot on location in New York City--a first for the L.A.-based production. Though the question of spin-offs is out of Seinfeld's hands--Castle Rock, the show's production company, owns the rights to the characters--he and the rest of the cast swear they won't participate in, say, Everyone Loves Elaine or Kramer the Vampire Killer. (As for a future reunion show along the lines of the one planned for next season with Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper reprising their characters from Moore's old show, Seinfeld recoils--"Good God!"--then pauses to consider the idea. "Well, maybe by then they'll have engineered the lenses that can take it."

Unlike most contemporary comedians whose entire careers are pointed toward the San Fernando Valley's sound stages, Seinfeld says he relishes returning to life on the road as a stand-up comic, which he claims as his true vocation, the "noblest endeavor." He plans to tour Europe and Australia this summer and then spend a week on Broadway filming an HBO special titled I'm Telling You for the Last Time; it will mark the last time he performs his current act. It's a kind of self-imposed trick, he says, to force him to write and perform new material. "I would like to be considered a great comedian. I don't think I'm there yet." Who is? "Richard Pryor. Bill Cosby. I haven't gotten personal enough yet to be considered great by my definition. That's what being great is, doing material only you could do and no one else. It's about getting to my truer inner feelings about things." Asked what kind of things, he offers, thoughtfully, "Breast implants."

Clearly he's not ready to start opening up his veins in public just yet. When asked if he's been seeing anyone romantically after breaking up with his longtime girlfriend Shoshanna Lonstein last year, Seinfeld--after ribbing the reporter who dutifully if reluctantly posed the question--responds only with an old joke from Larry David's stand-up act: "I'd like to start a family, but you have to have a date first." Having already sold his L.A. home, he's planning to move back to New York City and open up a small production company, more about which he won't reveal. Beyond that, the tour and the HBO show, his post-Seinfeld plans are vague. He variously claims that he'd like to do a movie someday; that he'd be open to returning to television, not in another sitcom but maybe a talk show; that he plans to pretty much take the next couple years off and just recuperate from the rigors of producing, writing and starring in Seinfeld.

"I don't really live here," he points out, gesturing around his spacious kitchen. "I get home at 10. I'm asleep by 10:30. I get up at 6, have a little exercise, then I'm back at the office." Though he's famous for his love of cereal, a peek at his pantry shows the dates on his cereal boxes--health-food brands, by the way--to be nearly expired; he eats at the office. He claims never to go to restaurants, to have no time to watch television or read the papers (except for reviews--he claims he's read them all), and to have seen only one movie last year (Titanic). "I'm not out in the world," he says. "I missed the whole '90s. I don't know what happened."

Given the fact that it seems to be his entire life, will he be sad when Seinfeld is all over? No, he says, then reconsiders. "I was sad the last few days. I saw an old Odd Couple rerun, and it was all yellow. You know those old shows--why are they all yellow? And then I thought, this is what my show is now--a re-run. It's not going to be a living thing anymore." No. Welcome, Jerry, to the land of TV's undead. One senses there's a routine there somewhere.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell and Jeffrey Ressner/ Los Angeles