Right Where He's Supposed to Be

When Billy Crystal was in Moscow several years ago preparing a TV comedy special, he made a lunch date to meet the country's leading comic, a man named Gennadi Khazanov. Crystal got to the restaurant first, sat down at a table and kept his eye on the door as dozens of patrons trooped in. He had no idea what Khazanov looked like. Nor did he have any reason to think the Russian funnyman would dress funny or walk funny; this was the straitlaced dining room of a hotel on Red Square. Yet Crystal spotted Khazanov the moment he walked into the room.

How did he recognize him? Khazanov looked as outwardly normal as all the other men in the room, with a conventional coat and tie and a reasonably serious expression on his face. But he also had a thing. He walked in, as Crystal tells it, with this stage person's thing. He was revved up in the way comics get before they go on, nerve ends waving in the psychic breeze, eyeballs scanning the room in a "What have we got to work with here?" mode. Like identical twins, pod people or Stepford wives, comics can sense that mode in one another, and these two connected instantly. They discovered that they both walk for hours before going on stage. When Crystal asked whether Khazanov hated working when his family was in the audience, Khazanov smiled knowingly; and yes, he said, he was Jewish, too.

Crystal talks about his Moscow lunch in the context of his love of performers; he puts seasoned veterans of the stage right up there with great baseball players or violin virtuosos. Yet with the lunch table turned, he might just as well be describing himself.

Crystal, seen in a restaurant on the promenade in Santa Monica, where not long ago he joined the waiting line without complaint until a hostess recognized him and insisted on seating his party, or in an aisle of a Pacific Palisades supermarket, or at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, where he has long cheered the recently energized Clippers through thin and thin, looks as normal as key lime pie. On screen, in such comedies as When Harry Met Sally and last summer's runaway hit City Slickers, Crystal's become a certified star, but not at all in the bigger-than-life style of Hollywood's past. Likable as he is, hip and funny as he is, Crystal appears to be just about the same size as life, or even a few inches shorter. This also helps to explain his phenomenal success as host of the past three Academy Awards programs. It's a matter of human presence versus inhuman scale--a smart, lithe, spunky little guy standing up to a dinosaur of a show, climbing on board, getting the pea-brain monster moving with a few swift kicks and galloping off with infectious glee.

"This last one was his best even though he was feeling miserable," says Robin Williams, whose own metaphor for hosting the Oscars is riding a razor. "He's so comfortable with it now, everyone knows him and he knows exactly what to do and when to go off."

But Crystal, too, has his thing, and no wonder. At the age of 44, he's been performing for 41 years--it took him the first three to work up enough audition material for his parents. Offstage as well as on, he takes in a room, knows intuitively how to work it and speaks with utter confidence that he'll be heard. He listens generously and well, but sometimes he's so eager to jump in with a reply that it takes him a second to register all of (continued on page 158)Billy Crystal(continued from page 100) what's just been said. Along with the sweet, sometimes sentimental comedy that's become his hallmark--such as the scene in Cily Slickers where he attempts to rescue the drowning calf--he has been writing and developing innovative, often tougher pieces of work. Beneath that comfortable surface, he's always on red alert.

As the creator and co-writer of Sessions, an HBO venture that came and went in six all-too-brief episodes, he used psychoanalysis as the framework for a raunchy, shrewdly funny exploration of a modern male's life. On Comic Relief, the annual televised fund-raiser for this country's homeless, he has been strongly political. "What the fuck planet do you live on?" he asked George Bush on this year's show through the mouth of an old black man whose store had been burned in the Los Angeles riots.

Earlier this year Crystal directed his first feature, Mr. Saturday Night, and played the starring role, much of it beneath elaborate old-age make-up. The movie spans 50 years in the life of Buddy Young, Jr., the acidulous stand-up comic he created and played on cable in 1982, then on Saturday Night Live and more fully and furiously on the 1986 HBO comedy special Don't Get Me Started.

"Buddy is the angriest character I play." Crystal says. "He's a child, a big wrinkled child. He doesn't know how to roll with the punches, how to handle life. And he doesn't quite know what he's angry at. He's angry at it, at whatever it is that's not working, and his anger knows no boundaries. The movie goes back and forth in time a great deal, and it's an intimate character study of this man who spoils everything he touches: wife, family, career. It's every nightmare that I would have for myself."

A hunched, slow-blinking, vinegar-voiced old man in a tuxedo stands on stage clutching a microphone. He looks eerily familiar, the same way the old man did in 2001, when Keir Dullea opened the door of a Louis XVI room and saw his own future. We are not, to be sure, in some space-time continuum beyond the planet Jupiter. Rather, we're on location in a sunny recreation hall at Lake Malibu in California, where Mr. Saturday Night is shooting a scene that's supposed to take place in a Florida condo. Here Buddy Young, Jr., finds himself stuck at one o'clock in the afternoon with an audience of white-haired old men and blue-haired old ladies.

Yet there's a time-warp quality to this scene, too, for it predicts Crystal's facial future. According to the contours of the latex prosthesis that takes five or six hours to apply every morning, Crystal's nose at the age of 72 will have broadened, his lips will have thinned and his flesh will have strayed more than slightly from its skeletal moorings. Does it scare him to look at his older self on a TV monitor between shots, or in dailies on a larger, less forgiving screen? "Oh, that's a nut I chew on a lot," Crystal says with an uncertain grin. "Because it's not all that different from now."

Age doesn't make Buddy grin. It turns him sour and rageful, which drives his brother-manager to despair; Crystal describes Mr. Saturday Night as a comic's version of Raging Bull. In the scene being shot today. Buddy, ignoring his brother's plea to make nice with the audience, descends from the stage and heads for a little old lady on the aisle.

"Moses called," he tells her. "He said you're a great fuck."

The little old lady, part of a group of extras bused in from a Jewish community center in Encino, wants to be amused because she loves Billy Crystal as a man--as a mensch--but his character's cruelty leaves her gnuinely shocked. That's perfect for the logic of the scene. Crystal shoots several takes, changing the words a little, varying the rhythms and intonations: "Moses called. He said to tell you you're a great fuck." Or. "Moses called: he wanted me to tell you you're a great fuck."

Gradually the old lady's shock lessens into surprise, and then into indifference. She has become, God help us, a trouper. I'm still startled, though, every time the hostile old man with the mike turns to the director of photography, Don Peterman, and asks in Crystal's own buoyant, vibrant voice how the shot looked. And I'm baflled when another old lady walks up to the director and star between takes, surveys the sorrowful ravages of his face and says brightly, "You look great this way. You look like Paul Newman!" It's either cataracts or eternal hope.

Mr. Saturday Night resonates with Crystal's feelings about the great comedians he grew up with, such men as Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Carl Reiner and Ernie Kovacs, and with the sometimes ghastly, sometimes glorious folklore of the comic's trade. "I love comics so much," Crystal says. He then eagerly counts the ways his love was first expressed, and requited: staying up late as a preschooler to watch Caesar, staying up even later as a prepubescent to watch Winters on The Jack Paar Show and cutting out a picture of Me! Brooks and Reiner from The 2000-Year-Old Man album cover and carrying it like a talisman in his pocket.

Later, as Crystal made his own way through the minefields of stand-up, comedians came to see him. Some of them were people whose work he'd memorized and performed as a kid. "Bill Cosby started to come down and watch me at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, take me out afterward, talk to me about what I was doing. That meant a lot to me because he was such a big hero. Then I got to know Belushi pretty well, and Dylan came in a couple of times, and it felt like this is where I was supposed to be. 'You're supposed to be in front of a brick wall at the Bitter End, and talk.'"

On the journey from clubs to TV, Crystal hit some turbulence--he got bumped from the first Saturday Night Live and wasn't sure where he was supposed to be for several years thereafter. But with his gifts as a writer, performer and mimic, he became a mainstay on later editions of Saturday Night Live and populated his comedy specials with such characters as fatuous Fernando, catatonic Joe Franklin and the two aging Juniors. Sammy Davis and Buddy Young.

His inevitable next step was into features--as an actor in such films as Rabbit Test, Throw Mamma from the Train, The Princes Bride, Memories of Me. When Harry Met Sally and Running Scared, as a producer-performer-cum-minimagnate in City Slickers and now, in Mr. Saturday Night, as an artist in full control of his medium.

Here again, Crystal seems to have landed exactly where he was supposed to be--in the company of other comics turned film makers, people such as Woody Allen, Steve Martin and Albert Brooks, who have managed to create a little Golden Age of handmade movies in the midst of Hollywood's dross.

The picture took a huge physical toll--nine months from start to finish, five months in actual production, 83 shooting days, with 52 of them in the old-age make-up that left only enough time for three hours' sleep. By the end of production. Crystal's exhaustion had become a way of life. But so, too, had his role as a high-tech painter possessed with putting his vision on the screen. "I love every inch of it," he said. "I love touching every nook and cranny." As the shooting days dwindled to a few, Crystal began to think about the transition he would have to make, in a period of exactly three weeks, from wrapping his first feature as director and star to hosting the 64th Academy Awards show.

"It's so strange," he said during the last week of production, "thinking I've got to tell jokes. I've got to come up with jokes. It's like being a comedian."

What's deeply strange is how the Oscars have taken over Crystal's career. Here's a man who has spent most of his adult life developing himself as an artist, yet a single show of surpassing goofiness has made him one of the best-known celebrities on the planet.

This year especially. Crystal drew reactions and reviews that few performers would dare dream of. ABC News anointed him Person of the Week. "His comedy and class have made more than one marathon Oscar broadcast eminently watchable," said Peter Jennings. "Here is a man who will take chances in front of hundreds of millions of people."

Most viewers can still recall what he did in front of the cameras: his rat-a-tat of one-liners in his opening song--Did Barbra Streisand's movie direct itself?--that lent the show honesty as well as laughs. But the more you know of what went on backstage, of Crystal's state of mind and weakened body before the show, the more you're inclined to look back on his performance as a kind of public ecstasy, a comic's high that must have ranked with the highs of Olympic athletes going for the gold, gamblers breaking the bank or astronauts running rings around the moon.

During rehearsals on Sunday night, less than 24 hours before the show, he was miserably sick and getting sicker. Dressed in blue jeans, white sneakers, a black crewneck sweater and a navy blazer, he grabbed every chance he could to get off his feet. When I arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion around eight o'clock, I found him sitting in the dark on a piece of scenery, off to the side of the stage, sipping tea. A few minutes later, when a disembodied voice summoned him to rehearse the start of the show, he stood up, traded his blazer for a tuxedo jacket, hit his mark and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I have a horrible cold."

That was the understatement of the evening, and of the following day. What he had, in the wake of his numbing fatigue from Mr. Saturday Night, was a 103-degree fever and pneumonia. He'd been so sick over the weekend that the producer, Gil Cates, lined up Tom Hanks as a last-minute replacement; as late as Monday afternoon Hanks looked like a good bet to host the show.

"I can't stand up anymore," Crystal told Cates at two o'clock. "If I'm going to do the show in four hours, I can't finish the rehearsal."

He never did finish. Having already run through his musical number, which was what concerned him the most, he fell asleep and recharged his batteries enough to propel himself into the spotlight when the show went on the air. Once out there, he had plenty of jokes to fall back on. Crystal and a trio of writer friends--Bruce Vilanch, Robert Wuhl and Crystal's manager, David Steinberg (no relation to the comic of the same name)--had been generating new material for weeks, winnowing out the stuff that didn't work, stockpiling the stuff that did and compiling an enormous script that, like a football coach's playbook, allowed the host and his offstage cohorts to plug in clever plays and witty options in response to what was happening on stage.

Vet no amount of preparation could have anticipated Jack Palance's preposterously--and only semi-intentionally--funny acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor in City Slickers. The moment Palance started doing one-arm push-ups and puffing up his sexual prowess, Crystal felt a new kind of fever grip his body and clear his mind.

"When I came back out--we'd gone to commercial right after Jack won--I went to the podium, said Jack was a man of few words and went into this thing about how he's on the StairMaster at this point. Then I stumbled into the Ironman competition, I'm getting more laughs, and I say, 'We'll keep you posted,' and I'm getting screams, and I know I have it, oh, here we go!"

Offstage again, Crystal rushed to his writers and said, "We're gonna run with this." Immediately, they started searching for the next joke. "I go, All right, I did Ironman, there's this and this and this, what about bungee jumping, next one could be bungee jumping, what about that? Next time I go out, I say, 'Jack Palance is bungee jumping off the Hollywood sign.' Oh, big one, boom! I come off again, go to the guys. Bob Wuhl wants to run 'He's the sexiest man alive.' It's funny, we can use it later, but it isn't strong enough for now. Meanwhile, ten or fifteen little kids flying around the stage in the number from Hook, I'm going toward the podium, I turn to Bruce Vilanch and I go, 'He's the father of all these kids,' and Bruce cracks up. So when I got out there I just went, 'Jack Palance is the father of all these kids.' Oh, this gigantic laugh! It was fun! It was alive! I felt the line and it was exciting."

Three hours into the show, Crystal fell less alive. He thought he was going to pass out. "They had a nurse and a doctor standing by, and they took me to an office, and there's Paul Newman. He looks at me and says, 'You OK?'

"They lay me down, and Paul Newman is putting a pillow under my head, and they're giving me these sucrose drinks, taking my pulse and my blood pressure, and he's telling me how much he loved City Slickers. I mean, it's Paul Newman, and he looks great, he's telling me how good it is and I'm going to be OK, and he's feeling my head.

"They get me back into pretty good shape, and my heart rate is OK, so I go out again and I see this intro I'm supposed to read for Shirley MacLaine and posed to read for Shirley MacLaine and Liza Minnelli, a last-minute change I hadn't seen that makes absoluely no sense. I'm so tired, it's something about past lives, and I'm going, What is this? It's crazy!

"But that morning, when they picked me up at home, I'm reading the L.A. Times in the car as we're driving in and I see Bill Clinton's 'I didn't inhale,' and I think, I gotta say this tonight, this has to be my opening joke--didn't inhale. But I stay away from it, stay away from it, stay away from it. And, finally, at that point when I'm feeling high myself, it just came out. Didn't inhale. It was bold and it was funny and unexpected, because I was lost with this crazy intro, and it just flew out. That's how the whole show went for me this year."

For all you jazz fans out there, imagine sitting back in the good old days and listening to a band composed of Buck Clayton and Henry "Red" Allen on trumpets, Zutty Singleton on drums, Willie "the Lion" Smith on piano, Tony Parenti on clarinet, Tyree Glenn on trombone and Eddie Condon on guitar. What is it, you may ask, an all-star group assembled for a concert by Downbeat magazine? No, it is the band that played at Billy Crystal's bar mitzvah.

Jazz musicians were regular members of Crystal's extended family. His father ran the Commodore record shop, a jazz mecca on 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue, and his uncle co-founded Commodore Records, so Billy and his two brothers knew Billie Holiday as a babysitter as well as a singer, and their house, as he likes to recall, always smelled of brisket and bourbon: "There'd be Zutty Singleton at Passover going, 'Bitter herbs--do I eat this or smoke this?'"

No wonder, then, that Crystal's collection of comic characters includes the black clarinetist Face, which was Billie's nickname for him as a child, or that Crystal plays black characters without apology or hesitation--and often without make-up--but with great accuracy of ear and heart.

Yet music was only part of the loamy soil in which Crystal's comedy grew. He still beams when he recalls the living room of his grandmother's house, five blocks from his own, in Long Beach, Long Island. "It was the greatest room you'll ever . . . everyone has that room, I hope. As soon as you walked in, everyone's arms were around you, people loved you, you loved seeing them. It was a fantastic family that, like all families, had a lot of ups and downs, but they just loved one another. My mother didn't have many friends, she didn't need any, she had all of her family. So I think I couldn't have ended up any other way than the way I am."

Everyone doesn't have that room, of course, and Crystal's own happiness was shattered at the age of 16 by his father's sudden death from a heart attack. But the formative years before that seem to have been singularly sweet, and his memories of them clearly inform such work as his Midnight Train to Moscow comedy special, which began with him hearing funny voices à la Field of Dreams--"If you go there, take a jacket"--included a touchingly awkward encounter with a group of cousins and other long-lost relatives living in the Soviet Union and ended with a meeting on a Russian train between him and a radiant young woman, played by his daughter Jennifer, who turns out magically to be his grandmother Sophie at the age of 15, emigrating to the United States.

That's vintage Crystal--the sentimentality is unabashed, the sentiments are heartfelt. In a profession that bristles with angry, bitter performers, he sometimes seems like the last happy man. His work has been criticized for being too sweet, and he knows it. But he also knows who he is and how much he really cares about friends and family. "I've also been painted as being scared and obsessed about dying or getting older, but it isn't that at all. I just feel the pressure of liking what I'm doing and liking my life so much that I want as much of it as I can have in the time allotted to me.

"I've become more in touch with that as I turn around and see that Jenny's out the door, and my younger daughter Lindsay's gonna go in three years. I miss Jenny so much now that she's away, I miss them both when they're here. I miss times that blurred by because I was working so hard."

A couple of years ago, as the speaker at Jenny's high school graduation, he said a lot of smart, hip, funny things about youth, and his audience ate it up. But he wanted them to know why adults get gushy as they watch their kids move on, so he spoke with characteristic emotion: "When you have held a tush in your hand, or fallen asleep with a beating heart of an infant on your chest, you'll understand us."

That's Crystal, too. If Buddy Young, Jr., in Mr. Saturday Night is every nightmare he might have had for himself, Billy Crystal is the man that Buddy might have dreamed of becoming--a performer who parlayed a great start in his grandmother's living room into a rich, rewarding life.

"The living room is in the movie strongly," Crystal says, "and the memories of my brothers and me making people laugh. There was that, there was only that, getting laughs, it was the greatest thing, I loved to make my folks laugh. I can't analyze it. If you write that I need to be hugged and loved, fine, I have a good time doing it. I give a lot, I get a lot back."

"'Buddy is the angriest character I play. He's a big wrinkled child who doesn't know how to handle life.'"