Mad About Paul

Something is wrong here.

Look straight ahead: There is the Pacific Ocean, pale gray and restless under an overcast California spring sky. Dolphins cavort as small waves break on the white-sand beach that Steven Spielberg and Johnny Carson and lots of other famous people greet every morning. Turn around and you'll see a typical house in the Malibu Colony, as exclusive a patch of real estate as can be found along this coastline. Inside are white walls, pale wood floors, overstuffed off-white furniture, pastel paintings and vases of fresh flowers.

And right here, standing in jeans and a flannel shirt, is Paul Reiser. He's what doesn't fit. Sure, he's the star, co-creator, producer and sometimes writer of a hit television show, Mad About You, which means he can live just about anywhere he wants. But to those of us who feel as if we know Reiser--and that pretty much includes everybody who watches the show--it seems that he really ought to be in, say, a New York delicatessen. Or a nice apartment in Lower Manhattan, like the one in Mad About You. If he has to live in Los Angeles, you figure it would be in the hills somewhere, not the Malibu Colony.

But it's every bit as odd that Reiser has become our new favorite funny, smart, neurotic, likable leading man, a hero for people who prefer their television shows to be a little smarter, more stylish and more sophisticated than Family Matters or even Home Improvement. After all, this is the man who spent three seasons mouthing hoary sitcom clichés in My Two Dads, co-starring with that guy from B.J. and the Bear. He's spent much of his film career being mistaken for Peter Riegert while acting in movies as woeful as The Marrying Man, Cross My Heart, Crazy People and Sunset Limousine. And his observational and proudly neurotic stand-up comedy once seemed to make him little more than a backup Jerry Seinfeld or Richard Lewis.

Suddenly, he's one of the coolest and sharpest guys on television. Mad About You walked away with seven Emmy nominations. You have to wonder: Has Reiser always been hipper than the room? Was he this smart all along and we just didn't know it? Does he really belong in the Malibu Colony?

I find the answer to the last of those questions when I poke around his house and ask him about one of the paintings. "I don't know anything about it," he says, shrugging. "We're just renting. My wife and I have a house in the hills, but we got tired of finding all the hotels booked when we would decide to go away on Friday afternoon. So we rented this house for a month, and then another month. It's a good place to bring journalists, because it's all beige and none of it's mine."

This, by the way, is not exactly true: The upright piano belongs to Reiser. It's the only black thing in the house, as far as I can tell. It doesn't match the decor. Draw from this whatever conclusion you will.

•

Let's pause for a love story. Reiser doesn't usually like to get personal, but he doesn't mind if you hear this particular one.

Paul's wife's name is Paula. Yes, they know the song Hey Paula, by Paul & Paula. A florist once thought it was so cute that he put a copy of the record in a bouquet Paula sent to Paul.

They met when Paul was playing a comedy club in Pittsburgh and Paula was working her way through college. "There's this really cute waitress you should meet," said the club's owner, though he'd never met Paul and barely knew Paula. They met and Paul was speechless. "I thought she was beautiful and absolutely spunky and smart and funny and wonderful." They started a long-distance relationship. Comedian friends of Paul's would play the club, and she'd introduce herself as Paul's girlfriend. "The other comics would go, 'Yeah, sweetheart, sure you are," says Paul. "Because they knew the kind of dogs they were, and they were thinking, Isn't that pathetic? This cocktail waitress spent some time with a comic and now she thinks she's going out with him."

After six years, they were married. (In the meantime she finished school, moved to Los Angeles, got her Ph.D. at USC and started practicing psychology.) And besides Paul and Paula's six years of marriage, there is another happy result of this love story. "As one of our friends told me," says Paul, "the fact that we got married will keep comics getting laid on the road for 50 years."

He shrugs magnanimously. "You do what you can to help those who come after you."

•

Mad About You is a love story, too, about a 30ish, recently wed couple named Paul and Jamie Buchman. Paul has a good, creative job, they have an implausibly large apartment, a terrific dog named Murray and brains that lead them into spirited, witty conversations. Exploring the interactions, negotiations and accommodations that invariably take place with a young married couple, Mad About You is now in its third season.

And while it may have had lackluster ratings when it debuted following Seinfeld, the show survived a first-season exile to Saturday night, then unexpectedly flourished after a subsequent move to Thursday at eight P.M. In the process, it helped NBC regain its hold on that night, which had slipped when Cosby and Cheers checked out and The Simpsons got hot on Fox. Now it's entrenched in the old Cosby spot, leading off the network's signature night with style.

"Thirtysomething, but shorter and funnier" is how Reiser and co-creator and executive producer Danny Jacobson pitched the show to NBC. But lots of other comparisons have been made. "When the history of classic TV marriages is written," wrote Manuel Mendoza in the Dallas Morning News, "the Buchmans will be right up there with the Ricardos, the Kramdens and the Petries. And although Mad About You has yet to embed itself in the collective memory like its Golden Age predecessors, it's been decades since a sitcom captured marriage as accurately--and as humorously."

Most often, though, Mad About You has been compared not to other shows about marriage but to another situation comedy starring another neurotic stand-up comedian: Seinfeld. Reiser isn't offended by the comparison. After all, he and Jerry Seinfeld are longtime friends who, together with comics Larry Miller and Mark Schiff, have had lunch together every New Year's Day for more than 15 years. Their immovable feast has become enough of a legend that they have turned down the chance to make a television movie about it.

But the comparisons are irksome, too, because Mad About You traffics in an area Seinfeld steadfastly avoids: the emotional pitfalls, trapdoors and bonuses of a committed relationship. You might think that this is because Seinfeld has been unmarried and unattached for most of his career, while Reiser has been married for six years to the woman he had been dating for the six years before that. But to make a connection this schematic would imply that Paul Reiser is Paul Buchman, an implication Reiser resists.

Sure, they look alike. They dress alike, in jeans, T-shirts, flannel shirts and the occasional blazer. They talk alike. They obsess about trifles and make various wry observations about things that annoy or amuse them. They have friendly brown dogs. They play the piano, though not often in public. They have talented, intelligent and sexy wives.

But Paul Buchman's wife, played by the talented, intelligent and sexy Helen Hunt, has blonde hair; Reiser's wife is a brunette more on the order of Teri Hatcher, who was in the running for the role. And there are other things that make Reiser different from Buchman. He loves to take a good line, or even a mediocre line, and repeat it endlessly: After he spotted Jerry Vale in the lobby of his accountant's office, he said, "Put it on Jerry Vale's account" so often that one uncomprehending assistant finally took him aside and said, "This isn't the first time you've used that line, you know."

He briefly considered making his living writing commercial jingles. He has the unerring ability to focus on the bad parts in any review of his work. In an episode titled "Paul Is Dead," in which his character is mistakenly declared dead, he did a scene without shoes as a reference to Paul McCartney's attire on the cover of the Beatles album Abbey Road. He sends notes to people whose work he enjoys. When his jokes bomb, one of his favorite responses is, "See, I find that funny, and you, less so."

And while he admits to strip-mining his personal life for material, he has his limits. "The truth is," he says, "if it's something really personal, I wouldn't tell anybody where it came from. It's hard for me to feel that I'm a stickler about privacy when so much of my life ends up in the show. But at the same time, it's the difference between admitting I'm a person who goes to the bathroom, which is fine, and having people walk in the door and hear flushing and see me drying my hands on my pants. Then they know that I just came from the bathroom. I'm not pretending that I don't go, but that's just, like, too personal."

•

"Look," says Reiser, happily. 'Jon Lovitz is giving me the finger."

We've just walked into Granita, a Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Malibu. The place is trendy but the food is good, says Reiser, who somehow looks as if he belongs in this artsy room where everybody recognizes him and the most famous guy in the place salutes him with an obscene but good-natured gesture.

"I used to be a great orderer in restaurants," he says after greeting Lovitz and sliding into a booth. "In fact, this is going back a while, but it's probably the only area in my life in which Seinfeld would surrender to me. He would put his menu away and say, I'm not even going to bother. I'll have whatever you're getting.' I was very proud of that, and then I hit a slump. For many years I would just order bad. And now I'm slowly getting it back."

He lowers his voice. "Here's a personal thing," he says. "The right food can make me happy in a way that is almost embarrassing. I suddenly go, 'Ooh, life is good.' Why? Because the soup is really nice."

And does the wrong food make him cranky?

"I don't quite notice it," he says. "Actually, I noticed the other day that I was eating cereal that wasn't good. It was hard and all stuck together, and I thought, How good should cereal be? But then my wife said, 'There's a fresh box.' And I opened the fresh box and went, 'Wow, that's really good.' I didn't even notice until it was pointed out to me. And that's actually a consistent theme with me: I don't notice when something is wrong, or I don't have the energy to fix it. I may be sitting on the remote control, but I either don't notice it or don't care until my wife says, 'Get up.'"

This is a typical Reiser monolog. He's a charming conversationalist who rambles and gives small glimpses into his life but always returns to his TV show, which he champions to the point of what could be construed as arrogance, except for his light and self-deprecating touch. Then he'll stop, frown and say, "Am I the most boring person in the world?"

He isn't, of course. If he were, Bantam Books would not have asked to (continued on page 98)Paul Reiser(continued from page 92) publish his musings, Couplehood. Or maybe it would have, simply because it'd already made so much money from Jerry Seinfeld's musings. "That had an enormous amount to do with it," Reiser quickly concedes. "It's the same publisher, the same literary agent and the same editor. I suppose that's why I resisted it at first. Every blurb about the book is 'Seinfeld did a book, now Reiser's doing a book.' But they asked me. And also, if I'm not mistaken, Jerry wasn't the first person to write a book. I believe James Joyce did one. I know for a fact Mark Twain wrote a couple.

"I think that my book is distinctive from Jerry's book," he continues, "in the same way that our shows are distinctive. It's couple-oriented and not as jokey."

He frowns. "And jokey wasn't a slight of Jerry's show, by the way. I'm continually astounded by how great his show is. I watched it last night and thought, Jesus, they're great, just brilliantly creative and ambitious. My wife and I were at the beach this morning, lost in thought, and I said, 'Where are you?' She said, 'Just thinking about my office. I don't like where the chair is. Where are you?' I said, 'I was counting how many sets Seinfeld used last night.'"

And has he seen the episode of the animated television series The Critic in which the main character, voiced by Lovitz, walks past a movie marquee that reads Seinfeld, The movie, starring Paul Reiser?

"No, did it say that?" he says. "Really? I didn't know that." He looks puzzled. "Is that good or bad? Is that a swipe? Is that neutral?"

Well, he could take it as neutral, or he could take it to mean that they consider him a second-string Seinfeld.

"I'm not comfortable with those kinds of things," he says. "I assume there's something bad to it. And that angers me. I've been friends with Jerry for 15 years, and we have a similar sense of humor. In fact, there are a lot of things that his show broke ground doing that I wouldn't have had the courage or the conviction to execute. Are there similarities between my sensibilities and Jerry's? Sure. Are there similarities between our shows? Sure. But to say that we copy Seinfeld is so offensive, because we try hard to shy away from that. Ours is an emotional show, which is something that Jerry proudly avoids. So any kind of comment like that just belittles all the fucking hours and heart and emotion that go into making the show as good as it can be."

He stops, takes a deep breath and grins. "So fuck Jon Lovitz."

•

He could have been a mogul. He should have been a mogul, if you asked Sam Reiser.

Paul's father was a mogul. He'd gotten into health food wholesaling in his 20s--"not because he was particularly health-conscious," says Paul, "but because it was a business that somebody thought would work." It did: In the mid- to late Sixties, when Paul was entering his teens, Sam Reiser's business boomed, branched out, bought other companies and became a successful national enterprise.

All along, Paul was Sam's designated successor. But as a kid in New York City, Paul was drawn to comedy: Frank Gorshin on The Ed Sullivan Show, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner's 2000-Year-Old Man records, David Steinberg, Robert Klein and George Carlin. But even after he had started performing, Paul worked for his dad. "He said, 'Take a year and get the comedy out of your system,'" says Paul. "But even then he said, 'But as long as your afternoons are free, you might as well come in and learn something.'"

After a year of comedy, Sam Reiser intervened. "He said, 'It's time to let it go,'" says Paul. "And he sent me to Oklahoma to learn the business from the ground up. It was the first time I was ever really alone, and I couldn't get enough of it. I was able to hear my own voice, and I found myself not homesick for friends or girlfriends but homesick for comedy. I actually remember thinking, If in ten or 15 years my friend Jerry Seinfeld has some big show, I don't want to be a potbellied guy sitting behind a desk telling my kids, 'You see him? I knew him when we were kids.'"

Paul worked in Oklahoma long enough to see that he could succeed in his father's business. "When I finally got to where I could say, 'Hey, I can do this and it could even be fun,'" he says, "then I was able to say, 'Given that you could succeed at it, is it what you choose to succeed at?' And for the first time I said, 'As a matter of fact, no.'" He remembers the day: February 26, 1979.

He returned to New York and rehearsed his resignation speech in front of two of his three sisters before he had the nerve to run it past his father. "He was very emotional, and it was a huge break because I was not fulfilling this unspoken expectation of 22 years that I would take over his company. I had to sell it to him in his terms. I said, 'It's an investment, like when you started your business. You had some start-up money, and you didn't really turn a profit for years and years. I'm not doing this foolishly, and I'm not expecting to be a star tomorrow or even in five years.'"

Before Sam died in 1989, says Paul, he admitted that his son had made the right decision. "The big thing for him," he says, "was when I was on The Tonight Show for the first time. The coinage for him was always when somebody he respected liked me, and after that he could say, 'Well, Johnny liked you.' And ultimately, he said, 'Yeah, you did the right thing.' "

Almost from the start, Paul got enough work in comedy clubs to pay the bills. In less than two years he got his big break. This is the classic story from his early days, and again he knows the date: February 12, 1981. He went to Macy's to buy socks with a friend, who insisted they stop at a casting office where the friend had to drop off a photo. Reiser began kibitzing with the casting director's secretary. She found her boss, who talked with Reiser and then asked him to come back with a photo. He came back, met director Barry Levinson and got a part in Diner.

Later, he figured he owed his career to the casting agent's secretary, whose name he didn't even know. His friends, meanwhile, never let him forget how he broke into movies. "It became a running joke," says his friend Larry Miller. "People used to say, 'Paul, I need some underwear at Gimbels.'"

•

Let's back up for a minute, to Reiser's first brush with greatness.

It was 1972. Reiser was in his teens. He came home one morning and his dad smirked and said, "You're not going to believe who's in the house." It turns out Paul's sister was interviewing George Carlin for her college newspaper. After the interview, at Sam's (continued on page 172)Paul Reiser(continued from page 98) urging, Carlin stuck around and they fed him lox and whitefish.

"I gotta get going," Carlin said after eating. "I gotta go uptown."

"Where ya going?" said Sam.

"Well," stammered Carlin, "I gotta go uptown. To buy a camera."

This was all the opening Sam needed. "Don't go uptown," he insisted. "I'll take you downtown to my guy." They piled into the car and drove downtown, where Sam marched into a camera shop and announced, "Take care of this guy. He's a big star."

"We left him there buying cameras," Paul says. "Six months later, my sister saw him again and said, 'I don't know if you remember, but we did an interview and then you went downtown--

"And he goes, 'Yeah, man, that was the weirdest interview. All I remember is that I was on my way uptown to score some coke, and the next thing I know I get lassoed into buying a camera.'"

When Paul tells this story, it sounds as if he's still in awe of his dad's salesmanship. "My father," he says, "made George Carlin buy a camera."

•

Reiser's movie career may have been almost accidental, but the films kept coming. Martin Brest saw Diner and cast Reiser in Beverly Hills Cop. Jim Cameron saw that movie and cast him in Aliens. But Reiser still thought of stand-up as his priority and didn't have a career plan--"you make the best of what's available"--so he also fell into substandard projects.

Take Sunset Limousine, a TV movie dumb enough to make My Two Dads look like a logical career move. "I didn't particularly want to do it," he says. "I thought it would be fun to work with John Ritter, but it wasn't a great part or a great movie. So I said no. And they came back with more money, and I said, 'No, I'm not trying to raise the price. I just don't want to do it.' And three or four times they came back with more money, until I went, 'Oh, look at this: I'm negotiating.' And I thought, Wow, that's pretty powerful. When you truly are willing to say no, look what can happen. And they ended up coming back with so much money that I went, 'Gee, OK. Fuck yeah.'"

Later, he won his first lead, in Bachelor Party. The rest of the film was cast around him. He'd go to the Twentieth Century Fox lot, run through love scenes with hopeful starlets such as Tawny Kitaen, then go home and mutter, "Another tough day at the studio." But one week into production, the top brass watched the dailies and decided to fire Reiser. In his place, they cast a young actor named Tom Hanks.

Reiser likes to shrug off such things: "In this business," he says, "you get used to a level of rejection that to somebody outside would be staggering." But even then, his friends insist, he wasn't devastated. "I had lunch with Paul the day he got back to town, and I was expecting him to be a puddle," says Larry Miller. "But he was very centered, he knew it was the kind of thing that happens, and he was great. I thought that showed extraordinarily clear thinking and real serenity."

Meanwhile, between the movies and stand-up gigs, Reiser developed a pilot with Gary David Goldberg, who'd been a fan of Reiser's. "He's a keen observer of ordinary people," says Goldberg. "The laughs in his act and on his show are laughs of recognition. They are deep and long-lasting." They developed a pilot that hit close to home: It was about a young man from New York who takes over his father's business. But it didn't sell. "I liked the script a lot," remembers Goldberg. "I guess I liked it more than NBC did. But everybody liked Paul, so they went ahead and put him in that other show."

That other show was My Two Dads, which bore little resemblance to the kind of humor Reiser had been doing onstage, or the quick wit that had led his comedian friends to dub him "the fastest gun on the East Side." Reluctantly, he says, he discarded his own show. "It was a very painful process," he says, "because I sort of bet against myself. And I never quite shook that during the whole My Two Dads experience. I thought, Maybe had I not done this, I could have been doing my show."

He talks cautiously, afraid to be too critical of the show but unable to be too laudatory. "I always liken it to manufacturing a product that you don't use yourself," he says. "It's like I make garden hoses but don't have a garden. All right, that's not bad. I'm not manufacturing napalm."

After that show's three-season run, he was determined not to do a series unless it reflected his interests and passions. While he put together a new stand-up act and a cable TV special, he began thinking about examining the early years of a marriage. It's what he and Paula were going through, and it was the most successful part of his act.

"The only time I ever felt close to saying 'Fuck this whole thing' was right around then," he says. "We had written the pilot for Mad About You and it was terrific, and at the time the network had these phony reasons for stalling. 'Change page seven.' 'Wait a second. You like the show? Change page seven later.' They were just buying time to see what else they had. I knew, sight unseen, that it was better than the 20 things they might be thinking about. And I remember thinking, I don't have a better idea than this. I'm not the kind of guy who goes, 'I got a million of'em.' I have one every once in a while."

Finally, NBC agreed to buy the show provided Reiser came up with an acceptable co-star. In early 1992 he brought them Helen Hunt. "We got to this office where we had to read for the network," he recalls. "If it went well, they were going to pick up the show. And while we were waiting, just out of nervous energy, I started walking around, kibitzing with this person and that person. I stuck my head into this woman's office and started playing with something on her desk, and she laughed and said, 'We've done this before, you know.' I said, 'When?' She said, 'I was the secretary to the casting director of Diner.' "

He walked out of the office with his green light from NBC. "I owe her something," he says of the woman who has been his good-luck charm twice. "I don't know what, but I owe her something."

•

The furniture is beige, and this time Reiser can't disown it. He's sitting in his office on the Culver Studios lot, where the mantel holds photos of his wife and of one of his heroes, John Lennon. Atop a television set in the corner are stacks of videotapes, many of them labeled Seinfeld.

The TV season has ended. In the next few weeks Reiser will finish his book and begin work on Bye Bye Love, a movie comedy about divorced men on which he'll team up again with writer-producer Goldberg. Then it's back to work on Mad About You.

"My feeling about Paul," says Danny Jacobson, "is always that I would like to see him go a little deeper, bleed a little. Even though he's a good actor, he comes from comedy, and when you come from that you never want to do anything to jeopardize it. Still, as he gets to be more comfortable, you'll start to see more things than you've seen from him before."

Contractually, everyone's committed for five seasons. "I don't know how much more than five years we can do," says Reiser. "In one way, I would love to end the fifth year with the birth of a baby, and then go away." NBC, he adds, wanted a baby after the first season. "We're talking about it," he says, a bit reluctantly. "And it's funny, because I've generally found that the show follows my life by three to five years. The stuff that Paul and Jamie go through, the discussions they have, are things my wife and I went through five years ago. But having kids is something we've been discussing lately, so if Paul and Jamie decide to have kids they won't be following us at all."

Suddenly Reiser stops and chuckles. "I just noticed the tapes on top of the TV," he says. "You're going to look at those and think I sit around here all day watching Seinfeld."

Then he gets back to the matter at hand. "I've found," he says, "that any advance I make in life is reflected in my work, and vice versa. When I made that personal break and moved into the city, when I went into therapy, when I started growing in those areas, I found that my work blossomed. When I started going to acting class, my stand-up benefited. When I was doing better stand-up, my acting benefited. And to me it's all about, on one hand, expanding and moving forward and creating new things, but it's much more about stripping away and removing the obstacles. I always maintain that this show is not autobiographical, and it's not. But the closer I make it and the greater those frequencies line up, the more the better stuff gets freed."

Then Reiser sits back, stretches and looks around the small office. It's Friday afternoon. His work here is done for the year, his book is almost finished and Bye Bye Love won't start shooting for a couple of weeks. There's nothing to do but go home, grab Paula and head for Malibu. Say what you will, he feels right at home there.

"Are there similarities between our shows? Sure. But to say that we copy Seinfeld is so offensive.'"

" 'In this business, you get used to a level of rejection that to somebody outside would be staggering.