Grace Under Pressure

Occupying a booth in a nearly empty Italian restaurant at 4:30 in the afternoon, Brett Butler, the brassy, blonde star of Grace Under Fire, sits hunched in her raincoat. The look on her face is somewhere between a pout and a frown, and her voice is low and angry.

Isn't it ironic, she asks, that people praise her character for standing up for herself and talking tough. "But when I do it in my personal life, when I am 'difficult' on the set, there's a kind of 'Oops--she's being trouble.'

"I'm in a big fight right now with the producers of my show," she continues. "I told them that I broke my back to mine comedy out of my life, and who are you or anyone else to say, Look, we've found gold on the ground? Granted, they gave me the show, but I'm not getting creative credit for it."

I hardly know this woman. I met her briefly a few weeks before on the set when she was taping her show one Friday night. At that time I was told to meet her at this restaurant in the Valley, not too far from the show's production offices on the CBS lot. In this early stage of the interview, I haven't yet raised the subject of her working conditions. But she mentions them anyway, griping about the writers ("Writers feel overwhelmed to be funny 23 minutes a week"), the producers, the show's creator, even Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, whose production company owns the show.

"My bosses Marcy and Tom need to kick some ass," Butler fumes. "They need to ask, 'Why isn't this done? Why isn't this story ready to go? Why isn't this happening? We're behind on scripts.' Because if I do it, then Carsey-Werner Co. gets to be the poor, beleaguered production company that signed yet another diva. And I'm not gonna have that shit."

I finally conclude that Butler has arrived with an agenda: She wants an executive producer credit, which she's been denied for two seasons, and she has chosen me to be her messenger. Then again, maybe she's just feeling crabby.

"You want more control?" I ask.

"I actually have control," she says, aggrieved. "But on other shows there's none of this bizarre 'me writer, you star' business. I'm like, Hey, guess what? I wrote for 12 years. I'm a literate, amusing, entertaining woman who has the personal and professional integrity of emotion to back up a scene. So give me a word. It's hard being all this other stuff. I'm so tired from it. Last Sunday I was up all night working with the writers."

A man enters the restaurant, a stand-up comic Butler met on the circuit, and she flies out of the booth to greet him. I glance at her publicist, tucked into the booth. He is reaching for a breadstick.

I stare at my notebook--and wait.

In the two seasons that Grace Under Fire has been on the air, it has been an astonishing success. It ended its first season as the sixth most watched show in prime time and climbed in its second season to number four. In chronicling the life of Grace Kelly, a divorced mother of three living in a small Missouri town, it has given sitcom humor a new twist. Grace works in an oil refinery without benefit of a screwball nanny or dependable day care, and she is saddled with an ex-husband, a reformed--or reforming--alcoholic who abused her. She has learned to live life at her wit's end. Although she bleeds humor from her assorted problems, there isn't even a glimmer of a pot of gold at the end of the road. Roseanne has her husband to comfort her at the end of the day. Grace has only tomorrow's problems. Lawrence Christon, who writes about comedy for the Los Angeles Times, suggests, "It is the notion of struggle that dignifies the show. It represents working stiffs, people who don't have big dreams. They know that fantasy America is not only unattainable but in many respects contemptible as well."

"I wanted it to be a love letter to all the single, working moms out there," says Chuck Lorre, who created Grace Under Fire. What Lorre didn't count on, however, was that running the show would become a bitter struggle in itself. From the beginning, Butler wanted Grace to have her sensibilities, a vision that often differed from Lorre's. Deciding that "life is too short," Lorre resigned after one season. "It should have been a joy," he says, sadly.

Lorre is not the only one bearing battle scars. Inside the offices of Grace Under Fire, internecine warfare is waged with wearying regularity. Like Roseanne, another Carsey-Werner production, Grace is a star-driven vehicle, and this star has definite ideas of what the show should be. As Marc Flanagan, who replaced Lorre in the second season, notes, "Because Grace is a character Brett feels close to, she is very proprietary."

Or, as Butler puts it, "They took my life, my point of view, they took everything about me and put kids on top. And for the first year I fought fart jokes and cows. They had a cow coming into the show. I said there should be no cloven hooves of beef in my house. And all they wanted to know was how someone who didn't finish high school could know about cloven hooves of beef."

It isn't so much Butler's story ideas and joke suggestions that staffers complain about. It's how she communicates them. "She had huge mood swings. She was prone to hysteria." remembers a writer. "She would come screaming into the writers' room, throwing down the script, cursing." There is one episode, he remembers, in which two of Grace's co-workers at the refinery trade junk food from their lunch buckets--Ho Ho's for Yodels. "We get a call in the writers' room," he relates. "Problem on the set. Suddenly the door bursts open and in walks Brett. She's screaming, saying we want her to be dirty, and she throws down the script. She hadn't heard of Ho Ho's and Yodels. She thought we were making dick jokes."

An agent who represents people who have worked on the show adds, "She makes Roseanne seem like Snow White."

As with Roseanne's show, life at Grace Under Fire is short: Few writers or producers stay longer than a year. "We had a bunker mentality," says another former writer. "We hid out in the writers' room. We'd get phone calls from the stage saying, 'Brett's on the way up.' We'd prepare for her tantrums. Look, you either get paid for your talent or you get paid to take shit. There you get paid well--to take shit."

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It's 7:30 on a Friday night, and Butler appears before a studio audience waiting for Grace Under Fire to begin taping. To warm them up, she delivers a ten-minute monolog.

"Did you know The Brady Bunch is a movie?" she asks. "Maybe in the movie they'll do what you always wanted to see--Mr. Brady kicks open the maid's door with his shirttail hanging out, holding a bottle of Jack and saying, 'Come on, Alice. I think it's more than a hunch!'"

The audience, not quite sure what to make of this un-Grace-like Brett, laughs politely. "Did you know we've got Kathie Lee Gifford on the show tonight?" Butler continues. "Uh-huh. We got Kathie Lee to appear without Cody. Found out Frank's not really the father. Cody gets really big checks from Ronnie Reagan."

Until three years ago, this is what the 37-year-old Butler did for a living. She was one of a troop of stand-up artists beating a trail from one comedy club to another. She may have been more successful than most--she was a headliner at smaller venues, she had begun to appear on The Tonight Show and the morning talk shows and she had her own Showtime special. But for many years it was a tough, hardscrabble life. Especially for a woman.

John McDonnell, who worked the comedy club route for 14 years, recalls, "Some women use obscene references to show they're smart. But those references can also make them look stupid. If the woman is attractive, people will look at her as a bimbo. If she is assertive, she's a bitch. Brett was always able to grab an audience. She didn't do anything abusive. She wasn't condescending. She always told it like it was. I think some men found that to be threatening."

Butler remembers how she had to feel her way through the routines she used as she learned her craft. "I'll give you an example of something I did as comedy when I was 24 years old," she says. "Somebody in the audience would say they were engaged. And I'd say, 'Oh, that's sweet. Marriage is magic, isn't it?' Pause. 'Turned me into a bitch.' Soon I began to look at it in terms of what I was saying about the word bitch, what I was saying about me, what I was saying about the type of behavior that women want and female comedians must do."

Butler managed to rise above denigrating humor, not by ignoring it but by putting a fresh spin on it. "Look, in a world of only six comic premises, what separates the men from the boys is presentation," says Judy Pastore, vice president of events and specials for Showtime. "Unless you're playing a violin on your nose, it's all about the individual artist. There's a lot of talk about bad husbands. But when Brett did it, it was funny. She always had that grittiness, that talking straight from the soul."

Andy Nulman, who runs the annual Just for Laughs--The Montreal International Comedy Festival, a two-week event that draws aspiring comics, talent scouts and nearly half a million attendees--first saw Butler perform in 1987. "So many female comics are stereotypes," he says. "They say, 'My boyfriend left me.' 'I have small breasts.' They do PMS jokes and become victims of tampon humor. Then there's Brett, this big, ballsy woman whose routine is politically charged and socially relevant. She was like a bucket of cold water in the face."

In 1988 Nulman added her to an HBO comedy special he was producing. Dressed like a Southern belle and sitting in a swing holding a mint julep, Butler delivered her material. "The South," she sighed, "where the wind blows through the trees and you see peach blossoms--and lynched black men swinging in the branches."

Bruce Vilanch, an Emmy-winning writer who creates material for several comics, including Butler and Billy Crystal, met Butler when they were both hired as writers for Dolly Parton's short-lived TV variety show. "Her humor was this bizarre combination of intellect and trailer trash," he recalls. "It was swamp trash quoting Kierkegaard."

Butler's humor was not always (continued on page 164)Brett Butler(continued from page 98) appreciated. As she made the rounds of the clubs, she came to realize that successful comics performed, in Butler's opinion, the same dreary, overworked material. "I found song parodies especially reprehensible," she says. "Once in a while I'd do parodies of parodies. I'd say, 'I bet you'd love me right now if I had a goddamn acoustic guitar and sat up here and sang Hit Me With a Pork Chop.' And some of the people in the room would look at me and think, You're right, we have a taste for the predictable. There was part of me that resented myself for not fitting in. But then I'd realize I just never cared."

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Butler is in her dressing room on the CBS lot. It is actually a trailer done up in warm colors and laced with the smell of burning incense. An exercise bike commands a place near the door. (According to one writer, an executive of Carsey-Werner Co. planted the bike in Butler's trailer, along with a supply of Jenny Craig food products, to encourage her to get in better shape. Butler has responded, it is said, by making the executive's life miserable.)

Wearing jeans and a bulky sweater, she is sitting in front of her vanity table waiting for her hair and makeup stylists to arrive. I ask her about life as a stand-up comic, and she relates an incident that took place while she was working the New York club scene. She had arrived in the city in 1984, lived in a walk-up apartment at 61st and First that had "crooked" walls, and worked for ten dollars a night, $100 on weekends. In 1986, she was approached by a man who owned a club called Foxy Boxing near Toronto. If Brett would emcee the show for four nights, he promised to pay her $700. She jumped at it. "I was living with my boyfriend, who was in law school," she recalls. "I needed the money."

At Foxy Boxing, as she discovered, men from the audience would go up to the stage with hoses and spray the "talent" with water. "The women wore bikinis and big gloves and hit one another," Butler remembers, "and I was supposed to say, 'This is Fifi and she does this and that.' Finally I went, backstage and I said, 'Look, we're all women here. You can do something with your lives.' And one of them said, 'Fuck you. I make $2500 American every night.'"

At which point Butler left the club and flew back to New York. Reflecting on the experience, she says, "It's what those women have to do. In their own way they're being assistants. I've worked in offices, and I can't see where that is any more spiritually or intellectually redeeming than letting some man become fascinated with your labia for a minute or two. If I were built, I'd rather do that than type."

Like all comics starting out, Butler was often put up at "comic condos," described by McDonnell as "former crack houses acquired cheap from the police. They'd say, 'We got rid of the crack and most of the guns.'"

They rarely got rid of the cockroaches, however, or the mess left by the previous occupants. "I came back one night to a condo in Fort Worth," Butler says. "The oven door was off, there were peas all over the apartment, there were overturned liquor bottles, there were pot seeds and roaches. It was gross." Eventually, she moved up to headliner and hotel-room status, earning $1800 to $2500 a week. Still, it wasn't a life anyone aspires to for long. "The idea is you do it for a while, until you can get booked on Leno. Then you hope you'll land your own sitcom," McDonnell says.

Butler insists she never aimed for a series. "I wanted to want to audition for sitcoms," she admits, "but I figured they would cast me as the girl next door who says things about grits. They have this minuscule idea of what a big, sassy southern woman should be. I just didn't want to participate in it. I had made my peace with never being famous."

One night in the fall of 1992, as Butler was about to go onstage at a club in New York City, she was told that someone from Carsey-Werner was in the audience scouting talent for a new sitcom. Don't be political, she was warned.

Sitting in the audience was David Tochterman, vice president of Carsey-Werner Co. ABC had approached Carsey and Werner for a sitcom about a single, working mom. They had hired Chuck Lorre to develop the show and to write the pilot. By that time, a number of drafts had been written and the characters were fleshed out. All they needed was a Grace Kelly.

•

"They saw my act, they saw my life, it's my show. 'Created by Chuck Lorre.' Can we guess? No shit."

The makeup artist has gone to work on Butler's face in preparation for an early afternoon run-through. This doesn't prevent Butler from lodging her litany of complaints, which haven't changed much since the last time we talked. Werner, she says, called her that morning, saying he had heard she had been "snippy" the day before. Butler laughs. "They're really nice," she says of Carsey and Werner. "Actually, I'm fascinated and appalled that they work as hard as they do and that they probably have about a zillion dollars apiece. But I really love what I've gotten from them in terms of watching people with power perform.

"One time, they were in a room with [the writers and producers], when something went terribly wrong with the person who ran last year's show," she says, referring to Lorre. "He was arrogant and refused to take notes. Arrogance and mediocrity from anybody would be intolerable. But I saw them blink once, blink twice, then go, OK, fine. But how do we make this better? I would have been having a fit if I were them."

She's had legendary fits, according to people who have worked on the show, many of whom departed bitter or beaten. Lorre had previously created the short-lived Frannie's Turn and spent two years as a producer on Roseanne. When he was asked to develop a show about a single, working mom, he says, "I wanted to push the envelope. I went to Elgin, Illinois and interviewed single moms who work in factories, women raising children without safety nets. I thought, There's a very heroic series here if I can make it funny and not too bleak."

Although Lorre and his writers incorporated Butler's experience as a battered wife into the backstory, they insist they drew from other sources to craft Grace Kelly's life. Dava Savel, a single mother and supervising producer the first season, remembers, "We studied Brett's tapes, got down her timing, listened to her stories. We called counselors, held group sessions with single moms. She has no idea how much work we put into getting her character right."

Nevertheless, according to several staffers, the fireworks between Butler and Lorre began during the taping of the pilot, when Butler took a writer aside "and told the writer how bad it was."

Carsey agrees that Butler "can be difficult," but adds, "She brings so much to the table. She feels things deeply, passionately and quickly. She once said, 'You'll see everything I feel in five minutes if you can just hang on and be patient.'"

Vilanch is sympathetic to Butler. "It's always a battle to have a vision and to see it through and get support for it," he says. "And the whole show is about how Brett sees the world."

Still, stories of mood swings, tantrums and insults to writers abound. The sitcom workweek begins with a table reading on Monday, at which actors, writers, producers, Carsey, Werner and a representative from ABC all gather to read through that week's script. Notes are given for changes. Butler offers hers verbally. Often, scenes are parceled out to be rewritten. It is at these sessions that Butler can be brutal.

"One day I was trying to explain to her why a line was funny," reports one writer who has since left the show. "And Brett said, 'Let me tell you something. If I don't think it's funny, it ain't a joke.' We all laughed. She repeated it. It was the end of the season and someone said, 'Come on, Brett, we're here for only two more weeks.' And she said, 'Yeah, at least some of us are here for only two more weeks.'" The writer pauses. "I'm sorry, but she's a condescending bitch."

Dava Savel left the show after the first season. "For half the season we got along fine," Savel says. "Then all of a sudden Brett hated me." Savel believes the change was the result of Butler's souring relations with Lorre. "She hated me because I was in Chuck's camp," Savel contends. "But what was I supposed to do? What is any writer supposed to do? Chuck ran the show."

According to Savel, at the end of the season, Butler walked into the writers' room, yelling, then walked out. Savel followed her. Butler said to her, "If you're in that room, I won't go back."

"It was the last show of the season," says Savel. "So I quit."

Within days, so did Lorre. (He went on to create another Carsey--Werner production, Cybill.) Lorre struggles to be diplomatic when speaking about Butler. "There is no arguing," he says, "that Brett has instincts for comedy. As the season progressed, she needed to have more and more input. That happens. I did everything I could to make her feel comfortable. I wasn't successful."

The next executive producer, or show runner, was Flanagan. "Marcy and Tom asked me to come in because I have good people skills, which is a big part of the job," he says in his office. "I not only run the show, I'm also the morale officer, chief cook and bottle washer."

A nice-looking man in a flannel shirt and jeans, Flanagan comes across as mild-mannered, someone who rolls with the punches. He pauses before he speaks and chooses his words carefully. "Brett is demanding. That's who she is," he says. "She won't say, 'Oh well, all right.' If she likes the story and what her character does, everything's hunky-dory. If she's unhappy, she's . . . forthcoming."

Several weeks later, he too announced his resignation. "It's a really hard show to do," he says, ever the diplomat. "It's not a personal thing. Chuck and Brett were not a complacent marriage, but my relationship with Brett is very good. It's just that I've completely lost track of my family this year. I got run down in this trough of stress. I just had to stop."

Others who have left the show are less concerned with niceties. "It was always a Faustian deal," says one former writer. "You get to work on a top-rated show, but you have to live inside Brett Butler's head and body. She would turn on people, launch vicious personal attacks and reduce them to tears. She seems to try hard to make other people unhappy."

Butler is only mildly defensive about her histrionics. "Look, I can't sing, I can't dance," she says wearily, "but I'm really good with this TV writing stuff. And I have people who are good at the structural aspects and the organization of it, people who can continue characterization and arcs and stories. Why the fuck don't they just use my suggestions and make my life a lot easier? I give all my notes and then I have to go in there again and give them again, and I'll have to do it again. I'll hit my head against the wall and I'll bleed for this show. It's really ridiculous."

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As it did in the early days, Butler's material sometimes derives from her impoverished, fatherless childhood and brief, abusive marriage. Although both periods are long reaches into the past, Butler carries these sources of woe around with her, displaying them to reporters and audiences.

Brett grew up in Marietta, Georgia, the daughter of an alcoholic father who left the family when she was four. She lived with her mother, two short-term stepfathers and four younger sisters. Her grades were fine. She played softball. "It was the one thing I was good at," she recalls. "It was the first time, frankly, in my life that I ever got out of a car and people said, 'Thank God, Brett's here.'" She was a pitcher, she adds, "because it involved being the center of attention and not having to move a lot."

Besides softball, her other interest was humor. From the age of five, she would watch comedians on TV with "abnormal intensity," she says. She was mesmerized by Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Johnny Carson and Joey Bishop. Listening to Richard Pryor was almost a spiritual experience. She adored Paul Lynde, Totie Fields, Robert Klein and Mort Sahl. She devoured Bill Cosby records. And, of course, there was George Carlin. "Carlin was the first comedian of resistance to whom I related," she says.

She had no idea where this passion was leading; she knew only that she wanted to be the center of attention. She would sell herself things in the bathroom mirror. She liked watching courtroom dramas and jury trials, anything that was stage time. "Revivals used to come to town," she remembers. "They would ask who wanted to be saved and I'd march right to the front. It was then that I knew I was destined for a career in show business, or at least alcoholism."

There was also the rebellious Brett, the one who campaigned for Andrew Young when she was 11 and did what she pleased with boys. "There's still in me this Protestant Southern girl who's afraid of offending her elders," she says. "But fighting that is a great part of what I am onstage and off. I have manners and I was brought up well about important things. So what if I was fucking around when I was 14? I said 'yes ma'am' and 'no sir,' and I opened doors for people. I took up for the weak. And I swore like a sailor and dated men twice my age 'cause I was always tall. I looked 30 when I was 14."

One could argue that there are worse childhoods. But Butler believes she paid a price. "I think I've had a huge load on my shoulders all my life from wanting to take care of my sisters and my mom," she says. "I'm the oldest child in a family where there wasn't a father or a big brother. I felt a hypervigilance that I still feel. I used to think that if I didn't watch the road while my mother was driving we'd have a wreck."

At the restaurant I had asked her what she was thinking when she married at 20. What about her ambition to be a comic? She replied sarcastically: "You think I knew I'd marry somebody and get the shit kicked out of me for three years?"

She studied her hands for a moment, then said quietly, "I was thinking alcoholically. You don't equate that with a lot of self-esteem. I'm lucky to be alive. Not only because of some of the things that happened in that marriage. I had an ectopic pregnancy that almost killed me when I was 19. I had a drunk-driving wreck that nobody should have walked away from. I hit two trees and a mailbox. But I was funny and I wrote poems and I read a lot, fell in love, I laughed and I danced. But I can give you no deliberate account of what the fuck I was thinking when I got married at 20."

Aside from the physical abuse, which Butler has referred to in her act and which her ex-husband, Charles Michael Wilson, has denied, Butler's three-year marriage brought her life to a standstill. "I was known as quite a dreamer in his circles," she remembers. "I wouldn't get a real job, but I would take a bunch of diet pills and write advertisements. I was convinced I could do it. His family said, 'We'll get you a job in a shirt factory.'"

Finally, she walked out, taking with her a feeling of shame. "I was never physically abused until that time," she says. "His denials about choking me and shooting at me and pointing a gun to my head and forcing me to flush my wedding ring down the toilet are between him and whatever he worships." Butler grins. "Which I suppose is a well-stocked sporting goods store."

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It is May. Grace Under Fire has wrapped for the season and Butler is about to return to stand-up on a six-city tour. In a phone conversation she sounds upbeat. Her second husband, Ken Ziegler, whom she married in 1987, has finally abandoned New York and now lives with her in the Hollywood hills. She is hard at work on a book, to be published by Hyperion. She has finally won her precious executive producer credit from Carsey and Werner, and--surprise!--a new show runner, Kevin Abbott, has been hired to replace Flanagan. That makes three before the start of the third season, beating even Roseanne's record for its first three years. Presumably, there will be a new staff of writers to terrorize.

Butler says she is excited about the tour and is looking forward to next season on TV. In an earlier conversation, however, she had remarked, "I just feel like I have so much more potential than what I'm doing right now. I truly look at what I'm doing as underachieving creatively. I'm not saying I don't like my job. I love it. But I know there's something else. My real work is ahead of me."

At Foxy Boxing, men sprayed the "talent" with water. "Women wore bikinis and gloves and hit one another."