Alexander The Great

as seinfeld's lovable loser, he lies, he cheats, he whines--and still gets the girl and the great job. can jason alexander do the same thing in real life?

You Learn a great deal about a man when he kicks the crap out of you. When Jason Alexander kicks the crap out of me, I discover, first, that he is a considerate man, even in conquest. "Is that a shock-resistant watch?" he asks helpfully. "You might want to take that off."

Then he proceeds to wallop me. It is not a scene for the squeamish. One punch to the sternum is so hard, I nearly cough up a lung. A fierce kick actually raises me off the ground. Making matters worse, Alexander narrates every blow: "This is the roundhouse kick." Baboons! "Does that hurt?" Baboom! "Try holding the pad closer to your chest." Baboons! With each shot a thud, like a melon hitting asphalt, echoes down the quiet street where he lives.

This mortal combat transpires in the driveway of Alexander's Los Angeles home. Thrice weekly, at dawn, the Seinfeld star meets with David Renan, a personal trainer who instructs him in the martial art of jeet kune do--"the Bruce Lee system," Renan explains in the Hollywood tradition of defining everything vis-à-vis its relationship to a celebrity. Normally Alexander pummels Renan (and vice versa). Today, at my request, he pummels me--after ensuring that I am well girded with vinyl padding.

Other things I learn in the process of getting bashed: Though chunky, Alexander is remarkably spry, even graceful. Though cheery, he possesses a killer instinct, talking confidently of how he would respond if someone pointed a gun or knife his way in what he calls "a street situation." Although, frankly, it's hard to take a man too seriously when he has a padded codpiece dangling between his legs.

After he administers my thrashing, the finale to a one-hour workout, Alexander removes his gear. (In shin guards, chest protector and face mask, he resembles a young Joe Garagiola.) He is winded. Standing, sweating, talking with Renan in the morning chill, he begins to smoke: Steam is rising off his shoulders and his balding pate.

"See all that steam?" Renan asks me. "That's chi."

Uh . . . chi? "It's a central untapped energy we all have," Alexander explains solemnly. "Secret mystical stuff. Martial artists are always trying to call on that hidden energy. You focus all that energy and you can do amazing things."

Then, just when you believe he's the reincarnation of Bruce Lee, Alexander reminds you that he is, instead, the man who incarnated George Costanza. "Either that," he says, taking a hit from his asthma inhaler, "or us bald guys just don't have anything up top to keep the heat in."

The Madness of King George

Call it chi. Call it talent. Call it tapping the zeitgeist. Whatever the source, Jason Alexander has accomplished an amazing thing. He has made a national folk hero--a sex symbol, some might argue--out of a short, pudgy, balding, crabby, neurotic nebbish by the name of George Costanza.

"No one's a bigger idiot than me," says George, summing up his appeal. "I'm disturbed, I'm depressed, I'm inadequate--I got it all!" And: "Once in my life I'd like the upper hand. I have no hand. No hand at all. How do I get the hand?"

For these reasons--his inadequacy, his handlessness--George has become America's favorite loser, a patron saint of misfits and malcontents everywhere. George is us; we are George. Ich bin ein Costanza. He represents the side of us that cannot be suppressed, the side whose tastes lie toward lying, laziness, underemployment. Says Alexander's TV pal, Jerry Seinfeld: "We often say that if the series were, just George, it would be called This Poor Man. This poor man, who is just beset--how could you not feel for this guy?"

The public's embrace of George pays tribute to Alexander. Granted, Seinfeld's writers have endowed the character with a plethora of personality disorders, not the least of which is his angst. In a Seinfeld appraisal that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, critic Francis Davis wrote that Alexander transcends the TV loser stereotype "by zeroing in on George's deviousness, his raging libido and his volatile combination of arrogance and low self-esteem."

Clearly, there was something auspicious in the joining of this character and this actor. Which leads to the inevitable question: Is he George? Eventually, this is what everybody asks about Alexander. Is he neurotic, needy, disturbed and depressed like his TV counterpart? "A very popular question,"agrees Seinfeld, who, after a thoughtful pause, takes a stab at answering: "Well, they look similar."

Alexander himself responds with weary resignation: "If I were like George, what would the answer be? If you're as neurotic as that guy, would you say, 'Yes, I'm terribly neurotic'?"

As a matter of fact, yes, you would. And though Alexander never says these particular words, other words and actions bespeak a certain Costanzan neurosis. If there's a little of George in all of us, there's more than a little in Jason Alexander. As Seinfeld says, playing George "wasn't a complete stretch for Jason."

Not that they're identical. Seinfeld's observation aside, the 37-year-old Alexander appears both thinner and younger in person; if the camera adds ten pounds, it also ages him about ten years. Without George's glasses, there's a boyishness to his face. His manner is earnest and cooperative. "He's very sweet," says Seinfeld. "He'll send me a card on my birthday, and you know that blank side of the card? He'll fill it up, and it won't be fluff. He'll take the time to write something deeply felt."

But scratch that menschy surface and you'll discover a long list of Georgian fears, foibles and eccentricities.

George's hypochondria? Pure Alexander: "Jason always has allergies and ailments that are very Costanzaesque," says Seinfeld. George's bleak insecurity? "I can see myself homeless seven years from now," Alexander admits. George's whole lying-to-impress-awoman thing? Alexander met his wife, Daena Title, while he was a lowly assistant at a New York City casting agency. Pretending to be a casting director, he put her through a bogus audition before he worked up the courage to ask her out.

That morning in Alexander's driveway I witness another quintessential George moment. In the middle of the workout, his mother-in-law drops by to borrow his white Volvo. "This is trust," he says proudly. "You let your mother-in-law borrow your car."

He has no idea. Alexander, Renan and I watch, transfixed, as Phyllis backs the Volvo down the narrow driveway. Alexander narrates, sotto voce: "Oh baby!" he mutters as she clips the hedge. "Pull it forward, my dear--you know, there are only four or five people who actually can get out of this driveway. I think she's gonna go for it--"

Crunch! Phyllis smacks the right mirror against the gate. She pulls forward, then backs up again slowly, inch by excruciating inch. When Alexander's son emerges from the house, in pajamas, Alexander shoos him back: "Gabe, Grandma's pulling out, it's not safe!" Renan averts his gaze: "I can't watch," he groans. And--crunch! Phyllis bangs the left mirror against the gate. A shower of shiny pieces falls to the ground.

Alexander grimaces. This poor man. "I'm thinking," he muses, "maybe we should rent a car for her."

Life After George

To find Alexander at his Studio City lot, you take Gilligan's Island Road to the Seinfeld sign. Turn left. If you hit Mary Tyler Moore Avenue, you have gone too far. Alexander's no-frills office is on the second floor. Here he sits in his offstage mufti (T-shirt, jeans and sneakers), talking on the phone: "Hey, it's not you," he cheerfully explodes. "What can you do? They'll fuck ya!"

Again Alexander is blowing off steam, though this time not literally. The producers had requested his presence on the lot at eight A.M.; it's now past noon, and they're not ready to shoot his scene. "A typical Seinfeld day," he grouses. "I was supposed to be shooting by ten, I've done zippity-doodah so far."

So he has spent the morning sifting through scripts, phoning moguls and doing deals--preparing for life after Seinfeld.

Yes, Alexander is working toward the day he will say farewell to George Costanza. He came perilously close this year. In a ballyhooed negotiation, Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards each asked for an unprecedented $1 million per episode to return for a ninth season. (Seinfeld, a writer and producer as well as an actor, had already cut a separate deal.) At the final hour they settled for $600,000 an episode (or $13 million per season), plus a cut of the profits. They also agreed to work for a tenth, and most likely final, season.

The rancorous negotiations took a toll on Alexander and his castmates. "It's not that we were adamant about making $1 million an episode," he insists. "We were adamant that we should have been cut in on the profits from syndication revenues. The money is there, and their cries of poverty fell on deaf ears." He claims that NBC dissipated eight years of goodwill by dragging out the proceedings. By the end, he says, his attitude was: "Fuck you. If you're not going to treat us like people, then we'll just be animals. And we'll walk away if we have to."

Walk away? Alexander was remarkably relaxed about leaving the decade's hottest sitcom. On the one hand, he says, "There is tremendous joy in doing this show. Seinfeld has changed all our careers and all of our lives. It was a space-shuttle ride to superattention."

On the other hand, "Everything Seinfeld hath given, it hath taken away," he notes. "I wouldn't have been considered for a lot of the films that I'm up for were it not for the show. But by the same token the show has prevented me from doing them." Thus he passed up plum roles in A Few Good Men, A League of Their Own and Glengarry Glen Ross. Furthermore, he adds, "I miss the challenge" of a more varied career. "The fact that the show has never concerned itself with anything other than funny--that gets to be a limited muscle to exercise."

Looking beyond Seinfeld, Alexander fears that George could swallow his career, reducing him eventually to personal appearances at Seinfeld fan conventions. He knows the perils of being indelibly identified with such a celebrated character. "I have seen many careers that have been at this point and then, for myriad reasons, don't sustain. Actors have come off this kind of boost and gone into oblivion. That's frightening to me."

Hence the $1 million per episode demand--an insurance policy against typecasting. "This could very well be the biggest thing that happens in my career," he says. "Seinfeld is going to live on the air for years, continually putting out the image that George is who I am. So if I'm going to give them another 22 of those images, they're going to make sure I'm set for life."

Alexander has this going for him: Unlike many sitcom stars, he came to the show with the résumé of a real actor. At the age of 37, he has done slapstick and Shakespeare, song and dance. A Broadway fixture in the Eighties, he won a 1989 Tony Award for his performance in the musical Jerome Robbins' Broadway, in which he played 12 different characters, from a young gangster to an old Jew. At one of those recent (and ubiquitous) award extravaganzas, he brought a dozing crowd to its feet with a vaudevillian star turn, complete with a tango, a flip and a pie in the face.

Jason has the ability to really transform himself," says Ken Kwapis, who directed him in the film Dunston Checks In. "He has the kind of abilities Peter Sellers had--I can easily see him playing several characters in a film, the way Sellers did in Dr: Strangelove. I have a feeling that he may ultimately be as strong a dramatic actor on the screen as he is a comic actor on TV." (continued on page 120) Jason Alexander (continued from page 74) "There's nothing I cannot imagine him doing," says Seinfeld of Alexander's life after Seinfeld. "I can imagine him joining Cirque du Soleil as an acrobat at some point, just swinging from ropes in some sort of leotard."

That is one of the few activities he has not pursued. Unlike George, who can't hold a job, Alexander holds many. "My wife has about had it," he says. "She's like, 'What else are you going to do?"' Besides his day job, he makes stage and concert appearances. He pitches pretzels. He hosts awards shows. During every Seinfeld hiatus, he makes a movie. In his most recent, Love! Valour! Compassion!, he plays a gay character--which explains the Out magazine cover showing Alexander with his hand down another man's pants. ("Not," as George once said, "that there's anything wrong with that!") "You hit and run, hit and run," he explains, "keep all your options open."

Unfortunately, his extracurricular activities have been more run than hit. Most of his films--Dunston Checks In, The Last Supper, The Paper, North--have been box-office duds. Though critically acclaimed, a television remake of Bye Bye Birdie (featuring Alexander in song-and-dance mode) went bye-bye in the ratings, losing its time slot to, among other things, a Valerie Bertinelli TV movie.

Alexander has also taken up directing, which he views as a way to "fade behind the scenes for a while" after Seinfeld, "to wash that impression out of somebody's mind." (He has a deal with Fox to develop and direct movies.) Again, however, his record is spotty. His feature debut, For Better or Worse, went to cable after a limited release. Although he defends the film--"I will maintain to my dying day that, though certainly a flawed picture, it is far more interesting and far funnier that most of the romantic comedies you've seen in the past two years"--the Hollywood buzz was not good. A Variety headline about the movie asked the question, More Worse than Better?

Alexander claims he has reached a point in his career where he doesn't care about box office or buzz, only about doing the work. He says he'd be happy doing smaller "art" films such as Love! Valour! Compassion! "The great luxury of Seinfeld is that I need to make much less money to maintain a decent quality of life. And I have enough cachet that, as long as I do good work, there's always a job.

"Of course," he adds, "ten years from now the follow-up to this article will be about me and Larry Storch in a breadline, saying, 'We were on TV once. Can you give us some money?'"

Then the Georgian pessimism really kicks in. "Mel Brooks," he says, "had a line as the 2000-Year-Old Man--he said, 'Everything is based on fear.' That's exactly true. What keeps me going is the fear that everything will come to a stop--that this is just a flash in the pan. I always think this can go away. My confidence has decreased with my success."

Gorgeous George

"Here's a bit of trivia," Alexander says cheerfully. "In the hair department of Seinfeld, Julia obviously takes the longest time--then comes me!"

"That is true," says Judy, the Seinfeld hairdresser, as she fiddles with Alexander's locks, or what remain of them. "And you're taking almost as long as Julia now."

At 1:30 P.M., after five hours of waiting, he has finally been called to makeup and hair. ("Then they want to rehearse the scene we'll shoot after lunch," he grumbles.) One would think Alexander's hair would require minimal attention. Yet Judy employs an arsenal of tools--brush, blow-drier, spritzer, spray--"to get some of the wave out," she explains, "so it doesn't look all floofy." Alexander says, "When I had hair, it tended to have a mind of its own. The remnants are still trying to do their own thing."

There follows a moment of silence, in honor of fallen follicles. Alexander has been balding since his late teens. "I blame it on the tight Jewboy perm I had when I was 17," he moans. "Went to a salon for a perm, and I swear the minute I did that I started losing my hair. My father is 85 years old, looks like he's 60, has a full head of black hair. I hate the man."

Now hairlessness is Alexander's stock-in-trade. He and his hairline are inextricably linked. In fact, when he tried a Hair Club for Men hair weave back in 1985, he watched in horror as his career screeched to a halt. "I couldn't get work," he says. "Nobody wanted me. Not even people who would eventually have put a wig on me. So I stopped. It would have been a matter of time until I couldn't afford the maintenance on the damn thing."

With or without a rug (and he says, "I look better with hair than without it"), Alexander has trouble convincing Hollywood that he's capable of transcending the confines of his body. Someday he wouldn't mind taking a crack at playing a hero, a romantic lead. But "every time I go near a leading-man's role I keep thinking, Boy, if only I had a little more hair and 20 fewer pounds," he says. "I was in consideration for Nick of Time a few years ago. The description of the character was a complete Everyman, an unremarkable guy in an extraordinary situation." His voice grows edgy. "So who played the part? Johnny Depp! Not exactly Everyman. When things like that get away from me, I become upset. I think I have something to contribute to a part like that, and no one will give me the chance."

Boy George

Alexander must have meat. At a Studio City trattoria near the Seinfeld studio, he scans the menu for steaks, chops or cutlets, the bloodier the better. "I'm on an all-protein diet. You don't know me very well, otherwise you'd find that dull. In fact," he admits, "I could be off by the end of the week. I'm on a different program every week." Among his friends, he is notorious for his diets. He has gone both macro- and microbiotic; he was once devoted to something called the Maximum Metabolism diet, taking pills to kill assorted pangs. "I am on the quest," he says, "for the elusive 20 pounds that just need an extra jump kick."

He has been "heavy," he says, almost since the day he was born Jay Scott Greenspan (Alexander is his father's first name) in Newark, New Jersey. He felt loved by his parents but "was always scared as a kid that I was going to get picked on or humiliated or actually beaten up by bigger kids."

Then, like so many fat, funny kids, he learned the value of comedy as a weapon. "As a preemptive strike against kids I thought were going to be mean to me," he says, "I would quote large sections of material from comedy albums." His arsenal included Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen and David Steinberg, plus "great old Jewish comics" such as Myron Cohen and Jackie Mason. In many cases, his playground riffs included "stuff that was way over my head. I did George Carlin's bit about how 'shit' is a synonym for marijuanaI had no idea. I had no idea. I was eight!" Did his ploy work? "Yes, it would head them off at the pass. Because I was funny, I was not taunted (continued on page 157) Jason Alexander (continued from page 120) much. But it wasn't funny that was coming from me--it was pirated funny."

When he was 13 his family moved to Livingston, New Jersey. Feeling like he'd been given "a clean slate," he fell in with a gang of junior thespians. In his first show, The Sound of Music, he heard the sound of his future: "I knew at that point that I had found my thing. I felt very powerful up on that stage, at a time when I did not feel powerful in any other part of my life."

By the time he was 13, he was "deadass serious" about theater, traveling six towns away to take tap-dancing classes. To get his parents to pay for voice lessons, he swore he was studying for his bar mitzvah. He knew the scores to two dozen Broadway shows: "When everybody was listening to the Beatles, I was listening to Fiddler and The Fantasticks." He was a natural and starred in countless shows. At 14 he had an agent and a manager. At 16 he appeared on a PBS pilot.

Improbable as it sounds, his teenage role model was William Shatner. "He's the guy who cemented my determination to be an actor," he says. "I didn't want to just copy him, I wanted to be him. And for years, until I got to college and started training, I basically did him--I played Nathan Detroit as Shatner and Fagin as Shatner and Oscar Madison as Shatner."

Mostly, he waited anxiously for the future. "I always wanted to be older than I was. I kept wishing I could get this phase over with; I knew my time was going to come." Livingston, New Jersey was not the place for it. "It was a very sports-oriented town, and because I was always on the stage, somehow I was perceived as a pain in the ass. A couple of kids were looking for a confrontation, and I was always avoiding it. I was a chickenshit kid." So he signed up for karate classes. One day, a brown belt under his belt, he confronted his tormentors. "The lead guy came at me, and I smashed into him. I thought, I don't care if I die; this is enough. The next thing I knew I was sitting on this guy's chest with his ears in my hands."

How did that feel? "Fabulous," he says, hacking merrily at his rack of lamb. "That's my touchdown for history."

Becoming George

Life on the Seinfeld set is not unlike Seinfeld itself. There is nonstop activity, yet nothing seems to get accomplished. During the lulls, there is much talk that focuses on . . . nothing. No minutia is too minute; there is discourse about cars, toothpicks, the length of Farrah Fawcett's nipples. In the makeup room, I overhear this impassioned exchange:

Jason: What is candy corn? I know what it is, but what is it?

Woman: It's just sugar.

Jason: How can it be just sugar? It's gotta have something else in it.

Woman: A little bit of flavoring, maybe. Jason: [Agitated] Sugar isn't chewy. There's gotta be something!

Finally, at three P.M., after seven hours of waiting, Alexander is called to the set: "Jason, they're ready for you in New York." He heads over to the New York street, a block-long stretch of storefronts with generic names such as Wine & Liquors or Bar & Grill. Built especially for Seinfeld--in gratitude for Nielsen conquests--the street is, Alexander says, the cause of today's delay: "It's like a kid with a new toy. We have cranes, we have dolly tracks, and everybody goes 'Ooohh.' Simple little scenes become these extravaganzas."

Today's extravaganza enlists 50 extras, a crane and a dolly. As we join the action, Kramer is crawling, bloodied and bruised, along the pavement--it's a long story--while Jerry and George discuss the vagaries of condom use.

They rehearse the scene. Then, cameras ready to roll, Alexander puts on the glasses--and suddenly the brow furrows, the shoulders slump imperceptibly, the Jersey whine is uncorked. He becomes George Costanza.

George: [Perturbed] Why do they have to make the wrappers on those things so hard to open?

Jerry: Probably so the woman has one last chance to change her mind.

The scene is repeated, and repeated. Between takes, Richards stays sprawled on the pavement while Seinfeld and the director huddle. Alexander sits on a car bumper and talks with the extras. After seven takes he grows impatient. "Come on, that's it!" he says with mock indignation. "It's realism, it's comedy--what more do you want?"

But there will be one more take. Once again Richards crawls. This time, however, Alexander and Seinfeld unzip their pants and straddle him in the street, ready to reenact the squeal-like-a-pig scene from Deliverance. "Kramer," Seinfeld says ominously, "I guess this just isn't your lucky day."

There are gales of laughter from the crew. "You fuckers!" Richards booms, bounding to his feet.

"OK," shouts the assistant director, "we are moving to the stage. Jason, you're done."

"There's a little something for the blooper reel," Alexander laughs. The idea came to them five takes back: "I said, 'Why don't we, like, piss on him before we walk off?" And Jerry said, 'No, but I've got an idea.'"

Walking back to his office, Alexander describes the prevailing mood on the Seinfeld set as "juvenile. Very laid-back, very silly, very casual, nobody takes anything too seriously. It's not particularly hard work; it's always enjoyable. We usually wind up cracking each other up. We do the show in two days and we bullshit for another two days. The job is still just an amazing time."

After eight seasons together, the cast remains on friendly terms, even if families and careers now take up more of their time. "We've never been a group that hangs a lot," he says. "Somebody once said that if we were all in high school together, the four of us would probably not be friends, because we're very different people. It's a strange little bastard stepfamily. But somehow it all works."

Alexander the Great

"I'll be home in time to give Gabe a bath," he says as the sun sinks slowly over the Seinfeld soundstage. But before he departs, he sits on his couch and talks. The conversation turns again to fear.

In 1981, when he was 22, Alexander made his Broadway debut in Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. On opening night, he nearly keeled over. Diagnosis: stage fright. "It felt like an out-of-body experience," he recalls. "There was another me that was looking at me doing it and going, 'What are you doing? You know, you're in front of people!' Acting took on a significance it never had before. Before it was just a joy. Now it was something I was going to be judged on. It freaked me out, and it continued to freak me out."

The stage fright lasted nearly a decade. Eventually a therapist helped him regain a "carefree attitude" about acting. During his Tony-winning stint in Jerome Robbins' Broadway, he recited this mantra every night: "Strength. Courage. Conviction. Joy."

Now the stage fright is gone, but he still sees a therapist. What does Alexander work on? "So many things," he says. "I spent a lot of my life being fearful, and the flip side of fear is anger. When you're made to feel afraid, you feel diminished, and as soon as you recognize that, you get pissed off. I didn't deal with my own anger well; I didn't deal with other people's anger well. Therapy has given me the outlets to change the way I deal with that.

"Humiliation--in my therapy this was a big thing. To be embarrassed was, I felt, the worst thing that could happen to a person, worse than being stabbed to death. I was in constant fear of that. It was pretty defining, because everything I was doing in my relationships was either rising above that fear or reacting to it.

"And what's interesting is that my response was to create a persona that I don't think I've dropped yet. This confident, cocky attitude, which I never really had. This bravura that covers the fact that most of the time I feel a little overwhelmed. The real me is more thoughtful, more somber, more quiet. The real me is a quiet little guy who might be better off doing things besides being in show business."

Fear? Cockiness? Humiliation? Maybe Alexander is George Costanza after all.

"I don't know where George comes from," he says. "Where the fuel for the fire comes from I'm not exactly sure. You know, everybody has insecurities and moments of feeling like the world's biggest schmuck."

Surely it's more complicated than that. "I'm not George," Alexander once said, "but I could have been." In other words, George is Alexander without the talent, without the success, money or therapy.

There are times, he admits, when he actually envies George. "When George feels something strongly, he's pretty inyour-face," says Alexander. "Whereas I don't look for confrontation. I sometimes feel like, Who am I to start a conversation, or make my feelings known if I have a different point of view? George has a lot of gumption. He has a lot of traits that I admire--in a neurotic sort of way."

But after eight years together, the time approaches when Jason Alexander and George Costanza must part company. This thought has Alexander musing aloud about how he'd like to say goodbye to his alter ego. "We all kid around about how to end the show," he says. "I think I can probably tell you this because there's no way in hell they're going to do it, but we thought this would be an amazing way to end it.

"Two episodes before the last one, everyone's fortunes are turned," he explains. "Elaine and Jerry get back together and fall madly in love. Kramer discovers God and becomes a preacher. George hits the lottery for 80 million bucks.

"The second-to-last episode is the wedding of Jerry and Elaine. George is the best man, pays for the whole shebang. Kramer the preacher marries them. Then we all get into the chauffeured limo to take Jerry and Elaine to the airport for their amazing honeymoon--and we have a blowout on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and crash and fall to our deaths.

"The final episode is four coffins. Every character who has ever been on the show is at the funeral talking about how they never liked us and how horribly we had treated everybody in life: 'They were such annoying people!'

"That," he concludes, "is a series finale. There's no tenth anniversary reunion show after that one!"

The follow-up will be about me and Larry Storch, saying, 'We were on TV. Can you give us some money?'"

"The lead guy came at me, and I smashed into him. I thought, I dont't cart if I die; this is enough."