Jerry Seinfeld: Master of His Domain
Written: Nov 24 '02 (Updated Nov 24 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Some decent gossip. As much about Jerry’s girlfriends as about Jerry.
Cons: It’s just a mediocre celebrity biography. Pretty pedestrian prose.
The Bottom Line: It’s a trend. I read the mediocre celebrity biographies so you don’t have to.
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| Lobstergirl's Full Review: Jerry Oppenheimer - Seinfeld: The Making of an Ame... |
I can’t really explain what made me pick up this unauthorized biography of Jerry Seinfeld (actual title Seinfeld: The Making of an American Icon, by Jerry Oppenheimer). Although I remain a big admirer of the eponymous TV show, I have no interest whatsoever in our nation’s rich history of Jewish comedy, nor specifically in comedy as an art or medium. My curiosity is not particularly piqued by Jerry Seinfeld the human being. I am not drawn to the fashion aesthetic of snug Levi’s and white sneakers. And I was horrified, even sickened, by the book’s photos of Jerry’s college era Jewish Afro-mullet, a voluminous, shoulder length mop with a middle part and Farrah Fawcett feathering. Nor was I all that impressed with the author’s unauthorized biography of Martha Stewart, Just Desserts. Clearly the near future will find me plowing through Oppenheimer’s Barbara Walters: An Unauthorized Biography.
The Early Years
Both of Jerry’s parents came from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds, his father Kal of Eastern European Jewish descent, his mother of Syrian Jews. They settled in middle class Massapequa, Long Island, also home to Joey Buttafuoco, Jessica Hahn, Alex Baldwin and his brothers, Peggy Noonan, and the Carlo Gambino family. Kal became friends with Carlo Gambino, often playing cards with him, and Carlo made a large contribution to Jerry’s bar mitzvah. The Seinfelds were considered to be the poorest family in the neighborhood, barely making ends meet. Kal had a sign-making business (called “Signfeld Signs”) and Betty Seinfeld sewed to bring in extra money. The décor in their split level home was tacky, schlocky, unmatched, the house itself underfurnished. Jerry and his homely sister Carolyn grew up with a lot of freedom and independence; it was like being “roommates”, Jerry would say later.
There wasn’t a clique for Jerry at Massapequa High; he wasn’t a jock, wasn’t studious enough to be a nerd, and didn’t fit in with the boys of the drama club who were starting to figure out that they were gay. His only interests were cars and Bill Cosby. In his youth he was an observant, if not religiously enthusiastic Jew. (Oppenheimer makes a big deal out of the fact that Jerry didn’t contribute money to his old synagogue once he hit the big time, nor – unlike the Baldwin brothers -- to Massapequa High School).
At SUNY Oswego, Jerry began dating Caryn Trager, a large-boned Jewish girl; with Jerry shorter and slimmer, friends saw them as the odd couple. (Their relationship would last five years until Jerry slowly broke it off by neglecting her. Trager often found it difficult to watch Seinfeld because many of the scenes seemed already familiar; she was convinced that the character of Elaine Benes was based on her.) Jerry was very emotional and talked about his feelings constantly. His personal hygiene was exemplary. He could “measure out his shampoo so it would last a whole semester”, Trager remembered. Oppenheimer’s narrative drips with homosexual innuendo: Jerry’s black roommate Larry was dominant while Jerry was submissive; their favorite music was Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler; Jerry began to hang out with the theatre crowd; tongues wagged when Jerry and a young black comedian friend took a two week vacation in Europe.
He became an adherent first of Transcendental Meditation and yoga, then Scientology, using them to focus his mind and become completely disciplined in mind and body. A friend remembered a big chart on his refrigerator detailing the precepts of Scientology, but Jerry always insisted he only used these “religions” as a supermarket, picking and choosing what he wanted from them and then leaving the store.
Once Jerry knew what he wanted to do with his life, he approached his career like a businessman, developing a strategy and goals. His immediate goal was to get as many gigs in comedy clubs as possible, to hone his stand-up routines. His intermediate goal was to get a booking on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. (He succeeded in 1981; the day of the show, Kal Seinfeld went around Massapequa with a bullhorn, like “some crazed Jewish Paul Revere”, exhorting people to watch Jerry that night.) And his long-term goal, after a very disappointing short stint in a small part on Benson, was to have his own TV show, completely on his own terms, with total artistic control.
The Commitmentphobe: Jerry and Women
In 1984, somewhat alarmed by having turned 30, Jerry became engaged to a pretty Jewish concierge for a San Francisco hotel. Jay Leno’s wife Mavis had done Jerry’s astrological chart and predicted the engagement; when she did his chart again later, it showed that the engagement wouldn’t last, and she was right. The next year Jerry began dating Susan McNabb, a 5'8", 100 lb. hand and lingerie model. The era of AIDS made Jerry even more obsessed with cleanliness and health than usual; they agreed that they would always use condoms. They would stay together (on and off) for the next seven years, very much in love, but ultimately Jerry couldn’t marry Susan because she was not Jewish. She offered to convert but Jerry told her it wasn’t the same as being Jewish. During their frequent breakups, Jerry dated the college-age daughter of his Jewish dentist. (McNabb claims that Jerry wanted her to bear his child, but she wasn’t willing to without being married to him.)
When they first met, Susan recalled, most of Jerry’s money ($40,000) was in a non-interest bearing checking account. There was a few thousand more in a bag at the bottom of his closet. Susan convinced Jerry to open an account at Merrill Lynch so that his money could work for him. It became part of his stand-up routine: “People always tell me, ‘you should have your money working for you.’ Well, from now on, I’ve decided I’ll do the work, I’m going to let my money relax.” After his first accountant embezzled about $50,000 from him, Jerry turned his money management over to his sister. When Seinfeld began airing fulltime, Jerry actually took a pay cut; his stand-up routines had been earning him $100,000 weekly.
Susan had brought an end to Jerry’s compulsive habit of throwing out the clothes he had traveled with after each road trip, and in 2000, almost a decade after their final break-up, she still had in her closet many of the expensively tailored jackets he had worn. She, her father and her brother wore them. Like Caryn Trager, Susan found Seinfeld too painful to watch for many years because she would see things on the show that she and Jerry had done together, or conversations they had had. “Years later when I could finally watch it,” McNabb said, she thought that in Elaine he had “written the perfect woman for himself: she’s fun, she’s one of the gang, he can hang out with her, and yet he has absolutely no responsibility for her.” (Elaine was not in Jerry and Larry David’s original script proposal. NBC had insisted they add a female character.)
Jerry began to date Tawny Kitaen, whose office on the set of WKRP in Cincinnati was near his. Kitaen had had some seriously raunchy liaisons – with the guitarist for Ratt, with O.J. Simpson during the first six months of his marriage to Nicole, with Tommy Lee, and had been married to the lead singer for Whitesnake. Jerry cast her as a beautiful but vapid model on an episode of Seinfeld. Unbeknownst to Jerry, Kitaen had started seeing an old boyfriend, the baseball player Chuck Finley, and became pregnant by him. She worried that the news would devastate Jerry, but he gave her a big hug and they ended the affair amicably.
He met 17-year old high school senior Shoshanna Lonstein in Central Park. Lonstein’s wealthy parents seemed to be thrilled that their daughter was dating the 39 year-old. The relationship lasted, on and off, for four years, during which time Jerry may or may not have proposed marriage and Shoshanna may or not have agreed on the condition that he quit the TV show, which had become increasingly stressful and time consuming since Larry David’s departure. According to a friend, after the final break-up with Shoshanna, Jerry lumped her in with David: “They’re both off my desk – my emotional desk.”
Jerry’s relationship with Jessica Sklar began at the exclusive Reebok Sports Club near his Upper West Side apartment, sometime between the final episode of Seinfeld in May of 1998 and her June wedding. (At the time they met, Jerry was reportedly dating another married woman, a former Seinfeld writer 15 years his junior.) Sklar came from a very modest background; the gym membership was a gift from her fiancé Eric Nederlander, the scion of a wealthy theater-owning family, so that Jessica could be firm and buff for her upcoming nuptials. The two had met through Jessica’s brother-in-law James, who in turn had met Nederlander when the chicken bones and newspaper he had thrown out of his Upper East Side apartment had blown into Nederlander’s window. Sklar and Nederlander’s five year courtship had been somewhat rocky. By most accounts, Nederlander lived fairly frugally, while Sklar was a gold-digger who needed someone to underwrite her Prada and Gucci habit. Jessica “was not going to marry Mr. Stockbroker, even if he was comfortable. She wanted more than comfortable.” Sklar continually pressed him for marriage, often publicly and ruthlessly. She would say, “Eric, let’s go to Tiffany’s” and “Eric, what are you waiting for?” recalled a friend. Another friend noted that at social occasions, Sklar would compliment other happy couples on their engagements and then confront Nederlander with, “Are you ever going to marry me? Why won’t you marry me?” Nederlander loved her, but was cautious. He didn’t want to rush into marriage.
When Eric finally did put a ring on her finger, she was less than impressed. It was 2.5 carats, costing the bargain hunter $25,000 wholesale, but it was cut so that most of its size was depth rather than width, so it appeared smaller than its true weight. Shortly after their engagement, Sklar quit her job at Golden Books to spend the next year planning the wedding, attending bridal showers, and getting into shape. Observers noted that Sklar seemed unexcited at her grandiose wedding, even emotionally dead. She cut short her month-long honeymoon in Italy after three weeks. About five days later, she left Nederlander for Jerry. Even then it wasn’t smooth sailing; Jerry got cold feet and they broke up several times over the next couple years. Sklar’s M.O. was to befriend media people, particularly gossip columnists, to keep her name in the press in an effort to make Jerry jealous. When she finally succeeded, she leaked the time and place of Jerry’s proposal (an intimate booth at Balthazar) to a contact at People and snagged a cover story.
Sklar’s former brother-in-law James, by then divorced from her sister, seemed to have the Sklar sisters figured out:
“[They’re] Jewish and that’s a plus for guys like Jerry and Eric and myself…..they have strong personalities and they make you think they are bringing something to the table. In certain ways they are, and in other ways they’re not….they know what’s “in” and what’s “out”. They’re very social and they like doing things and making plans. They’re also able to show you how to spend money…..they have lots of energy and know how to do things that men don’t. They become the executive assistant, the travel agent, the social director, the benefit consultant.”
Recommended:
No
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