Jerry & George & Kramer & Elaine
NOW DAWNS THE AGE of Nothing. Once, not so long ago, people thought little of Nothing. They pretended Nothing ever happened when, in fact, Nothing was happening all around them. Back then, Meaning was everything, and people sought only larger truth. Those who dared to ponder the Meaning of Nothing could not expect to be taken seriously. Fortunately, one such man did not let this stop him. He spoke out fervently about not much of anything, about the implications of socks and cereal and pens and pockets about Nothing, really and always he was laughed at. Because this man was a comedian, he took the derision well. Eventually, he was given a television show on which to not do a lot. Like him, the show was called Seinfeld, and it dwelled on matters mundane. Each week, Nothing gloriously transpired as characters waited in lines, looked for parking space, smelled things or tried not to masturbate. “Even nothing is something,” Seinfeld himself would say during an episode in the show’s fourth season. Soon thereafter, people began to invest new pride in how little they did. All of a sudden, you realized you couldn’t even really know another person until you saw him or her do Nothing.
But what about these Seinfeld people? Yes, they do Nothing on television, do it in a way all others envy. But what about in life? To sate our curiosity, the four principal cast mates agreed to let themselves be watched not doing very much. By name and role, they are Michael Richards, as the peculiar neighbor Kramer; Jason Alexander, as the desperate friend George Costanza; Julia Louis-Dreyfus, as the platonic heroine Elaine Benes; and Jerry Seinfeld, as himself, more or less, the calm center around which all manner of Nothing revolves. What follows are details of how each of them rose to a pronounced lack of occasion.
IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF KRAMER
HE GREETS THE DAY FUZZILY. He leaves his bed to open the door, which he does slowly, unlike Kramer, who prefers his doors flung with velocity. Kramer makes entrances, explosive and erratic, for which no door is safe. There is dire purpose in his every intrusion. “You got any meat?” he said, for instance, upon his first Seinfeld entrance four years ago. Michael Richards, who is Kramer, has arisen this morning to open his door for movers. His daughter is moving out and into her first apartment, and men have come to take away her things. “I want to watch them,” he says, “because this is comedy, you know.” Richards watches for comedy everywhere and always sees it. “Their van is parked on a bit of a hill,” he says, “so it could easily roll backward, up the curb, over a flower bed and into a tree, and it could be kind of funny.” This does not happen, but he sees it anyway. “I think those guys just fell over a hedge,” he says next, peering out a window. They didn’t. But that is how he sees.
THE HAIR ALSO RISES. “This is not the way I amuse myself,” he recently said on The Tonight Show. “This is the way I am.” Because he has become a national oddity, coffee mugs bear his likeness, with the legend I’M HUMAN IN MY WAY. Worshipful men gather about Richards in public places and chant: “Kra-mer! Kra-mer!” “If I could arm these people,” he says, “I could take a country over.” Women yearn to touch his hair, which stands tall, as does he, at six feet two, not counting hair. “It’s electric,” he says, meaning the hair. “It just goes whoooom! It’s interesting. It just took its own shape. It’s fascinating.” For summer, there has been a haircut, although, fresh out of bed, it looks spry as ever. “It is like a back-to-nature look, isn’t it?”
WE ARE LOCKED OUT OF THE HOUSE. “For a single man, it’s fine,” he says of his house, a large California ranch-style structure in Studio City, near where Seinfeld is filmed. At forty-three, Richards is genially divorced from his wife of eighteen years, who is, conveniently, a family therapist. “This place is basically just for me,” he says, showing me ongoing renovations. “It’s tranquil.” But suddenly a gust of wind blows a door shut, and we are trapped in an unfinished addition. “Well, there we go again — to Kramerland,” he sighs, as though it were a familiar journey, and he begins knocking loudly to regain entry. He pounds for minutes and says nothing until a mover readmits us.
KRAMER HAS A FIRST NAME. There is, in fact, an actual Kramer. That Kramer lived in New York, across the hall from Larry David, the writer who created Seinfeld with his friend Seinfeld. “He was a jack-of-all-trades — he still is,” says Richards of his prototype. “He’s just a hustler.” Kramer, it’s said, was the sort of man who paid $400 rent on an $1800 apartment. He lived by mysterious means. He had free access to Larry David’s place. His first name, like his fictional counterpart’s, is a secret. “We just never talk about it,” says Larry Charles, Seinfeld‘s supervising producer, who gave TV Kramer his unspoken name. “It’s a funny name, too,” teases Larry David. If Richards knows it, he doesn’t say.
HE STEALS FRUIT TO THROW AT A GUY. “Hey, let’s pick a tangerine,” he says, plucking two of them from a tree belonging to his neighbor. “They’re Dr. Joseph’s,” he says, tossing one over generously. “Have a Dr. Joseph tangerine.” He spots a guy walking past his house. “See if you can hit that man over there with your tangerine,” he says to me. “Come on, do it. I’ll give you $100. I swear. He’s getting away.” How to react if there is contact: “You just say that you didn’t mean it,” Richards says. “Don’t even acknowledge it. Just hit him!” Meanwhile, he has already eaten his own purloined tangerine, which he found pleasantly sweet.
KRAMER SMELLS LIKE ETERNITY. Calvin Klein said of Kramer, “His buttocks are sublime.” This happened in the episode where Kramer creates a fragrance called the Beach, which recalls beach smell; Calvin Klein (played by an actor) appropriates the concept for a new scent called Ocean and repays Kramer by photographing him for an underwear ad. After the show aired, the real Klein shipped Richards vast supplies of Eternity for Men, which he has ever since splashed on before tapings — to further demark Kramer’s presence. Says Richards, “I work very hard to make this character three-dimensional.” Charles concurs: “He’s not a simplistic character at all. Kramer is full of facets and contradictions; he’s real and unreal; he’s like an adult and a child; he’s like neutered yet very sexual; he’s very fight yet very dark; he can be idiotic and yet very wise.”
HE TEASES A VERY OLD MAN WEARING SOCKS. Across the street from Richards, there lives the shoeless octogenarian. He walks the streets in only socks. We see him now padding along the pavement. “Hey, Captain!” Richards hollers after him. “He was a great psychiatrist and studied with Freud,” he tells me. “He’s crazy but brilliant.” “My brother!” says the Captain, greeting Richards, kindred spirits enjoined. “I’m going to be eighty-five soon,” says the Captain. “You look eighty-four and a half,” says Richards, whom the Captain seems to be studying keenly, as though eyeing a lost specimen.
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