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  The official announcement was made in June 2007 that Larry and Laurie had separated amicably after fourteen years. They would share custody of their two daughters. Larry, of course, had to make everything a joke and so he told people that when he left the house to his environmental-activist wife, he first turned all the lights on. Larry took up residence in his friends Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen’s guest house. “We could not get rid of him,” Ted said afterward. “We used to call him Larry the Lodger.”

  Perhaps it was because of the breakup that Larry wanted to do something special for his two daughters — as only a celebrity can. They were huge fans of Hannah Montana and so he wrangled a guest spot on the show, along with the girls. He played himself, waiting at a restaurant with the girls and unable to get a table — a very Larry situation.

  But a viewer knowing nothing of Larry David’s personal life would simply think that he was pursuing comic possibilities in Curb’s sixth season story arc about the separation of Larry and Cheryl. In the classic sitcom form, a long-suffering wife puts up with a ridiculous, scheming, naughty but fundamentally innocent husband. No matter how many times he screws up, she always forgives him in the end — because in the parallel universe of television, happy endings are guaranteed. But not on Curb Your Enthusiasm. In real life husbands and wives are not all-forgiving. A marriage, unlike the relationship between a parent and a child, is based on conditional love. It must be earned. And if Larry David is good at anything, it’s seeing the truth in ordinary human behavior behind the facade and turning it into comedy — which means that Cheryl is going to come to the point where she has simply had enough of Larry. But can you really play a marriage breakup for laughs? As it turns out, yes. At least mostly.

  A change in the sixth season was that Larry decided he wanted some help in writing his outlines. The show had been on for long enough that he was ready for some collaboration. Reaching back, he asked three Seinfeld cohorts to join the show as executive producers — Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer, and David Mandel. Their job would be to help Larry work out the various story lines to create the right balance or, as they liked to call it, “geometry.” Berg, Schaffer, and Mandel would also direct.

  Again in this season, Larry employs a second story arc as well, one that in fact takes up more screen time than the second arc usually does. He got the idea from the terrible effect of Hurricane Katrina and its disruption of the lives of so many people. “I needed to exploit their tragedy in any way that I could,” he said. And so he imagined what would happen if Cheryl wanted to bring in a family of African-Americans made temporarily homeless by a natural disaster. It would shake up the David household and give Larry a new set of characters to play off, characters who were very different from a white middle-class New York Jew.

  Larry David had been using black characters with big personalities in the show for some time. Not just Wanda Sykes, who was a regular as Cheryl’s friend, but also Chris Williams as Krazee-Eyez Killa and, in episode six of the previous year, Kym E. Whitley as a large prostitute named Monema. In fact, most of the black characters fell into certain categories (a nicer word than stereotypes), spoke a street vernacular, and had jobs legal or otherwise that demanded no education. The only notably educated black character has been a doctor in episode nine of the first season whom Larry insulted by implying he got into med school through affirmative action. Of course the show relied on other types as well — gays, Asians, Hispanics — sometimes for laughs, sometimes as objects of Larry’s ignorance. But the black characters seemed different. They were juicy parts for actors — big, noisy, funny, and allowed for a lot of mugging. Larry David seemed genuinely fond of their vivacity. He almost romanticized them.

  And now he would bring a whole family of noisy, emotional, sassy-talking African-Americans into Larry the character’s house: a young, attractive mother, her two kids, her brother, and her aunt. For the mother, Loretta Black, he cast the film and television actress Vivica A. Fox and for the equally important role of the brother, Leon Black, J. B. Smoove, a writer for Saturday Night Live, performer, and comedian who had once been a hip hop dancer. Of all the Black family, his character was the most expressive as he became Larry’s friend and confidant and Smoove played him, as he said, “like he’s got controlled Tourette’s.”

  In the sixth season, Cheryl leaves Larry after a stormy plane trip during which she thinks her life might end. She begins to see the man seated next to her and Larry suffers greatly at the loss of her, although it does not prevent him from starting to date (Lucy Lawless of Xena: Warrior Princess fame, no less). But Larry schemes to get Cheryl back, going so far as to influence her therapist. In the highly satisfying closing episode he takes Loretta to the Garlin bat mitzvah and realizes he has fallen for her. The ending montage of Larry and the Blacks living like a regular family is priceless.

  “This isn’t Seinfeld,” wrote Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times at the start of the season. “This isn’t a show about nothing. It’s a show about everything. Or rather everything in the rarefied world of extremely successful television show creators.” However, she also noted what some other critics were saying — that after so many seasons, “David is having to reach a bit.” The show seemed strained at times. Had it come to its natural end?

  While shooting, Larry had thought that the sixth season might be the last. The only problem was that he had an idea for the seventh season, an idea that would bring the two great creations of his life together, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

  By now it wasn’t just newspaper reviewers and television viewers who had become aware of Curb. Intellectuals, academics, and public commentators had too. It was the portrayal of Jews, gentiles, and their differences that seemed to light a fire under them. An academic named Evan Cooper presented his paper “We’re Not Men: Representations of Jewish and Gentile Men on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm” to the American Sociological Association. The paper examined the way both shows “feminized” Jewish men. A couple of Jewish intellectuals, Michael Green and Rosalin Krieger, also weighed in. Green, writing in the Jewish daily The Forward, asserted, “By the end of the day, Larry David turns out to be quite the traditionalist.” He argued that the show recreated “the long-dead world of the shtetl,” the old Eastern European villages where Jews lived before the war, in Westside Los Angeles. There, everyone knew everyone else and was connected by blood or by work. Larry’s bickering over “minutiae” was even seen as a kind of “rabbinic discourse” similar to expounding on the intricacies of the Talmud. Krieger’s interest was in Larry David’s exploration of Jewish ambivalence toward Christians.

  In England, Holly A. Pearse (writing in the cultural journal Jewish Quarterly) claimed that “Larry David raises core questions of what it means to be Jewish in contemporary America.” She saw Larry’s marriage to a gentile as a paradigm of Jewish/ gentile misunderstandings and the show as a sign that “rumors of the Jewish cultural assimilation in America may be greatly exaggerated.” But the best, or worst, was yet to come. The seventh season would give commentators plenty to froth about.

  In the meantime, the cast members of Curb were finding that their popularity was opening a lot of doors for them. Simon and Schuster published Susie Essman’s What Would Susie Say?, a quasi-memoir/advice book with plenty of comedy thrown in. Larry David and Richard Lewis both blurbed the back cover. Cheryl Hines got a supporting comic role in the Katherine Heigl/Gerard Butler romantic comedy The Ugly Truth (2009). There wasn’t much fresh about the film but Hines did a good job in the role of a newscaster in a sexually frustrating marriage. Her best line — “No, Larry, that would be my untouched vagina” — sounded as if it came straight out of Curb. Even more important for Hines was her directorial debut. She helmed the feature film Serious Moonlight (2009) with Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton, using a script by the filmmaker Adrienne Shelley who had been murdered. Hines had acted in Shelley’s 2007 film, Waitress. Perhaps it was Hines who gave Larry David the idea of giving Meg Ryan a guest spot in th
e seventh season of Curb.

  As for Larry himself, a rare acting opportunity, and with one of his heroes, came his way. He described how he was approached: “First, I was just asked if I was interested in being in a Woody Allen movie, if I was available. And I said sure. I thought it was going to be, like, two or three days. You know, you come in and you do it, and then you leave. And then the next day I get a script with a cover letter from him. I opened the script and there I see Boris, the character, on page one. And then I got to page 50 and he’s on page 50. And then I go to the end and he’s got a speech at the end. I go, oh my God, what is this? So I called him up on the phone. I said, you know, are you nuts? I don’t think I can do this. There’s so much material to memorize, I hadn’t really done anything like this before. You know, on the show I improvise; I make up my own stuff. It was a big challenge for me. I don’t care for challenges . . . but he talked me off the ledge.”

  The script was called Whatever Works and Allen had written it in the 1970s for Zero Mostel. Allen had starred opposite Mostel in a 1976 movie about blacklisting called The Front. When Mostel died in 1977, Allen shelved the script. Allen is a prolific filmmaker, producing a new film every year, and this was not the first time he had dusted off an old script. Allen began his career as a teenager, writing and selling jokes, became a successful stand-up comic, and graduated to writing and starring in his own comedies. But he is a lover of serious film and literature and, mixing comedy with human drama, created his masterpieces — Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and a long list of other films. But as his career went on the critics and public both began to dismiss his later films as a pale imitation of his better work. In recent years, however, he has made something of a minor comeback, getting better reviews and drawing somewhat larger audiences for films like Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2009), which won an Oscar for Penélope Cruz’s performance.

  Allen had always been able to get fine actors to be in his movies; just to be in a Woody Allen picture was an honor. And the allure was great for Larry David too, who had played small roles in Allen movies early on his career and never would have expected to be made the star. But he wasn’t really an actor and had never done anything so demanding. The character of Boris, a world-class physicist, failed suicide, and philosophic complainer dominated the script from beginning to end. He even had a young love interest, to be played by Evan Rachel Wood. Although he accepted the role, Larry worried particularly about the emotionally dramatic moments and the long monologues. He told Woody Allen that casting him was “potentially destroying” to the film.

  Woody Allen himself wasn’t worried. He said, “[Larry David is] believable to me as an intellectual, as a guy who would know physics, who was cultivated, who’d be sardonic and opinionated and really very taken with himself. And . . . insecure underneath.”

  In the end, Larry didn’t find the work beyond his capabilities. The shooting took place in New York. He was supposed to have a limp and he didn’t practice it until on the set. As a director, Allen pretty much left his actors alone. He already had the blocking worked out and simply had to show Larry where to stand or move. They went over the lines a couple of times and began shooting. Only when he didn’t like something Larry was doing would Allen make a suggestion. “It was really a breeze,” Larry reported. “He’s very easy. He gives you a lot of freedom to do anything you want. If you’re not comfortable with some of the words, he lets you change them.” Larry even tried to improvise, but when he found that the other actors couldn’t react to an unexpected line, he gave up and stuck to the script.

  The character that Larry inhabited was a step, but a small one, from his persona on Curb — an intellectually pretentious, cynical man who feels superior to those around him and who, through a decidedly unintellectual and not very bright young woman, comes to learn some simple lessons about enjoying life. Larry had no problem with the comedy, but that he could play the drama as well surprised the critics. For the most part they liked what they saw. When Whatever Works was released in 2009, Time’s Richard Corliss called it Woody Allen’s “freshest film in ages” and gave credit to Larry for his “robust manliness” when he might have played the role like a whiner. Roger Ebert, who had so disliked Sour Grapes, wrote that Larry played Boris with “perfect pitch.” The Philadelphia Enquirer called the combination of Woody Allen and Larry David a “match made in misanthrope heaven.”

  Not everyone was taken by the film, or Larry’s performance, however. “[Larry David] has no equipment for suggesting a conflicted inner life,” wrote David Edelstein, the critic for New York. Reviews like that likely didn’t bother Larry David. He probably would have agreed. Of his final big monologue in the movie he said, “It is a beautiful speech, quite moving. If someone else had delivered it, you might have been moved to tears, actually.”

  The story of Larry and Cheryl didn’t end with the last episode of the sixth season. Indeed, it can be said that the story for season seven is really a continuation — that seasons six and seven have one big story arc in the marriage crisis.

  At least a couple of years before, Larry had an idea of putting a scene from Seinfeld into Curb, possibly in flashback. He asked Jerry Seinfeld back then if he would come on the show, but in the end Larry left the idea on the back burner. He just wasn’t quite sure how to do it. But the answers became clear as he began to sketch out the seventh season. For years people had asked him if Seinfeld would ever have a reunion show and he had always said no. Reunions were always “lame,” a pathetic echo of their earlier selves. The actors, looking older, always seemed somehow ridiculous. But what about a mock reunion, something like the mock documentary that began Curb in the first place? What if Larry thought that giving Cheryl an acting role in a Seinfeld reunion show would help to win her back?

  Bringing on the cast members of the old show, writing scenes for the supposed reunion, even finding and shooting on the old sets, was an exciting but also daunting idea. It was a big help to Larry that he had three former Seinfeld producers now helping him with the story lines — Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer, and David Mandel. He talked it through with them and then, feeling confident, approached Jerry Seinfeld who was living in New York with his wife Jessica and three kids. Seinfeld had written and acted the starring voice in the 2007 animated kid’s film Bee Movie, which had received mixed reviews but had made a hefty profit, and had continued with the occasional stand-up appearance and television ads outside of the U.S. Generally though, he was keeping a low profile. “The idea of working with Larry was just too overwhelmingly appealing to me,” Seinfeld said. “And Curb is such a great show. There was a little part of me that said, ‘Do we really want to tamper?’ But to hell with that. How much damage can you really do?”

  Once Seinfeld gave the okay, Larry approached the other actors, just as he would on Curb. (He was careful to keep the order in which he approached them a secret.) Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the busiest of them, was starring in The New Adventures of Old Christine. She agreed, although privately she was doubtful that it would really happen.

  Jason Alexander had been making guest appearances, doing television ads, some directing, and making use of his talents as a singer and a magician but hadn’t been noticed by the public much. The Jason that Larry was imagining for the Curb Your Enthusiasm season, a continuation of his earlier appearances, was competitive, pretentious, even mean-spirited — not like the real Jason Alexander. “I became a funnier and richer human being because of [Larry’s] genius,” he said. “So I just said, I’m in Larry’s hands.”

  Michael Richards had been in semi-retirement since the notorious 2006 incident at the Laugh Factory, a comedy club in West Hollywood, when he had become enraged at some hecklers and had used the word “nigger.” (The incident may have been the inspiration for the Curb Your Enthusiasm season seven episode “The N Word.”) Agreeing to do the show, Richards told a reporter that he had done a lot of “deep work” on himself since the incident. “It’s like open heart surgery.”


  The Seinfeld reunion would have a major part to play in four episodes, but that left six episodes needing stories. In the first two, Larry would manage to rid himself of Loretta, even though she would suffer from (curable) cancer. Although Larry David has said that he doesn’t choose subjects to shock or upset people, it’s hard to believe he didn’t quite deliberately choose one of the most visible causes of our time. As always, Larry David would not belittle the seriousness of the illness itself but Larry the character’s reaction to it and, to a lesser degree, the victim Loretta’s use of it. Once she was gone, he would be free to win back Cheryl, but that wouldn’t stop him from dating a couple of other women. Most other stories were stand-alones that might have fit comfortably into any previous season, dealing with everything from the mentally unbalanced (“Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister,” season seven, episode one) to the dangers of fellatio in moving cars (“Vehicular Fellatio,” season seven, episode two).

  But Larry David’s greatest attention would be on the four reunion episodes. In episode three, Larry would approach Jerry, Julia, Jason, and Michael about doing the show. In episode six, Larry and Jerry would take up residence in an office to collaborate on the script. Episodes nine and ten would be almost completely devoted to the reunion, so much so that Jerry would later say they ought to be included in the Seinfeld DVD set. The first would show the actors doing a read-through of the script and the final episode would show the rehearsals and the airing of the show.

  Shooting the episodes proved to be an emotionally moving experience for Larry and the actors. The Seinfeld scenes were shot on the show’s old stage on the CBS Radford lot, on the original sets of Jerry’s apartment and the diner, which were dug out of a warehouse. Only the fridge needed to be replaced, and the apartment door — which Seinfeld had taken as a souvenir. Larry was extraordinarily sunny on the set; he kept saying, “This is unbelievable.” He would watch the taping of the rehearsing of the reunion segments and would step in to suggest changes in blocking or line delivery, just as he had done on the show. Alexander had worried about being able to be George again, but found that the character came right back. Michael Richards had saved a pair of Kramer’s shoes and found that putting them on made him ready to slide through the doorway of Jerry’s apartment again. The regular actors were thrilled too. Jeff Garlin said that being on set “more than made up for the fact that I never got an audition on Seinfeld.”