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  The Seinfeld Curse meant that nobody associated with the wild success of that show could succeed again, or so the media said. It started with Larry David but it was even more associated with the non-creating actors — Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards. First up was Michael Richards with his own The Michael Richards Show on NBC (2000–2001), which did not make it to the end of its first season. Jason Alexander’s ABC show Bob Patterson (2001) lasted only five episodes. In 2002 Louis-Dreyfus got her own post-Seinfeld television show on NBC called Watching Ellie. Ten episodes aired before it was pulled because of low ratings, reassembled as a more conventional sitcom, and put on again to an even lower viewership. Six more episodes later it was gone. In 2004 Alexander tried again, this time on CBS with Listen Up! It did not make it to a second season. Then Michael Richards would damage his career in 2006 by calling some hecklers “niggers” during a stand-up performance in West Hollywood, a meltdown recorded on a cell phone camera. That same year, though, Louis-Dreyfus would finally find a successful home on The New Adventures of Old Christine.

  All this bad luck would become interesting material for Larry. First, though, he had to lift his own curse.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Unspecial

  The simple old truth is that money alone doesn’t buy happiness. Many people need to find fulfilment in work, and Larry David is one of them. The minimal budget that Larry could scrounge for Sour Grapes and the dismal reception it received did not exactly encourage him in the direction of more feature films. Instead, it sent him back to his origins: stand-up comedy. Maybe, like his friend Jerry Seinfeld, he thought he should return to the basics of what he did, or wanted to do, which was make people laugh: an empty stage, a microphone, a small audience of half-drunk revellers ready to laugh or jeer.

  On the other hand, maybe not. Larry hadn’t exactly been a successful comic before Seinfeld and although the audience would no doubt be far more generous to him, at least at first, he still might not be a hit. The very thought of getting up there brought back the old anxieties. And after Seinfeld would a small audience be enough? Jerry might be able to pack huge halls night after night, but he had already been doing that before the show. Larry would have to go back to the clubs.

  There are at least two versions of what happened next. The official one is that Larry decided to talk over the idea of returning to stand-up with his friend Alan Zweibel. In addition to an office next to Larry David’s at Castle Rock, Zweibel had rather a lot in common with the Seinfeld creator. Also a Brooklyn Jew, Zweibel had done time on Saturday Night Live and had written a movie, North, which Roger Ebert hated even more than he hated Sour Grapes. At the time, Zweibel was working on a pilot for the comic and actor Jeff Garlin. Alan Zweibel listened to Larry David talk and then suggested that if he was going to return to the stage he should film it. It could become some kind of television special. (Zweibel would become a consulting producer on the show.)

  But as Jeff Garlin and Larry David both remembered it, he was the one who gave Larry the idea — at a Koo-Koo-Roo chicken restaurant in Beverly Hills. According to Garlin, “Larry and I were acquaintances, and one day Larry asked me to lunch and was asking me questions about stand-up comedy, and I was, ‘If you ever want to do an HBO special, I have the perfect idea for you.” It certainly is possible that Jeff Garlin would have thought about a special, for he had already worked on specials for two other comics, Denis Leary and Jon Stewart.

  In either case, Larry decided to think it over. He told Laurie, who thought it was a good idea. But the more Larry mulled it over, the more convinced he was that a more-or-less straight concert special would be dull. It’s possible that he also knew that a straight special wouldn’t take advantage of all his comedy strengths, such as creating twisted and unlikely narratives and finding the humor in brief encounters. Maybe, Larry thought, he could create a fictional story around the stand-up, a story about Larry David himself that would be based on his own life (married, co-creator of Seinfeld) but wouldn’t be bound by actuality. There could be other characters — his wife, his agent, etc.

  Jeff Garlin said, “I was very specific as to what the special would be because I had just directed Jon and Dennis. The difference was that mine included a lot more stand-up and Larry’s included more behind-the-scenes. He was right. I could have brought the idea to a million other people and we wouldn’t be talking about a great show.”

  Larry further developed the idea. It could be a fake documentary about the making of an HBO special. And at its center would be Larry himself, the guy who created Seinfeld. That must have been an appealing idea, for the truth was that, despite all the publicity around the show, Larry David was still far less known than either Jerry or the cast. The general public did not realize that Larry was the real genius behind the show. The special might act as a corrective to that.

  Larry David brought Jeff Garlin onto the project as an executive producer, but Larry still needed some more input. For a director he thought that somebody with a real documentary background might work. He had wanted Seinfeld to be shot with a single camera, documentary style, but had lost that battle with the network. On HBO, he could have far more freedom. Also, he had the idea of not writing all the dialogue but letting the actors improvise around his story. So he approached Robert B. Weide. Weide was a documentary filmmaker who, as a bonus, had taken some great comics as his subjects — Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, the Marx Brothers, all members of Jewish comic royalty. Fifteen years before, he had read and loved Larry’s screenplay Prognosis Negative and had even been a fan of Larry’s stand-up act. In other words, he got Larry’s humor and approach. The special was a stretch for Weide and a more commercial project than he was used to, both inducements to say yes. It was Weide who suggested that they add some talking-head interviews to the special. Not only would that allow them to have people like Jerry Seinfeld as guests, but it would give the show a real documentary element.

  Larry began working on the special in earnest. He felt committed to improvising, an idea used more in serious independent films than for comedy. He said, “There’s no way that you can get that sort of documentary feel, that cinema verité thing, unless you’re improvising. And I’ve always liked improvising — whenever I’ve done it in the past, I felt I had a knack for it.” He would definitely have a manager character, taking the place of his real-life manager Gavin Polone. And a wife. He wasn’t sure if the wife should be Jewish (as Laurie was) or if they should have kids, questions that never were resolved in the special.

  As for the title, Larry came up with Curb Your Enthusiasm early in the process. “I mean, who likes enthusiasm?” he explained. “It’s sickening, isn’t it? To see enthusiastic people when you’re miserable. Nobody wants that.” The executives at HBO thought it would be hard to remember and wanted Larry to consider other possibilities. On the list were Regrets Only, Half Empty, and Best Foot Backwards. But Larry, fortunately, never wavered.

  Next came casting.

  JEFF GARLIN

  The manager was easy enough to cast: Jeff Garlin. Jeff Garlin’s original hope, as he discussed the special with Larry David, was to direct it. But Larry said to him, “No, you’ll be the producer, and I want you to play my manager. Nobody else can play my manager.”

  Six-foot-one, tanned, with chestnut hair, notably overweight, and with a slight lisp, Garlin was an unusual comic. He had some significant health problems, including a heart defect that no doubt affected his childhood and was finally operated on when he was in his twenties. He was also diagnosed after many puzzling years of what appeared to be anxiety symptoms with a form of epilepsy. He had type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, and regularly saw a psychiatrist who specialized in patients with ADD. Not a lot to laugh about, but certainly the kind of life that sometimes forms very funny people.

  Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove, Garlin’s love of comedy started when his parents took him to see Jimmy Durante perform. On the way home Garlin, who was eight years old,
asked his parents, “Is that a job?”

  Garlin doesn’t paint the typical picture of a Jewish household — overly dramatic mother, sighing father, annoying relatives. “It was a sweet house,” he has said. When he was eleven the family moved to Plantation, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale, where his father became a legal administrator. The move put the young Garlin into very unfamiliar waters. “I was the first Jew that a lot of these kids had met. So needless to say, I got into a lot of fights. I won most of them. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. South Florida is still the South.”

  His favorite performer was Steve Martin. He identified with a generation of Saturday Night Live performers — John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd — most of whom left the show about the time that Garlin graduated from high school. He also names Albert Brooks and Woody Allen as filmmaker/writer/ actors he admired. They gave him a model for what he hoped to do. (Later when Garlin finally made his own movie, he would describe it to people as like “Woody Allen, only not as good.”) The closest he got to show business was his mother, who acted in community theater. His father naturally wanted him to go to college, but Garlin felt that the only way he would achieve his goals was if he had no safety net. “If I had something to fall back on, I probably would have fallen back on it. If you have nowhere to go but forward, you move forward.”

  But he did end up at the University of Miami for filmmaking. And a week after his twentieth birthday he performed his first stand-up at the Comic Strip in Fort Lauderdale. “I didn’t bomb,” he has said. Two years later he quit school and moved to Chicago, rooming with Conan O’Brien, the first of several moves for Garlin between that city, New York, and L.A. in order to further his career. He took classes, most of which he considered “crap”: “I think that a good acting teacher is immensely helpful, but a bad acting teacher, if you don’t have your wits about you, can destroy you.”

  Unlike Larry, he did not find himself nervous before going on. He spent five years at Second City and developed a reputation for being a great improv comic. Improvisation was ideal for Garlin, who frankly didn’t like memorizing lines. It would be his work both in improvisation and as a stand-up that would give him the necessary background for the improvisational process on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Later he would create a weekly show in Los Angeles called Jeff Garlin’s Combo Platter that brought in guest comics and used both stand-up and improv sketch comedy. He never liked to have a set routine but instead would respond to the audience. “To not be in the moment is to deny so much comic possibility,” he said like a comic Zen master. “By being in the moment, you are being true to the art form.”

  His humor didn’t attack the audience but instead emphasized his own “low status.” He explained, “I love when you’re humiliated and the audience feels for you. In my stand-up, the only one who should ever look stupid is me.”

  He didn’t do ethnic jokes, considering stereotypes to be “just mean-spirited and false. I don’t even like Polish jokes. When did Polish people become stupid?” He did, however, do jokes about his weight. “If there was a room where you could find the best cocaine in the world, the best pot, a glass of the best wine, and a two-day-old sheet cake from Gristedes covered in ants, you know where I’m going,” he told audiences.

  In fact, Garlin had an eating disorder that he was constantly struggling to overcome. More seriously, he said, “There are times where I cannot sit still, I cannot do work and I cannot focus. Then sometimes I have a complete lack of joy. Am I going to be a jerk and let everybody now what a miserable time I’m having? No, I internalize it. And by internalizing it, what do I do? I eat.” Although he made jokes about being heavy, and would later tolerate comic abuse on Curb (“You fat fuck!” his fictional wife would scream), he also insisted that being fat wasn’t what made him funny. He used it, but he didn’t believe it defined him as a comic.

  Garlin had married Marla Garlin, a casting director who has worked on such films as The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Like Larry, Jeff had been marriage-shy but his girlfriend had made an ultimatum. He is father to two boys. In an industry where being nice is often equated with being a loser, he’s known as a sweet guy. Garlin considers it a way of coping. “I’m humble. I’m lucky to be here, you know?”

  Garlin had his ups and downs, sometimes getting fired from clubs. He was supposed to audition for Saturday Night Live on the stage of the Improv, but after David Spade and Rob Schneider went on, Lorne Michaels and the other SNL big shots left the club. Eventually Garlin made it onto Letterman (to appease his nerves he stuffed himself at the nearby Carnegie Deli), but he never considered himself a star. Although his early ambitions had been lofty, over time he realized that he was more like “an alternative band or jazz musician,” someone who has a loyal but not necessarily large following. It was all right with him, he finally decided, if he never sold out Madison Square Garden. He preferred not to have anyone introduce him before going onstage. Even after the beginning of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Garlin often went unrecognized, sometimes even by the doorman at a comedy club.

  As an actor, Garlin found himself getting some small roles in sitcoms. At one point he told his agent he didn’t want to go to any more same-day auditions because he wanted prep time before trying out for a part. Nevertheless he agreed to try out the same day for an episode of Mad About You, the sitcom starring comic Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt. He got the part but by the day of the shoot his character’s role had been cut to a single line. In rehearsals, the producers liked the chemistry on the set and decided to come up with more for Garlin to do, resulting in the continuing role of Marvin, lasting three years. It was Garlin’s most visible part before Curb. (Reiser makes an appearance in season three, episode five of Curb. The stand-up world is a small one.)

  As a director, Garlin found himself called upon by many comedians who had come to trust his taste. He worked with Denis Leary on the HBO special Lock ’n Load and with Jon Stewart on Jon Stewart: Unleavened. Both comics asked Garlin to travel with them while they honed their material, giving feedback and helping them get more laughs. It was the sort of role he would perform for Larry on the set of Curb. And it wasn’t long before his working relationship with Larry David was so easy and casual that it felt, as Jeff Garlin said, that “we’ve been working together for thirty years.”

  CHERYL HINES

  Perhaps the most important casting decision for Curb Your Enthusiasm was that of Larry’s wife. The first thought that everyone had was to cast a Jewish actress closer to Larry’s age. The casting director, Garlin’s wife Marla, brought in women with loud voices. Despite not looking at all Jewish, Cheryl Hines somehow got booked for an audition, but then the date was put off. That same evening Robert Weide went to see her perform as part of an improv group, the Groundlings. He arranged to have her come in the next day.

  Cheryl Hines had never met Larry, or Jeff Garlin, or director Robert B. Weide. “I’d heard a few things about Larry,” she has said. “Like that he wasn’t real warm towards people. And I think some writer told me about a pitch meeting he had with Larry where Larry basically said, ‘yeah, I don’t like it.’ In this business people never say that.” She’d also been told that he was a “germophobe” and that she shouldn’t touch him.

  The daughter of a man she herself called a redneck, Hines grew up in Tallahassee, Florida. She acted in high school then went to West Virginia University and Florida State before finally graduating from Central Florida with a major in TV and a minor in theater. She did not study comedy; on Curb she would play the straight woman. In her early twenties she had a job at Universal Studios, where, among her other performing duties, she had to reenact the shower scene from Psycho. Moving to Los Angeles, she worked as a waitress, bartender, and personal assistant to Rob Reiner (who makes an appearance in season two, episode five of Curb). Unlike Garlin, she praised her experience in acting classes. “I learned so much from each teacher. It’s very specific; they teach very specific things, and I need that.”

  Hines wanted to get onto Sa
turday Night Live and heard that the best way was to train in improvisation with the Groundlings, an L.A. comedy troupe. Phil Hartman, for one, had gone from there to SNL. She had never heard of the group but went to see a show, loved it, and began taking classes. “It wasn’t really a choice to do improv,” she said. “I wanted to know how you got from Tallahassee to Saturday Night Live.”

  She found it took a while to get up her courage and assert herself during an improvised scene. “Women are brought up to be nice and supportive and not to make too much noise,” she said, “so guys . . . are quick to take control, whereas women take a while to get used to the idea that you need to jump in there.” In time, she became a member of the performing troupe. She never did get to audition for SNL, although she tried out for MADtv without success. But she did land the occasional television part, including an Unsolved Mysteries where she played the mother of kids who were being abused by the nanny, a part she considered the worst acting job she ever got.

  When Hines walked in for the audition she was surprised when Larry shook her hand and greeted her warmly. Her audition consisted of the two of them improvising a scene together. All Larry told her was that they had kids and that Larry had stopped eating chicken. She was almost twenty years younger than her supposed husband. Jeff Garlin and Robert B. Weide were also in the room. Larry liked that she didn’t raise her voice or become strident even when acting annoyed. Jeff Garlin said afterward, “We saw a lot of actresses. It was instant chemistry. She was clearly the one. She was the only actress who also stood up to him. Everybody else was kind of intimidated, but she stood up to him like she was really his wife.” After she left, David, Garlin, and Weide looked at one another and agreed.