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  Before shooting began, Larry had no idea how the special would turn out. He was nervous enough that he thought if the cost wasn’t too high and if he didn’t like it maybe he would pay HBO back not to show it. Afterward, he would look back with some amazement that he had gone ahead with it at all.

  Shooting the special required three basic kinds of scenes. There were the fake documentary scenes of Larry with his agent, or his wife, or meeting the HBO executives and other encounters. These scenes were improvised, based on an extraordinarily brief outline of one page by Larry, and so they had a surprisingly real feel about them. As the shooting went on and the actors got more comfortable, the improvisations grew longer. Larry didn’t instruct the actors much, or even tell them what to expect in the scene. He told Hines only that Larry’s wife had heard every excuse and story in the book and that she didn’t take his “shit.” Then there were the scenes of Larry performing stand-up in clubs while getting ready for the big HBO concert. This was not fake, but the real Larry performing both old and new material before audiences in L.A. clubs. Most of the time he got good laughs (he found these audiences more responsive and sophisticated than when he stopped performing some nine years earlier), but not always. Finally, there were the interviews. Most were with people who had really worked with and knew Larry and were speaking truthfully about him, although two were with the fictional characters of agent and wife. All of this made for a fiction that was, in fact, often real, or at least partly real. It was an unusual and compelling hybrid, and the effect was to create a portrait of Larry David, temperamental comic and genius behind Seinfeld.

  As for the improvised scenes, while the situations sometimes felt Seinfeld-like, they played out very differently. There was no quick banter and smashing punch lines. Instead, the humor was situational and grew more slowly. Scenes were sometimes funny and uncomfortable. This was something truly different.

  Because of the long, improvised scenes, the editing process was long. The finished special used a soft jazz score rather than the signature tune that would later seem such a perfect fit for the show. In a couple of ways the special superficially resembles Seinfeld. Short scenes of stand-up punctuate it, and near the end a couple of plotlines intersect. But otherwise, the resemblance is more minimal than might be expected. It does feel like a documentary. Larry points out the presence of the camera in the room, which follows him into a meeting or onto a stage. The HBO executives (played by Allan Wasserman and the late Judy Toll) look uncomfortable under the scrutiny of the camera. The club scenes are underlit and shot from the side.

  Although the apparent casualness of filming and the unscripted dialogue have an air of reality to them, the special is clearly plotted. Larry’s agent Jeff comes up with the idea of an HBO special and takes Larry in to pitch it successfully. Then Larry prepares by playing small clubs in Los Angeles and New York. Incidents occur along the way: a former Seinfeld assistant asks for a job recommendation; Larry offends a woman he knows by mispronouncing her name; Larry worries that Cheryl (her hair dyed dark so she will look more Jewish) will think he’s having an affair with a young woman who is in fact having an affair with Jeff; Larry avoids going to the wake for a friend’s stepfather. Each time, Larry comes off badly, and the audience both laughs and winces, a pattern that gets set for the series that is to come. We hear remarks that eventually we will come to recognize as Larry Davidisms: “I have a tendency to nod to black people.”

  Eventually Larry visits the arena in Pasadena where his concert will be taped, only to suffer stage fright at the size of it. Quickly he runs to HBO where he tells them his own stepfather has died (he has no stepfather) and he has to fly to Florida. The concert is cancelled. Larry leaves the building, whistling happily. In other words, not only does Larry create a radically different kind of concert special, he also leaves out the concert.

  The interview segments have a sort of parallel function. The first is to tell the audience that they already know Larry David’s work. Jason Alexander says, “The average guy on the street didn’t know the funny stuff coming out of our mouths was coming out of Larry David.” The second is to tell the audience that Larry was never a successful comic. Jerry Seinfeld says, “And then he would always call the audience ‘You people.’ I used to say to him, you know, calling them ‘you people’ is a bit distancing.” The third is to set up the special. Larry Charles says, “Once he saw that Seinfeld was successful, I think he felt the most fulfilling thing he could do next would be to return to stand-up and complete that unfinished business.”

  In the very brief stand-up segments (which shrunk during the editing process), Larry looks fairly confident. He usually has a piece of paper with notes on a stand, as comics sometimes do when trying out new material. His bit about not taking “shit” from magicians is particularly funny, as is his description of a near-death experience caused by masturbating with a high fever and his ruminations about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. (Did Clinton really think there’d be no price to pay for getting oral sex from a Jewish woman?) But in a late segment, a request to be euthanized when he’s unable to go to the bathroom by himself receives total silence.

  A true revelation is how good Larry David is on the screen. The man who never truly appeared on Seinfeld, who previously had acted in a few bit parts and in some television comedy sketches almost a decade earlier, proves himself to be a fully confident and remarkably charismatic performer. The camera likes Larry, likes his expressions, likes the way he lopes when he walks, likes his sighs, frowns, and his big, head-back laughs. What’s more, he’s convincing. It’s not so easy to play a fictional version of oneself, but he does it without self-consciousness, as if he’s not acting at all. When, of course, he is.

  Larry’s rapport with the other lead actors is also good. Cheryl only gets one real scene, but she comes off as the wife who knows her husband well, treats him with skepticism, but is charmed by him anyway. Jeff, on the other hand, is a mover and shaker, a businessman who pushes to get things done, and who takes advantage when he can. Yet, he’s still a real friend. The part will evolve later in the show, with Jeff becoming far more likable and vulnerable.

  The special aired on October 15, 1999, a mere seventeen months after the last episode of Seinfeld. That episode had been dumped on by critics and viewers alike, but Seinfeld was, if anything, a bigger success in reruns than it had been the first time around. People were watching episodes for the second, third, or fourth time. It was a good time for Larry to wipe out the memory of that last episode. (He didn’t need to erase the memory of Sour Grapes, except for himself; nobody had seen it.)

  And it worked. The special was a critical hit. Variety called it “a work of genius.” Treating its documentary quality seriously, Tom Shales in the Washington Post called it “a peek into the life and mind of a brilliant creative talent who is also clearly a huge pain in the neck.” He did complain that Larry had no “TV presence whatsoever.” James Brundage, writing for Filmcritic.com, seemed to have taken a while to realize that it wasn’t a real documentary. But once he did, he declared it “the best mockumentary I have ever seen.” Meanwhile, an article in the New York Times noted that it seemed so real to people that a friend of Cheryl Hines believed that she had actually gotten married to Larry David.

  Larry would have been justified in shouting, as George once did in Seinfeld, “I’m back, baby! I’m back!” Of course, the viewership did not come close to the tens of millions who had been watching Seinfeld. This was HBO, after all. But it also meant that Larry had far more freedom and control. And freedom to continue expressing his comic self as he wanted was very tempting. The acclaim could only encourage an idea that he had been nursing: to turn Curb Your Enthusiasm into a show.

  CHAPTER 8

  The First Season

  On the first day of filming the HBO special, Larry had said to Jeff, “Wouldn’t it be great if we did this as a series? Maybe we will.” Later he explained, “We realized as we were doing it that this thing seemed lik
e it could be — a show! The scenes came out very well, better than expected. I didn’t cringe when I saw myself — I mean, sometimes I did, but it wasn’t a big cringe-fest for me. And it was fun. I found myself laughing.”

  Chris Albrecht, chair and CEO of HBO, had known Larry since the seventies. He too had been a comic at Catch a Rising Star. He once nicely captured Larry David’s attitude toward life as “I knew I should have had the chicken.” Watching the special, he too realized that it had the makings of a series. He asked Larry for a meeting and offered him a thirteen-episode season. Larry said he would be willing to make ten. Usually it’s the channel that doesn’t want to commit itself too deeply, but it was Larry who said that he would agree to only one season. He wasn’t going to let himself feel trapped as he had on Seinfeld.

  The show that Larry imagined was not without precedents. The husband who often finds himself in trouble with his wife, or getting caught in his own schemes and subterfuges that backfire, has a long history on television. More recently, comedians have played fictionalized versions of their real selves: Jerry Seinfeld, but also, just as tellingly, Garry Shandling. Shandling first played himself in the sitcom It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which was co-created by Alan Zweibel — the same person who had a hand in conceiving the Curb special. On the show, which aired from 1986 to 1990, Shandling played a stand-up comic and performed monologues. He also broke the fourth wall, often interacting with the audience. Later Shandling created the better known Larry Sanders Show, playing a talk show host (Shandling had often substituted for Johnny Carson and was offered his own show but turned it down). The episodes were frequented by celebrities playing exaggerated or outright fictional versions of themselves, as would occur on Curb. The show mixed reality and fiction, as Shandling was known to ask the writers and the guest stars to use real experiences on the show. Questions of Jewish identity arose, sex was a major subject, race and sexual orientation were themes, and, seeing as it was on HBO, there was much swearing and sex talk. The dialogue had an improvised feel and the camera work was loose. It even had, in the talk show aspect, a show-within-the-show, just as Larry would put a musical-within-the-show in Curb’s fourth season and a show-within-the-show in the seventh (the Seinfeld reunion).

  Running concurrently with Seinfeld and ending in the same season, The Larry Sanders Show was considered far more risky. Seinfeld himself called it his favorite sitcom. It’s easy to imagine Larry envying the kind of freedom that Shandling had on HBO. Shandling talked about the show in a way that Larry never spoke about his own work: “I wanted to do a project that dealt in a deeper way with human behavior. . . . I wanted to be more deeply challenged as an artist.” But Larry’s own character would, in its own way, be an exploration of human behavior — the sort of behavior that Larry claimed he wished he could practice in real life. Shandling said something else about the show that could easily apply to Larry’s character in Curb: “Everyone wants to be famous. They think being famous will change their life. I’m here to tell them that it doesn’t.”

  As a writer for Esquire put it about Larry’s character on Curb, “You needn’t love yourself to be a narcissist; you can be just as transfixed by self-loathing.” The personality that Larry David developed for the first season of the show has a reduced super-ego and a runaway id. He speaks his mind, acts selfishly, tries to fulfill his wants, and avoids obligation. He understands instinctively that to be involved in human relationships means to experience constant conflict on both a small and a large scale. Larry David himself said, “The person on the show has more character than I do. He’s not as bright, but inside he has more character. I’d rather be the person on the show.” In years to come he would often assert that he liked the character on the show far better than his real self.

  The HBO special was the origin of the series, but the show itself takes something of a leap into a different form. For one thing, there is no stand-up. Instead, Larry is positioned as the vastly wealthy co-creator of Seinfeld, someone with an office and an agent but no visible work. In other words, a man of leisure who chooses to fill his days with the minutiae of modern life — squabbles with the wife, arguments with friends, hours spent in restaurants, stores, and shopping malls. He might as well be a successful Jewish importer who has retired to Florida condo living. The difference, of course, is that he is not only rich but famous. And famous people have famous friends.

  So what Larry David gives us is a domestic comedy of manners involving a husband who is, yes, a nudnik, but also opinionated and even aggressive, along with a mildly disapproving but still affectionate wife, difficult friends, and a series of confusions, embarrassments, and social faux pas. The plots in season one sometimes feel Seinfeld-like as Larry feels his way into the series. They are relatively modest in ambition — far more modest than in subsequent years.

  The character of Larry dominates the show far more than Jerry ever dominated Seinfeld. All the others are secondary and are there to play off Larry and illuminate various facets of his character. They exist only because Larry does and they never have developed plotlines of their own.

  JEFF GREENE

  “Like it or hate it, Curb Your Enthusiasm is Larry David,” Jeff Garlin said, confirming as much. “And so when people tell me how great I am on Curb or how great Curb is, I defer to Larry David. So if you’re uncomfortable, I also defer to Larry David. My responsibility on Curb Your Enthusiasm 100 percent is to help Larry David get his vision on the screen. My job is to make the other actor look good.”

  Which is not to say the other characters aren’t important. Jeff Greene, the manager that Garlin plays, is not quite the obvious sidekick that he appears to be. He does have a recognizable upper middle class, Californian, Jewish male point of view and often seconds Larry’s opinion on various contentious matters. As Garlin said, “My job as his best friend/manager is to pour gasoline on the fire and make it worse.” But the character of Jeff also understands better how the social world works. He doesn’t cause the friction that Larry does, or put his foot in his mouth, or insist on his version of the truth or morality as Larry does. The irony is that Larry is more of a moral straight arrow, for it is Jeff who has the wandering eye when it comes to extramarital sport.

  CHERYL DAVID

  The role of Cheryl, Larry’s wife, is less co-conspirator and more judge and jury. Like any good Jewish husband, Larry fears his wife’s opprobrium, and the woman holds an unseen but universally understood power in the relationship. That power originates in the sex drive. That is, in Larry’s sex drive and in Cheryl’s ability to withhold. Larry also knows that Cheryl understands the ways of the world, the simple rules of social conduct that often baffle or aggravate him. She is the first to see that he has done wrong, but she is also the first to understand and forgive. She is, in other words, a kind of mother to him, whom he might often take for granted but upon whom he depends for his life.

  Cheryl has no job. She worked once but, like the real Laurie David, has given it up to devote herself full time to the environment. Cheryl always seems to be at home and only occasionally busy with her cause, but she seems to have no household duties as the TV Davids turn out to be childless with a staff befitting such wealthy Hollywood royalty. (In a parody sketch on the Fox show MADtv, Larry asks Cheryl why is she always just in the next room and what is she doing in there.) They eat in restaurants and, when they have a dinner party, Cheryl hires a caterer. She is nothing less than an old-fashioned woman of leisure. And while in the first season her dress is very plain (due largely to the show’s small budget), in time she will begin to wear shimmering, well-cut, even alluring designer wear as befitting a princess.

  “It’s a departure from who I am in real life,” Cheryl Hines said, “so it is a fictitious character for me. All I can do is imagine if I was married to someone like the Larry David on the TV show and I had to put up with him 24 hours a day, that’s what I imagine when I’m improvising with him.”

  RICHARD LEWIS

  Just who is Lar
ry’s best friend? Is it his manager Jeff, whom he inevitably sees more than any other friend, or is it his long-time pal Richard Lewis? Lewis appeared as an interviewee in the special and as a guest star in the first episode, the first of many appearances on the show. Unlike the fictional manager, Richard — like Larry — plays a version of himself: a recovered alcoholic, love-seeking, highly neurotic stand-up comic who only wears black.

  In real life, Larry and Richard were born three days apart and met when they were thirteen, at Camp All American in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. They didn’t like each other. Later in the New York clubs, Larry saw Richard perform a few times. When they finally spoke, it was Richard who reminded Larry of their earlier connection. They developed a friendship that Larry would later claim was much like the one in the show, in which arguments and raised voices never hurt their relationship.

  Lewis has claimed that comedy helped him get through his bad patches. “I went onstage to get reassurance that I wasn’t going insane.” His alcohol abuse worsened and eventually he was hospitalized for having hallucinations. When Richard Lewis got into trouble Larry David was one of the people he would call in the middle of the night. Larry was also one of those who convinced him he had to get help for his drinking. Between 1991 and 1994 Lewis did not perform. He hit bottom, cleaned up, and has remained sober for over fifteen years. A highly successful comic, he has performed in a series of HBO specials. Known for being neurotic, obsessive, wired, an essentially unhappy man with trust issues, he was famous for pacing restlessly onstage, stooping as he walked, running his hands through his long hair — what one critic called a “kvetch ballet.” Until Curb, Lewis’s film and television success was modest.