From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Listening to Kelsey Grammer
A happy man, happily out of step with Hollywood politics.
NEW YORK--The star comes loping into a New York hotel lobby, a sight at once familiar and not. Kelsey Grammer's smile is the same one that has beamed out from Dr. Frasier Crane and the TV screen for two decades, first in "Cheers" and then, for the past 11 years, in "Frasier," where Mr. Grammer plays Seattle's famed radio counselor and guide to the perplexed.
Even so it's hard--for a mere longtime viewer, anyway--not to be a touch startled by the size (6 foot 3), the muscularity and the generally gleaming good looks he presents up close. Those looks aren't nearly as evident in the soft-looking, faintly--if perhaps appropriately--swollen image presented by that on-screen character, Dr. Crane. Something about the lighting, maybe, or perhaps the focus on the bald spot--Mr. Grammer doesn't know and he's not disposed to complain, certainly not about anything involving his life in television, which has brought him countless rewards, including a degree of fame that still occasionally takes him aback.
"It's a powerful medium," he opines, as Dr. Crane might, though in this case the pronouncement is the way into a story. A few years ago, he'd traveled to deepest Africa, where, Mr. Grammer reports, two men, in Masai getups, did a double-take looking at him.
"'Ah, Frasier!'" one of them exclaimed.
The narrative comes complete with the man's rolled British r's--"Frrrasier!" "Amazing," Mr. Grammer murmurs.
There is plenty in his life and career about which he can say the same, with far more reason, not least the fact that he is, today, clearly a happy man. His was an early history studded with tragedy and violent loss--two half-brothers set upon by sharks and killed, a sister raped and murdered. There were subsequent bouts with substance abuse, and two bad marriages.
On the other hand, he'd had the good luck to be exposed in early life to certain saving, powerful influences--and the even greater luck to have been able to recognize them as such. Those included his grandfather, with whom he lived the first 11 years of his life; his mother, who took him to Leonard Bernstein's children's concerts and exposed him to the arts. There was, not least, the experience of Christian Science Sunday School and the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy that stayed with him.
" 'Should extraordinary odds come against you, as they will, do not be a sluggard in the race.' Even as a little boy, I got that--that you don't give up. That you work out your own salvation. That's what saved my life."
There had been others whose advice he had stored away. Dr. Kai Dee, who played in the "Ironside" series, gave a talk one day to a Fort Lauderdale high school audience that included a young Kelsey Grammer--an address that urged constant feeding of the imagination. If you have to stand in a bank line, he'd advised, you can still stare at the carpet and imagine hordes of horsemen riding in the hills. The student took to that piece of guidance, which suggested, like the others, that one's fate was in one's hands.
May 13 will see the end of the 11-year run of "Frasier," one that brought the show more Emmys--31--than any other comedy in TV history. Some of the reasons for that success are obvious enough--hilarious writing, a regular cast that includes not only David Hyde Pierce, spectacular in the role of Frasier's brother, Niles, but also John Mahoney as their dyspeptic father, Martin, an ex-cop who clearly finds the character of his dog, Eddie, more convivial than that of his two excessively cultivated sons. Not to forget the character of Eddie, currently portrayed by canine actor Moose, replacement for the now retired Enzo, and others. Then there are the distinguished pop-ins like Gil (Edward Hibbert), restaurant critic and resident queen at Frasier's radio station, and the magnificently unshakable creep Noel (Patrick Kerr), malignant in his pursuit of Roz (Peri Gilpin), Frasier's producer.
Practically an entire episode was given over to guest Anthony LaPaglia, as a cockney layabout and Niles's future brother-in-law. The idea, Mr. Grammer explains, was that when something worked, it was allowed to roll; people other than the stars got their chance to be funny.
That said, it remains true that the chief and most obvious source of the show's success has always been Mr. Grammer himself--his grasp of the character he plays, and knows in his gut, and one, it's clear, that speaks for him in many ways, excluding, perhaps, Frasier's bottomless vanity and ambition. For all that pomposity, which Mr. Grammer has these many years rendered with increasingly delicious nuance, there's no missing the essential truth about Seattle's radio psychologist--a creature devoted to the power of the mind and reason, to art and culture in a world that blares its indifference to these things.
No television show--or writers, producers or actors thereof--had ever before created a major character so purely identified with such values, or so winning in their defense. Nor does Frasier get away with this merely because the show ridicules his and Niles's esoteric tastes, clatter about wine, and such. One way or another, the Crane brothers give as good as they get, and more.
It has always been a rule at the show, Mr. Grammer says, to play up to its audience, not down. That fact has, to say the least, done harm neither to it nor to its star.
Neither, one learns, as the conversation turns to the war and politics, has Mr. Grammer's publicly expressed scorn for certain of the wilder manifestations of antiwar, antiadministration mania now emanating from Hollywood. The entertainment world, he notes genially, isn't crowded with people who share his views, but he gets along.
"I didn't mind waving the flag a little bit " he allows. He does mind the poisonous political atmosphere, the class-hatred themes in the rhetoric of Ted Kennedy and other Democrats.
"That stuff is so repugnant to me."
"People might go for a President Frasier Crane," his interviewer suggests.
"He's an honest guy who cares," comes the return.
Buoyant, he is off, now back to the West Coast and home. There's also a farm in upstate New York and a house in Maui--plenty of places, and time, in which to ponder future work. Maybe even another TV show sometime. But look at what television used to be, and what it is now, he reflects. Once it offered writers like Paddy Chayevsky--programs that offered people something to think about. "Today it's whatever turns you on."
Frasier Crane couldn't have said it better.
