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A Simple Turn of Phrase
The TV comic has long been able to get laughs from the simple turn of a phrase or the slow turn of his head. His first audience was his mom. When Kelsey at age six belched at the dinner table, she would tell him to “swallow your burps.” One day, after a particularly loud emission, he beat her to the punch. “Chew before you swallow,” he said.He was 12 when his maternal grandfather, Gordon, died—making Kelsey the “titular head of the household without the authority.” Again, humor got him through. “I used that gift to help buoy my mom’s spirits when things weren’t going so well,” he says. “She was phlegmatic and a little inscrutable. I would dig at it until I got her to smile.”
As a surfer growing up in Florida with no surfer girl, the introverted and bookish Grammer added his ability to make others laugh to his social arsenal. “I didn’t think I was cute enough to score without some backup,” he says.
He discovered acting at age 16, when he appeared in Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes at Fort Lauderdale’s Pine Crest School. He went on to Juilliard in 1973 but was kicked out after two years for poor attendance. It was the first sign that his personal losses would haunt him for years to come.
“The grief I carried was debilitating, and I basically tried to drown it with booze for a long time,” he says. In 1990 he was sentenced to 30 days in jail (he served 11) for failing to complete a mandatory driver’s education class following a DUI. When, in 1996, he flipped his Dodge Viper and ended up in the Betty Ford Center, he decided to try to change. “My life has undergone a renewal of faith and a release from grief, which actually has been really wonderful,” he says today. “This has only taken place within the last few years.”
Grammer’s professional career began to take off in 1984, when Mandy Patinkin, who appeared with him in the musical Sunday in the Park with George, recommended Grammer to a casting director looking for funny leading men for Cheers. For his audition, Grammer pulled out a pair of yellow golf pants, donned a blue blazer and, with his preppy attire, became Dr. Frasier Crane.
Cheers cocreator James Burrows recalls his initial reaction: “Before he said a line, we saw that face and started laughing. It’s cherubic. He looked like what we had envisioned for Frasier.”
Dr. Crane was supposed to be a brainy new love interest for Diane Chambers (Shelley Long), to create tension with Ted Danson’s Sam Malone. But the audience loved Frasier and Diane’s repartee. “We knew right then and there we had to keep this guy around,” Burrows says.
When it came time to create a spin-off, in 1993, Frasier was an obvious choice for the central character. He was often the butt of the joke. “I think we all understand what it is to feel we’re just not good enough,” Grammer says. “Frasier was so tortured and yet so caring. He really wanted to do the world some good.”
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