Richards had been studying with legendary acting coach Stella Adler throughout,building Kramer from the ground up,beatnik wardrobe and all,and was a character actor more at ease within his creation’s confines than in his own life.
Michael Richards and his Seinfeld cast mates Julia Louis-Dreyfus,Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander.Sony Pictures Television
“It took years for me to feel comfortable with myself outside of show business,” Richards,now 74,says. “I was very comfortable playing Kramer. I was the ultimate character for what,nearly 10 years? When I would go on host shows and things,I was uncomfortable being myself. Even when I won awards,it was difficult for me.
“Now I’m probably more comfortable as Michael Richards. But I’m not acting now.”
Few beloved stars have experienced a public unravelling as dramatic as Richards’ when,on November 17,2006,during a stand-up set at Hollywood’s Laugh Factory,he screamed racist slurs at a group of hecklers. The confrontation was captured on video and disseminated across TMZ and other media outlets,becoming one of the 24-hour news cycle’s earliest pile-ons.
Seinfeld had wrapped in 1998,and Richards had endured the dismal experience of his short-lived follow-up,The Michael Richards Show,which was a “painful process that went lower and lower and then bust!” he writes in his new memoir,Entrances and Exits.
Michael Richards (left) as Kramer in Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi episode.Supplied
Inspired by a conversation with comedian George Carlin,he’d been heading back to the clubs night after night,“loose and all over the place”,with the hope of building an hour of new material. That Friday night,he lost the plot.
“It was a huge mistake,a terrible,terrible show,” he says. “I’m used to bad shows,but I don’t go around calling people horrible names because of it. That night it went where it went. I made my apologies. I felt bad for what I’d said. And then I thought,‘OK,I don’t feel like doing stand-up any more.’”
For such a monumental meltdown,a moment that all but shuttered his career,Richards spends a scant few of the book’s pages recalling the episode. Is he tired of talking about it? “Not at all,” he says. “But it wasn’t really an end to my showbiz career,in that work was coming my way. I was actually a bit hot from it,and clubs wanted me. I could have worked. But I didn’t want to do it any more.”
His retreat,it seems,was self-imposed. “I had to,it was necessary,” Richards says. “Any work that did come my way,I ditched it,I wasn’t interested. I wanted to get at the basis of,what is this thing called anger? What’s it trying to say to me? I was fascinated with that kind of rage.
“I mean,for me to respond like that to being told I’m not funny? I even explored it for a moment while I was on stage:‘Let’s see where anger goes.’ But I just didn’t have a button for it,as they say. I couldn’t make it into laughter. It was too big. It was the race stuff underneath the floorboards of the American psyche. This stuff was coming up between me and a black man,and it got where it got. Whoosh! I dropped the microphone and said,‘That’s that.’ It was a big turning point in my life.”
A still from the viral incident at the Laugh Factory in 2006. “It was a very bad night,” says Richards.AP
After years of contemplation,does he know why he went to those words specifically at that moment? “He went low,I went lower,” Richards says. “It was just a lot of trash talk going on. The footage that was released didn’t show all of what was going down,it became a one-sided thing of just me. Which is OK. It came out just the way it should’ve come out so that I could take a good look at a bad night and how I can go so hard against my brother. To say such things to another human being? It’s despicable. I’m truly sorry for that.”
In the book,Richards writes:“Public condemnation and humiliation are forms of justice.”
“Oh,definitely,” he says now. “Everything that came my way is just what should’ve been coming my way in the face of that.”
Richards accepting his award for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series at the 1997 Emmys.AP
Compared with the parade of cancel culture crusaders and other on stage any more or risk losing their careers,Richards’ perspective is novel. Having been on both sides of the equation,what’s his opinion on it? “I don’t know,I don’t know …” he says searchingly. “It’s just about what you stand by,what you think is right.”
Speaking from his book-lined office in Los Angeles,Richards feels a world removed from the highwire energy of his onscreen persona,his lackadaisical mood barely jolting above a monotone murmur. Cosmo Kramer was something,but Michael Richards is a serious dude.
It wasn’t just the consequences of his public humbling at the Laugh Factory;he’s always been this way,he says. In the book,he spends pages dissecting and recoiling at the awkward onstage fumbling that greeted his second Emmy win in 1994 (“I have turned dumb and idiotic. I can’t stand before this world outside of character,” he writes). Even at the height of his cultural and financial clout onSeinfeld,when Jerry collected Porsches,Richards collected books:first editions of Mark Twain and Washington Irving,Yeats,Chinese and Indian philosophy. He was more at ease alone in thought than carefree with his spoils.
A decade since his last major screen appearance,there’s a weight to him. During our interview,the only time he animates is while offhandedly mentioning that Antonio,the 12-year-old son he had with his wife,actress Beth Skipp,is currently at soccer practice.
Part wholesale stocktake of a remarkable life,part fan-tilt toSeinfeld enthusiasts,Entrances and Exits is an intriguing read. A battle with prostate cancer five years ago prompted the idea. “I was in a state of reflection,” Richards says. “I felt I had a book in me. I wanted to tell my story,review my life,and bring that across for people.”
Richards delves beyond Kramer’s mask in his first memoir,Entrances and Exits.Supplied
Over four years,he pulled from 40 years’ worth of diaries he’d kept. “I barely got through much of it really,in view of how much I write,” he says. “This book was almost 700 pages long;I had to cut it down to 427. My upbringing,coming into myself as an artist,my time in the military,my education,the dreams that kept me going – I wanted to talk about that. People don’t know these things. I’ve never gone into it much with the press,even when I was doingSeinfeld.”
Richards grew up in Culver City in Los Angeles,so close to the fringes of Hollywood that he’d regularly jump the fence into MGM Studios to play in the studio back lot. “Show business was going on all around me,” he says. “They used to shoot Laurel and Hardy shorts where I lived,right at the foot of the Baldwin Hills. I’d watch Laurel and Hardy and be like,‘I ride my bike down there!’ I’d be looking out for them on the street.”
Raised by a single mother and regularly left under the supervision of his Italian immigrant grandparents,including a schizophrenic grandmother,Richards never knew his father. His mother’s story about his dad shifted as Richards got older and demanded more details:first,he was a soldier who died in the war,then he was an engineer in construction who died in a car crash in Arizona. He was in his 40s when he finally learnt the dark revelation around his birth,and his mother’s burden. “Oh,my sweet mother. I am so sorry. I just didn’t know,” he writes in the book.
During the Vietnam War,just as he was launching a fledgling comic double act with friend Ed Begley Jr,he was drafted into the army. Although a pacifist and spiritual seeker in the free-love era when “What’s your cosmology?” was a viable pick-up line,Richards went enthusiastically,attracted to the structure and discipline of the service,as well as fantasies of the father he never knew. While there,he joined an acting troupe and spent much of his time in character as a high-ranking colonel. It cemented the seeds of his acting bug,while a drill sergeant’s warm advice,“Buck up,f---head!”,became a grounding philosophy.
Honourably discharged in 1971,Richards enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts to study acting and began playing open mic nights at the Improv and Comedy Store in Hollywood,earning the attention of agent Charlie Joffe,who handled Woody Allen and Robin Williams. In 1980,he scored a gig writing and performing on ABC’sSNL-style sketch comedy showFridays,where he met cast mate Larry David and then Jerry Seinfeld,who was working across the hallway onBenson. In 1989,he was cast in the NBC pilotThe Seinfeld Chronicles,changing his life for good.
Across the book,Richards comes off as a knockabout Zelig,his early interest in Jungian psychology,mysticism and the spiritual life leading to run-ins with Carlos Castaneda and Joseph Campbell;his time in the comedy clubs around Williams,Jay Leno and a then striving actress named Caryn Johnson (Whoopi Goldberg). In the clubs before his bigFridays break,his “off the wall going for the bizarre” act earns a compliment from the notoriously confrontational comic Sam Kinison;he reads it as a sign to kill his act and drift towards his main love,acting. Cosmo Kramer swiftly follows.
A decade into his exile,Richards says he’s making small steps towards returning to the screen – comedic or dramatic parts,he doesn’t care. “I’m an actor,that’s just really,ultimately what I am.” He’s already working on a second book,he says,more philosophical,beyond recollections ofSeinfeld or the worst thing that’s happened to him.
“Seinfeld was so long ago;even the Laugh Factory was[18] years ago. I’ve come a long ways. But I’ll still acknowledge it for whoever wants to return to it. It was a very bad night. The whole act went to shit. But I’ve got to take some responsibility and get at what’s behind all this shit.
“I think when I put stand-up down after the Laugh Factory,the quest was to find the person behind all this. And that’s the ultimate part to play because it’s the most real you can be.”
Entrances and Exits by Michael Richards is out now (Simon and Schuster,$34.99)
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger..