Stars of David (24 page)

I tell him it's hard to believe that the hate mail he occasionally receives doesn't rattle him at all. “No, it doesn't,” Brown says. “Because I've been doing this a while, I know that the people to whom your religion matters—good or bad—know your religion. For example, long ago, I had just gotten out of the service and was working at a little radio station in a little city in western Pennsylvania trying to earn enough money to get a car. And one of the first calls I got was from
the
Jewish family in town.
How
did they know
?” he says with a smile.

“My whole deal in life is I'm pretty calm about it all, whatever it is. I try not to get too terribly worked up over people who I think of as idiots. I've never met a
smart
anti-Semite.”

How does he approach Israel as a journalist? “I'm pretty careful about how I report the story,” he says. “One of the things I know better than almost anyone on the planet, I think, is that no matter what I do on that story, both sides will find fault with it. We did a program one night, and my normal routine is to come down and take a quick glance at the e-mails that came in that day, and there were back-to-back e-mails—I mean, they literally came in within the same minute: The first one was from someone very upset at our pro-Israeli slant on the story and the next note was from a guy in Colorado who was incredibly nasty, referring to the exact same story on the exact same show, describing me as the modern-day equivalent of the concentration camp kapo who would turn on his own people for money. So it doesn't matter because fundamentally—and this is harsh, but I believe it—the partisans on both sides really don't believe the other side has a story. So I've just come to accept the fact that I'm not going to make everybody happy; I might as well make
me
happy. And I'll report and edit the story the way I think we ought to do it. And some days we do it pretty well and some days we don't, but we never don't do it well because we're Jewish.”

Does he find himself cringing when he reports on wrongdoing by Jews? “It's funny: When President Kennedy died, the first thing I remember my mother saying was ‘Oh, my God, I hope the assassin wasn't Jewish.' And I said, ‘Whoa. Wow.' No, I think in an odd way it's kind of nice that we have evolved to a point in our history when we can have, comfortably, Jewish bad guys, Jewish villains. When I was growing up, the big mobster in Minnesota was a Jewish guy: Isadore ‘Kid Cann' Blumenfeld. I'm pretty sure he was Jewish. So it never occurred to me that we were somehow perfect; nor did I think we had to be. I just thought, if you were going to be a gangster, then you had to be really good at it; I think that's what God's always expected of us. So I was a little disappointed that he got caught.”

I'm curious about those who want Brown to be more publicly Jewish than he is—who ask him, for instance, to speak to their Jewish organizations. He usually declines because he's supposed to maintain a reporter's distance, but recently made an exception. “I went back to Minnesota a year ago; I'd promised I would do it a long time before and in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have done it. But I went to talk to a [ Jewish] Federation dinner. It was a big deal. And I didn't talk about the Middle East until we got to the questions, even though I knew that's what they wanted me to talk to them about. I couldn't do that, it would have been highly inappropriate—it was a fund-raiser, for God's sakes. But one of the things I said to them then and have said before, is that this is a really important distinction I want people to understand:
I'm not the Jewish anchor
. I'm an anchor who happens to be Jewish.

“If they want me to be the Jewish anchor, then they're disappointed because I don't make judgments with that in mind. But I think they get a lot out of my being Jewish, nonetheless, because I bring to my life, my work, to the decisions I make, a sense of who we are; what history has required of us. I think those sensitivities—even when they make people uncomfortable at a given moment—are really important. They're a huge part of who I am. I embrace them, I rejoice in them. I can't convey to people in terms more strongly than that, that it's a source of considerable joy and pride to me. I think I come from a culture of exquisite values and I think I bring those values to what I do. And that ought to be enough.”

Fran Drescher

FRAN DRESCHER PHOTOGRAPHED BY FIROOZ ZAHEDI

SYLVIA AND MORTY DRESCHER happen to be staying with their daughter, Fran, when I come to interview her in Los Angeles. Sylvia wanders downstairs during our meeting, looking every bit the coiffed Brooklyn Jewish mother from central casting. Their conversation seems plucked right out of an old
Nanny
script:

FRAN: This is my mother!

SYLVIA: Guess what I came down for? Daddy wants candy.

FRAN: [To me] Mom and Dad came into town because I got a Woman of Achievement award last week.

MOM: Let me tell you something: I can't stand these people that stay skinny and eat all day!

FRAN: What's with Dad and all the candy?

MOM: He likes candy.

FRAN: Maybe he'd rather have the pineapple sorbet.

MOM: He wants chocolate.

FRAN: Okay, okay. Are you comfortable? Are you resting?

MOM: I may never leave.

FRAN: I wish you wouldn't. Have you gone into the bathroom upstairs?

MOM: To make a sissy? No.

FRAN: You have to go in there; it's paradise in there.

Fran Drescher laughs in person just the way she does on TV. It's that unmistakable, nasal, unrestrained heh-heh-heh-heh. “I'm Jew up the wazoo,” she says. “I have Jewish moments every day.” We're sitting in her white-on-white living room, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean. Her home is in a nondescript building on the Pacific Coast Highway (I drove past it twice, searching for the address), but inside it feels like a spa, with white wood floors, white furniture, white cushions, and white flowers. There's a shock of blue in the large fish tank built into one kitchen wall, and the smell of the sea, which is frankly less fragrant than fishy.

I can't help but feel that this environment was fashioned deliberately as an antidote to the upheaval Drescher's experienced in the last few years. First she divorced her husband of twenty years—Peter Jacobson, the cocreator of their hit show,
The Nanny
; then she spent three years fighting off uterine cancer. “I felt in touch with my spirituality in a deeper way than I had ever experienced before,” she says, her bare legs ending in trendy Ugg boots, propped on the coffee table. “I saw God everywhere doing small favors for me—allowing me to see the beauty that's life and the love that surrounded me.” She devotes much of her time these days to increasing medical awareness for cancer victims. “I feel like I have a purpose now. I became famous, and then I had the cancer, and now I lived to talk about it, and now I feel like this was destiny.”

It's a much more New Age outlook than I would have expected from a no-nonsense loudmouth from Flushing, but it's clear that Drescher, forty-eight, is still the “pretty Jewish girl with a voice that could call the cows home,” as she once described herself.

Drescher grew up in a heavily Jewish Queens neighborhood that, she says, basically shut down on Yom Kippur “out of respect”; even her gentile neighbors dressed up for the occasion. She idolized Barbra Streisand— “God's gift to all little Jewish girls in need of a leader,” she once wrote—and grew up intensely close to her sister, Nadine, and parents, Morty and Sylvia, who were always looking for a discount and didn't waste a scrap of food.

In her 1995 autobiography,
Enter Whining
, she refers to her mother as “The Kishkila,” which she defines as “someone who really enjoys their food.” Sylvia always encouraged her to eat more. “I was fed when I was sad, I was fed when I was good,” she writes. “We ate to celebrate, we ate to mourn and in between, we'd describe what we were going to eat later.”

Back in 1993, when Drescher and Jacobson created
The Nanny
, the network and advertisers worried that it would be too Jewish. “CBS said, ‘We can get Procter & Gamble to buy the show if we make your character Italian,'” she recalls. “And I said, ‘I don't want to be Italian'—not that I couldn't play Italian as an actress—but television is too fast a medium to play something that's not really close to who you are. And the whole essence of my humor comes from my background. So I said, ‘This is it: what you see is what you get.' And as it turns out, everybody sponsored us anyway. You can't analyze it too much. It was the Midwest and the Sun-belt that embraced The Nanny before New York and L.A.”

I was surprised to hear that Procter & Gamble, in the mid-nineties, would worry about a Jewish character in a sitcom. “Actually I'm the first person in I don't know how long who was a
Jew playing a Jew
,” Drescher informs me. “It really didn't happen before. You know Valerie Harper is not Jewish. She played Rhoda Morgenstern, but she is not Jewish. So, for advertisers, it just must have seemed like a double whammy.” She laughs. Indeed,
The Nanny
went on to run six seasons and trounced the competition. “
Who would have believed that a nice Jewish girl from Queens would beat
Star Trek: Voyager, Melrose Place, Coach
and
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?” wrote
USA Today
in 1995.

I ask Drescher if she knew her sense of humor would connect with the rest of America or if she felt she had to Americanize the nanny. “I Americanized my character by pitting her against a Brit,” she explains, referring to her “boss” on the show—a British widower with three blond kids. “That's how I did it. And it was a very contrived choice. I am a blue-collar, American, working-class girl—red, white, and blue all the way. He was
Upstairs, Downstairs
. Who could relate to
him
?” So she'd be the character audiences would connect to? “Right. Even though I'm a funny New Yorker, it made me American. Because he
wasn't
. And he didn't have the heart that I had. Now it didn't hurt to have her in short skirts—don't get me wrong. But she was a good person. She brought love into a home that was loveless. And everybody could relate to that.”

As the show took off, some Jewish commentators held up Drescher's character, Fran Fine, as breaking new ground for Jewish images on television. “
Who would have thought
,” wrote the
Forward
in 1997, “
you could fashion a Hollywood starlet—who made
People
's ‘50 Most Beautiful' list—out of
real-life, bridge-and-tunnel Yiddishkeit? Many actresses in Ms. Drescher's place
would have tried to lose their accents, suppress their big hair and play to Middle
America by conforming. Not Ms. Drescher, who is the only reigning Jewish actress
on television with the chutzpah to celebrate her ethnic ‘otherness.'
”

But there were others who denounced both the character and her creator. “
Executive producer and star Fran Drescher is a whiny, manipulative clothes-horse, hunting rich (non-Jewish) men by projecting a non-threatening ditziness
,” wrote Nora Lee Mandel in the Jewish feminist magazine
Lilith
the same year. “
A hit for CBS,
The Nanny
has the whole world laughing at her
.”

One episode in particular raised Jewish brows: The Nanny goes into a tailspin to create a picture-perfect Christmas for her boss's family. “I'm the one who teaches these people how to have a real Christmas,” Drescher told
The Jerusalem Report
in 1994. “I'm the one that shows them that family and togetherness are what's important. This was a show about a Jew who is having a Christmas every Jew dreams of. To deny the fact that growing up, it always seemed like Christmas was a more fun holiday—if anybody isn't honest about that, they're bullshitting themselves.”

Drescher wasn't bruised by the critics. “There were people that wrote editorials and things putting me down because they didn't feel that I represented the Jews well. For many different reasons: the fact that I was in love with my boss who was gentile. The fact that I didn't speak the King's English or look refined or act refined. It never rattled me. First of all, every loudmouth is going to try to take a position just to get a platform. So that's the first thing, and I'm hip to that. The bottom line is, anyone that would put me down for doing what I was doing is insane. I had such a likable character. I was loved by people in Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia. On a trip to Israel, I climbed Masada and when I got to the top, there was a girl who worked there who said, ‘Oh we love you much!' And the Israelis honored me at the Knesset.”

In 1997, the Jerusalem Fund of Aish Ha Torah bestowed Drescher, John Kluge, Sanford Weill, and others with the Theodor Herzl Award, which is, according to the Web site, “designed to highlight the achievements of individuals remarkable for their strength of will and commitment to realizing their dreams.” “It was fantastic,” Drescher gushes. “My parents came.”

When she spoke, she says, she commended the Jews for believing “so wholeheartedly” that they are the Chosen People: “‘Whether it's true or not,' I said, ‘it is the smartest
brainwash
known to civilized man. Because it doesn't matter how many people kick sand in our face, how many countries we're thrown out of, how many places don't want us, how many people don't like us; we still feel
great
about ourselves.'” That laugh again. “You can't really break our spirit in that way. I thought, ‘If only other minorities could subscribe to the same kind of ego-booster!' Most people who get knocked feel downtrodden; but when someone knocks us, we say, ‘Ach, what do
they
know?'”

When it comes to Jewish ritual, however, she's less gung-ho. “I feel like I'm not comfortable with a lot of organized structure. I like to subscribe to the positive things that make me spiritually a good human being, a caring, understanding, altruistic person. I defend and protect my roots, my family, and my friends. And in so being, I feel like I am a good Jew.”

The doorbell rings and Drescher answers it. “Hi, dahling!” she greets a young woman whom she introduces as her manicurist/pedicurist. “She's been doing me for years,” Drescher tells me. We move into the white bedroom, where Drescher settles herself in a rocking chair, and we continue talking while Drescher gets filed and buffed.

“I would say that a great majority of my close friends are Jewish, but some of my closest friends are not Jewish,” she says. “I just came out of a four-year relationship with a gentile—actually he was half-Arab. We had a wonderful, loving, and very deep and meaningful friendship, and we were very respectful of each other's heritage. When you stop looking at the differences, you start to see how similar we all are. For many years, I've been very, very close friends to Danny and Donna Aykroyd. She's Christian, he's Catholic, I'm the legal guardian of all three of their children, if God forbid, something happens to them. And we are a family; we love each other.”

Her first marriage, to Jacobson—her high school boyfriend—lasted twenty years (they served matzo ball soup at their wedding in 1978). “I think, growing up, we were conditioned to thinking that it's easier to marry one of your own kind; then you don't have to decide what you're going to do with the kids.” (She hasn't had children, but says she still wants to.) “You have this ethnicity that's bonding. People who didn't grow up being haunted by tales of the Holocaust don't really know what that's like. Even my last boyfriend, he could not get over how paranoid Jews can be.”

The afternoon light has dimmed the whiteness in the bedroom, and with Drescher's feet now soaking in a small tub, I feel like I'm intruding on an intimate toilette. Before I leave, I ask her very simply, what it means to her to be Jewish. “It means to be a member of a tribe—a very warm-blooded tribe, full of life and tenacity and ideals. And it makes me proud. It's not always easy. But what is?”