Me and Billy Crystal: Part I

Before Saturday Night Live there was Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell. On that program I was awed by the talent of Billy Crystal. His bits included pretending the mic was broken and mouthing every other word, as well as an imitation of a wedding photographer who in between various directions keeps asking, "grandma, will you stand up please".

He got the guest spot on Cosell's show(on the same night as Patti Smith) soon after his big break. When Robert Klein pulled out of a sports dinner at the last minute, Crystal, a much lesser name, was aked to fill in. He blew his audience away with imitations of Cosell and Mohamed Ali (Cosell: How fast are you? Ali: I'm so fast I turn off the light and jump into bed and I'm in the bed before the light's off.") Soon after that he became a player on Soap.

I'm hesitant to fully reveal my level of geeky fandom, but it's probably too late for that. I remember being happy for him when he got the role of playing the first pregnant man in Rabbit Test (directed by Joan Rivers). And I followed him through years of stand up and chances. He had a TV show that Marvin Kitman said to watch because it was great, but too much for the masses. Eventually he got bigger breaks, like Running Scared, an excellent, overlooked film (http://www.fast-rewind.com/). Then there was the "real" Saturday Night Live, where he broke though as a "mahvelous" superstar.

It always bugged me that that it was largely due to that character that Crystal became big. Lorenzo Llamaz' wife asked Crystal to stop doing it, but he didn't. He said it wasn't based on Llamas. But, he had already confided to Johnny Carson that it was based on Llamaz. It seems to me like Crystal may have knowingly hurt this person in order to make it big. While I am a huge fan of Crystal's this was an early siting of the angry toughness that I would catch again as he continued to rise in talent and fame.

These memories came to mind recently when I saw Crystal's monumental Broadway show. It is amazing. But, while the show plays up Crystal's homespun warmth and charm, it does not hide his darkness.

At one point on the night I saw the show someone wheezed loudly. And Crystal stopped, turned in the sneezer's direction and said "Jesus Christ! You're in a public theatre. Control yourself!" It got a tremendous laugh, but it probably hurt. Later, Crystal's monologue turned to the his family's proclivity for coughing up phlegm. He turned to the man again and said,"You'd have fit right in." Mean, but funny.