A room service waiter entered the ritzy hotel room where George Wendt was staying. On the table, covered with fresh linen, the waiter set a big metal platter in front of Wendt, and, with a flourish, removed the cover to reveal-a cheeseburger. It seemed only right that the burly Chicago native known to millions as Norm Peterson, the beer-swilling accountant on ”Cheers,” would order such an unpretentious lunch.
Dressed in jeans, track shoes and untucked Oxford shirt, Wendt, in town with actress-wife Bernadette Birkette (”It`s Garry Shandling`s Show”) talked about life on the ”Cheers” set.
”We`re blessed, so blessed, because of the writing,” he said. ”For us, it`s like Christmas morning every day that you get new pages.” Birkette chimed in, ”They get along like siblings. For someone who`s not in the cast, to peek in, they look like they`re having the greatest time in the world.”
Wendt responded, ”We are, we are! What we learned when Nick Colasanto passed away and Woody (Harrelson) was cast, was if we embrace whomever comes in, the audience will follow suit.”
So he wasn`t anxious when Shelley Long left the cast last year? Wendt chews on a couple of vowels along with his cheeseburger before answering.
”You`ve got to be apprehensive when someone as talented as Shelley leaves, but we did our best to open up to Kirstie (Alley), warts and all . . . not that Kirstie has any warts,” Wendt wryly adds. In fact, Wendt said Long`s departure revitalized both cast and writers.
”We might almost be sick of the show if they had to prop up a relationship (between Long`s waitress character Diane Chambers and Ted Danson`s bartender Sam Malone) that had pretty much run its course. Kirstie`s character, Rebecca (Howe), genuinely does not like Sam. It`s like the door slams; it`s not happening.”
Although he cut his acting teeth at Second City, where each performer helps create material through improvisation, Wendt said he`s happy to have his lines handed to him at the beginning of each week.
”I was the kind of guy who never enjoyed improvising that much,” he said. ”I liken it to jumping out of an airplane: The apprehension is pure dread. I mean, once you`re actually doing it you`re going, `Wow, this is great!` But naw, I don`t miss improvising that much.
”Bernadette loves it,” Wendt continued. ”She probably gets a little more encouragement from Garry than we do from our producers, but it`s a different environment completely.”
Indeed, Shandling`s is probably the loosest sitcom on television today.
”Garry is very funny, and there are other brilliant improvisers on the show as well,” she said, ”so he`ll change things while we`re shooting.”
Last season, one of the episodes was supposed to center around Birkette`s real-life delivery of her second child with Wendt (she also has two teenage sons from what she calls her ”hippie incarnation”). The timing didn`t quite work out, but for Birkette the point is that ”I don`t think there`s another show that would be confident enough to take that kind of risk. Garry`s character and whole approach keeps it so fresh-he`s not going to trip up a lot of actors depending on this setup or that setup.”
Wendt and Birkette met at Ravinia in 1976 when both were members of Second City`s touring company.
”It was so beautiful and lush-the band, Beethoven-who could help but fall in love,” Birkette intoned mock-dramatically. ”Especially with someone as funny as George.”
While Wendt may have always been funny, he had no inkling he`d make a career of comedy while growing up in Chicago`s South Side Beverly
neighborhood. A fan of Jackie Gleason, Daffy Duck and the Three Stooges, Wendt said he ”watched the class clowns and stole from all of them.”
After lackluster performances at a Wisconsin Jesuit prep school and Kansas State University, where he said his main activity was ”partying,”
Wendt trekked around Europe and North Africa for a couple of years. Finding himself at loose ends back in Chicago in 1973, he decided to enroll in a Second City workshop.
”It was like, `Whoa!` For the first time in my life, I applied myself,” Wendt recalled.
In 1974, Wendt was invited to join Second City, and for the next six years he performed with its touring and resident companies in Toronto, Schaumburg and Chicago.
Wendt and Birkette finally cut the cord with Second City and moved to Los Angeles in 1980. Two years later Wendt was cast for ”Cheers.” ”(Series creator) Jim Burrows had a relationships workshop the first couple of days,” Wendt remembered. ”He basically let us believe that we were in on the creating of our characters, although he was probably funneling us exactly the way the writers wanted us.”
For what he jokingly referred to as the ”Geek Chorus”-Norm and Cliff
(Calvin) the mailman (John Ratzenberger)-Wendt said, ”We did have some broad parameters; we knew we wanted Norm to be a working stiff, but not blue collar. We wanted white collar, but not particularly distinguised-sorry accountants,” Wendt added with a laugh. ”And we knew we wanted Cliff in a uniform of some kind.”
Although Wendt said he brought ”a lifetime of preparation” to the role of barfly Norm, he has learned to stay perfectly sober during shooting on the set.
”I used to drink it like a real trouper the first year,” he said.
”Then I became very aware of where the camera is. Now, I take eensy beensy sips.” And, where he describes Norm as a ”real slug” in terms of fitness, Wendt admits in real life he jogs at home-while watching his beloved White Sox on television.
Looking beyond ”Cheers,” Wendt said, ”I`d like to move from medium to medium with impunity. Take Judd Hirsch. He can do films, TV, Broadway, off Broadway, commercials without anyone raising an eyebrow. And I think a dramatic role would be pretty much within my reach. I try to approach comedy as real as anything, so it`s not a big leap for me to retain credibility.”
Birkette added, ”We want to write, produce. We`re actually thinking people and have ideas of our own.” Said Wendt, ”We`re just flapping our jaws about it so far, but we have a good half-dozen projects `in development` so to speak . . . .” ”Up here,” Birkette said, completing Wendt`s sentence, pointing to her head.
As Wendt and Birkette left their hotel room for the airport, yet another wedge was driven between Wendt the actor and Norm the character. Ambling down the hallway toward the elevator, shirt still untucked, Wendt clutched in his hand not a frosty bottle of beer but-Norm fans prepare yourselves-a container of Perrier.
