Julia Sweeney has made some important discoveries in the last couple of years.
One is that there is life after “Saturday Night Live.”
Another is that there is life after Pat, the utterly androgynous and cloyingly annoying he/she “SNL” character Sweeney made famous.
Another is that, despite the cancer death of a much loved brother and a cancer diagnosis of her own, there is life.
“I feel people are beginning to know who I am other than the character Pat” she said in a recent interview in New York, where she’s living on the Upper West Side as she completes her book, “God Said, `Ha!’ ” which was also the name of one-woman show that just closed on Broadway. “I’m really glad, because Pat is so far from my own sensibility.”
A product of Spokane, Wash.,Sweeney came to television and comedy, if you will, in a funny way.
Through accounting.
“When I got out of college (the University of Washington), I had a business degree, and had an idea I wanted to be an accountant,” she said. “So I moved to L.A. and fulfilled my dream.”
At this, as at so many other things she hears and sees, she laughs, uproariously.
For five years, she worked as an accountant for Columbia Pictures. Though it was “not exactly the creative side.”
In 1986 she began taking acting classes and performing at Los Angeles’ Groundling Theater, a sort of West Coast version of Chicago’s Second City that counts among its other graduates Phil Hartman and Jon Lovitz.
Julia was “discovered” by “SNL” producer Lorne Michaels while on the Groundling stage, and joined the cast of “SNL” in 1990–“my big break.”
“I did Jane Pauley, and this Ethel Merman thing for a while,” she said. “But the character I’ve done mostly was Pat. It was my invention. I was actually doing it at the Groundling before I got on `Saturday Night Live.’
“It was based on a combination of different people. Some people I’d been an accountant with and some I was working with at the Groundling. It wasn’t about the androgyny for me, really. It was more about the annoyingness of Pat. Like standing too close and asking you to go to lunch when you don’t want to go. That kind of thing.”
Though Pat seemed a ubiquitous regular “SNL” feature, Sweeney actually did only 12 Pat sketches over three years.
Toward the end of her “SNL” tenure, someone suggested she do a “Pat” movie, which she agreed to happily.
“I just felt it was time to leave `Saturday Night Live,’ ” she said. “I’d been on the show four years. I felt it was like high school and it was senior year. Even though I didn’t know if I was going to college I still had to leave.”
Released last year as “It’s Pat,” the movie bombed. It opened first in Seattle and Houston and drew such bad critical and box office response it didn’t open anywhere else.
“I think it’s great,” she said, defensively. “I really stand by it. I had a great time making it and wrote it with a couple of good friends and it was a really fun experience shooting it.”
She still gets the occasional residual from video rentals of “It’s Pat.” But there she was, not only trapped professionally in the Pat character but without her “SNL” gig.
Things got worse. Her brother Mike was diagnosed in the last stage of lymphatic cancer. While he underwent treatment, she had him move in with her. Divorced in 1993, she was living in a small, two-bedroom bungalow. Matters became more difficult when her parents came down from Spokane and moved in with her to help take care of her stricken brother. Her other brother, Jim, an assistant to the mayor of West Hollywood, also became a fixture.
Conditions became so crowded and disagreeable that one of her three cats fled and moved in with her next door neighbor.
Then, while her brother was in the midst of his ordeal of futile treatment, Julia was diagnosed as having cervical cancer.
” `You just can’t stand to let somebody else have the spotlight,’ ” she quoted her brother as saying.
She auditioned for and won a few acting parts (she had a small role in “Pulp Fiction” as Raquel, Harvey Keitel’s girlfriend, and delivered the line to John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson: “What’s with the outfit boys, are you going to a volleyball game or something?”) but also began performing, more for emotional relief than livelihood, at a small L.A. club called Luna Park in West Hollywood.
“They have this alternative comedy night,” she said, “for comics who want to get out of their milieu. The rules are that you have to tell a story, that it has to be the first time you tell the story, that it has to be true, that you can’t have jokes in it, but that it has to be funny. I performed there all year long while all this stuff happened to my brother and me, and so at the end of it I had this huge wealth of material.”
She wrote it into a 90-minute, one-woman show, which ran to huge success at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre and, last summer, at Los Angeles’ Coronet Theatre. It moved to Broadway last fall with great critical acclaim, but the economics of a big Broadway house ultimately proved prohibitive.
“My budget in L.A. was $60,000,” she said. “In New York, it was $650,000. Isn’t that amazing?”
Sweeney claims she wasn’t deliberately trying to escape from Pat, but she did, into a character called herself.
Her one-woman show opened with her explaining how she is one of those people “who have this quality that says I don’t exist”–illustrating this by recounting her troubles getting served even at a Starbucks Coffee.
As she told audiences, the difficulties she encountered having to live with her parents included enduring their theatrical taste. On one of the few nights they could all get out of the house, they insisted on seeing “Nunsense.”
“I can’t explain why I didn’t want to see `Nunsense’ so much,” she said, “but it might be my fear of Catholic vaudeville.”
Her recounting of her own ordeal by cancer included, in a hilarious retelling, a hysterectomy. The doctors left her ovaries intact, in case she wanted her eggs fertilized and borne by another couple. Sweeney, 35, lamented that she’d not only have to go on a romantic search for a boyfriend, but find a boy and a girl.
Her book, which contains twice as much material as her show, will be published by Bantam late in 1997. Her movie, produced by her “Pulp Fiction” boss Quentin Tarantino and also called “God Said, `Ha!,’ ” is now in the editing stage for release in June.
“I feel like this is kind of my way of saying goodbye to Mike,” she said. “I get to think of him in such a wonderful way, and I get to share him.”
Sweeney finished her radiation treatment months ago and remains cancer free. Her parents have returned home and she has a beau–“That’s a good word for him, because he’s a bow hunter”–whose name is Carl Frank and who lives with her when he’s not hunting in Idaho.
Her absent cat moved back and her brother Jim, the mayoral assistant, has taken up residence in her bungalow as well
“And his fiancee,” Sweeney said.
Pat, of course, is long gone. Sweeney wants to audition for more movies, but as herself.
“Pat was funny, but so limited,” she said. “We stretched out Pat too long as it was, let alone trying to build a career on it. I was proud of it. It’s not like, `Oh, I hope I live that down.’ I mean, I hope people see me do other work that’s better work than Pat.”
