Brad Garrett

Photo/CBS
Emmy-winning actor Brad Garrett plays Jackie Gleason Oct. 13 on CBS. He had dreamed of playing Gleason since seeing "The Honeymooners."


Quotable

I just knew that if I kept his childhood in his eyes and in his gut, even in the meanest scenes, when he was the meanest to people, what was inside would be, 'My dad left me when I was 8 years old, and he never came back.

- Brad Garrett,
" Everybody Loves Raymond" co-star, on Jackie Gleason

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Well, no. Garrett is playing Gleason. Playing Gleason so persuasively, in fact, that it sometimes seems as though he's channeling the actor-comedian who created "The Honeymooners" and made bombastic bus driver Ralph Kramden a pop-culture icon. I wasn't going to mention the mistaken assumption to Garrett, but he told me not one but two previous interviewers had asked him if he was playing Carney. He didn't even sound annoyed, just amused.

Garrett, 42, knows he was a wild-card choice. Before "Raymond," for which he recently won an Emmy, stand-up comedy was his meal ticket. His dramatic resume is minimal.

He's accustomed to his hulking size - he's 6-foot-8 - costing him roles. His natural voice brings to mind the sepulchral bass of Lurch, the Addams family's butler, not Gleason's sandpapery baritone. And even though he aggressively pitched himself to CBS Entertainment president Leslie Moonves when the network announced the Gleason project, he got the part, on short notice, only after Mark Addy, the porky star of CBS' new sitcom "Still Standing," dropped out.

"Les called me and said, 'You want to do your dream, you've got to be on the plane (to Montreal) in three weeks,' " Garrett said.

He did not start packing. He had dreamed of playing Gleason since he discovered "The Honeymooners" on TV at 2 a.m., when his life was one long one-nighter. So he began studying him in earnest. Reading about him. Watching "Honeymooners" videos. Watching and rewatching two lengthy interviews Gleason had done with Morley Safer of "60 Minutes" and David Susskind.

"I had the headphones on, listening to his interviews on tape day and night," Garrett said. "We felt the audience has to accept me as Gleason in the first three minutes."

The movie's opening sequence is shocking. There's Gleason as he appeared late in his life, gray and jowly, a haze of cigarette smoke around him, doing one of those interviews, talking about his life, his ambitions, his regrets. Except it's not Gleason, it's Garrett.

From there, the movie flashes back to Gleason's poor Brooklyn childhood, to his sweet, tough mother, Mae, and the hapless, alcoholic father, Herb, who would soon abandon them, just disappear. In the couple's interactions, the confrontational behavior, the loudness, the threats, the loving apologies, we see the seeds of characters the little boy will make famous three decades later. One of these days, Mae, one of these days.

And then it's back to Garrett, playing a young, aspiring vaudevillian with a modest knack for stand-up comedy, intense drive and a belligerent self-confidence that knew no bounds.

Viewers who haven't read or at least heard about "The Great One," William A. Henry's meticulously researched, downbeat 1992 biography of Gleason, may be startled by the nasty side of the beloved comic's nature.

Garrett said he asked one of the surviving "Honeymooners" staff writers what the greatest misconception of Gleason was. "He said, 'That he was a big, wonderful, jolly guy.' "

The Gleason in "Gleason" can be an insensitive, egomaniacal jerk. He expects loyalty from everyone around him, yet shares little of himself. He cavalierly cheats on his wife and ignores his children, regards his co-stars jealously, when he acknowledges them at all.

And yet, as in life, he's likable nevertheless. People put up with him. "He was almost like the comedic Sinatra," said Garrett, who toured with the Chairman as a warm-up act for years. "He had such an amazing instinct. There are people out there who have to run the show and do the music and write and produce and direct, and most of it's a disaster. But there are a handful of people in the history of the entertainment industry who really can do all these things, and Gleason was one of them. I think he was so charming and so passionate about what he believed artistically that people were onboard."

Conveying the magnetism that belied Gleason's actions required intense focus, Garrett said. "I just knew that if I kept his childhood in his eyes and in his gut, even in the meanest scenes, when he was the meanest to people, what was inside would be, 'My dad left me when I was 8 years old, and he never came back.' "

That wasn't the only challenge, however. The size differential posed problems. Garrett is as big as an NFL linebacker. Gleason was 5-foot-10. "We were lucky that Gleason had, literally, a larger than life persona," Garrett said. "He's almost sizeless when you think of him. He had that bravado."

Still, a little movie magic was necessary. "We had to take care of the giant' factor," Garrett said. "I have a big hand - like a mitt, you know. When I held a king-size cigarette, my hand looked three times bigger. So the prop department hand-rolled custom cigarettes to make my hand look more human."

For the "Honeymooners" scenes, he said, "Everybody in the cast had 7-inch boots made for them by wardrobe. Furniture was custom made to look larger, to bring my size down a bit. Doorways were 8 feet instead of 6-9. Neil Roach, who was the cinematographer, said, 'I'll shoot it another way. You're still gonna look larger, but you're not going to look like you're towering over people.' 'Cause my concern was, you know, that his comedy was so in your face that if I raise my fist to Alice and say, 'You're going to the moon,' all of a sudden he becomes a bully, and it's threatening, and it's no longer funny. We had to make sure we were eye to eye."

Garrett said the "Honeymooners" re-enactments were actually more difficult for him than the portrayals of Gleason's vaudeville life because so many people know the Ralph and Alice bits by heart. "His stand-up was never that strong, but when he would go into the audience, when he improv'd, that was my thing. I was never a great monologuist, but when I just took the mike and went into the front row, that's when I was best."

His performance as Gleason is easily on par with Judy Davis' Emmy-winning turn in "Me and My Shadows: Life With Judy Garland," maybe better. It could be a bigger turning point in his career than being cast as Robert Barone.

Garrett insists he has modest expectations.

"I just want people to know I can be something besides the goofy brother and maybe be seen in a different light as an actor," he said. "Not that I don't love what I'm doing (in 'Raymond'). I'm on a great show with good people. But we're always looking to break out. And I don't think I could have played a character that's more unlike the guy I'm known for. Maybe it'll give me the liberty of auditioning."

Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Oct. 13, 2002.