Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a national treasure. Read this profile to understand that truth. If this is a (fair & balanced) portrayal of a genuine person, so be it.
[x New Yorker]
Frustration, I Love You — Julia Louis-Dreyfus
By Ariel Levy
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
Julia Louis-Dreyfus was not feeling relaxed. In a few weeks, she would be receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, in a televised ceremony at the Kennedy Center, and she was anxious about her speech. “It’s, like, ‘If you’re so fucking funny, get up onstage and prove it!’ ” she said one morning in Los Angeles. She was sitting in a white bathrobe, having her makeup done, in a room at the Glendale Hilton, where she was shooting an episode of her HBO series, “Veep.” Louis-Dreyfus has nine Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Golden Globe, and she shares with Cloris Leachman the record for the most Emmys accumulated by an actor: one for playing Elaine Benes, on “Seinfeld,” the role that made her a star; one for her performance in “The New Adventures of Old Christine”; and six for playing Selina Meyer, on “Veep.” But the Twain prize felt different. “Anyone can bomb,” she muttered. “Oh, God. Whatever.”
When the makeup was finished, a stylist ran a curling iron through Louis-Dreyfus’s shiny brown bob, one of several wigs she’s worn while making “Veep,” in order to minimize her preparation time. Her real hair is explosively curly, when it hasn’t been coaxed into sleekness for an event. These days, it is also “blasted by chemotherapy and still growing out,” after six rounds of treatment that Louis-Dreyfus underwent last year for breast cancer. She’d decided to address her illness and recovery at the Twain prize, but, as she put it, “I don’t want it to be ‘The Cancer Show at the Kennedy Center.’ ”
Later that day, she sat with the showrunner of “Veep,” David Mandel, in a small conference room in the Hilton, surrounded by a dozen writers and assistants, who were helping Louis-Dreyfus fine-tune her speech over lunch. (Mountains of dumplings from Din Tai Fung for the writers, and a spinach salad for Louis-Dreyfus, which her assistant handed her in a Tupperware. Asked how it was, she replied, “Punitive.”) She leafed through a printout of the speech. “OK, should we hear this thing and see how bad it is?” she asked, and began to read. “ ‘When Mark Twain first e-mailed me about the prize, I totally misunderstood: I assumed that I was being asked to honor somebody else, and I thought, Oh, my God, what a hassle. I have to go all the way to Washington, DC—which, no offense, is a nightmare—and get a dress and all that crap, and make up flowery things to say about how funny someone else is? No effing way.’ ” The writers tittered. “ ‘Then I reread the e-mail and I realized—it’s me! They’re giving it to me! And I get the prize! And my attitude about the whole thing changed, it really did.’ ”
In the section of thank-yous, the speech turned fractionally more serious, and Louis-Dreyfus wound her way toward her health. “ ‘The old cliché about laughter being the best medicine turns out to be true: when I was getting my hideous chemotherapy, I’d cram a bunch of friends and family into the tiny treatment room with me . . .’ Gosh, as I’m saying this I’m going to cry,” she said, and started to. She shook her head in self-rebuke, then continued, “ ‘We really did have some great laughs. Of course, I was heavily medicated and slipping in and out of consciousness, so I was a pretty easy audience.’ ” She wiped her eyes. “ ‘My point is that laughter is a basic human need along with’—oh, fuck!” she said, crying harder but also sort of laughing, “ ‘along with love, and an HBO subscription.’ That would have worked better if I weren’t weeping.”
After the shoot that day, Louis-Dreyfus described her recent state of mind. “You know if you get on a horse and you have really tight reins and the horse is galloping?” she said. “I felt like I had really tight reins on myself. That’s what it felt like: I was just holding on tight.” Then she rolled her eyes and said, “I’ve had a really rough year, blah, blah, blah—you know, we’re getting through it.” She thought about it for a second. “I had a rough couple of years, actually.”
In the fall of 2016, on the Friday before the Emmys, Louis-Dreyfus’s father died. She won the award, and during her acceptance speech her voice cracked as she dedicated it to his memory. “I’m so glad that he liked ‘Veep,’ ” she managed, “because his opinion was the one that really mattered.”
A year later, on the Friday before the 2017 Emmys, Louis-Dreyfus went to see a radiologist about a lump she had noticed in her breast. “He did a biopsy,” she recalled, “and he said, ‘I think you should prepare yourself for bad news.’ ” That Sunday, she won her sixth Emmy for “Veep,” setting a record for the most wins by an actor for a single role. “Monday morning, I found out—it’s cancer,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “I mean, is that crazy?” She gave a little half laugh, half snort. “So I was glad to give the Emmys a skip this year,” while her show went on hiatus as she did chemo.
“I have a different kind of view of my life now, having seen that edge—that we’re all going to see at some point, and which, really, as a mortal person you don’t allow yourself to consider, ever. And why would you? What are you going to do with it?” she concluded. “I was a little more breezy before. I was a little . . . breezy.”
If there was one move that expressed the essence of Elaine—uninhibited, emphatic, irrepressible—it was the shove. When she was outraged or shocked or dazzled, she put her hands on the chest of the man who was eliciting that reaction, shouted, “Shut up! ” or “Get out!,” and then shoved him so hard that he toppled backward. It was a kind of kid-sister move, at once obnoxious and irresistible—a way of propelling another, bigger person into her reality.
It was a move that Louis-Dreyfus brought to Elaine, but it predated the character by at least a decade. “The way that she would shove guys—that’s the way she had to treat us,” Paul Barrosse, who cast Louis-Dreyfus in a comedy show when they were students at Northwestern University, said. “That kind of physicality was on display very early.”
Louis-Dreyfus was a freshman and Barrosse was a senior when she joined the “Mee-Ow Show,” which she describes as “the comedy show on campus.” She told me, “It was the seminal moment in my life. I remember thinking, Oh, this feels like something huge. And it was something huge: everything came from that.”
At eighteen, Louis-Dreyfus was already strikingly self-assured. “There’d be, like, seven male cast members and two female,” Barrosse said. “I and some of the other senior guys in that show were like the eight-hundred-pound gorillas in the room, with huge egos, and she really stood up to that. I remember she was working on a scene with someone, and we came poking our noses in, and she threw us out of the room: ‘What are you doing? We’re trying to work in here!’ ”
After Barrosse graduated, he started a theatre company with his roommate Brad Hall and a couple of friends, putting on shows in a rented wig shop that they converted into a forty-seat auditorium. “Our first comedy revue was all guys,” Barrosse said. “The one guy who didn’t have a beard played all the women, like in Elizabethan times.”
“It was still common for people to say, ‘Boy, it sure is hard to find a funny girl,’ ” Brad Hall said. “It was, like, completely an accepted idea: there are fewer women in comedy because women aren’t as funny as men.” But they thought they might like to have one female cast member in their next show, so Barrosse took Hall to see Louis-Dreyfus, who was then in a sketch revue called “Ten Against the Empire.”
From the beginning, Louis-Dreyfus was taken with Hall. “He was gorgeous,” she said. “He looked like Björn Borg or something. I remember thinking early on that this was the guy for me, but I didn’t dare tell anyone, for fear they would say, ‘That’s ridiculous. You’re so young—you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ So I kept that little secret close to my heart.” They became a couple, and have been together ever since. (They have two sons. Henry, twenty-six, is a musician in Los Angeles, and Charlie, twenty-one, is a junior and a basketball player at Northwestern.)
Louis-Dreyfus joined their troupe, which they called the Practical Theatre Company. (They’d started out as Attack Theatre, but then made the practical decision to choose another name.) Like Barrosse, Hall was impressed by Louis-Dreyfus’s toughness. “There was a day when Julia brought everything to a halt in rehearsals,” he recalled. “We were teasing her in some way, and she just said, ‘That’s over. We’re not doing that anymore.’ We all just went, ‘Whoa, holy shit.’ ”
Barrosse remembered the particulars: “Jamie Baron was calling her a pudgy glamour-puss. She was not as svelte as she is now—she was very cute, but she probably had an extra five pounds, which was enough for Jamie to come after her. The guys were hard on the guys, and we didn’t treat her with any additional dignity. When Jamie started calling her names, she’d just had it: ‘If this is the way it’s gonna go, then I’m out of here.’ It was making her uncomfortable, and it’s difficult to be funny when you’re uncomfortable! I’m sure I saw her shove Jamie.”
The Practical Theatre was surprisingly successful, selling out every show. In 1981, it moved to a larger venue, in Piper’s Alley, behind Second City (where, by then, Louis-Dreyfus was also doing some improv). After the first performance in the new space, a critic from the Chicago Reader wrote, “It made me laugh more and harder than any satirical show in recent memory.” Weeks later, Tim Kazurinsky, a writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live,” came to a performance, and told Dick Ebersol, the show’s producer, that he needed to see it for himself. Ebersol did, and promptly hired the entire four-person cast.
“Saturday Night Live” went on the air when Louis-Dreyfus was in high school, and she watched it with her family every week, rapt. “If somebody had a date, that person would have to sit with us and watch,” Judith Bowles, Louis-Dreyfus’s mother, said. “It was like a church for us.” It was a thrill and a shock when her daughter was hired. “I was blown absolutely away,” Bowles said. “It was like a blitz of fireworks.”
Louis-Dreyfus was elated. “That was the show for our generation,” she said. She dropped out of Northwestern after her junior year and moved to New York. But the Practical People, as the show’s writers called the new cast members, did not fit in well. “It was a very dog-eat-dog environment,” she said. “I didn’t go in armed with a bag of characters from which to pluck. I came into it naïvely, with this notion that it would be ensemble work, and that writers would be trying to write for everyone. But it was very political and very male-centric. Very.” Eddie Murphy was the star at the time, and Louis-Dreyfus rarely made it on the air for more than a moment or two. She felt simultaneously ill-equipped and underutilized. “Julia was used to being the gal in the show and being relied on to do a lot,” Barrosse said, “and suddenly she’s getting cast as the nurse or the whore.”
Barrosse was cut after a season, and Hall after two. Louis-Dreyfus felt increasingly isolated. Sometimes she complained to a writer she’d befriended named Larry David. “He was as miserable as I was,” she said. “I’d hang out in his office and bitch and moan.” After her third season, Ebersol left the show, and she wasn’t invited back.
Louis-Dreyfus and Hall lived in the West Village, auditioning for parts and going back to Chicago periodically to work with the theatre company. “It was a fallow period for me,” she said. “I was just trying to get work—anything and everything.” They went to Los Angeles for pilot season, and Louis-Dreyfus got cast in a spinoff of “Family Ties.” “I was the twentysomething who ran the coffee shop, or something,” she recalled. The show didn’t get picked up, but it led to a role in “Day by Day,” a sitcom in which a married couple quit high-powered jobs and start a day-care center in their home. “I was the snarky neighbor who didn’t like kids,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “It was very joyful: they were writing for character, and it was really funny stuff they gave me to do.” She was also cast in small parts in “Christmas Vacation,” with Chevy Chase, and in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters.”
When “Day by Day” was cancelled, after two seasons, Louis-Dreyfus was offered a development deal at Warner Bros. “It was a really big deal at that time,” she said, “a sum of money to do a show that I’d star in.” But the writing didn’t come together as she’d hoped. “I said, ‘This isn’t worth it. I want to get out.’ A couple of days later, I get a call from my agent. Larry David’s written this script with a comedian, Jerry Seinfeld—I hadn’t really heard of him—and they’re adding a girl.” The pilot of what was then called “The Seinfeld Chronicles” had already aired on NBC, and the network had offered to buy four more episodes if David and Seinfeld created a real female character. Both of them hated the idea of doing anything like a romantic comedy, but it occurred to David that they could base Elaine on an ex-girlfriend whom he’d managed to retain as a friend after their romance fizzled.
Louis-Dreyfus was struck by the quality of the material. “It was not written like standard sitcom fare,” she said. “The rhythm was entirely different. The jokes were subtler, and they had a different tone.” But she was looking for a more substantial role. “In two out of the four scripts, I had some kind of meaty stuff to do—in the other two, less so,” she said. “And this was coming off of developing my own thing, so I thought, Gee, I don’t know. But I met with Larry and Jer at the old DesiLu studios, and we read a scene together. I remember Jerry was eating cereal, and he was very young and casual, in a way I thought was appealing.” Rosie O’Donnell, Patricia Heaton, and Megan Mullally had already read for the part, but none of them embodied the character the way that Louis-Dreyfus did. As she was getting ready to leave after the audition, David ran after her and said, “What do you think?” She was still concerned about whether it was the right move for her career, but she signed on that weekend. “I had a feeling about ‘Seinfeld,’ like I had a feeling about ‘Mee-Ow,’ ” Louis-Dreyfus said. “I’m sitting on top of a great treasure, and no one knows it.”
“Seinfeld” was not an instant hit. Brandon Tartikoff, the network’s president, worried that it was “too New York, too Jewish,” and scheduled it in a time slot that one executive described as “garbage-dump theatre.” For a few seasons, it was a “struggling, nothing show that nobody’s watching,” as Jason Alexander, who played George, put it. It wasn’t until Ted Danson told NBC he planned to retire from “Cheers” that the executives, desperate to find a replacement, risked putting “Seinfeld” in their best spot: Thursday nights, with “Cheers” as a lead-in, in the hope that some viewers would stay tuned. Within months, “Seinfeld” was getting better ratings than “Cheers.”
Early on, Louis-Dreyfus was bothered that she didn’t get to drive much of the comedy. “I seem to remember having to fight to get more material,” she said. “Not fight but push—that’s the word. Multiple times.”
Neither Seinfeld nor David had ever written for a sitcom, let alone one with a substantial female character. Seinfeld described Elaine’s increasing presence on the show as a product of their evolution as writers. “Larry and I took a while to realize that all four characters had to have a solid story every episode,” he told me. “A four-story sitcom structure was not something anyone had ever done before.” Paul Barrosse, who was living with Hall and Louis-Dreyfus in Los Angeles when the show began shooting, said, “Once again, here she is in a show where she’s the lone woman, with three guys with big egos—four if you count Larry, and he’s the biggest neurotic ego of all.” He saw the shove—along with some of Elaine’s other bursts of comic aggravation—as a way of stealing the show when she had too little to do. “Those things came out of a well of experience that she had built up, and probably they were a release of frustration,” he said.
“You could say frustration has fuelled my career,” Louis-Dreyfus told me, smirking. “ Frustration, I Love You—that’s going to be the name of my book.”
As Louis-Dreyfus pushed, and as Seinfeld and David developed, Elaine became both funnier and more interesting. “The girl role was not the Girl Role,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “That was very important culturally: ‘Oh, you mean women have, like, value beyond whether or not you want to fuck them?’ ” Elaine’s story lines were sometimes specific to her femaleness, as in the episode when people at her office started calling her Nip after she inadvertently sent out a revealing Christmas card. But more often her gender was incidental. She was the person forced to suffer the indignities of flying coach while Jerry luxuriated with an ice-cream sundae in first class, or the beleaguered bakery customer cheated out of the last chocolate babka because of circumstance, not sexism. David Mandel, whom Louis-Dreyfus met when he was a writer for “Seinfeld,” said, “Jerry always talks about three idiots and adding a woman. But it wasn’t three idiots and their babysitter, or three idiots and the girl who lives next door who gives them knowing looks. It was four idiots. There was no differential. And that’s glorious.”
“These sunglasses make me look like a stone-cold bitch,” Louis-Dreyfus said one morning, between shooting scenes of “Veep.” She was wearing enormous black shades, along with a lipstick-red, skin-tight skirt and suède stilettos. Kevin Dunn, who plays her strategist Ben, nodded and said, “Like Leona Helmsley.”
The sunglasses were a prop, meant to hide the evidence of Selina’s late night. In the scene that followed, she turned to Marjorie (her grim daughter-in-law, who has temporarily become her body woman), lowered the glasses, and asked, “How do my eyes look?”
“They’re puffy, Ma’am,” Marjorie answered impassively.
Moments later, Selina asked the same question of Gary, her besotted aide, played by Tony Hale. “Honestly?” he replied. “I’m surprised they let you run for President—because you look thirty-four, tops.”
Selina—a vain, unprincipled Vice-President turned (briefly) President turned perpetual candidate—requires a level of fawning that would give Michael Cohen pause. By the show’s logic, Marjorie clearly had to go; Gary needed to be reinstated as Selina’s right-hand man. In an early take, Louis-Dreyfus tried an understated approach, reacting to Gary’s flattery with a slight smile, but it felt wrong. “Sorry, Tone,” she said. “That was my bad.” Hale shook his head and said that the problem was his delivery. Mandel, who was seated behind monitors twenty feet away, called out, “You’re both awful,” and they did it again.
They played with versions in which Selina dismissively told Marjorie to “go back to doing whatever it was you did before,” while Gary mouthed “Yes!” After several iterations, Louis-Dreyfus swapped her stilettos for sneakers and walked over to the monitors, where Mandel had been watching with the episode’s director, Beth McCarthy-Miller. “Try one with just ‘Marjorie, you’re out,’ ” he suggested. Louis-Dreyfus flinched. “I’m hesitating, because I’m afraid it’s getting too arch.” Mandel nodded, then said, “Let’s just try it once.” Louis-Dreyfus went back to her mark and did it Mandel’s way. It was undeniably the best take.
Louis-Dreyfus is both the star and an executive producer of “Veep”: the shove has given way to the push-and-pull of creative collaboration. As the boss, Louis-Dreyfus has achieved the ensemble focus she craved at “SNL”—in stark contrast to Selina’s management style. If Elaine Benes was frustrated, Selina Meyer is irate: she isn’t losing the last babka, she is losing a position as the most powerful person in the free world, and she reacts to every setback with flagrant cruelty, usually directed toward her own staff. Louis-Dreyfus’s favorite line in the series is a venomous castigation that Selina levels at an aide who used a crummy source to get information: “That’s like using a croissant as a fucking dildo. . . . It doesn’t do the job, and it makes a fucking mess!” Louis-Dreyfus is often funniest on “Veep” when she is expressing that least acceptable of human emotions: unbridled female rage. Sometimes her put-downs are surrealistically lewd—like Jolly Green Jizzface, the name she devised for the towering, incompetent Jonah Ryan. At other times, they are reality-based, as in the episode when the comedian Kumail Nanjiani had a bit part, as a statistician. After asking him between takes if it would be OK to insult his appearance, she ad-libbed the furious dismissal “You take your eyebrows and you get out.” The memorably titled episode “C**tgate,” which Brad Hall directed, centers on Selina investigating which lackey has called her a cunt, only to discover that it was all of them.
“Even with horrible Selina,” Louis-Dreyfus said, “one can’t approach it like she’s horrible. She’s super driven, and she’s highly frustrated, and certainly I can understand that—her frustration, as a working woman who is in the business of selling her brand. Because, guess what? I’m doing the same thing.”
Louis-Dreyfus is less work-obsessed than Selina, but only slightly. Before last year, her only long stretch away from acting came after “Seinfeld” went off the air, in 1998, when she took an extended leave to be with her young sons. “I’d had a lot of anxiety about being a mother working outside the home—that I was missing things, that I needed to be with them and I wasn’t,” she said. “I’d had a nursery on the set at ‘Seinfeld,’ and I would take both boys with me—which in some ways was worse, because then you’re so split! I was racing between the stage and the nursery, I was breast-feeding and all that shit.”
She used her maternal self-doubt to help develop her character on “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” Kari Lizer’s sitcom about a divorced mother who runs a gym, which Louis-Dreyfus starred in for five seasons after returning to work. “There was a lot to tap into there,” she said. “It was about trying to keep your head above water as a mother who is sort of up against it.” She smiled. “God, I loved working on that show: there were a lot of women in positions of authority, and it was super well run, super efficient in terms of time, and it was just a great gig. It was a very female point of view.”
Divorce and a mother’s fears—this time about her child leaving for college—were also at the heart of Nicole Holofcener’s film “Enough Said,” one of the few dramas that Louis-Dreyfus has appeared in. “She’s inherently funny, but she’s also inherently emotional,” Holofcener said. “I didn’t have to trick her into crying, that’s for sure, or direct her toward vulnerability. She just was there. Her feelings are very close to the surface, and she has a lot of them.”
“When you have children, which is in so many ways a glorious endeavor, part of it is about constantly separating,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “Even when they’re born—I remember thinking, Oh, God, I miss that movement in my body. And from there on that story continues: they crawl away from you. They go to school. It’s a constant. Separation has been a theme in my life, something that I’ve really struggled with.”
Julia’s grandfather Pierre Louis-Dreyfus cut a romantic figure in Paris. He drove a race car in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He knew Charles de Gaulle. As a ball-turret gunner for the Resistance, he flew eighty-one missions over the Western Front. After the war, he and his brothers ran the family’s company: an international dynasty encompassing shipping, banking, and agricultural commodities. Pierre, who was Jewish, married a Catholic woman of Mexican descent, but the marriage didn’t last, and she moved to the United States with their children, Gérard and Dominique. He had two more with his second wife, and lived to be a hundred and two.
“He was deaf and he didn’t have any teeth when we went to see him, and he was screaming at his butler—the kids got a kick out of that,” Louis-Dreyfus recalled. “But he was an incredibly handsome, dashing fellow, as was my father. They were both very dashing, tiny Frenchmen.”
Her father, Gérard, started going by William when he was a young teen-ager, recently arrived in the United States. From 1969 to 2006, he led the Louis Dreyfus Group, overseeing its expansion into real estate, natural gas, and telecommunications. “He saved the company,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “But the reports of my father’s wealth are, in fact, greatly exaggerated in the press. He’s referred to as a billionaire, and I’m referred to by some heinous term like ‘billionaire heiress.’ It’s incorrect! My father—unfortunately—was never a billionaire. Far from it.”
Compared with most of us, though, he wasn’t that far from it. Among other pursuits, he amassed an art collection, including works by Alberto Giacometti, Alice Neel, Bill Traylor, and Yves Tanguy, that has been valued at fifty million dollars. On a bright afternoon in October, Louis-Dreyfus visited the collection, which is housed in a former car dealership in Mount Kisco, New York, where William had his country estate. He left the bulk of his collection in a trust to benefit the educational programs of the Harlem Children’s Zone; Louis-Dreyfus was at the gallery that day to meet the other trustees of her father’s charitable foundation and discuss the upcoming sale of several paintings at Christie’s.
The board has had to be reconfigured since the death of Louis-Dreyfus’s youngest sister, Emma, a social worker who focussed on at-risk children. In August, at the age of forty-four, she suffered a fatal seizure while on a camping trip in the Sierra Nevadas. Louis-Dreyfus got the news just as she was starting work again on “Veep.” “It was out of the blue,” she said. Emma was found to have alcohol and cocaine in her system, and her death became a minor fixation in the celebrity press; the day before our visit to the art gallery, a British tabloid noted that Louis-Dreyfus had not publicly commented on the loss, presenting this as evidence that the sisters were estranged. “Given the fact that that heinous shit came out, I would simply say I’ve kept this under wraps out of reverence for my dearest Emma,” Louis-Dreyfus said. Her eyes welled and she shook her head, as if to disagree with her grief. “It’s been a very bad period of time.”
Her family, though extraordinarily privileged, has always been complicated. Louis-Dreyfus’s parents separated when she was a year old, and divorced not long afterward. “I don’t have a memory of them together,” she said. She was five when her mother was remarried, to a surgeon named Tom Bowles—Daddy Tom, Louis-Dreyfus called him. When she was seven, they spent a year in Sri Lanka so that he could work with Project HOPE. “It was very exotic,” her mother told me. “We were up in the mountains in the old capital. It was a way of life that was so entirely different from anything we’d known in New York. Unbeknownst to me was how much she missed her dad, William, during that time. It was very hard for Julia.”
Brad Hall said of William, “He was a larger-than-life character, very forceful and very opinionated. Getting his approval was big—it was big for me when I met him, big for anyone who knew him. A guy like that, you want his energy. I think that accentuated her longing for him.”
When the family returned to the United States, they moved to Washington, DC. Louis-Dreyfus lived with her mother, Daddy Tom, and her two half sisters, Amy and Lauren. On weekends, she visited Daddy William and his family in Mount Kisco, or at their apartment on Fifth Avenue. In the gallery, she stopped in front of a sculpture by Raymond Mason. “This was on our coffee table,” she said. It was a group of figures, each about a foot tall, clustered around a man lying on a stretcher, with his head bleeding. “I loved it,” Louis-Dreyfus said, and pointed out two women with their backs to the crowd: one holding an ice-cream cone—breezy—and the other with pink eyes swollen shut, screaming in agony into the sky. “Everyone had a story.”
Louis-Dreyfus found moving between the two families wrenching. For one thing, Judith and Tom Bowles lived an upper-middle-class life, and her father was rich. “The discrepancy was hard, because I was straddling two universes,” Louis-Dreyfus said. At times, her father’s wealth made her feel “sort of ashamed” around her sisters Lauren and Amy: “I used to come home from Christmas and hide presents in the closet, because I didn’t want them to see.” Her mother told me, “To Laurie and to Amy, he was sort of Daddy Warbucks up there. We certainly were not poor people, but by contrast there was a huge chasm.”
It bothered Louis-Dreyfus, too, that she looked different from the people she spent the most time with. “My two sisters with whom I grew up were very blond and very gorgeous, and I always felt sort of like they were so beautiful I didn’t fit in with them,” she said. Her wild, curly hair was a source of angst, particularly during puberty. “Once, when I was a teen-ager, I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted it to do, and I was so frustrated I started screaming,” she said. “Just screaming at the top of my lungs. I thought I was in the house by myself, but my dad—my stepdad—comes running down the stairs: he thought I was being murdered.” Louis-Dreyfus looks markedly like her late father, with the same distinctive chin and downturned eyes. “I didn’t think of myself as Jewish growing up,” she said, “except people always thought that I was because of my last name, so I kind of identified. But I did think of myself as the ugly duckling in the group.”
“It was a bother to her when people would say she was dark,” Judith Bowles told me. “When we were in Ceylon, people thought she was Ceylonese. There was that contrast with us. And it kind of represented that Julia, in a way, never felt completely a Bowles or completely a Louis-Dreyfus. It represented not feeling like she fit in, and she felt that very keenly.”
Her inability to conform to the sunny, Gentile beauty of her family—and of the times—shaped the way that Louis-Dreyfus conceived of herself as a performer. “I knew I couldn’t compete with certain people on a certain level,” she said. “I was never an ingénue type. I wasn’t really pretty enough for that. So I didn’t bank on my sexuality to sell myself.” As Elaine, she chose to wear long skirts and jackets with shoulder pads, and not solely because that was a popular look in the late eighties. “I spent a lot of time trying to hide my body with clothing, including as Elaine,” she said. “I battled . . . well, I gained weight as a teen-ager. I mean, I wasn’t enormous or anything. I’m talking about ten, fifteen pounds, normal teen-age stuff. But it made me feel a lot of shame. I had a costume designer I worked with, on ‘The New Adventures of Old Christine,’ who said, ‘You need to start wearing fitted shapes.’ And it hadn’t occurred to me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more confident.”
Louis-Dreyfus, who is fifty-seven, had a memorable part in the 2015 sketch “Last Fuckable Day,” on the Comedy Central series “Inside Amy Schumer.” In it, Schumer is hiking through the woods when she happens upon Patricia Arquette and Tina Fey, feasting and drinking toasts to Louis-Dreyfus. “In every actress’s life, the media decides when you finally reach the point where you’re not believably fuckable anymore,” Louis-Dreyfus explains. “I’m thrilled. Ecstatic!” Then she guzzles a quart of melted ice cream, burps, and farts. “Who tells men when it’s their last fuckable day?” Schumer asks. The other women crack up.
“I don’t know why, exactly, but there was a moment while I was doing it in which I lost my sense of humor about it,” Louis-Dreyfus told me. “The joke wasn’t funny to me anymore, and I had this complete crisis of confidence.”
As Selina, Louis-Dreyfus wears vertiginous heels with snug, extravagantly priced dresses, designed by Roland Mouret or Victoria Beckham: outfits that express Selina’s vanity and avarice and willingness to suffer for power. Out of character, Louis-Dreyfus wears jeans, casual sweaters, and Blundstone work boots—outfits that express a desire to fit in, and that do not draw attention to the fact that she has a body that doesn’t stop.
“Except for the breast-cancer part,” she said with a rueful laugh. She looked down at her breasts. “They definitely betrayed me. It was like, I thought I knew these.”
After each round of chemotherapy, Louis-Dreyfus had debilitating nausea and diarrhea and could not keep food down. She suffered from excruciating neuropathy in her hands and feet. She got sores all over her face and on the inside of her mouth. “What we went through last year was horrific,” her mother said. “Her strength, just now, is coming back. It takes about a year.”
Initially, Louis-Dreyfus imagined that she would continue working on “Veep” throughout her treatment. “She was, like, ‘I’ll do chemo on Thursday, we’ll shoot Friday,’ ” Mandel told me. “And we were, like, ‘We’ll let her figure out that that’s not right.’ ”
Once she consulted with an oncologist, it became clear that the show would need to go on hiatus. This gave Mandel and the writers time to rethink the season they’d written, to address the radically changing political reality: Trump had been sworn in seven months before Louis-Dreyfus’s diagnosis, and his Presidency was taking shape. “Whatever side you’re on, I think we can agree that Trump, post his State of the Union speech, last January, has amped up the Trumpness,” Mandel said. “Had we shot the show we had written—which I thought was good at the time—and then aired it this past April or May, I believe it would have seemed out of touch.” He paused, and said dryly, “What I’m saying is the cancer was a good thing.”
Louis-Dreyfus would come in for table reads just before a chemo session, when she had recovered most fully from the previous treatment. It was a welcome distraction. “I’ve always just wanted to work,” she said. “It has its challenges. But when it’s singing? It’s like if you’re skiing or something—you’re just thinking about getting down the hill. You look up and it’s four hours later.”
One afternoon at the Mayflower Club, a gathering place for British expats in the San Fernando Valley, Timothy Simons, who plays the ignorant, foulmouthed intern-turned-politician Jonah Ryan, stood at a lectern and gave his stump speech to the actors playing his audience. “I just found out that Muslims created math!” he said indignantly. “If you elect me, I will protect our children from this Sharia math!” Louis-Dreyfus sat in comfortable clothes in a chair embroidered with “The Veep.” Mandel was next to her, behind a row of monitors at the back of the hall. They both laughed as Simons led the crowd in a chant: “No more math! No more math!”
Then they filmed the reaction of his political operatives: his workaholic campaign manager, Amy Brookheimer (Anna Chlumsky), and his financial backer, Sherman Tanz, a Sheldon Adelson-like prison magnate. After shooting the basic architecture of the scene, Mandel called out alternate lines for the actors to try, as Ryan encouraged the crowd to turn on his own staff, who don’t think he’s fit for office. (Louis-Dreyfus has said, “Our show started out as a political satire, but it now feels more like a sobering documentary.”)
“OK!” Mandel yelled. “Now try ‘That is Amy Brookheimer. She recently had an abortion!’ ” Laughter and gasps came from the cast and crew, and Chlumsky mouthed “Holy shit,” as she tried to figure out what her character’s face ought to do in response.
“Uh, no,” Louis-Dreyfus said, from behind the monitors.
“It’s an alternate!” Mandel protested.
“Yeah,” she said, “an alternate which I want you to enjoy right now.”
The midterms were coming up, and Louis-Dreyfus had been doing a series of public-service announcements for the group Multiply Your Vote. She went outside with her assistant, Rachel Leavitt, who took out her cell phone to record Louis-Dreyfus in front of a brick wall. Leavitt noticed that the headphones Louis-Dreyfus had used to listen to the actors were still draped around her neck, and asked if she wanted those in the shot. “I think not,” Louis-Dreyfus replied, handing them off. “A little too liberal-Hollywood.” Then she switched into a drastically peppier tone for the taping: “Believe it or not, over five thousand of you have joined in the past few days, which is blowing my mind!” The clip, which Leavitt posted on Louis-Dreyfus’s Instagram, got more than a hundred and fifty thousand likes.
Louis-Dreyfus is active on social media, posting her (liberal-Hollywood) support for candidates and causes: Sally Yates, Stacey Abrams, her fellow Holton-Arms alumna Christine Blasey Ford. She also used it to keep her fans up to date on her cancer treatments. “There were people with long lenses trying to get pictures of me looking ill, and I think I kind of burst the bubble on a lot of it because of my social-media presence,” Louis-Dreyfus said, with satisfaction.
I asked if she had ever succumbed to fear or self-pity during her illness. She thought for a minute and then replied, “ ‘Am I gonna be dead tomorrow’ kind of thing? I didn’t let myself go there.” She paused. “Don’t misunderstand: I was to-my-bones terrified. But I didn’t let myself—except for a couple of moments—go to a really dark place. I didn’t allow it.”
Mandel, who has known Louis-Dreyfus for some thirty years, described his own reaction when he heard that she had cancer: “I had the sense of the walls closing in on me, and I was racked with guilt and other weird Jewishness, and I was a goddam wreck. She seemed great. Then we watched her go through the chemo and you could see its effects on her. She got thinner and thinner. We couldn’t hug her, because we were afraid to get her sick. It was the first time that—all of a sudden—she looked her age and seemed human and vulnerable.”
There are so many celebrities in Santa Barbara, it feels like Madame Tussaud’s by the Sea. There’s Natalie Portman at the farmer’s market! There’s Katy Perry drinking a skinny margarita at the bar of the vegan restaurant with Orlando Bloom! “That’s all new,” Brad Hall, who grew up there with five siblings, said. It was a few weeks after the Mark Twain Awards, and he was sitting with Louis-Dreyfus on the beach in Montecito, in front of the house they bought two decades ago. The walls inside were lined with baby pictures of their sons, and photos of Hall’s parents on the beach; his mother still lives nearby, and they were going over to her house for dinner that night. “I fucking love it here,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “We came here for vacation when I was fourteen. I remember I smelled orange blossom—you know how there’s nothing like the smell of an orange blossom? I thought, This is it for me. And who knew that I would come back?” She and Hall were married at a church nearby, where his father was the minister. When Louis-Dreyfus walked down the aisle, she had Daddy Tom on one side and Daddy William on the other.
All the women she has played have been bad at love, but Louis-Dreyfus has stayed married to Hall for thirty-one years. “The lucky thing,” Hall said, “is that Julia’s never been that interested in . . .”
“Other men?” she finished for him, laughing.
“In other men,” he deadpanned. “She’s cheated so little. . . . I mean, comparatively.” He pulled his baseball hat sideways to block the glare.
“B., do you have sunscreen on?” Louis-Dreyfus asked him.
Hall, who is as fair and blond as the sisters Louis-Dreyfus grew up with, pulled a bottle of lotion out from behind his beach chair to prove it. Then he returned to his point, about the durability of their marriage. “She’s never been interested in the trappings,” he said. “The Mark Twain thing is the kind of thing Julia might very well pass on a lot of the time.” The bit in her speech about her initial horror when she received the e-mail was true. “Verbatim,” Hall continued. “I don’t know if it was subliminal, but I think part of the reason you did it was to collect yourself as you’re going back into the fight of life again, after this year, this annus horribilis. So it was kind of a lucky thing that happened for Jules—don’t you think, honey? That you got to kind of take stock?”
There was a certain loftiness to that evening at the Kennedy Center, when Louis-Dreyfus, a slender glamour-puss in a navy-and-black lace Oscar de la Renta dress, was honored. Several female comedians spoke about her as a pioneer. “Elaine Benes was sex positive before we had a term for it: hoarding birth control and realistically failing to remain master of her domain,” Tina Fey said, citing Louis-Dreyfus as a role model. “Her ability to appear completely effortless and natural on the surface, while being a stone-cold machine of timing underneath it—Julia is a Terminator robot of comedy. That’s why she doesn’t age: metal bones, rubber eyes.”
Abbi Jacobson, of “Broad City,” declared, “Without J.L.D. there’d be no us.” Her co-star, Ilana Glazer, said, “The shove changed my life!” They described Louis-Dreyfus’s work as deliberately feminist in spirit. “Julia has always shaken off the stiff and limiting postures of ladylike behavior, not only to make us laugh but to make us free,” Jacobson said.
Larry David broke up the reverence—it was, after all, a prize for humor. “The lengths that she went through to get it! I mean, come on. That whole cancer thing? Cancer?” he said, in a taped bit. “What a scam. It’s diabolical. I’m a little jealous that I didn’t think of it, because that is right up my alley.”
The televised program was edited to ninety minutes, but the event itself stretched on for hours, as collaborators—Seinfeld, Barrosse, Lisa Kudrow, Bryan Cranston—told stories about working with Louis-Dreyfus. “It’s a compilation of your whole life, which is somewhat overwhelming,” Judith Bowles said. “It’s almost like you’re witness to too much.”
When the ceremony was finally over, Bowles, who is eighty-four, stood by the bar at the Four Seasons, wearing a black dress and red lipstick, chatting with two of Hall’s sisters. Louis-Dreyfus was at a table next to her, having a glass of wine with Tina Fey, Keegan-Michael Key, Lisa Kudrow, Tony Hale, and Kumail Nanjiani, who had all been on-stage that night. Everyone was hungry, but the staff at the Four Seasons—which the Louis Dreyfus Group built, in 1979—said that the kitchen was closed for the night. Finally, someone thought to order pizza.
After all her fretting over the Twain Prize, Louis-Dreyfus was pleased. “I was so shocked by the magnitude—I was overcome,” she said. “I was in such a frenzied froth about my speech!” She laughed. “And, oh, my God, I was hysterical! ” She had found the whole experience gratifying, though she admitted that listening to so many people talk about her had felt a bit like sitting in the wings at her own memorial. “I said to Brad at one point, ‘Am I dead?’ ” ###
[Ariel Levy joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. Her subjects for the magazine have included the South African runner Caster Semenya, the artist Catherine Opie, the swimmer Diana Nyad, and Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act. Levy won a 2014 National Magazine Award for essays and criticism for her essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” and guest-edited The Best American Essays 2015. She is the author of the New York Times best-seller The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir (2017), See her other books here. Before joining The New Yorker, she was a contributing editor at New York magazine for twelve years. Levy received a BA (English) from Wesleyan University (CT).]
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