Sandra Bernhard shows up after a session at her gym in West Hollywood, relatively subdued, dressed for anonymity, no makeup in evidence. Her not-so-secret weapon, that angry slash of a mouth, is metaphorically holstered today. On screen it’s usually highlighted, glossed in souped-up, self-satirizing shades of scarlet or vermilion. But what’s most outrageous are the words it spits out.
Late last year, the mouth landed her in trouble again, after reporters picked up on a scathing riff on then US vice-presidential contender, Sarah Palin, in Bernhard’s stage show Without You I’m Nothing. Bernhard, who is loudly and proudly Jewish, told her audience that if the Governor of Alaska showed up in Manhattan, she’d “tear her apart like a Wise Natural Kosher Chicken.” She then hit her stride, calling Palin a “turncoat bitch” and — with typical, eye-popping overkill — praying she would be “gang-raped by my big black brothers.” Outrage duly ensued.
Today, Bernhard is in a more reflective mood as she prepares to take Without You I’m Nothing to London. She says that she’ll “try to add a little local color and commentary — I try to keep it as relevant as possible.” Expect Sapphic reworkings of Me and Mrs Jones and Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, alongside sulphurously tart demolitions of celebs, divas and homophobes.
“I may not have fucked much with the past,” Patti Smith once said, “but I’ve fucked plenty with the future.” Bernhard has occasionally borrowed the line to express her own sense of being ahead of her time. She first burst on to the international scene in the early 1980s, starring as Masha in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, a role that should have made her a star. Still in her 20s, and with a face that startled more than it soothed, she was totally assured as the bratty, obsessive stalker who eventually kidnaps the object of her desire. But rather than making Bernhard a household name, the film established her as a woman to be feared; an antic, unsettling presence.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THIS ...
Over the last 25 years Bernhard’s public persona has been diffused across stage shows, TV talk shows and guest appearances on TV series such as Roseanne. She was famously friends with Madonna in the late 1980s; Bernhard claimed to have slept with both Madonna and then husband Sean Penn. That friendship went south soon enough and Bernhard has remained blisteringly funny on Madonna’s shortcomings ever since. Last year, the New York Post reported on a withering five-minute demolition prompted by a heckler asking, “Are you still friends with Madonna?” Bernhard — “in a mad, dark, five-minute freestyle” — robotically repeated the phrase, “We only got four minutes to save the world” interspersed with screeches of “My chicken is raw!” Pause … “Does that answer your question?”
As Bernhard often says, “My father was a proctologist and my mother was an abstract artist, so that’s how I see the world.” She is also the product of two starkly contrasting communities: Flint, Michigan, and Scottsdale, Arizona. The former is the cradle of modern American unionism, the site of the 1936-1937 strike by United Auto Workers that broke General Motors. “What I got, growing up in Flint,” says Bernhard, “was a work ethic.”
In 1965, when she was 10, Bernhard’s family moved to Scottsdale. “It was definitely an alien atmosphere. Very, very white — and I already was
greatly respectful of the influence of black culture from Flint. People in
Arizona were very freaked out by
people of color, otherness. It hasn’t changed that much, but that also made me more compassionate.”
At 19, Bernhard split for Los Angeles, intent on a musical career. “But I find there’s all these comedy clubs. So I started performing and eventually put songs into my act. Even though it wasn’t the right atmosphere, I forced it in anyway and it really made me strong as a performer.” She was surrounded by a generation of great comics: Robin Williams, Jay Leno, Arsenio Hall. Her breakthrough came when she was cast in The Richard Pryor Show. It only lasted four episodes, but it raised her profile. “Richard was totally cool. He was a very, very reserved kind of person, but he was not distant, he was not arrogant. He encouraged the young talent to really go for it.”
Ever since, Bernhard’s arrival in anyone else’s project has brought with it a clear set of associations — the loudmouth with a sweet side, the ceaseless provocateur, the trouper with a fizzing brain. She may be cast as Nancy Bartlett on Roseanne — the first gay TV character to be played by an openly gay actor — or in a recurring guest part on The L-Word, but it’s always Sandra Bernhard who shows up, trailing all those familiar traits.
POST-FEMINIST
She was even offered the role of Miranda in Sex and the City, but “the original script wasn’t very good and they weren’t paying much! And nobody liked that character — bitchy, unhappy, curmudgeonly. I’m not sure that show has done a lot for women.” She defines her own work as post-feminist “because I’m too young to be an active part of that first movement, in terms of fighting for basic women’s rights, but I was strongly influenced by it when I was young ... Not that we haven’t had to continue to work and fight — the patriarchy still rules the world. And it survives in all the other cultures, in Africa, the Middle East. I constantly remind people that there’s no place that’s absolutely safe for women except the Western cultures, where we’re able to get away with basically anything — well, except when [former US president George W.] Bush was in office, when it was all threatened again.”
Even with Bush gone, there are battles to fight. On the day US President Barack Obama was elected president, Proposition 8, outlawing gay marriage, was passed in California. Bernhard is bisexual, and has a 10-year-old daughter. How did she feel? “I wasn’t devastated,” she says.
“I just felt like the gay community dropped the ball on this. The Mormon church was pouring millions [of US dollars] into this fight, so why the gay community wasn’t out there, I just don’t understand. But when something’s almost taken away from you, then you roll up your sleeves and get back to work.”
Bernhard’s public persona remains that of an in-your-face woman, proudly urban and cosmopolitan, contemptuous of rubes and racists. The squirming reactions to her from the super-straight and uptight always remind me of the way Little Richard — black and unashamedly flamboyant — must have appeared to suburban American parents in the mid-1950s. They didn’t understand what he was saying either; they just knew in their bones that, whatever it was, they didn’t like it.
On the Net: www.sandrabernhard.com
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