SPEND more than a week in America and you will find it difficult to avoid Kelsey Grammer. Turn on the TV Tuesday night and you will find him playing the uptight but loveable psychiatrist, Frasier Crane, in his own hugely successful show. Flick through the channels another day and you might catch him crooning for President Clinton on the White House Christmas Special. Switch to sport and there he is, belting out the national anthem at the all star baseball game.
A dozen years after he debuted as a member of the widely loved Cheers ensemble, Grammer is one of the brightest stars in the American television firmament. For three straight years he and his show have enjoyed a virtual monopoly of TV comedy awards, while Frasier has rarely slipped out of the top 20 highest rated programmes. So highly valued are his services that Paramount Television, which produces Frasier, reportedly pays him around 5250,000 per episode, a figure at the very top end of TV salaries.
But Grammer's formidable acting skills, and comic timing do not alone account for his ubiquity. Indeed, his celebrity owes as, much to his exploits off the small screen as his performances on it. For Grammer is, quite simply, The pre eminent star of America's therapy culture. In a nation where chat show appearances have taken on the trappings of psychoanalysis sessions, it is not, enough to be talented alone. To be really big, you need to be "conflicted" too. You must have demons, tribulations.
And Grammer has more of them than half of Hollywood put together. A brief list: his father and sister were (separately) murdered; his two half brothers were drowned, in a diving accident; his two marriages have ended in divorce, the second after he allegedly became a "battered husband"; he has been convicted of drink driving and cocaine possession; he has served time in prison; and he has been accused of having sex with an underage child, which did not lead to criminal charges but did sully his reputation.
Last weekend Grammer, aged 41 added to his catalogue of misfortune by crashing his Dodge Viper sports car, a reward from NBC for Frasier's success, in what police politely refer to as a "single car accident". Paramount promptly announced that the star had voluntarily checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic. Production of new Frasier episodes will go on hold until its star has dried out.
Grammer's off screen problems are invested with a certain newsworthy irony, of course, thanks to his TV alter ego's line of work. On television Dr Frasier Crane straightens out the lives of others, countless journalists have cleverly observed, while in real life he can't straighten out his own. For that, needless to say, the real Crane sees a real therapist, freely sharing the results of his self analysis with all of America.
Only through therapy, he confides in his autobiography, So far, has he come to understand "the pattern" which drives him into destructive relationships with needy women. For obvious reasons I have a great fear of abandonment. Everyone I've ever loved has left me. My father, Gordon (his grandfather), Karen (his sister), and even Goose (his dog). The pain of losing them was so unbearable, I had to find a way of making sure I'd never feel such pain again. Subconsciously I worked out this formula: if I can make them need me, they can never leave."
Grammer's childhood certainly offers plenty for his therapist to work on. His parents, musicians who met at a New York music school, divorced before his second birthday. Grammer's mother, Sally, moved to live with her parents in New Jersey, then to Florida. When he was 13, his father was shot dead by an intruder at his home in the Virgin Islands. "I can't say that Allen Grammer was a good father," he writes in So For. "Or that he was my father at all, except genetically. Basically, my father abandoned me. When you look at it right in the face, I didn't have a dad."
Though he was heartbroken by the death of the grandfather who had become a surrogate father, the defining event of Grammer's youth was the rape and murder of his sister. Though the incident took place in Colorado, thousands of miles from where Grammer was living, he has said often that he felt he had failed to protect her. For almost a year he was severely depressed, drinking heavily and walking the streets of New York at night looking for trouble. "I felt guilty, ashamed, and angry, and wanted to make up for it somehow. Maybe even get myself killed."
Grammer had moved to New York to study drama at Juilliard, the prestigious performing arts school which Mandy Patinkin, Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve attended around the same time. He didn't finish but managed to get a job with San Diego's Old Globe Theatre company, building a modest theatre career in touring Shakespeare productions and the odd. Broadway musical. He was understudying for William Hurt and Christopher Walken in a production of Hurly Burly when Patinkin recommended him for the part of Frasier in the hit NBC sitcom, Cheers.
On screen, the professorial looking Grammer was an instant success as the pompous, neurotic regular at America's favourite watering hole. Off it, his troubles multiplied. In 1987 he was arrested for drink driving, and the following year for possession of cocaine. At times during the late 1980s his cocaine habit was so bad that he would appear glassy eyed on the set. In 1990 he served 30 days in a prison for a probation violation resulting from his cocaine and drink driving arrests.
His troubles with the law were as nothing compared with his troubles with women, however. After divorcing Doreen Alderman in 1990, he moved in with Cerlette Lamme, a former ice dancer he spotted in the audience while playing Lucio in a production of Measure for Measure. Two years later, however, he had a daughter by another woman, Barrie Buckner, and married a third, Leigh Anne Csuhany.
In his autobiography, Grammer claims that Csuhany, an exotic dancer, abused him verbally and physically throughout their nine month marriage. "She'd spit in my face. Slap me. Punch me. Kick me. Break glasses over my head. Break windows. Tear up pictures of my loved ones. Threaten to kill me, kill herself. Cut my balls off. Chop me up. Put a bullet in my head." With a clinical hindsight born of expensive therapy, Grammer says he stayed with her as long as he did because he suffered from low sell esteem. I believed that she was right about me, that I was all the things she said. So I could not defend myself.
Soon after he left her, Csuhany checked into a Malibu motel and swallowed five bottles of Tylenol tablets. She was found with a note which read: "Kelsey doesn't love me". Doctors managed to save her life but not the baby she was carrying.
Long before Cheers ended its near decade long run in 1993, Paramount began planning a spin off series built around Grammer as Dr Frasier Crane. In the new series, Crane would be divorced and transplanted from his native Boston to Seattle where he would present a radio advice show. The cast would be filled out by Crane's nerdy brother, Niles, his partially disabled father and his producer, Roz.
Frosier was an almost instant hit. In its first season it collected four Emmy awards: best director, best show, best writing and best actor in a comedy. Each year since then it has been named best comedy series at the TV awards ceremony.
Grammer has been playing Crane for so long now that it is difficult to establish where he ends and Frasier begins. The actor concedes that there is more than a part of himself in Crane. "Frankly, I think I'm smarter than Frasier," he has said. "I have a better vocabulary. But I do lend a lot of myself to him. We walk the same streets together. In tends of our erudition and ability to speak, we're akin." Certainly Grammer does not always relinquish Crane's pomposity after the cameras have stopped rolling. His relationship with Csuhany, he told one reporter, had been "an overwhelming diabolical desecration of who I am".
Grammer's rise clearly owed much toe the clever writing and slick production that made Cheers a hit and then turned Frasier Crane into something of a 1990s icon, but those who have worked with him say Grammer possesses a rare combination of Shakespearean presence and comic timing. Grammer says he learned comedy from watching Jack Benny. In rehearsals, he frequently ad libs his lines, wrong footing cast members who have diligently memorised the script. "He really likes to fly by the seat of his pants," said Jane Leeves, who plays Crane's live in caretaker, Daphne. "He freaks guests stars out on show day because we have a line through in make up and it appears he doesn't know what he's talking about. But then we're on the set, it's right there."
Frasier is one of the classy shows that has led some critics to proclaim this a golden age of American television but Grammer, oddly, remains somewhat haughty about the medium. "I don't watch much television," he told one interviewer. "I saw Home Improvement once." He has hinted that his ambitions lie in Hollywood, though so far he has singularly failed to transfer his TV success to the big screen. His 1995 naval farce, Down Periscope, unceremoniously tanked.
WHAT has endeared Grammer to millions of Americans is his willingness to bare his tortured soul to each and every one of them. Where some celebrities insist that aspects of their private life remain off limits during interviews, Grammer seems happy to share the most intimate details of his psyche. "Kelsey's emotions are right there," said John Mahoney, who plays Crane's excop father. "He cries very quickly, he laughs very quickly, he loves very quickly.
Last year the actor claimed to have put the turmoil of the 1980s behind him. Amid much fanfare he had proposed to his girlfriend, former model Tammi Alexander, in front of the cast and crew of Frasier. In his autobiography he wrote: "Life is very good these days. I'm healthy. Frasier is a success, I have two wonderful daughters and a loving partner in Tammi." He almost sounded convinced.
Since then, however, he and Alexander have split up and re united more times than even the most diligent supermarket tabloids can keep up with, most publicly after she posed nude in Pkiyh. Even before his recent crash there were reports that Grammer was drinking again. "He has a death wish," said Alexander. "It's almost as though he wants to punish himself. The more successful he becomes, the further into a downward spiral he goes." The chat show hosts will be relieved to hear that.