On the other hand,” he added, “then no one could have babies, either, because it would get too crowded.The economy has tanked, unemployment’s up and we’ve all got better things to do than read about the woes and ruminations of prep school-educated rich folks, right? “If it was up to me, nothing would ever change, no one would ever die. And I say, ‘But this is the closest we can get to them.’ ” He gazed out at Times Square, perhaps seeing past the JumboTron dazzle to the Tenderloin of decades past. My wife hates all these visits, going to see the graves. I don’t remember much joking, never much encouragement. He was Fred Willard, and I was Fred Willard. I went down to the intersection listed on the certificate, a Buick dealership, and it was very touching.
They said he usually turned to wave after he got in his car, and this time he didn’t. He died after dropping off Christmas gifts to a customer-he worked at a financing company, it was all a little vague. “A few years ago,” he said, after a moment, “I was in Cleveland, where I grew up, and I looked up my dad’s death certificate at City Hall. “Lots of remarks about Jews and blacks,” Willard observed, “yet we haven’t even mentioned Pearl Harbor.” Back in midtown, she pointed out two famous “Jewish delicatessens,” the Carnegie and the Stage. In Harlem, the guide explained that black people’s hair was different and that they all went to church in their good clothes, whereas everyone else in the city was too busy to be religious, especially the Jews. Near Columbia University, Willard made note of where Lou Gehrig used to play ball, adding, “I once went up on Coogan’s Bluff, and this very gangster guy comes over and says, ‘What are you doing?’ He was probably dealing drugs, and worried that I was a plainclothesman, and there I was showing him this photo of the Polo Grounds and asking where it had been.” Willard confided, “Used to be a gay porno theatre, by the way.”Īs the sightseeing continued-Columbus Circle, Lincoln Center, etc.-Willard kept up a murmured alternative commentary, pointing out the block where Jack Dempsey’s restaurant used to be, the apartment building where Arnold Rothstein fixed the 1919 World Series, the hotel where the gangster Albert Anastasia was gunned down in a barber’s chair.Īs the bus drove down West Seventy-second Street, past the Dakota, where John Lennon was killed, Willard looked away: “It’s too recent, like O.J.’s house.” Peering into Central Park, he continued, “I wonder how long it’ll be before they start building in there. Sitting on the bus’s open upper deck, wearing chinos and a checked shirt, the sixty-six-year-old actor listened attentively as the guide, a small Japanese-American woman shaded by a large black sun hat, drew everyone’s attention to the first attraction: the Gray Line offices across the street. Willard and his wife lived in Manhattan in the early nineteen-seventies-“Our daughter was born in the old French Hospital, where Babe Ruth spent some of his last days,” he recalled-and he was curious to compare the metropolis today with his memories. So he boarded a Gray Line bus at Forty-seventh and Eighth for a city tour.
#Tad friend wife free#
One morning recently, Willard, in town from Los Angeles, had a few hours free before a rehearsal (he is starring as an Elvis impersonator in “Elvis and Juliet,” written by his wife, Mary, at the Abingdon Theatre). He pores over photos of bygone buildings and makes pilgrimages to places like the intersection near Bakersfield where James Dean’s Porsche got rammed and the motel in South Los Angeles where Sam Cooke was shot. Willard improvises his lines, spouting poppycock with absolute self-assurance in the film “Best in Show” his character, a dog-show announcer, muses about a miniature schnauzer, “You’d think they’d want to breed ’em bigger, wouldn’t you? Like grapefruits or watermelons.” Christopher Guest, the writer-director of “Best in Show,” as well as the Willard showcases “Waiting for Guffman” and “A Mighty Wind,” has observed that “Fred has the patent on characters who are comfortable in their stupidity.” Away from the cameras, however, Willard is a scholar of vanished luminescence. Fred Willard Illustration by Joost Swarteįred Willard has long put his hearty, game-show-host manner to use playing characters who are gloriously out of their depth.
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