Call Her Sandi

An Interview with Sandra Bernhard
by Michael Szymanski

Sandra Bernhard

She walks into her hotel room wearing dark sunglasses and grumbles something to the publicist about knowing this is going to be the first of a dozen or so interviews of the day for a movie, Lover Girl, that's seeking distribution at the Toronto International Film Festival (and to date has not found distribution). She's not happy. She seems every bit the acerbic brassy smart-mouth she played for years on Roseanne.

Forget about reminding her you'd met her about a half a dozen interviews before, stood at plenty of bars together at movie premieres, walked into Madonna's Truth or Dare party together, gave Lily Tomlin a paper and pencil to write your home number down on at a Beverly Hills soiree, and even had lunch with her once. Forget it. She tips her sunglasses to get a better look but she has no recollection and doesn't even fake a remembrance of you. She shrugs. Oh well.

So, as it turns out, as the clock ticks down the morning hour, the real person behind the comedienne comes out and she reveals more than she planned to, and things really go fine after all. She's not the crusty bisexual bitch she puts on stage, and she's not even drinking coffee. She's hunched over in jeans and a white shirt in her hotel room, sipping tea and picking at a bran muffin.

You expect her to be like the fanatical fan in King of Comedy, or the bizarre criminal of Hudson Hawk, or one of the other off-beat quirky characters in Inside Monkey Zetterland or Unzipped. You expect her to be like the sassy sharp-tongue host as she was on Mad TV recently.

In the movie Lover Girl, Bernhard plays a high class hooker who takes in a young runaway, (played by Tara Subkoff) and teaches her the ropes. Now, Bernhard talks about wanting to be a mom.

"Yeah, I think this did bring out motherly instincts in me," says Sandra (Sandi to her friends). "It's such an emotional role. Tara's character is very vulnerable. And so is mothering, so it just kind of fit on a personal real level."

This role shows a different side of Bernhard.

"I am a very loving person in general so, it's actually the first time I am going to express that as a performer, as an actress," she says. "And yeah. I do. I do want to be a mom. To the point of actually carrying a child and all that. Yeah. Yeah. Uh huh. It is scary."

When Lisa Addario and Joe Syracuse, both writers and directors, approached Bernard to star in this edgy dark story, the comedian balked. Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Kristy Swanson joined in because of Sandi. The writers so enjoyed their experience with Bernhard that they were commissioned by her to write her next mainstream film.

"I know they were pursuing me for awhile," Sandi says. "It was nice from the first moment. Meeting Lisa and Joey and telling them some concerns I had about the original script and their willingness to work with me and collaborate is what sold me on the part, as well as their absolute warmth and clarity of vision."

She didn't want to do gratuitous sex, and they cut that out. Sandi didn't want to do nudity. "I just wasn't up for it. I think it would've hurt the movie and very quickly they agreed with me. They agreed that it wasn't necessary, so I thought that was really cool. And I just fell in love with them and wanted to work with them."

Does she know people who prostitute themselves?

"Only actors in Hollywood. I haven't hung with any respectable whores. I've only hung with the disrespectable ones. Don't you pretend they actually have some consciousness. I'd rather deal with the real ones to be perfectly honest with you," she giggles slightly.

She knows Robin Byrd from New York, a mutual friend in the adult industry. We've both been on her show. We talk about porn stars.

"I think they're great. I always find them very lively and interesting, they are much more animated and real about what's going on," she sighs. "I know people who might fuck their way to the top or fuck their way to the middle. I don't think that they really made it. I don't know. People are whores in so many different ways. I think it's great that people are just doing it because it's something that they connect with and they actually get something through it."

She agrees it's not a feminist issue. They are not victims. They are not being taken advantage of.

"Yet, well, if I had a kid, I would prefer that they didn't run away and work in a massage parlor. That wouldn't be my dream for my daughter, that's for damn sure," she muses.

The teen in Lover Girl eats a lot of candy. Sandi knows that's a bit unavoidable.

"I would just rather let my kid do what they wanted to do in that way without limitations so they would automatically be turned off to it just from the over availability of it," Sandi laughs. "But this girl had no acne; pretty amazing, huh? Somehow she managed to keep a pack of Stridex pads with her at all times and clean up."

Sandi likes peanut M&M's. She wants to know the buzz of the festival. "How was the Boogie Nights premiere? Stink bomb?" she asks. I seemed to be the only one who didn't like it. She asks about all the bisexual characters in film.

"They never use the B word, they never say 'bisexual' except to say, 'but'--," Sandi wonders. "I don't really know what the heck is going on with anybody anymore, young people or not. I really don't. I am confused by the confusion. I really am. It has become a bit much for my sensitive nature to figure out what anybody wants or does.

"I just think that people connect to people and I don't think that it's necessary to define it. Love is pretty undefineable. I think what's missing with kids in their early twenties now is just the whole context to what I grew up with, which was feminism, and which was the breakthrough of sexuality, and there was a struggle for it.

"And now I think because things come so easy for everybody in a certain way, there is no real emotional tie to anything. It just seems everybody is floating with their anxiety and with their desires. I think it takes a tough young person to really have that inside ability to connect to that on a real emotional level. I think they get into it, I think sometimes because it's appealing, I think sometimes because it's easy, but I don't think they necessarily drop down to some real deep place in their soul. I think it's easy for them to let go of things, but I think it's been true with every generation, so --I don't know. It just seems that there's a spiritually in the world of people who are running from it and people who are running into it. It's hard to make a broad generalization about anything these days."

The divine Miss Bernhard is on a roll -- at nine in the morning.

She's still working on her work in progress at Luna Park and is seeking a theater in New York to take it to. The taping of her last club act, Without You I'm Nothing, was nominated for a Grammy as Best Comedy in 1991. In her act she now sings -- very well, too -- and does her own version of Mariah Carey and Liza Minnelli.

"I think what I am doing at Luna Park is the most exciting part of the process. I think that the people who are seeing it there, they'll always have that wonderful feeling that they were there when I put a new show together. I am very excited about the show because in a way it is a total throwback to when I very first started performing, only with all the experience and wisdom and insight that I have at this point of my life. So it's that same kind of free, really wonderful, spontaneous technique combined with being a more introspective well-rounded person," she says. She also loves the audiences.

"I really love them in L.A., that's always the fucking uncool thing to say. But I love L.A. I love it for so many reasons. I love it for the darkness and the dinginess and the weirdness and all the apartment buildings built in the sixties. It's a unique place. It's not like any place in the world. It may have no soul but, in a sense of building and architecture, there is something there that, I guess ... it was built on the desert. I guess there's that feeling of we're taking advantage of a place that we shouldn't be but it's still supporting us in a weird way. Nurturing us."

She nurtures herself now, a bit. She works out four times a week. She has a big, gorgeous Brazilian trainer. She runs and lifts weights. She doesn't go on the Internet, she would much rather run into people on the streets or interact face-to-face at a coffeehouse. She's also working on a relationship with a nice girl.

"Yeah, it's sort of an ongoing relationship," she smirks. "It's sort of going and stopping and going and stopping. It's been a rough year. I broke up with somebody -- well, somebody broke up with me, actually, after five years and then I started seeing someone else and then she wanted to get back together again but, I don't know, it's been a weird year."

Coming up, she has another film called Somewhere in the City, another small role. And she's just finished the Ed Wood, Jr. script, co-starring Billy Zane and tons of really cool people.

"I really enjoyed just sitting and chatting. You are good -- you got a lot out of me, and I really didn't want to get very deep, not this early." She says to call her "Sandi."

By the end of the interview, with her sunglasses on the table next to her, she hugged me good-bye, thanked me, and gave me her room number, 2544, at the Sheraton to call later to go to one of the night's film festival parties together. That was the real Sandi.

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