Being the Big Guy; Actor John Goodman: Funny and Formidable

It's 2 in the morning in the Hollywood Hills and Monte Kuklenski, Chuck Louis, Kenny Ralph Harper and John Goodman are at the bar in Goodman's den, nursing the last beers in the house and their memories of the true glory days when all were drama students at Southwest Missouri State University. And, although one is now making his living driving a limo, another is a part-time caterer and a third has a desk job with a television network, no one seems to miss their old college triumphs more than Goodman.

They boast about kicking butt, doing some damage, and being able to hold their own against any school in the country, whether as Goodman says, it was "Julie-Ard" or "those Steppenwolf boys from Northwestern." They salute old teachers the way other big guys recall coaches. "Bradley was like a professional director," Kuklenski says; "he'd hardly say a word, as long as what you were doing served his vision of the piece."

"With McElhaney," Goodman says, alternately snapping the fingers of each hand, "it was all timing -- hit your spot and deliver your line. Whereas Howard, he'd methodize you through the whole thing."

And as his guests sit at the bar, and the nearly 300-pound, 6-foot-3-inch actor nimbly moves about behind it, sometimes lifting one sneaker to a waist-high counter and resting his enormous arms on his knee, they talk about other bars. There's the Antler Tavern, where they often went after shows, the Twilight Inn, where you could always cash a $2 check, and the Iron Horse, where a small deposit got you your own permanent mug -- Goodman's was inscribed "Brando," Harper's "Hamlet" -- and they would drink 5-cent beers and compare notes on each other's work, from one end to the other of a four-hour happy hour. "Stanislavsky and Pabst Blue Ribbon," Goodman says.

You could say the same about the intriguing texture of Goodman's acting, the way it can be at once natural and self-consciously sophisticated, goofy and droll, highbrow and lowbrow, mainstream and eccentric. In the last five years, Goodman, now 38 years old, has sent a remarkable collection of big guys out into the world. Like the actor himself, they tend to be smarter, wittier, weirder and sadder than you'd think they'd be, and they're almost always better dancers.

Among them, in film, were Louis Fyne, a desperately unrequited bear of a bachelor in David Byrne's "True Stories"; Gale, a simultaneously shrewd and stupid career criminal in Joel and Ethan Coen's "Raising Arizona"; Lawrence, an ugly ol' redneck of an offensive lineman who punches the holes Dennis Quaid runs through in "Everybody's All-American," and Sherman Touhey, a stuck-in-a-rut Forest Hills detective who teams up with Al Pacino in "Sea of Love." And last summer in "Arachnophobia" came Delbert, one very sick puppy of a small-town exterminator. About halfway through this roster, in the fall of 1988, came Dan Conner, that fragile character-in-progress on the hugely popular television sitcom "Roseanne," which Goodman calls his "day job."

He's felt equally at home in personal films by artsy auteurs like Byrne and the Coens as in a populist assembly-line sitcom, where at Friday-night tapings a large flashing sign commands the studio audience to applaud, and when scenes have to be reshot a master of ceremonies says, "All right, folks, you know where the laughs are."

For an actor who till now has spent his entire career occupying character roles, he has already made a strong impression. Pauline Kael, the New Yorker film critic, credited Goodman with carrying his on-the-screen wife Sally Field through their scenes in "Punchline," and David Byrne says Goodman's performance in "True Stories" "carried the movie." Steven Spielberg, who directed him in "Always," calls Goodman "every bit as serious an actor as Robert De Niro and Montgomery Clift," while Al Pacino says, "John is an important actor, period." Even when Goodman has appeared in a dog, no one heard him bark. "He is just about the only credible touch in a film reeking of Hollywood sham," wrote Richard Zoglin in Time magazine about Goodman's work in "Stella." Goodman's assessment of himself is less flattering: "I'm just a journeyman really, slipping into hackdom."

Nevertheless, Goodman will soon be arriving in even larger doses. "King Ralph," in which he plays his first leading role, as a third-tier Las Vegas lounge act who ascends to the British throne, opens this Friday. And he'll be Fred in a movie version of "The Flintstones," which Spielberg plans to shoot next year. "It'll have romantic stuff with him and Wilma," says Spielberg, "and it's a buddy picture, about him and Barney."

FOR ALL THEIR DISTINCTIVENESS, GOODMAN'S characters arrive with a few significant family traits. They are all men of deep feeling, guys who could explode or start weeping at any moment. "Maybe I play them too deeply; maybe I overdo it," says Goodman, who in a televised interview last year barely held back tears while describing how much his mother missed his late father.

They're full of this smoldering repressed funk that's been kept bottled up way too long, generally held back by the character's lack of confidence in his own attractiveness. One of the most moving explosions of this kind came in "True Stories," when Goodman's Louis Fyne gets his chance to be a star for a few seconds while lip-synching to a little passage of the Talking Heads song "Wild Wild Life." Louis, quoting moves from Elvis Presley to Michael Jackson, cuts loose with a tour de force dance sequence you had no idea was in him, all the time his eyes registering the shyness and panic he has somehow overcome. "There's an intense inner struggle going on in all of John's characters," says Tess Harper, an actress who is an old college friend and the former wife of Kenny Ralph Harper.

There's also a deep blue streak. "If it's in the script, I'll find it," says Goodman. What makes his portrayal of Roseanne Barr's television husband, the small-job contractor Dan Conner, so much more real than any other sitcom dad, is that delicate layer of depression he can never quite shake, rendering him, like so many husbands and fathers, a bit of a guest in his own house. "That edge of melancholy gives his characters a lot of depth," Byrne says. "His characters are never just bits. "

That sadness is something his friends all see in him. "There's a certain depression level in John," Chuck Louis says. "John is so full of paradoxes," Tess Harper says. "And, of course, one is that under this jolly facade lies basically a sad man."

A slightly odd one too, judging by the inspiredly demented improvisations he has injected into his performances. For instance, in "Raising Arizona," Goodman plays an escaped felon who pays a visit to a former fellow inmate played by Nicolas Cage. In one scene, while eating all his host's food and very articulately laying out an elaborate plan for a bank heist, Goodman absent-mindedly scratches a spot behind his ear with a drumstick, uncannily reinforcing the schizophrenic nature of a character Goodman calls "a criminal mastermind with a two-digit I.Q."

"I looked, saw what I had, and used it," Goodman says about the dark meat. "At that time, a lot of what I was doing was seeing how far I could push something and still root it in some kind of reality."

The director Frank Marshall says Goodman arrived on the set of "Arachnophobia" with the character of Delbert fully conceived, having imbued him with the somnambulent disembodied voice and personality of one of his old biology teachers who, maybe not so coincidentally, moonlighted as an exterminator.

In one scene, he and the character played by Jeff Daniels are racing back to Daniels's house to save his wife and children from certain death, not to mention all life as we know it. Goodman, in an unscripted piece of dialogue that comes right out of his character's insufferable self-absorption, starts babbling that this current infestation problem reminds him of one "encountered by some colleagues in the Benelux countries." When this succeeds in getting Daniels to tell him to shut up and drive, Goodman daintily mimes an enormous weirdo locking up his naughty little mouth.

There's also a fair amount of anger in a Goodman character. No matter how comical or good-natured, there's always a potential for violence. "You get the feeling that all of John's characters draw the line somewhere," says David Ward, who directed Goodman in "King Ralph."

"There's a lot in me that's just swallowed and repressed," Goodman says. "I should probably look into it, but I don't care to. It might be valuable to me as an actor."

But Goodman invests his characters with more than himself, inventing detailed personal histories for them that are lavish even for a method actor, which he essentially is. Asked where Louis Fyne had picked up that Michael Jackson moonwalk in "True Stories," Goodman says, "Oh, that was something Louis had seen on 'Soul Train' one morning drinking a glass of grape juice."

ALONG WITH THE FACT that they almost all work at low-paying jobs, Goodman's characters arrive with one other conspicuous similarity. They all weigh in at around 250 pounds -- a little less for some of the early parts, quite a bit more for more recent ones.

Goodman is the rare actor who actually looks more formidable in person. With enormous forearms, neck, chest and thighs, Goodman has the infrastructure of a National Football League nose guard. But for almost all his life he has also been overweight, and his acting draws on both the genuine status that comes with being big, and the stigma that comes with being fat.

Being big can make his characters heroic, being fat can make them tragic, or at the least, give them one more cross to bear. Just seeing John Krytsick, the insurance-selling husband in "Punchline," trapped inside a shirt and tie, or Sherman Touhey in "Sea of Love" pulling up his pants before he sits down, evokes a lifetime of petty humiliations and discomforts.

Size gives Touhey the impeccable macho credentials that let him get away with doing a fake striptease in front of a room full of cops in "Sea of Love," and gives Dan Conner the ballast to pull off all those faux pro- wrestling throws on "Roseanne."

"There's a difference between being big and fat," says the director of "King Ralph," David Ward. "You just feel like you don't want to get into it with him, not just because you think he might sit on you, but because he would throw you out the window."

But while Goodman is far more of a big man than a fat one, he's always seen it the other way around. He saw magazine polls a couple years ago listing him among America's sexiest men as an effort "to taunt the poor boy." And when Anna Elizabeth Hartzog, at the time 19 years old, approached him during the shooting of "Everybody's All-American," Goodman was so convinced this very pretty college student couldn't be interested in him that he was rude. They were married two years later at the end of a weeklong party Goodman threw for his friends in New Orleans; in August they had a daughter, Molly Evangeline Goodman.

If there's anything that limits the range of roles Goodman can play, it's that he doesn't have the vanity of a leading man. Asked if now that he's done his first romantic lead, in "King Ralph," he was ready to move on to hot sexy roles, to get paid for rolling around on a bed with the likes of Ellen Barkin, Goodman just couldn't see it. "No, I don't think audiences expect that," he says, "or deserve to be subjected to that, although Barkin probably does, at least once."

And Goodman finds all praise of his dancing and grace insultingly condescending. "Yeah, for a fat guy," he says when complimented about it. "Right, like watching the elephants in 'Fantasia,' and those hippos in their tutus."

Well, isn't he at all aware, when he's up there dancing as Touhey or any of the others, that his size is bringing something to the party? "You know what?" he says. "I don't. It's sad but true. A fat guy that moves around like that doesn't think of himself as primarily a fat guy moving around like that. He's just a guy trying to find the groove like anyone else."

What Goodman resents most about all the questions concerning his size is that they minimize his talent as an actor, which is the only thing he's ever felt vain about.

"I imagine that his physical dimensions have as much to do with his work as every other part of him," Al Pacino says. Goodman strongly believes his size has offered him no meaningful advantages as an actor. If another kind of body had steered him toward other kinds of roles, he would have made as much of them. "I have to use the tools I have," Goodman says. "I have to make lemonade out of lemons."

Goodman's particular size and shape are unquestionably a significant part of his appeal. It's as if this large, unvain man is the best friend we've always wanted, a guy who'll keep the bullies at bay, make us feel manlier just by association, and won't steal our girlfriend.

No one is immune. After completing "Sea of Love," Pacino got Goodman accepted as a member in his beloved Actors Studio, and during shooting in Toronto, the two went to several Blue Jays baseball games. Asked what the pleasures of taking in a game with Goodman were, Pacino (who takes questions in writing, dictates his answers into a tape recorder, then has his assistant transcribe, photostat and relay them by fax back to the reporter) says: "John is an interesting guy to be with anywhere. Going to a ball game with a guy like him is fun, because he understands baseball. He enjoys it in a particular way that has to do with the way he understands it."

Steven Spielberg's infatuation with Goodman is so complete that during a scene in "Arachnophobia," where Delbert is driving his Bugs B Gone truck, Spielberg is lying crunched down out of view on the passenger seat "so I could say I was in a scene with him."

Just being near the big guy soothes old wounds. "John was the guy who used to beat me up in fourth grade," Spielberg says. "Now we can be friends."

GOODMAN'S TAKE ON THE limited expectations of working-class characters is an inheritance. He grew up in the blue-collar town of Affton, south of St. Louis, about as unwealthy as you can get without being in real trouble. His father, Leslie, a mail carrier, whom he has no memory of, died of a heart attack at 36, leaving his mother with the 2-year-old John, his 16-year-old brother, Les Jr., and a sister, Elizabeth Ann, about to be born.

Les, who was home the day his father died and tried to revive him, says his father was a very well-liked man who enjoyed getting up at parties and "doing a turn with the band -- hit stuff, a Frank Sinatra ballad, 'I'll Get By.' "

After her husband's death, Goodman's mother, Virginia, worked as a cashier at the Globe drugstore, waitressed at Jack and Phil's Bar-B-Cue, took in ironing, baby-sat and bought Christmas presents on lay-away. At 73, she still lives in the same Affton house, and works a few hours a day at the high-school cafeteria.

Goodman's first and most enduring image of himself is of a misfit wearing the same clothes day after day, sitting in his room reading Mad magazine. "He was actually skinny and wore glasses," Les says. John started to get chunky, and his brother sent him to the Y.M.C.A. "to improve his self-image." Then John started to get huge. Misfit became jock, a starting offensive and defensive lineman on the Affton High School football team. Nor was Goodman a meek soul bullied onto the field by an odd quirk of size. "I enjoyed the contact, the mayhem," Goodman says, "particularly defense. I liked hitting people."

After a year of community college, Goodman transferred to Southwest Missouri State where he wandered into a rigorous drama program whose students included Kathleen Turner and Tess Harper. For the next three years Goodman studied Stanislavsky, Boleslavski and Lessac, while appearing in as many as four major plays a year. And because everyone was stuck in Springfield, Mo., and most were broke -- Goodman was on food stamps his entire time -- there developed a real camaraderie. In the spirit of that time and place, Goodman eulogized a beloved classmate who died as a "genius, a great actor, and a damn good thief."

Even among all that nascent marquee talent, Goodman stood out. "John moves air," says Howard Orms, one of his college acting teachers, "even when he's backing up."

"I think it was clear to everyone but John how talented he was," Tess Harper says. "The power was always there. He was also very handsome. He looked like the quintessential big blond high-school football player."

In 1975, with a $1,000 stake from his brother, Goodman left for New York , and it took him two years before he could regularly pay the rent. Every morning he got up at 6:30 and walked to the audition halls that had been posted in Variety the week before, so he could be sure to get his name high on the posted lists. Then he'd go back later in the morning to make sure no one had crossed off his name or simply replaced the list.

EVENTUALLY GOODMAN started getting a lot of work in commercials -- big-guy parts like steel workers and root-beer drinkers, and a smattering of psychotic and comical big-guy bit parts for television and film. In 1985 he got his first major exposure, playing Huck Finn's Pap in the Broadway musical "Big River." The next year, David Byrne, in need of a large man who could sing, cast him in "True Stories," and Goodman was on his way.

For all Goodman's recent success he remains closer to the shy young misfit than the movie star. He hasn't even stopped reading comics. Issues of Superman have been spotted in the little apartment he gets on the Studio City lot of "Roseanne." And, a dozen years ago, when he met Kenny Kosek, a musician who would become a friend, what immediately bonded the two was that they could both quote verbatim the same 20-year-old Mad magazine pieces.

If Goodman has a consistent off-screen persona, it's that of a coffee-house, beat-generation hipster. "John has a real beret consciousness," Kosek says. "The whole bohemian demimonde is very attractive to him."

Over the years, Goodman has practically created his own eccentric vocabulary, full of comic-book verbs and antiquated hep talk. People don't get angry or upset, they get "cheesed" or "hunked off." A beer is an "oat soda," a coffee a "cup of Joe." That his mom wasn't pushing him toward any particular career -- whatever made him happy -- "was Jakes with her." When he discovered acting he "was born again hard." And fellow actors are "cats," as in "cats like Crispin Glover and Nicolas Cage aren't very much worried about whether their stuff works for anyone but themselves, but it works for me. I really think they got their foot into something."

And when he's not getting paid, Goodman's tastes and sympathies are hardly mainstream. Before going to work on "Roseanne," which at various points over the last two years has been the top-rated show on television with an audience of some 30 million, Goodman spent seven years on "Citizen Kafka," a monthly comedy radio show on WBAI in Manhattan that was so scatological, self-indulgent and absurd it never consistently entertained anyone but its creators -- Goodman, Kosek and Richard Shulberg, the show's disk jockey.

On a given night, Shulberg, a k a "The Citizen," might spin one of his instruction albums on parakeet training, or Kosek, Shulberg and Goodman would improvise off material Kosek had worked up during the week. They could include sketches and facetious community bulletins and commercials, which, "coming out of John's magnificent pipes, would be lent this amazing legitimacy," according to Kosek.

Kosek says the only pay for the show was the pure joy of having their own hour of New York radio time, and the guarantee that at some point during the night they would find themselves "on the floor weeping unashamedly in a fetal position."

Now, Kosek and Shulberg could hardly be called devoted fans of "Roseanne," but they can't help watching the show regularly. When they do, they are often rewarded by hearing old bits from the "Citizen" show fall out of the mouth of Dan Conner, like the high-pitched Julia Child voice he sometimes uses for the kitchen scene.

ONE THING LEADS TO another, and the guy who once amused himself on nonprofit radio is now earning an estimated $30,000 a week, being interviewed by Barbara Walters and seeing tabloid reporters deployed around his property at dawn. But Goodman, whose talent for acting and friendship is connected to a talent for self-disparagement, takes little pleasure in fame.

When he talks about "Roseanne," for instance, it's always "when the show ends" or "when the show goes away," as if the possibility that he might have to serve the full term of the seven-year contact he signed in 1987 is unthinkable. And he constantly harasses himself with fears that the show is making him complacent, warping his career and turning him into a hack.

"I took 'Roseanne' for the paycheck, to get off the road, get home to Annabeth and the baby and watch TV," he says. "As for 'The Flintstones,' it's a double-edged deal. I don't want my daughter to have to hear, 'Hey, that's Fred Flintstone's kid,' or be known for saying 'Yabba-dabba-do' for the rest of my life."

Watching him during scene changes at a "Roseanne" taping is like watching a slightly embarrassed and depressed zoo animal. In fact, when Roseanne Barr's new real-life husband and manager, Tom Arnold, took the microphone during a break and began talking up a number of Barr's new projects, Goodman leaned forward, lay his big jughead on the show's famous kitchen table and took a nap.

"I always wanted to be a regular old Joe," Goodman says, "a brown-shoe square from Delaware, just live a normal life, working a slightly different profession." As a matter of fact, what interested Goodman about his character in "King Ralph," he says, was the way his good fortune so quickly became a velvet prison.

Perhaps the most convincing proof of the sincerity of Goodman's discomfort with success is the degree to which his old friends forgive him for it.

And late at night, at his house in the Hollywood Hills, it is clear that Goodman is hanging on to his good friends for dear life. Although since his college days in Springfield Goodman has been in a movie with Al Pacino, even seen a couple of ball games with him, tonight he prefers the shared memory of when, after seeing "The Godfather Part 2" back in 1974, the four friends had all tried to call Pacino. They told the operator it was all right to give them his number; they were acting students.