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My Story

After I graduated from San Francisco State College, I went to Wayne State University in Detroit for my graduate degree, which, let’s be honest, made no sense. I wanted to be an actor. You don’t need a graduate degree for that, and in downtown Detroit, no less.

Jim Thompson was my advisor at SFSC. He was from Minnesota, and all his cronies from back home were faculty at Wayne State. Dr. Jim and a tape recording of my breathless four-minute interpretation of the “If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well [I emphasized “well,” which they considered revolutionary], it were done quickly” speech from Macbeth got me a scholarship, $55 a week, and all the inner-city poverty I could handle.

As part of my scholarship, I performed in the repertory company, took classes toward a master’s degree, and taught an acting class. I was twenty years old, and I’ve been teaching ever since. I taught at Wayne State for five years, then taught for the esteemed director and coach Milton Katselas for two decades at his famed Beverly Hills Playhouse, then held an acting workshop at SXSW for ten years.

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For the last few years, I’ve been on the road with a program I call “Performing Your Life,” which is the fancy-schmantzy name I made up for it while eating pastrami at Art’s Delicatessen in Studio City, in answer to Michael Laskin’s question “What shall we call this?” (Michael was my producer at the time.) Lately, I added a little coda to the schmantzy name of my talk: “Performing Your Life: What’s Keeping You?” This coda is a fascination of mine. I am consumed by why people stop. Just stop. And move to “more comfortable rooms.” Change directions and give up.

Here’s the deal. I have taught thousands of students over the years—some successful students, and some very, very successful students. I’ve had some students who have become very wealthy—one billionaire and many millionaires—and the rest, I guess, are thousandaires. Some have won major awards. But 90 percent of my students abandoned their acting dreams to settle for “other rooms of less consequence.” I’ve become obsessed with why so many of us halt our progress, fold up the cards, call it a day.

At the start of my lecture, no matter where I am, whether it’s a university or some corporate function, I dedicate my talk to a late friend of mine who came up to me one day with tears in his eyes and said, “I used to be somebody. Now I’ve become somebody else. God help me, what have I done?”

I used to pitch for my Cub Scout softball team, the Westlake Tigers, Pack 248. Our uniforms were bought by Woody’s Barber Shop in the shopping center across the highway. The uniforms were magnificent, white and pristine—pristine because none of the team ever slid or had any contact with anything brown or green like you’re supposed to when you’re playing baseball. The catcher was Peter Dunan. Mr. Dunan, his father, was the coach. When I was pitching and things were going awry—there was not a strike to be seen or called by the umpire—Mr. Dunan would call time out, and he and Peter would come out to the pitcher’s mound and Mr. Dunan would say, “What’s keeping you, son?”

Old-fashioned merry-go-rounds sometimes had a dispenser or wooden arm with brass rings, and riders tried to snatch a ring as they passed it. It’s become a symbol for taking what you want, even if you have to lean precariously off your horse to get it. I want to know what keeps us from that ring. I think the answer is a story, a story that keeps us from the prize. (I’m not the first person to think this, for those of you playing along at home.)

In my talk, I speak about an actress who was in one of my acting workshops. She was terrific, one of the best students I ever had, dazzling, except anytime we worked on a scene from a Tennessee Williams play or other material that had any sexual connotation, she couldn’t “bring” it. She would get right up to the mark—and freeze. I could see her practically leave her body and go soft and squeamish.

After a scene, I would invite the actors to sit at the edge of the stage to talk about their performance—what they were working on…how they think they did…what their process was…that stuff. During one of these talks/critiques/back-and-forths, I asked her the Mr. Dunan special: “What’s holding you back?” She talked about the usual things: where she grew up back East, where she lived now in Los Angeles, how she came out here to try acting, that kind of thing. And she happened to mention in passing that she spoke to her father on the phone almost every night, and at the end of every call before he hung up, he said, “Are you still my little girl?”

Houston, I believe we have a story. How could she ever be comfortable with her attack on a scene with that daddy whispering in her ear with every move she made? That story gets up with her in the morning, chooses her outfit for the day, and goes to rehearsal with her. It hangs around until it’s time to accompany her home and wait for the phone call.

Here’s another. I had a student who was the brother of a very successful businessman. And he would jest he was the unsuccessful brother. That’s his role, the role he has adopted for his life. He has an unsuccessful car, he has unsuccessful clothes, he has an unsuccessful agent, he has an unsuccessful house. And he has an unsuccessful career. The story affects your life.

When I do my talk, I choose a moment in the evening to have the audience close their eyes and imagine someone in their lives who is having a bad time of it, someone who is failing. I caution them not to use themselves, because it’s too close and it’s hard to be objective. It’s quite a sight to see this from the stage, and it is so affecting to see people getting in touch with their feelings about their friends and their pain. It is very quiet, because we all realize in that instant that there are manufactured and inherited stories that keep us from the prize.

Want another?

My dad, Bernard no-middle-name Tambor—they didn’t give him a middle name—Barney on the West Coast, Bernie on the East—came from a Hungarian Jewish family (our part of Hungary was in Prussia at the time) who lost people in the Holocaust. How he passed that on to me was: “Shhh, shhh, shhh. Don’t celebrate. They’ll take it away from you.” He would always tell me, “Keep your nose clean.” Stay out of trouble. Stay below the radar. Don’t celebrate. Shhh.

It’s worth noting that the very definition of being an actor is: Don’t keep your nose clean—your mission is to get into trouble and stay there.

After Thirty-First Avenue, we moved to a community called Westlake in Daly City, just south of San Francisco. It was one of the first developments in the country designed specifically for working people, the brainchild of a genius developer named Henry Doelger. My father was a flooring contractor, and he had worked with Mr. Doelger when he was building this revolutionary community. We lived in one of these beautiful houses, which cost my parents $18,000, what I thought was a fortune. And we had a DeSoto two-door just like the one that was advertised on the Groucho Marx show, You Bet Your Life. Clearly, we were doing okay. When we said we were middle class, my mother would say, “No, no, we’re upper-middle class.”

The sun rose and set on my parents. My dad, the former boxer from the Lower East Side of New York, was big and handsome, like Cesar Romero. My mom, who came from Saint Paul, was Lena Horne beautiful and a fantastic cook. Every night when my dad got home from work, he’d take a shower and they’d dress up, turn on the radio, dance, and they would drink old-fashioneds with English bitters and smoke Lucky Strikes.

I adored my older brother, Larry. Lawrence Richard Tambor—him they gave a middle name. Five years older than me, he was the eldest and first boy child in a Jewish family. On his W2 form, it said “golden child.” Everybody loved him. He wasn’t just the troop leader of Pack 248 of the Boy Scouts, he was Order of the Arrow. Me, I got maybe the cooking merit badge. I think all I had to do was light a fire (I cheated, used a Zippo) and make beef stew out of a can. I ended up in the hospital after one camping trip because I was dehydrated and fell off a mule. So if there’d been a dehydration merit badge, I would have gotten that too. The mule was fine.

My mom was in charge of punishing us for our misdeeds. My dad never did it. The ex–professional boxer had no stomach for it. All he had to do was hold up his big boxer’s hands and say, “These are lethal weapons,” and Larry and I would scatter. But one time, my mother insisted he punish me after I’d broken a window in the kitchen, playing ball in the house.

“I don’t want to hear any lecture about ‘lethal weapons,’ ” she said. “You have to teach your son a lesson, Barney. Now.”

My father solemnly ushered me upstairs to my bedroom and closed the door.

“Yell ‘ow!’ ” he whispered, and slapped himself on the chest and arms.

Slap!

“Ow!”

Slap!

“Ow!”

“Cry, Bep,” he whispered.

Slap!

“Ow!” and then in a whisper, “What?”

“Cry.”

Slap!

“Ow!” I yelled, my voice breaking.

He nodded approval.

It was my first performance. We had created a “spanking” that never happened. I was delighted.

Okay, confession: I may have led you to believe those last few paragraphs are my story, but they’re not. Those things happened, it’s all true, but that’s not my story. Close, but not quite.

Something happened in the Tambor family; something broke and stayed broken. It’s the Tambor mystery. I have only fragments, hints, fuzzy memories.

I’m in the car with my mother, driving across San Francisco. We arrive at a house I don’t recognize. My mom and I get out of the car. We go upstairs to a waiting room. My aunt is there. My mom checks in with this woman. My aunt takes me to her house for the weekend.

My mom and her friend Eve Singer, a tough-talking Jewish girl, used to play golf together then go drink at Joe’s of Westlake. One afternoon I got home from school, Eve was leaving. My mother was in the living room with a man. He looked familiar. Maybe the bartender at Joe’s?

My dad packs up and leaves while Larry and I scream, “Don’t go! Don’t go!” He comes back a few weeks later. But now there is only silence and a sickening tension.

My mom started acting different from the mom we had on the Avenues. She seemed to start drinking earlier and earlier in the day. She stopped making breakfast for us, instead locking herself in the bathroom with a vodka and lime juice.

“Bye, Mom.”

Silence.

“Mom? Bye. I’m going to school [or sshkool with my lisp].”

Silence.

She still made dinner, enormous plates of food. I mean, enormous—I never knew what a normal serving looked like until I went to a restaurant. There was so much soup in a bowl, it was round, not flat. But my mother wouldn’t eat. Instead, she would sit at the table with a drink and a Newport cigarette in silence. (Newports—who smokes Newports?) Not a word. She would just look at us as though she would have preferred we weren’t there.

My poor dad’s jaw clicked when he ate—either because of Joe Louis’s left hook or undiagnosed TMJ—and my mother would turn to him as he clicked through the meal: “Barney.” Larry got so nervous, he would crack his knuckles. She would turn to him: “Larry.” She only looked at me; I didn’t even get a “Jeffrey.”

She would wait until late at night to cook herself a steak and a potato. She’d take it upstairs to her room and eat just a little bit in front of her television. Like clockwork, she fell asleep during the eleven o’clock news. I would go into her room, take the tray, go downstairs, and finish the steak and potato.

There came a time when my father sold our lovely house in Westlake because he needed the money to buy into a partnership at Floorcraft, the store where he worked, with his partners, Wally and Jack Lerner. We moved to an apartment in Parkmerced at 14 Vidal Street. It was a comedown for my mother, and things got worse. Much, much worse.

She started to break her silence. When she lost her temper, she would use words I never heard anybody else use. She said “fuck” and “shit” a lot—she was very fond of “shitty” this and “shitty” that, especially when examining my room and the ring in the bathtub. This was not a person I knew; it bore no resemblance to the mom on Thirty-First Avenue.

The house reeked of Lysol. Dad and the rest of us started eating over the kitchen sink to avoid making a mess. She had my dad install wall-to-wall white carpeting all over the house—including the bathroom. On top of the carpet, plastic runners everywhere, from entrance to exit. Woe unto you if she saw footprints on the runner—she could tell by shoe size who was the perp. We had to take off our shoes on entering the house, and put on these slippers that a Chinese acrobat might wear. There was plastic on all the furniture, and it was not even taken off for guests. I stopped inviting people over; I couldn’t take the look on their faces when I pointed to the slippers they’d have to wear to play at Jeffrey’s house.

When I was eighteen or nineteen, I was at home convalescing from a minor back surgery, when a group of my theater friends came by unexpectedly to visit me. I invited them in, shoes on, and had them take a seat on the sofa. From upstairs, my mother went crazy. “Who is down there? What the fuck are they doing? Get them out!” She threw in a lot of “shitty” and “fuck” to spice up the faceless rant from her bedroom. I will never forget the look on my friends’ faces as they sheepishly left our house with my mother still yelling from upstairs.

About once a week, as a special treat at dinner, my mother would sit there, puffing on her cigarettes, and say ever so matter-of-factly:

You are shtick drek.

You’ve always been shtick drek.

You will always be shtick drek.

Translation:

You are a piece of shit.

You’ve always been a piece of shit.

You will always be a piece of shit.

It was a curse.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you get yourself a story.

She cut ties with her family completely and abruptly. No more Seders with my grandparents. “That piece of shit.” “She’s a piece of shit.” The circle of the condemned was widening.

She inexplicably began to wear dark glasses at night. One evening at dinner, she said, “I wish you were dead.” It was out of the blue—there was no antecedent to it. She wasn’t looking at any one of us, she was just staring straight ahead.

What is happening? Who is this? How do I make this stop? Where is the mom who dances to the radio?

I was never threatened with physical violence. That would have been better. I would have killed for a beating. What she did was so much worse. It hurt.

Larry had left for college by the time my little sister, Jodi, was born. She never knew our warm, loving mother; she knew only this Gorgon, this hideous female monster whose look could turn you to stone, who was obviously in so much pain. My sister never had a chance.

One afternoon, I was in my bedroom with my sister watching cartoons on my black-and-white television, and my mother stopped in the doorway. She looked at us and gave us a smile, but not a warm and fuzzy one. And then she blew us a kiss. I could sense Jodi tensing. There was something ominous about it. My mother said nothing. The next thing we knew, she was being rushed to the hospital after trying to kill herself with an overdose of pills. She wasn’t hospitalized, just given medication and sent home to drink even more, so she could try a second time.

We then entered what we fondly called the “your mother is very nervous” stage, which was my father’s code phrase. Dad became terrified that she was going to commit suicide. We all were. Every action in the house was calibrated with: Will this make her kill herself? I still worry about this with students and friends to this day; this horrid measurement continues to be a part of my life, my story.

Dad would pick me up from school and tell me, “Your mother is very nervous.” He’d be driving erratically, first at 5 mph and then 70 mph in a 25 mph zone, telling me over and over, “Your mother is very nervous, Stinky.”

Then one day, my mother came into my bedroom as I was studying, and, without saying a word or any rancor in her expression, opened the window and proceeded to throw every single book I owned, including my schoolbooks and homework, out onto the street for all the world to see.

In that moment, I changed. I thought, Whatever it takes, I will get out of here. I’m going to live. I would steel myself, so that it wouldn’t hurt anymore. I would never let anyone hurt me again; if I had to lie or manipulate or calculate, I would be cold of heart. As Iago said of his hatred of the Moor—I being Iago, my mother being the Moor—“I have’t. It is engender’d. Hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.” I know, I know, it’s a little over the top, but when I first read this passage in college, I said to myself, “Yep, I get that. That’s what I did!”

Actors have often said they have a problem with that aspect of Iago. Me? Piece of cake. It was my motto, the operating principle of my escape, Beppy’s theme song. And that’s why I am the last Tambor standing.

I’d looked up to Larry when I was a little boy, but that morphed a bit with the following incident. I had hauled in $400 from my bar mitzvah, which I kept in a passbook savings account at the Bank of America. I was so proud of that money, I would look at my bankbook every day. One day I went to the bank to withdraw ten dollars to buy myself something. The money was gone. All of it. I went to the bank manager, who was friends with my dad. He called Barney. Larry had pretended to be me, and took the money. All of it.

Larry, the golden child, was supposed to be the doctor in the family, but he didn’t have the aptitude. He pretended he went to Princeton for college, but he didn’t. He went away, but we didn’t know where he went. In the end, the closest he got to fulfilling our parents’ dream for him was by selling pharmaceutical supplies. He became alcoholic and obese. I went to a barbecue at his house in Martinez after I’d begun appearing on television. I sat there like I was the bee’s knees. I knew he could sense the message I was sending him: I beat you. He had a huge glass that he drank and drank and drank from; I’d thought it was water but it was wine.

I turned my back on him. When he was alive, he’d been my hero, my Elvis, and then I felt ashamed of him. When he died at thirty-six years old, I was ashamed of myself for never helping him. I still am.

When my little sister later fell under the sway of alcoholism and drug addiction, I tried to help her but it didn’t take. Like all of us, she’s still trying to find the path back “home.”

My parents never spoke of Larry’s death, as though they’d closed the book on it. My father, I believe, had the death certificate changed to say Larry died of pneumonia, he was so ashamed of what had truly killed his son. And there was my father’s mantra: “Don’t celebrate, they’ll take it away from you.” They took Larry from him. Larry was such a good son.

My mother was horrible to Larry’s wife and children—they became outcasts. The last time Larry tried to see my parents, they closed the door on him. Some fool had told them that if he came over for a drink, they should shut the door in his face. They did as they were told. He died three months later, leaving his young children fatherless.

My father “closed up shop,” as they say, filled with self-recrimination until leukemia caught up to him. My father spent the last year of his life in and out of the hospital. My mother seldom went to see him. She sent me. When it was clear that he was near the end, they sent him home so he could die in his own bed. A nurse came daily to give him morphine; after the final shot, Barney sailed away.

My mother had spent a fortune on these gold-monogrammed hand towels that hung in the bathroom. When my father’s doctor came to the house to see him the final time, the doctor wiped his hands on those towels. My mother came to my room and I thought she was about to share her sorrow with me, but this is what she whispered: “Tell him not to use the towels.” Her husband was dying. Her son was dead. Her daughter was gone. She’d cut ties with her family. She had no one. Just me and the towels.

I thought I would be free after my father died. My mother was living in Walnut Creek, California, and I was hundreds of miles to the south in Los Angeles. It was what I had wanted my whole life—distance from her. But I had promised my father that I would at least play the dutiful son, so I still checked in from time to time.

I took her for an early-bird dinner not long after my father died. We were getting on rather well, both of us pretending we liked each other. And then she whispered drunkenly to me, “Take me home.”

“What?”

“Take me home.”

“What? Why?”

“Just do what I tell you. I’ve shit myself.”

She invited me and Katie, my wife at the time, for the first Thanksgiving she was alone, and I agreed to go. I invited my friend Rick Podell and his girlfriend to join us. The four of us stayed safely away in a hotel, but at the appointed time we went over to my mother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. When we arrived, the table was set, and the smell of things cooking permeated the house. There were mashed potatoes and vegetables and all the expected sides. But no turkey.

“I forgot to turn on the oven,” she said.

So we decided we’d eat around it and wait for the turkey to be done. A little strange, but okay.

Then she excused herself from the table and went into her bedroom. A few minutes later, while my friends and my wife and I were still sitting at the table not-eating turkey, my mother walked by the open doorway to the hall. She was completely naked from her underpants up and carrying the dress she had been wearing to the laundry room. Rick and I looked at each other and began to laugh so hard that tears spilled down our cheeks. A moment later, my mother walked back to her bedroom and closed the door. She never looked at us, and she didn’t come back out. She had no idea we were there. We stopped laughing.

We turned off the oven and put everything away, and we left. It was the strangest evening I have ever experienced, and it was never spoken of again.

A few months afterward, I got a call from my business manager. “Your mother has sold the house.”

“What?”

“She wants to move to L.A.”

It made no sense. But my business manager found an apartment for her and made the arrangements for her move. And then there she was, alone. No friends, no one to visit her. She knew no one in the building. She didn’t have a dog or a cat. She had nothing. Okay, that’s not entirely true. She had one friend—well, a steady and reliable acquaintance—the delivery man from the liquor store around the corner on Robertson Boulevard.

I would visit once in a while. She had a TV blaring in every room. It was deafening. It was impossible to talk. It was its own circle of hell.

She came to visit me at work just once that I remember, when I was doing a TV show called Mr. Sunshine, which was produced by my friend Henry Winkler. I had the lead role, Paul Stark, who was a blind professor. It lasted just eleven episodes—they put it up against Dynasty, my first welcome-to-network strategy. My mother came to a taping one evening and sat in the audience. While I was changing my clothes just offstage in preparation for the taping, I could hear the warm-up guy doing his patter out front. Someone in the audience was answering back to everything he was saying, and she—it was a she—was getting big laughs. Oh my God, it’s my mother. My mother is heckling the warm-up man.

The night before she died (nearly two decades after my father), the hospital in Century City called my assistant to fetch me out of my acting class. I excused myself to say my final good-bye. She was morphined up, basically in a coma, all but gone. I stood by her bed. Her hair was perfectly done. I kept touching it; the hairspray made it bounce back against my hand. How do you get your hair done in ICU? She always had her hair done three times a week, and even now, when she was ready to go, it was just so.

And here was another bit of proof of God’s irony: A few years later, I was doing a series for NBC called Bent. My character, the dad of the family, was going through a health crisis and had to be hospitalized. The locations manager found a suitable space in the very same hospital. The hospital was no longer practical, so it was being leased out to film crews. I found myself in the same ICU ward, different bed.

When my mom died, I was dating my then-girlfriend-now-wife Kasia, and the two of us went to my mother’s apartment to clean it out. She had very few things, some beauty products, a few photos. Everything there—her faux gold, her clothing, her perfume, her handbags—added up to less than a student has in a college dormitory.

It wasn’t until years after she died that I opened the bag we had put her jewelry in with thoughts of dividing it up to give to the family. The smell of her perfume and just a hint of Lysol wafted out of that bag and punched me in the face. There was just no escape.

You’re a piece of shit. You’ve always been a piece of shit. You’ll always be a piece of shit.

And remember, Stinky, don’t celebrate, don’t say anything. Shhhh. Shhhhhh. They’ll take it away from you. Oh, and your mother is very nervous.