At Home With Susie Essman

Author: admin

11 Oct

THE location of her house, in a suburb outside Albany, is one of the first hints that Susie Essman, comedian, wife and stepmother, is nothing like Susie Greene, the perpetually enraged, expletive-spewing Los Angeles housewife she plays on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” If you need more proof, there are the two little words you hear after you call and ask if you can come over early: “I’m vacuuming.”

A vacuum, you can bet, is nothing Susie Greene, with her successful show biz-manager husband and screaming animal-print wardrobe, has ever touched with her perfectly manicured hand. It’s kind of surprising that Susie Essman, the quintessential fast-talking New York City comic — who is having the biggest success of her life, with a new book, “What Would Susie Say?,” out this week, a featured role in a hit HBO series and fans begging her to insult them the way she does her co-star, Larry David — would be vacuuming.

But then Ms. Essman’s life, as she talks about it in stories that career happily into other stories like bumper cars at a fun park, is full of the unexpected.

A few years ago, after a lifetime of being single, Ms. Essman, now 54, fell in love with an upstate contractor-turned-Realtor named Jimmy Harder, became stepmother to four children and bought a ranch house in the suburbs — yeah, she was the one who bought it. She could afford it, and Mr. Harder was changing careers and going through a divorce.

The house is more suburban than she would like, she said, but the children are only a mile away from their mother.

Six years ago, she said, she was illegally subletting a rent-stabilized apartment on West 78th Street — paying $1,200 for a large one-bedroom with an eat-in kitchen — and then the super died and the new super ratted her out.

Is that coffee hot enough? You sure you’re comfortable there at the kitchen counter?

And then: “Michael Harder, my brother in law, he does wedding flowers — he had two weddings up in Lake George this weekend — he always has extras, he came by yesterday and he had no extras. I said, ‘I got company coming tomorrow. What do you mean you got no extras?’ ”

“This is how I have conversations,” she said. “Joy and I will have 17 conversations at once.” (That’s Joy Behar, “The View” host who is her best friend.) “It drives Jimmy crazy.”

Mr. Harder, when he arrived with his 16-year-old daughter, Cyndi, who had just passed the test for her learner’s permit — much proud mom noise at this point from Ms. Essman — showed no sign of going crazy. He’s good looking and buff in a sharp gray suit, and sits in during the first hour and a half of the interview, perhaps being sociable, perhaps protective, maybe with managerial thoughts in his head. He and Ms. Essman have been married a year and, for sure, he’s proud of his wife.

“I just thought she was incredible, fast, witty, smart,” he said, recalling the first time he saw her perform, at Caroline’s. “Susie walks on stage and bam! You don’t know what hit you.”

“You see why I married him,” Ms. Essman purred. “He was still a contractor when he used to come to see me. He had jeans and a tool belt. It was hot.”

“I still have a tool belt,” Mr. Harder said. “I can put it on.”

But to the house. There is a classic episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which Susie Greene, who has moved into a new house, asks Larry David if he’d like a tour. When he says no, she tosses him out of her house.

The real-life Susie is just as proud to show off her home, a 1980s ranch she bought for $353,000 three years ago, as well as several things that would never impress Susie Greene. Ms. Essman has loads of stuff, like a $900 red leather mission rocker and $800 leather couches in the den that she found at flea markets or on Craigslist. And her husband finished the basement himself — something she mentioned at least four times.

What’s so important about a guy who can finish a basement, she is asked after the husband has gone to work.

“Competence,” Ms. Essman said. “It’s so primal. It’s, ‘We’re in the forest and if there is a nuclear holocaust he could build a lean-to.’ He could survive. He’s a guy — Jimmy’s a guy, not a metrosexual — he’s a guy and totally competent.”

How does he compare to men she used to date?

“Actors, musicians — you know those types, artistic types,” she said. “I never went out with anybody who had children, so here was this man who was the most incredible father. I saw that right away, the maternal, the taking care of. I think that finishing the basement goes to safety. From the very beginning, I felt totally safe, that I was going to be taken care of.”

The Susie Essman life story: Grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., one of three children. Her mother was a professor of Russian, her father an oncologist.

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