John Larroquette: This is a Dark Ride

[Zoneboy]

Link

If you want to understand John Larroquette, you've got to remember one thing. When he finally got his own starring TV show in 1993, he played a recovering alcoholic named John Hemingway who was five hours sober when the series began.

And Larroquette served notice of his intentions by nailing an old amusement park sign on his office wall.

“This is a dark ride,” was the message for all to see.

And even though the 63-year-old Larroquette's career is currently enjoying the heights of musical comedy laughter, starring opposite Daniel Radcliffe in the smash Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, he doesn't want to forget the other side of the coin.

“You remember the whole dark ride thing?” he says over the phone from Manhattan, with a bit of delighted surprise. “Well guess what, it's hanging above my desk right now. I think it's going to go with me everywhere.”

And even though the self-admitted former alcoholic has been sober for nearly 30 years now, he likes to keep one eye on the past, even though he's the first one to insist, “Dark rides can be fun. You just can't stay on them for too long.”

In a business where shallow sound bites are more common than cancelled series, Larroquette is an anomaly: a well-read, thoughtful man with a gift for mordant irony that has served him well throughout a long career.

“And I came by it honestly,” he laughs. “You try growing up an only child in the ninth ward of New Orleans with a father who was never around and see what your world view turns out to be like.

“I had an old Jesuit confessor at Holy Cross who handed me a book by Samuel Beckett and said 'Here, young man, I think your personality would enjoy this.'”

By the time he was a teenager, Larroquette had already carved out a reputation as a jazz musician (clarinet and saxophone), moved into the French Quarter and started working as a disc jockey.

“I know that was the time when everyone was concerned about Vietnam and social issues, but you have to understand about New Orleans, especially the French Quarter. It's a time warp. It has nothing to do with the present.”

In 1973, his wandering nature took him to San Diego, where he wandered totally by chance into the Mission Playhouse.

“They just had actors sitting around reading plays. I stayed, I listened. Then they asked me if I wanted to join in the next week. The play was Vieux Carré by Tennessee Williams and something clicked in my head. This is what I'm supposed to be doing.”

The tall Southerner with the resonant voice soon found he could get lots of work, ranging from a regular role on the TV series Baa Baa Black Sheep, to doing the original narration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

“I did the remake too, but the only difference was that they paid me that time,” he quips.

Looking around his life at that point, Larroquette said “it was pretty obvious to me that I could have a damn good career, if I didn't burn out or kill myself.”

But at that point, it was a pretty big “if”.

“Why was I an alcoholic? It was my personality. I'm addictive and compulsive in so many ways and you could drink to fit any circumstance. A disaster doesn't stop you, because you have to drink to get over the disaster and a victory doesn't stop you, because you have to celebrate the victory.”

He's quiet for a long time. “The sad fact is that the vast majority of drunks stay drunks. There's a small minority of us who reach that fork in the road where one side says 'live' and the other says 'drink'.”

For Larroquette, that moment came on Feb. 5, 1982. “It was just an ordinary night of getting ****ed up. But I suddenly looked at myself from a third-person viewpoint. I turned to the friend I was getting trashed with, told him I was going to the bathroom and just left his house.”

It wasn't long after that he went to an audition for the show that would change his life: Night Court.

“I thought it was just another pilot, even if it was one with a damned funny script, but I had gotten philosophical about those things. I said 'If I get the job, I'll do it,' and I did, for nine years.”

Larroquette was cast as the smug, vainglorious, would-be womanizing attorney Dan Fielding, but the character definitely evolved in his hands.

“I think the writer is the mother of every character, but the actor becomes the father. In the first episodes Dan was more conservative, straitlaced but as Riney (creator Reinhold Weege) got to know me better, he opened the door to let a lot more of me and my sense of humour come through. All that stuff about eating chicken feet, living the swamp life, that was me.”

Larroquette won four consecutive Emmys (1985-1988) for the show and then asked that his name be taken out of consideration.

“They were talking at the time of spinning Dan off into his own series,” he reveals, “but I thought it would never work and so I said no. Do I ever regret it? Never.” A deadpan pause. “Well, maybe when I see Kelsey (Grammer) get into his private jet.”

When Larroquette came back to episodic TV in 1993 with The John Larroquette Show, he now admits that he and creator Don Reo “might have laid it on a bit too thick for some people. We based the first 12 episodes on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And that wasn't really prime-time network comedy material.

“If we had had Showtime or HBO back then, we might have had a chance. But we didn't. They wanted to cancel it at the end of the first season, but I insisted we try to fix it up and that ruined it even worse. I blame myself and my hubris. The audience wants what it wants and you can't change that.”

Since then, Larroquette has had some unforgettable turns on The Practice, Boston Legal and CSI: NY, but he had never thought of stepping into the world of a Broadway musical.

“I feel like I'm on a series of trapezes,” he says about singing and dancing, “and I'm afraid to let go of one to grab the other. But I'm learning every day.”

And with shining young superstar Daniel Radcliffe sharing the stage with him, there's one thing you can say for sure.

This time around, it's not a dark ride.

FIVE FAVE AUTHORS OF JOHN LARROQUETTE

SAMUEL BECKETT: It's his novels that get to me: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. I must have read them 15-20 times.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Infinite Jest was such a wonderful work. I am just so sad he won't be around for us anymore.

JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE: If you grew up in New Orleans like I did, you feel more strongly about A Confederacy of Dunces than anyone else in the world.

WILLIAM FAULKNER: Maybe it's my Southern roots again, but I find something so powerful about The Sound and the Fury that always stays with me.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE: Ever since I read Coming Through Slaughter, I have begun a love affair with that man's work

[ekkostar]

Beat me to it on posting the article, I read it through the Google News feed a while ago, was going to add it to the links in the Night Court topic.

It's cool that he still has the sign and takes it with him everywhere.