Melanie Chartoff: My Father Was a Charismatic Chauvinist
“My father’s dominating view of women and the world formed my earliest performance style. Self-satirizing to get his approval, to charm and not threaten him was my big motivation.”
— Melanie Chartoff
Melanie Chartoff’s lust for acting began on the stages of Yale University and Long Wharf Theatre in her hometown New Haven. Working on and off Broadway while studying craft with Stella Adler, singing, dancing and improv in many schools of thought, she moonlighted as a singing stand-up at the Improv Club. While guest-starring on television in Los Angeles, she continued honing her comedy chops at the Hollywood Improv and joined the cast of Fridays, ABC’s answer to Saturday Night Live, along with Larry David and Michael Richards. She’s best known for characters she created there and on Seinfeld, Newhart, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, Weird Science, Wiseguy, and Rugrats, also familiar from the notorious Andy Kaufman incident, for testifying against George Costanza in the Final Seinfeld, and for playing Grandma Minka in the first animated Chanukah Special for Rugrats and Nickleodeon.
Recently, she’s been published in McSweeney’s, Medium, Entropy, The Jewish Journal, Funny Times, Five on the Fifth, Glint, Entropy, Bluestem, Goats Milk Magazine, Evening Street Press, Mused, Jewlarious, Defenestration, Better after 50, Living the Second Act, and four editions of Chicken Soup for the Soul (Simon and Schuster). Odd Woman Out: Essays and Stories is her first book, rated 5 stars on Barnes & Noble and Amazon. It intimately exposes the nature of identity in the life of a performing artist, snapshotting the search for a self Chartoff could love, and someone else’s self to love, too She found and married him seven years ago and became a happy step-mother to his fabulous prefab kids.
She has been teaching “Charismatizing Improvising and Acting” in private classes and online coaching for many decades. For info and testimonials, go to charismatizing.com. Her performing website is melaniechartoff.com. Her social media are: https://www.facebook.com/charismatizing https://www.facebook.com/melaniechartoff @melaniechartoff, #melaniechartoff.
It seems that your first experiences of sexism might have been from your father, both in his treatment of you and your mother. How did you experience/deal with that at the time, and how did your view of him evolve over the years?
My dad was a charismatic chauvinist and his attitudes toward women were imbued in me early on. I saw us women through his demeaning gaze, laughed with his male sense of humor, and self-deprecated and objectified myself in collaboration with it. I first saw the world from his dominating male gaze, which guided me in forming my self-satirizing stand-up act. I learned how to work the male crowd at home to survive. But around the time I started my menses, I became separate from him. Finally realizing the depth of his misogyny, his cruelty to my mother and sister, made me an ardent feminist fast.
You dedicate the book to your mother. Would she herself, or even her mother, have experienced in their lives any version of the sexism you encountered in yours?
Are you kidding? My grandmothers endured way worse than I did and my mother witnessed it. Men of my grandfather’s era beat and treated their wives and girls with contempt. My dad was in the military in WWII and mostly disciplined his daughters and wife like we were soldiers in some involuntary platoon. Luckily, my father was mainly verbally abusive, although the ferocity of his tone could bruise worse than sticks and stones. The idea of Women’s Liberation was coming into American consciousness as I was coming into puberty, and I had the desperation and wiles to get away.
You say your mother taught you that it’s never too late to learn to love. Again, was that something from her own experience, or just her belief?
I’ve always admired my mother’s determination to work on herself, especially when she finally left my father, who made us all feel so horrible about ourselves. In her sixties, she went to Twelve Step meetings for codependents, to therapy, and told people who she was as she developed a less anxious, more confident self. She learned to be alone and love herself. And she fell in love for the first time with a good man in her sixties, as did I. The symmetry is pretty laughable. It’s in my book!
In thinking back over all your romantic relationships that have not worked out, do you blame yourself, the men, bad luck, or something else? What have you learned from these relationships about men, dating, and love?
I was too hungry for the love and approval my dad didn’t offer. I got a lot of that, but from the wrong guys in the wrong ways. They loved the performance version of me, as my identity was fragmented for so long.
Do you think that experiencing grief, loneliness, depression, illness and failure makes one a better actor, comedian, or writer as a result of the suffering endured?
Every empathic human being has the capacity for all those emotional and bodily states, and the imagination lies within us all artists to create them. Actually, feeling ill or shut down would make it hard to be a working actor. It’s a strenuous profession requiring great discipline, focus, stamina and genuine vulnerability.
Perhaps it’s different for painters, composers, novelists who work according to their own rather than a production’s schedules, who don’t use their own bodies and feelings for pigments in the service of a circumscribed story. They are free range to invent everything.
I disagree with the idea that actors have to have experienced something in real life to play it on stage or screen, that you have to re-wound or regurgitate painful parts of your past life to be a successful. James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Sal Mineo relived their hurts repeatedly and it took them out of life prematurely.
Did you feel any pressure from your Hollywood career not to have a baby?
No, I was just too busy when it was possible, and while I was fertile, never met the man who I felt could father and co-raise my child and support me.
Do you think you appreciate love more having found true love later in life?
I had such an appreciation of others’ loves that made me hurt at the size of the lack of it in my own life. Now I am grateful every day. My husband and I still contrast the ease and joy of our interdependence with the suffering of many years in fraught relationships or alone.
How has the MeToo Movement affected you?
I was stunned by the number of horrible stories I heard about household names, legends in the entertainment industry. I actually wondered why it never happened to me! I had to audition for every job I ever got.
I’m part of a belated #WeToo movement, I feel. With no holds barred we mature women are telling our tales openly in our writings. Mine were all minor transgressions, except for the sex forced on me by a rejected boyfriend.
If you could offer a message to a group of men accused of sexism and sexual harassment by the MeToo Movement, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Louis C.K., Larry Nassar, Charlie Rose, Donald Trump, and others, what would you want to convey to them?
“Shame on you for inflicting all your little peccadillos and twisted sicknesses on such terrific women.”
Conversely, what message would you like to offer to today’s young women, and/or to your younger self, in how to best deal with experiences of sexism should they arise?
“There are far more resources available and ears to listen now than ever before. Tell your truth as quickly as possible to protect others and save yourself heartache. You will be believed, and others may be spared.”
Do you feel that you grew up in a time where women, and in your case women in show business, were raised to turn the other cheek when experiencing sexism? Did the Me Too Movement change that, or had the change process started before the Movement?
Yes. Both sets of cheeks were grabbed when I was entering the business, and we often just let it go in the interest of salvaging opportunities. If we had whined and complained, we’d have been called uptight “bad sports” with no sense of humor. We might not have been hired. I’d like to believe that men copping cheap feels and thrills didn’t know how horrified we were, how un-titillated and revolted we felt, because we didn’t want to miss a beat to take them down.
How has experiencing being a woman in a man’s world of comedy shaped your feelings about men, show business, sexism, femininity, and speaking up?
I was on a late-night comedy show with only one-woman writer in the early 80s, on which the female gaze was mightily suppressed. On the other hand, Lorne Michaels gave women many opportunities to write and create characters on SNL back in the day and still does today. When I started out in stand up, aggressive male delivery predominated the rooms in which I played. My femininity was novel. When I moved into late night TV with mostly male writers and executives, men’s kid gloves came on when I was soft spoken in my requests, but came off when my agent or I asked for more. As I matured and came out of the closet as a feminist, I started speaking directly from a sexless center, meaning from my intelligence unadorned, less vulnerable. I got more power and negotiated men’s “no’s” more successfully. All types of voices are far more welcomed in comedy worlds now than in the 70’s when I started out.
If we were looking at a pie chart of your experiences in show business with men, what percentage would be good, respectful encounters versus bad, sexist ones?
I’d say 75% of mine were respectful, and the longer I live the larger the good part of the pie gets.
How did having comedy and acting icons such as Henny Youngman and Ed Asner copping a feel from you affect you? How did you respond then, and how would you respond now?
I looked at them in shock after the little pats and strokes. The degree was minor compared to other atrocities, but still it hurt my feelings to be treated like a sick joke by these icons. They lost my trust and respect.
Do you think your experiences over the years with sexism may have served, in a way, to make you more cautious about the kind of man to whom you’d give your heart? Made you demand higher standards from him, in a way?
Yes. I wanted a nice feminist guy who respected women and didn’t feel dwarfed by our power or success, and I got myself a really good one.
Your new essay collection, Odd Woman Out: Exposure in Essays and Stories, deals with your brutally honest takes on yourself, your career, men, women, and the sexism you’ve experienced. Did that honesty come to you organically right from the beginning, or was it something you’ve had to develop over the years, and if so, how were you able to do that?
It took me years to get brave enough to reveal my many, many mistakes, to sully my image. I’m hoping my candor spares some women twisted thinking about themselves. I hope my happy ending gives others hope.
Could you explain the significance of “Odd Woman Out” in the title?
I’m coming out of the closet as imperfect and warped. And, I think many felt as I did–that we were left over misfits, third wheels, oddballs, excluded somehow, without realizing it was from choices we were making rather than being ostracized by others.
