Word: crystallic
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...Crystal attributes his contentment to Janice Goldfinger, the hometown girl he married in 1970. "I fell in love with the right person, a person I knew and who knew me. I still want to make her laugh." He was a full-time father before it was fashionable, changing diapers during the day and playing clubs at night, while Janice worked as assistant to the dean of theater at Nassau % Community College on Long Island. "I loved those years of being Mr. Mom. One of the saddest days in my life was when Jennifer said, 'Dad, I can wash...
...hunger for family comes in part because when he was 15, his father dropped dead after bowling a 200 game on lane 13. "All the fun went out of the house then," says Crystal's brother Rich, a producer at Hearst television. "My mother adored my father, and she could barely manage." From then on, part of what propelled Crystal was the desire to make his mother happy again. He became the school comedian, memorizing Bill Cosby's routines and performing them so well at assemblies that when classmates heard the actual recordings they joked that Cosby was stealing Crystal...
...years after that, it looked as if Crystal, like Buddy, might never break into the big time. He started out in a group called 3's Company, which appeared in between folk singers doing whaling songs at coffeehouses and never attracted much of a following. In 1974 he earned so little and had such high expenses that the IRS came calling. The auditor found the $2,200 in travel receipts in order but asked Janice why in the world he kept at it for only $4,000 a year. "It's in his blood," she sighed...
...rare shot at instant stardom -- an appearance on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live in 1975 -- misfired when producer Lorne Michaels cut his spot from six minutes to one and Crystal pulled out. "It was awful," says Crystal. "Gilda ((Radner)) walked me to the elevator. I was crying all the way home on the Long Island Railroad, the tears running down the makeup." While friends Chevy Chase and John Belushi went on to become household names, he had to settle for a spot on ABC's wacky series Soap, playing television's first prime-time homosexual. Then came...
...That season," Crystal says, "lifted an anvil off my heart. It made other things possible." Like working his way up the emcee ladder from the Grammys to the Oscars. The Oscars were thrilling for the kid who once sat glued to the black-and-white set with the family, shrieking, "There's Loretta Young! Look, over there, Alan Ladd's getting out of that limo!" His mother Helen remembers Billy grasping his toothbrush like a mike, "thanking all the little people who made this possible." In the morning, she would put notes under the cereal bowl -- "Gregory Peck...