Kelsey Grammer Meets World

00:00:26
Speaker 1: Little warning for our Pod Meats World listeners. This episode contains details of a horrific crime that involves not only violence, but sexual assault and intense grief. Please proceed with caution. One of the many lessons we have hosts have learned while making Pod Meets World is that you never really know what people are going through. We would drive to set every day ready to have fun. I would endlessly talk about boys, Writer would read a book he had stuffed into his oversized.

00:00:55
Speaker 2: Gene pockets, and Will would smoke.

00:01:00
Speaker 1: As kids, we just bopped around, laughing, care free, while our adult co workers around us doing their job, each hysterical and talented. We're experiencing difficult adult situations, and now, as middle aged human beings ourselves, we know that's not easy. And some of the most successful and funny actors of all time weren't exactly as ready for the spotlight in their personal lives as they were on screen. Matthew Perry, Chris Farley, and Carrie Fisher come to mind, and the new book Karen a Brother Remembers by sitcom legend Kelsey Grammer is another example of never really knowing what your favorite characters in movies and on TV could really be going through at home. This five time Emmy winner, who helped define modern comedy as Fraser Crane on Cheers and then his own show, Fraser, experienced tragedy at just twenty years old when his eighteen year old sister Karen, was raped and brutally murdered by men who had intended to rob the Red Lobster where she worked. She was kidnapped, assaulted, and then later stabbed by a group that ended up killing a handful of others before they were caught. Kelsey was soulmates with his sister, connected beyond the normal sibling relationship, and the way she was taken from him and his own conceived inability to save her still plagues him today. In his honest and brave writing, he finally faces the devastation and pain he feels, offering the reader a glimpse into not only his struggles, but his process of coping with tragedy. Because, in addition to Karen, Kelsey's father would be killed by a man in a racially motivated attack, his half brothers would die in a scuba diving accident, and his own daughter was slashed by a knife wielding man in a New York restaurant while she tried to pull the attacker off of another person. And yet Kelsey Grammar survived, fighting every day to get up and move forward, letting others enjoy his work on screen and on stage. So now we welcome to the podcast, a sitcom legend and a true survivor. It's Kelsey Grammar.

00:03:07
Speaker 3: Thank hello. That was quite nice, Danielle. Thank you very much.

00:03:11
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you for being here with us. So nice that you're here to share your and Karen's story. It means a great deal to us.

00:03:21
Speaker 3: I do appreciate it. Thank you.

00:03:23
Speaker 1: So the story of your sister is so tragic and yet beautiful with your ability as a vulnerable narrator. And I was wondering at Cheers or Frasier, did a lot of people know this story?

00:03:41
Speaker 3: No they didn't. Actually I didn't walk around talking about it a lot. You know, it's been with me, of course, you know since the day it happened, which is now it was fifty years this summer, I was actually thinking about a friend of an old friend of mine years ago who actually accused me of using it sometimes to try to score.

00:04:06
Speaker 4: It's because you weird.

00:04:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was just weird. It was like, it's so funny that he brought it up. He said, well, Kelsey, when somebody asked you have sisters or brothers, you say, yeah, I had a sister, And then they asked you, and then somebody asked another question, how are they? What are they do? I said, well, actually she was killed, you know, And so it would come up naturally and I would never volunteer it. But I just suddenly thought what a strange friendship that was. I didn't wrote about it in my.

00:04:33
Speaker 5: Bo That's probably not a great friend.

00:04:38
Speaker 3: From somebody you call a friend, but it's okay.

00:04:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can imagine, Yeah, it's been something you just abide with for a long time.

00:04:49
Speaker 3: And I never really actually there's a there's a great line ordinary human unhappiness, his life and its natural color, nothing to cavilove, and that's an audun line. But I always thought that. I thought, well, we don't any reason to let, you know, piss and moan about our lives. We don't have any real reason to complain about where we are. My purpose in writing the book came when I was kind of instructed through a medium and said, oh, your sister's here with me. She wants you to tell her story, and that was really kind of interesting. I thought, well, I wonder how that would go. So I sat down one day and I started writing, just to kind of, you know, do some sort of bullet points in my head. I thought, well, maybe I should give us a try. And about an hour later it had ten pages of stuff kind of jotted down, and I thought, oh, I guess I'm going to write a book. And that's that's what turned into Karen and I spent three years working on it.

00:05:41
Speaker 6: Basically, I'm so curious, having having read the book, what were the first ten pages that came out?

00:05:48
Speaker 3: Pretty much what you read the first ten pages.

00:05:52
Speaker 4: It was linear at the time, and it really became a.

00:05:54
Speaker 3: Kind of stream of consciousness exercise. And of course the style is stream of consciousness. But when I was twelve, you know, I read Portrait of the Artist as a young Man by James Joyce and I thought, boy, what a little crap. This is kind of harpooned byself. You know, we always become what we make fun of when when we were younger, you know, employee in that style, because it was so immediate, it was like, I mean, I'm working on another book now, And I just basically realized that I wanted to be like, you're having a conversation like you have, like we're sitting down for a coffee and maybe you know so it's several hundred pages, but still it's it's like, yeah, well we're sitting down, I'm going to tell you some.

00:06:39
Speaker 5: Stories, right well, I mean, for me, like what was so interesting about the book was how much of the book becomes or the journey of the book becomes the writing of the book, you know, I mean you're literally taking time where you're like, I'm not going to write for a little while.

00:06:52
Speaker 4: I need to, I need to take them some days off.

00:06:54
Speaker 5: And then you come back and say, I'm rereading what I wrote ten days ago and I'm picking up and I thought that was so interesting. Did you ever, I mean, how far into it were you like I have to finish this or were you ever were you still constantly like I might just put this in a drawer, and no.

00:07:09
Speaker 3: Once it began, I thought I have to finish to finish it out. Uh, what I found, what I found so engaging about it, and what was what I hope you know, we'll be shared with other people now that book's been out for about six months now, but no, maybe four. But I wanted it to be something that I discovered with the reader, and I think that I think that comes across. But I discovered things about time, and I mean, my my favorite metaphor ends up being that that carpenter's tool with the folding tape measure, the folding measure ring device, you know, the thing that suddenly it goes out to eight feet long or whatever, and then you fold it all in and say, it's just about this big, and that's all those marks and time just fold it in on each other and you can open any one of them and you're in that time. Yeah. Really, the organic kind of exercise of time in my life became completely different, completely quantum, I guess, is what you could say about it. And it was a wonderful thing for me to suddenly go to be transported from a memory of Karen when she was just a little girl to something I remembered about my own child, you know, yeah, three months ago. It was extraordinary.

00:08:25
Speaker 6: I'm so curious because so much of the book is about loss, but it's also at the same time about the people that were so important in your life and So with all the loss of the book covers, has writing the book brought any of those people back into your life?

00:08:39
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, what's fun is a couple of the people who are still alive. Brad Keller, for instance, is one of my great great friends I went to the music camp together with when we were seventeen. Is still a pal, and that's been great. Some of the folks that I looked up, you know, that I'd known in the past, wanted to talk to me. Some didn't, so I got them. But what was most important actually was to realize, as I'd never realized before, what a great gift my grandparents gave us and to grow up in that, you know. I Mean we everybodys talking about privilege and all that kind of stuff these days, but I mean we really were privileged for those ten years. I mean, we were just kids, and they gave us safety and art and you know, exposure to a great world. And they fed us, you know. I mean, that is a privilege to live in a world where you get fed, you know, and looked after. And we were told, you know, stories about what it meant to be an American, and we were told what it meant to be like pioneers. And I mean because the family was related to connected to pioneers. My great grandfather across the country ten times on a horse. I mean, it's just this kind of history is extraordinary, and they gave us that, they gave us a sense of where we belonged in history. That was a really great gift. And so I ended up being extraordinarily grateful to them and to my mom because my mom had the courage to kind of it didn't work got so well with my dad, but she said, well, I need to go back to my mom and dad, and I ended up with this amazing man who taught me as a boy. You know, that was a great, great gift. Yeah, it was.

00:10:16
Speaker 6: Well, that was one of the things that really stuck with me is the vision of planting the garden you're never going to get to see.

00:10:22
Speaker 4: So the fact that he.

00:10:25
Speaker 6: Right before he passed, moved the whole family to Florida because he knew you were going to have the better life down there and never got to be in the home.

00:10:32
Speaker 4: That was the plan.

00:10:34
Speaker 3: Thank you.

00:10:34
Speaker 4: That really stuck with me.

00:10:35
Speaker 6: Where it is it's somebody it is planting the garden that you know that you're not going to get to sit under the shade of the tree, but you're still you're still doing it was really wonderful.

00:10:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know if I don't remember now if I wrote about it in the book, but Gordon, when I was about fifteen, came to me in a dream, right, and I was I'd gone down some some weird sort of series of staircases into a like a late a late night brothel kind of place where I was having a beer and he walked in wearing some khaki shorts and you know then his socks pulled up to his calf like a Safari each shirt. The hell are you doing here? He said, Oh, well, I just had to get out. I was losing my mind. He left me with him, you know, he said, yeah, yeah, I forget you coulda hadle it by then. And so I got this kind of release of like, well, yeah, he knew he was. He was passing the baton to me, basically, I was. It was really fun to kind of have that. It's almost joyous closure with this vision of a man who I mean, he loomed large in my imagination, of course, you know, in his his service in World War two, and he was god for twenty eight months. You know, that's extraording what those people did and that he was part of it. I knew, and then I had the privilege to know him, you know, really well, it was it was a great gift to know Gordon anyway, that's yeah.

00:12:01
Speaker 4: I also sorry, I just have to say I felt very connected to Jill. Oh.

00:12:06
Speaker 6: I'm sitting here right now in Avon, Connecticut, in the town right next to West Hartford. Kidding, my mom born and raised in West Harford, and her parents worked at the ETNA and the Hartford So there's a chance my grandparents knew Jill's family. There's a there's very much a chance that happened. Yeah, So yeah, it was such a connection.

00:12:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was really in love with her. It was interesting, was it was. It was need to rediscover that as well, and they kind of realized that it was real. You know, for a long time, I just sort of died, you know, you know, you dismissed certain experiences in your life as being all flippant or or you know, maybe maybe too superficial or whatever, but it really wasn't. I mean, we were we were two kids that actually we're trying our best, and I just couldn't quite do what she needed.

00:12:55
Speaker 4: The story of so much young love though, I mean really there.

00:12:58
Speaker 3: Was no I was going to be able to make it her at that point.

00:13:01
Speaker 1: Those things, well, one thing I noticed in the book was a real openness to something you have already touched on talking to mediums and those people who work in a little more of a supernatural realm, and maybe that you even encountered a ghost on this journey. Were you always a believer in these things? Or was was the where is how you got there? The need to speak to Karen?

00:13:26
Speaker 3: Yeah? I I was always kind of interested in this world of you know, what level are we on? What? What? What? What aspect of existence is like in current form and then in other places you know, or dimensions if you will. And what is it about the psychometry or any number of other what they call oracles or you know, a guidance devices or or mechanisms. Yeah, and so I produced a show twenty years ago called the Oracles, and it never got on the air, But we had readings with seven psychics, basically, and some of them were good, someone weren't so good. But one of them was this Gal Allison who we ended up making a show called Medium about her gifts and about her story, and she was pretty interesting. But there was another Gal Dolores, who was a psychometrist and she had hits. She you know, you start to learn the language of it. There's a they get hits, they get they have sittings, they have a sitter, someone that's there and they're the subject of a reading. Sometimes if they're if they're getting stuff that they don't know this person at all, and you know that's the case, and they're getting hits of more than sixty percent that are accurate about them, it's pretty phenomenal. You know, I don't know this person and yet I know these things about them as a result of some of the information I'm getting from wherever they're getting it. I don't have the gift. I discovered some gifts of inside. I guess because that's the kind of person I'm I'm empathetic. I guess as our way of living as an as an actress to kind of try to figure out what motivates people, why they do what they do, and so that was that's always been part of me. I can kind of see what motivations are for certain people that might you might not seem apparent to most. But so that's my gift, but their gift is really extraordinary. And like with Esther, when she first told me the thing, I mean, it was you know, almost cartoonish in my head because we were on the phone and she lives in England, and there really was that you know, there's a little rattle I heard, and I thought I heard some bones being thrown around where this goes. And then she pops out with that tell my story thing, and I thought, wow, okay, I believe that. And I've I've met others who who brought Karen by and you know, and got some input and others that I thought, well, that sounds a little derribative of what you'd just be able to read if you're interested. So but I do think it's a very interesting thing. And I've got some you know, fundamentalist friends or evangelical pals that you know say, oh, you know, Kelse, we can't really talk about this stuff, and right I respect that, because you know what, I do think it can muddy the waters. I mean, I do think you know your your life of if you're a devotee of Christianity, if you if you're following the Christian path, it might be wise not to invite in voices from some other place, some other plane. But I do think that, you know, in Revelation, you know, John Devine was actually channeling.

00:16:50
Speaker 2: So but you do.

00:16:52
Speaker 6: It's what That's the other thing that's so interesting is because at times you're talking about Buddha, at times you're talking about Valhalla. Yeah, I mean, there's it seems like you're kind of open to every spiritual path.

00:17:04
Speaker 3: Frank Yeah, absolutely, I think. Uh. I mean, they're they're man made, you know, and but they are they're they're taken from moments when man interfaced with the higher power, whatever that is. Wherever they're whatever, there are series of symbols and and uh and images are that the sort of resonate with them. Uh. It's still the same story. It's still our interaction with with God, with with the power, with our creator, something that is above us within us at the same time. And so there's different ways of expressing it. But I love the idea of voyeah.

00:17:42
Speaker 4: Me too, Yeah, me too as well. Yeah, same, so Yeah.

00:17:46
Speaker 6: One of the best quotes I heard was was God is the name that we give the blanket that we throw over the thing to give it shape. And I think there's something kind of interesting about that where it's you know, you got to you got to call it something right.

00:17:58
Speaker 3: Somebody years years ago. I think it was Theodore macaal as lecture in in my high school where he just said the word of jahweh or whatever basically just means that thing again that yeah, yeah, there is Yeah, there's that thing. Yeah, it just keeps coming up.

00:18:18
Speaker 2: That thing we can't quite describe.

00:18:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are a lot of times in the book where you mention that Karen is still with you, helping you in life and sharing her thoughts with you even while you were writing the book. And my husband also talks about this with his mother. He says, I can't explain it, but in times where something comes up and we're having a conversation, he goes, I know exactly what my mom would say, and he's sure it is like a direct placement of her her opinion into his brain from her. He's like, I just know it. I know for certain what she would say. Is that how it feels for you. What are some of the examples of Karen being with you and helping to guide you.

00:19:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's really interesting. Of course it became more present. I mean, I was more aware of it as I wrote the book. Yeah, and then I realized that throughout my life with her, it's probably come up a few times. I mean, I remember I was sitting on a plane once years ago with a group of friends. It was like thirty years ago, and I was going to some advance, some upfront or whatever it was. And things were cool and we were drinking champagne and there were people all around and it was a real celebration. And a girl I was dating at the time said, you know, your sister's here, lovely ow. You know, maybe she is, so it's come up before I thought, he'll grab that phone. But in the descriptions of the events while writing the book, the sense of Karen around me, with me just became more apparent, you know, because I was accessing it. I was asking her to be there, and she was and it was wonderful, And it also released her in a way in some ways, you know, not necessarily feel like she had to be in the every day of it all all the time. But I still like her around. I still expect to see her when I'm done.

00:20:25
Speaker 6: Well, that was that was the thing that was one of the things that really struck me about how it was written, is it it almost seemed like a mirror of grief in that you have times where you're reading the book where everything's good and happy, and then all of a sudden, there's a letter from.

00:20:40
Speaker 3: The pear Board.

00:20:41
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it's it's like it all comes rushing back right away, so you feel like you're able to take this breath, and then you're dragged under the water again, and there's something very does it Does it get easier as time goes on.

00:20:54
Speaker 3: No, it's really weird. It's just there. There's still that pang. The pang is just renewed. It just it just it's just as vibrant as the first time it happened. But what's weird is that it did seem like the first time the parole Board actually reached out to me. I guess there was a sort of a limit in terms of years as to how long that wouldn't happen. And then the period passed and the first letter came through, and I was with Kate at the time, so we've been together for fifteen years, and oh my goodness, I just I wept for days because it was like they just sent a knife through me. And they just said, oh, and this is happening. You need to do this, you need to now talk about And suddenly my whole the forty years that had passed before were gone, and I was still I was back as that twenty year old young man looking at his dead sister, and it was just a horrible, horrible thing. And I don't know, you know, I don't know how to get around it, because yeah, people deserve justice, and yes, criminals who've done horrible things have a right to try to, you know, make amends and move on in life and stuff like that. I just there are some instances I think, I think that it's just not going to happen, but I believe in the process of it. But I mentioned it in the book. I think that's one of the parole people said to me. At one point. I said, you know, this is really cool stuff that you guys have to do to people, and all these innocent people who suffered have to suffer again. Why is that okay? And they said, well, it's it's not called the victim's justice system. It's called the criminal justice system.

00:22:37
Speaker 4: Yeah, jeezu, Yeah.

00:22:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, I get it. I mean, you know, and so, and we have a lot of that going on now, you know, Los Angeles, some of the bigger cities. You know, we're lost in this repeat criminal stuff. The stuff is going on every day around us. You know, you just keep thinking, how is this possible? But I guess that our better angels are telling us to try to be you know, forgiving and give people second chances. But maybe maybe nine or ten or eleven chances is one too many.

00:23:07
Speaker 5: Yeah, you talked about how you know, time sort of is meaningless when you have these pangs and you have these emotional and there's a really incredible scene in the book where you are you're playing lairties I believe and yeah, and he's talking about his sister being dead and you have you know, you were playing the scene and then you had this incredible dog you're in real life, who knew that you weren't acting for a moment and came running from backstage or whatever came to you to try to make you feel better. And it was such a striking scene.

00:23:45
Speaker 3: It was so beautiful.

00:23:45
Speaker 5: And then I was also thinking about how, you know, you've done a lot of comedy and that that's primarily been you know, the bulk of your career.

00:23:54
Speaker 3: The money Maker.

00:23:55
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I'm curious about how the grief that you do clearly just have access to on a moment's notice, Like, how has that has that been something that you've accessed as an actor or is it something that you've avoided as an actor and and moved away from intentionally?

00:24:13
Speaker 3: Yeah? Interesting, I don't I'm not afraid of it. I think it actually kind of fortifies comedy to know that there's a tragic side, you know, that's that there's that balance. I think Fraser was always capable of being quite emotional when it was important, you know. And it was like when he had a scene with Niles when he says, you know, that woman's never been part of this family blah blah blah blah blah. I mean, and that got very emotion of what I remember. There was a great moment between Martin and Fraser where the boys had always suspected that this one summer their dad was having an affair, and it turned out that it was their mom. It just felt like just like a page rip out of my own life, right, And then, uh, John and I both sat and thought, isn't it remarkable that we have these feelings about these two people that aren't really real, but they're made real by us. We give them their flesh, their their life, their atmosphere, their their their emotions, and boy, I just it's just I mean, I was crying my eyes out back then. It's about, you know, suddenly realizing that you shared a grief with your parent that you didn't ever know about before. It was an extraordinary thing, you know, I didn't really know my dad. I talked about that in the book. But having the experience I had with John, Having the experience I had with David uh as as my brother and my father were relationships I didn't have in life that I got to experience because of the acting. Wow, kind of a great gift, you know. I mean, that's and I feel like I started to understand what that could be like like certainly, I mean, probably more idealized than most. I mean, because I mean, you know, human beings. Who is disappointing it's our actual parents and then people we've known, I mean, might not be quite so perfect in their revelations as we are as actors, but or quite so willing to embrace, you know, the emotion. But I had a wonderful it was a wonderful gift to have a brother and a father that I'd never had a relationship with in my real life. That's cool.

00:26:27
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's I have to read a quote because as an actor, it's just so stuck with me. You wrote, I'm quite willing to share this theory. I think it's simple. Shy people are afraid to speak the truth. Acting as a professional past time in which a person can tell the truth and not get in trouble.

00:26:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, and set early on.

00:26:47
Speaker 6: It's just it's really did. It just really resonated as I read that. It's very interesting because I've always thought that unless somebody really deals with the tragedy early in life, your childhood really kind of ends the day you realize your parents are people.

00:27:00
Speaker 3: Oh that's that's pretty interesting. Yeah, that's a pretty sad day that first that they're like, oh.

00:27:04
Speaker 4: No, you're not superheroes. There's something about that. It's very real. But at the same time, it's like, oh, it's kind of deposing.

00:27:14
Speaker 3: It's very deflating. Yeah, shocks. Yeah, we're all perfect and now that's just small people, just people.

00:27:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, you flawed human beings. It can't be possible. Yeah.

00:27:29
Speaker 3: And then hopefully you have enough time to forgive them.

00:27:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:27:34
Speaker 1: Of course, you have eight kids, which, by the way, feels like a totally different book you could write. You write just a book about having eight children. What did they know about their aunt Karen before you wrote the book?

00:27:49
Speaker 3: Interesting? Yeah, most, I've never really told them a lot about it when I started to write the book. The younger set, you know, this is this group that's now we just had our fourth one, so it just became maate kids. It was like three days ago.

00:28:02
Speaker 4: Oh my god, congratulation.

00:28:08
Speaker 3: Christopher, that's just joined the family.

00:28:11
Speaker 4: Welcome Christopher.

00:28:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, lovely, Yes, But so this younger group, you know, I've told him they can't read the book yet because some of the stuffs too brutal. Sure, they don't really need to be exposed to that yet. My eldest daughter of this cluster.

00:28:29
Speaker 2: Coming clusters, when you have you can section them off.

00:28:34
Speaker 6: However, you've got several gangs that.

00:28:39
Speaker 3: Faith my my, you know, my thirteen year old. You know, I've told her some of what happened, you know, and then said, you know, maybe in another year or two you can probably probably read the book and be able to handle it. It's it's pretty brutal. But she's a very sensitive kid too, so I do you know, I want to be careful about it some. But Gabriel a year old. I mentioned him in the book too, He's the one that's more inquisitive. He says, how do you feel about that? How does it make you feel? Does your do you want to kill the guy that killed your sister? Stuff like that. I said, well, that wouldn't be right, babe. I'm going to take you know more. Death doesn't necessarily make things right, you know. But he asks really really probing questions. It's it's his thing, it's what he does. He likes to find out what's going on. I think he's going to be, I know, some sort of weird genius side of what he'll choose in his life. But but he's definitely in it with his whole heart and with his whole head. And it's it's it's it's fun to answer questions from someone who is so thoroughly interested in the answer. Yeah, And I admire him as a person. I admire his so you know, his stick to his tenacity and turn in searching for the truth. He's a really interesting kid.

00:29:51
Speaker 6: They're all interesting, just curious because you touched on it how I mean, complex is the wrong obviously word to use, but because it was so much closer to the time.

00:30:02
Speaker 4: Of your sister's actual death.

00:30:04
Speaker 6: What what did you feel when her killer's sentence was commuted from death to life in prison?

00:30:11
Speaker 3: Right. I was sort of on the periphery of that decision, but I thought to myself, well, that's weird. These guys actually they received the death penalty. Yeah, and there were three of them at the time. Ah, And I just thought, what's going on? And it was it was actually just it was toward the end of the Carter administration and the Supreme Court of Colorado just did a blanket commutation of all death sentences because they were reviewing everything. And of course, since then, the death penalty doesn't exist in Colorado, but it the life without possibility of parole did not exist then as a possible sentence, and so what happened was they had to they had to immediately be placed into a regular kind of paroling situation, which was probably inappropriate for them, but they were the only three for those years, and then of course now there's just the one left.

00:31:10
Speaker 4: Wow.

00:31:10
Speaker 1: I know you read the police report for the first time for the book. How did you take care of your mental health while reading writing this book?

00:31:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a really hard day. That's one of the places where in the book I say I'm going to be gone a while. Yeah, yeah, I'll check that again in a bit, and I did. I took a few weeks after the first insertion into that report, I mean. And then the most devastating thing about it was the was the lack of identity for Karen, was that she was just a thing, just a girl, a Jane Doe, a corpse, and the language reflected that, you know, ongoing investigation, ongoing investigation on going first couple of her pages, they had no idea what had happened or who she was, and to read that just felt so dehumanizing about my sister. You know it, just call me, well, that's that's Karen. Surely you know that, right. But they didn't.

00:32:16
Speaker 7: It's okay.

00:32:17
Speaker 3: They were doing their job and you know, it got done. I mean. And frankly, the police works fascinating to me in terms of you know, capital cases, I guess, but they didn't really. They had a stroke of luck when one of the guys was arrested in New Orleans, and he said, I know about the girl in Colorado. That's how it came up. And then a couple of days later they called me, So.

00:32:57
Speaker 1: Have you ever I'm sure the answer is yes. Have you ever thought about out what Karen would have done with the rest of her life?

00:33:03
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, all the time. Yeah, I'm not sure what it would have been, but she was she was kind of a wild animal, you know. Really, she was really a fun person. But she loved everybody, and she loved animals, so I you know, I pictures it might have been on a farm somewhere. Her last her last year was pretty much spent around at least the last summer, but pore she went to Colorado was spent around animals on a friend of ours branchi and in upstate Florida in a little town called we Laka, which was it was pretty fun. It was great. And I visited her there once and there was a wonderful swimming pole. It was it was so weird. It was like it was like one hundred and fifty feet deep and was ice cold water, clear blue, and it was only like twelve feet across, but you jump in it and go this is amazing experience. And she and a couple of her friends were there, and we all loved each other. I mean, her pals and my pals. We all, we all, you know, spent time together, and it was it was a great way to grow up. We were a close group of young people. And it's funny, Yeah, we didn't really see much of our parents, weren't really around anyway. But uh we were just a really nice group of kids exploring things, trying things together, listening to music, you know, led that book the Beatles, and yeah, James Taylor. It was. It was a wonderful world, wonderful time, and it was kind of an innocence and it did seem like it didn't seem like a lot of people were getting hurt too much. Every It was sort of accepting the fact that, oh, we're exploring things, we're we're together, we're liking you know, this this experience, we're growing up together, and uh, I I kind of miss it. I don't know what. I don't know what we would have done if we were just on iPhones and stuff. It seems seems to be more impersonal now. And we were always there was always a group of us together you know, yeah, just trying things. That was That was nice.

00:35:00
Speaker 1: You have been open for years and in the book about your own struggles with self medicating and some reckless behavior, no doubt connected to what you have faced. How did you stop that cycle?

00:35:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting I did do. I did about six years kind of actively in the in the program, you know, an AA twelve step kind of thing. But I've actually turned more toward God after that, okay, and realized that, oh, that's probably the avenue for me, like your sense of faith and offensive sense of strength and connection to God. And one thing that one of the guys I knew, who was kind of an old timer and the AA had said, he said, well, you know, the cause of addiction is unresolved grief. M That really makes sense for me. Yeah, and in a lot of ways, I got to resolve it. And once that happened, you know, uh, it was pretty smooth sale. And I mean I still have a drink once in a while, and I enjoy a party with my friends and Christmas Eve sometimes I'll have you know, one toddy too many, but it's pretty but it lost its teeth to like stop me from living, you know, for a long time, I allowed myself to have it abrupt me, have it, have it stop me, you know, have it shift me away from the things I wanted to do. And that was that's that's the mistake you make. I mean, and I think, yeah, there's clearly there's clearly a component of it. There's a disease that's like you could do, I say, a functional disease. I suppose, But it's a disease you can get over, you know. I mean my son, my son, one of my sons has O c D. And I said, honey, it's okay to like have oct but don't let it have you. And it may be an oversimplification, but you can make that decision about things like that. Yeah, you don't have to let it have you.

00:37:03
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:37:04
Speaker 3: So, I I mean, I hope my message about you know, alcoholism or addiction is an encouraging one because it needn't have you. You don't have to let it take that place in your life. It's pretty tempting, that's, you know. And there are moments when you think, oh, pole asture, do need that? But then it goes away.

00:37:23
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:37:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, that the same guy, It's same guy years ago, he said to me. He said, well, you know, eventually the natch you know, becomes a good thing. And then he said, and this whole thing one day at a time, he said, nonsense. You know, after a while, you know you don't have to think about one day at a time. He said, you know, it helps it first when you're kind of a newby to think, well, if if I can get through a day without drinking, that's at least something, you know, he says, Noah, yeah, eventually you just know you're not going to be going down that path. Yeah, yeah, that's it. But that grief thing really helped, And hence the reason for the book in a lot of ways, was to offer people to a context for why you would live that way or why your grief would be overwhelming, and to see that you can actually move on and you can actually take it and have it incorporated into your life. So that the book was always meant to be a kind of not an admonishment, but but a kind of an encouragement to say to somebody, remember the joy as of course, remember is you know the word that I you know, really focus on, but that gift that those people gave you in your life, the thing you're missing need to be missing all the time. You know, you can reclaim that joy and and you can weep that it's lost, but it's not lost. You still have it. You still have it. It's up to you to go ahead and dive in there and open the page and say, Hi, I miss you, I love you.

00:38:54
Speaker 4: That's great.

00:38:55
Speaker 6: So speaking of joy, then I have to ask what meant more or to you? The greatest moment you've ever experienced as an actor?

00:39:04
Speaker 4: Or that day water skiing.

00:39:06
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, there's only so many of those, you get right, that end the surfing day, the surf I disappeared through the wave. I just uh, those were still the defining moments of my understanding where I am in the universon where the universe is with me. I still have them, they're still in there. But yeah, to remember what was great about that that session with Esther, which was the water angel thing. Uh, I'd never seen it through Karen's eyes, and that was the gift that she gave me that day, was to see her vision of watching this boy in the water.

00:39:49
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, wow, amazing. Do you still ride a motorcycle?

00:39:54
Speaker 3: I do not as much? You know, my wife.

00:39:59
Speaker 4: We had eight I mean, well, but.

00:40:04
Speaker 3: I will get another one.

00:40:08
Speaker 6: I tell you the way you talked about your dog and the way you talked about your bike, just how important things were.

00:40:13
Speaker 3: They were absolutely like, you know, talismans of my life. Absolutely touch those. Yeah, that motorcycle, it was a great bike. I mean there was one time, and I think it's called the Texas Canyon. I was doing about one hundred and thirty miles an hour. Oh my god, and it was just heaven. There was nobody. There was nobody on the road. It was a beautiful highway. And uh, you know, there's this thing you do, but when you're going fast on a motorcycle, you know, it's like you understand where the center of gravity is right. And when you're really going fast and you go deep into a turn, you don't decelerate. You have to accelerate. You have to you have to crank it up a little bit. And then once you crank it just a bit, the bikes stands up, the bike finds its center again, and you just feel so safe and secure on it. I mean, it's insane, but it's not. It's just you have this the sense like I am completely rooted to the universe in this moment, with this man made machine that is part of me, that is part of the earth. It is one of those expressions of existence. I guess it just it just blows your mind and it's so wonderful. And you know you're going somewhere. I mean, we're doing one hundred and thirty miles an hour through you know, Savage country. You know they look like John Ford the landscapes, desert scapes up John Wayne movies. And I was going on, you know, co Cheese Valley or whatever. I was going, Man, this is fantastic.

00:41:42
Speaker 6: And something in the motorcycle maintenance exactly exactly what it was.

00:41:50
Speaker 3: It was that experience. And I mean, I'm an eternal juvenile when it comes down to that. It's just fantastic. That's great.

00:41:58
Speaker 1: In your long Hollywood career, you have been a producer multiple times.

00:42:02
Speaker 2: Have you ever thought of turning Karen's story into a movie?

00:42:07
Speaker 3: You know what, I haven't, but there are there were some people talking to us now about the possibility of it, and and you know, I'm giving it some thought. I'm giving it some thoughts.

00:42:16
Speaker 5: You're it.

00:42:18
Speaker 3: The important thing for me, and writing the book as well, was to to invite people into the joy that we'd had together because growing up was wonderful. Growing up together was wonderful. Karen and I together was it was a great thing. I was closer to her than any other human being in my entire life, and it just felt it just fell that way. And that story when when Estra said, you know, I said, looks like I just was writing and I realized, oh my god, she's the love of my life. And she said yes. And how fortunate that you guys were born into the same family. Hmm, you didn't have to spend your life looking for each other. Yeah, there you were. And she said, yes, you've lived many lives together. Because you know, this is when they start talking about I don't know if I buy all that stuff, what I kind of do? You know? I'm living in LA you know we got All's the guy that reads auras and angels and says, oh, yeah, you've got one right there. You're telling you right now. He goes like, is he talking to But he told me once he told me, he said, you've lived two thy four hundred and eighty five lives.

00:43:23
Speaker 4: Okay, they're busy, busy, and you.

00:43:28
Speaker 3: Know, whenever I go to an airport, I look at all those airplanes and I see you know a quantas or you know cathe or you know whatever emirates or whatever, And I think to myself, what I was? You know, have I actually lived that many lives? And I've been at all those places from from all those places. So there's this weird thing that resonates with me. You know, it probably resonates with you guys too. You think maybe I've been an adventurer of it. Yeah, I circumnavigate the globe once, if you still believe it's a globe, you know. So you know, I've got a whole bunch of.

00:44:01
Speaker 4: Science that.

00:44:09
Speaker 6: It would be a wonderful film, Danielle, that now I'm thinking about it as a film, it would be It would be a wonderful film to see.

00:44:15
Speaker 3: It would definitely be a sumptuous kind of revisiting of the seventies.

00:44:20
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm curious.

00:44:22
Speaker 6: I know your your sister would be difficult to answer, But who would you cast to play your grandfather?

00:44:29
Speaker 3: I'm trying to think of an actor that I was interesting. You know, that's a really good question. Was such a monumental guy? I mean I really looked up to him.

00:44:41
Speaker 4: Yeah, you could tell you definitely could tell.

00:44:44
Speaker 3: I've known very few people like him who seemed to show up, you know, just as surely as the sun was going to rise that day, he was in it. And there that's a great question I'm going to have to get back to you on.

00:45:00
Speaker 4: I'm so curious because you touched on it a little bit in the book.

00:45:02
Speaker 6: But I'm the idea that right before he passed he actually opened up about the war and being at Guadalcanal. Do you think and you touched on a little bit, you said you weren't quite sure, But looking back.

00:45:14
Speaker 4: Do you think he knew he was sick?

00:45:17
Speaker 3: You know what, I kind of do, But I don't know if he was ready to acknowledge it right. You know, I'm not even sure if he actually got a proper diagnosis, because everybody seemed pretty pretty surprised when he checked in and he got the diagnosis that he was riddled with, you know, c and well everybody's what you know, and including him, So it's a I think he sensed that he was going But that night, when he opened up to me about what had happened to him, was the first time he spoke to me as a man. I think that was part of it. Yeah. I think part of what he was trying to negotiate with me, or at least kind of a massage in me, was that you're on a you're at the sort of precipice of real manhood, and tragedy will will visit you, and you will You need to know how to maintain your character in the face of what seems like the impossible. And I think maybe that's what that lesson was. And to understand that in his heart it had been broken. I think that he had lived with a broken heart for a long time and was still brave about it because I mean, you know, he lost his mom when he was little. His brother blamed him extraordinary things, and he was a man of great accomplishment Captain of the crew at Berkeley, which was pretty interesting. Wow. Yeah, he's a dynamic guy and he did his part, and he was kind of uh in terms of World War Two, he was he was you know, he knew we were manipulating in that war. He thought he knew that, you know, Roosevelt kind of made plans to fight a war well before we were in it, and he didn't like that, but he went anyway. I mean, he left for two and a half years and didn't didn't have his wife or his daughter with him. And yeah, they're just amazing people, amazing.

00:47:20
Speaker 1: I did want to ask a work related question. We have often mentioned the pilot of Cheers as an absolutely perfect episode of TV on this podcasts.

00:47:34
Speaker 2: Did you know immediately Cheers was something special?

00:47:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean Fraser. When I joined Cheers, it was like, yeah, that was special too. I mean, I am actually writing about that right now. They're just too good, so discover it again. But but Fraser was one of those things where it just came right off the page at some point, this is this is good now. I've heard Jimmy Burrows talk about the pilot of Cheers and said the same thing. He said, you know, they'd written a script that was He said it was a script for radio. He says, you could have done that script success without ever seeing it. So I think that's that's a really good indication of what it could be. And I think I think Fraser had the same hallmark to it. We had some fun with it. We got we did a rehearsal of it once and got a standing ovation from a full house and thought, well, that's weird. We weren't even filming yet. And that's when David came up to me and said, say, he said, what do you what do you think this means? And I said, honestly, I think it means you're going to be able to buy a house. He said, what doesn't mean for you? And I said, I think I'm going to be able to buy two houses?

00:48:46
Speaker 6: Well, I mean that's I'm the resident television addict and historian.

00:48:50
Speaker 4: I love it.

00:48:51
Speaker 6: And I know that there were times where I won't get into names, but other cast members of Cheers would sit there at the table read and say, man, we really got.

00:48:58
Speaker 4: To get rid of the Fraser character.

00:48:59
Speaker 6: Yeah, well where you know, there were times it was very difficult and and and some people didn't even want the character around. To then become what Fraser became, it was truly amazing. Yeah, truly extraordiny.

00:49:12
Speaker 3: It's a reflex.

00:49:14
Speaker 6: And I have to ask, just because I'm such a fan, what is working with James Burrows?

00:49:19
Speaker 3: Like, Uh, Jimmy just knows his story, you know, he knows the story he wants to tell. He's I called a requisite disrespect he has. He has no particular respect for anything he's doing except that he just knows what he's doing, and it's just on an automatic pilot. You don't get there unless you've done it long enough. Right now, this is the this is the thing. You know. I'm all for it, trying to give people jobs and stuff, But we got the last decade or so, we're giving people, you know, directorships to people who've never directed, and you keep thinking, what the hell are we doing this for? And there was a whole bunch of reasons for it, but lack of preparation destroyed a lot of TV lately. Pople just weren't showing up. They didn't know how. Jimmy Burrow shows up. He always shows up. He always knows how. He sees what's wrong with the character, he sees what's wrong with the story. He can look at it in two seconds and say, well, you got to write that better, or you got to you don't need that. And and because he's earned the sort of respect that he has in the industry, people just take the note and do it right. It's very hard to find younger writers, especially these days, who will actually take a note. You know, and you think, you guys got to get the got to get the hang of comedy. Comedy is a collaborative effort. Man. It's not like you're sitting in some closet thinking about what's funny, and then there's a bunch of actors who don't know how to make it funny, and you think it's their fault. Some of the funniest, most talent people in the world sitting there doing their best and it ain't funny.

00:50:47
Speaker 6: Right, Maybe do you think sitcom is gone? Do you think the sitcom that we know and love is ever going to come back?

00:50:55
Speaker 3: I don't think so. Actually, I think I think it's being gradually sort of reintroduce. Now. We tried with the new Fraser, and you know, there was some resistance over Paramount Plus and they didn't quite know what to do that. I think they may have even devalued the project as a result. But we were close. We were close. I really liked the new show and I loved where it was going to go. But we haven't really done more than one season of it, right. We did twenty shows, right, so that would have been oh, hi, now we know.

00:51:23
Speaker 1: Who you are, right exactly.

00:51:25
Speaker 3: There's the show now, and now we get the next nine years, which is I mean the first year to figure all that stuff out and have people fall in love with the characters. Again, I thought we were well on our way, but they didn't know what to do with it. You know. What's happening though now behind the scenes, what I'm hearing is, you know, Amazon wants to put commercials on. They want to make programming maybe just once a week.

00:51:50
Speaker 4: They want to go back to network TV.

00:51:52
Speaker 3: So what a great idea. It's kind of ext but I mean, I know, I'm it is a wonderful medium. I didn't like sitcoms when I was a kid because I thought, well, it's not theater, it's not TV, so hey, you know, but it was a bit of a snob and a joke.

00:52:11
Speaker 4: So right understands.

00:52:18
Speaker 3: Now it's the most wonderful way to kind of relate to the audience. It's the indulge you he acknowledge the audience. You know they're there, that they laugh, you have you play to them. Uh, And that's what entertainment has always really been, you know. I at one point what happened to Fraser when Fraser was you know, but the first five years we were just swimming, and then they introduced this show called When the Animals Turn on their owners.

00:52:43
Speaker 4: When animals attack. Yeah, right, we're competing with taking.

00:52:52
Speaker 3: Kidding me? Who wants to sup crap like that? But you know when you put an alligator next to a guy and you see him chopping, you know you think, well, yeah, I sound like to see that the different world. I thought, well, how the hell did that happen? And then of course then we got to sex and the City and a couple of By then they started the single camera comedy, which of course they didn't know what to do to make you laugh, so they ended up putting calypso music. Whenever a laugh track would have been right, you know, they just said, they just said, well, here's your cue, this is your kye. Now you can laugh. Yeah. Yeah, they talk about a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. In in previews that musical, it was dead. They thought, what the hell are we gonna do? It doesn't light up, it doesn't spark, it doesn't go. And then somebody said, well, let's tell them it's okay to laugh. And the first thing they wrote a song called comedy Tonight, and that's what opens it to night. And then suddenly it turned around and the show.

00:54:05
Speaker 7: Is a success.

00:54:06
Speaker 3: So you've got to give them permission to laugh, right, So you have to find some way to do it. You got to give an audience the wink of the eye somewhere and say, come on in, we're going to have some fun. Yeah. Yeah, so they traded out with you know, it's not canned laughter, it's actually recorded laughter from the actual event.

00:54:23
Speaker 2: Yes.

00:54:23
Speaker 3: Well, there were some shows where they would can't do it, you know years ago Dick Van Dyke show. Sure, no audience for that. Yeah, but it worked.

00:54:32
Speaker 1: My last question for you, if anyone is newly facing grief, like a listener has just stumbled into the death of a loved one, what is your advice to them, Considering all the work you've done to survive.

00:54:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have to accept this now, you're not going to get over it. It's always going to be there. And let it be impossible, Let it be awful for a while. Yeah, because you can't. You can't have it go away. You just need to let it breathe and breathing you and miss that person and then slowly try to climb out and remember what was good between you and hope that you know there is justice in the world. There really isn't a lot of the time, right, But I mean, what's happened with it, you know, some of the highly publicized stuff that's going on lately. I mean, not of those poor people have lost their their loved ones, and those beautiful young women have been killed. I mean, it's just awful, awful, and to die that way, well, it is, I guess, part of the human story, you know, But it's been going on for thousands and thousands of years. Tragic endings and horrible circumstances and people's disregard for one another. But through it all, you have a right to embrace the memory of that person and remember them, as I've said before, in the in the sumpture of their lives, and then the joy that they brought you. And it may not bring solace now, but in time, the memories of those people, that first smile you had, the first the first kiss they gave you, the first hug you felt, the first time you wept for them because they were in pain, whatever, all those things are precious gifts about what means in life, what means eventually everything to you in life. Those are the only things that actually mean anything. Yeah, that is that connection and someone took it away, and then you have a right to actually be upset about it. Then you have a right to expect justice. I mean, I don't think you can actually go meet it out yourself. I mean, although you know, for a long time I thought, well, I'd go kill those guys if I could, right, But you just don't let them. Don't let that memory be sold by the way they died.

00:57:02
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:57:03
Speaker 1: The book is called Karen a Brother Remembers by the incredible Kelsey Grammar. It is available everywhere, and you should be so proud that you were able to share her story and yours with all of us. Thank you so much for being here with us today.

00:57:18
Speaker 3: Good pleasure. Good to see you guys.

00:57:19
Speaker 1: Good to see you.

00:57:20
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you, thank you, Thank you too.

00:57:23
Speaker 7: Bye bye.

00:57:37
Speaker 3: Man.

00:57:40
Speaker 1: His ability to go from telling such a funny being so funny and telling a great story and then just within seconds tapping into raw emotion is just unparalleled.

00:57:59
Speaker 6: Well, he's a genius. I mean, he's an actual genius. And that's when you read the book. One of the first things that happens to him, which is just so insane, is he's.

00:58:06
Speaker 8: Kicked out of Juilliard. Yeah, so it's like it's like, who the did you keep? I'd love to know, because I mean, seriously, he's you see it just in a conversation with him, but when you when you watch his work, Uh, it's insane.

00:58:26
Speaker 4: There's a there. He reminds me a bit of.

00:58:29
Speaker 6: Bill Daniels or you know, in that there's this this gravitas to him even as he's.

00:58:34
Speaker 4: Just sitting there.

00:58:35
Speaker 6: Yeah, and and he can make a sitcom Shakespearean and there's something wonderful about that.

00:58:43
Speaker 4: And he's yeah, he's a living legend. I mean he really is.

00:58:46
Speaker 7: Yeah, he's so open, you know.

00:58:49
Speaker 5: And it's about actors that I always find so is that the emotions are right there, just teeming somewhere right under this. And it's like that, you know, because you can easily think of her actors as fakers or people who you know, But like he said, it's actually being able to tell the truth. It's actually just always knowing that it's just going to flow out of you, you know. And that's why when he said he wrote the book as a stream of consciousness, is like right, because you've been training all your life for a for things to flow out of you, for the words to come out for the you know, and so that accessibility is just it's so powerful, and you know, you can see like he just we start talking about a certain subject, he's going to start crying.

00:59:29
Speaker 3: He's going to let it happen.

00:59:30
Speaker 5: He's going to let it come through, and then you know, yeah, yeah, it's an amazing thing to see.

00:59:35
Speaker 6: Well, I mean, if his goal with the book is to introduce you to a person that by the end you feel like you know, then he did it. I mean, you do you feel like you know this girl who was taken when she was nineteen in a horrible way. And while you do know all that about her, you also know the kind of free spirit she was and the guy she was dating and the life she was leading, and you know, going to this place and going to that place and living here and living there.

01:00:02
Speaker 4: That's one of the things about the two of them.

01:00:04
Speaker 6: They were total had total wanderlust. Both of them, you could tell, just wanted to travel and see the world. He keeps talking about like, oh, and then I drove to San Diego again from Florida, and then I drove back, and then I drove to Texas and then I drove It's like they're not even flying to these places. They're hopping our motorcycles, they're hopping in cars, and they're experiencing the trip, the journey for them.

01:00:24
Speaker 1: And even when he talked about past lives and he talked about being on airplanes and like, I've been to all these places, I've done all you know, I've circumnavigated the globe.

01:00:33
Speaker 6: Like, yeah, yeah, it's yeah, really incredible. That might might be my favorite conversation we've had with anybody. And we've had some, we've had some great ones.

01:00:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, really great. I'm so glad he came and talked to us about it. Thank you all for joining us for this episode of Pod Meets World. As always, you can follow us on Instagram pod Meets World Show. You can send us your emails pod meets World Show at gmail dot com.

01:00:54
Speaker 4: And we've got March Hug the people you love.

01:00:58
Speaker 1: March pod meets Worldshow dot com will send us out.

01:01:03
Speaker 4: We love you all, pod dismissed.

01:01:06
Speaker 6: Podmeets World is n iHeart podcast producer and hosted by Danielle Fischel, Wilfredell and Ryder Strong Executive producers, Jensen Carp and Amy Sugarman, Executive in charge of production Danielle Romo, producer and editor, Tara Sudbaksh producer, Maddy.

01:01:20
Speaker 4: Moore, engineer and Boy Meets World superfan Easton Allen.

01:01:23
Speaker 6: Our theme song is by Kyle Morton of Typhoon and you can follow us on Instagram at Podmets World Show or email us at Podmetsworldshow at gmail dot com