Smoking With Kelsey Grammer

On rare occasions, I sit with a celeb of some stature and spin a profile out of it.

Way back in another epoch, I did so at the Waldorf-Astoria, I believe it was, with Kelsey Grammer.

It was a cover story for Smoke Magazine, a cigar and lifestyle and men's mag that is actually still around. (Think, Cigar Aficionado for the less wealthy dude.)

Grammer was terrific. After the interview was done, I turned off the tape recorder and we chatted for some time. His then wife Camille--you remember Camille Grammer--was at the table with us.
He told me about hitchhiking as a young man, seeing Jimi Hendrix, some other fun remembrances. I never felt he was eager to get on with his day and see me out of his suite. I had him sign an autograph for the receptionist at our office and he was gracious.

The story ran in 2000 and is called "Grammer's Lesson."

Here's a bit of it. 

It’s the voice you notice first. Grammer’s diction and enunciation are decidedly Frasier-esque; he tosses around words like “syllogism” and “travail” without blinking, and masterfully marries tricky adverbs with equally cumbersome adjectives. But the voice does not boom the way Frasier’s does. It doesn’t fill the impossibly resplendent Waldorf Astoria suite in which we sit the way it filled a certain Boston watering hole then, or the Seattle airwaves now. Though still very much a work-in-progress after 16 years, Frasier is so real, so believable, so dead-on, it’s hard to imagine that there’s any acting going on, that there’s a difference between the actor and the role. Yes, the voice - the reverberating, rumbling baritone, spewing overeducated philosophy, boundless frustration, and earnest angst and, in turn, making America feel better about itself every Thursday night - the voice sounds, well, normal. Later, I play the tape for friends. They don’t believe it’s Frasier. I tell them it’s not.