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The Bitch is Back

When I ask Bernhard about her "reluctant lesbian icon" status, circa late eighties, she says, "That was when the gay community was very p.c. and everybody had to come out, and now Sarah Pettit, who used to be the editor of Out, is writing freelance articles about her hair for Elle. I'm like, 'Honey, who predicted this shit? Who predicted it?'

"At the end of the day, it's all about fashion. So that's why I wouldn't buy into it and that's why I still fight it. Everybody knows; it's inferred; it's all there in my work. I'm not here to make you feel good as a performer and a person. That's not what I do. I just leave it completely out. Which to me is a throwback to stars of the thirties and forties. You didn't see those people talking about this shit. It's nobody's fucking business."

Bernhard detests the high-wire act of Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche's intensely public romance, calling it "shtick . . . I think they're targets for every imaginable kind of hatred, and who wants to expose yourself to that? They look like they're ready to break apart at the seams. I just find it very bizarre. I don't understand it at all."

Sandra Bernhard was born in Flint, Michigan, and raised from the age of 10 in Scottsdale, Arizona. As she says in Without You I'm Nothing, "My mother's an abstract artist, my father's a proctologist." A beat. "That's how I view the world." She has three older brothers, all of whom had creative leanings (photography, music, writing), though they all eventually opted for professional careers (dentist, doctor, sales), a fact that seems to disappoint her. She qualifies her relationship with her brothers as "very close," but when I ask if her family "gets" what she does, she shrugs: "We don't really talk that much about it. "My mom's very cool with it, but she doesn't always understand who I'm talking about. I don't really get away with too much in my family. Keeps me grounded."

In high school, Bernard spent a lot of time "scowling in the corner" with her two best friends, Dan and Tom. She was a mediocre student and not much of a joiner -- except for the chorus. "I loved singing," she says, "but they never let me in the best chorus, the one where you got to do all the musicals, which is pretty ironic, I guess. I wasn't the class clown, I was the class commentator. I always had some smart-ass observation about the world that I had to, like, let everybody in on."

She graduated from high school a half- year early and went to Israel to work on a kibbutz for eight months. On May 5, 1974, at the tender age of 19, she moved to L.A. and became a manicurist in a beauty salon, where she would eventually tend to the cuticles of seventies superstars Dyan Cannon and Jaclyn Smith, beginning in earnest her peculiar relationship to fame. Within a year, she was onstage.

"My first performance was at an open- mike night in a club in Beverly Hills called the Ye Little Club on Cañon Drive, and it consisted of a Mary Tyler Moore impression and a really bad joke about being a medium: 'This is a small. This is a large. I'm a medium!' I was wearing a pair of khaki shorts, a safari jacket, a straw hat, and some espadrilles -- a bad fashion moment. Two very pivotal people in my life -- Lotus Weinstock, who passed away a year ago, and Paul Mooney -- were there that night, and they kind of took me under their wing and raised me in this business. My goal was to be somewhere between Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler: I wanted to sing and be really original and audacious and outrageous."

For five years, Bernhard worked at the salon by day, performed at the clubs at night, and disco-danced into the wee hours. "I was a fag hag," she says. "That was my favorite thing to do: go dancing with gay guys." While she no longer spends her nights dancing in clubs, she is, it would appear, still a fag hag. When I ask who her best friends are, she lists a handful of guys, all gay men in the business of fashion or decorating.

Bernhard is sitting in a chair across from me in her den. Just above her head on the wall is a photograph of her and longtime pal Isaac Mizrahi in Budapest. Richard E. Grant took the picture during the filming of Hudson Hawk, a film distinguished mostly by being a spectacular failure. Bernhard has had a very strange film career. After brilliantly inhabiting the creepy, predatory groupie in Scorcese's The King of Comedy in 1982, she never lived up to her original promise. Other than that performance -- one that she admits was "so close to me" -- Bernhard has never been very good with anyone else's words but her own coming out of her mouth. "I don't really consider myself to be an actress," she says. "I don't really like it that much."

In 1992, after seeing her perform in her one-woman show Giving Til It Hurts, Camille Paglia enthused, "By her gutsy insistence on singing . . . Bernhard has rejoined stand-up to its origins in vaudeville, where music and comedy were brassily interwoven." "Singing's my first love," says Bernhard. "If I could be anything, I'd definitely be a rock singer in the league of Linda Ronstadt, Marianne Faithful, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell. But . . . I get to do it enough so that it's satisfying."

At a Laura Nyro memorial at the Beacon Theater last year, she performed a dead-on mimic of "Lonely Women," and earlier this year, she sang on the same bill at a Walden Pond?benefit concert with two of her heroes, Stevie Nicks and Joni Mitchell. "Bernhard delivered a surprisingly forceful and full-bodied take on George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward's 'Summertime,' " noted the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps more important, she has become "good friends" with Marianne Faithfull.

"Sometimes I want her to provide the alternative to some of the things she makes fun of," says John Cameron Mitchell, "because she is so unique herself that I think of her as the alternative to the ridiculous rock stars. She is, to me, as much of a rock star as they are. She's like the Cassandra -- warning of the ridiculous, the hubris, the troubles -- but sometimes I want her to be the heroine, leading the vanguard of the alternative to those stupid things. She likes the mind-fuck, but the ultimate mind-fuck for her audience would be for her to force them to take it completely seriously, force them to cry."

Perhaps Bernhard's newfound, Cabala-inspired "inner peace" and the addition of a child to her life will give her the necessary empathy/sympathy to connect with an audience on that level and move them past seering sarcasm to actual tears. Who knows. When I ask Steve Aturo, Bernhard's best friend, how motherhood has changed her, he says, "I think the big change came even before she was pregnant. It wasn't that she was an unhappy person before, but she let go of a lot of anger, which made her relate to things in a different way. She's really let her guard down." He starts to laugh. Though she's still the edgy Sandra we know and love. She hasn't lost her edge, that's for sure."

No kidding.

"People are afraid of me," says Bernhard, when I mention that some people really dislike her. "People don't like the truth. They don't like to be called on their bullshit. They'd rather be nice. They'd rather hide behind the pretension of being nice, and being nice doesn't really get you anywhere in this world. It's a cop-out. It always has been. Being nice is bullshit. Being real, being concerned, being passionate, loving, all comes from very strong emotions. Being nice is a weak emotion. It's not even an emotion. It's just a weakness, period."