Kelsey Grammer has huge, flat feet. His trainers look like canoes, and his arches have fallen further than Icarus. This may seem an incredibly unfair way to start - after all, this man is a comedy god - but it is the first thing I notice about him. His vulnerabilities hit you before anything else. Not his achievements. Not his record number of Emmy nominations (seven), his eight years on Cheers, his six on Frasier, his hall-of-fame status as one of the great comic actors of American television. None of that. He shambles towards me across the Frasier set, as behind him, rather unnervingly, the Seattle daytime skyline is wheeled away and replaced by Seattle at night, and what I notice is that he lollops, clown-footed, like a big, friendly lug of a man. He shakes my hand, puts his arm around my shoulder and smiles. It's a Big Guy kind of arm-around-the-shoulder.
He's a tall man, who looks older than he is, physically fatherly, and with a bellow of a voice. Yet, when he smiles, he looks like Charlie Brown. He is a man-child; a six-year-old boy living in a 43-year-old grown-up.
"Absolutely," he says. "I was only saying to my wife last night, `I'm just a big kid', and that's the way it's been for a long time." He pauses, then adds: "I'm not such a troubled kid now." When you start to find out about Kelsey Grammer, the first things you discover are to do with trouble. Drugs, drink and woman trouble. Not that he tries to hide it. He has even written a frank, if occasionally grandiloquent, autobiography, So Far. But the kind of messes he got himself into in the past surround him like legend, and go before him on the Internet, in the tabloids, and in Hollywood gossip.
Self-pity is off his agenda now. He says lightly: "My daily diet is a little ridicule and shame. But now I can read something negative in the press and not take it completely personally." This is one of the reasons he has decided to go live on the Internet on his own home page (kelseylive.com), chatting one-to-one with fans and, once a month, on camera. "It's a way of taking my life back a little." The articles don't, by and large, tell lies about him, just partial truths.
He did take truck-loads of cocaine, drink gallons of alcohol, wreck a few cars, get arrested for possession and drunken driving in 1988, get jailed in 1990 for 11 days for failing to turn up for his arraignments on other charges. But, as he says now: "I didn't so much drive under the influence of drink as of deep despair. I wasn't physically incapable of driving a car, but emotionally incapable."
In 1996, he stopped drinking for good. "You go in and out of addictions, and then you hit your bottom. My bottom came in August of that year. For four weeks, I barely slept." In September, he wrote off his sports car. He was lucky just to be charged with driving without a licence. "They were dark days, when I was malcontented and lost and incredibly depressed and full of self-loathing." So he checked into the Betty Ford Clinic. And he has been to AA.
He has climbed all the way up the 12-step programme. "It just became clear to me, one day after I'd stopped drinking, that I was going to live this way now . . . The other way was a lot of fun. It stopped being fun, that's all. Towards the end, it fell apart." He prayed. So, was sobriety a prayer answered?
"Absolutely." It's surprising. He doesn't seem religious. He was brought up a Christian Scientist, but belongs to no denomination now. "I go to church to listen to a friend of mine talk. But if it was up to me, I would probably tear down the institution completely. But it isn't up to me . . ." He laughs out loud, and continues eating a disgusting turkey burger and pickle the security man has brought him. He is always grazing, on set and off. Popcorn, crisps, more turkey burgers. And rarely anything healthy, although a close friend of his told me he is a great cook.
He says he spent his life before sobering up "figuring out how to solve the problem of the day, but more time inventing the problem . . . I'm trying to put this accurately . . . For instance, I just didn't do my taxes for two years. I don't know if it was conscious or not. I was thriving on turmoil. I just made choices that would promote turmoil." Only the week before Christmas, his celebrity-profile page on the Internet was headlined "Grammer's Porn Problem", which amounted to little more than an ex-girlfriend hawking a video of the two of them "voluntarily engaging in sexual and intimate relations". It seemed rather rude to ask him for details. However, he did volunteer that "the video is, frankly, pretty funny, and I was actually quite flattered. I didn't think people would be that interested. I never really thought of myself as a sex star."
It's brave-face time, and who can blame him? He is rumoured to have paid the woman $1 million - which sounds a lot until you find that, according to a well-placed studio source, it's not much more than his pay cheque for two or three episodes of Frasier. Until now, he says, most of the women in his life have specialised in being hurtful. But now he's married, for the third time, and sober, for the first.
Talking about his wife, Camille, who he met before his spell in the Betty Ford, in what he calls "one of my good periods", he is clearly entranced. She attends script-readings with him, bright and blonde, but not cheesecake, despite the fact that the papers always refer to her as an "exPlayboy model". But, unlike the other women in his life, she doesn't hit him, or scream at him or abuse him. Everyone you ask says she is "great for him". And they all say it with the relief of good friends who, for the sake of friendship, have for years put up with all the bad lovers and the fights. All through the days of addiction, he sustained an extraordinarily high quality of work on Cheers and then Frasier. "I am just the kind of person who can stay up for three days and still show up for work."
Since 1975, when he left the Juillard School in New York - also the theatrical nursery of his contemporaries Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve - Grammer had been working reasonably consistently and to increasingly good reception as an actor in the San Diego Shakespeare Festival and in Othello on Broadway. Cheers appeared on the horizon in 1984, while he was in a production of Sondheim's Sunday In the Park with George, with Mandy Patinkin in New York. Patinkin had lunch with a casting director from Paramount, who happened to be on the look-out for a "funny leading-man type". Patinkin recommended Grammer. The producers on Cheers wanted a new character to interpose between the sexually-rampant bartending Sam and his prissy, nose-up-turned girlfriend-cum-waitress-with-absurd-literary-pretensions, Diane. They were confident it would work because she would be easily attracted to an upmarket psychiatrist, and the competition would drive Sam wild. Frasier Crane's calling-card to the bar in Boston was a combination of snobbery and jealousy.
Grammer has called his role in Cheers "hit-and-run comedy". "My obligation to the show was to get in and out as quickly as I could with a joke." For the character of Frasier to grow into a new series of his own, Grammer had to change that. He has described the transition as needing "to become the glue of a show. In Frasier, the action takes place around me, I'm sort of the canvas, whereas before I was one of the bright spots of colour." And that is a risky business. Spin-offs have had a notoriously unsuccessful history.
??????eres this Christmas. Danson is caught because no-one seems to be prepared to accept him as anything but Sam, yet he doesn't want to get further trapped. Becker is a doctor. And Danson is cautious about whether it will work: "Right now, I'm a 12-step actor," he says. "I'm taking one day at a time." It's different for Professionally, Grammer is surefooted and confident. He says: "The only place I ever had some sanity was my profession. In my life, I may make the wrong choices, but on stage I can walk up and say this is a good choice and this is a bad one." And Frasier was a brilliant one. It flew right from the start, winning five Emmys at the beginning of its second year. And for good reason.
In Grammer, Frasier has got not just a serious comic talent, but, more than that, an actor of real range. David Hyde-Pierce, who plays Frasier's brother Niles, put his finger on it when he told me: "The hallmark of his style is that he can go from the sincerest, pure emotion to the broadest, physical comedy in a split second, and make both things equally believable." Frasier the character is a complex confection, and Frasier the sitcom is a fine balancing act. They both pivot on Grammer's talent. He makes the character real and knits together a very fine ensemble of actors. He is, according to Hyde-Pierce, a "very generous actor. He has no problem with any of us taking the spotlight". It is surprising how self-effacing he is in the show, how often you find you are concentrating on Niles or Daphne, how often the star sets up laughs for the others.
Frasier's whole life, which is a frantic exercise in self-control, is governed by the dictatorship of his good intentions. His anger, so funny because it is so heartfelt, not vindictive and impotent, constantly threatens to boil over. He ranges from a broad, sarcastic drawl to a pent-up, breathy staccato as he fights an endless but unsuccessful campaign to repel hoi-polloi and vulgarity from life, and to do the right thing. He is correct rather than snobbish. He is merely the kind of man who knows what a ramekin is.
THE balance with his father Martin, played by John Mahoney, is crucial. The old man is there to prick the pretensions. Martin reminds you where the brothers came from, and that grounds their priggishness and makes you realise that, underneath it, they are likeable.
Whether you live in Des Moines, Iowa, or Nuneaton, Warwickshire, you neither need knowledge of good wine nor of expensive shrinks to get the jokes, because the decoration of the comedy comes from the interplay between class and aspiration, between airy pretension and feet on the ground, between the two brothers, Frasier and Niles, and their father and Daphne, his health worker. And central to it all is the vulnerability and tenderness that Grammer brings to the role.
Grammer's parents split up when he was three. For years, he harboured the heroic illusion that his father had to leave "for some romantic calling. But after therapy for a few years, I just began to realise it was abandonment. He left because I, and my sister, didn't mean anything to him.' And then, when he was just 13, this father, whom he had seen for barely a month since he'd left, was murdered. A year later, his grandfather was, unbeknownst to the boy, dying of cancer `and probably alcoholism'. All Grammer knew was that - and he understates this movingly - "he became less patient with me in the last couple of years of his life. And that may have begun the idea that there was something wrong with me. He was the most important man in my life, and he was pretty much getting annoyed with everything I did". Then, at 20, the biggest blow of all landed. His younger sister, who was working in Colorado, away from the family home, was abducted, raped and murdered.
"That's where it all starts, doesn't it, I suppose," he says. "It sounds so hopelessly cliched to blame it all on the folks but . . ." He trails away.
"I have a great fear of abandonment. Everyone I have ever loved has left me." That shows in the urgency of his comedy.
There is a great contradiction in Grammer's life between his polite and conventional manner and the emotional brawling and addictive excesses of his bad-boy days. When we talk politics, he talks of his respect for the American constitution and the president, his love for "the dream of what America is".
The fact that he has spent time in prison doesn't escape him. "I've been on both sides of the law in my life. I guess on the human and spiritual level we must forgive the man." This contrast has, in a strange way, sustained his career on television. As he says, "There's a certain romantic quality to being a Hollywood bad boy. I grew up loving Errol Flynn and John Barrymore, the big drinkers, the guys who were the good bar-room brawlers. Being known as that is, on some level, a good thing. And it seems so inconsistent with the character I was playing.
"If I was playing some devilish-doer on some show, and lived that way off-screen, it wouldn't be as much of a surprise. So, it may have actually extended my career." Now he's not a bad-boy any more, he acknowledges that his profile has probably diminished: "Kelsey's not such an interesting story any more."
Frasier will run for another three seasons, he says. He still feels he can develop the character. The show is now No 3 in the US, behind ER and Friends, having been moved to the Thursday slot vacated by Seinfeld. There is some sniping in the TV mags that it's not as good as its predecessor, but Grammer defends it - well, he would, wouldn't he? - and there are few programmes that can trade punch-for-punch jokes about an '86 Amontillado and the Superbowl, and mix pure physical panic with such tenderness.
Grammer has few plans for the future, except in his marriage. When asked about the much-rumoured possibility that he and Hyde-Pierce and John Mahoney will do Yasmina Reza's play ART, on Broadway, and then in London, he says: "It turns out I can't do ART." Can't? Well, won't, actually. "This is the second year of our marriage, and there is just stuff we want to do together. The return I get from my marriage is just a lot more rewarding."