BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Mary Gross bounds to the deli table with Silly Bandz on her wrists, a bounce in her step and a tickle in her voice.
Her older brother, Michael - like Mary a transplanted Chicagoan and 1980s TV star - greets her with a hug, kiss and bemused smile about her new accessories. "My grandchildren wear them," he says. "I didn't know my sister wore them."
Mary, a "Saturday Night Live" and Second City veteran, laughs, as she often does, and relates how her long-ago boyfriend's daughter introduced her to Silly Bandz last summer. "Here's the United States," she beams, removing a nation-shaped rubber band from her wrist. "As if they weren't amazing enough, they have put sparkles in."
Riding that sense of delight, the almost-58-year-old actress relates the encounter she just had with a young Barneys New York saleswoman in the bathroom shared by the store and Barney Greengrass deli.
"She said, 'How's your career going?' And I said, 'Ohhhhhhhhh,'" Mary recounts with a laugh. "I said, 'There's a reporter out there, I have to go talk to him about my career, and things have been a little slow lately.' And she said, 'But Mary, your body of work is so impressive, and you've done so many wonderful things. Go back to the table knowing that.'"
"Were you both sitting on the toilet at the same time talking over the stall?" Michael Gross, the 63-year-old former "Family Ties" star, asks.
"No, we were in the mirror," Mary says. "But I came here (to the restaurant) like 'Ohhhh, no,' and I went to the bathroom, and that's the conversation I had. Isn't that magical?"
"Barneys' bathroom, when you need a pick-me-up. ..." her brother deadpans.
The conversation is chipper, but an undercurrent of tension is detectable. The recession, combined with the reality TV boom and the tax-incentive-chasing outflux of production from California, has made acting jobs even scarcer than usual, and being a household name from an earlier decade is no guarantee of work now. Stick around long enough, and your health costs go up while your earning potential goes down.
"As you get older," Mary says, "it gets scarier."
So Michael Gross is out chasing auditions, and so is Mary Gross. But Michael, who lives in a house in Pasadena with his wife and her 100-year-old mother, has the luxury of seven years' accumulated prime-time sitcom salary plus syndication residuals, which also have bought him a second home in Santa Fe, N.M., and part ownership of the Santa Fe Southern Railway.
Mary, who isn't married and lives in an apartment to the west and whose "Saturday Night Live" work is rarely re-aired, has more urgency in the never-ending quest for work. "My goal is to pay the rent," she cracks.
This February lunch marks the first time these siblings have seen each other since a cousin's wedding before Christmas. Michael Gross is a warm, wry wisecracker, long and lean and dapper in his neatly trimmed salty goatee, tweed blazer and blue checked shirt, still recognizable as Steven Keaton, the liberal "Family Ties" dad to Michael J. Fox, Justine Bateman and Tina Yothers - minus the plaid flannel shirts and some hair.
Mary, identifiable from her "Saturday Night Live" days as well, is slim and casual, in a long-sleeved navy blue T-shirt, baggy lime-green pants and sneakers. She still has that high-pitched librarian's voice that swoops and soars like an animated bird, and she spins stories with a breathless energy, as if she's reliving every moment.
That night Mary would have a bit part as a poolside tourist who distracts her former "Saturday Night Live"/Second City co-star Jim Belushi on the CBS legal drama "The Defenders." Two evenings later Michael would play a stuffy food critic who flirts with Richard Chamberlain on the ABC family drama "Brothers & Sisters."
Although Mary and Michael took very different routes to arrive at this place, they come by their talents naturally. Their father, William, who designed tools and still lives on Chicago's North Side, embraced the arts, but their mother, Virginia, was the irrepressible performer.
"She was known for singing and dancing and telling jokes and creating games, wearing costumes - we never knew what she was going to do next," Elizabeth Gross, the sibling between Michael and Mary, says from her Chicago home; she does financial work for a downtown firm.
"She was the only ham that couldn't be cured," Michael says.
Mary made her performing debut in a musical mounted by the since-razed Madonna High School's history club, whose president was future "Taxi" star Marilu Henner. Mary, a reserved type who liked to make her friends laugh, sang a ditty about Louis XIV of France set to the tune of "I Feel Pretty."
Little did she know what a pivotal moment this performance would be.
"I just wasn't prepared for that overwhelming fear that took hold of me as soon as I got in front of the audience," she says. "I wasn't trying to get a laugh, but somehow my awkwardness and my anxiety turned me into Barney Fife (from 'The Andy Griffith Show'), and I was getting huge laughs. And all I wanted to do was get off that stage and find a bathroom."
The before-and-after realities couldn't have been more dramatic.
"When I came off stage, my life changed," she says. "The school bullies loved me. The teachers loved me. Our science teacher canceled a test that day, she said, because I made her so happy."
Calling the performance "the most terrifying moment of my teenage existence" and "a magical day for me," Mary didn't set foot on a stage again for years.
Michael knew about none of this; he was already away pursuing his calling - he puts on a mock-pompous voice - as "a classical actor." He had thought he might become a priest before he sang in Kelvyn Park High School's mixed chorus and a production of "Oklahoma!" and discovered his love of performing.
By the time he was starring in plays at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Michael had become, in the words of his college acting teacher and future best man William Raffeld, "probably the most disciplined actor I'd ever come across."
Michael was acting in Minneapolis when he heard the news about Mary, who as a 24-year-old employee of the American Dental Association had swallowed her fear and taken an improvisation course at Loyola University. "My mother said, 'Well, Mary's doing improvisational comedy,'" Michael recalls. "I said, 'My little quiet sister Mary?'"
Soon Mary was acting at The Second City alongside Tim Kazurinsky, who had lobbied for her hiring. "She was very young and seemingly delicate and fragile, but she just did this outrageous stuff and said things that sort of shocked you," says Kazurinsky, now primarily a screenwriter.
A couple of years later, Gross was joining Kazurinsky at "Saturday Night Live," and she spent four seasons (1981-85) on the show, which was dominated by Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo for the first three years and the Billy Crystal-Martin Short all-star cast for the last. Her memorable contributions included impressions of Alfalfa from "The Little Rascals" and Marilyn Monroe, which Kazurinsky and Jim Belushi say is the best they've ever seen.
Meanwhile, Michael, who was acting in New York when Mary arrived for "Saturday Night Live," overcame his aversion to television and got cast in "Family Ties," which debuted in 1982. Now the siblings were on the same network, NBC, though they rarely swapped notes.
"I was under a lot of stress, and we were on two different coasts," Mary says. "The two times I visited Michael, I thought, Oh my God, what a cushy job this is. He doesn't have to write the show. He doesn't have to fight for space in the show. He just gets a script and knows right where he's headed."
"I always felt as if Mary and I were kind of in two different businesses," Michael says, "because she was still doing essentially what she was doing at Second City on 'Saturday Night Live,' and I knew very little about that world and comics, and I thought they were all even more neurotic than regular actors" - pause, sly smile - "present company excepted."
Two years into "Family Ties," Michael married Elza Bergeron, a casting director who'd signed off on Michael's hiring at Paramount Television. She had two teenage children, and, he says, "life became very busy for me."
Mary wound up in Los Angeles, too, to chase jobs after Lorne Michaels retook the reins of "Saturday Night Live" and let go everyone hired by Dick Ebersol, who oversaw Mary's four years there. She views her subsequent struggles as being as much about mindset as opportunity.
"I'd spent a couple of years in improv, a couple of years at Second City, four years at 'Saturday Night Live' - I'd spent eight years satirizing everything," she says. "I had an audition for a show called 'thirtysomething,' and I remember thinking 'thirtysomething'? It sounded like something we would immediately parody, just because of the title. To this day it breaks my heart: I had a callback for 'thirtysomething,' and I don't think I went in on it. And then later when the show was on, I loved it."
Michael's post-"Family Ties" career started more strongly but also spurred regret: He immediately scored a change-of-pace role as a survivalist in the well-reviewed, tongue-in-cheek horror film "Tremors" (1990), which became so popular on home video that it spawned three sequels and a short-lived 2003 TV series, all of which starred Michael, but "Tremors'" initial theatrical release fizzled.
"You don't cry over spilled milk, but had more people really come to see that, it might have made a difference in more of a major sort of film career for me," Michael says.
Michael and Mary have spent the last two decades appearing in movies and on TV shows, sometimes for multiple episodes (he on "Spin City," "E.R.," "The Drew Carey Show," "The Young and the Restless" and "How I Met Your Mother"; she on "The People Next Door," "Billy," "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch," "Boston Legal" and "General Hospital"). But neither Gross has experienced the kind of steady work each enjoyed in the 1980s.
Still, Michael remains comfortable. "Anybody's who's been on a top-10 TV series for seven years and hasn't gone out and bought a bunch of Ferraris and yachts has a bit of a cushion, and I'm aware of that," Michael says. "Mary's like that great middle class of actors who work pretty consistently but don't have that particular cushion."
"Four years on late-night comedy does not equal seven years in prime time, financially," Mary sighs, noting that she's had to borrow from her retirement account.
Now that Michael is a grandfather, he doesn't want to work thousands of miles from his family. "My priorities changed. It's as basic as it always was: I want to be associated with something that's good."
"Me, too," Mary says. "I was being cynical when I said I want to pay the rent. Of course, I want to pay the rent, but I agree with Michael that I want to do quality work."
In some months, Mary goes on five auditions. In some she goes on zero. Most auditions, no matter how well they go, she never hears back anything and tries not to take offense. "I only can control what I bring into the room," she says.
But things get complicated. She says she was asked to audition for the recently released film "Cedar Rapids" as Ed Helms' former high school teacher and current girlfriend, and she really liked the script except for a love scene between their characters.
"She's completely naked," Mary says. "She's on top of him. They're engaged in the act, and she's saying in a Wisconsin accent, 'Bring it home!' and it was funny, but as soon as I saw that, I just froze because I thought: My cousins can't go see this. They'll be appalled."
"Never let bad taste stand in the way of a good opportunity," Michael says.
Mary says she asked her agent's assistant whether the naked sex scene was "negotiable," and the assistant responded, "It is what it is." So Mary didn't audition, and the role went to Sigourney Weaver, who does not appear naked on screen.
"I just don't want to see you ever do that again," Michael says at the end of Mary's story. "You can't give a (expletive) about what your cousins think."
That she doesn't work more often is a frustration to friends, relatives and fans as well as herself. She says a couple recently approached her to express their admiration, and after she thanked them, "the man said, 'We miss you.' And it sort of made the hair stand up on my neck, because it sounded like I'm retired or passed away. I said, 'Oh, I'm still working.' His wife said, 'Oh, what are you working on?' And I said, 'Nothing.'" Mary laughs and claps her hands. "So it was very awkward."
Kazurinsky thought Mary was so "fantastic" in her four-episode turn as a woman with Asperger's syndrome on "Boston Legal" that he wondered, "Why isn't this woman working all year instead of a few times a year?" His proposed solution: She should return to Chicago.
"I've made many attempts to tell Mary to move back here and become part of the Chicago scene," Kazurinsky says. "She'd get tons of stage work and tons of voice work, but to no avail."
Upon hearing of Kazurinsky's recommendation, Michael chimes in: "I think my sister would gain a lot from going back to her roots. I would love to see her do that work again because I think that's where a great deal of her soul is and her spark."
"Here's the problem," Mary says. "Over 10 years ago I became deaf in one ear (from Meniere's disease, an inner-ear disorder), so working onstage is very frightening to me. Especially doing improv, because I'm afraid I'll miss some nuance, I won't be able to play off the laughter of the audience. My timing is - "
"I'm not buying that," Michael says. "You were fearful when you went into those first improv classes at Loyola, but you went back. And I know all you have to do is tell the rest of the cast, 'I'm deaf in one ear, keep that in mind.' They work with you."
"That's true to a certain extent," she says.
"You have a gift," he says, "and I'm sorry to this day that you don't exploit it more and use it."
"Get over it," she snaps with a laugh.
Elizabeth Gross says she understands why Mary wouldn't want to move back to Chicago. "She does wonderful auditions out there and meets a lot of famous people that are considering her for shows," she says. "It's hard to not do that, especially when it's something you've been working for for so many years. It's like anybody's dream - we don't want to give up."
"My dream?" Mary says later. "I don't think I've ever used that word in my career. Especially now, after 30 years, it's a career. I don't see it with any romantic notions." And as much as she loves Chicago, she says, that career is in Los Angeles.
Later, Michael notes that if Mary would return to her roots, she would get back "some of her joie de vivre," which prompts her to cackle.
"Do you know what my mom said?" Mary says. "When I lost my hearing, I was on the phone, and I was crying, and I said, 'Mom, I have a permanent hearing loss, and now I can't hear out of my right ear.' I said, 'Michael used to make so much fun of me (about my allergies), and now I can't hear,' and she said, 'Well, now you don't have to listen to him.'"
Mary flips back her head and laughs uproariously.
After a couple of hours, Michael bids his sister a warm farewell. Mary remains, looking pensive. That wasn't so bad, right?
"No," she says, "except for Michael telling me what to do."
During the lunch she has written on the paper tablecloth in elegant handwriting: "I always wanted."
Mary explains that when Michael was talking about their mother, she flashed back to a conversation she had with her in the hospital, about a year before her mother died the day after St. Patrick's Day in 2005.
"My mother was on morphine, and she was in intensive care, and she was very charming and very chatty and feeling no pain, and one of the things she said to me was, 'I always wanted to do what you do,'" Mary recalls. "And I said, 'Mom, you've always been my inspiration,' and she said, 'I know.' It was so cute."
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