The Neurotic Zen of Larry David

HE MIGHT NOT AGREE, BUT LARRY DAVID IS LOOKING pretty, pretty good here in the Pacific Palisades sunshine on this Tuesday afternoon in late spring. His symmetrical head is tanned to a golden sheen from endless weekend rounds of golf, its eggish shape recapitulated in each of the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses; the gleaming white of his well-tended teeth matches the lupine sideburns that extend from his fringe of hair. He’s wearing a familiar-looking outfit: a blue sport coat over a gray sweater with a zip-up neck, khakis, suede sneakers — as usual, it’s all from his Curb Your Enthusiasm wardrobe, underwear excepted. •

“Here’s the question,” David muses, leaning against a parking meter. “With the hair technology they have now, would I have made use of it if they had it when I started to lose my hair? I was a good candidate. Sometimes I have these fantasies of just moving to a foreign country and com­ing back with a full head of hair.” He cracks up, though he’s not exactly joking. “Or not even come back! Make a new life there with hair. Starting anew with a full head of hair. Change my name, just see what happens.”

Two teenage girls walking by smile and wave when they spot him — he offers a cheerful hello. David is stand­ing in front of the pink-stucco facade and green awnings of Cafe Vida, a local health-food place where he just picked up a kale-infused green drink — part of a strict health regimen that he’s hoping will forestall death, or at least infirmity. As the dry-cleaning lady who nearly slept with his character in one Curb episode observed, he is, at 64, quite fit: three days a week of weights, two days on the exercise bike, all that walking on the golf course.

David just finished running an errand across the street, which went smoothly. On Curb, HBO’s longest-running show, the task would have caused a misunder­standing that would spiral into calamity — and then unexpectedly intertwine with another social disaster or two to create roughly 28 minutes of deliriously hilar­ious awkwardness. Such is the stuff that has made him one of the most influen­tial comedy auteurs of the past quarter-century — reshaping the sitcom as co-creator of Seinfeld, and then doing it again with the improv-heavy Curb, which paved the way for Judd Apatow’s loose, naturalistic comedies, and opened the door for The Office and Parks and Recreation.

Today’s successful errand entailed pick­ing up a just-repaired pair of glasses, the long-since-discontinued Oliver Peoples frames he’s been wearing since 1990, back when he had just started as executive pro­ducer of Seinfeld. “I can’t find another pair of glasses,” he says. “I just like them. And now it’s too late to change, even if I didn’t like them. It would be like getting a tou­pee. It feels like a big step.”

This is a good time to catch up with Larry David. He’s finished all 10 episodes of Curb‘s new season, and hasn’t yet begun agonizing over whether to do more, which could, in turn, lead to the even more pain­ful process of writing another set of epi­sodes — or rather, assembling eight-page outlines that set up the improvised dia­logue, a process he likens to “putting to­gether a giant jigsaw puzzle.”

“This is the sweet spot for Larry, when the show’s in the can,” says his friend Richard Lewis, who’s known him since they were sports-camp rivals somewhere around I960, two Brooklyn Jewish kids who hated each other on sight. “Walking around like Fred Astaire, dancing around, saying ‘hello’ to people. It’s like some weird animal on the Discovery Channel that hides for 11 months and then comes out — it’s the Larry David that only lasts for, like, a month.”

Hands in his khaki pockets, David strolls back to his mint-green Prius, parked conveniently around the corner. (“Is there anything better than a parking space? It’s so satisfying.”) Starting the en­gine, he says that losing his hair “wasn’t as bad as you’d imagine it to be. Not as bad. When I look in the mirror, I don’t really see a bald guy. I see bald when I see myself on TV. As I’m talking to you right now, I don’t feel bald. I know that I’m bald, but I don’t feel bald. Shouldn’t I feel bald?”

Driving along, he grins in appreciation as a middle-aged woman hustles across a crosswalk. “She’s not strolling, holding up traffic,” he says. “She’s being consider­ate of cars, and very few pedestrians have any consideration for cars at all.”

IT STARTED, BY THE WAY, WITH what a TV show would call a cold open: My cellphone rings one after­noon, and Larry David’s assistant puts her boss on the line. We’ve never spoken before, but he doesn’t bother say­ing hello. “I’m sick about this,” David says, by way of introduction. “I want out.”

Fifteen minutes earlier, he says, he had pecked out an e-mail on his BlackBerry canceling his Rolling Stone cover story — but never hit send. “I figured, ah, it’s too late,” David says. “It’s like my marriage: You’re already committed. You don’t want it, but it’s too late.” (Later, he adds, “I don’t even know why I’m doing this. My parents are dead — this is the kind of thing you do when your parents are alive. It must be for women.”)

He sighs, and we talk logistics — the kind of thing every other celebrity would have their publicists and assistants han­dle. We decide that I’ll fly to L. A. the next week and hang out with him there. “What is this, a buddy movie?” David says, rais­ing his voice as if he’s arguing with Rich­ard Lewis in a restaurant. “We’re going to become best friends now? Next week is going to be all Larry and Brian?” He adds a warning: “You have to make all the plans. I’m not making any plans.”

I interject a sputtering protest — if I decide where we go, it will reflect me, not him. “That’s the point!” David says, sounding exactly like a triumphant George Costanza. “There’s nothing that reflects me! I’m unreflectable!”

The next week, David greets me with a smile at the door of his two-story, four-bedroom Mediterranean-style house, also in Pacific Palisades. The house sits direct­ly on the golf course where he plays. “This is my post-divorce house,” he says. David split from his wife of 14 years, environmental activist Laurie David, in 2007, and they now share custody of their two teenage daughters. They have an unusu­ally amicable relationship, meeting up for regular Sunday-night dinners with the kids and spending holidays together. “He’s so much better as an ex-husband,” says Laurie. “He takes ex-husbandry to a new level.”

He doesn’t exactly paint the breakup as a tragedy. Before he found the house, he lived for a while in an oceanfront Santa Monica apartment complex informally known as Divorce Towers. A recently separated Hollywood executive lived in an adjoining apartment. “He would open the door to go to work, and I’d open my door,” says David, “and you’ve never seen two happier people. We were just delight­ed.” (Laurie calls this kind of talk “pure bullshit.” “Breaking up is hard to do. It’s torture,” she says. “But I think he’s happy now. For a guy who spends endless hours on a golf course, it’s best not to have a wife waiting for you at home.”)

It’s 11 a.m., and David has finished his weights workout in the basement gym and had his first health shake of the day, plus some hot cereal with rice milk and blue­berries. He pours me a third of a glass of coconut water from a glass bottle with a handmade label. “I’m not going to give you that much, you know why? Because it’s too valuable! I can’t spare more than that. You may think this is me being chintzy, but for me to give somebody this much coconut water, this is a huge deal.”

We sit down at a rustic wooden table in the hardwood-floored living room, just off the kitchen — it brings to mind the bit from last season’s Curb about “respect­ing wood.” It turns out his daughters are offenders. The table was one of the first pieces of furniture he had on his own, and he was initially protective. “I’m like, ‘Come on, put a coaster down.’ They don’t want to live like that.”

David grabs a golf club and walks out back, where there’s a small yard, a tiled deck, an infinity pool that he doesn’t use (“I don’t care for water. I love to show­er, don’t get me wrong”) — and a jaw-dropping view of his country club’s golf course, green and inviting in the endless distance. He starts practicing his swing. “See, if I could do that out there, every­thing would be fine,” he says, after a par­ticularly smooth stroke. “It’s kind of sad! I feel very bad for the wealthy man — ev­erything’s not going his way.”

He’s supposed to keep his head down when he swings, but something — some psychological block — gets in his way. He’s tried to fix it, gone to coaches, but noth­ing’s worked. Is he a hopeless case? “I’m a hopeless case only insofar as I’m con­cerned; nobody else would consider me a hopeless case,” he says, heading back in­side. (In fact, he’s a decent golfer, with a handicap of 13.) He thinks for a sec­ond and begins to laugh uncontrollably. “There’s something very funny about the term ‘hopeless case,’ you know? I think that from the time I became a teenager, I think somewhere deep inside me, I felt or I knew that I was a hopeless case. Not golfwise but lifewise.”

When did he make this determination? “I don’t know, it must have been one of those moments where there was an at­tractive woman and I didn’t have the cour­age to walk up to her,” he says. “It must have been a moment like that. I’d always watch the guys who were smooth with the women and be in awe of them — cool guys who could say anything and behave in any way. I really admired those guys, even if they were criminals. Even if they were reprobates, I admired them. Anybody who was considered cool, I admired.”