May 1, 2001

Matthew Broderick's New York Story

He grew up backstage with his father. Now he lives downtown with his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, and returns to the theater to heal all wounds

By Russell Scott Smith, US Weekly (Issue 325/36)

When Matthew Broderick was growing up in New York's Greenwich Village, his favorite record was a well-worn copy of the 1960 comedy album 2,000 Years With Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks. After his parents put him to bed, Broderick would pull up the covers, turn down the volume and listen in the dark to Brooks's shtick. "I have over 42,000 children," Brooks says as the 2,000 Year Old Man. "And not one of them comes to visit me!" "I must have listened to it a thousand times," Broderick recalls. "Especially when I was supposed to be asleep." To this day, he still knows most of the routines by heart.

Since those innocent days, Broderick, 39, has faced both great success and devastating tragedy - including the early death of his beloved father, James Broderick, in 1982, a fatal car accident and the death of his therapist. But there was never a question of quitting, especially because James, an actor best known as the star of the 1970s TV drama Family, was so excited about his son's career. Four years after his father's death, Broderick had his breakthrough role, as the lovable teenage prankster in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). Since then, he has starred in more than 30 films, including recent turns as a high-school teacher in Election (1999) and a bank manager in You Can Count on Me (2000).

Through his ups and downs, Broderick has always returned to what he likes most - performing onstage. He debuted on Broadway in 1983 in Brighton Beach Memoirs, as Neil Simon's alter ego, for which he won a Tony. He went on to star in such shows as Simon's sequel to Brighton, Biloxi Blues (1985), and the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1995). On April 19, he arrived on Broadway again, costarring opposite Nathan Lane in a new musical version of The Producers, the manic 1968 film by Broderick's childhood hero Brooks.

With his focus on theater, Broderick follows in the footsteps of his father, who had a long and varied career on the New York stage. As a child, Broderick tagged along with his father to rehearsals, and the theater was like his second home. "Initially, I thought I might want some kind of backstage job," he says, "because I fell in love with the environment of the theater."

Broderick met the woman who would become his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, in a theater in 1992, when he was directing her brother Toby in a one-act play. Parker wandered into rehearsal one day, and before long, the two were biking all over Manhattan, going to baseball games and eating sesame bagels with whitefish salad at Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side. Nearly every Sunday, they had Chinese food for breakfast. "Brunch in Chinatown is a tradition for New York Jews," says Parker, 36, who, like Broderick, has a Jewish mother. "We've been doing it all our lives."

In 1997, Broderick and Parker got married in New York's oldest synagogue, a ramshackle 1850s building on the Lower East Side. Around 140 family and friends attended, including Broderick's mother, Patricia Broderick, an artist and a playwright, and his older sisters, Martha, a psychotherapist, and Janet, an Episcopalian minister, who officiated. In keeping with the couple's taste for the dramatic, they held the wedding at night, and the guests found their seats by the light of dozens of candelabra. "You could see the parts of the building that were still gorgeous," said Parker, who wore a black dress with a moss-green crinoline underneath. "And you couldn't notice the parts that were less so."

Broderick and Parker live in a duplex apartment on a quiet, tree-lined street in SoHo. The 1840s town house has a fireplace in every room and hardwood floors covered with vintage Oriental and American rag rugs. The walls are decorated with memorabilia from their favorite baseball teams (the Yankees and the Mets, of course) and with paintings by Broderick's mother, who still lives nearby in the Washington Square apartment where Matthew grew up. Now that they are married and both busy working, Broderick and Parker spend Sundays lounging around their living room, reading the Times and the Post and eating Cheerios with their border collie, Sally, by their side. During the week, Broderick works late at the theater, and by the time he wakes up, Parker has usually left for the set of her hit HBO series Sex and the City. Broderick says he comes downstairs to find "newspapers spread out everywhere and an empty coffee cup."

On Broderick's few nights off, the couple goes out to dinner with their close friends, especially Parker's brothers, Toby and Pippin, and the playwright Kenneth Lonergan and his stage-actress wife, J. Smith-Cameron. Lonergan, who was nominated for a best original screenplay Oscar this year for You Can Count on Me, has been Broderick's best friend since high school. He now lives nearby, and the two spend hours playing Ping-Pong on the table that Broderick keeps in his home office.

When they go out, Broderick and his friends drink martinis and sometimes smoke Camel Lights - even though he has been trying to give up smoking for years. As the evening progresses, Broderick is prone to launch into one of his celebrity impressions, including those of stars he has worked with over the years, such as Marlon Brando (The Freshman, 1990) and Dustin Hoffman and Sean Connery (Family Business, 1989). "Matthew always jokes that he's going to write his memoirs," Lonergan says. "The title will be They Called Me Pal: The Stars' Favorite Dog Tells His Own Horrifying Story."

Broderick also likes to quote from the 1954 James Mason version of A Star Is Born. He's particularly fond of a scene in which Mason's character laments over a movie career that's fading fast, Lonergan says. "Matthew goes, 'Tell me the truth. Am I slipping? Am I slipping?' Then he says the other guy's line - 'You've got the tense wrong. You've slipped.' "

Broderick and Parker rarely go to parties, he says, especially those thrown by celebrities. Last summer, when they were invited to a Fourth of July soiree at Sean "Puffy" Combs's seaside mansion in the Hamptons, they hesitated because the Puffy-Jennifer Lopez crowd seemed too glamorous. "It's not our natural inclination really to leave the house," says Parker. "Especially to something potentially intimidating and something potentially revealing of our uncoolness."

In the end, they were too intrigued not to go. "There's something Great Gatsby-ish about Puffy," explains Parker. Broderick agrees: "He just makes everybody comfortable and happy, and he's charming and funny. He hired a guy to make cosmopolitans and a guy to make blinis. What's not to like?"

"Coolness" is something Broderick has always defined his own way. As teenagers at the private Walden School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Broderick, Lonergan and their friends did everything they could to distance themselves from the mainstream. They hung out after dark on the fringes of Central Park, smoking joints and making witty comments about passersby. "We kind of looked down on everything," Broderick says. "So that left us with very little to do."

Schoolwork was not a priority. Broderick and his pals prowled the city, stopping at their favorite pizzerias to play pinball and the video game Defender. They listened to records in their parents' apartments, including one that had original Picassos in the living room. In their perfectly shabby Converse All Stars, army-surplus pants and old wool dress coats, they told one another jokes and compared notes on their odd musical preferences, such as Fats Waller and Frank Zappa.

Beneath his studied nonchalance, however, Broderick was developing as an actor. Lonergan wrote his first full-length play in eleventh grade, and Broderick starred in it. By the time he graduated from high school, Broderick had decided to skip college. He enrolled in theater classes with the famous acting teacher Uta Hagen, who lived in his parents' apartment building, and soon established himself in New York theater, starring in 1980's On Valentine's Day with his father and in Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy (1981). On his twentieth birthday, Broderick flew to Los Angeles to begin working on his first movie, Max Dugan Returns.

It was a heady time for Broderick, who spent a year in an apartment in Santa Monica, California. "I was a bachelor in a big movie," he recalls. "It was fun. I met girls." But at the same time, his father's health was worsening. "I mostly remember that time as terrible," he says. James died on November 1, 1982, at the age of 55, on the day after Broderick's first rehearsal for Brighton Beach Memoirs, a project that James had been especially excited about. "Not to sound like a TV movie," Broderick says, "but I think he wanted to stay alive to see how that went. I called to say it went well, and he died the next day."

For the next several years, Broderick jetted between movie sets and New York theaters. He dated costars Helen Hunt, Penelope Ann Miller and Jennifer Grey. And he tried not to think about his father. "I was in denial of everything," he says. "It was very strange that my success happened at the same time my father died."

Tragedy struck again in 1987, when Broderick and Grey - who were visiting his family's Irish vacation home - were driving in Northern Ireland. Broderick was behind the wheel on a country road when he collided head-on with another car. The crash broke Broderick's leg and, worse, killed the two Irishwomen in the other car. Broderick pleaded guilty to a reckless-driving charge and was fined $175. The event still haunts him, and he doesn't like to discuss it. "I don't feel comfortable spouting off," he says, "because the families of those women who were killed don't get to."

The accident sent Broderick into psychotherapy. Then, a year later, his therapist died as well. "I've experienced a lot of death," Broderick has said. "But experiencing it doesn't make you any more comfortable with it."

Broderick does take comfort in certain old-fashioned touchstones that he learned from his father and has always relied on. "Matthew is not a modern, rock & roll guy," says Parker. "Everything about him is pretty old-school." He is the kind of man who prefers vinyl records to CDs, loves SoHo's cobblestone streets and shaves with hot cream he rubs on with a brush. For years, Broderick has bought the same style of leather-soled lace-up cordovan shoes from Brooks Brothers.

As always, Broderick finds solace in the theater, and thanks to the success of The Producers, it looks as if he will be on the Broadway stage for many months to come. That's not an opportunity he takes for granted. "I sing at home, like any civilian," Broderick says. "But to be up there singing, with real violins and cellos and horns behind me - that's better than any movie."