48 THE CUT | MARCH 2–15, 2020
It was the whole point. She was gorgeous, she was clever, she
was outer-borough middle class—she fairly honked. Drescher
is not unapprised of the singularity of Fran. “I was never going
to have Meryl Streep’s career,” she says. “I was going to have
Fran Drescher’s career, and that’s what I did.”
She couldn’t have had anyone else’s. She made her film debut
coming on to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. “Hey, are
you as good in bed as you are on that dance floor?” is her adenoi-
dal purr, and he leads her there, her proprietary hand on his
polyester ass. She kicked around in some other movies; she did
pilots for TV. But she realized early on that she’d have to make
her own opportunities. You can still see a few episodes of the last
sitcom she did before breaking out, the now-forgotten Princesses,
on YouTube: She and Julie Hagerty and the ’60s model Twiggy
shack up together as wacky roommates with wildly divergent
styles. But the show failed to catch on. “On TV, a New York Flavor
May Be Poison,” ran the headline in the New York Times.
After its cancellation, Drescher wound up on an international
flight with Jeff Sagansky, then-president of entertainment at
CBS. Seizing her chance, she buttonholed him. “I thought,
Thank you, Lord, and I ran into the bathroom to put some
makeup on,” she says. “I remember the movie was
starting—back then, everybody watched the same
movie—and it was The Prince of Tides with Barbra
Streisand. And he said, ‘Oh, I want to watch this. It’s
my favorite.’ And I thought to myself, Oh, this guy is
so ripe for me.” She told him that, because of her
voice, networks had always gotten her wrong. She
wasn’t sitcom seasoning. She was the main course.
Sagansky agreed to a meeting and eventually to
what would become The Nanny, the idea Drescher
and her then-husband, now-out gay ex-husband,
and now-and-forever writing partner, Peter Marc
Jacobson, came up with for her. It was sparked by her experi-
ence schlepping Twiggy’s daughter, Carly, around London.
They’d spent years working as frustrated actors in L.A. and
suddenly had the chance to write their own ticket. The studio
brought in Prudence Fraser and Robert Sternin to help guide
the writing process, but Drescher “was doing stories every
single day,” Jacobson says. “We were so young, I think we did
things that if I was getting into it now I’d be afraid to do. Who
brings Yiddish into a CBS eight-o’clock show in 1993?”
But the gamble worked. The Nanny was a major hit and, with
it, Drescher, who had been a bit player for Miloš Forman and a
standout as a brassy publicist in Spinal Tap,became not only a
star but a durable icon. A New York flavor, no longer poison, was
now a bragging right. The New York Times: “For Queens, a Place
in the Sun; Hollywood Is Suddenly Zooming In, With a Ven-
geance.” Queens’s other most famous modern export, Donald J.
Trump, was a frequent punch line and onetime guest star. They
were once two comic actors, one playing a souped-up fantasy
version of her younger self, the other playing a souped-up, fan-
tasy version of his father. Now they are president and guru, sit-
ting on the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. He bellows
with inchoate rage. Drescher remains a foghorn of joy.
DRESCHER LIKES TO point out that, until the show aired, there
hadn’t been a Jewish actress playing a Jewish main character
on an American comedy for decades—not since Molly Gold-
berg, the echt Jewish mama of early broadcasting, appeared
on CBS in the late 1940s. (Rhoda, the canonical sassy Jewish
gal of ’70s TV, was played by Valerie Harper, who wasn’t.) The
Nanny was “the only show where someone being Jewish was
a major part of the show,” Bloom says. “You’d think there’d be
a lot more shows where people were overtly Jewish, consider-
ing the disproportionate amount of Jewish people writing and
creating shows. But there’s this idea of ‘We don’t want to alien-
ate Middle America.’ ”
Drescher and Jacobson based Fran Fine on the young Fran and
insisted on her being Jewish even when a major conglomerate
offered to sponsor the show provided Fran be rewritten as Italian.
“We thought about it because we knew it was our big break,” Dre-
scher says, “and we didn’t want to be difficult. But I thought of
Neil Simon because he said, ‘Write what you know.’ I didn’t know
Italian like I know Jewish. So I mustered up my chutzpah and told
them Fran Fine must be Jewish. And they said, ‘Okay.’ ”
There were occasional complaints that Nanny Fine and her
Queens clan—a domineering, guilt-tripping Jewish mother
and a yenta grandmother, Yetta, named after Drescher’s grand-
mother—didn’t represent the best of Jewish womanhood. The
L.A. Times published an opinion piece to this effect,
then Drescher’s rebuttal. But the archetype she
incarnated was both hyperspecific and hyper-
relatable—if not in its details, then in its values—to
women, and non-women, used to being told to turn
it down. The shock of The Nanny was “not only the
Judaism,” Bloom says. “It was being too much, being
loud, being different. It was a lot of things that I
hadn’t seen before.”
Since The Nanny, Drescher has never fallen out of
the cultural mainstream, though she has, project by
project, drifted toward the outer boroughs of the tele-
vision landscape. There was Living With Fran, on the now-
defunct WB, about a Fran who juggles family and a younger
boyfriend (2005–6). Then Happily Divorced, on TV Land,
about a Fran still living with her newly out, newly gay ex-hus-
band (2011–13), another show she created with Jacobson. After
their divorce, they didn’t speak for a year—he hadn’t wanted to
get divorced and was angry. They’ve since come back together
professionally and personally, and they’re both single again now.
“I always used to joke and say if I do have a relationship, they’re
going to have to be happy sitting, when we’re 70 watching The
Nannyon television, between me and Fran,” he says.
Her life hasn’t all been sitcom rosy. “I’ve been very candid
about my personal life,” she says. She has written two memoirs
(fun fact: Fran loves Phish). The second, Cancer Schmancer,
details her fight to correctly diagnose and ultimately beat uter-
ine cancer. Drescher’s relationship after Jacobson, with a pro-
ducer on The Nanny, ended following her cancer treatment,
and a second marriage, to the tech entrepreneur Shiva Ayyadu-
rai, ended in divorce. Ayyadurai is internet infamous for his
claim that he invented email, though he sued Gawker for its
posts debunking the claim, a suit the company settled for
$750,000; he also ran unsuccessfully against Elizabeth War-
ren for a Massachusetts Senate seat. “In my second marriage,
we were together for three years. The first year was bliss, the
second year was agony and ecstasy, and the third year was just
agony, and I said, ‘Enough,’ ” Drescher has said. Some of herGIORGIO ARMANI
gown and wrap, similar
styles at armani.com;
LISA SHAUB FINE
MILLINERY hat, similar
styles at 134 Orchard St.;
CHOPARD earring,
at 709 Madison Ave.