Edition: U.S. / Global

THE BIG CITY; Seinfeld, Come Home?

By John Tierney
Published: March 5, 1995

A NEW HOPE HAS gripped New Yorkers ever since an item appeared in Liz Smith's gossip column in January. "Jerry Seinfeld is looking to make a permanent move back to New York City," she revealed, and soon the rumors escalated among Manhattan's actors and script writers -- not only was Jerry coming, but he was bringing his show with him. New York magazine celebrated by putting Seinfeld's smiling face on the cover above the words: "Goodbye, L.A. Hello, N.Y.C."

I can understand the excitement, because I, too, have longed for Jerry and the gang to come home. "Seinfeld" always struck me as a troubling paradox. Yes, it captures the travails of Manhattan better than any show ever on television, but it is written and filmed in Los Angeles. Yes, the characters Jerry and George seem to be quintessential New Yorkers, the kind who believe, as John Updike put it, "that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding." But the characters' creators and real-life counterparts -- Seinfeld and his friend Larry David, the show's executive producer -- appear to be doing just fine in California. Their show's success threatens New York's work ethic, which is based on the assumption that we all have to endure the city's cramped indignities in order to gain that ineffable New York savvy. If the "Seinfeld" crew can prosper by reproducing that quality in the sunny hills of Southern California, where does that leave us? New York, New York: why make it here if you could make it so much more pleasantly somewhere else?

So after the rumors of their move started, I went out to Studio City to talk to Seinfeld and David, hoping to hear how anxious they are to return, how impossible it is to do good work without the city's daily stimulation. What I actually heard was a little different, and it leaves me in an awkward position. I feel like an expatriate Polynesian who has come home to find the villagers gathered at an abandoned wartime airstrip, praying to the heavens for the return of the American cargo planes that once brought riches. It is my painful duty to tell the Seinfeld cargo cult: Return to your homes, people! It's no use! The Great Ones are not coming back to our island!

Seinfeld and David tried to break the news gently as they sat in their office, where they work at facing desks. Seinfeld explained that he had indeed suggested moving the whole show back to New York for several episodes or maybe even a whole season. The attempts to import the Upper West Side -- weekly shipments of H & H bagels, a new $800,000 exterior set this season simulating the sidewalks of Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues -- were no substitute for the real thing. But now it looked as if the move would be too complicated for the rest of the staff.

"People have really bought into this Hollywood life style," Seinfeld said. He insisted that he still considers himself a New Yorker and regards his 14 years in Los Angeles as an extended business trip. David, though, said he wasn't sure if he would ever move back -- an ambivalence that deeply concerned me, particularly when he said that he hadn't been to New York for two years. How could the Brooklynite responsible for George's neurotic New York psyche be content . . . in Los Angeles?

"George is more or less based on you, isn't he?" I asked David. "I just can't see George out here. Of all the characters, he's the one who shouldn't be able to survive anywhere but New York."

"He definitely is a strong side of me," David said. "George is a good vehicle for a lot of the sick things you would think about doing. No, I couldn't really imagine him out here, either. Probably he'd yell at somebody in his car, and they would follow him home and kill him."

"But you don't mind staying out here yourself?" I said.

"I get the Knicks and the Rangers on the satellite, and I get The Times every day, so I'm not really missing that much at this point."

Seinfeld was staring across the desk exactly the way Jerry stares across the coffee shop table at George. "That is an insane thing to say," he explained.

"Yeah, I know what I'm missing," David said. "There's life going on in the streets there. New York makes you a little more mental because you're dealing every minute with problems. You're walking around without any money. You're smelling urine. You're bumping into people." He was working himself into a frenzy. "The bus is coming, you don't have change, it's a big thing -- 'You got change for a dollar? Change for a dollar?' You're begging on the bus! 'Let me on the bus!' Why do you need exact change on the bus?" He looked exhausted.

"When I lived there I wasn't a happy person. I'm not really a happy person here, either, so really what's the difference where I live? If I'm going to be unhappy, I may as well live in a place where it's a little easier to do things if you're going to be miserable." He looked at Seinfeld. "What do you think?"

Seinfeld was smiling. "I'm thinking, 'What does it take to make a person happy?' I'm looking at you, I'm thinking, 'What is there in life that could make you happy that you haven't got?' " Acclaim, power, wealth, love, home, family -- he and David both knew all the unGeorgelike rewards that David had enjoyed since moving to Los Angeles.

"Obviously," Seinfeld said, "nothing on earth makes a difference."

"Right," David said. A minute later, though, something occurred to him. He remembered the daily chorus of horns outside his apartment in Manhattan. "It was gridlock every day at rush hour. You wouldn't believe what it sounded like. That was one thing I did like. I liked the fact that so many people were having such stress, and I could be in my apartment instead of having to be out there with them. Yeah, that really gave me some pleasure."

He looked so unexpectedly contented that I thought of asking him if maybe now he felt more like moving back to New York, if only for the horns of gridlock. But the question didn't seem so important anymore. I could see that it didn't really matter which coast the show was produced on. George and his creator had not prospered by fleeing the pain of New York. They had prospered by taking it with them.

"It doesn't make any difference where he lives," Seinfeld said. "He doesn't even know where he is. He's like in one of those bathyspheres with those little H. G. Wells windows where you can barely see out."

David nodded and gracefully accepted what only a true, still uncorrupted New Yorker could regard as a compliment. "I could be unhappy anywhere," he said proudly. "I could go to Venice for a year, and it wouldn't make a dent in me."

Photo: The West Side out West: On the California set of "Seinfeld." (PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID STRICK/ONYX, FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)