Panic. When actress-comedienne Geri Jewell steps in front of an audience, there's a moment of sheer panic. She has a limping walk and a listing head, slurred speech and a wrinkly smile that comes curving out of left field, and you can't blame people for worrying that they have let themselves in for a disaster. Twenty-three years old, blue-eyed and talented. Geri Jewell has cerebral palsy. People had better get used to it.
Whether as a stand-up comedienne, or as recurring character "Cousin Geri" on NBC's The Facts of Life, or as the star of a prospective movie based on her own life, Geri Jewell acknowledges her cerebral palsy, jokes about it, exploits it. Not long ago, she sidled out in front of a Southern California comedy-club audience and, like a dabbling alchemist, practiced transmuting pain into laughter. These are the jokes:
"I'm one of the few people who drive better than they walk" she says. "I've been pulled over once for speeding and four times for walking.... Ever notice there are no handicapped people on TV? ... Name That Handicap? Bowling for Crutches? ... I've had some really high scores bowling ... only never in my lane. ... Whenever I start plucking my eye-brews, I end up piercing my ears.
It's a peculiar kind of vaudeville, which walks -- Geri Jewell might say staggers -- the line between humor and mockery. It's a line she knows well. Pronounced dead at birth ("They couldn't find my heartbeat; they were only trying to save my mother, who was hemorrhaging badly"), she then spent three months in an incubator, suffered a bout of pneumonia and took a trip to new doctors in California where she was diagnosed a victim of cerebral palsy, a disabling condition characterized by loss of muscle control and, in her case, hearing loss. It is not inherited or infectious; It's a condition resulting from brain damage and, while it can be treated, it is not curable.
For Geri, it looked like a life of therapy, "special" schools, carefully tailored goals. But, early on. Geri Jewell had other ideas.
"I took the wheels off my skateboard, the tires off my bike, nailed a patio chair onto the skateboard and built a wheel-chair," she recalls. "I went through this performance because I didn't want the kids to think I was retarded. I thought: With a wheelchair, they'll know I'm handicapped and there's nothing wrong with my mind."
If anything was wrong with her mind, it was a surfeit of fantasies. "I used to play that I was a hero. I was really involved with Vietnam because both of my brothers were there. I used to pretend I was fighting the war in a wheelchair. I had a great imagination."
Too handicapped for normal schools, Jewell was also too deft and cunning for special schools. "I just slid by." She grew up believing she didn't fit in anywhere except, perhaps, Hollywood.
"There was a bag of potatoes on the tool bench in our garage," she says. "and the potatoes were Oscars and I pretended to be different stars going up for their acceptance speeches. I used to practice what I would say."
She was chockful of fantasies and, for a time, the biggest fantasy of all was acceptance. When she entered a suburban California high school, she hoped to be just another student.
"After special schools. I went to the same high school my sister went to. I thought I was going to automatically fit in with the neighborhood kids. I was going to date football players, go to the prom, all that. It didn't happen. I found out that being popular in a special school doesn't mean being popular in a regular high school. I was still looked upon as an 'OH' [orthopedically handicapped] kid. One of them, not one of us."
Geri Jewell sits eating an egg-salad sandwich in a snack bar not far from her new apartment, near Hollywood. It's a place her Facts of Life colleague Lisa Whelchel discovered. Close friends, the two of them roomed together until recently. Lisa's 8-by-lO picture is on the wall in the snack bar, and people recognize Geri when she walks in. One suspects she likes the recognition: being spotted on a sidewalk or picked out of a crowd. When the dream of fitting-in faded, another dream replaced it: standing out.
A high-school misfit, a self-described con artist and clown. Jewell never doubted that she was a performer. Hollywood-bound. Not everyone was convinced. A Goodwill Industries training program indicated she might do well as a receptionist. State counselors urged her to take clerical courses in college. She took their money, not their advice, and studied theater arts.
"After college. I tried to get a job." she says now, in the snack bar. "I went to City Hall and tried typing. I wasn't fast enough. I tried to work at 31-flavors ice cream. I broke the cone in my hand. I tried joining the Navy. They told me to try the Army. I tried to work as a computer-data processor, punching cards as they went by on the machine. Ten cards passed by the time I got done with one. I lasted three days."
Once, assuming she would never be married. she thought she'd be a nun. Or maybe a circus clown. "With the makeup, the funny hair, the circus costume, no one would know I had cerebral palsy. I'd just be a funny clown." Three years ago, Jewell tried out at a comedy club, no costume, no makeup. She was a cerebral palsy comic, with a T-shirt that joked about her jerky movements. "I don't have cerebral palsy, I'm drunk." it proclaimed. At 45 cents per T-shirt letter, polio would have been cheaper, she quipped.
Her stand-up comedy was novel and well-received .. . mostly. But her failures were harrowing. There was a grotesque night at a club out on New York's Long Island, 30 minutes for $50. Thirty minutes that turned into less than 10.
"People were talking and talking and talking. I started telling jokes and there was no laughter. People were sitting in front of me, leaning back in their chairs with their arms crossed and blank expressions on their faces. I tried to work to the people in back of them and they looked the same.'Who the hell put her on?' 'How much did she have to drink?' 'She's making fun of the handicapped!' The rumor spread quickly through the room that I didn't have CP. There was hate staring at me. I started crying. When I left the stage, they clapped because I was leaving."
She succeeded more often than she bombed, but the success was limited. The jokes she'd devised were getting tired and Geri Jewell found that proving something could be done was not the same as doing it forever. She still thought of herself as an actress with a comic bent, a la Carol Burnett. And Norman Lear, catching her performance at a benefit dinner, agreed. "She was terrific at that benefit," a Lear cohort recalls. "She was totally refreshing and new. She wiped the audience out. Norman fell in love with her. He thought she should be on The Facts of Life." Soon she was.
Geri Jewell became buxom, snobbish Blair Warner's "Cousin Geri," a character who happened to have cerebral palsy and happened to be a nightclub comic. It may not sound like much of a stretch, but Lear's people were pleasantly surprised.
"At first, we weren't sure how much she could do well," executive producer Jerry Mayer remarks. "Her speech patterns are affected by cerebral palsy and we wondered about long speeches. We didn't want to tire her and we didn't want the audience to get tired of trying to figure out what she was saying. But we saw her act, we talked to her, gave her more to do and treated her like any other actress."
For Geri Jewell, her first appearance on The Facts of Life was like a dream. "I was in seventh heaven. I couldn't believe it. The five days of taping were right before the holidays, and everybody was high-spirited. I cried after the taping was over. It was hard to say goodbye. I thought to myself: Well, that's it; you've touched it and it's over.
It wasn't over. The show was so well received that she was signed to appear as a semiregular and will be back next season. With her cerebral palsy established, "Cousin Geri" can move on to other things. More interesting things. In one show she has a romantic fling with a dashing French teacher. One half-serious title for this episode is "Is There Sex After Cerebral Palsy?" The answer is a cheerful yes, in real life as well as on television.There are lots of things after cerebral palsy. Geri Jewell can tell you that. She was a smash on Norman Lear's patriotic special, "I Love Liberty," and she plans to keep on improving.
"What do you think?" she asks. "Do you think I wake up every morning of my life and say,'Geri, you have cerebral palsy'? I never thought about cerebral palsy as often as when I was doing comedy. I used cerebral palsy, I manipulated it. It got me something. But it's old. I want to get past it. The more parts I get, the less people will see my cerebral palsy. I'll blend in. I'll be part of society."