Sandra Bernhard by Seán McGovern
Illustration by Sam Russell Walker
Seán McGovern is a Programmer at GAZE: Dublin LGBT International Film Festival, and a Programme Advisor for the BFI London Film Festival.
Some of you may have discovered Sandra Bernhard the way I did - by accident. For me it was an episode of Will & Grace, probably early 2001, viewed originally on actual broadcast television (can you believe it?). Maybe you recently came across her as Nurse Judy on Pose, Ryan Murphy’s fictionalised account of the late 80s New York ballroom scene, the early days of AIDS and the origins of voguing. The show is made with strong queer talent in front of and behind the camera, with legendary children such as Janet Mock and Our Lady J helming many aspects of production. As for Nurse Judy, the ordinary viewer may see a sensitive portrayal of an AIDS nurse, doing her best in the worst situation. For others, the sight of Sandra Bernhard is instantly ingenious casting. Bernhard is a woman who lived through it all, a riotous character who revelled in the campy queer glamour of the 80s, who most certainly lost countless friends to AIDS. She was besties with Madonna the moment she cannily appropriated voguing for the mainstream. And though she may have mellowed in her later years, Bernhard’s irreverence, chaos, her frenetic energy - behaving like no other performer at the time - shows us just how ahead of the curve this queer icon has always been.
There are many unique things about Sandra, and how she came to prominence is one of them. Her father a proctologist, her mother an abstract artist (“that’s how I view the world”), Sandra finished highschool in Arizona, headed to LA and went straight to beauty school. By day she did the nails of the greats and near-greats, by night she performed at The Comedy Store, becoming a staple at the LA institution. Not bad for a comedian who didn’t really tell jokes. Sandra would riff on popular culture, her own life as a manicurist, and perform songs. She stood out amongst the few women there, refusing to make self-deprecating jokes, a seeming requirement of all female comedians at that time.
What launched Bernhard to international attention was the career making role of Masha in Martin Scorsese’s 1983 film The King of Comedy. Masha was a combustible presence in the film, all legs and arms and hair and lips. An obsessive fan of Jerry Langford (played by comedy legend Jerry Lewis), Masha teams up with Robert de Niro’s stand-up stalker Rupert Pupkin to hold Jerry at gunpoint, duct-taping him to a chair while singing Come Rain or Come Shine. While every actress wanted to be the female lead of a Scorsese flick, not everyone could pull this one off. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role once you’ve seen it. Bernhard said in a 2013 interview that although she hates to admit it, “tonally, I was close to Masha at the time. I was on my own since I was 18, I moved to L.A. and became a manicurist and was totally self-supportive. I was like a loon. I was out every night, performing at the comedy clubs. It was the ’70s. You just didn’t think about the dangers. So I had a lot of compassion for Masha.”
The King of Comedy, even the veneer of humour, is now considered to be as dark and ominous as Taxi Driver, and revered much in the same way. But upon release, the film bombed. And as Sandy herself says in her hilarious tribute to Marty at the AFI, being cast in a Scorsese film is the highlight of one’s career, but “unfortunately it was my first film, so for me it’s been downhill ever since.”
Bernhard’s entire career post-King of Comedy is a hodge-podge of what-nexts, hustles, side-hustles, personal triumphs, cult status and further bombs. For me, Sandra Bernhard embodies a kind of Queer Art of Failure: one day gracing the Chanel runway, the next a one-episode arc of Highlander: The Series. Bernhard laughs it off, and has done so with insouciance time and again. Intentional or not, she railed against the career trajectory of female performers, both in what they were supposed to do, and how they were supposed to look, remarking that “you just don't see lips like these often enough on a white girl”.
Smaller roles followed, but Bernhard had a gigging spirit, grabbing each opportunity whether it’s a cameo in Sesame Street’s Follow That Bird or one of the many brilliant appearances she made on Late Night With David Letterman. For anyone ready to take a trip to Sandyland, this is the place to start. Across her nearly 30 appearances you can chart the first 10+ years of her career. From the wry and relatively restrained early guest spots, practically girlish her first time to promote the King of Comedy, to the Diane Von Furstenberg Paper Towels, to the many interviews she did about Without You I’m Nothing, which over the course of the interviews goes from a one woman show, to a Nicolas Roeg-produced feature film.
Beginning as a show in 1987, it was quite unlike anything else, but after all - it’s Sandy we’re talking about. The show featured childhood reminiscences, fantasies about being a gentile at Christmas and Bacharach-scored segments about the woman she could have been. As well as her own take on Ain’t No Mountain High Enough - sung about the night she maybe saved Warren Beatty (“If this is about Ishtar - I’m getting up and walking out of your life forever because that’s too self-indulgent for even me!”).
When the show was adapted into a film, it added another layer of absurd fantasy. With the fingerprints of Nicolas Roeg came a melange of truth and fiction, and a masterclass in the art of artifice. There are stripteases, pop culture and knife-edge racial politics of knowingly-appropriated black culture. By the time the credits role, no-one is certain of what she was trying (or not trying) to do. Without You I’m Nothing taught me that everything we’ve been told about straight society is a lie, and queers have been blessed with the power to realise this.
I never tire of the appearances on Letterman. Watching them you can trace not only her success, but the point where being Sandra Bernhard is better than anything she’s ostensibly there to promote. But in later appearances, Sandra is more of a ferocious high-fashion glamour-puss whose comedy is mainly derived from saying designer labels with a clipped accent. It’s not her best, and Dave finds it tiresome. But my sense of Gemini solidarity understands this: believing your own hype when success comes your way, knowing that people look to you to be the truth teller, albeit only the truth of others (but never your own). Delivering acerbic observations that roll off the tongue but don’t always land well - especially with those who will be asking you back. For all her career ups and downs, Sandra still does shows across the nation, and hosts her own radio show on Sirius XM. She may have had a bigger career if she didn’t piss so many people off. But fuck it, who cares?
A piece in a June 2019 edition of the New Yorker was entitled “Sandra Bernhard on Leaving Bitchy Behind.” Now in her 60s, the mother of a grown daughter, the queer trailblazer has naturally mellowed. Her heyday of gallivanting with gal-pal Madonna firmly is firmly the past, along with history making moments as the first lesbian character on TV in Roseanne. But in the queerest sense of the word, Bernhard still defies definition, eschewing the term lesbian even after 20 years in a same sex relationship with girlfriend Sara Switzer, saying that “People used to attack me for not coming out and saying, ‘I’m a dyke’... all these tastemakers in the gay world were handing me my ass, and I thought, You don’t even get it! I was in the trenches in the seventies breaking all the rules about what sexuality was!” Bernhard prefers “girlfriend” above other more age-appropriate terms like the sterile “partner”.
Her role as Nurse Judy on Pose is yet another transformation of the ever evolving performer, and the fact that she’s a regular on the show everyone’s talking about is a gift to all of us. She now embodies a warmth that comes to all good Geminis who have lived long enough to temper our impulses. But don’t dare think she’s gone all soft. To play an AIDS nurse who cares for the dying but also speaks truth to power at ACT UP demos, you need a performer with a bit of that Bernhard-edge.
Sam Russell Walker is an illustrator based in Glasgow. He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2015 and his work is inspired by film, pop culture, the human form, plants and fashion. His process is also heavily influenced by the act of mark making and creating textures through this process.
