Mandy Patinkin's anger rises like the steam from a nice hot bowl of chicken soup.
"They're trying to break our legs!" he yells, his deep-throated tenor bouncing off the walls of his favorite Upper West Side nova emporium, Barney Greengrass (the Sturgeon King), where the owners allow him to charge an onion bagel extra-well toasted with nova and fresh-squeezed orange juice to his personal account, a luxury afforded to few in this life.Patinkin, 42, a star of the struggling new CBS series "Chicago Hope," plays Dr. Jeffrey Geiger (the Surgeon King), possibly the most neurotic television doctor ever to have squeezed fingers into rubber gloves.
For Patinkin, playing a neurotic is not what you call a stretch.
On this January morning, what has the high-strung Patinkin hot as blintzes is the nature of competition and sportsmanship in American life. Or to be more precise, those mean-spirited programmers over at NBC who reran the pilot episode of that network's hit medical series, "E.R.," against Patinkin's show on CBS the same week his show moved to its new time slot on Monday night at 10. This seeming act of aggression was the latest conflict in a battle that started last fall when the shows began the season against each other, on Thursday nights at 10. "E.R." emerged as the clear ratings winner.
"I was stunned when I first heard about it," Patinkin says about the "E.R." rerun, loud enough to wake a sleeping whitefish. "Everyone I knew was stunned, from the cabdrivers to the cleaning lady."
Do not be surprised at the idea of Patinkin's heatedly discussing the vagaries of network programming with his cleaning lady. For as long as he has been a part of the show-business world, Patinkin has been revealing his profoundly introspective, deeply self-analytical side to anyone who will listen, particularly as it relates to the plays, songs or movies that employ his varied talents.
Taking a head-first leap into a television series, Patinkin has found new windmills to tilt at. His character often holds center stage in an ensemble drama that is set in a high-tech Chicago hospital. His co-stars include Adam Arkin, Hector Elizondo, E.G. Marshall and Roxanne Hart.
Just as Patinkin sings at the drop of a hat, so Dr. Geiger sings at the drop of a scalpel, often from Patinkin's own repertory of show tunes; and like Patinkin, Dr. Geiger specializes in matters of the heart, in surgery and in life, his own worn frequently on the sleeve of his scrubs. Patinkin has, at last, found a character with an emotional charge to match his own - quite a feat for an actor whose roles have included those of Che Guevara and Georges Seurat.
This primal passion has driven him to go to extraordinary lengths to keep "Chicago Hope" alive. It is quite possible that Patinkin is the first star of a series on one network to demand a meeting with a top programming executive at another network, simply to complain about the rival's counter-programming strategy. Yet it comes as no surprise that Patinkin made just such a trip in December to the offices of Don Ohlmeyer, the president of NBC's West Coast operations, in Burbank, Calif.
"I completely am in favor of every level of competition and good sportsmanship," Patinkin says. "I have two boys. I teach them to be very competitive. But with good sportsmanship. And I felt that this was poor sportsmanship. It crossed the line. I feel that if you, as a network, had original footage of the shooting of President Kennedy that no one had seen, from the grassy knoll, and indeed there were other people involved, I would have broken your legs if you didn't put that on the air opposite us. Or anything else. This was a very different thing of trying to be mean-spirited, strictly beyond the need for numbers."
"Do you have to be a college graduate to understand what the point of that is?" he said. "It's to break our legs!" (Playing a surgeon has apparently made Patinkin more sensitive to the pain of limb fractures.)
Hearing of Patinkin's complaints, an NBC spokesman offers a suggestion. "Maybe Mandy should be meeting with the people at his own network," says Flody Suarez, the spokesman. "They could tell him what they know, which is that we scheduled the rerun of the `E.R.' pilot on that Monday night weeks before we knew CBS was going to put `Chicago Hope' there."
For his part, Patinkin heaps praise on Ohlmeyer for meeting with him. "To Don Ohlmeyer's credit, for whatever he and I may have discussed in his room," Patinkin says, regaining his composure, "he had no hesitation whatsoever in opening his door to me. He was incredibly friendly, and we'll have a further relationship. We had a great chat. I would let him in my door any time of the week."
Niceties aside, Patinkin returns quickly to emotional matters. "I was overwhelmed," he says, furiously brushing a wisp of curly black hair off his forehead, "that people were shocked that people talk to each other in Hollywood."
Hollywood has never figured all that prominently in Patinkin's professional life. He has lived in New York since the 1970s and has performed in such Broadway shows as "Evita" and "Sunday in the Park With George." More recently, he has recorded albums of old standards, and for now he betrays no inclination to leave the city.
His agents had long kept him away from television parts, but the major movie roles he coveted never materialized. So, it has been with some pleasure that Patinkin has recently noticed - in stares at a Knicks game or the frenzy created by a visit to the dishwasher department of a Sears store upstate in Kingston, N.Y., near his country home - that television has suddenly made him more famous than ever before.
"I just never hit in terms of feature films," Patinkin says. That may be one reason he will not soon forget the Thursday afternoon in late January 1994 when his agent called about a new pilot script by David E. Kelley, the Emmy award-winning creator of "Picket Fences" and writer for "L.A. Law," that would shortly be faxed his way. Patinkin read it before dinner and agreed, within just a few hours of reading a script that he now describes as "brilliant," to a deal that locked up his services for the next five years of his life.
"I wasn't familiar with David Kelley at the time, because all I watch is CNN," Patinkin says.
Halfway through shooting the pilot last year, Kelley sent Patinkin some rewritten pages that gave their budding relationship a new dimension. Without warning, Kelley had given Dr. Geiger an unexpected new twist: a dead son.
"I didn't know that when I read the script or when I shot the first half," Patinkin recalled, the testiness of that moment uncomfortably resurfacing. "Which then meant I either had a wife or someone that I was living with, or not living with, but had a son. How did he die? I didn't know."
A pause in the conversation suggests an even longer pause in the filming of the pilot, probably long enough for Kelley to learn something about Patinkin's needs. (Kelley declined to be interviewed for this article.)
From their collaboration on the pilot grew a character so cosmically in tune with Patinkin's sensibility that the series can now be almost as over the top as he is.
"In preparing for the role, I got to hold a human heart in my hands," he says, his voice practically choking at the memory.
Every moment of an encounter with Mandy Patinkin feels fraught with emotion. You know he would love nothing more than to make everyone in Barney Greengrass weep into their latkes with a rousing rendition of "Over the Rainbow." What has always distinguished him from his acting brethren is that naked emotional power, the sense that an amazing amount of thought goes into each moment of his life, sometimes too much. This is a man who has had therapy.
All of which makes the comparative normalcy of his life so unexpected. His longtime marriage to the actress and playwright Kathryn Grody; his close relationship with his sons, Isaac and Gideon, and even his Upper West Side apartment all separate his life from the standard high-powered dysfunctional family life that often goes with a Hollywood career.
Patinkin compares himself in this respect with Kelley, who balances two network shows with marriage to Michelle Pfeiffer and two children. "There's a harmony, and understanding, and simpatico between David and myself," he says. "You feel it. We both have families. We are both very much in love with working. We very much don't want to sacrifice either one, yet we recognize that things need to be sacrificed."
For that reason, Patinkin tortures himself (also a favorite hobby) with finding a way to maintain his life in New York as he commutes 3,000 miles to work on the 20th Century Fox lot in Beverly Hills. "It's 22 minutes from there to the airport," he says.
While in Los Angeles, he says, he lives "in Hollywood, or West Hollywood, I don't really know, one of the Hollywoods," in the basement of a house. He shares the space with one of his two 7-month-old black Labrador retriever puppies. Dad and one dog fly cross-country together, while the other dog stays in New York with Mom and the boys. "The puppy and I suffer together," he says, which is not hard to imagine.