The team managed to wrangle a few concessions. Frasier would follow Crane’s return home to Seattle, trading the brawling stickiness of Boston for the Pacific Northwest’s newly-cool capital of latte culture. Moreover, aside from Crane, no other characters from Cheers would be back. This gave Grammer the chance to shape the show away from the overshadowing success of its predecessor. His crotchety affection for his elderly father Marty (John Mahoney) and his intellectual sparring with his brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) became fan favourites.
With longevity came eccentricity. Grammer reportedly insisted that the Frasier set was kept refrigerated during filming, believing comedy thrived in cooler temperatures. And his acting methods, whereby he would skip rehearsals and patchily learn his lines to bring greater authenticity to the role, caused conniptions among his fellow cast members.
There was a darker side to this unorthodoxy, too. With fame, Grammer’s alcoholism and drug-taking escalated. In 1988, he was arrested for drunk-driving and cocaine possession and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Two years later, he was re-arrested for drug possession and given a three-year probationary sentence, $500 fine and 300 hours of community service. In 1996, three years after Frasier launched, he smashed his Dodge Viper into a wall while drunk; his cast members came to his rescue and production was suspended for a month while he dried out in a rehab clinic.
“He would ooze into the studio, his life all out of sorts,” Frasier writer Dan O’Shannon told GQ in 2012. “Jimmy would say ‘action’, and he would snap into Frasier and expound in this very erudite dialogue, and be pitch-perfect. And Jimmy would yell ‘cut!’ and he would ooze back into Kelsey – glazed-over eyes, half asleep, going through whatever he was going through.”
The stint in rehab smoothed things out, but Grammer’s personal life remained jagged. He has been married four times, and has seven children from four different women. In 1995, he was accused of having underage sex with his 15-year-old babysitter, but after hearing her claims, and Grammer’s steadfast denial, a grand jury threw out the case, citing the year-long delay in pressing charges and the consequent lack of physical evidence.
His second marriage, to exotic dancer Leigh-Anne Csuhany, lasted only a year; Grammer alleged that Csuhany was abusive and fired a gun at him. He filed for annulment and evicted her from their home when she was three months pregnant, and she subsequently miscarried during a suicide attempt. He met his third wife, Camille Donatacci, an actor and star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, on a blind date. Their 14-year relationship was marked by domestic tiffs and tabloid back-biting. Reflecting on his ex-wife, Grammer said in 2019: “I don’t really talk about her so much because so much of her life is spent talking about me.”
