Meet the woman behind Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes

JERRY’S ex, Elaine, is famous for being Seinfeld’s sassiest character. Who is the woman from real life who inspired her?

THE character of Elaine Benes in Seinfeld was based on several women but many people believe comedian and writer Carol Leifer was the main inspiration.

Is that true, though?

“Well, you’d probably have to ask Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David,” Leifer said coyly to news.com.au.

“People make that connection because I dated Jerry many years ago and we have stayed friends all these years. So I think when they were thinking about characters for the show it always makes it interesting when you have a friend who you’ve dated before. It kind of makes it more of an interesting relationship, so that’s why people make the connection.”

Leifer first met Seinfeld and David when she decided to give stand-up comedy a crack back when she was in college.

Carol Leifer in May this year.

Jerry Seinfeld with Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

“I went to audition at an open mic night at a club called The Comic Strip,” Leifer recalls.

“The MC that night and the person who was the arbiter of whether you went through the audition or failed was Jerry Seinfeld. The same thing goes for when I auditioned at Catch a Rising Star ... the MC that night was Larry David. So I literally go back to my first day in show business with both of them.”

Leifer remained mates with the funny fellas and in 1993 she joined the writing staff for Seinfeld, penning six episodes and winning four Emmy Awards for her work.

“What is so great about Seinfeld is that so many tangents of the show were really told from things that happened in real life,” she said.

“There’s an episode that I wrote called The Lip Reader where George brings a deaf woman with him to a party to lip read from across the room and find out why his ex-girlfriend broke up with him. One of the inspirations for that episode was, I was a working comic for so many years and spent so many years on the road and one of my pet peeves was when I would get picked up to go to the airport. These car service drivers would come at 6am and pick me up at my apartment

and take me to the airport and they were like Chatty Cathy, they wouldn’t shut up and it was so annoying to me. So we came up with this idea that Elaine pretends that she’s deaf so that the car service guys won’t talk to her.”

The Lip Reader episode: Marlee Matlin as Laura, Jason Alexander as George Costanza and Jerry Seinfeld as himself.

Not only did Leifer use experiences from her own life for Seinfeld storylines, but she was also inspired by true events from her friends’ lives.

“When you write on Seinfeld, the bane of any writer’s existence was people coming up to you and saying, ‘Oh I’ve got the best idea for a Seinfeld episode,’” Leifer said.

Most of them weren’t great but every now and then there’d be some gold.

“I have a friend from high school who said she had a great Seinfeld idea. She said, ‘We had a dinner party the other night and these people brought a bread to serve at the dinner and I forgot to put the bread out and I noticed at the end of the night they took the bread home.’

“I remember saying to my friend, ‘You know what? I’m going to pitch to Larry and Jerry because I think there’s something there.’ And sure enough when I pitched it to them, Larry David was like, ‘That’s a show. We’re definitely doing something with that,’ and that became the episode called The Rye.”

Leifer had a great working relationship with David and Seinfeld, describing the latter as “a very generous guy”.

“The story I told in my book, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Crying, is how my dad was sick and Jerry, who was flying east in his private jet, offered to fly me to see my dad in hospital.

Famous friends: Carol Leifer, Joy Philbin, Regis Philbin and Jerry Seinfeld.

“My dad had some dementia as a result of having a fall, so I went with Jerry in the jet which was so generous and I went to the hospital and my dad was actually doing really well.

“I went back the next morning and I ran into the nurse and I said, ‘How’s my dad doing?’ And she said, ‘Not so good. I’m sorry but the dementia is back. He woke up this morning talking about how his daughter had flown with Jerry Seinfeld on his private jet!’

“I love to tell that story because Jerry’s generosity almost landed my father longer in the hospital,” Leifer said laughing.

Leifer has also written for shows including Saturday Night Live, The Larry Sanders Show, The Ellen Show, Modern Family and the Academy Awards.

“I’ve written for Billy Crystal three times at the Oscars and I really enjoy it,” she said.

“When you work with Billy, so many of us (writers) are just off stage so that when things happen in the moment, he just comes off stage and you just throw jokes at him and just see which are the best ones that he likes.

“This was the year that some of the Oscars had been stolen and Erykah Badu, the singer,

came out on stage and she had a very tall headdress on. As she walked off, Billy was backstage with us saying, ‘What should we do?’

Billy Crystal during the Oscars in 2000.

Erykah Badu at the Academy Awards in 2000.

“I pitched him the joke, ‘Oh well, maybe now we know where one of the stolen Oscars is hidden!’ Billy snapped his fingers and said, ‘That’s it!’

“He went out and he did the joke and it got a great laugh and it’s one of those moments where I thought, ‘it doesn’t get any better than this’. Not only did Billy Crystal do my joke but a billion people heard it. That’s a very cool thing.”

One of the main reasons Leifer loves working on the Oscars is because, despite working in show business for almost 40 years, she still gets starstruck.

“There was one Oscars that I was working on and I was in the green room going over the copy with the presenters,” she said.

“Angelina Jolie was there with Brad Pitt and I really wanted to go over to her and tell her briefly that her adopting internationally really inspired my wife and I to adopt our son. We adopted him from Guatemala. But I didn’t get a chance to talk to her and I didn’t want to overstep my professional bounds.

“I told the Oscars talent co-ordinator my story a bit later and she said, ‘Write me an email and I’ll forward it onto her rep and maybe Angelina will get it.’ So I wrote this email up thinking what are the odds that it will actually get to her and sure enough a day later I got the sweetest,

nicest email from Angelina Jolie. She said she was so moved and touched by my email and so happy that we adopted and happy to have been an inspiration to us.”

Carol Leifer has many more fascinating and hilarious stories from her career in show business. You can read them all in her brilliant book, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Crying.