Everybody's All American

By Richard Zoglin

Sprawled across a rose-patterned armchair in his new Hollywood Hills home, John Goodman looks like a baby elephant lolling in a flower bed. The oversize (6 ft. 3 in., 260 lbs.), overworked actor is taking a rare five-day respite from his nonstop schedule. Says Goodman, with a sigh of exhaustion: "I'm drained."

It isn't hard to see why. Since September alone, Goodman has helped Al Pacino catch a serial murderer in Sea of Love, watched Richard Dreyfuss crash to earth in Always, and dried Bette Midler's tears in the just released weeper Stella. He is currently shooting a sci-fi film for Steven Spielberg, Arachnophobia, in which he plays an exterminator battling killer spiders. All that in addition to his regular weekday job: playing Roseanne Barr's TV husband in the top-rated ABC sitcom Roseanne. "More has happened to me in the last year," says Goodman, "than anybody except maybe Nicolae Ceausescu."

With his beer-barrel physique and pliant pudding face, Goodman, 37, has become Hollywood's hottest character actor. He has the nimble, dancer-like grace of such portly clowns as Oliver Hardy and Jackie Gleason, anchored by a straight-from-the-heartland believability. After a sweetly engaging turn as a lovelorn Texan in David Byrne's True Stories, he literally burst onto the scene in the 1987 comedy Raising Arizona, playing an escaping convict who, drenched in mud, erupts from the ground with a roar. He shone again, and added new shadings, as an over-the-hill athlete reliving past glories in Everybody's All American.

Even as his lovable-sidekick roles have begun to grow familiar, Goodman shows a knack for making the best of tired circumstances: as an alcoholic ex- bartender in Stella, he is just about the only credible touch in a film reeking of Hollywood sham. In Roseanne Goodman has created a full-blooded portrait of a working-class lug, equally credible whether giving heartfelt advice to a teenage daughter or doing boisterous pirouettes in a bowling alley. He seems to mesh perfectly with Barr; Goodman can be deferential even while he is stealing the show.

Goodman's co-workers speak enthusiastically of his talent and dedication, as well as his offscreen antics. "John is a lot of fun," says Barr. "He puts us on the floor." Director John Pasquin praises Goodman's "fertile imagination" as an actor. In one upcoming episode, his character is caught eating ice cream when he is supposed to be on a diet. Goodman improvised the notion of quickly swallowing the ice cream and then fighting off a piercing headache from the cold. Marvels Pasquin: "It was totally rooted in the situation, not something you would ordinarily think of, and hysterically funny."

One of three children of a working-class St. Louis family, Goodman was raised by his mother from the age of two, when his father died of a heart attack. After graduating from Southwest Missouri State University (Kathleen Turner was a classmate), Goodman hopped a train for New York City, helped by $1,000 saved for him by his brother. A decade of stage work culminated in 1985 with a major Broadway role: as Huck Finn's "Pap" in the hit musical Big River. In 1987, while appearing in a Los Angeles production of Antony and Cleopatra, Goodman was asked to audition for a new sitcom opposite Roseanne Barr. The reading was an instant success. "I knew I had the part when I walked out," he recalls. The producers were so sold on Goodman that they delayed the show until he could finish shooting Everybody's All American.

Goodman retains strong roots in the Midwest, returning frequently to St. Louis for visits. Once known for his hard-partying bachelor life-style, he got married last October to Annabeth Hartzog, 21, a college student he met in New Orleans in 1987. Teases Goodman: "She was just a country girl looking for a gravy train."

He seems little affected by the much publicized turmoil that has plagued the Roseanne set. While Barr has staged tantrums, battled with producers and talked about quitting, Goodman has been a stabilizing force through his sheer professionalism. "I just don't involve myself," he says. "Roseanne is committed to doing a quality show on her own terms, and she's got her terms. I'm an actor and a reactor. I do what they set down in front of me."

And they do keep setting things in front of him. Goodman will shoot two more films this spring and summer, both with lead roles: a Las Vegas lounge singer who inherits the English throne in King Ralph, and a salesman in 1940s Hollywood in Barton Fink. Meanwhile, he and Annabeth are preparing for a baby (due in September) and looking forward to a relatively settled life. "Unless," notes Goodman, "I fall hopelessly out of fashion and we have to work in a carnival." Fat chance.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles