TASTE MAKERS : TRACEY ULLMAN

Calendar’s choices of Taste Makers--people who move and shape our arts and entertainment in 1988--run the gamut. If the eight faces on the cover form a rather curious collection, it’s because creative abilities come in many forms.

As a result, our group’s pursuits range from directing the distinguished PBS series “American Playhouse,” to fronting the hard-living, hard-rock band Guns N’ Roses. All eight individuals have been significant players in 1988 and we feel will continue as leaders and creators in the future--as have the Taste Makers of previous years.

In this fourth annual survey, we hope to present an insight into what stimulates and influences these people of influence.

Great Britain’s comedy chameleon who, working in the United States, has set the pace for TV comedy. Her concern: Living in the U.S., media contradictions, irksome female cattiness, among others

Tracey Ullman has gotten more than a few laughs at the expense of the archetypal L.A. show business airhead on her weekly variety program, “The Tracey Ullman Show,” but she has to confess that her favorite gadget is the archetypal L.A. show business prop--a car phone. “I know I look totally L.A. when I use it but I really love it,” she says with a laugh.

The very model of a modern girl zipping down the freeway punching automatic re-dial, Ullman is surprisingly old-fashioned in other respects. “Because I’m trying to create classic TV, I like to investigate what’s classic in other fields. I’ve been reading things like Don Quixote, Trollope’s “The Barsetshire Chronicles,” and “A Far Cry From Kensington” by Muriel Spark. I love reading about ‘50s London, double-decker buses, having tea in Kensington and all that. Even though I ran away from it, I miss London.”

Given a choice between a good book and a movie, Ullman claims: “I’m not interested in most major studio films and would rather read. There are, of course, a few directors whose work I follow. Woody Allen is my favorite and he’s always brilliant. I like James Brooks--who I work for--Michael Apted and Louis Malle, but generally, I’m terrible about going to the movies.”

Though Ullman attends plays when in New York, she feels the Los Angeles theater scene doesn’t merit her time, nor is she particularly taken with what’s currently going on in pop music.

“I listen to KCRW and find I can’t listen to popular radio anymore. Occasionally, I’ll buy all the records on the Top 20 to see if I’m missing anything and I find that most of it’s cyclical--Tracy Chapman is the new Joan Armatrading and so on. The last new group to knock me out was the Sugarcubes, and I love Edith Piaf and Django Reinhardt. Lately I’ve been listening to the ultimate yuppie group, the Gipsy Kings.”

Describing Britishers (and herself) as “very reserved, private people,” Ullman comments that “living in L.A. has changed my personality in that I’m more outgoing and see people more--and I like that change as long as I don’t get dopey with it.”

Ullman may have become more outgoing, but don’t expect to run into her at the Scream club. She prefers Paddington’s (a quaint tea shop on La Cienega), Musso & Frank’s, Orsini, the Palm, and the Maryland Crab House. “I hate those trendy restaurants with Hockney prints and overly elaborate sauces, and I don’t eat out a lot because much of the food here is tasteless. Vegetables aren’t supposed to grow in the desert so they force grow them here with a lot of water and they don’t taste of anything.”

Ullman admits she’s not much of a whiz herself in the kitchen of her home in the Palisades, but she prefers it there to any place else in town.

“I was desperate to find a house that wasn’t a weatherboard set and I looked for this house for three years.” Adorning the walls of casa Ullman are “pictures of my baby and images of France by a printmaker named Pallachi. Modern art bores me completely and most of it looks as though my baby could’ve done it.”

At home with the Ullmans you can expect to find the TV tuned to “crappy shows like ‘Star Search’ and ‘Gene Scott.’ I also watch the Letterman show, and check out all the new sitcoms, which I pick to bits. Dennis Potter is the best thing to hit television in years. ‘The Singing Detective’ was without a doubt the best series ever made.”

Ask who her heroes are and Ullman immediately replies “The Beatles. Nothing entertainment-wise has affected me as profoundly--I had feelings a 5-year-old shouldn’t have about men, and I think they had a lot to do with my wanting to become an entertainer. They’re still heroes for me and when I hear their music now I nearly pass out with pleasure and memories. As for female role models, I don’t have much respect for other women, and much prefer men. Men don’t gossip and get catty, and most of my friends are men.”

While Ullman finds feminine cattiness irksome, her real pet peeve is the media.

“There’s so much contradiction in American media because the news is big business here. England has the BBC and you know you can trust it, but it’s hard to know what to believe here. It takes too long to separate the wheat from the chaff in the L.A. Times, so I read the New York Times and the Utne Reader, which is a no-frills (magazine). I also trust the Christian Science Monitor, the MacNeil/Lehrer program and David Letterman.”

The brash classicism that colors Ullman’s comedy is reflected in her fashion sense, which leans heavily on French designer Jean Paul Gaultier. “I wear bizarre things that most people wouldn’t consider wearing and love it when my clothes scare people. I hate that American preppie Ralph Lauren/Calvin Klein thing, and I’m not into any American designers. Melrose Avenue looks as though someone went mad.”

Though she’s not an exercise fanatic, Ullman does admit to occasional visits to what she refers to as “fat farms,” but dismisses the New Age movement as further evidence of the self-absorption she finds epidemic in America. Ullman feels she’s become more aware of the shifting currents of the culture since giving birth to her 2-year-old daughter Mabel, whom she describes as the dominant thing in her life.

This project was edited by David Fox, assistant Calendar editor.