The Crystal Ball

If there’s one thing he vows on his fifth turn at the Oscar podium, it’s this:

Billy Crystal will not show you the money.

As he jokes, sings, ad-libs and cavorts his way through the marathon Academy Awards telecast, the comic who has become the gold standard for Oscar hosts in the ‘90s pledges not to utter the catchy “Show me the money!” line from the Oscar-nominated hit “Jerry Maguire.”

Well, OK, not unless he really has to. (Hey, it’s a long night. He even dubbed the academy Web site to which anyone can send jokes and comments www.whyistheshowsolong.com)

“I’m trying to get through the show so I don’t say it,” he says with a slight wince.

You can’t always go by what Crystal says. Three years ago, after Whoopi Goldberg, his good friend and partner in the Comic Relief fund-raisers, emceed the show, he told an interviewer: “As I sat there watching Whoopi do it, I said to myself, ‘I don’t ever have to do this again.’ ”

He listens quietly as this quote is read to him.

“So here we are,” he says with a little smile.

After four straight hosting gigs (1990-1993)--plus duties hosting the Grammys and Comic Relief--he wanted a break. “I didn’t want to be the designated host-guy,” says Crystal, who won one Emmy (in 1991) for hosting and two for writing on the show, in 1991 and 1992.

He was tired of going on and having that get-the-first-laugh tension, tired of spending the two months before going on thinking of nothing else but the show. “That gets to be old,” he says. “And when you stop doing something, you realize how hard it was. . . . I needed to recharge my batteries and take my talents in different places.”

He did do “Hamlet,” playing the first gravedigger in Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour version. (How’s that for different?)

But after three consecutive Oscar shows spent not in front of the podium but in front of his TV set with the rest of the fabled 999 billion (or whatever) who are watching, Crystal started thinking about coming back.

He probably would have done it last year--when Quincy Jones produced--but no one asked. “I think they assumed I wouldn’t do it.”

He also figured it wouldn’t hurt to be doing the Oscars less than two months before the early May opening of “Father’s Day,” a comedy in which he stars with Robin Williams. “That’s a really funny movie and I’m really excited about it. And I didn’t want people to forget what I do,” he says.

He waited until his friend Whoopi Goldberg signaled her intentions to not do the show. Then when longtime Oscar show producer Gil Cates--who did not do the show last year--called Crystal and asked him, he accepted. “I felt like, ‘You know what? One more good one.’ ”

So on Monday, he’ll walk out on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in his Armani tux, with a toothbrush in his pocket--a reminder that he was once just a Long Island kid who held up a toothbrush as an Oscar to mimic the winners as he watched the show on a black-and-white TV. The first few rows of the audience--all of whom he will see with a discomforting clarity because the house lights are up--he describes as “nervous, nervous people.” This year, many of them will be new and different faces from the bounty of independent films that garnered nominations.

“It’s sort of fun to say, ‘Great, three years away, and, uh, who are you people?’ ” says Crystal, who has seen all the nominated films. “We’ll have some fun with that and be respectful because I think the quality of the movies this year is quite terrific. It’s great the academy people voted for good work rather than the blockbuster syndrome.”

He’s sitting in a Peninsula Hotel conference room that just doubled as makeup and dressing room for a photo shoot for this story in which he posed as someone from each of the nominated films. To imitate Frances McDormand’s plain-spoken wily cop in “Fargo” he had pulled on a heavy officer’s jacket and geeky ear-flapped cap. Thick socks doubled as mittens. He stood before the photographer and scrutinized his hands.

“Somebody cloned Lamb Chop,” he deadpanned.

Going for one of the slightly vacant, bemused looks of McDormand’s character, he inadvertently telegraphed dazed surprise.

Crystal explained: “Sort of a Disney stockholder’s look--’He got what? For how long? What if he’d done a good job?’ ”

The room tittered as he took the swipe at Michael Ovitz leaving the No. 2 slot at Disney with his multimillion-dollar farewell package.

It’s the kind of riff that Crystal has made his trademark as Oscar host--kind of topical, kind of insider-y, a little jab, not a full blow. He’s been known to excise, in the writing phase, jokes that were too harsh on people he expected to be in the audience.

“I want to push some buttons and make it fun and be a little dangerous and playful,” he says. “None of it’s meant. But you want to be a little provoking. It’s fun to get a little ooooh from the audience.”

He is reminded that his first year he told a joke about Jack Nicholson and Jon Peters, the onetime hairdresser who at the time was one of Hollywood’s biggest producers: “You said Jack Nicholson is so powerful that Jon Peters still cuts his hair.”

“Jack is so rich,” he corrects and laughs. “Comics will remember the setups.”

In fact, there’s little he’s forgotten about his shows--the jokes, the nominees, the winners. The 103-degree fever in 1992 that left him woozy; the antibiotics he took that made his mouth feel pasty. (Tom Hanks was on call in case Crystal couldn’t do the show.) In fact, that was Crystal’s favorite year.

“That was the show I came out with the Hannibal Lecter mask, and I felt really hot from beginning to end--like ‘boom, boom, boom, boom,’ ” he recalls.

It was also the year his “City Slickers” co-star Jack Palance won a best supporting actor Oscar and capped his speech with one-arm push-ups.

“I was going, ‘Wow, thank you,’ ” Crystal recalls. “It was the greatest setup in the history of the Oscars.”

When Crystal went backstage, he huddled with the handful of writers who watch the show from monitors in both wings of the stage. He and the writers conferred about jokes--many of the ad-libs have been planned out moments before.

“When we came back from commercial I said something like, ‘Jack is now on the Stairmaster backstage, we’ll keep you posted,’ and when I said, ‘We’ll keep you posted,’ I knew that we could run with that the whole night.”

His least favorite show was his last. He was still deeply hurt from the box-office failure of “Mr. Saturday Night,” his labor of love about an edgy comic. And he was feeling the pressure to be as clever as he had been all the years before.

“After the third show, I probably shouldn’t have come back for the fourth,” he says. “The third show was so complete for me and so fulfilling. I should have been like Shane,” he says invoking the legendary movie western hero. “Come in, clean up the town, and then move on.”

He’s diplomatic about Goldberg’s two turns at the podium. “Whoopi’s second show was indeed better and it was a very good Oscar show,” he says. About Letterman’s show, he says, “I think Dave should have been out there more, been in the show more.”

Crystal laments the fact that some stars snub the show. “People say the glamour isn’t there sometimes,” he says. “There are so many people who could present who choose not to come. . . . It’s disappointing. It should be, ‘Look, do you see who’s there?’ You give your fans back something for loving you all those years.”

He applauds Madonna for coming to sing the Oscar-nominated song from “Evita,” despite the fact that the academy overlooked her for a best actress nomination.

“I think it’s really classy that she called up and said, ‘I’m on the show, I want to sing.’ Streisand’s not singing her song. And Barbra Streisand is the greatest singing star of our lifetime--besides Sinatra. I feel bad she’s not coming. People would love to see her. She felt she didn’t want to do it--for whatever reasons.”

An Oscar of his own is not a goal, Crystal says.

One of his predecessors in the hosting job, Bob Hope, turned his own lack of nominations into a running joke. “He had a great line,” Crystal remembers. “He used to say, ‘Welcome to the Oscars--or as it’s known in my house, ‘Passover.’ ”

Only once did Crystal let himself think about a nomination. The year he starred in “When Harry Met Sally . . . “ he listened to television pundits tout him as a possible best actor nominee. “I stupidly bought into it,” he says. “It’s intoxicating.”

The night before the nominees were announced, he went to bed hoping for an early-morning phone call from a studio official congratulating him. “The phone didn’t ring,” he remembers of the next morning. “I just looked at my wife and she looked at me and the clock and she just held me and she went, ‘Sorry.’ ”

He’s cheerfully, deliberately bland when it comes to describing this year’s show: “We have a really good opening,” he says. “The whole thing . . . it’s going to be good. It’s different than anything I’ve ever done.”

He and a posse of half a dozen writers--including actress-screenwriter Carrie Fisher--divide their time between Crystal’s offices and his Westside home poring over jokes. They concoct lists of jokes for all the nominees so they can pull one out at any time during the show. The monologue is a long-term work in progress. If you see Crystal in his car on the freeway talking to himself, he’s working on the monologue.

“From the time you say, ‘Yes, I’ll do it,’ until the time you say, ‘Good night,’ you have a headache,” he says (repeating a line he’s used before, by the way.)

So how’s his headache this year?

“I’m surprisingly calm because I like what we’re doing,” says Crystal, who never sleeps completely through the night. “It feels fresher.”

Crystal, who just turned 49, trains hard for several weeks before his big night, working out with weights and running. The Saturday before the show, he likes to be alone. The Sunday before the show he has rehearsal. Monday morning will find him at the theater at 8 a.m for the first of two technical run-throughs. Right before he goes on, he’ll do 200 sit-ups and 150 push-ups, he says.

“I like to feel pumped up; it’s like a big game,” says Crystal, who played competitive baseball in school.

For his troubles, he will earn somewhere in the range of $15,000 to $20,000, he thinks. He’s not sure. He donates it to charity anyway.

There are some great perks. Giorgio Armani designs a couple of tuxes for Crystal and flies in from Milan to personally fit Crystal (and several other Oscar clients).

“I’m a little bit of a clotheshorse,” Crystal says.

Once, at a fitting the weekend before the Oscars, Armani blew up at his tailor over the fit of one suit. “I thought it looked great already,” says Crystal, who is slender and 5 foot 7. “And he says to me in this halting English, ‘No, no, Billy, I make you taller.’ I said, ‘Where were you when I was in high school?’ ”

Armani tweaked the suit here and there, Crystal says, “and I swear to you at the end of it, I looked . . . 5-8.”