Rags to Riches--and ‘Red to Redneck’

Forty-some years ago on cold winter nights, a small Russian boy would sit huddled around the family radio listening to the Voice of America. And he would dream.

Dream perhaps of someday growing up to don a white Stetson hat, climb aboard a horse and ride onto a stage in the Ozarks, where he’d joke of making the transition from “red to redneck.”

Well, no, not really.

Yakov Smirnoff’s dreams may have been big for a poor boy from Ukraine, the comedian says as he sits chatting in his dressing room after a recent show. But even he couldn’t have imagined his own theater, the horse and all the rest.

“I envisioned being in the United States. I envisioned being free. I envisioned having a lot of material things,” Smirnoff, still dressed as a Russian Cossack from his show’s last comedy bit, says earnestly at one point.

“But I never envisioned that I would be a successful performer. . . . How could I? I couldn’t even speak English.”

His English is flawless now, save for an occasional tendency to drop a conjunction here and there. He smiles modestly when told how different he sounds from 10 or 15 years ago.

Of the once-thick Russian accent he used to great comedic effect in his early days, he says, “I don’t try to keep it on. I try to evolve.”

The evolution of Yakov Smirnoff began in the southern Ukraine seaport city of Odessa, where he was born in 1951.

Growing up there, he recalls, he’d often awake at 3 or 4 in the morning, get up to use the bathroom and find his father listening to the Voice of America on the family radio.

“That was the only time they would not jam the signals,” says the 46-year-old comedian, whose dark hair and beard are beginning to gray.

He recalls how he’d stay up and listen, surreptitiously, in the communal apartment that he, his mother and father shared with nine other families.

Living a life that included no phone, no car and one bathroom shared by 20 people, he dreamed of coming to this magic land where things were so much better.

At age 26, with his somewhat skeptical parents in tow, he got there, giving up a career as a rising young comedian on the Russian cruise-ship circuit in the process. He applied and was allowed to emigrate.

“I guess I was pretty gutsy,” the thought occurs to him now. “In those days, very few people even attempted to apply.”

Then he adds, in a much lighter tone: “I think we were exchanged for some wheat. That was during the days of the wheat shortage, remember? Yeah, I think the United States sent them some wheat, and you got a comedian in exchange.”

A bartender, actually. That was one of the first jobs Smirnoff was able to land in his new country.

But with just two weeks of formal English lessons, he found bartending gave him the opportunity to pick up the language quickly, and in the way real Americans spoke it, which at first seemed ridiculous.

“Like they’d tell me, ‘It’s raining cats and dogs outside,”’ Smirnoff recalls. “And I’d be thinking, ‘Well, umbrellas won’t help. Windshield wipers won’t do much good.’ ”

Soon, he was telling America about all of this, punctuating his observations with what would become his signature line and the title of the 1980s television show he starred in: “What a Country!”

Still, paradise wasn’t perfect, at least not the Los Angeles version, and Smirnoff came to Branson in 1994.

“We lived in a very affluent neighborhood. People like Goldie Hawn, people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, they were our neighbors. Tom Hanks lived two doors down. But we didn’t feel it was the right place to raise kids,” the father of a 4-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter continues. “We had gates, alarms, security system. That was all part of life in L.A.”

Someone suggested Branson, but Smirnoff, who was appearing in movies, on television and on the comedy circuit, was dubious.

“I thought, here’s this country music place and here’s this Russian comedian,” he says now. He wasn’t sure anybody would know who he was, or even care.

He decided to take a chance on the Ozark mountain town after being warmly received at an Iowa Farm Aid benefit that Willie Nelson organized.

Now he headlines his own theater, Yakov’s American Pavilion, doing two shows a day, six days a week, nine months a year, sticking around afterward to pose for pictures and sign autographs for anybody who asks. And he tells people of the new life he’s found in Branson, one that includes the material things he once dreamed of and much more: a friendly, giving people who are showing the rest of the world how we can all help each other be better.

An American citizen since 1986, he says he misses nothing about his homeland except for family and friends he left behind. And his parents have come around too.

“I asked my mother if she wanted to go back, and she said, ‘I’m not going,’ ” he recalls.

“Actually, she didn’t say no,” he muses almost to himself. “She said, ‘No way, Jose,’ I asked her why and she said, ‘The California Lottery is up to $52 million.’ ”