Larger Than Life

The DeLuise dining table is 14 feet long, which is a good thing considering how many people gather around it and how much food is served there.

For a recent lunch of holiday leftovers, for example, there were 10 guests--not including the baby in the highchair--and five main courses that began with turkey soup and ended with strawberry shortcake.

There were platters of beef filet, chicken breast and sausage; a hefty basket of muffins and breads; a big ceramic bowl of spaghetti and meatballs drenched in marinara sauce; a dish of steamed broccoli, and, oh, yes, a saucer of lettuce.

In this larger-than-life thespian family, it would seem there are no small appetites. Even for Dom, the 325-pound patriarch for whom food poses a near-fatal attraction, “Enough!” is an epithet seldom heard.

But weight is not a problem for Dom’s petite wife, actress-singer Carol Arthur. Nor is it for middle son Michael--best known for playing Dennis Franz’s doomed son on ABC’s “NYPD Blue”--who has always been slim. Youngest son David--Christina Applegate’s ditsy brother in NBC’s new sitcom “Jesse”--learned how to eat healthy back in 1992 when he shed about a third of his bulk. And eldest son Peter--a former football player who starred in the Fox network’s first hit, “21 Jump Street”--struggles but does it quietly, living on protein and coffee shakes between dangerous dinners at home.

In Hollywood, fat is funny. And over the years, Dom-the-comedian has learned to make the most of his girth. But at home in Pacific Palisades, overeating is nothing to laugh at. Even for the fat man himself.

“I am diabetic, and I try really hard. I do. I’d like to weigh 260. Or 220! That would be heaven. But it’s complicated. And cookies! It seems like there’re cookies all over the place!”

He twists his enormous frame in his heavy oak captain’s chair and yells in the direction of the kitchen.

“Hey, hey! Are those banana cakes out or in? Are they burnt? I don’t want them burnt!”

It’s a Dog’s Life in the Acting Biz

Dominick DeLuise was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 1, 1933. A child actor who attended New York’s High School for the Performing Arts, he made his formal--that is to say, he was paid--stage debut at age 18.

He played the role of Bernie the dog in the holiday drama “Bernie’s Christmas Wish.” His compensation consisted of a modest amount of money and one spaghetti dinner for each of his four performances.

“I had to strap on a lower jaw and an upper jaw, and I went ‘Grrrrr,’ ” recalls Dom, now 65. “I remember saying to my mother after the first show, ‘How did you like it, Mom?’

“And she said, ‘Well, I felt bad when you barked.’ ”

It was an atypically mild reaction for a DeLuise. Dom’s family, including his sister Anne, was more likely to be yelping and whistling at their young star’s every walk-on. “Even if I had two lines, as I often did when I was starting out on Broadway, my entrance was always accompanied by tumultuous applause from my sister and parents.”

His mother, Jennie, born Vicenza DeStefano, was a full-time homemaker whose talents in the kitchen inspired Dom not only to eat, but also to learn to cook and, ultimately, to devote an entire cookbook to her--”Eat This . . . It Will Make You Feel Better” (Simon & Schuster, 1988).

“Although they were very supportive, I was really in this acting thing alone,” Dom says. “My father was a peasant, a blue-collar worker, who was amazed that I got paid for what I do. He used to say, ‘If you can make money with your mouth, God bless you!’ ”

Dom’s father was a garbage collector for the city, and from him, the son learned to treasure trash.

“I love to take things people throw away and turn them into something useful. I’ll sit down with [5-year-old granddaughter] Riley with an old oatmeal box and some scissors and tape--presto!--we’ve got a bank,” boasts Dom.

“You wanna know the very best gift I ever got? It was when a good friend of mine brought over a bunch of wood, sticks really, all broken up, and I said, ‘What is it?’ And she said, ‘Well, it’s a broken chair!’ And, I said, ‘For me?’ I couldn’t have been more thrilled. I took all the parts and rebuilt it. I did the same with a mirror once, a huge shattered antique mirror. It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle. It took forever! Wonderful!”

In the family room of the DeLuises’ 1950s ranch home on a shady street in the Palisades, another, smaller puzzle hangs in a frame on the wall. It is a $20 bill that has been torn to bits and reassembled behind glass.

“Carol and I were walking in Greenwich Village a long time ago,” recalls Dom, “and we found this all torn up, and we picked up each little scrap and put it back together again.”

Beneath the bill, Carol has written, “ . . . and when this goes, there is love!” The “love” is underlined in red.

Making a Name for Themselves

Dom and Carol met 37 years ago while doing summer stock in Cape Cod.

“I never met anybody like him. He was just so much bigger than life and he was so funny,” says Carol, 63. “I thought, ‘This is the way to spend a lifetime.’ ”

Both were struggling to build careers. Carol Arthur (born Arata) had a big, belting voice that critics compared to Judy Garland’s. Dom was building a reputation as a versatile comedian, as comfortable emceeing a variety show as he was at playing title roles on Broadway, as he did in Neil Simon’s “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers.”

By the time they married in 1965, Carol had finished a successful run on Broadway in Noel Coward’s musical “High Spirits.” Between pregnancies, she would work with Buster Keaton in “Once Upon a Mattress,” sing a duet with Lauren Bacall and play George Burns’ daughter in “The Sunshine Boys.”

As a child growing up in New Jersey, she sang and her mother accompanied her. Her grandfather had been in Vaudeville. Her father, Peter, also a pianist, was a police officer in East Rutherford.

“I’ve kept his badge all these years--No. 2. That’s how small the police force was in those days,” Carol says.

Her sons, who have taken the badge to work with them for roles as TV cops, use the word “sacrifice” whenever they describe their mother’s decision to put her career on hold to raise them. But Carol sees it differently.

“I see it as having the best of both worlds. Of all things, having a family is the greatest blessing of all.”

All three DeLuise boys are in the entertainment business. Peter, 32, also includes TV’s “SeaQuest DSV” and “StarGate SG-1” in his acting credits, and recently began writing and directing. His latest film is produced by brother Michael and has parts for every other member of the family.

Michael, 29, also appeared on “SeaQuest DSV” but may be remembered more for his brooding but sympathetic portrayal of Andy Sipowicz Jr. on “NYPD Blue.” Leaving Pacific Palisades High School in his junior year to work on a Danny Thomas sitcom (he later went back and graduated with his class), Michael has been an actor the longest of the DeLuise sons and, until recently, enjoyed the most recognition.

Now that honor belongs to the youngest DeLuise--27-year-old David who, after years of auditions and bit parts and jobs selling yogurt and painting houses, won the role of Darren on the NBC hit “Jesse.”

“We’ve all had our turns in the spotlight,” says Michael, “and I’m glad David is finally getting his . . . not that there’s any sibling rivalry or anything.”

Not Your Average Next-Door Family

The house at the end of the block--the one with the faux wishing well in front and the wood shop out back--looks a lot like every other house in this unpretentious neighborhood of West Los Angeles. And inside, although there have been expansions in all directions and renovations here and there, much is the same as it was when the boys were growing up.

“Here’s the light we shot out with our BB guns. We turned the shade around to the wall so the holes didn’t show,” says Peter.

“Oh, oh,” says David. “Remember Peter did something to Michael and Michael ran in here and shut the door. Look, here’s the plaque we put up to mark where Peter kicked in the door to his room and the brass knob hit Michael right in the eye.”

Peter smiles.

“Ah, yes. My punishment was to watch Michael get stitches,” he says.

“What a childhood! We had cats, dogs, rabbits, garden snakes. Every one of us broke a window, and every child broke a door at some point,” David says.

And where was Mom when all this was going on?

“Flattened against a wall somewhere trying not to get hit by the sparks,” Dom says.

Dom says he is flattered by the fact that his sons have followed his parents into show business, but he’s not surprised. They’ve been in training almost since birth.

There were annual crying contests in the kitchen--just to see who could conjure up the first tear. Dom would think about his little dog Nancy who died, but he rarely won. From an early age, David learned to cry almost on cue.

“It’s a gift,” he says, brow furrowed and lips trembling.

David, like his father, is dyslexic. But unlike his father, David got help early, from special educators at the Frostig School in Pasadena.

The disability did little to stifle their imagination, according to Peter. “We were always making home movies. Dad always did the spooky sound effects and we used an enormous amount of catsup. Blood, you know.”

A common story line began with David asleep and Michael sucking his blood.

“There’s a vat of catsup on his neck and then he screams like this. . . .” David screams. “And then Mother says, ‘Stop doing that!’ ”

Then there was the time they built the huge lobster costume and filmed the red monster devouring dozens of people up and down the block.

“Our neighbors,” notes David, “always had small parts.”

As children, it didn’t occur to the boys that people did anything other than act. Falling asleep to the dinner party repartee of such family friends and world-class wits as Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft and Ruth Buzzi, the boys dreamed of growing up to star in their own full-length features.

It was only later that they discovered they had mixed feelings about their father’s celebrity. David recalls “the best birthday I ever had” was the one he spent with his dad at Disneyland. “What made it so terrific and so special was that everyone there left us alone. Nobody came up for an autograph or to talk to him. I had Dad all to myself.”

Peter recalls the difficulty he had in reconciling the fact that “when I was Dom’s son, I was somebody. When I was just me, I was nobody. As a kid, you begin to resent that, and I did.”

Those feelings surfaced again when Peter was 20 and his publicist began the young actor’s bio with this phrase: “Son of funnyman Dom DeLuise.” Today, says Peter, “I know how lucky I am to have him as my father. But then, I wanted to be me, not just a relative of his.”

Always the Center of Attention

The noise level is building around the big pine dining table. David’s wife, Brigitte, and daughter, Riley, are quietly sipping their soup, but Riley’s little sister, Dylan, is tapping out a loud message with her spoon on the tray of her highchair.

But with Dom talking, all eyes are on him. As one of his sons explains, “There’s no point trying to compete with Dad for attention or laughs or anything else, because he is too good. He’s always going to win.”

Loving and patient with his granddaughters, Dom is more demanding with others. Although both Dom and Carol sit down regularly to write--in longhand--personal letters to their children congratulating them on their achievements, as a day-to-day diet, Dom might seem overbearing.

Speaking to him on the phone, it is not unusual to have the conversation interrupted by Dom telling someone to do something. Now.

“Car-ol! Car-ol!” he will bellow. “Where are you? Get the door. Car-ol!”

His sons recall friends occasionally being frightened by their Dad’s huge voice and enormous presence.

“Dad is just such a big guy, in every imaginable way, and in our family, we just communicate on a very loud level,” shrugs one son. “He’s really a sweet, caring person--but with a big, big mouth.”

In the uproar that is normal family life for the DeLuises, Carol and Michael seem like bemused bystanders.

“My mom and I share a birthday--and probably the same outlook on life,” says Michael philosophically. “I guess we both feel more free when we’re not in the middle of all the noise. We’re not so outspoken, I suppose. . . .”

For Carol, Dom’s boisterousness, even his outrageousness, are just a part of the package. “We do have fun here. We’re all Italian and everybody has a great sense of humor. But our life isn’t a fairy tale by any means. Sometimes Dom will seem to give more of himself to someone he just met than to us. He’s such a gregarious, open person, and we say, ‘What about us?’ But then, he hears us and we talk about it and we all move on.”

The family came together in an extraordinary show of solidarity about six years ago when Dom needed to have a hip replaced. The surgeon refused to operate until Dom lost almost 100 pounds, so the entire family, including Brigitte, who was pregnant at the time with Riley, went to the Duke University Diet and Fitness Center in Durham, N.C.

“Something had to be done to help us to help Dom,” Carol says. “We had to change the way we were eating, and we did.” Dom’s surgery was successful, but his weight soared again. His family views his obesity as a psychological problem, an addiction that no amount of nagging can cure.

Slowly, leaning forward on his hands, Dom pulls himself up from the table, adjusts the black hat he wears to cover his balding head, blots his perspiring face with a paper napkin and makes his way to the frontyard.

Every year, the family poses together for a silly picture that they will send to friends along with Carol’s traditional gift-in-your-honor card to the Pearl S. Buck Foundation benefiting Amerasian children.

Peter wedges himself against a wall of bougainvillea next to the wishing well. Carol wraps bright colored scarves around Riley and Michael, and finds her place next to Dom. She adjusts her jacket and beams at the camera, satisfied that everyone looks just the way she wants them to.

And then it happens.

“Mom, Mom!” shouts David. “You’re standing in dog poop!”

The carefully constructed pose collapses in laughter.

“Well,” says Carol serenely, “it may not be perfect, but that’s the way families are sometimes. Take the picture.”