‘Raymond’ renown

Everybody loves Raymond, but what about Phil? Doesn’t the 45-year-old creator of the 9-year-old Emmy-winning sitcom deserve a little love too?

He surely thinks so, and he’s not shy about expressing it -- not that Phil Rosenthal is bashful about anything. A self-declared ham, Rosenthal turned to writing because acting, his first love, wasn’t paying the bills. After nine seasons of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” which leaves the air Monday as the No. 1 comedy on television and is currently the No. 1 comedy in syndication, Rosenthal wants America to get to know the heart and soul of the sitcom that many viewers seem to feel has depicted marriage and family life more honestly than any show ever has. That is, Rosenthal wants to buck Hollywood’s obsession with fame and celebrities and introduce the country to a new concept. And he doesn’t mind coming to a venue near you to do it, either.

“I think it’s important that people know that the actors don’t make up the words by themselves and that there is more to life than just being famous, that real work is involved,” Rosenthal said. “We live in a celebrity culture. They only care about the famous face, and unless you stand up for yourself, you will be pushed to the back of the bus. It’s weird. You would think people would be interested in the people who actually make the show -- to take nothing away from the actors, but they obviously don’t do it alone.”

Being left at the back of the bus should be construed as hyperbole where Rosenthal is concerned, considering his show’s 12 Emmys and his reported $50-million development deal with CBS and Paramount, but his point about the national obsession with stardom is well taken. This might explain why “Oprah” invited the “Raymond” cast for a final tribute and producers asked Rosenthal to sit in the audience, the same way “Desperate Housewives” creator Marc Cherry beamed from the audience earlier this season as his cast was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey on stage.

But Rosenthal did not beam. Instead he protested, reached out to friends in high places and landed a seat on the stage couch, if only for the last 1 1/2 minutes of the broadcast. Later, when “60 Minutes” neglected to interview him, choosing to feature only Ray Romano -- the star and executive producer of the show who exits as the highest-paid actor in TV history -- Rosenthal said he saw the writing on the wall. He took a look around and did what anyone in Tinseltown would do: He hired a publicist.

“You’re just the writer,” Rosenthal said. “Nine years later and I still get that. Now it turns out that everyone in my position has a publicist. I didn’t know that. But if you don’t, you get swallowed up. The writers work very hard, and we’re the soul of the show. That’s why I have a show now where I go around the country with writers and we have such a fantastic time talking about all the horrible things that happened at our houses and then illustrate them on screen with the ‘Raymond’ clips that they became.”

Rosenthal’s Inside the Writers’ Room troupe performs around the country and will be at the Writers Guild in Los Angeles on June 2. The ensemble consists of Rosenthal and most of the show’s writers, a tight-knit group of men who broke another industry tradition by sticking together through the series’ entire run.

“They are brilliant, hilarious guys, and 90% were stand-up comedians,” Rosenthal said. “We love to make people laugh because we are all innate performers or frustrated performers. But the ‘Oprah’ thing wasn’t about that. I felt it wasn’t right that in an end-of-series hourlong tribute that me, or anyone in my position, would not be welcome on stage with the actors to talk about how the show was done. Seeing the face behind the scenes fills you in on an entire world and makes you appreciate the show more. So for all of those reasons, on top of the fact that I’m a ham and I want to be on, that’s why it’s important.”

On the morning after CBS’ goodbye bash for “Raymond,” Rosenthal relaxed by the pool at his Hancock Park home before heading to lunch with Jeremy Stevens and Lew Schneider, two of the show’s writers who have become his “family.” Rosenthal loved the party “for my little show,” although mention of the sets, which CBS moved to a Santa Monica Airport hangar for guests to view, sparked an unexpected reaction.

“That’s not where I know them to be, so it felt odd,” Rosenthal said. “I felt like it was either they’re in a museum or it’s a wake. I guess it’s cooler for outside people to come and see them because they didn’t see them where we lived with them for nine years. For me, it’s like, ‘That’s my loved one -- it doesn’t belong in a casket!’ ”

And loved ones is what it’s all about for Rosenthal and Romano, who had never met until Romano was on the hunt for a writer for a sitcom based on his family and the two men clicked after swapping stories over sandwiches.

The dysfunctional but endearing Barones were modeled after the Romanos, who lived a quarter-mile from his parents, and his divorced brother, who was approaching 40 and lived with his parents; and the Rosenthals, who inspired the show’s parents, Marie (Doris Roberts) and Frank (Peter Boyle).

“I needed a Jewish guy in there to balance off my Italian,” Romano said. “I identified with his family life, his sensibility. I could get from our meeting the angst he had, what went on with his family. He had parents who were a little overbearing, the Jewish version of my parents. And he was funny and he also had a style that was similar to mine, but not exactly, which was good. The truth is I don’t think we would be here if it wasn’t for Phil.”

Truth be told, Rosenthal was Romano’s second choice -- the first was already committed to “Friends” -- but once the two native New Yorkers got to work, no one looked back. “Raymond” premiered on Friday nights at a time when CBS ranked fourth among the networks. CBS had not had a comedy hit on that night since “Gomer Pyle,” and Leslie Moonves, who had just become the network’s president, badly needed a show to stick.

With its complex family dynamics that portrayed with brio what holds relatives together while simultaneously driving them crazy, “Raymond” relied more on character than on pranks and became a critical favorite from the start. It took the viewers a little longer. It wasn’t until the third season, after it had moved to Mondays and went head-to-head with the popular “Ally McBeal” and “Monday Night Football,” that “Raymond” ranked 11th, and more important for the network, became “the first link in the comeback of CBS,” Moonves said. “Raymond” has been a top-10 staple for the last five years.

“I’m very sad it’s going off the air. It has meant a great deal to me personally as well as professionally because it was the first show my administration developed,” said Moonves, now co-chairman of Viacom. “Ray and Phil were terrific partners from the beginning. The reason the show stayed so good, and it should be a key for every show-runner in history, is that Phil stayed with it for every single episode. He was the quality control. Being a show-runner is a three-ring circus. And Phil did it so brilliantly because he loved every aspect of it.”

Rosenthal knew at the age of 4 that acting was his first love, said his mother, Helen Rosenthal, who lives in New City, N.Y. Rosenthal always entertained at family gatherings and was a natural showman, she said. But the mother detected another talent in her son early on. “Phil’s writings were always very clever, and we tried to encourage him to take writing classes, which he decided he didn’t need,” she said. “That now turns out to be true.”

Rosenthal, who recently had a small role as a chef on “Spanglish” and in the fall will appear on one episode of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” dreamed of being Art Carney. After moving to Los Angeles and becoming weary of the daily rejection actors face, Rosenthal teamed up with an old friend who had become a sitcom writer, Oliver Goldstick, and worked short stints on “A Family for Joe,” “Baby Talk” and “Down the Shore” before landing a three-year gig on “Coach.”

“Everybody Loves Raymond” is the first pilot Rosenthal ever wrote, and much of its success has to do with a gift he should have never given his mother, a membership to the Fruit of the Month Club, which viewers saw Ray Barone bestow on his mother on the small screen.

“It was the best pilot I had ever read,” said Stevens, one of the show’s writers and a longtime friend of Rosenthal’s who was the first person to read the script. “I told him, ‘We’ll be on for 10 years with this.’ ” Sitting by his pool three weeks before the show’s final and 210th episode airs, Rosenthal joked: “Well, he was wrong, wasn’t he? It was only nine.”

It is futile to get anyone connected to “Raymond” to reveal any clues about the finale, which will be preceded by a one-hour retrospective. Romano: “I’ve been hypnotized and deprogrammed.” Stevens: “It’s just right.” And Rosenthal: “It’s a half-hour.”

The united front is not surprising. By all accounts, the writers’ room at “Raymond” was a special place where men cracked jokes and discussed personal woes as if they were in a support group. Then, often to the horror of their spouses and relatives, those revelations were uttered word-for-word on the tube.

“We’d come together every morning and sit around and just catch up with each other in terms of what’s new or pressing,” Stevens said. “We’d talk as friends. We were close. If we had problems, we’d bring it up. We realized fairly quickly that the main source of our stories is our lives and that a lot of the humor was going to come out of the gravel of our lives.”

Monica Horan’s PMS, for example, was the plot of one of the sitcom’s classic episodes in which Raymond is at a complete loss over Debra’s (Patricia Heaton) extreme irritability.

Horan, who played Amy on the show and has been married to Rosenthal for 15 years, remembers watching the episode and weeping because “Oh my God, he heard everything I said. I couldn’t believe he had absorbed the information and applied it to this literary couple. And when Raymond says to Debra, ‘You’re my girl,’ I lost it. That’s what Phil says to me -- private, private -- and just like that. The same exact way.”

Rosenthal’s father, Max, who along with Romano’s father, Albert, appeared in five episodes of the show, said he always got a kick out of seeing his life on television, even if situations were exaggerated for effect. Frank Barone (Boyle) taunts his wife the way the senior Rosenthal likes to, “but my wife says to tell you that I don’t open my pants when I watch television.”

Does Frank’s favorite expression, “Holy crap!” come from real life? “No. ‘Holy crap’ is not me. Insulting the wife, that’s me.”

Helen Rosenthal wants the world (the show is seen in 169 countries) to know she never favored one son over another the way Marie Barone always chose Raymond over Robert (Brad Garrett), and she never interferes in their private lives. “But certainly this household has not been a model of quiet peace.”

Rosenthal laughed hard when he heard this (“That’s an understatement!”) but then his eyes welled up with tears a few moments later when he described the most gratifying part of the last nine years:

“When I get a letter from Sri Lanka, from Pakistan, from Australia, from Denmark saying, that’s my father, that’s my wife, that’s my mother, that’s what it’s all about,” Rosenthal said. “I’m not writing about somebody’s mother in India. I don’t know you. I’m writing my mother, OK? Well, it turns out that’s everything. You don’t write universally, vaguely so that you hit everybody. If you do that, you miss everybody. What I learned is you write as specifically as you possibly can and therein lies the universality because all of our lives deal in specifics.... That’s how you connect with people, and that connection is why you put pen to paper in the first place.”