Seinfeld: The Cheever Letters

Vanessa Marquez

This coming Friday it will have been thirty years since the Seinfeld episode "The Cheever Letters" first aired. The episode aired on Wednesday, October 28 on NBC. While not as well known as such Seinfeld episodes as "The Contest," "The Soup Nazi," "The Merv Griffin Show," or "The Calzone," "The Cheever Letters" was in many ways a pivotal episode for the show. It is an important episode to me because it marked the only guest appearance of my dearest Vanessa Marquez on the show. It was also the first time she played an adult role after playing juvenile roles in film and TV shows. It was also one of her earliest guest appearances on television.

"The Cheever Letters" was written by Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, Elaine Pope, and Tom Leopold. Like many episodes of the show, "The Cheever Letters" featured multiple subplots, some of which carried over from earlier episodes. One of these subplots that carried over from earlier episodes was Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld) and George (Jason Alexander) continuing work on the television sitcom pilot they are developing for NBC. Two other subplots carry over from the previous episode, "The Bubble Boy," in which Kramer (Michael Richards) is careless with a cigar and as a result burns down the cabin owned by the parents of George's girlfriend Susan (Heidi Swedberg).

The first of these subplots resulting from the cabin burning down is the fact that George and Susan must break the bad news to her parents (Warren Frost and Grace Zabriskie). They do so at a dinner with her parents, and her father takes it very badly. He goes into another room sobbing. It is later, when Jerry and George visit Susan's parents to return her sunglasses, that a doorman (David Blackwood) delivers a metal box, the only thing that survived the fire at the cabin. As it turns out the metal box contains letters between novelist John Cheever and Susan's father detailing their rather torrid affair.

The second subplot that grew out of the burning of the cabin in "The Bubble Boy" is the loss of Kramer's source for Cuban cigars. As a cigar connoisseur who prefers Cubans, Kramer is distraught about the cigars having burned up, and requests that George ask Susan's father for more of them. When George fails to do so, Kramer decides to find a new source on his own and visits the Cuban diplomatic mission at the United Nations. There he strikes a deal with the diplomats in which he trades his jacket to one of them for more Cuban cigars. This is the subplot in which my dearest Vanessa Marquez appears. She plays the receptionist at the Cuban diplomatic mission.

Finally, a fourth subplot deals with Jerry complaining about Elaine's assistant Sandra (Lisa Malkiewicz) being overly chatty. Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) then asks Sandra to not be so talkative with Jerry, whereupon Sandra quits. Elaine asks Jerry to call Sandra and take back what he had said by claiming that Elaine misconstrued his comments. It was while Jerry and Sandra are on the phone that Sandra asks him out. Jerry agrees to a date, which goes badly after Jerry says something to her that, to paraphrase George, is "not offensive" but is "abnormal." This subplot ends with what might be the best line in "The Cheever Letters," a zinger delivered by Elaine towards Jerry. This particular subplot was based on an actual experience by writer Tom Leopold, in which he said the exact same thing to a date that Jerry had, with a similar reaction from his date.

"The Cheever Letters" was shot on September 22 1992 in front of a live studio audience at CBS Studio Center in Los Angeles. When it first aired, it received a Nielsen rating of 11.1 with an audience share of 17.

Here I should point out that the John Cheever who gives "The Cheever Letters" its title was an actual novelist, who lived from 1913 to 1982. He was known for writing four novels: The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park, and Falconer (which George is reading at the end of the episode). He also wrote the novella Oh What a Paradise It Seems and several short stories. It was following his death that his daughter Susan Cheever revealed in her memoirs (Home Before Dark) that her father had affairs with both women and men. This would be confirmed by John Cheever's own journals and letters. The idea that Susan's father had an affair with John Cheever is then not very far-fetched.

As I mentioned earlier, while not as well known as some other Seinfeld episodes, "The Cheever Letters" is significant to the show for several reasons. "The Cheever Letters" would mark the very first time that Susan's parents appeared on the show. Strangely enough they would not appear again until the seventh season episode "The Rye," their marriage apparently having survived the revelation that Mr. Ross had an affair with John Cheever.

"The Cheever Letters" would also mark the first credited guest appearance of actor Timothy Omundson, who played Susan's brother Ricky. Timothy Onmundson would go on to have regular and recurring roles on the TV shows Judging Amy, Psych, Galavant. and This is Us. Curiously, this was the only time that Susan's brother Ricky ever appeared on the show. He was absent even for major plot lines.

Lisa Malkiewicz was not the only actress considered for the role of Elaine's assistant Sandra. Dedee Pfeiffer (Michelle Pfeiffer's sister, later a regular on Cybill and currently a regular on the show Big Sky) and Kim Gillingham (earlier a regular on the short-lived show One Big Family) also auditioned for the part. Both actresses would later appear in Seinfeld episodes, Dedee Pfeiffer in the fifth season episode "The Opposite" and  Kim Gillingham in the fifth season episode "The Puffy Shirt."

"The Cheever Letters" was Vanessa Marquez's second guest appearance on a TV show, following an appearance on the short-lived Tequila and Bonetti earlier in the year. While Vanessa was Mexican in descent, it was the second time she played a character of Cuban descent. She was set to have a recurring role as Consuelo Burns, the niece of the new lead character Michael Santana (Steven Bauer), on the TV show Wiseguy, but the show was cancelled before her episodes and never aired. They would be seen in syndication and would be released on the fourth season DVD set of Wiseguy in 2009. Both Michael Santana and hence Vanessa's character were Cuban in descent.

Vanessa never related any memories of her guest appearance on Seinfeld, other than saying it was one of the more pleasant experiences in her career. Given how briefly she appears on the episode (she appears for around a minute or two and has only a few lines), I have to think she did not spend much time on the Seinfeld set. Vanessa did say that out of everything she had ever done, "The Cheever Letters" was the most consistent in delivering residuals to her, even beating out Stand and Deliver (1988). This should be no surprise, given how often it has aired since Seinfeld entered syndication.  Here I have to once more point out that "The Cheever Letters" was the first time that Vanessa Marquez played an adult character. Before the episode, she had played teenagers in the movies Stand and Deliver and Night Children, the TV movies Sweet 15 and Locked Up: A Mother's Rage, and on the TV shows Wiseguy and Tequila and Bonetti.

"The Cheever Letters" was the eighth episode of the fourth season of Seinfeld, the season in which the show finally broke into the mainstream. It was during the season that NBC moved Seinfeld from Wednesday to Thursday night, which resulted in a rise in the show's ratings. For the first time since it debuted, Seinfeld ranked in the top 30, coming in at no. 25 for the year. It was also the year that several of the show's best known episodes aired, including "The Bubble Boy," "The Contest," "The Outing," and "The Junior Mint."

"The Cheever Letters" may not be as well known as any of those episodes, but, as pointed out above, it was a pivotal episode for the show. It marked the first appearance of Susan's parents. It also gave Timothy Onmundson the first credit of what has been a very successful career. It would only be a few years later that he appeared on Judging Amy and Psych. And while Vanessa Marquez only appears briefly in the episode, it marked the first time she played an adult role and gave her more exposure than she had since Stand and Deliver. It would only be two years later that she would return to NBC on Thursday nights as Nurse Wendy Goldman on ER.

On a personal level, I also think it is one of the all-tme funniest Seinfeld episodes. There are some truly hilarious bits here, from George delivering the bad news about the cabin to Susan's parents to Kramer at the Cuban Diplomatic Mission at the UN to the revelation that Susan's father had an affair with John Cheever. And the zinger Elaine directs at Jerry at the end of the show is one of the best closes to an episode of the entire run. Indeed, the line received such an enthusiastic and prolonged response from the audience that it had to be buffered and truncated  when the episode was edited. During its fourth season Seinfeld truly came into its own, and "The Cheever Letters" is proof of that.