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Crystal attributes his contentment to Janice Goldfinger, the hometown girl he married in 1970. "I fell in love with the right person, a person I knew and who knew me. I still want to make her laugh." He was a full-time father before it was fashionable, changing diapers during the day and playing clubs at night, while Janice worked as assistant to the dean of theater at Nassau % Community College on Long Island. "I loved those years of being Mr. Mom. One of the saddest days in my life was when Jennifer said, 'Dad, I can wash my own hair.' "
His hunger for family comes in part because when he was 15, his father dropped dead after bowling a 200 game on lane 13. "All the fun went out of the house then," says Crystal's brother Rich, a producer at Hearst television. "My mother adored my father, and she could barely manage." From then on, part of what propelled Crystal was the desire to make his mother happy again. He became the school comedian, memorizing Bill Cosby's routines and performing them so well at assemblies that when classmates heard the actual recordings they joked that Cosby was stealing Crystal's material. The three brothers, including Joel, the oldest, who teaches at the high school they all attended, did the old routines at a surprise 75th birthday party for their mother back in their Long Beach living room.
For years after that, it looked as if Crystal, like Buddy, might never break into the big time. He started out in a group called 3's Company, which appeared in between folk singers doing whaling songs at coffeehouses and never attracted much of a following. In 1974 he earned so little and had such high expenses that the IRS came calling. The auditor found the $2,200 in travel receipts in order but asked Janice why in the world he kept at it for only $4,000 a year. "It's in his blood," she sighed.
A rare shot at instant stardom -- an appearance on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live in 1975 -- misfired when producer Lorne Michaels cut his spot from six minutes to one and Crystal pulled out. "It was awful," says Crystal. "Gilda ((Radner)) walked me to the elevator. I was crying all the way home on the Long Island Railroad, the tears running down the makeup." While friends Chevy Chase and John Belushi went on to become household names, he had to settle for a spot on ABC's wacky series Soap, playing television's first prime-time homosexual. Then came the ill-conceived Billy Crystal Comedy Hour in 1982, which NBC promoted as a male version of the Carol Burnett show. "We were up against The Love Boat and first-run movies without much network backing," Crystal remembers. "I learned in the trade press that the show was canceled after only two episodes." He scraped himself up off the floor and went back on the road. He appeared in a few successful HBO specials, was a guest host on Saturday Night Live. He became a headliner instead of a warm-up act, sought after for his character turns rather than his one-liners.