Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 15, 1992 TAG: 9202150400
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
IF CANDIDATES ARE RUNNING, MARK RUSSELL IS SINGING
Another election year. Through his horn-rimmed glasses, you can almost see the sparkle in Mark Russell's eyes. For him, election year is like a retailer's Christmas week, the liveliest season.Since 1975, the political pundit of the Potomac has been singing and joking on television about those who run for and hold elected office.
Wednesday, the night after the New Hampshire primary, he sharpens his satirical needles for the first of his six live PBS specials, airing nationwide from WNED in Buffalo, his hometown (at 9 p.m. on WBRA-Channel 15 in the Roanoke viewing area).
In December, after the first Democratic candidates' roundtable debate on NBC, Russell was already off and running, zeroing in on their foibles.
"Jerry Brown was pleading to get his 800 number out. It looked like a PBS drive. I thought he was going to offer a tote bag as a premium. If Kennedy was running, he'd have a 900-number.
"When Tsongas suggested that they all publicly disavow PAC money, you could hear five throats clearing simultaneously in a mad scramble to change the subject. He looked like the class tattletale. Afterwards, he gave an apple to Tom Brokaw. And Cuomo couldn't decide whether to watch the debate or not."
Almost shy in person, Russell makes it look easy. But to joke about politics requires understanding, and Russell, 60, with a long memory and a sharp eye, is well-versed in Washington ways.
His friend, lawyer Joseph DiGenova, said Russell "knows more about policy and politics than people who pretend to be consultants. He has to understand it better to translate it into humor."
When he isn't traveling, Russell spends long days in his attic-office reading newspapers to find material for his act and writing his four-day-a-week column for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.
Working from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., he rarely goes out for either lunch or dinner, said his wife, Alison, 40, who is his business manager. "He will not come down until he's got something," she said.
Washington's best-known political satirist has spent almost his entire adult life here. Five years ago he and Ali moved from a condo to their Twenties-era house, a few blocks from the vice presidential residence at the Naval Observatory. She said they bought it because "it made us laugh. We're always working on it."
Russell has lived in Washington since 1951, when his parents, Marcus and Marie Ruslander, moved from Miami. Later, he took the name Russell; his brother Dan, his booking agent, chose Ruskin.
"I did that when I was just starting out in the mid-'60s," he said. "If your name was the least bit complicated, you changed it. Today I wouldn't do it."
If the Japanese hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor, Russell would have grown up in California. And if his parents' grocery store in Miami hadn't failed, he'd have been a Floridian.
"My parents had gone through the Depression," said Russell. "My father was ahead of the curve: He could see that Buffalo's best days may have been starting to recede. They were always picking up and moving. We went to California and arrived there the day after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had submarines off the coast of Santa Barbara. There was so much turmoil, we went back to Buffalo."
He finished at all-male Canisius High School in Buffalo, affiliated with Jesuit-run Canisius College, and his four-piece band, Mark Ruslander's Orchestra, played for weddings and dances. Then the family moved again, this time to Miami.
"They opened up a grocery store and a meat market, but they went broke down there, and they were too proud to go back to Buffalo a second time. That's how we got to Washington. That's twice when they made major moves - furniture, everything, with no job. Twice."
Marcus Ruslander tried again, opening a gas station in Alexandria.
After his discharge from the Marines, Russell landed a job at the defunct Merryland Club and, in 1958, at the old Carroll Arms Hotel on Capitol Hill, where his impish humor took on a political flavor.
By the 1970s, he had become a Washington institution and had begun his TV specials, the result of an offer from WNED officials who caught his act in a hotel lounge.
For 16 years, the Russells have flown to Buffalo to tape his shows before an audience at the Katharine Cornell Theatre at the State University of New York.
After his tenure at the hotel ended in 1981, Russell began a stint on NBC's "Real People," a prime-time comedy show that some of his Washington friends thought beneath him. But Russell liked it and liked producer George Schlatter, who also had produced "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" and was interested in politics.
The show was canceled in May 1984.
The Russells returned to Washington, and the next year his calendar was booked with 100 appearances.
This year Russell plans to attend both political conventions, then return to Ford's Theatre next January for inauguration week. In early August the Russells plan to rent a farm in Ireland with DiGenova and his lawyer-wife, Victoria Toensing, while Russell does a show in Dublin to be taped for airing later.
In DiGenova's view, "This is a guy who doesn't want to hurt anybody with his humor, to be funny without having to fall into vulgarity. Mark has never lost the essential humility of a great comedian. There's not an arrogant bone in his body. This man is basically a monk: He cloisters himself for a set number of hours each day in a regimented lifestyle. That discipline is sort of the antithesis of this free-flowing humor that people see."
DiGenova, like Toensing a Republican, characterizes Russell as "an independent. But I think Mark's heart is deep in the Rooseveltian era. He's a 1930s Democrat, liberal, but with a deep appreciation for other ideas. And his humor is bipartisan."