THE NAKED SANDRA

Madonna may be planning to rock the limits of erotica, but her former sidekick Sandra Bernhard has discovered a new sex goddess for the nineties—herself. LYNN HIRSCHBERG reports as the cutting-edge comedienne dehuts a new HBO special

LYNN HIRSCHBERG

"I'm getting what I want. And what I deserve."

Sandra Bernhard likes to take her clothes off. She's naked in her new HBO special, Sandra After Dark. A few months from now, she'll be nude— and, in one shot, painted gold—in a Playboy pictorial. And right now, before a quarter-empty auditorium at Bally's Casino Resort in Las Vegas, Bernhard has slipped out of her see-through sequined gown, and except for a purple thong bikini bottom, she is, yes, naked. "Take it off!" someone yells. She smiles her odd, downtumed smile. The thought has definitely occurred to her.

As her onstage dresser holds open another sequined dress for her to step into, Bernhard pivots her body so that her bare breasts face the audience. She pauses. She stares. Her band, the Strap-Ons, plays that ode to built women, "Brick House." She has never looked happier. She may never get dressed again.

"I'm an exhibitionist," Bernhard explains a while later over a hamburger at Bally's coffee shop. Her manner offstage, like her manner on, is somewhat surly. But now she is dressed, and she's shed the painted-gargoyle regalia—false eyelashes, red red lips, Bride of Frankenstein hair. Still, she doesn't so much converse as hold forth. She is stunningly consistent in her choice of topic.

"I'm very comfortable with my body," she says, munching a French fry. "I like it. And my work is naked. It's another level of exposure to me. Another way to push the limit."

But it would be too taxing to explain what new frontier, exactly, she is pioneering. Her tone is flat, her expression tired. She talks instead about how beautiful she is.

It wasn't always this way.

The youngest child and only daughter of a proctologist father and abstract-artist mother, Bernhard, who is thirty-seven, had a surprisingly carefree life in Michigan and Arizona before coming to prominence in Martin Scorsese's disturbing and brilliant 1983 film, The King of Comedy. Her portrayal of Masha, a fan who becomes fixated on a Johnny Carsonesque talk-show host (played by Jerry Lewis), was one of those seamless triumphs—a portrait of a tightly wound, specifically insane exhibitionist.

"It was intended to make people uncomfortable and I did that very well. If I'd had my way after King of Comedy, I would have been a huge movie star. I thought I'd get offered roles in the Diane Keaton-Julie Christie area. I think of myself as a cross between those two."

To her chagrin, she was offered the role of the assistant (eventually played by Annie Potts) in Ghostbusters, and really not much else. So she went back to playing comedy clubs in L. A.; she recorded an album of Top 40-type songs. And then she started turning up on Late Night.

Those appearances went Masha one better. David Letterman was the perfect repressed foil for Bernhard's lunacy. She got to him through sex. She'd pretend they were lovers—once even appearing on the show with a pregnant stomach, claiming that Dave was the dad. She'd sit on his lap, she'd kiss him, he'd squirm. When she and Madonna came on dressed like twins and hinting that they were lovers, Letterman seemed about to implode. (The briefly-best-friends no longer speak—Madonna reportedly tired of Sandra's braggadocio.)

One minute, Bernhard would tell a reporter that she was gay, then she'd yell at People, "I'm not a lesbian and I'm sick of being called one." Oh, the intrigue, the infinite mystery, of her true sexual preference. "I can't say that I necessarily love to fuck men, but I do like them," she explains. "I'm very small. I'm very tender. I can't handle all that violent action." Is there, one wonders, a man small enough for Sandra? "Maybe there's a man out there who can change my mind."

Her Off Broadway show (and subsequent movie), Without You I'm Nothing, was all about Sandra relating to fame, style, songs from the seventies, and, of course, sexuality. The movie is a docudrama of an ego on the loose. Rarely has any performer made the hunger for full-out spotlight sex-bomb-baby attention plainer. But while she seemed obsessed, her obsession was contagious.

And then Sandra took another long look in the mirror and discovered she really was beautiful.

"I'm described all the time as folie-laide, ' the beautiful-ugly thing," she says with no small amount of outrage. "And it's, like, 'Fuck you, man. ' I'm not some blonde bimbo, but I'm fucking hot. A lot of people want to fuck me."

She is hanging out with models these days ("It's the world I love the most"), and still plying sly references to her "breakup" with Madonna ("She was the best lover I ever had"). But vanity is the most demanding mistress of all. She was dying to pose in Playboy—she volunteered—because it is yet another affirmation of her lustrous beauty. ("I know I've jerked off over Playboy, so why not everyone else? I think I should be partially responsible for getting the world off.")

Bernhard looks around the restaurant, her face set in apermanent snarl. "I'm getting what I want," she says rather grandly. "And what I deserve, if you can be that egotistical. I love my life. I am becoming an icon."