Intelligent life in search of her sign on 'West Wing'

By Lynn Elber
Associated Press

•	'The West Wing' Wednesdays, 8 p.m., NBC

As played by Kathryn Joosten, she was not only a moral bulwark for Martin Sheen's President Bartlet but a real pistol to boot.

Then Lily Tomlin walked in as Debbie Fiderer and the world was right again. Smart, gutsy and eccentric, Fiderer promises to keep Bartlet on his toes. And Tomlin, once again, reminds us what a treasure she is.

But don't try telling her that. The actress, acclaimed for her early "Laugh-In" comedy, dramatic turns in "Nashville" and other films, and her ambitious one-woman plays, is a model of modesty.

She's also a charmingly haphazard

storyteller and possesses one of the great celebrity smiles, an impish kid-who-ate-all-the-cookies grin that lights up her face and puts Julia Roberts to shame.

Over lunch at a Studio City restaurant down the street from her office, Tomlin admits she had daydreamed about a "West Wing" guest role, maybe as a tart-tongued pol modeled after former Texas Gov. Ann Richards.

"I liked the show immensely. I thought the writing was just terrific," she said of the NBC series (airing 8 p.m. here on Wednesdays) that received its third consecutive best-drama Emmy Award last month.

Tomlin, 63, has approached other series she admired, gaining guest roles on "Homicide: Life on the Street" and a memorable

"The X-Files" episode in which

she and Ed Asner were paired as mischievous married ghosts.

"I thought it would be nice if I could suggest an idea to 'West Wing,' but then you let those things drift because you think, 'Well, I might get rejected. Maybe they don't even want me to be on the show."'

The planets aligned for her casting when Tomlin was appearing in a New York revival of "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe" and Thomas Schlamme, an executive producer of "The West Wing," was in the audience.

"A friend sat near Schlamme and heard him say, 'Lily would be great on the show,' " Tomlin recalled. "That really perked me up. Then I got on the case."

She didn't expect to follow Joosten — "She's such a darling actress and funny" — as top-dog secretary but relishes the role. She's scheduled for 10 episodes this season.

"The language is very dense, filled with ideas and intelligence and observations and questions. And everybody's supposed to be extremely intelligent and fairly witty," she adds, with a small, self-mocking laugh.

She happily recites a choice bit of dialogue from the season's opening episode. "What I lack in memory I more than make up for in deductive reasoning," the president tells Fiderer during a rocky job interview.

"Does that come with tights and a cape?" she replies, prompting an annoyed Bartlet to declare, "I think the meeting's over."

"Yes, but let's do this every once in a while," says the spunky Fiderer.

Make that spunky and mysterious. So far, we know that Fiderer was fired from a previous White House post because she stepped on bureaucratic toes helping Charlie (Dulé Hill) get hired as the president's aide.

Fiderer's subsequent colorful job history of gambler and alpaca farmer have been sketched in, along with some evidence of political activism.

Tomlin starts to relate the time she talked about notoriously secretive Woody Allen during production of his "Shadows and Fog" (1992), then stops. "Don't let me digress, because I can digress from here to the parking lot," she warns.

But that's part of the Tomlin charm, a stream-of-consciousness approach that echoes her theater work, including "Intelligent Life," featuring Tomlin as more than a dozen different characters and written by longtime partner Jane Wagner.

On stage, that translates to a flow of memorable lines, including "I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific." In life, it means Tomlin jumps from describing the backstory she's created for Fiderer (she plans to post it on her Web site) to how she felt like a social nerd around "Tea with Mussolini" movie co-stars Maggie Smith and Cher.

For instance, she sorely wanted to appear on "The Lawrence Welk Show" in the guise of lounge singer Bobbi Jeanine and wrote to Britain's Prince Charles and Lady Diana in 1981 about another comic alter ego.

"I wanted to have Tommy Velour sing at their wedding," Tomlin said, smiling fondly at the thought of playing the cheesy guy with the pencil-thin mustache for royalty.

Mrs. Landingham might not have approved.