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America's new family man
Comedian Bernie Mac brings tough love to a new school of prime-time viewers.
By Mark Morrison

It's Saturday night in the Hollywood Hills, but don't expect TV's hottest new sitcom star to rush out to any fancy parties. No, the star and namesake of Fox's breakout series, "The Bernie Mac Show", is home alone in a gated tract house on a quiet cul-de-sac. What's more, the hulking stand-up comic -- who has so smoothly adapted his loud, politically incorrect stage persona to the small screen -- is enjoying a favorite evening ritual: Mac circles his partially furnished living room lighting an assortment of scented candles.

"This is me," he says, stretching out in an easy chair, sounding nothing like his fire-breathing TV character. "I'm a domestic cat. When I get done working, man, I put that mike down. I don't need a posse. I don't need a lot of people. I like my privacy. I see all these cats, man. ... They got everything to the point where they got nothing. I don't want to do that."

That's why the 44-year-old actor keeps apart from the Hollywood hubbub and refuses to pay attention to other people's opinions. "I don't hear the voices," he says, which may be his foremost career strategy. "My grandmother taught me that. I don't listen to 'em, good or bad." Not even the critics who have hailed "The Bernie Mac Show" as the most original sitcom since Fox's "Malcolm in the Middle", or the skeptics who don't get the humor in his tough-love take on parenting.

Doing things his way has enabled Mac to take a routine from his stand-up act about the rigors of raising his sister's kids while she was in rehab (based on a situation in his own life when, in 1995, he took in his sister-in-law's daughter and granddaughter), reinvent it for TV without dulling his edge and make what is arguably the nimblest leap from comedy clubs to the tube since "Home Improvement"'s Tim Allen.

Although the performer points to such heroes as Jackie Gleason, Redd Foxx and Bill Cosby, his greatest inspiration is probably his grandmother Lorraine, who helped raise him after his father left when Mac was growing up on Chicago's South Side. She held the family together after Mac's mother died of breast cancer when he was in high school (one brother died in infancy; another died of a heart attack at 26). "My grandmother always told me, 'If you're going to do something, do it. Don't back off. Don't stop. Don't knock on my door. Don't ring the bell. If you didn't go to school, you didn't come home.' That was tough love," he says. "That's where I came from."

"He's old school," says his wife, Rhonda, who met him in high school in 1975, married him in 1977 and still calls him Bernard. Armed with a big personality and endless imagination, Bernard Jeffery McCullough was a natural storyteller who always performed at family and church functions. But after he married at 19 and daughter Je'Neice was born in 1978, a lot of "penny-ante jobs" followed. He was a school-bus driver, professional mover, painter, laborer and gardener. The low point came when he was laid off from a job with General Motors, and he, his wife and his daughter had to move in with his family.

"My priorities were messed up," he says. "I didn't know how to handle my responsibilities. I was blaming everybody, feeling sorry for myself." After his grandmother died and his best friend was killed in a shooting, it hit him that "life ain't no rehearsal. And I started getting myself together." By his early 30s, "Chicago was my town." He was playing clubs seven nights a week while still driving a Wonder Bread truck. Finally, he got up the confidence to quit his job and told Rhonda, who worked as a nurse, he was going to be a full-time comic. "I knew he was ready," she says. "There was a look in his eye I'd never seen before. And I didn't want to be the one to stop his dream."

An appearance on HBO's "Russell Simmons' Def Comedy Jam" led to featured roles in movies such as "Mo' Money", "House Party 3" and "Life". Two years ago, Spike Lee captured Mac's Original Kings of Comedy tour in a documentary film. Then last year, he co-starred as a corrupt casino dealer in "Ocean's 11". The days of food stamps and living without heat are long over. Rhonda, who is now vice president of Mac's company, flies in from Chicago to visit every two weeks. The couple is planning a Chicago blowout for their daughter's wedding in July, and something quieter for their 25th anniversary in September. "Everything that's happened to me has happened on its own," Mac says. "I've just been in training. There's going to be a time when all of this is no more. But I'm not coming back like [Michael] Jordan. If it stops tomorrow, I can walk away. I can go home. I got a life."

Mark Morrison, West Coast editor of InStyle magazine, last interviewed Tom Cruise and Cameron Crowe for USA WEEKEND Magazine.