Kelsey Grammer opens with the murder of the sister, the sorrow, the forgiveness

Karen Grammer liked to soak her Oreos in Coca-Cola ice cream until the cream is filled and the cookie softens. She wore glasses. She had no solid relationship with her father, but was extremely close to her grandfather. She smoked Marlboro Lights. She jumped naked on her bed in her college dormitory while listening to Leon Russell's music. She, at least according to her high school directory, had a hell of a trip to Disney World before graduation. She really entered the film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”.

If she was alive today, her older brother suspects, she would live in Florida. Maybe she was working with animals or would do something artistic. She has always loved working with her hands.

Karen was kidnapped, raped and murdered on July 1, 1975, just two weeks before her 19th birthday.

The details of the attacks are more horrible than anything that anyone, not to mention a loved one, should never have to know. And especially because Karen was the younger sister of Kelsey Grammer – then a Juilliard Flunkie, 20 years old – it is easy to sensualize his last moments.

So, the older grammar did what he could not do 50 years ago: he protected his sister. In “Karen: a brother remembers”, who came out on Tuesday, the actor “brewing” sometimes refers to the atrocities that men have committed (the verb “massacred” is invoked on a few times and he notes, from the coroner report, that the entrance on his neck was so great that you could see throughout his lung). But his main objective is to capture the joyful and lively spirit of his sister and interview his friends about his last years. He writes that it is not so much a book of sorrow as a book of life; A detailed story of her childhood and sister and how she stayed with him “before and after her human experience”.

Said in a fluid style that Grammer joyfully concedes that he borrowed from “The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling” by Henry Fielding, he presents stories of their adolescence along the bank of Florida and explores how these events have had an impact on his life and his career.

If these memories of five decades ago seem particularly sharp, it is because Grammer says that his sister appeared to him a few years ago and told him what to write. Grammer works regularly with mediums – he was even an executive producer on the procedural “medium” of Patricia Arquette – and says that during a recent zoom, “I think that all this is immediately at our disposal as long as we abandon filters and simply believe.”

It is not that sorrow and adaptation mechanisms do not appear in this book; One of the ways in which Grammer has managed time as a beginner actor of the old theater of the Globe of San Diego was to take a Loma Seafood point crab sandwich with wine or beer, and to go to the military cemetery of the neighborhood to sit on the tomb of a soldier of Vietnam who was around the age of grammer at the time of his death.

The actor now says: “An old friend of mine said that the cause of dependence is generally unresolved sorrow, and that holds me” because “(I) had a fairly large basket of sorrow that I had to face.”

“I arrived in a phase of my life where everything should have been wonderful,” said Grammer about his youngest me, known as much for his multiple victories in Emmy as tabloid titles on her myriads of relationships and marriages and drug addiction problems. Now married to his fourth wife, Kayte, with whom he shares three children, Grammer says that at the time, “I was rich and famous and succeeded and doing what I like more than anything in the world, and yet I could not forgive myself. So, I had to find a way to do so.

This means accepting that there are things he will never be able to answer, like the way Karen, a waitress, became sitting in the parking lot of the lobster red when she was not working that evening (he theorizes that she was alone and wanted to wait for her friends to finish their work quarters). Or if she knew what would happen when Spree Killer Freddie Glenn and two others approached her when she was sitting near a Beetle Red Volkswagen, showed her a weapon and told her to come with them. He thinks that his reported response – “for what?” – It looks like her copper little sister.

Working on the book also means reliving, and sometimes the question, your own life choices. Grammer writes that Karen's mind told him to forgive himself for the regret he felt about the abortion of his college girlfriend. He says he no longer believes that Karen's death was a kind of “nonsense of the eye”. In the book, he describes his “boxing faith” towards Christianity. During our interview, he talks about the “reappearance” he experienced while promoting his film in 2023 “Jesus Revolution”.

“I do not go out of proselytism, but I will not deny my faith; I'm not going to deny Jesus Christ, ”says Grammer.

This, inevitably, raises the complicated thoughts of Grammer on the death penalty. Glenn was sentenced to the gas chamber for Karen's murder, but two years later, Colorado abolished the death penalty.

“I have always had mixed feelings about the death penalty because I hate being society that puts the guy who is innocent to death,” says Grammer, before adding: “This guy is not innocent.”

In his book, Grammer writes that he eats that Glenn's petitions on the board of parole are never remorse, but rather that he was a “good child”.

“Sometimes it was really overwhelming; it can still stop at my footsteps,” says Kelsey Grammer about the sorrow to lose his sister.

(John Russo)

“I can love the young man,” writes Grammer. “The young man whose hopes have become so dark, he could not think of any way of allowing himself to kill an innocent girl. And I give it a lot of credit in this characterization. You need each fiber of my being, but my heart goes to him. I leave him to God.

Grammer knows that revisiting the case gives him more advertising and he is also aware that there have been special television specials (although he points out that they have not always been exact). His family has undergone other tragedies, such as the ball death of his father after a crime of hatred and the death of two of his half-brothers. He writes in the book that his paternal grandfather's response when Grammer told him about the murder of Karen was: “This family is cursed.”

It is a strange thing not only to be famous, but also to know that the worst things that have happened to you and your family can be reduced to whispered gossip and Wikipedia entrances. Grammer says that he has not thought much about the public perception of these events. In addition, he says: “It is not a badge of honor to have suffered from sorrow like that. It's just my constant companion. ” He adds: “It never really lets go (Karen), but it lets go part of the load.”

“Sometimes it was really overwhelming; It can still stop in my footsteps, ”explains Grammer. “What is funny is now that something had been withdrawn from me … When I think of Karen, I don't think of his death as much as I of his life. It was a good deal; it was the gain. And it was great.