Sacha Baron Cohen The Unauthorized Biography: From Cambridge to Kazakhstan

The first biography of the comedic genius behind the cult favorite TV show "Da Ali G Show" and the high grossingand gross outsmash film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. If the millions of fans who flocked to the blockbuster films Boratand Talladega Nightstuned in to Sacha Baron Cohen's interviews on late night TV hoping to see the man behind the characters, they were sure to be disappointed. Who exactly is this Sacha Baron Cohen, who has everyone from TV personalities to the government of Kazakhstan all riled up? Did he fool all the politicians and luminaries who made such idiots of themselves on "Da Ali G Show" or did it just look like it? Was it the RV-driving Southern good ole frat boys in Borat Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstanwho got taken for a ride or were their on-camera remarks fair game? And how did he get a fiancee as foxy as Isla Fisher, the babe from "Wedding Crashers"? Tracing his roots as the soft-spoken son of an English clothier, biographer Tracy follows Cohen's path to Cambridge, where he ditched the idea of pursuing a Ph.D. for an infinitely trickier comedy career. As we wait to see just what Cohen will come up with next, Tracy gets to the man behind the charactersand details the outrageous moves Cohen has made in character as the boorish English hip-hop journalist Ali G, the tender and tactless Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, and more

Kathleen Tracy is an entertainment journalist who has written biographies of a number of celebrities, including the Dixie Chicks, Don Imus, Angelina Jolie and Ellen DeGeneres.  She lives in California.

Sacha Baron Cohen
1Iz It Coz I'ze Welsh?AS A CHILD, MY DAD MADE US WATCH AMERICAN SHOWS HE LOVED GROWING UP, EVERYTHING FROM SGT. BILKO TO SID CAESAR'S YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS.--SACHA BARON COHENIT'S ironic that the Borat and Ali G characters have been accused of being anti-Semitic, considering that Sacha Baron Cohen is Jewish. However, contrary to reports that he is devoutly Orthodox, Baron Cohen's identity is more firmly rooted in the secular."I wouldn't say I'm a religious Jew," he admits, explaining that his observances have more to do with Jewish cultural customs and traditions. When in England, for example, he'll spend Friday nights with his family and "we'll light the candles. A couple times a year I will go to synagogue." He also tries to keep kosher, not because he's religious, but "because I'm culturally and historically proud of my Jewish identity."And that heritage he identifies with comes to him from two disparate lineages. Although the individual experiences for each side of his family tree differed, the reality of living with a bull's-eye on their back because of their faith merged into a collective consciousness that has left its indelible markon each subsequent generation, in one fashion or another. For some of his relatives, it fueled the fires of commercial ambition; for Sacha, it informed his desire to expose passive prejudice through biting humor and seek understanding and tolerance through the laughter of recognition.Whether any of his ancestors would find Borat's running-of-the-Jews scene funny is debatable since there weren't a lot of yucks finding oneself an endangered species. Sacha's mother, Daniella Weiser, was born in Israel, the daughter of a German Jew whose girlhood dream of being a dancer was derailed by Hitler's rise to power."The Nazis were incredibly fair," Baron Cohen deadpans, "because they had a rule that any Jew who enrolled [in school] before the Nuremberg laws was allowed to complete their education. Just no Jews afterward were allowed to. So [my grandmother] stayed until 1936 ... and was basically the last Jewish girl taught ballet in Germany."By that time, Sacha's paternal clan was long gone from the area, having joined the exodus of Jews fleeing the pogroms that had become increasingly common, and increasingly brutal, throughout Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. Sacha's great-grandfather Hyman Baron Cohen was among those who sought refuge in London. Broke and unable to speak English, he took whatever work was available. For immigrant Jews that usually meant a job in one of east London's notorious clothing sweatshops.But the harsh circumstances became the backdrop for Hyman's courtship of coworker Amelia Angell, who hadalso come to London in search of tolerance and safety. The couple married and decided to make their home in Wales, which had a growing Jewish immigrant population of merchants and would-be entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on the influx of laborers from the Continent looking for work in coal mines and factories.Eventually, anti-Semitism reared its head in Wales, and in August 1911 Jewish businesses in the south Wales coal-mine countryside were attacked by mobs, prompting most of the Jewish immigrants to leave and settle in Cardiff's Jewish ghetto along with five thousand others struggling to survive and somehow integrate into the local citizenry--not an easy task. Being Jewish in Wales is akin to being a snake-handling revival Baptist in Italy--to say you are a minority doesn't remotely begin to describe the cultural isolation Jewish immigrants in Wales faced."We were always outsiders," says Baron Cohen's uncle, Sammy Epstein, a retired film distribution manager who still lives in Cardiff. "Sacha is very mindful of his history. He is proud of his Jewish and Welsh roots, even though he once came down here and poked fun at the Welsh in one of his shows."Hyman and Amelia settled near Cardiff and had fifteen children. Sacha's grandfather Morris, the second oldest of seven brothers, was born in 1900 in Pontypridd, which is also Tom "Panty Magnet" Jones's hometown. Tales of the hardships Morris and his siblings endured have become family lore.Baron Cohen's cousin Samuel Minton reveals that Morris's family "lived in a hovel in a real ghetto" that had no electricity, no heat, no indoor plumbing, "and appalling hygiene." Food was scarce and hunger was common. Their home was so tiny, all the kids shared one bedroom. Hyman struggled to support his family by working as an all-around fix-it man who repaired everything from glass to pots and pans."It was an incredibly hard life," Epstein says. "They peddled services and were paid in installments." There were some suggestions among locals that Morris drummed up extra business by encouraging local youths to go around breaking windows so that he would be hired to repair them. That was the first clue young Morris had a bright future in business ... or as Tony Soprano's director of marketing.With money so scarce, education was a luxury Morris's family could not afford. When each kid turned fourteen, he or she had to quit school and find a job. "The girls became dressmakers," Epstein says, "while the boys did all sorts of menial work, selling glass and even going down the pits." Morris went to work when he was eleven, earning sixpence a week, or the equivalent of about twelve cents.When World War I broke out, five of the Baron Cohen boys enlisted. "There was never any question about waiting to be called up," Sammy says. "They all went straightaway to volunteer. They felt one hundred percent British and wanted to fight for Britain."Most of the Baron Cohen brothers lied about their age so they could be enlisted. Fourteen-year-old Morris--short, slight of build, and nearsighted--claimed to be nineteen and was assigned to the Cardiff City Battalion. He became the youngest non-commissioned British officer and saw combat in France, Germany, and Belgium. Three of his younger brothers also served.Inordinately confident and mature, Morris went on to become a sergeant. "Well, he was always a noisy beggar," observes Sammy, "and obviously clever, with all his marbles about him."The eldest Baron Cohen son, Isaac, was wounded at Ypres and died of pneumonia on the last day of the war. Morris took the responsibility of being the oldest living son to heart."Although he was only eighteen, Morris was the elderstatesman of the family, always on the go and a real go-getter," Epstein says. "He worked hard, he took menial jobs, anything he could find ... . And he always did it with the most remarkable sense of humor."For a while Morris followed his dad's lead and worked as a tinker. Being a resourceful young man, Morris frequently subsidized his meager earnings hustling at snooker. But as Europe's economy began the slide that would ultimately domino into the Great Depression, work became scarce in Wales. So Morris periodically traveled to London in hopes of finding a decent-paying job. Instead, he found a high-spirited Cockney maiden named Miriam. The couple married in 1929 and settled in London's Stepney neighborhood, not far from Whitechapel, where Jack the Ripper had roamed forty years earlier.Miriam and Morris's two sons, Hymie and Gerald, were born in England, but Morris was homesick and moved his family back to Wales. He was hired at a tailor's store where he finally found his niche, turning the job into a thriving family business.Alan Schwartz, who edited a Welsh Jewish publication called Bimah, recalled in a London Daily Mail interview that Morris "was a decent, strait-laced sort of bloke." Even though business and financial matters were his primary focus, Schwartz says Morris was also "fairly orthodox and observant to the faith and our holidays. He became a pillar of the community and was made the honorary warden of our local synagogue ... . Morris likedto be known as a professional and his wife certainly lived up to it."Another acquaintance recalls that Miriam was much more outgoing than her husband. "She was hilariously loud and ebullient and you could hear her coming a mile away." As Morris became more prosperous, Miriam nudged her husband to upgrade their lifestyle by moving to a posher neighborhood in Cardiff, "but she still insisted on shopping in the poorer part of town."While Miriam was out looking for bargains, Morris did a mitzvah by establishing a scholarship for underprivileged children. He also set his sons up with their own tailoring company, called Morris Cowan, with outlets in Cardiff and London. Gerald moved to London in the 1960s.Although Sacha's maternal grandmother still lived in Haifa, Israel, where she ran--and continues to run--a fitness center for geriatrics, Daniella had moved to London and supported herself as a movement instructor. After their marriage, she and Gerald settled in the well-heeled Hampstead Garden suburb, where they raised three sons.Sacha Noam Baron Cohen was born on October 13, 1971, and grew up in the family's three-story redbrick house, the youngest child. His father owns the House of Baron clothier, located in always trendy Piccadilly. By all accounts Sacha's was a typical upper-middle-class upbringing--plenty of creature comforts, minimal money worries, and tacit parental expectations of achieving personal success.As Sacha was growing up, the family consensus was thathe had inherited Grandma Miriam's outgoing humor, served with a splash of vermouth. In 1981, he wrote an essay about school that practically reeks of a precocious sarcasm: "My first lesson on Monday morning is English. This reminds us of the correct way to speak and write English. This is very important as most of the boys have been watching television and speaking with their parents all weekend."He recounted a history lesson that detailed the life and times of people in the Stone Age, concluding that such knowledge would in the future help him and his peers to better survive "many bad English winters and strikes."Math was Baron Cohen's favorite subject because it offered the comfort of consistency in an otherwise always changing world. "Russia may have invaded Afghanistan, England may have lost against the West Indies at cricket, and the price of Smarties has jumped 5p. But in our maths lesson nothing has changed."It's not too hard to see how the self-satisfied amusement expressed would eventually ferment into Baron Cohen's signature dry, sardonic wit.All the Baron Cohen brothers attended the public,1 all-boy, apostrophe-heavy Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, mercifully known as just Habs, where the best and brightest "will be challenged by an exciting academic curriculumallied to a wealth of sporting, dramatic, musical and cultural activity." Like an educational Club Med, minus the bikini babes.Although not a boarding school, Habs maintains an equally strict code of conduct that reflects its mandate to create sophisticated gentleman scholars and discourage rakishness, boorishness, and simple bad form. The rules include:The roof of any building, the woods and water gardens are out of bounds. 
Boys are forbidden to possess or use tobacco or alcohol. In the case of senior pupils alcohol may be consumed in moderation with parental permission and under staff supervision on appropriate school occasions specially announced in advance. 
Bullying in any form is not tolerated. 
Boys are expected to be committed both to their academic work and to the extra-curricular activities of the school. They have an obligation, if selected by the school, to take part in school games and other out-of-school activities and to attend practices and meetings on schooldays, weekends and before term unless special exemption has been granted. 
Any action which might bring the school's good name into disrepute, such as contributing to a scurrilous website, is forbidden. 
All boys are expected to take a pride in their appearance and to be smartly dressed.To attend such a school is to have what's proper and appropriate drummed into your psyche on a daily basis. But the curriculum also encouraged freethinking and pushing the creative envelope. Interestingly, both perspectives can be seen in Baron Cohen's comedy: If you're going to be inappropriate, at least be entertaining and have a point to it.One of Sacha's classmates at Habs was Dan Mazer, who years later would become one of his collaborators. Mazer and Baron Cohen were the same age, but Sacha was a grade ahead. Dan recalls the school as being a kind of scholastic comedy factory, "just cocky young Jews. And because we were all too weak to fight each other, we compensated with verbal jousts."Some remember Sacha standing out for being slightly eccentric. "He seemed to have a basketball permanently attached to his right hand," recalls another former classmate, "which was funny in a school without a basketball team."Although the Baron Cohens expected their sons to do well academically, the arts were also stressed. The English newspaper The Observer, which described Daniella as a "forceful Jewish mother," reported that she would urge her sons to perform recitals after the family's Friday-evening Shabbat meals.Sacha's older brother Erran recalls, "Even in the early days he was the comic and I was the musician."And then there was that break-dancing phase ... "As a kid, I was very into rap," Baron Cohen says. When he was twelve, Sacha's mom would load up the linoleum flooring in the back of her Volvo and "take me and my crew ... to Covent Garden in the dead middle of winter. We'd pull out the lino and start breaking."At first, the group didn't have an official name. Then, once they started appearing at local bar mitzvahs, Sacha says they called themselves Black On White, and that they "used mainly robotics."Sacha even provided the entertainment at his own bar mitzvah. "Yes ... I put down the linoleum on the floor of the Marquis," and with Erran providing the musical background, "me and my crew performed for about an hour and a half."Sacha's embrace of hip-hop culture didn't go unnoticed. One of his Habs classmates was William Sutcliffe, the novelist. In his first book, New Boy, set in a public school not unlike Habs, he described a classmate as a Jewish boy "with floor polish in [his] hair pretending to be [a] ghetto black kid."Baron Cohen doesn't hedge the characterization. "Essentially we were middle-class Jewish boys who were adopting this culture, which we thought was very cool. That was sort of the origins of Ali G," including the accent, which he and his brother would use while out together."I always enjoyed speaking in stupid voices," Sacha says. "I never really spoke as Borat or Bruno, but yeah, I loved playing characters." He also loved watching characters and became a fan of Peter Sellers after seeing a Pink Panther movie when he was eight.But not everyone found his rap shtick a knee-slapper."I always thought Sacha was incredibly full of himself--I never liked him," a former classmate told the Daily Mail anonymously. "He was a nice Jewish boy, close to his family, very ambitious, and, to be fair, very talented ... just incredibly aware of how funny and clever he was, and never modest about it."Claws bared, the classmate added, "I don't remember Sacha having girlfriends. He wasn't the most attractive of boys so I'm not sure he was a big hitter with the girls. Also, he was quite religious and it wouldn't have been the done thing for him to have lots of girlfriends."Baron Cohen confirms he was no teenage ladies' man. "I'm afraid I was never invited to the 'black gates' area," he says, referring to the secluded Habs location where the prep boys would take girls to "cop off."2The perception that it was Judaism that hindered Sacha's romantic development--and not the fact that he attended an all-boys school--is a curious, and perhaps subtly telling, assumption.Even if he wasn't as devoutly religious as others thought, he was eager to learn about his Jewish culture and was deeply involved with Habonim Dror, a Jewish youth group with chapters in over twenty countries. The British chapter's Web site states its mission is to "build a Socialist, culturally Jewish future in the state of Israel." Practically speaking, to that end it provides Jewish education, stresses social responsibility, and sponsors summer youth camps.Sacha, who worked as a madrich, or youth leader, down-plays any political or social relevance by joking that belonging to Habonim "basically meant that we shared our sweets." But it's clear it provided an outlet for performing. He made his acting debut in a Habonim production of Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues and honed his comedy stylings in sketch shows the group put on."He was always doing characters, always performing," says a fellow member.Another recalls the time Baron Cohen did his sidesplitting bit about a break-dancing rabbi. (Again, you clearly had to be there.) "I think all of us ten-year-olds hero-worshipped him. He had this ability to capture a roomful of people with his wit and charm and just make us all laugh. When I first saw Ali G I knew straightaway it was our Sacha." He also calls Sacha a good person and with a great artistic presence. "He has been making the Jewish community laugh for years. Now he's making the whole country laugh."Although "madcap" isn't usually the first thought "Jewish Zionist group" brings to mind, a spokeswoman for his former London Habonim told the Daily Mail newspaper, "We think Habonim is where he got his craziness; the confidence in speaking out, feeling comfortable in a crowd--that is what Habonim would have given Sacha."The ultimate goal of Habonim isn't a life on the boards; it is aliyah, permanent relocation to Israel, but most of the youth opt for an extended stay on a kibbutz instead. So after leaving Habs, Baron Cohen took a one-year sabbatical to Israel, living on the Rosh HaNikra kibbutz, by the sea near the Lebanon border. Established in 1949 by Holocaust survivors and members of the pre-state militia, the kibbutz has around six hundred residents.Baron Cohen's kibbutz roommate, Elliot Reuben, says that when his work picking avocados was done, Sacha busied himself making short films. "In one, he climbed into a hoist and pretended to be the Messiah ascending to Heaven. In another, he acted out a Western, rolling around in the sand dunes nearby. He was the funniest man in the place by a mile." Of course, there weren't many other people within a mile of the isolated kibbutz.Despite the encouragement, Sacha was reluctant to acknowledge his desire to pursue performing as a career. "I think I was embarrassed to admit to my friends, or myself, that I wanted to be a comic. It was sort of like admitting you wanted to be a model."So when the year was up, he headed back to England and Cambridge, where it was expected he would study history at the University's Christ's College and follow a long line of Baron Cohens into a proper and appropriate business career.It didn't quite work out that way.SACHA BARON COHEN. Copyright © 2007 by Kathleen Tracy. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.