Los Angeles Magazine: Camryn & Karl Manheim

I DON'T KNOW WHAT CAME FIRST --my politics or my fat," Camryn Manheim says. It's poker night, and the Emmy-winning actress and her older brother, Karl, are sitting in the comfy study of her Venice beach house, waiting for the gang to show up. "I would like to think I would be against the objectification of women and how the whole beauty myth is handled whether I was fat or thin. But if I were a skinny, gorgeous model, would my politics be completely different?"

Karl, a professor at Loyola Law School, suspects not. "You were rebellious," he says, grinning, "when you were a skinny little punk."

He's a lawyer. She plays one on TV: defense attorney Ellenor Frutt of ABC's courtroom drama The Practice. Both are known in their respective disciplines for relishing an uphill fight, whether it's preserving immigrants' fights (him) or proving that big can be beautiful (her).

For her first three seasons on The Practice, Camryn lived in the guest house ("a two-car garage," she corrects) of Karl's Culver City home. He helped her memorize her lines by teaching her legal terms like "interlocutory appeal." She threw parties, he is still miffed to report, that she didn't invite him to. ("They were girl parties!" she yelps.) For a while he kept her out of his weekly all-boy poker game. She is persuasive, though. Not only has Camryn been playing with the guys for five years now, but Karl often buys her chips. "And I always have to put her ante in," he says.

Karl, 53, has fought to preserve affirmative action in California and is a nationally recognized expert on rent control. He argued, successfully, before the California Supreme Court to rein in insurance premiums, and he helped strike down Proposition 187, the ballot measure that sought to deny public assistance to illegal immigrants. He is, as his sister likes to say, the last of a dying breed--a confirmed bachelor ("He's married to the underdog," she says) who is so unabashedly liberal that he began one law review article about the California initiative process with the Black Panther Party slogan "Power to the people."

Forty-year-old Camryn, meanwhile, is the champion of a constituency that is reviled nowhere more than in size 2-obsessed Hollywood: plus-size women. "This is for all the fat girls!" she told the world when she accepted her Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in 1998. The next year, her memoir--Wake Up, I'm Fat!--was a bestseller. This month, she attempts something even more radical. In Kiss My Act, a TV movie she produced that will air on ABC, the actress plays a stand-up comic who tries to win the heart of the handsome (and thin) man of her dreams--without dieting.

The doorbell rings, and the poker crowd begins to trickle in. A UCLA professor, two composers, a Screen Actors Guild staffer (the Manheims' cousin), two TV producers, and an Internet entrepreneur assemble around Camryn's huge Mission-style dining room table. Karl buys Camryn's chips, as usual, and announces the first game, Follow the Eights, a variation on seven-card stud.

In college, Camryn majored in math. She is a crack bridge player, and she won her role on The Practice after she challenged the show's creator, David E. Kelley, to a game of cribbage. The woman can play cards. But tonight she is distracted by two things. One, she is very pregnant (she is due this month). Two, this group doesn't much care about winning, preferring instead to argue about which player should be fined "the asshole tax," a 25-cent punishment for stupid behavior.

"You understand this is not real poker," Karl explains, noting the low stakes (nickel-dime-quarter). "We're playing to distract us while we talk."

Next to him, Camryn howls with laughter. She has just been told that her ace-high straight does not beat the full house at the other end of the table, and she is in denial. "A full house beats a straight? What happens underneath a full boat? A flush beats a straight? That's wrong!"

The table erupts in good-natured whooping as Karl assesses his sister's grasp of the rules. "When Camryn plays, the game becomes very existential," he says in the hushed voice of a sports commentator. "As a matter of principle, she thinks the rules are wrong."

You don't have to play poker with the Manheims to know that they care about matters of principle. They were raised in a family that prized political activism. Because of their 13-year age difference, they lived two distinct childhoods. Karl grew up in suburban New Jersey in the '50s, when their father, a mathematician who frequently spoke out against racial segregation and other injustices, was targeted by Senator Joe McCarthy for supposed communist leanings. Karl didn't know it at the time, but the FBI used to follow him to school.

Camryn, whose real name is Debra Frances, was born in 1961 in Peoria, Illinois. Their father was then a college administrator, their mother a schoolteacher. Around the dinner table, Camryn, Karl, and their sister, Lisa, were encouraged to speak their minds about current events. But before Camryn was old enough to really know him, Karl joined the merchant marine. Only in the '70s, after their dad had become a dean at Cal State Long Beach and Karl had started lecturing at Loyola, did the eldest and youngest Manheim children realize what they were missing. "I like to say I didn't meet Karl until I was ten," Camryn says.

Apparently, he made up for lost time. Karl gave Camryn her first guitar (a Gibson LG-1), taught her how to drive, and moved her and her overstuffed U-Haul to college at UC Santa Cruz. He was also the only one in the family for whom her fat wasn't a problem.

"He never made it a point of interest for him. It was a nonissue," she says, momentarily tender. Then she turns to him, mischievous. "Though I haven't seen you have any fat girlfriends. That, to me, would be the highest praise: if he'd come home with a big fat girl."

Karl blushes, which is impossible to miss, since Camryn is yelling "Look! He got red! He got red!" He protests that his sister never fixes him up with her friends.

"If I could find a computer that wore a dress, I'd set you up with that. I think you could have a fantastic love affair with a computer with boobs," she retorts, referring to the fact that Karl is something of a nerd. (He created her Web site, www.camryn.com, which links to his own.) "People expect me to be as smart as he is," she says.

So she relies on him. When she went on Politically Incorrect, he was with her in the green room, helping to hone her talking points. Recently, she had some concerns about a Practice script that revolved around the legal issues faced by single parents (a key issue for her, as she's about to become one). She called Karl.

She points out that the same night the TV networks broadcast her visit to the floor of last year's Democratic National Convention, Karl served as a legal observer outside the Staples Center. His job: ensuring that law enforcement treated the protesters fairly. "I don't mean this to sound weird, but Karl has really become my spiritual adviser," says Camryn. "He keeps my moral barometer in check. People seem to care what I think, just because I'm in their living rooms once a week. I wish I could channel my brother."

When it is Camryn's turn to deal, she does not choose Anaconda or Baseball or anything recognizable. Instead she opts for a baffling variation invented by her brother. The rules: Buy on the fives, sell on the sixes, ten-cent penalty on the sevens, and follow the eights. The name of the game? "Seven, Card Karl."