No one dares upstage Judy Sheindlin, 55, who for two seasons has meted out justice—often with the subtlety of a catapult meting out large rocks—on Judge Judy. The syndicated half-hour show is patterned after The People's Court (small-claims cases, with up to $5,000 awarded in damages), but where Court's Judge Wapner was an august if crabby presence, the petite Sheindlin, a former Manhattan family court judge who announces her decisions in a rasping Brooklyn accent, is part Harry Truman, part Rhea Perlman: funny, quick-tempered, bluntly honest. "What you see," says her husband, Jerry Sheindlin, 64, a judge in The Bronx's supreme court, "is what you get."
In a typical episode, Sheindlin chides one plaintiff—a mother on welfare, for being a burden to taxpayers—then blasts a defendant for not bringing in evidence. To a woman whose case involves a crushed hat, Sheindlin offers the advice, "You better get a life, madam." Sick of waiting for a straight answer, she'll tap her forehead and ask, "Does it say stupid here?" Or she'll bark, "Baloney! Baloney! Baloney!"
Sheindlin's justice is both extreme—Cheri Oteri parodies her on Saturday Night Live—and extremely entertaining. Ratings are terrific. Sheindlin even beats The People's Court's new host, Ed Koch, who as mayor of New York City appointed her to the bench in 1982. Assessing his rival, Koch says judiciously, "She has a greater tendency to lecture."
But hers is no star chamber. Despite the bluster, Sheindlin rules from the heart. "She truly gives a damn about these people," says the show's bailiff, Petri Hawkins-Byrd, who served under her in New York City. Sheindlin practices what she calls "Judy's Law," relying on gut instinct she honed raising five children and hearing 20,000 family-court cases, from custody battles to homicides committed by minors. "I didn't come into this as a starstruck teenager," she says. "I'm a fully cooked human being."
The chief chef in her Brooklyn upbringing was her father, Murry Blum, a dentist whose wife, Ethel, ran the office. From him she learned her salty language—including the phrase that is the title of her 1996 book on family courts, Don't Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining—and her credo: "You do the right thing, the right thing usually happens to you," says Sheindlin, whose brother David Blum, 50, took up his dad's calling. "But you can be sure if you do the wrong thing, it's going to bite you in the [posterior]."
An average but articulate student, she decided to study law after graduating from American University in Washington, D.C. When a professor told her to just focus on finding a mate, even though she was first in an otherwise all-male class, "I looked at him as if he didn't know what he was talking about," says Sheindlin. "This [joker] is telling me, 'You're not going to make it'?"
She did make it, and she did find a mate: She married Ronald Levy, a lawyer, in 1964, a year before graduating from New York Law School. As a prosecutor in family court, she raised a daughter, Jamie Hartwright, now 31 and a homemaker, and a son, Adam Levy, 29, a (surprise) lawyer. Mom Judy was loving, says her son, but tough. When 5-year-old Adam stole cap-pistol caps, Sheindlin hauled him before the store manager. "If you ever see this boy in here again," she said, "call the police and have him arrested."
Her 12-year marriage ended in divorce court in 1976, foundering partly on career issues. "I didn't see why I couldn't accomplish everything, as long as I was willing to work a little harder," she says. Her husband "viewed my work as something to keep me busy, like bridge." Three weeks after the divorce, she met Jerry Sheindlin, a well-known criminal defense lawyer, and, she says, "we've been together ever since"—with a combined brood that includes his children, Greg, 33, a lawyer; Jonathan, 30, a doctor; and Nicole, 29, a lawyer. "Jerry's smart, and he makes me laugh, but he's not easy," says Sheindlin of her husband, whom she wed in 1978. "He's convinced that if he were easy, I would find him boring."
There was never a dull moment after her 1982 appointment to Manhattan family court, where the judge put in "six-Tylenol days" hectoring city bureaucrats to bend impractical rules that in one case would have put four kids in foster care at a cost of $100,000 rather than reunite them with their mother in a subsidized apartment. When, in that instance, she threatened to call in the press, the officials caved in, she says. "You had to rattle the cage that extra time."
She made enough noise to be profiled in 1993 in the Los Angeles Times and on 60 Minutes, bringing her to the attention of Larry Lyttle, whose company Big Ticket Television produces Judge Judy. "She reminded me of my mother," says Lyttle, "with an edge." And Sheindlin, after 14 years on the bench, was willing to trade law journals for Variety—even if that meant deciding cases about rottweilers that devour ostriches. "Just the head," Sheindlin explains, "but that was enough to kill it."
Sheindlin, who lives in a three-bedroom Manhattan apartment and commutes to L.A. four days a month for tapings, admits she enjoys her new, enlarged salary, which supplements her pension. She recently treated herself to a belated diamond engagement ring that she demurely describes as "substantial and befitting." She also owns a three-bedroom weekend house in Upstate New York, where she works out with free weights (she's a size 2 under her $400 silk robe) and tends a garden "big enough to feed half the Third World."
Not that she prides herself on her green thumb—or much of anything: "I am clueless in math, have absolutely no voice, I can't draw a straight line, I can't sing." But, says the judge, "my skill is people sense. Isn't it nice that I've been able to find a medium where I can use it?"
Tom Gliatto
Stanley Young in Los Angeles
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