Authors: Jerry Stiller
I got around those days in a used ‘54 Dodge that acted as a shrunken limo for my fellow actors.
“I got room for eight,” I would holler after the show. “Five in the back, three in front. We play kings and queens on stage. This car was
built for royalty.” Two of the royals, George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst, were getting warmly acquainted in the back seat.
“Can we pay for gas?” Suddenly all these actors were throwing dollar bills at me, little greenbacks floating over the front seat.
“I don’t need all that. I was going home anyway.”
The automobile ride made me feel big time. Whoever rode in that ‘54 Dodge had some luck: Roscoe Lee Brown, George and Colleen, J. D. (Jack) Cannon, Leo Bloom, Stephen Joyce, Ed Sherin, David Amram (who wrote the music for Joe’s shows and later the score for Kazan’s
Splendor in the Grass
). Driving actors home made me feel important. I didn’t do it to suck up, I just loved the camaraderie. When I was in shows at the Phoenix, with people like Zero Mostel, Blanche Yurka, and E. G. Marshall, I’d similarly considered it a privilege. I always drove Miss Yurka and her sister home. Blanche was sweet to me, kissed me goodnight, treated me like a son. I would drive Zero, Bea Arthur, and Carroll O’Connor home whenever I picked up Anne at the Rooftop Theater on Houston Street, where they were all starring in
Ulysses in Nighttown
.
With the Papp company, Colleen Dewhurst was special. She was playing Lady Macbeth. I was the Porter. On opening night for the press, under menacing skies in Central Park, there was a crash of thunder on the line, “So fair and foul a night I have not seen,” and the rains poured down, drowning the show. During the run Colleen, as Lady Macbeth, stood and shook her fist at a TWA flight passing overhead every night during her soliloquy. She got Joe to hold the opening curtain five minutes in the hope that the jet would have passed. Of course, the flight was often delayed.
One day Colleen said, “Why don’t we all go out to Riis Park on our day off?”
“We can use my car,” I was quick to suggest. Everyone agreed. Roy Poole, Jack and Alice, Roscoe, Leo, Colleen, Anne, and I put some beer, cold cuts, potato salad, and ice into a cooler and headed out to the Rockaways. On the way out we sang songs and told stories. It was a rare occurrence for actors to hang out together on their day off. As we reached the toll gate to Riis Park, the engine conked out. I tried the choke. Nothing. The engine wouldn’t turn over.
The toll-keeper said, “What’d you do, run out of gas?”
I looked at the gauge. It was low but not empty.
“Must be some mistake,” I said.
“You’ll have to get this heap out of here,” he said.
“How?” I said.
Colleen Dewhurst jumped out of the car and started to push. The others followed suit. I remained behind the wheel.
“Choke it!” Colleen hollered as the car picked up a little speed. It started to putt-putt. “Now the gas,” she said, and the engine turned over. “Keep driving it,” she yelled.
I drove around the parking lot while she kept spurring the car on. The gas line had been clogged. Colleen got back in. When we got out we gave Lady Macbeth a standing ovation.
When
Romeo and Juliet
was at the end of its run, Joe Papp had asked if I would like to do Launce, the servant and clown in
Two Gentlemen of Verona
. I told him I’d like to, but I couldn’t afford to on the $35 salary.
“Why can’t we hire Anne?” he suggested. “She can play Julia and the third witch in
Macbeth
.”
I immediately agreed. It would solve the Stiller/Meara rent problem as well as the situation that occurs when one member of an acting family is working and the other is not.
“By the way,” Joe said, “would she mind taking her clothes off? The director wants to do one of the Julia scenes in a bathtub.”
This was before frontal nudity was commonplace. There was never any of this in Shakespeare, I thought.
“I don’t know, Joe. She was brought up Catholic.”
“We can get her a dispensation,” Joe said by way of a jest. “The audience will never really see the nudity. It’s going to be done behind a screen on a raised platform, too high for anyone to see. It’s just another way to play the scene.”
“Okay,” I said, without asking Anne.
“Oh, by the way, you’re going to have to work with a dog. Have you ever worked with an animal before?”
“I worked with a dog in
The World We Make
at the Equity Library Theater. The dog got a lot of calls as a result of my performance.”
“Okay, then, we’re set,” Joe said.
I began rehearsing for my part as Launce on a blistering hot summer day in a little park in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Also in the play, attached to Launce, was—as Joe Papp had indicated—Crab the dog, a character in the play. A few days into rehearsal, Joe asked if I had found a dog yet.
“No. I’m rehearsing alone, Joe. When he arrives, I’ll work him in.”
“You’d better get on it,” Joe warned. “If you leave it to the last minute, you’ll be stuck with whatever you’ve got.”
I asked the stage manager, John Robertson, to go to the ASPCA. John returned with a beautiful young brown collie, full of life and sparkle. He started licking me and seemed eager to be adopted.
“He’s wrong,” I said.
John said, “Okay, I’ll take him.”
Suddenly I was Louis B. Mayer looking for the perfect Scarlett O’Hara.
At that moment Ed Sherin, a fellow actor, said, “What would you think of me playing the dog?”
“You’re wrong for it, Ed.”
“I’ll get a dog outfit.”
“It wouldn’t work, Ed,” I said, trying to let him down easily.
“Okay,” he said with a shrug. Ed gave up acting, married Jane Alexander, and today produces the television show
Law and Order
.
In show business, miracles sometimes do occur. Just at that moment a dirty, grayish-looking animal approached, walking very gingerly on the hot sidewalk. He seemed oblivious to everything around him. He was bowlegged, and his head was turned aimlessly to one side. The hot sun was beating down on the Brooklyn pavement, causing him to wince as his paws touched the ground.
“That’s him, that’s the dog!” I said. It was like Lana Turner being discovered in Schwab’s Drugstore. “He’s what Shakespeare would have wanted. He’s a mutt, he’s great, they’re going to laugh at him. Get him!” I yelled.
John and I caught the poor animal, who cowered in fear. He obviously had been beaten by someone, somewhere.
I looked around for the owner, but there was no one nearby. The dog had no collar, no license. Who’d own a dog like that anyway, I thought.
“Look at his ribs,” I said to John, admiringly. “He’s so pathetic, he’s perfect,” I said, as if I had just crowned a beauty queen. I looked into the dog’s eyes, which were tearing. He had hairs growing out of something in his eyes. It made him look like he was always crying.
“What kind of dog is he?”
“Who can tell; he’s a mixture,” John said.
Just then an old man walked by. The dog whimpered as he passed. He
must’ve been beaten by some old man, I figured. He was so sad-looking, I knew people were going to pity him when they saw him on stage.
“Come on,” I said. “Come on, Crab.” I was calling him by his professional name. I extended my palm. The dog slowly walked over and sniffed my hand. “Here, Crab. Here, baby, I’m not going to hurt you.”
He listened to me. I knew he was going to be great … as long as I could get him to come onstage with me.
The director came over and suggested I try rehearsing with the dog.
“You think so?” I said, a little tentatively.
“Try it.”
“Come on, Crab,” I said. “Come on, Crabbie.”
He wouldn’t budge. I picked him up, and his body stiffened. I cradled him in my arms, carried him onto the truck/stage, and started my opening lines, “My mother wailing, my sister crying, my nurse bawling, yet did not this cur shed a single tear at my departure …”
Crab didn’t say a word, and I knew that being onstage with him would be memorable.
I arrived home with Crab. Anne said incredulously, “You’re not going to have the dog
live
with us?”
“Just until the end of the show.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why can’t he live somewhere else, and just rehearse with you?”
“Don’t you understand? We’ve got to get used to each other.”
“What about me?” she said. “This is not a puppy. He’ll probably hate me. He’s big and gawky. Where’s he going to sleep?”
“I’m going to put him in front of our bed. I’ve got an inner tube that I’ll put a blanket over, and he curls up in it. He was beaten, you know.” I was trying for sympathy. “I’m going to have to get him to trust me. If I lift my hand quickly, he cowers and cries. If that happens onstage, I’m dead. They’ll think I’m the one who beat him. He’s got to learn we love him.”
“What do you mean ‘we’?” Anne asked.
“Think of him as a pet.”
“
You
think of him as a pet. You talk about him like I gave birth to him.”
Crab moved into our now smaller three-room West Side apartment. Prior to the opening of the show I cooked chicken wings and necks for him. He loved them. Crab took to Anne and me. At night he’d hop out of
his inner tube and into our bed, and as he wedged in between Anne and me, he’d sigh. Things had changed for him; he’d come a long way in just a few days. Love really works.
Crab and I rehearsed well together. I had won his trust. When the show opened the audiences adored him, and so did some of the reviewers. And so did I. Anne threatened to divorce me. She said she would name Crab as the co-respondent.
When the run had ended the score might’ve read: Crab 99, Stiller 0. He got all the acclaim. He appeared on the CBS-TV show
Eye on New York
. An article was written about him in
Theater Arts
magazine. I was often greeted by people on the street with the words, “By thy dog thou shalt be known.” At a party that the Shakespeare Festival threw, a man approached me, saying he loved Shakespeare. Then he confided that he’d contributed $25,000 to the Festival because of Crab’s performance. And here I was making thirty-five bucks a week.
As Crab’s popularity grew, I found myself riding on his coattails, or on his tail anyway. I thought I might share some of his glory. Hardly so. To make matters worse, Crab was now so completely at home onstage, he’d yawn on my lines. He’d stare at the audience at the end of a joke. Maybe he’d been Jack Benny in another life. When he was really loose, Crab would turn facing upstage and wag his tail on my punch lines. Then he’d turn back to the audience as though he’d done nothing wrong. Luckily my next line was, “Oh, ‘tis a thing sad when a mangy dog plays the cur with him.”
Many people brought their dogs to the show. Crab would invariably sniff them out while onstage, again stealing my thunder. I complained to Joe about this, so he agreed to ban dogs at all performances. People got around that edict by bringing their dogs in lunch baskets. Crab had become a full-blown celebrity.
Since no one could determine Crab’s breed, I called him my Shakespearean Retriever. Whatever laughs I missed, he retrieved just by his presence.
When the play ended its run, Anne and I decided to keep Crab. It was his reward for making me look good onstage. Now Crab was just a dog again, an ordinary dog, but I soon learned that without the footlights he would always have the heart of a stray.
Crab never could be curbed—which, translated, simply means he wouldn’t pee unless off his leash. As the saying goes, you can’t teach an
old dog…. Over the years Crab incurred hundreds of dollars in fines for being off the leash. At one of the court hearings I claimed Crab was neurotic. The lady judge hit me with a $100 fine.
“It’s usually five dollars,” I pleaded.
“Say one more word and I’ll hold you in contempt,” she shouted.
“But—”
“Shut your mouth.”
I mentioned working for Joe Papp in the park.
“I’m warning you.”
“But …”
“One hundred dollars!”
I fished out my last hundred bucks and left the courthouse. The irony was that the man who preceded me, a Madison Avenue executive who had urinated on a subway platform while intoxicated, was given a suspended sentence on the promise he’d never do it again.
Syracuse, New York
October 23, 1957
Mr. Jerry Stiller
153 West 80th St.
New York, New York
Dear Jerry:
Seeing your picture in the current issue of
Theater Arts
magazine (or I should say, you plus your dog) stresses the fact that I should have written to you long ago. In one breath, then, let me say what should take many pages. My thanks for your letters and phone calls during the summer. I had not realized until I had been hospitalized what these things really meant, and how much a token of friendship they were. Believe me, every letter and call helped me somehow to get better. At present I am at home, trying to gain back some of the thirty pounds I lost. I was a little despondent for a time about my progress, but in the last week or ten days I have improved much beyond my expectations
.
It will, however, be some time before I am able to come to New York, so I will have to count on your keeping me up-to-date about your
activities. I imagine you are still affiliated with the Shakespeare group since you and it got such favorable notices. Is Anne also still with the company?
Mrs. Falk joins me in sending affectionate regards to both of you.
Sincerely,
Sawyer Falk
153 West 80th Street
New York, New York
October 25, 1957
Dear Professor Falk:
It was wonderful hearing from you. Life on this planet (NY, that is) is still a paradox. Despite the good notices, somehow I’m not in the right place at the right time and all that to land a B’way play. Not that I crave being a Broadway actor anymore. Who am I kidding? No one. I’d love to be on Broadway but nobody’s asked me.
I’m very happy to be working with Stuart Vaughn, where through a certain rapport, understanding, and common sense we get the meaning out of the comedy (and comedy it is despite the constant reference to Shakespeare’s tedious clowns). They’re not tedious, they’re simple, and the acting should be simple.