Authors: Jerry Stiller
“We’d like you all to get up and bump,” I said.
No one moved.
“Peaches, tell them to get up and bump.”
“Please”—there was a sob in Anne’s voice—“please get up and bump for peace.”
Nothing.
“Let’s get up and sing ‘God Bless America,’” I said. “Let’s show the Atomic Energy Commission we mean business.”
The conversations in the audience continued. No one got up. No one stopped chatting. We started to sing “God Bless America.” Anne started to bump. No one responded.
Don’t they have any feelings about nuclear testing?
I thought.
About the fate of humanity?
I was taking myself seriously. What kind of world are we living in? No one cares about life? This is the Village, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O’Neill, W. H. Auden, the freethinkers. Don’t these people have any social conscience?
“Let’s get up and bump each other,” Anne’s sweet baby voice pleaded with them.
We went from the bomb to “The Farnsworths.” Nothing. They’re so stupid, I thought. The Village audience, stupid. We finished as Herbie Mann’s flute, Willie Bobo’s congas, and Dave Pike’s vibes softly came on to get us off. Applause, for leaving. In the dressing room, Anne and I pondered what went wrong. They weren’t mean, I thought.
“Do we have to do that again tonight?” Anne asked.
“Yeah. Maybe it’ll go better the second show.”
Art didn’t come back to talk to us. Did he see it?
If it was terrible, he’ll tell us,
I thought.
For two weeks, twice a night, Anne and I would go out. We’d try new approaches. One night I did ten minutes of talking about anything that came into my mind. D’Lugoff never gave up on us.
Maybe we’re not that bad, I kept telling myself. The audiences were always polite. They just talked while we were on. I started thinking perhaps they could not accept the premise that we were actually a doctor and a stripper. It was not believable to them. On Sunday night between shows I said, “This ain’t working.” Dejected, I said to Anne, “Let’s take a walk.” Across from the Waverly Theatre on Sixth Avenue was a little park; we sat on a bench. I said, “We have our last show coming up, and I know what’s wrong.”
“What?”
“The audience doesn’t know who we are. We assume too much.” The hip Village was not so hip. “We’ve got to do something they can associate us with.”
“Like what?”
“How about a man and a woman?” I said. “Let’s put them in a situation that anyone can relate to.” On the marquee of the Waverly Theatre facing us I could see the name Ingmar Bergman.
“How about two people who go to an ‘Ingmar Bergman’ movie? Let’s do it.”
“Do what?”
“An improvisation, like we did in St. Louis. I’ll be Hershey,” I said.
“And I’ll be Harriet,” Anne said.
Right on the park bench, as people were passing by, we worked up an improv. I put my arm around Anne’s shoulder.
“Hershey, please,” she said. “I’m watching the movie.”
“Harriet …” I said, pleadingly.
“You’re missing the picture. It’s Ingomar Bergman. Please!”
“I gotta have you.”
“Hershey, don’t be pushy. Look at the symbolism.”
Anne went on and on about the Bergman movie. The more she rejected me, the more passionate I became, begging, imploring her to go to bed with me. Finally I asked for a single kiss.
“Don’t get dirty,” she said.
“But Harriet, we’ve been married eight years.”
We even had a punch line.
“Come on, let’s try it. Our last show of the week,” I said.
We went back to the Gate. We were introduced. Anne said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to show you two people who are at an Ingomar Bergman movie.” We did the sketch. Laughs. Laughs! After two weeks, it
was like rain after a drought. They loved it. It was so simple. Why didn’t we think of this before? You say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to show you …” and suddenly people listen. Hey, we could do this all the time. Red Skelton had said it, Sid Caesar—we learn from the masters.
As we prepared to leave for home, Edith Gordon, who managed the place for Art, said, “Art told me to tell you we have to let you go.”
“But we just found it.”
“I know. But he wasn’t here.”
We packed our stuff and left the Gate. Art had been kind enough to keep us for two weeks. “At least he paid us while we bombed,” Anne said.
“I know. But we found it tonight. We’ll find it again.”
After bombing at the Bon Soir and being fired at the Village Gate, trying to support a wife and child led me to the idea of quitting show business and going back once more to selling. I loved cooking, and had a special recipe for Chicken Gai Yung.
I decided I could sell the delicious chicken legs door to door. I told Anne my idea. I’d marinate the legs overnight, broil them in the morning, and then hit every apartment building on the West Side. A dollar a leg. I figured it was an idea whose time had come, and it took me away from the pain of rejection. We’d become rich and possibly franchise the idea. You’re sitting at home, watching TV. A knock on the door. “I’m selling Chicken Gai Yung. It’s only a buck.” Who could resist?
Anne looked at me and started to laugh.
“We’re going down to the Phase II tonight and audition. They’re looking for an act to take over down there,” she announced.
I was out of business before I began.
At this time Vaughn Meader, completing his stint at the Phase II, a little club next door to the Lafayette Bakery, just off Seventh Avenue on Bleecker Street, was about to open at the Blue Angel and attain national acclaim for his Kennedyesque press conferences—but not before putting us on stage at the Village coffee house one rainy Monday night as his replacement.
We inherited his comedic pulpit, and our nightly appearances before a Bleecker Street crowd, mostly wandering in off the sidewalk, gave us a chance to try anything. It was the slow end of Bleecker Street, and people weren’t expecting much, so we had lots of opportunity to half-fail. If something did get a laugh, passers-by would peek through the doors out
of curiosity to see what was going on. We’d reel them in like fish, with some ad libs and several overlong sketches. One was about a boss and a secretary, based on Paddy Chayevsky’s
Middle of the Night;
another had Amy Vanderbilt teaching a bus drivers’ courtesy course; and another had TV news correspondent Pauline Frederick interviewing a man named Mr. Jonah who is miraculously swallowed by a whale while visiting his daughter in Miami Beach. We had started to draw audiences and attract attention.
Larry Holofcener, a talent coordinator, came in to check us out for a possible appearance on the Merv Griffin daytime TV show. Larry was also the composer of
Mr. Wonderful
on Broadway, starring Sammy Davis, Jr. He had written the song “Too Close for Comfort,” a big hit. After watching our act, Larry came back and suggested some cuts. The next night we tried the revised act and it exploded. Larry then booked us on Merv’s show, our first national TV appearance.
The Village was now abuzz about the tall girl and short guy whose names Stiller and Meara sounded like a trucking company. The aficionados of comedy would come back more than once to check us out. I decided that comedians are created like geraniums in a minefield.
Six months later, we were voted
Cue
magazine’s 1961 “Comedy Finds of the Year.”
Now agents and managers were coming by to catch us. One night after the show, a man came back and introduced himself as Milton Blackstone. He was distinguished looking and wore a business suit, hardly anything like the Village types who dressed down. An uptown guy, I thought.
“I like your work very much,” he said. “Can we talk someplace?”
The only space available was our cellar dressing room. It was very damp, and we could sometimes hear the rumble of the Seventh Avenue subway beneath us. A piece of burlap served as a ceiling. To complicate things, a rat, huge and aged, also made his home somewhere in the sagging burlap. We invited Mr. Blackstone downstairs, where with no objection he took a seat on a mildewed couch. The damp, murky cellar didn’t seem to bother him.
“I manage Eddie Fisher,” he said quietly. “And I like you two and your act very much.”
“Thank you,” Anne said in a subdued voice. Was this for real?
I could feel the excitement fill me. I couldn’t believe we were sitting in our dungeon of iniquity while the manager of one of the biggest names of that day was sitting two feet away, telling us this.
“I’d like to manage you,” Milton Blackstone said.
I turned to Anne. She looked at me with a kind of “he’s got to be kidding” smile.
“I’m serious,” Mr. Blackstone said. Seeing our faces, he went on. “Let me tell you what I have in mind. Eddie’s going into the Winter Garden, and I’d love you to be on the bill with him.”
Just then, above our visitor, the burlap moved. The rat was walking across. It was slow motion, like a drunken circus acrobat-clown staggering his way across on a high wire above a net. I prayed that Mr. Blackstone would not see it, for fear that it would blow everything, that he’d run out to the street and forget he’d ever seen us.
The rat seemed to sense this. He stopped, turned around, and discreetly headed back. I looked straight ahead during the whole process.
“Well, what do you think?” Blackstone asked.
Anne and I sat silent.
“You want to think about it?” he asked.
“Yes, we’d like that,” Anne said.
“Give me a call,” he said, handing us his card and leaving. There was no pressure from him. It was all just matter-of-fact. Are the big boys like this? I wondered. He didn’t act like he was anybody. He was a gentleman. He’d acted like we were stars, even in that place. He’d treated us as if we were stars.
Anne and I went upstairs and sat at an empty table.
“Did you see the rat?” I asked.
“No, where was he?” Anne said.
“In the burlap. I thought he’d fall through and land on Blackstone’s head. That would have been the end of everything. Well, what do you think?” I asked.
“About what?” Anne said.
“About going into the Winter Garden. With Eddie Fisher.”
“I’m not sure,” Anne said.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re not ready yet. It scares me.”
I sat speechless. I knew she was right, but how do you turn down a thing like that?
“We’ve got to wait,” Anne said. “He knows we’re good, but he also knows we’re not ready. He just wants us. It’s good that he wants us; it means other people will want us too.”
After Milton Blackstone there were lots of others. We asked ourselves who we wanted; who would take us to the next level? Was there someone out there who saw something special in us, someone who could help boost us to the top?
Jack Rollins was our manager of choice. He had thrust Woody Allen and Mike and Elaine into prominence. He had an amazing eye for what was new, and he could market talent.
I called Jack and asked if he’d come down to the Phase II to see us. He and his partner Chuck Joffe obliged. That night, after the performance, the four of us sat together in the empty coffeehouse. “What did you think?” we asked. Anne and I were praying that this was our man.
Immediately, I knew we were not his cup of tea. “I think you’re both talented, but I can’t handle you.” If he rejected us, we must be less than perfect, to say the least. Out of desperation I said, “Jack, is there anything you saw tonight that you liked?” Maybe I was begging for a hit on the head, but if this man is the top of the line, perhaps he could pass on some piece of wisdom we could use.
He then mentioned the sketch in which Anne, as Amy Vanderbilt, lectured me, a New York City bus driver, on the rules of etiquette.
“That’s it?” I said.
“That’s it, Jerry.”
My heart sank. “Well, do you have any advice for us?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Wear a suit with a shirt and tie, and Anne, you put on a nice dress. Get rid of the ponchos.” Ponchos were the “in” thing in the ‘60s. Folksingers, like the Kingston Trio, were wearing them at the time, and we did too.
With that, he and Joffe said goodnight.
Anne and I sat a little bewildered. The whole world wanted us, but we couldn’t get the one manager we wanted. When we got home, I looked at Anne and said, “This guy knows something. Tomorrow night I’m wearing a suit and tie.”
The next night we came out dressed as Rollins had advised. I looked like Madison Avenue. Anne looked like a young schoolteacher, and bingo!—laughs like we’d never had before. Something about my being in
a suit and Anne in a proper dress, in Greenwich Village, made us funnier. Who would think it? I thank Jack Rollins for that advice to this day.
Marty Farrell, a young comedy writer, came in a couple of weeks later. He had written for Jackie Mason and Topo Gigio, the Italian mouse character on the
The Ed Sullivan Show
. Farrell came back one night and said, “I usually never tell comedians how much I like them. They usually get suspicious. But I had to tell you how much I love you guys. Would you mind if I brought a friend of mine down to see you?”
“No,” we said.
His friend was a young lawyer named Bob Chartoff, who at the time was managing a stable of comics including Jackie Mason, Charlie Callas, and Jackie Vernon.
Chartoff came to see us at Phase II. He too visited our damp dressing room. “I think you two are wonderful, and I’d love to manage you,” he said. He was very matter of fact.
“Really? Why?”
“I’ll make you lots of money,” he said. “You’ll travel all over the world and meet presidents.” I sensed this guy was serious.
“How do you know you can do all this?” I asked.
He said, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars.”
I laughed. It sounded like a bribe. “What would I need with a thousand bucks?” I asked.
“Buy some clothes for you and Anne,” Bob said. “You’ll pay me back.”
I looked at Bob. Anne looked at Bob. His thick glasses magnified the pupils of his eyes. There was a silence. I could see Bob was a gambler, a guy who would bet money on anything.
“You’re a gambler,” I said.
“Yeah, I love it.” There was no macho in his voice. He just meant it. I looked at Anne.