Authors: Jerry Stiller
“What do you do?”
“I jog at the Y. I love watching basketball, but I’m lousy at it.”
“Let’s shoot some baskets some day,” the analyst said.
“You mean that?”
“Sure. Someday.”
At one of the sessions he suggested we go to a comedy club. I took him at his word and brought him to the Improv. Dick Cavett was on. When Dick finished his set, I introduced them, not mentioning to Cavett that the other man was my shrink.
“Why are you so hostile, Dick?” the doctor asked. Cavett gave me a look and we said good-night. A few minutes later Milt Kamen, friend and brilliant satirist, got up to perform.
When Kamen finished, the shrink said, “Why don’t you introduce me to him?” I couldn’t believe the same thing would happen twice so I naively agreed. “Why are you so hostile, Milt?” he asked. “Hostile” was the
in
word in psychiatry. Milt said to me, “Is he a shrink?” And I laughed. We said good-night.
When I asked the doc why he had done what he did, he replied, “Because I was being direct, which is what you should try to be.” I wondered if he wasn’t right. I was never direct.
The following week he asked if I’d like to shoot baskets at the Y. I didn’t hesitate. I came to the conclusion he was an avant-garde shrink. Go with it. Maybe I’d learn something. We met at the Y, changed into our gym stuff, got on the court, and started shooting baskets.
He was taller than me and better. He made his shots. “You gotta get different shots,” he advised. Is this some kind of metaphor for my life? Were we playing hoops, or analyzing? Go with it, I told myself again.
We played one-on-one. I played hard. He beat me. I figured he was still analyzing. When we finished, he said, “Let’s take a shower.” I knew he wasn’t gay. In the shower we looked at each other. His eyes dropped, and I knew why we were here. He looked at my penis. I didn’t look at his. I was afraid to. Was his bigger than mine? Would it make a difference?
“You have to learn a few more shots,” he said kind of cryptically as we toweled off and got dressed.
He didn’t charge me for the session in the gym.
At the next session in his office we talked about penis size and its relationship to the sexual act. He spoke in medical terms. He didn’t embarrass me. When I left that afternoon, I was gratified that some part of me was bigger than I had allowed myself to imagine.
In the ensuing sessions we spoke about my freezing on stage during the act. Nightclubs were getting Anne and me off the ground. I told him I’d made more money in the past year than in my entire theatrical career, but after expenses I had barely enough to pay for the analysis.
He looked at me and said, “What are you complaining about? You’re already making more than me.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. Was he serious? Was this a psychological ploy? Another avant-garde shtick? Perhaps he was tricking me into revealing some hidden repression. If so, a feather in his cap for getting me a step up on my id.
He suggested Anne join the sessions, which she agreed to. The three of us had very little rapport together. At one of the single sessions, I mentioned the possibility of leaving Anne. There was a long pause.
“You gotta be strong about this,” he said. I knew then that I had to leave
him
. I had been with him about five years by that point. Why? Schmuck bait.
On the night of our first
Sullivan
show we learned we would be on with Ella Fitzgerald and Jimmy Durante.
We were last on the bill. Thank God we didn’t have to follow Durante. I was grateful and less scared. We had the dressing room on the top floor. We took the elevator down from there as our turn came close.
We heard Jimmy Durante doing his stuff on stage. The sound of his
voice brought me back to seeing him at Loew’s State. I was maybe eleven. The movie was Max Fleischer’s
Gulliver’s Travels
, one of the first feature-length cartoons but my father and mother had really taken us three kids to see Durante. On the bill were Jesse Block and Eve Sully, a husband-and-wife comedy team. They did about fifteen minutes and were funny. And then Clayton, Jackson, and Durante came on:
The house lights go up. The music blares “Who Will Be with You When I’m Far Away, When I’m Far Away from You?,” and Jimmy Durante struts out, hat in hand and face in profile, showing off that wonderful schnozz. The audience applauds, a full house at the morning show. It’s like the greatest event in history. He grabs the microphone like he’s going to choke it. The music, the trumpets, the trombones, quiet momentarily. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is Jimmy, and I’m glad you all could be here at these prices.”
“Who Will Be with You When I’m Far Away? ….” The audience applauds. Eddie Jackson shouts, “Sing it, Jimmy boy.” Eddie Jackson, with a top hat and cane, provides a high falsetto harmony as he starts to cakewalk behind Jimmy, bumping him along. Durante, annoyed, tries to maintain his cool dignity. Jackson keeps bumping him. Jimmy shows frustration as Jackson, singing a cappella, seems to be off on his own, distracting Jimmy. Totally frustrated, Jimmy flaps his arms down against his thighs, making a slapping sound. The audience is stifling its laughter. “Stop the music, stop the music,” Jimmy demands. Silence, total silence in the theater. There’s a slight noise. Durante turns and says, “Surrounded by assassins.” The music starts again. “I’m Jimmy, that well-dressed man.” Once more the great schnozzola is struttin’.
Jimmy sits at the piano, starts to play some arpeggios. A pianist on the opposite side of the stage does likewise. Jimmy does one arpeggio. The other piano does exactly the same arpeggio but adds a note. Jimmy suppresses his indignation. He is now engaged in a duel of arpeggios. The piano player matches Jimmy each time and adds a note. Jimmy finally rips off part of the upright and hurls it across the stage, chasing the other guy off.
My mother and father are laughing. When I see my mother and father laugh, I’m happy. Jimmy now explains to the audience that he had a lot of trouble getting this engagement. “They said I wasn’t high-class enough to play Loew’s State, that I didn’t have a tuxedo. I want you to know I’m wearing tails.”
Jimmy removes his tails. He calls Jesse Block on stage. “Jesse, come on out here.” Block comes out. “I want you to show every person in this audience my tails.” Jimmy hands Block the tails. “Put on your house lights,” Jimmy tells the electrician. All the lights in the theater go up. Loew’s State has become a courtroom.
Jimmy vs. The State
—Loew’s State. We are the jury. Block is walking into the audience, showing us Jimmy’s full dress outfit. We are all laughing. I want to get up there and be like him. I want to make people laugh.
“Show the audience my tails, Jesse. Show them to ‘em. And they said I couldn’t play Loew’s State.”
The tails are passed down a row. “Feel it. Let the people feel the material, Jesse. Show ‘em how strong it is.” Now the people in their seats are feeling Jimmy’s tails. “And they said I couldn’t play Loew’s State.” A huge laugh. “Show ‘em how strong those tails are, Jesse. Pull ‘em apart.”
“What?” Jesse asks, “Are you sure, Jimmy?”
“Do it!” Jimmy says.
Jesse yanks the tails. Rrrip! The tails split. There is an ominous silence followed by snickers. Jimmy’s face is now a mask of indignation like he’s been betrayed. “Get off the floor, get off the floor!” Durante barks. Block half-walks, half-runs into the wings.
I look at my mother and father, who are are in tears from laughing. Arnie and Doreen are also laughing. We are a family. I don’t want to ever go home again. I want to be in this place forever.
The show ends and we leave. We are back out on Broadway. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon. We get on the subway and go back to Brooklyn. Something has happened to me. I’ll never be the same again.
I snapped back to the present, to Anne and me standing in the wings waiting to go on. “Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time on our show, Stiller and Mara!” Ed Sullivan had mispronounced Anne’s last name. We did “Jonah and the Whale.” When we got back to the dressing room, Bob Chartoff said, “You were wonderful. He wants to sign you for three more shows. By the way, Anne, didn’t he call you ‘Mara’?”
“Yeah,” Anne replied. “That’s the way it’s pronounced in Gaelic.”
And that’s the way Ed Sullivan pronounced it thirty-six times over the next seven years.
The sketch that was the breakthrough for us was the meeting of Hershey Horowitz and Mary Elizabeth Doyle through a computer dating service. The William Morris Agency, where we had gone to discuss our
future, told us Ed Sullivan would never allow this sketch on the air. When we asked why, the agency said because most of the country was Protestant.
Sullivan let us run with it.
Here’s how the first Hershey and Elizabeth sketch opened.
ANNE: Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to show you two single people who, having been matched up by a computer, are meeting for the first time.
JERRY: How do you do?
ANNE: How do you do?
JERRY: I’m Hershey Horowitz.
ANNE: I’m Mary Elizabeth Doyle.
JERRY: Doyle?
ANNE: Yeah…. Horowitz?
JERRY: Horowitz…. H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z. Hershey…. My friends call me Hesh.
ANNE: Doyle…. D-o-y-l-e. My friends call me Mary Elizabeth.
JERRY: Is Doyle your real name?
ANNE: Well, sure. Why wouldn’t it be my real name?
JERRY: I don’t know…. I was just hoping.
ANNE: No, no … we’re Doyles. You see, we’re Dempseys on my mother’s side.
JERRY: Dempsey, huh?
ANNE: Horowitz?
JERRY: Yeah. Shmulowitz on my mother’s side. This computer is supposed to be a very good thing … I was reading about it in the
New York
—
ANNE: It’s scientifically worked out so you can’t make any—
JERRY: —mistakes…. Mary Elizabeth, you come from a large family?
ANNE: Me? Sure!
JERRY: I mean, you have a lot of sisters….?
ANNE: In my family I got plenty of sisters…. Sister Mary Monica, Sister Bernadette Marie, Sister Mary Virginia…. Do you have any brothers and sisters?
JERRY: Three brothers …
ANNE: Oh …
JERRY: Buch, Bujie, and Sol.
ANNE: Buck?
JERRY: No, no, Buch. B … uch.
ANNE: Buck?
JERRY: No, it’s Bu-uch.
ANNE: Bu-uck.
JERRY: No…. Bu-uch.
ANNE: Bu-uch …oooh! I think I hurt myself.
JERRY: Where do you live?
ANNE: Me? I’m from Flatbush.
JERRY: So am I. East 42nd Street.
ANNE: That’s my block….
I
live on East 42nd Street!
JERRY: How do you like that.
ANNE: Hey, do you know Richie Flanagan?
JERRY: No…. Do you know Moishe Bader?
ANNE: No, I don’t know any Moishes. I’d know—
JERRY: Do you know Stanley Auster?
ANNE: No, I don’t know him either.
JERRY: Adolph Hausman?
ANNE: Do you know Tommy Toohey?
JERRY: Tommy Toohey? No, I don’t know Tommy Toohey.
ANNE: Timothy Sheehy?
JERRY: No, I don’t know Timothy Sheehy.
ANNE: Vinnie Dougherty?
JERRY: Vinnie Dougherty? I don’t know him either, no. Do you know Raymond Kisch?
ANNE: Kisch? No, I don’t know any Kisches.
JERRY: Leon Wahaftig? Seymore Ehrenpreis?
ANNE: Eleanor Dempsey?
JERRY: I don’t know her, no….
ANNE: Patsy Jo Shannon?
JERRY: Patsy Jo Shannon? I don’t know her…. Well, that’s a pretty big block, that 42nd Street.
ANNE: Very long….
JERRY: Listen, you like to dance?
ANNE: Oh, I’m crazy about dancing.
JERRY: Well, maybe we can go dancing some night.
ANNE: Oh, I’d love that. Do you wanna go dancing tonight?
JERRY: I’d love to go dancing tonight.
ANNE: They’re having a dance tonight at my Sodality.
JERRY: At your what?
ANNE: My Sodality.
JERRY: What’s that?
ANNE: Well, it’s a girls’ organization in my parish.
JERRY: You mean like the Hadassah?
ANNE: What’s that?
JERRY: It’s a girls’ organization in my parish.
ANNE: This computer … it really …
JERRY: Oh yeah…. It really did a job on us there, didn’t it? …
That night Hershey and Mary Elizabeth got a tremendous audience response. Ed’s eyes watered as we performed. He called us over and said to us on the air, “Someday they’re going to change all that in Rome.”
When I thanked him later, he said smilingly, “I loved the sketch but these mixed marriages, they never work out.”
The next day at the YMHA when I was in the sauna, Georgie Lieberman, one of the directors there, said to me, “I saw you on
Sullivan
last night.”
“Did you like the sketch?” I asked.
“Forget the sketch,” he said. “It’s what Sullivan said about changing things in Rome. Is he going to talk to the Pope?”
Some weeks later Ed confided to me, “We got lots of nice mail on the last sketch you did between the Jewish boy and the Irish girl.”
“From the Catholics or the Jews?” I asked.
“The Lutherans,” he replied. “They all want kinescopes.”
Ed Sullivan had a great sense of humor. He especially loved comedians. One day I mentioned that the
Dean Martin Show
was taped. They cut out the bad parts and sweetened it by adding laugh tracks.
“Wouldn’t it take a lot of pressure off if you taped your show?”
“But it isn’t honest, Jerry.”
“But what about when the comedians aren’t funny and bomb?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but it’s honest.”
Of course, I was thinking of how it could lighten our load. Ed knew the audience brings out the best in you. He was right.
I think our sketches grew on Ed, and he’d often call us over for a quick on-camera chat. “Come over here,” he’d say waving at us after we finished. He’d ask some questions—like “What’s a
megillah?
”—and
we’d have two seconds to answer. The call-over meant he liked you and the audience liked you, and you’d be back.
Ed loved everything we did until we performed our astronaut sketch. We had just finished the Sunday-afternoon dress rehearsal. In the sketch, Walter Flonkite (me) interviews a weeping woman (Anne) whom he mistakes for the mother of an astronaut who’s just completed the first manned space flight.