Authors: Jerry Stiller
“How does it feel to be the mother of an astronaut?” Flonkite asks.
The lady replies, “I’m not the mother, I’m the cleaning woman.”
Flonkite, nonplussed, forges ahead.
“Why are you crying?” he asks.
“I have to clean it, Walter, clean the capsule. You don’t know what it’s like in there.”
The rehearsal audience laughed hard. The sketch was topical, Alan Shepard’s historic flight still being fresh in everyone’s mind.
Off-camera, Ed Sullivan’s face turned beet red. He had always trusted our taste. As the make-believe interview continues, the cleaning woman gets more and more graphic about what a mess the capsule is. Who doesn’t laugh at bathroom references? Before she can say the “s” word Flonkite cuts her off with, “Be sure to be with us next time for the launching of Gemini, the twin capsule.”
“Two of them!” Anne screams. “I can’t handle it!” Lots of laughs.
When the dress rehearsal ended, Sullivan’s producer, Bob Precht, sent word that Ed would like to see us.
“We’ll see what he has to say,” Bob Chartoff said, leading the way to Ed’s second-floor office. He knocked on Ed’s door. Precht opened it.
“Come on in,” he said. “Ed wants to talk to you.”
I walked in. The door behind me slammed shut. I realized immediately I was alone with Ed Sullivan. I’d somehow lost Chartoff and Anne.
Sullivan, standing in the middle of the room and very upset, asked, “How could you bring in a piece like that?” He was clearly holding back his anger.
“Because it’s funny,” was all I could think of saying. There was a pause.
With disbelief in his voice, he said, “Do you know what this sketch is about?”
“It’s about a cleaning woman who’s cleaning a space capsule,” I said, playing bewilderment.
“It’s about s--t!” he said.
The reason I was alone arguing the merits of our sketch with Ed Sullivan was that Ed was so furious he didn’t want a woman in the room. Bob Chartoff just never made it through the door.
“I’ve got it here,” Ed said, pressing down the “play” switch on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. “Do you want to hear it, Jerry? It’s not funny.” I listened. There were laughs. I felt abandoned—the lone sailor on a raft, lost at sea with no compass. Suddenly I felt responsible for foisting bad taste on Ed Sullivan and his worldwide audience. Why me? Was I the sacrificial lamb?
“Do you know what this sketch is about?” Sullivan repeated. I looked him squarely in the eye and said, “Mr. Sullivan, this is a sketch about a woman who cleans a space capsule.”
With a look of mild surprise and without missing a beat, Ed said, “Well, you’re not going to do it on my show, Jerry. You and Anne have done too many good things to blow it now. I won’t allow you to do this kind of material.” His eyes turned soft. He suddenly became very fatherly. “You can do an old piece tonight, and come back in a couple of weeks with something new.”
In seconds, his anger had dissipated. I had made the biggest name in show business mad. Was I that important? For an instant, I no longer resented Anne or Bob. I actually wanted to thank them for giving me the chance to prove I had balls enough to stand up to Sullivan, although no one was there to witness it. Downstairs I said to Anne, “He wants us to do an old piece of material.”
We did as he asked, but I figured Sullivan had had it with us. This was the kiss-off. I was wrong. Ed was true to his word. Six weeks later we were back on his show.
What was it like being on the most popular television show of its day all those years? Anne would say, “It was what Jerry wanted.” I think she was really a reluctant traveler, unlike me—the Brooklyn kid who aspired to be a vaudevillian. Never did Anne mention that her dream in life was to someday appear on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. Nor did she ever aspire to be another Gracie Allen, with me as the straight man. Her love was theater, the stage.
“I love Kim Stanley. If I could only be as good as her.”
But could Kim Stanley get laughs, I asked. Somehow I’d schlepped this beautiful young acting wunderkind into my dream world, and she’d married me into the bargain. She was living
my
dream.
I wanted to be a comedian so badly that when Anne came into my life I figured the two of us would do it together. Doing an act together would satisfy my dream, and we’d
tummel
through life as husband and wife. What
chutzpah
. Did I want a wife or a comedy partner? Good, sweet-natured Irish people, they’ll go along with anything—up to a point.
Anne went along just as some vast sea change was taking place in 1960s comedy fashions. Comedians were going cerebral, developing a new style from classroom exercises. Improvisation, which goes back to
commedia dell’arte
, was all the rage. All this school stuff was birthing a new intellectual connection with the audiences. The old titans of laughter were being replaced by New Age comics.
Mike and Elaine had suddenly come onto the scene. Shelley Berman. Dick Shawn, Flip Wilson, Bill Cosby, Pat Morita, who talked about his Japanese-American heritage. Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber, who also were funny doing ethnic comedy. George Carlin. Mort Sahl. David Frye. Richard Pryor. Vaughn Meader and the Kennedy press conference. The doors of comedy were now open to a new breed. Lenny Bruce would kick those doors open even wider.
As a result of the
Sullivan
show, we were in demand and began to tour. Bob Chartoff called us. “The Establishment in London wants you and Anne to fly over.” It was 1963 and the Establishment’s four stars—Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett—were at that moment performing their show,
Beyond the Fringe
, on Broadway. Lenny Bruce, who was to take over at the Establishment in the interim, had been banned the night before by the Lord Chancellor—the official censor—after a reported onstage altercation between Bruce and Siobhan McKenna in which, it was said, fists flew and blood flowed.
“They’ve heard great reports about you two, and want you to replace Lenny. You open tomorrow night.”
Words like this brought me back to life and thawed the onstage freeze. With additional Sullivan bookings coming up, we were certainly on a roll.
Within hours we decided to go to London. But what about Amy? Our friends Ursula and Pat Campbell agreed to care for her for the length of the three-week London engagement. We flew the Atlantic.
Cook, Moore, Miller, and Bennett had spawned an audience who treated acts the way the British Parliament treats its members. They hiss you if they hate you and stamp their feet if they approve.
The folksingers who opened for us got boos. “Rubbish! Rubbish!” one
highly vocal patron bellowed. We were terrified. The manager of the club did his best to put us at ease. We had barely an hour to rehearse our New York-oriented material, in the wild hope that it would be understood by these Anglos. There was no time to wonder. The urgency of the situation must have blasted my freeze away. We did our act, about fifty minutes, and the English audience ate us up. At the end they stamped and then rose for an ovation. We suddenly felt international.
As we passed through the audience, the boisterous patron whom I had heard earlier stopped us and offered his congratulations in a thick Irish accent. “I’m Dominick Behan, Brendan’s brother. You were terrific. Both of you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But you hated the other act?”
“Rubbish!” he roared. “They were terrible. If you were terrible, I’d say, ‘Rubbish,’ but you weren’t.”
The three weeks in London were a great success for us. Bernard Levin, the toughest London reviewer, gave us a rave in
The Daily Mail
.
During the run, we resided at Olivelli’s, a theatrical hotel in Bloomsbury. The hallways were filled with photos and letters from acts such as the Marx Brothers, thanking the hotel for its hospitality. One such letter was charred as if burned in a fire. It was from Ben Dova, a juggler I’d seen at the Roxy Theater as a boy. Typewritten at the bottom were the words, “Mail Salvaged from the Hindenburg.” Here we were performing in London, married nine years, and wondering how life had changed us.
We flew back to New York and our apartment in Washington Heights. We had not seen Amy for three weeks, and in that time she had started to put words together. I figured she must have wondered, “Where the hell have those two been?”
The success of our London engagement started us on a cross-country tour, beginning in Detroit. We opened a week after the terrible race riots. Opening for us was a young singer whose admiration for our work was boundless. Before the first show in the dressing room, he recited every line of our routines. We were flattered. After doing his first song onstage, he then did our act word for word. We were mortified.
Next stop was Milwaukee. When we arrived at the Holiday House, we saw our names on the marquee, just above a permanent sign that read, “Where Every Night Is New Year’s Eve.”
We had no idea of the significance of the motto until on opening night at precisely midnight, in the middle of our second show, we heard the
strains of “Auld Lang Syne” being played by a small band. At that moment, a door leading to the lounge swung open and we could see customers wearing party hats, tooting horns, and making noise with paper whistles that untwirled, as confetti rained down from above. It was the middle of July and people were celebrating New Year’s Eve. This went on every night for the entire two weeks we played there.
Before going on that first night I had the urge to pee. I opened the door to what I thought was the bathroom. It was a small closet with an empty jeroboam bottle. I realized immediately that we had no bathroom. On the wall of the closet was some graffiti that said, “Never Again—Ella Fitzgerald.” Other stars autographed the walls with similar sentiments. I knew I wasn’t the first to use the empty jeroboam bottle.
The overriding factor in getting us through clubs like these was the knowledge that we had another
Ed Sullivan Show
coming up. We knew we were going to be seen nationally, and the next
Sullivan
show could possibly get us out of nightclubs. But to where? In the middle of the act we would sometimes bravely attempt to break in a new
Sullivan
piece. It was unfair to inflict it on a paying audience, but we tried.
One such sketch dealt with a man buying a doll for his daughter that could eat, drink, talk, and pee. He had to prove to the saleswoman that he was a respected member of the community, had a job, and could provide a decent home for his new offspring. The audience barely understood what we were talking about. Weeks later on the
Sullivan
show, the same sketch got a great response.
The final leg of the cross-country tour brought us to Gene Brown’s Crescendo in Hollywood. We were on the bill with Pat Suzuki and Arthur Lyman. We would be seen by the bigwigs in movies, radio, television, and recordings. We had reached the entertainment capital of the world. This was the engagement that would give us the visibility to make us stars.
We couldn’t afford to stay at the Chateau Marmont so Anne, Amy, and I moved in with Charlie and Joanie Robinson on Whitley Terrace, high in the Hollywood Hills. Charlie had recently filmed
Sand Pebbles
and Joanie had done
Middle of the Night
on Broadway in a company headed by Edward G. Robinson and Gena Rowlands. The Robinsons would care for two-year-old Amy while Mom and Dad were hoping to take Hollywood by storm.
Anne and I had known Charlie since he and Joan decided to tie the knot. At that time Anne and I were just toying with the idea of doing an
act. At Charlie and Joanie’s wedding reception on Bank Street, we did a takeoff of the play Joan had been in. The improvised skit convulsed everyone and prompted Charlie to say, “Why don’t you two do an act?”
I said at the time, as a joke, “If we ever do this in public, we can say it started here.”
Charlie’s enthusiasm was overpowering. It was so strong that it was unreal, sheer belief. I could never feel the same sureness that Charlie felt, not about myself. But now we were doing an act, just as he’d said, and we were playing Hollywood.
During the countdown of the days until we opened, Charlie advised me to get a haircut.
“You must go to Jerry Rothschild’s,” Charlie said. “In Beverly Hills. If you’re going to open at the Crescendo, go there. It’s good for everyone to know you’re getting a cut at Jerry’s.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Twenty-five dollars. Everyone in Hollywood is seen there.”
Charlie made the appointment, and I arrived on time. I parked the car and entered the shop. A woman asked me for the parking stub, which, she said, she would have validated. I was asked if I would like a shoe shine while I waited. I said yes. A gray-haired Black man in a sweater, shirt, and tie, who carried himself like one of my uncles in the Bronx, started shining my shoes. He attended to them with a dignity I’d never realized any pair of shoes could deserve. When he was finished, a woman took me to a stainless-steel sink to shampoo my hair. She wore a smock and was made up like a courtesan in the palace of an eighteenth-century European king. It was difficult not to surrender to her strong, expert hands as she massaged my scalp with fingers that were sending messages my Orphan Annie secret decoder would blush at. I was toweled vigorously and placed under a dryer to await the call from my particular barber.
“Are you Jerry Rothschild?” I asked him when he appeared.
“No, I’m Harry Gelbart. I’m Larry Gelbart’s father,” he said.
“The writer?”
“Yes, he’s my son.”
“He’s a funny writer,” I said.
“Yes. He just finished
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
. And I know your wife, Anne,” Harry Gelbart said. “You’re very funny also, the two of you. Do you write your own material?”
“Yes. We’re too egotistical to think that anyone could write it as well,” I said, trying to act Hollywood.
“Maybe you can meet Larry sometime.”
“Does he know you work here?” I asked.
“Yes. I was a barber before he was a writer. I enjoy this. I meet a lot of interesting people.”