Authors: Jerry Stiller
“It’s 7
A.M.
in California,” Murray said. “They’re all asleep. The only way to get these people here to change your room is to scream at them. It scares them.”
While Murray was still screaming, security men arrived.
Murray turned on them. “We’re American actors shooting a movie in your country, and you’re treating us like dirt.”
“All the rooms are the same size,” the desk clerk said. “The airlines use this hotel.”
“There’s got to be a better room for this man. This is an American star.”
I was beginning to feel a lot more wounded now, believing the things
Murray was saying about me. The clerk went into the back office and returned.
“All right, sir,” he said to Murray, “we can make two adjoining rooms into one for Mr. Stiller and yourself.”
A few years later when Murray was nominated for his Academy Award for
Amadeus
, a Texas newspaperwoman called and wanted to know what I knew about this comparatively unknown long shot for an Oscar. I told her that I’d once seen him give an even better performance in a London hotel lobby.
I went to Twickenham Studios to meet Richard Lester for the first time. He was between scene setups. I introduced myself.
“You’re playing Vespucci,” he said.
“Yes.”
“We’ll have to darken your hair,” he said, on the run.
The hair stylist, a forceful English lady, said, “Come with me. We’ll do it at my hotel.” She called a driver.
Minutes later we were sitting in her room, my hair now being dyed black. She worked very quickly, inundating the hair with a thick gooey substance. When she finished she said, “Good, now get in the shower,” directing me toward it. “Go ahead, get in.”
I was taken aback.
“Get in,” she said.
Without questioning, I removed my clothes and got in the shower. I told myself,
You’re in England, and I guess this is the way they dye their hair here—naked.
I could feel the water going down past my navel.
It’s probably dyeing all of me
, I thought.
After a few minutes the forceful English lady said, “All right, come on out.”
I needed a towel, I said.
“Just come on out.”
I felt like a hostage being released. There was nothing in her voice, no emotion.
“I’m going to put the conditioner in,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, locating a towel.
She applied the liquid and said, “Get back in the shower. Rinse.”
“Okay,” I said. I rinsed.
“Tip top,” she said. “You’re ready to shoot.”
Two weeks later my hair needed a touch-up. Again we went to her hotel, and again she applied the dye. Then she said, as before, “Get in the shower.” I did. It was like a dance step, like the “Lambeth Walk.” Only naked.
The next day we were about to film the death scene between myself and my father, played by George Coulouris. Mr. Coulouris had appeared in many Hollywood pictures of the ‘40s and early ‘50s—notably
Citizen Kane
—and had then moved to England during the McCarthy period, which put a number of actors, writers, and directors into exile. As Coulouris lay on his movie deathbed, waiting for action, I introduced myself.
“Tell me,” he said. “I know I’m supposed to die in this scene, but is this movie a comedy or a tragedy?”
“You mean they didn’t send you a script?”
“No. It’s only one scene. I just need to know whether it’s supposed to be funny.”
“Well, it’s funny—I think. You’re my father, and on your dying bed you tell me to kill my brother-in-law, Gaetano Proclo, whom you hate because he’s fat and you think he’s a sissy.”
“Okay, I’ve got it,” he said. “There’s a difference, you know, when you die funny or serious. A lot more going on when it’s funny.”
On the word “Action,” Coulouris became a volcano. He bellowed like a bull and died like a buffalo.
There was a scene in
The Ritz
in which the gay bathhouse customers tie me up, dress me in a green sequined gown and red wig, gag me, and throw me in a steam room. When I finally break loose, I scream vengeance from a New Orleans - like balcony.
During the run of the Broadway show the sight of me in the green gown and red wig provoked some interesting reactions. My kids said, “Dad, green is your color.” Leo Bloom, a Syracuse buddy, loved the outfit so much he sent me a huge hand-painted button that said “Think Green.” I kept the button in my shoulder bag, a kind of knapsack, and had forgotten about it. Now the bag was in London with me. Coincidentally, this was a period when the IRA had recently set off some bombs in the London Underground, and security was tight. Kaye Ballard, who played my sister in the movie, invited me one afternoon to go with her to see Albert Finney in
Hamlet
. She asked me to pick up our tickets at a booth in the lobby of a West End hotel. As I walked up to the ticket booth,
I was suddenly pushed against the wall by two large men, one of whom immediately grabbed my shoulder bag while his mate searched me.
“Keep your ‘ands up against the wall,” the first guy said. He was in civilian clothes. “We’re Scotland Yard,” the other informed me, flashing his identification, “and we’d like to see what you’ve got in that bag.”
“I’m an American,” I said. “I’m in a movie.”
This didn’t deter them.
The second gentleman, going through the contents of my bag, pulled out the button that said “Think Green.”
“What’s this all about?” he wanted to know.
I suddenly realized I was dressed kind of scruffily and they had somehow suspected me of being a member of the IRA. The button confirmed it.
“Look,” I said. “You may not believe this, but I’m here in London shooting a movie. I’m an actor, and I play this Mafioso character who gets thrown into a steam bath by these gay guys in a bathhouse.”
The two policemen stared at me. “Go on,” they said, in fascination.
“Anyway, these guys in this bathhouse put this green sequined gown and a red wig on me, and they tie and gag me. When I finally break loose and the audience sees the gown, it’s hilarious. A friend complimented me on the gown when we did it in a theater in New York. He said green was my color. It goes with my eyes. And he gave me that button.”
The two cops didn’t say a word. Finally one of them started to laugh. “When does the fill-um come out?” he asked.
“In about a year,” I said.
“You’re sure you’re an American?” the other fellow asked.
I took out my wallet and showed them some credit cards—not that they proved I wasn’t an IRA bomber.
“Look,” I said, fishing in my pocket, “these things prove I’m an American.” I had two Kennedy half-dollars on me, brand shining new. The policeman suddenly relaxed. “Would you take these as a gift?” I said.
They were enthralled by the coins, and each accepted one, telling me how sorry they were for the inconvenience they’d caused and hoped I’d understand.
“By the way, Yank, what’s the name of the picture?”
“
The Ritz
,” I told them.
“We’ll be sure to watch for it.”
• • •
Fifteen years after the Broadway production of
The Ritz
I heard that Bobby Drivas had died. He was only fifty. Terrence McNally organized a memorial service at Frank Campbell’s. July is a bad month to die if you’re in the theater. Everyone is either in the Hamptons or doing summer stock, but at 11:30
A.M.
the chapel was filled. I saw Colleen Dewhurst, Ken Marsolais, Renee Taylor, Joe Bologna, Ken Friedman, Jack Betts, Jane Bergere, Adela Holzer, Rex Reed, and a lot of people I didn’t know. I saw F. Murray Abraham, whom I hadn’t seen since the filming of
The Ritz
.
We were all seated. Cy Coleman walked over to a piano and started playing something. It was almost like an overture to a show. I had been in this same room for Ed Sullivan’s wake. I remembered telling Bob Precht, Ed’s son-in-law, that Anne and I would not be at the funeral mass for Ed at St. Patrick’s the following day because we’d be working.
“That’s the one thing Ed would’ve understood,” Bob said.
As Coleman played, I wondered how the piano had gotten in here. You don’t find that at Jewish funerals. I remember Bob Fosse at Paddy Chayevsky’s funeral, when asked to say something, doing a time step. He did it a cappella.
McNally got up and said Bobby was a tough taskmaster.
“He’d say to me, ‘You’ve got a pretty fair first act, a decent second act, but you’ve got no third act.’ Bobby had three actors whom he loved. I want them to say something.”
Jimmy Coco, Paul Benedict, and F. Murray Abraham got up and spoke; then Colleen recited one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. There was a moment of quiet. Five men appeared and quickly wheeled the casket out.
Terrence McNally said, “Let’s give Bobby a hand.” The standing ovation lasted two minutes. No one would stop.
In 1976 Anne and I took one of our few non-working vacations. We packed up and headed for Nantucket, an island off the Massachusetts coast. The four of us stayed in a small room in a bed-and-breakfast. Although we were somewhat near the water, the room was tiny and faced an alley. There wasn’t much light. At least on Riverside Drive we could see trees.
Anne was ecstatic. She loved the island, the quaint shops, even the overpriced restaurants. One day she took me to a ramshackle house and
said she would love to live there. I didn’t understand. Yes, it was near the water, but the house was falling apart, we would be the only Jews for miles around, and there were no kosher delis. What was so great about this place?
We returned to New York and I forgot about Nantucket. The next year Anne returned to the island, this time by herself. I thought nothing about this until she returned home and announced, “I bought the house.”
“What?”
“The house on Children’s Beach. I bought it. Our first house, Jerry.”
I was stunned, to say the least. But I trusted Anne and she proved to be right. Nantucket has become a very special place for both of us. And now they even sell kosher franks.
Coming from the sidewalks of NYC, owning a second home was a dream. To look at the trees, the ocean, the stars at night. But I forgot about fog. Nantucket was one hundred miles away from New York by air if you weren’t fogged in. I was told that during World War Two American pilots learned how to land in fog by training on the island. Nevertheless, over these many years I’ve learned to love Nantucket, fog and all.
As the island’s reputation grew, though, so did the airfares. Nantucket became the island of the rich, and after a while the $140 round-trip cost $400, possibly more.
The idea that there were people desperate to bolt from the Big Apple speedily and inexpensively must have struck a young aviator living on the island as a good business opportunity.
Sam flagged me down one day while I was riding my bike past his house. He asked if his business manager might call on us to discuss the matter of the rising cost of airfares. I said sure. Two days later the four of us—he, his business manager, Anne, and I—sat on our porch sipping vodka tonics, watching the sky change from fiery red to orange, then disappear as the harvest moon emerged above the horizon.
“We have an idea which you two might be interested in,” the business manager said. “We all love this place. The problem is, how to afford to get up here? Sam has a twelve-seat passenger plane. He thinks he can start a service to get people like yourselves up here whenever you like. We’ve already got ten people interested enough to put up money. Sam has been flying up every week for five years.”
Sounds good, I thought. “What would it cost?”
“We’re thinking of everybody putting up $25,000 each. We can start an airline. You guys fly free. You also become stockholders, so you’re investing and collecting dividends.”
The idea excited me immediately. To own a share in an airline that could get me to Nantucket in an hour was the answer to a dream.
“We’ll get back to you on it,” I said. Anne was in agreement. I called our business manager and told him of the idea.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “You don’t know the people. Are they legitimate? I don’t recommend you put $25,000 of your hard-earned money into it.”
I was devastated by his pessimistic attitude, but aware that his conservative approach came from hard experience.
I notified our two entrepreneurs of our decision not to invest. “Can we meet again?” they asked. I said yes. The dream was still alive for me despite the forewarning.
Back in New York, the two pioneers sat and laid out an alternative plan for Anne and me. In lieu of payment, would we write commercials for the new airline? We would not have to invest and would still get free passage to Nantucket whenever we wanted. I asked how I could get an idea of what the service would be like.
Sam said, “When you’re back in Nantucket again, call me and we’ll fly to New York.”
So one weekend I met him at the waiting room in Nantucket Airport. “Just follow me,” Sam said. I carried my bags to a remote part of the runway and stared at the strange craft whose fuselage seemed to sit practically on the ground. It had tiny wheels, a double tail, and a single engine. It looked like the Edsel of the aircraft industry. I told myself not to make any quick judgments.
Sam loaded my bags into the baggage compartment. “Do you want to sit in the copilot’s seat?”
“Of course,” I said. Another adventure.
I sat to his right as he coolly hit the ignition and turned on the engine. It’s only a hundred miles, I said to myself. A milk run. We got clearance, and minutes later were in the air, circling Nantucket, then heading to New York. There was no conversation between us, not even, How’re you doing? The guy had enough to do, looking at the altimeter, checking the gas, and being in contact with the control tower. There was really no time for small talk. He had earphones on anyway, listening to the weather. I
likened it to being on stage. You’re there to act, not to converse with the stagehands.
Out of curiosity I looked behind me and examined what was in the back of this flagship of our fledgling airline. The seats were not all in the upright position. Some seemed to have torn upholstery. And there was a strange smell.