Authors: Jerry Stiller
A young minister asked if anyone wanted to speak. A couple of people got up and praised Arnie as a wonderful, giving person.
Then I got up. I knew I had to say something meaningful. Arnie had told so many people that Anne and I were his life.
I raised a Sony ghetto blaster to my shoulder. It was surely a shock, I knew, for everyone in that chapel. I said, “Forgive me, but these things do have a value other than for the street. I don’t know any other way of playing for you a tape I’ve found that Arnie made thirty-seven years ago. If the song ‘The Things I Miss Most’ brings a single tear to your eyes, I know Arnie would kill you if he could.”
They laughed.
I held the blaster at arm’s length and prepared to press the switch.
“Before I play this,” I said, “I have to tell you that Arnie did a lot of things wrong.” Huge laugh. “Let me tell you a few things.”
How wonderful to list a man’s faults and still know he was a giant. I told them the Bob Kelly story—Arnie on the phone, to the United Van Lines guy in St. Louis, “He says he’s not in, Bob,” and then, turning to me, “Bob said can you call him when you get in?”
They never stopped laughing.
I said, “Arnie always thought of himself as Dick Powell.” I played the tape.
When it ended I said, “Did you know his favorite movie was
All About Eve
? And he loved Anne Baxter. He knew every word in the movie. Well, Anne Baxter died on the same date Arnie did. Maybe they planned it that way.”
The funeral ended, and everyone got into their cars or cabs and headed back where they came from.
· · ·
I read somewhere a motto attributed to Paul Muni, whom as a kid I was likened to by my uncles, aunts, and cousins. When I mentioned to any of them I wanted someday to go on the stage, they’d call me “Paul Muni.” For me it was like someone saying I could be president of the United States if I wanted to. Paul Muni was a hero of mine because he made it from the Yiddish theater to Hollywood stardom. Muni was quoted as saying in an interview, “An actor must act,” meaning that the true test of an actor was his constant need to perform. It didn’t matter whether he was a good actor or bad actor, he just had to do his thing someplace.
In May 1985, I got a call from Donald Schoenbaum, the director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, asking if I’d be interested in playing Nathan Detroit in
Guys and Dolls
. I was informed it was to be the first musical ever done at this illustrious playhouse. We’d rehearse seven weeks. I was assured that this was to be a first-class production, with Roy Thinnes as Sky Masterson, Mike Mazurki as Big Julie, and Barbara Shaema as Adelaide.
After days of procrastination I said, Why not? I’d have the opportunity to rehearse long enough to do my best work. There would be no big-city distractions. I imagined performing in a peaceful city and not fighting traffic. It was a chance to play the best role ever written in an American musical.
On the first day of rehearsal I realized that the Guthrie, a three-sided theater, created a special problem for actors, namely to share the performance with each third of the audience. A part of me kept saying that this was wrong, I didn’t feel right, moving on this line or that. Another part of me said, You’re an actor, you can make anything work. Within a few days I started to feel lonely without Anne. This grew into a sense of isolation. I wondered as to whether I’d bitten off too much.
As rehearsals continued I pictured the ghost of Sam Levene, the original Nathan Detroit, hovering over me. At the first preview performance I was terribly nervous. I never listened to a word being uttered by the character of Adelaide. I was too busy acting. When the show opened I received the worst reviews of my life and felt totally miserable. A couple of weeks after we opened we were rereviewed. The critics still hated me.
But the show played three months and did 97 percent capacity. The theater was out of the red. Among the many people who came backstage during the run were Garrison Keillor and his son, who told me how much they’d enjoyed the show. Lots of young actors also came back, many of
whom had played Nathan Detroit in a school play or a community theater production. The young Nathans would invariably advise me on how to get more laughs.
One night after a performance, around 2
A.M.
, I was half asleep watching Charlie Rose on
Nightwatch
on a black-and-white TV set. He was reporting the passing of Ira Gershwin. It was a particularly hot summer evening and the windows in my apartment were open because the air conditioning was on the fritz.
Suddenly I heard a noise, turned, and saw a pair of wings through the open window. The wings zoomed straight for my head. I screamed, “Bats, fucking bats! What the hell am I doing in Minneapolis,” and tore the sheets off my bed, throwing them over my head as the bat zoomed straight at me.
I kept watching that bat circle the room blindly. I was standing on the bed pulling the sheet hard over my head like a sheik. I could hear myself screaming, “fucking bats!” as though this was the last of the plagues that were visited on me for wanting to do
Guys and Dolls
. It was right out of Dracula.
I reached for a record album. I would wait for the bat’s next swoop and swat. I didn’t think of the consequences. What would I do if I did hit it? Would it turn killer and go for my jugular? Once more the bat sailed toward me. I stood on the bed and swung as it flitted past. I could hear the hit, a soft thud against the wings, and the bat fell to the floor, wounded. I ran for the light switch and flicked it on. There on the floor was a small bat. It was crawling rapidly toward the radiator, and before I could grab it, it escaped underneath. I tried using the album cover as a shovel to pull it out. I felt nothing.
I awakened the superintendent of the building. He arrived with some tools. “Yeah, we have bats in the summertime, Mr. Stiller,” he said as he removed the radiator cover, “but we’ve never had anything like this.” As the radiator cover came off I expected the worst, a dead bat. Nothing. Where the hell was it? Had it been a hallucination? I noticed a metal ring encircling the radiator pipe where it goes through to the floor below. There was barely an inch between the radiator pipe and the metal ring. I asked the super, “Could a bat escape through that size pipe?” The superintendent said yes, “They shrivel.”
I said goodnight to the super, put the sheets back on the bed, turned on the television, and tried to get to sleep. Suddenly I heard the sound of
wings. Once more a bat flew into the apartment and once more the sheets went over my head. Could it be the same bat? I picked up the album cover and hit it. Down it went. One shot. I had gotten good at this. I turned on the light and there was a bat crawling toward the crack under the door. It disappeared into the hall before I could make a move. I stopped and wondered what to do. Follow it out? Never. It could fly back in. After a full minute I opened the door. Nothing. Gone. But where? I looked down the stairs.
That summer I got bad notices, but I knew that if I ever got to play Dracula I would win an Oscar.
A few weeks later the run of
Guys and Dolls
ended and I flew back to New York City. My old pal Joe DiSpigno was being honored that night by parents, friends, and the faculty of King’s Park Public School. He was retiring as their principal. Joe and I had been in touch on and off for twenty-five years.
“Could you come out and be part of the evening? It would thrill everyone to know we’re friends,” he said.
This was one event I didn’t want to miss.
When I first met Anne I had called Joe. “I met an actress and I’m thinking of marrying her. She’s Irish Catholic,” I said.
“An Irish girl, huh?” Joe was picturing us together and laughing.
“I want you to meet her,” I said.
“I will.”
Anne, Joe, and I met someplace. We talked in generalities. He seemed to be my protector, as if he were screening Anne for defects. He was never sharp with her, just there to intimate, “If you ever hurt this man, I’ll get you if I have to travel to the end of the earth.”
Through the years Anne and I would have get-togethers with Joe, his wife, Italia, his son Dominic, and his daughter Thalia. Now tonight it was Joe’s big event.
I flew in from the Guthrie, rented a car at La Guardia, double-parked in front of our apartment building, and ran upstairs to change into my tux. The schedule was tight. Anne was already dressed and ready to go. When we came back down my rental car had been towed away. The doorman, who was new, had gone to dinner and had not told his relief man to call me if the police came by. I went totally pale and screamed at the poor handyman, who didn’t understand a word of English. Anne and I ran up and down the streets looking desperately for the tow truck. No luck.
Dressed in my tux, and Anne in a gown, we hailed a cab that took us to the impound lot at 12th Avenue and 54th Street. Every New Yorker who owns a car—and many out-of-town visitors—know this place. At that time, seventy-five dollars in cash, plus your driver’s license, would get you your car back. The victims lined up in front of a booth on a dock on the Hudson River. It was a scene out of a Chekhov play—bureaucracy in action. Explanations fell unheeded on the ears of the clerical help, who’d locate your car and issue a receipt to allow you to drive away.
Anne and I were on line. The man in back of me handed me a card. “I’m Alan King’s tailor,” he whispered. “I make his tuxes. I can make one for you.”
“I’m wearing one,” I said.
“You can use another.”
I took his card so as not to offend him. I saw a policeman who seemed to be in charge. I ran up to him. “Please, I need my car.” I was hoping he’d recognize me.
“Aren’t you …” A smile of recognition.
“Jerry Stiller,” I tell him.
“Stiller and Meara,” he said, like he’d discovered treasure. He was smiling. That miserable, depressing atmosphere didn’t affect him. He worked there. This was home for him. He loved his work, and I was the icing on the cake he’d been baking all day.
“Come with me. Your car was towed away, huh?”
“I’ve got to get to King’s Park, Long Island. We’re doing a show for my best friend.”
“Come with me.”
He took us to the back of a makeshift office that looked like something out of a shanty town in the Depression. The walls were filled with locations of vehicles.
“Here it is,” he said, pointing to a pushpin. “That’s seventy-five dollars, Jerry.”
How wonderful, I told myself. The magic of being recognized. I could get my car back without waiting on line. I paid him the seventy-five bucks. “You don’t know how much this means to me,” I told him.
He said, “Hey, can you do me a favor? Could you send us a picture?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You know who else we got?” He pointed to the wall. Opera stars, football players, other actors, people I respect were all up on the wall. I
suddenly felt good all over—I was in with the best. A cop arrived with our car. “Here it is, Mr. Stiller.” It was like valet parking. I’m on a pier on the Hudson River, my car has been hijacked from in front of my house, and I’m grateful. I took out a five-dollar bill and handed it to him.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“I know that, I want to do it.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Don’t forget the picture.”
Two hours later Anne and I arrived at the Smithtown Inn. We were an hour and a half late. Once we were onstage, our first fifteen minutes were about being towed away. Half of Long Island was there to honor my pal Joe, a principal who gave kids vision, insight, and inspiration. It was an overwhelming expression of love.
He’s like the pillar of the community
, I thought.
What happened to the rebel I once knew?
I told the audience of our adventures in the army, throwing chairs overboard, his meeting Italia and falling in love. When it was over I realized that as a school principal Joe had changed people’s lives. It was fifty years since he’d stopped me from jumping overboard on the
General Howze
, and I was still able to call him my friend.
Some time afterward Anne answered the phone.
“Jerry, it’s Mike Nichols, pick up.”
Mike Nichols? What could he want?
I picked it up. “Mike …?”
“You’re the Jew,” he said laughing.
What was he talking about? It was about thirty-five years since I had worked with Mike in Isaac Rosenfeld’s
The Liars
, my first experience performing without a script, improvising. I had replaced Shelley Berman and was working with the original members of the Compass Players, Tom Aldredge, Walter Beakel, and Mike.
We were trying to raise money at a backer’s audition for the New York company of Compass. I asked Mike, whom I’d never met, what I had to do.
“The outline is up on the board,” he said. “Just follow it.”
“I make up my own lines?”
“Yes. You just have to listen and follow the scenario. You’ll see.”
Working in that sketch was a turning point in my life. I had no memory of time passing on stage. I could hear the audience laughing but I didn’t want to stop the flow of the scenario. We were four people breezing through acting space like it was pure oxygen. No resistance. No stops.
No pauses to think. Just one continuous flow of acting energy. What did I say? It didn’t matter. I was on to something else. When it was over, a wonderful response. How long were we on? Someone said forty-five minutes.
After that, Mike and his partner, Elaine May, were also performing a sketch, in the middle of which an argument broke out between them. I had no idea they were performing a sketch called “Pirandello.”
I called Anne immediately after the performance to say, “Anne, I had the most wonderful experience I’ve ever known in the theater. It’s called improvisation. We’ve got to try it.”
Postscript: The following night, Mike and Elaine opened for Mort Sahl at the Village Vanguard, were discovered, and soon became stars.
“You’re the Jew,” Mike said again.
What was he talking about?
“I’m doing David Rabe’s new play,
Hurlyburly
,” Nichols said, “and I’d like you to play Artie.”