Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny (2 page)

Chapter 2
A Kid at the Studio

I
sat on the lap of director Henry Koster for weeks. I was eight years old, and my father was filming a movie at Warner Bros. with child star Margaret O’Brien, who was nine. It was summer and school was out, so I went to the studio with Dad as often as I could. I loved the whole workday, which began with cueing my father on his lines as we drove to the studio. He’d tell me how well I read Margaret’s part, and I’d feel so proud and useful.

Then we’d get to the set.

And I remember watching as Dad and Margaret worked on the scene that we had rehearsed in the car.

And I remember wishing she’d fall over in a dead faint. And then somebody would shout, “Is there a little, dark-haired girl here who knows these lines?” And I could rush in and save the day.

It was so much fun for a kid to run free around the studio—wandering through the wardrobe and makeup departments, visiting other sets, going to lunch in the commissary and sitting next to a man dressed like a pirate or a cowboy.

But the best part was watching the filming from Koster’s lap. He would wave his arms around me as he directed the action. Then when the take was over, he’d bellow in his thick Hungarian accent, waving his arms, “Cut! Print it! Very good! We try it again.” He’d never say that the scene was bad. It was always, “Very good. We try it again.”

Dad working with Margaret O’Brien. Was I jealous? Was I ever.

Margaret and me. I knew all of her lines, just in case . . .

My Lebanese grandparents were visiting from Toledo that summer. My grandmother was a saint—but I didn’t like my grandfather. He was kind of mean, and I was scared of him. I can still feel the sting on my legs where he swatted me with a pussy willow branch because I was playing with a dog in his tomato garden.

Our dinner table was always a raucous affair, with everyone speaking over everyone else, telling stories and laughing. It was obvious that Grandpa didn’t like this kind of commotion at the table. He preferred kids to be seen and not heard.

One night, I was pushing my food around the plate, as always, so it would look like I had eaten most of my meal. I was a terrible eater.

“Finish your vegetables,” my father admonished.

I didn’t.

“I see your children don’t listen to you,” my grandfather muttered under his breath.

Embarrassed in front of his father, Dad pushed his chair back with a loud scraping noise and stood up, looking as if he was going to spank me. I jumped up, shocked and frightened, and ran from the table.

“You’re being disobedient, young lady!” Dad yelled as he chased me around the room.

I ran right into the corner. He was coming at me. I was terrified.

Suddenly, I stopped, spun around, waved my hands in the air and yelled in my best Hungarian accent, “Cut! Print it! Very good! We try it again!”

My father literally fell over laughing. My grandfather was disgusted with all of us. And I had learned a good lesson: Laughter is the best way to get out of a corner.

Chapter 3
The Boys

W
hat fun they all had together. Milton, Sid, Jan, George, Phil, Red, Joey, Harry. They just loved to laugh—and to make each other laugh. Our dinner table was like a writers’ roundtable, with each of my father’s pals taking his turn trying to top the others. They were always attentive, and never heckled one another as each one “took the floor.” Some jokes were told, but many of the biggest laughs came when they made fun of themselves.

It was a known fact that no one was funnier “in a room” than Jan Murray—and my dad was a sucker for him. One night, Jan told a story about trying to get Frank Sinatra’s autograph for his son’s admission counselor at Northwestern University. He felt like an idiot asking one of the guys for an autograph, but the counselor wanted it, and Jan wanted his kid to get into the college.

The way the story went, all the boys were at a casino in Miami. Jan walked up to Frank with a little piece of paper and asked him to sign it. But Frank brushed the paper aside and said that if it meant getting Jan’s son into Northwestern, he’d send the man one of his albums. Jan said, no, that wasn’t necessary. The guy just wanted an autograph.

“Nah, it’s no trouble,” Frank said. “I’ll send him an album and a signed photograph.”

But Jan was fixated on just getting that autograph. He followed Sinatra around the whole weekend, toting this little scrap of paper—sidling up to Frank at the gambling table, slipping it under his stall in the men’s room, pushing it on him while he was schmoozing some blonde in the lounge. The whole weekend—Jan flapping his paper, Frank pushing it away.

I remember watching Jan tell this story one night at our house, wringing the absurdity out of each beat, building the frustration and idiocy of the situation to such a height that he had my father so convulsed with laughter that Dad was lying on the floor in total surrender, howling.

You’d think that Jan would let up, having gotten him to the floor—but, no, now he really had him. Jan stood over my father’s prone body, legs straddling him, as he dug even deeper into Dad’s funny bone. My father was laughing so hard he screamed, “Stop! Stop!” afraid he would actually die of laughing.

In the real world, the guy laughing that hard is having the most fun. In this world, the guy
getting
the laugh is getting what he lives for.

They were called “The Boys,” and like all boys, they had a clubhouse. It was the Hillcrest Country Club, and that’s where they spent their afternoons playing golf and cards. Hillcrest sat on a sprawling property in a beautiful setting just south of Beverly Hills. Its famous, rolling green golf course ran along Pico Boulevard, across the street from 20th Century Fox Studios.

Hillcrest had a terrific brunch on Sundays, and it was a great place to throw a party. The only problem—it was restricted. Jews only. This was because the Jews had been kept out of every other club in the city—the Bel Air Country Club, the Los Angeles Country Club—so in the 1920s, they built their own.

“The Boys” celebrating Dad’s seventieth birthday at Hillcrest.
BACK ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT:
Art Linkletter, Milton Berle, Don Rickles, Steve Landesberg, Bob Newhart, Morey Amsterdam, Bob Hope, Jack Carter, Joey Bishop, Carl Reiner, (honorary “Boy”) Phyllis Diller, Sid Caesar;
FRONT ROW:
Jan Murray, George Burns, Dad, Red Buttons and Buddy Hackett.

All of my dad’s pals belonged to Hillcrest, but since he was a Lebanese Catholic, he wasn’t permitted to join. He’d spent so much time there, however, that the boys decided they should find a way to make him a member, even if he was just an honorary member.

Of course, such a big decision had to be voted on by the board. Groucho Marx had the most memorable comment at the meeting.

“I don’t mind making a non-Jew an honorary member,” Groucho said, “but couldn’t we at least pick a guy who doesn’t look Jewish?”

Dad got in. And Groucho got his laugh.

George Burns was also a club member. He didn’t play golf, but he loved to play cards. George would go to Hillcrest in the late morning, then spend the rest of the afternoon there, smoking cigars, having lunch and playing bridge with his cronies. He was such a darling, funny man. And a modest one. One day during a card game, he made a remark that broke up everyone at the table. I never knew what he said. I only heard the story of how he got such a big laugh he couldn’t wait to use it again. But George, being George, decided to attribute it to someone else—Georgie Jessel—so he could retell it without sounding like he was bragging.

Everywhere he went, George would say, “Did you hear that great thing Jessel said at Hillcrest?”—and, sure enough, he’d get the laugh. This went on for a few weeks. Finally, Jessel ran into George at a party.

“Hey, George,” Jessel said, “did you hear that great thing I said at Hillcrest?”

That
story went around and got an even bigger laugh than the first one.

All of the boys took pride in coming up with the killer line, and if there’s one thing they had in common, it was how quick they were. But Dad always said that the quickest of them all was Joey Bishop.

Joey and Sammy Davis were once driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The route is 270 miles of flat highway through the desert, and everyone speeds like a demon through it. Sammy was going about 90 miles an hour, and, of course, he got pulled over. The cop asked to see his license.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” he demanded of Sammy.

“Around 70,” Sammy said innocently.

“Seventy?” the cop said. “You were way over that. You were going at least 90.”

Joey leaned his head toward the window.

“Officer,” he said, “the man has one eye. Do you want him to look at the road or at the speedometer?”

Most people would think of a line like that three days later and say, “You know what I shoulda said?” These guys said it on the spot.

Sometimes the boys would travel in a pack, and one of their favorite pack nights was a trip to a club where Henny Youngman was playing. If ever a comedian was a joke machine, it was Henny. He was the kind of comic who built his entire act around a string of one-liners, bouncing from one joke to the next without any segues. He’d make a crack about his wife, then without the slightest concern for any semblance of a connection, talk about the snow outside.

The boys, all of whom painstakingly constructed their own acts, found this hilarious—and audacious. So they’d sit in the back of the club and yell out, “Hey, Henny, what about your wife?” Or, “Hey, Henny, get back to the snow!” Henny loved it, of course, and would heckle them right back.

Like everything else the boys did, it was all about having fun and getting laughs. That’s what they knew. That’s what made them the most comfortable.

But the toughest hecklers of all were the kids Milton Berle faced when he did card tricks at our backyard birthday parties. He wasn’t the world’s smoothest magician, and the kids called him on it.

“I saw what you did with that card!” they would holler. “Cheater!”

But nothing fazed Milton—or stopped him. He was
on,
and that was just where he wanted to be.

Years later, when I was doing my television series,
That Girl,
Milton appeared as our guest star one week. I had never worked with him—I only knew him as one of my dad’s pals. But he was different on the set. Difficult, really. He’d roam around the soundstage in his big, white terry-cloth bathrobe, with a towel wrapped around his neck, like he’d just gone six rounds with Ali—constantly complaining. It was too cold in his dressing room. It was also too small. He’d been kept waiting too long. He wasn’t feeling well. He had to get home. On and on and on.

Milton was driving everyone so crazy that our assistant director begged me to do something. Desperate, I called my father.

“Dad,” I said, “Milton is behaving impossibly and I don’t know how to deal with him. What should I do?”

Without a pause, my father said, “Ask him to spell words that begin with R.”

“What?” I said. “Ask him to spell words that start with R?! What are you talking about?”

“Just do it,” Dad said.

I walked back to the stage baffled, and spotted Milton, who by now was coughing and hacking and whining about how sick he was to anyone who would listen.

“Hey, Milton,” I yelled, “how do you spell
recluse
?”

Milton snapped his head toward me.

“R-E-C-Q-U-L-S-E,” he shot back, feet pointing inward.

Everyone laughed.

Then I yelled out, “How do you spell
remember
?”

“R-E-M-M-M-E-M-M-M-B-M-M-E-R-M.”

Another big laugh from the crew.

That was it. Milton just wanted to feel comfortable. And he felt comfortable when people were laughing. Now he could go to work.

Kind of touching, really. I loved those guys.

P.S.
Jan never got Frank’s autograph.

DID YA HEAR THE ONE ABOUT . . .

An old man and his wife die and go to heaven.

They’re sitting at a table having iced tea, with little
umbrellas in their drinks. They’re looking out at the lush
hills and valleys, birds are fluttering about and the
beautiful aroma of lilac trees is wafting over their table.
Everything is perfect. Even no waiting at the tees.

After a while, the wife turns to her husband.
“Darling,” she says, “isn’t heaven wonderful?”

“Yeah,” he says, “and if it hadn’t been for your goddamn
Oat Bran we would have been here ten years ago.”