Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny (28 page)

Chapter 48
Legends of Comedy

W
ell into their seventies, Dad and two of his best pals, Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, teamed up to form a new act called
The Legends of Comedy.
Exactly what the title implied, the show was a celebration of the careers of three men doing what they did best—entertaining people. And now for the first time they were doing it on the same bill. I went to see the show in Atlantic City and sat in the audience more spellbound than I would have thought. I had seen them all perform countless times, but never side by side. It was an amazing experience—like attending a one-night, crash-course comedy school—as these veterans of the craft tore up the stage, each in his own unique style.

Milton came on first, exploding with energy—banging out one-liners, walking on the sides of his feet, making faces, crossing his eyes, prancing and dancing, licking his hand to slick back his hair, and all with a look of sheer delight on that rubbery mug of his. He was a marvelous rat-a-tat clown—a master of Berlesque burlesque—who the audience adored and he adored back. As I watched him, I could almost see the six-year-old boy standing up in his parents’ living room, making his whole family double over in awe at this precocious and genuinely funny kid.

Then came Dad, Mr. Sleek, in his pressed black tuxedo with his red satin pocket hanky. He strode to the mike and good-naturedly welcomed his audience.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.”
They immediately quieted down to hear what he would say next. Dad adored making an audience laugh, but he also loved bringing them to a hush. He used to tell me that a good storyteller knows how important the silences are, and is never afraid of them. Dad controlled his audience like an orchestra conductor. He was Mr. Cool.

I remember once being with him in the dining room of the Sands Hotel when a young comic approached our table.

“Mr. Thomas,” he said nervously, “I’m just starting out as a comedian, and I’m having the hardest time beginning my act. I never know what to say when I first come out. Can you give me some advice?”

My father looked up at the young comic.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll give you, free of charge, what I open with.”

“Oh, my God,” the kid said. “Would you really? What is it?”

Dad said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.”

Third on the bill was Sid Caesar, who couldn’t have been more different from his two friends. No rat-a-tat, no gentlemanly welcome to the audience. Instead, Sid came out in character—a German professor—then gave us another of his characters, and another, and yet another, all from different countries, all with different accents. The audience was transfixed.

And it was interesting knowing where all those voices came from. Sid had told us the stories of growing up like my dad, as the son of immigrants, in the same kind of melting-pot neighborhood. His father owned a small restaurant in Yonkers called the St. Claire Buffet and Luncheonette. When Sid was a boy of nine he worked there—for a quarter a day—clearing tables after school. As he went from table to table, he’d hear the customers chattering in a smorgasbord of accents—French, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish, Hungarian, Russian and Yiddish—and he liked to mimic them. He picked up the rhythms, the intonations, the musical nuances of each dialect, then he’d talk to each group in his own double-talk version of their language.

At first the customers thought Sid was actually speaking to them in their language, but soon they realized that this little pisher was faking it. They loved it—and Sid loved making them laugh. He couldn’t wait to get there after school every day. He had found his way into a comic device that would become a signature of his career.

Milton, Dad and Sid, always together, this time on stage.

On stage that night in Atlantic City, we never saw the man, Sid Caesar, until the final moments of his act, when he bid us “Good night.” But he was brilliant. He gave us not only a cast of colorful and funny characters, but also a touch of the rich cultures that came along with them.

In their brief but memorable engagement as a team, Milton Berle, Danny Thomas and Sid Caesar painted a remarkable picture of the distinct ways in which a comedian can approach comedy. They also made it clear that each one of them was destined to do it his own way. And it was certain, as you watched them up there on that stage, that they were also destined to spend their lives making us laugh.

SID’S MOST MEMORABLE JOKE

I asked Sid Caesar if he remembered the first time he got up in front of an audience. He told me that he made a speech at his Bar Mitzvah, and though much of it had to be serious, he did manage to slip in a few jokes from the pulpit.

But the real headliner that day, Sid remembers, was the rabbi, who told a joke that still makes Sid laugh.   —M.T.

There were mice running all over the synagogue, and everyone was in a panic. Women were terrified, kids were hiding and the men didn’t know what to do.

“Don’t worry,” the rabbi announced. “I’ll take care of it.”

Sure enough, the next day all the mice were gone. The people in the shul were astonished! An older gentleman stood and asked, “Rabbi, how did you do it? How did you get rid of all the mice?”

“Easy,” the rabbi answered. “I Bar Mitzvahed them. And as everyone knows, once they’re Bar Mitzvahed, they never come back.”

Chapter 49
The Elm House

I
t’s very odd when someone dies suddenly. Your brain can’t compute it. It’s like they’ve been kidnapped, plucked out of your life. They were here yesterday. Now they’re not.

Dad had been on the road promoting his new book,
Make Room for Danny
. And he was having a ball—big crowds, the book was selling well. He seemed healthy and very happy. You could hear it in his voice.

Then the call from the doctor at 1:30 in the morning. I dropped the phone and screamed. My father had died of heart failure. I fell to the floor and began rocking back and forth—like I was davening, I think, which I’d never done in my life. It must be primal. Phil climbed over me to get to the phone and I heard him saying, “Who died? . . . Oh no!”

It was February 6, 1991. Daddy was 79.

I got on the plane to L.A. and cried all the way. Phil stayed behind to dedicate a
Donahue
show in remembrance of Dad. So I was alone. My pal Kathie Berlin wanted to fly with me, but I couldn’t wait—I had to get there. She took the next plane. The flight attendants were dear—hovering with Kleenex and water. I was inconsolable. An open faucet of tears. Then cocktail napkins started being passed over my shoulder, with notes written on them.

“I loved your father.”

“He was like a father to me.”

“I grew up on your Dad.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

They were my first condolence notes. It was so sweet, it made me cry more. Something I didn’t realize till much later was that, when we landed, though I was sitting in the front row and the door was at the center of the plane, there wasn’t a line. I walked right off. The attendants must have asked the passengers to let me off first. And they did. What a kind thing for all of those people to do.

I walked dazed off the plane, to where Terre and Tony were waiting for me. We drove to the house, which was filled with people, and all I could think of was
What do I drink to make this pain go away?
No one ever tells you that grief is physical. I felt like I’d been hit with a plank. I’m not much of a drinker, so Father Pat, our family priest since we were small—and a pretty good drinker—introduced me to mixed drinks. Scotch—too bitter. Vodka—too hot going down. Same with gin. We settled on Seagram’s 7 and ginger ale. I remembered that from college—a kid’s drink, but I could get it down. I got a
few
down. It wasn’t yet noon.

My best pal since childhood, Camille, was already there, passing food, making drinks. Of course Camille would be there. We’d shared so much growing up. And now her presence brought some kind of normalcy to this otherworldly tableau.

Dad’s comic pals started coming in, red-eyed, telling stories, forcing a laugh. But it was too soon.

Thank God for Terre. She was taking care of Mom, walking her around the courtyard. Mom had the stunned look of a boxer who had hit the mat, and Terre was trying to keep her on her feet. Tony and I went to Good Shepherd Church and began to arrange the flowers. So many flowers had arrived, it looked and smelled like a florist shop. Or a funeral parlor. We put all the white ones, for resurrection, on the altar. We sent out for white ribbon to arrange bows on the ends of all the pews. We had a piano brought in so Roger Williams could play Dad’s favorite song, “Autumn Leaves.”

Then we made a list of the speakers. Tony looked at me.

“You know what we’re doing, Mugs, don’t you?” he said.

“No,” I said. “What?”

“We’re producing Dad’s last show.”

Yes, I guess we were. We hugged each other tight and continued producing. Then we got a call from the archbishop’s office and were pleased to learn that he would attend the service. That was nice—Dad would have liked that. But they informed us that, for this honor, only one person would be allowed to speak other than the archbishop. Guess he had a busy day.

“Thanks, anyway,” we said, “but we have a couple of presidents and several comedy legends who will be speaking on behalf of their friend, so we understand if this makes it impossible for the archbishop to attend.”

Presidents Reagan and Ford spoke. So did the archbishop (yes, he came anyway). So did Bob Hope and Milton Berle.

Phil emceed—beautifully. If ever a man was put in a spot to fail, this was it—taking on the role of speaking on behalf of a family’s adored patriarch. But it was as if he had reached into our hearts. He expressed it for all of us. I’ll always remember him saying, “He made us believe that he would live forever. But two days ago he proved us wrong and broke our hearts.”

The first speaker Phil called on was Milton, who walked up to the pulpit and said, “Thanks, Geraldo.” Good ol’ Uncle Miltie. He knew what to do. Everyone laughed. They needed to.

There were a lot of laughs that day from the comics. Bob Hope said that Dad was so religious he had stained glass windows in his car. There was also a memorable laugh that did not come from the pulpit. It started when Mother’s lipstick fell out of her purse, hitting the ground with a noisy clack, then began rolling across the floor. Terre, Tony and I watched it roll and started to giggle. As it made its way past the grandkids—first Dionne, Jason and Tracy, then Kristina and Kate—they started to giggle, too. And trying as hard as we could, none of us could stop, until we were all laughing hysterically. It was terrible. Our bodies were shaking, tears of laughter streaming down our faces. We must have looked crazy. We were.

For hours and hours, day after day, friends came to offer their condolences, eat heartily and make us laugh. And what good friends—Elaine, Herbie, Chuck, Julian, Barry, Kathie all came from New York to be with me. After a while, Terre, Tony and I decided to duck out and take a drive to the old Elm house. We just had a need to see it again. It had been, what, thirty years, since we had all left and Mom and Dad had built their big beautiful dream house on the hill, atop Beverly Hills, overlooking the city.

We drove to the corner of Elm and Elevado and parked across the street. I could see my old bedroom windows that faced the street. How many times I had watched from that window as a boyfriend rode away on his bike. It looked smaller. Does everybody’s childhood home look smaller when they’re all grown up?

We got out of the car.
Let’s knock on the door. Maybe the owner will let us go inside. No, that’s crazy. We don’t even know these people
.

We walked to the door and knocked. A nice-looking blond woman opened it.

“We’re the Thomas kids,” we said. “We grew up in this house. We just lost our dad and we felt a very strong urge to visit this house.”

The nice lady smiled. “I was wondering when you’d come,” she said.

“What do you mean? You were expecting us?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Your father used to drop by all the time, and he’d sit in the den and have a vodka with us, and talk about the old days. He loved this house.”

We were floored. We should have known. Dear, sweet, sentimental Daddy.

We entered the house.

“We’ll go outside,” the woman said. “Feel free to walk around.”

So we sort of meandered. I walked into the den first, where on Friday nights we had watched all the Capra, Sturges, Chaplin and Three Stooges movies. I remembered how I used to run the projector. Because I was the oldest, Dad had taught me how to work it, so when he was on the road, we could still watch movies.

Then the living room, with the big black piano that held Grandma’s picture as a fortune-teller on top of it, and where all the pianists and singers would sit on the bench and perform after dinner, and where the comics would tell stories and make everyone laugh. At the far end of the room, in front of the glass doors, was where we put our Christmas tree each year—with the mountain of gifts from family, friends and Dad’s colleagues.

Then the dining room, which faced the street, with the windows that let in such a pretty light through the panes. I could almost see the U-shaped table, built that way so that no one sat with their back to the huge, wall-to-wall carving of the Last Supper that hung there. Me always on Dad’s right. On Sunday after Mass, we’d have to close the drapery so the movie guide buses wouldn’t look in at us having our brunch. “Monkeys in a cage,” Dad would say.

I walked up the stairs and remembered Mom sitting on the top step, holding baby Tony in her arms that Christmas, just two weeks after he was born, so he could be a part of our Christmas morning.

I went into my parents’ bedroom. It didn’t look like it did on all those school mornings when I’d go in for my allowance, or something extra to go to the movies with Camille and Moya, or to negotiate staying out later than they wanted me to. But the bed was in the same place as it was when we used to climb into it to keep Mom company when Dad was away.

What I hadn’t expected was the burst of emotion I felt when I walked into Dad’s bathroom–dressing room, where I used to sit on the edge of the tub, watching him shave and listening to his stories about being on the road, or telling him how I felt about something that no one else seemed to understand. It was the room most untouched by the new owners—the “oatmeal”-colored tile (Mom called it that), the big glass shower with the tile bench inside, the pane-glass window overlooking the street, where I would glance at our circle driveway and the brick house across from ours. Oh, how many times I had sat there transfixed and laughing and happy to be with him. Dad’s bathroom. How funny that it was this room that held the sweetest memories of my childhood home.

I couldn’t stop weeping, but I was glad I had come. Because for those few moments, the flowers, the eulogies, the box that held him were washed away, and I was transported, and as close to him again as I could get.

I went downstairs, and Terre and Tony looked as I must have. Drained. But it was good. We had made a visit to relive, not just to bury, our father. We were ready to go back and finish the ritual at home.