It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (12 page)

He turned out to be right. They were a great audience and the show went great. I was so relieved that my father got to see me kill an audience.

Driving home, my old man said to me, “I think you’ve got something.”

My ol’ man was tough. He allowed no drinking in the house. I had two brothers who died of thirst
.

I
t’s not just me. Everyone—at one time or another—gets no respect. The movie
Fargo
got no respect. A few years back, it was up for Best Picture with
The English Patient
.

I saw
Fargo
, and like most people, I thought it was great. I saw
The English Patient
and thought it needed a doctor. Like a lot of people I spoke to, I didn’t like the movie.

The Motion Picture Academy named
The English Patient
best movie of the year.

Now how could anyone who’d seen both those movies choose
The English Patient
over
Fargo?
I know how—it seems more sophisticated to like
The English Patient.
The name’s so
classy
—whatever it means—and the story’s so
serious
—whatever it was supposed to be about.

From day one, comedians got no respect from the Academy. Actors and actresses know that comedy is the toughest thing to do in show business…unless it’s birdcalls. Many comedians are great actors, but few actors can do comedy. But comedy never gets respect. Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope—none of these legends ever won a regular Academy Award.

Yet when the Academy has their awards show every year, they get a comedian to host it.

I told my landlord I want to live in a more expensive apartment. He raised my rent.

A
bout ten years ago, AT&T was trying to lure back customers who’d switched to other phone services. Their big ad campaign said, “Call AT&T and we’ll take you back.” All you heard was “Call us, we’ll take you back.”

So I wrote a joke about it. “I get no respect. I called up AT&T. They won’t take me back.” I did it on
The Tonight Show
, and it got a good laugh.

That gave me an idea for an AT&T commercial, so I got in touch with some big shot there and told her my idea. She said, “I like it. Let me think about it for a week.” A week later, she said, “Let’s do it.”

AT&T changed its mind four or five times over the next six months. I found out they took many surveys about whether people liked me, and asked them if they thought I would be good to do commercials for AT&T.

Finally, they called me and said, “Okay, it’s definite. We’re doing the commercial. We’ll start right away.”

But I had a problem. I couldn’t start right away. I had to check into the hospital. I had an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which forced me to have a very distasteful operation. They cut my gut open, took all my intestines out, and put them on the table while they fixed my aorta. When they were finished, they stuffed all my intestines
back in and stitched me up. For the next three or four months, I was in constant pain while my intestines shifted around, trying to settle.

One day, I was out on my balcony in L.A., and I saw my new neighbor, Shaquille O’Neal, on his balcony. We gave each other a wave. The next day, he sent his calling card: one of his size 22EEE shoes, inscribed
To Rodney, I gets no respect—Shaq.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

I called the woman at AT&T and told her I had another “project” I was working on and had to finish it. I figured it would take about four weeks. She told me to call her as soon as I was free.

As soon as I was feeling myself again, I called AT&T and said, “Let’s get going.”

They flew a fellow from their New York advertising agency out to L.A., and he and I wrote two commercials in two days.

We liked them, AT&T liked them, we were set. I shot both commercials in one day.

A few weeks later, AT&T ran the commercials on TV, and they were a huge success. AT&T then got full-page ads with me in all the major newspapers, and radio, too. Almost immediately, the business started coming in. Everybody was happy, happy, happy.

They paid me well for the six months of that campaign, so I was planning to do some more. I had two more ideas ready, and the fellow from the ad agency was set to fly out to L.A. again to help write them.

Then out of the blue I got a call telling me there was some kind of problem. So I called the nice lady at AT&T, who told me that one of the company’s big stockholders didn’t want me in any more commercials because—he said—I wasn’t
dignified
enough to represent AT&T.

Okay,
I figured.
That’s that.

The other night I turned on my television and saw another comedian doing an AT&T commercial—someone I guess they think is more dignified—Carrot Top.

I tell ya, my wife was never nice to me. On our first date, I asked her if I could give her a good-night kiss on the cheek. She bent over
.

Chapter Ten

Let the Good Times Roll

I tell ya, my wife is never nice. She won a trip to Las Vegas for two. She went twice
.

T
hanks to my appearances on
The Tonight Show,
my career took an upswing.

I got booked for the first time in Las Vegas, opening for Dionne Warwick at the Sands Hotel. My salary: $4,000 a week for two weeks, which was a lot better than what I had been making selling paint and siding.

I had no trouble getting work now. In fact, I had more gigs being offered to me than I could handle, and I was on the road constantly. And it wasn’t working for me.

I was now forty-seven and feeling old, so I decided to open a nightclub in New York, Dangerfield’s. I opened it for one reason—I had to get off the road and be in New York to look after my two young kids. I wasn’t living with my wife anymore, but her arthritis was so bad that it made it impossible for her to take care of our kids.

Twice in my life people told me I was nuts. The first
time was when I was forty and I decided to go back into show business. Everyone told me I was out of my mind. But I stuck to it and I’m glad I didn’t listen to them. The second time was when my partner and I decided to open Dangerfield’s. They gave me two weeks, a month. Thirty-five years later, we’re still in business.

Opening Dangerfield’s wasn’t easy. At that time, I had maybe $50,000 in the bank, so I went to all my friends borrowing money—$2,500 here, $5,000 there, another $2,500 over there somewhere. It was hard—and scary—but it made me feel good that so many of my friends had that kind of confidence in me.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

The original cocktail napkin from my club. We still use them today
.

I loaned a guy $10,000 to get plastic surgery. Now I can’t find him. I don’t know what he looks like
.

I
was told I would need $125,000 to open the club. It ended up costing me $250,000. It was supposed to be ready in two months; it took about six months. We opened the doors on September 29, 1969.

While my partner, Anthony Bevacqua (affectionately known as “Babe” because he was the youngest in his family), was overseeing construction of the club, I was working in Vegas. And every night after my show, I’d run all over town getting my picture taken with all the big stars playing there. We then put all those pictures on the wall at Dangerfield’s. We’ve got dozens of them.

We had a practice run the night before we opened—invited about a hundred people to see the show and eat and drink for free. I knew we were ready, but I was still as nervous as hell. I remember sitting in that empty club with Babe a few hours before we opened the doors for the first time, frantically trying to think of something we might have forgotten. After a few minutes I thought of something—we had forgotten salt-and-pepper shakers for the tables.

Other than that, everything went great on our preview night.

We opened for real the next night, and never looked back. We were off and running. We drew young people
and old people, tourists and natives. We were even big with the rock-and-roll crowd. I can’t remember all of them—guys with long hair all look alike, you know?—but I know that the guys in Kiss and Led Zeppelin used to come by whenever they were in town. And after about five or six months, we were doing so well that I paid back all the money I had borrowed from my friends.

A month later my accountant told me, “You have no money left, and you have to pay taxes. All that money you paid back to your friends was supposed to go to the IRS.”

So now I had to go back to all my friends and borrow the same money
again.

After that screwup, I saw no profit from the club for about two years. That’s how long it took us to pay back all my friends again, to pay the IRS, and to pay off the ice machine. This put me in a weird position, because I was now getting really hot in the business, but I couldn’t take jobs out of town because I had an obligation to my partner, and to my young kids again. I had to turn down good jobs, much more money than I could make working at the club.

Oh, the other night my wife met me at the front door. She was wearing a sexy negligee. The only trouble is, she was coming home.

B
efore I opened Dangerfield’s, people warned me, “If you start doing good business there, the Mafia will take it from you.” But I wasn’t worried about that—I’d met a lot of Mob guys when I worked at the Copacabana, and I got along great with them. When I opened Dangerfield’s a lot of those guys came in, wished me good luck, and were my best customers. I never had a problem with them.

Some of those Mob guys were funny. One night this “made” guy was talking about the nicknames he and his friends had given one another when they were kids. He mentioned one nickname a few times that I never forgot. He referred to one kid as Mile-away.

I said, “Why’d you call him that?”

He said, “Because whenever there was trouble, he was always a mile away.”

The toughest club I worked was owned by a guy named Nunzio. Man, he was tough. One day he said to me, “Kid, you wanna go hunting?” I said, “Okay, I’m game.” And he shot me
.

O
nce when I was backstage just as Ed Sullivan was about to introduce me, I could hear a couple of the stagehands talking about my club Dangerfield’s. Sullivan says, “And here he is…” and one of the stagehands yells to me, “Hey, Rodney! Can I get laid at your joint?”

As I walked onstage, I yelled back at him, “Leave my joint out of this!”

I bought another book,
How to Make It Big.
I got ripped off. It was about money.

T
hey say an elephant never forgets. Around this time, I had a night with an elephant that
I’ll
never forget.

One night a woman came to see me at Dangerfield’s. She asked me to do something for charity. They wanted celebrities to perform with the circus, to ride around Madison Square Garden on elephants.

I said, “Sure,” and two days later, I report to the circus at Madison Square Garden, all set to ride the elephant. The trainers bring the elephant out, and they hoist me up into the saddle. No problem. Now we start walking.

We’re maybe halfway around the ring, and I find myself having a problem staying on the elephant. He’s moving quite a bit from side to side—he’s swaying and I’m slipping. Sure enough, he swayed this way, I swayed that way, and next thing I knew, I swayed my butt right off the elephant.