Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (14 page)

I made a triumphant return to the Improv in New York. Richard Lewis told writer Richard Zoglin in his book
Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America
, “It was a night I’ll always remember. . . . When Budd introduced him, the place went fuckin’ nuts. Before he opened his mouth . . . I remember thinking to myself, I’m never quitting. Until I hear a Budd Friedman say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Lewis,’ and they’re already applauding.”

But for me the highlight was spotting a woman in the audience at the Improv who I had not seen in years but recognized immediately. She was with her husband. She remembered when we last spoke and so did I. Alice Trillin, the teacher at SEEK who said my comedy would never go anywhere, came up to me after the show. She said, “I think I was wrong about you.” All I could do was smile.

Everything changed. Even producer Ernie DiMassa, who said I was “too black” for his middle American audience, finally booked me for a shot on the
Mike Douglas Show
. Not only did I go on many, many times after that, but Freddie and I, representing the new young comics on TV, also cohosted for a week.

My father tried to reach me too.

The last time I exchanged any serious words with him was about ten years earlier. I was about seventeen years old, working at Yankee Stadium, and for some reason he came to a game. While I walked through the stands carrying soft drinks to sell to the fans, he harangued me about how awful a person I was, how I was such a bad guy. He had gone to college, at Alabama A&M, and here I was working at a stadium and going nowhere in life. He told me I was a wise-ass who would never amount to anything.

Then he called my mother a “cunt”—that was the word he used. I cringe even now writing it. I consider that word one of the nastiest, most disrespectful that anyone can say referring to a woman—worse than “nigger.”

“You know, I wish you could stand in my shoes for a minute,” I told him.

“Why?”

I was a big Bob Dylan fan and I laid a Dylan line from “Positively 4th Street” on him: “Because then you’d know what a drag it is to see you.”

Now, on the
Good Times
set, producer Manings called me into his office.

“This happens all the time when someone gets well known,” he said. “People suddenly come out of the woodwork and want to get in touch with you. But we never know who these people really are. Anyway, someone has been calling us asking for you. He says he’s your father and he says he wants to talk to you. We want to make sure we’re not doing anything you don’t want us to do. We don’t know if he really is your father.”

“He probably is,” I said, “at least technically.”

“Do you want us to get back to him or let you know the next time he calls?”

I did not have to think about my answer for more than a split second. I told Allan, “I want nothing to do with him.”

He saw how strongly I felt and simply said, “Then we’ll handle it.”

I never again heard about him trying to contact me.

For the next season—our first full one—
Good Times
moved to Tuesday night at 8 p.m. (leading into
M*A*S*H
) and broke into the Top Ten, to number seven, with nearly eighteen million households—25 percent of the American television viewing public—tuning in each week. The show sometimes referred to as the “Black Waltons” or “Black Brady Bunch” ranked higher in the Nielsen ratings than
The Waltons
and
Maude
, Lear’s favorite show of his own production. The cast was on the cover of
TV Guide
, and I was on the cover of
Ebony
, alongside Arthur Ashe, George Foreman, Johnny Mathis, Lou Rawls, and others for an article titled “The Unmarrieds: They Tell Why They Remain Single.”

Given my parents’ marriage, it should be no surprise that I have never been a fan of that institution. But though I played the field, I was never a Hollywood “player,” never dated a starlet. Everyone has problems, but actresses have more of them. My girlfriends had regular jobs, such as a secretary. One of my main girls was the black and beautiful Samantha. I felt fortunate that she or any woman would go out with me. Yet even in an
Ebony
article that featured photos of the two of us together, I made it clear that we were not exclusive.

I suspect
Ebony
might have had a problem running photos of me with a white girlfriend, such as Diana, a singer/waitress at the New York Improv, a redhead with a big voice. She was the first woman I went out with who had a child. But she never whined about being a single mother. When I got a little juice because of the series, I brought her to LA, put together a band for her, and took her on the road as a singer—even brought her onto the
Mike Douglas Show
. She hung out with me and laughed at my jokes and was happy—for a year. There was never a break-up. We just saw less and less of each other. In my experience relationships never last forever.

Ray Peno, I mean, Jay Leno, dated a singer named Adele Blue for a long time. She was a girlfriend of another girlfriend of mine, another Barbara. This Barbara was almost six feet tall, a leggy, strawberry blonde from Kalamazoo, Michigan. She had come to LA wanting to do something with her life but didn’t know what. We spent our first date in bed—for two days. She was sexy, feisty, and bitchy. Her midwest family could not believe we were together. Nor could they understand—this was the mid-’70s—why she would get a boob job.

We had the most intense physical relationship I have ever had with a woman. We were so volatile and passionate together that it reminded me of Lenny Bruce’s relationship with his wife, Honey. We fought and fought and fought, and then we had the most incredible make-up sex. I was out of control with her. We had that crazy I-can’t-quit-you love, where I would wake up alone at three in the morning at my place after an argument and go to her apartment to be with her. We were so nuts for each other that as hard as we tried, we just could not live together.

But at least this Barbara and I were together during the good times of
Good Times
. Adele stuck it out with Jay through years and years of struggle. Then they broke up just before he hit the big time. When he began to go out with Mavis, the spectacular, beautiful, and smart woman who became his wife, his career took off. I felt sorry for Adele that she never enjoyed at least some of the rewards of his success.

My success on
Good Times
backed up the network in convincing Lear to allow me to do my own thing. Of all the compromises he had to make in his long and illustrious career, I think that was the one that was the hardest for him. He bit his tongue and got on board the J. J. train.

But with the second season, “Dyn-o-mite!” was no longer a non sequitur. I was now Kid Dyn-o-mite! It became a nickname usually punctuating a rhyme: “About time you saw the light, to hire the great Kid Dyn-o-mite!”

The celebrity and merchandising machine went into action. There were J. J. buttons, t-shirts, posters, belts, socks, pajamas, trading cards, and a talking doll that wore a floppy hat, turtleneck sweater, and jeans—just like me—and it spoke nine phrases when you pulled the string. The J. J. Fan Club received a thousand letters every week.

I guess you know you are famous when people begin inventing stories about you, including that I was married. I had my “Paul McCartney is dead” moment too. Both issues forced me to write a letter to the members of my fan club:

I am NOT married and have NOT been in any fatal motorcycle or automobile accident. I don’t know where these rumors started but girls don’t want to go out with me because they’ve heard I’m married—and people keep calling to find out if I’m still around—which I certainly am. . . . So if you hear either of these rumors, you can say you know they are NOT true—because J. J. told you so!

Another sign of fame is having a stalker. I was with Stacey, a beach-blonde, Anna Nicole Smith look-alike, aerobics instructor I was juggling, uh, I mean, dating, when a round black woman came up to me in the parking lot of the Store after a performance.

“We should be together,” she said adamantly.

I brushed it off with “I don’t think so.”

She was angry. “Is this white bitch with you?” she said.

Stacey and I walked away. But every now and then while working at the Store, I would spot her standing outside. Nothing else happened though. Maybe she moved on to Sherman Helmsley.

Like Fonzie, J. J. was so cool, he was hot. That gave me the opportunity to break down a few barriers for blacks, such as TV commercials. For example, I did a spot for milk, dressed in a tuxedo and sitting in the back of a limo with a beautiful black woman on either side of me.

Some people may try to tell you that drinking milk isn’t cool. I happen to like milk. . . . Let me tell you one thing, if you still don’t think that drinking milk is cool, it hasn’t cut into my action one bit, if you can dig that.

There had never been a black celebrity who came into people’s homes every week who could have done that commercial before I did. J. J. truly was the first black male character on series TV who was overtly sexual, and he was able to be that only because he was funny. Breakthroughs often begin with a laugh.

When the opportunity was presented to record a comedy album, I went back to the Cellar Door like I said I would. I reminded Jack Boyle, the owner, that I had told him this would happen. He was happy for me—and glad he could put a few asses in the seats too. Yep, this guy he called a “nobody,” merely an emcee or opening act, had become a somebody.

I was determined to impress upon the public that I was a stand-up comic first and J. J. second. I would not say “Dyn-o-mite!” on the album. I also wanted the title to be “Jimmie Walker—At Last.”

“Are you fuckin’ insane?” said Jerry Kushnick, my lawyer. “We’re trying to sell records here, man! The title is
Dyn-o-mite
. Oh, and put that hat on for the cover photo!”

When the photographer for the cover posed me with a couple of sticks of fake dynamite in my hands, I balked.

“Do we have to do this?”

“If you want to sell albums, you do,” he said. They ended up using a photo showing a lit fuse coming out of my finger.

But at the Cellar Door performance that was already recorded I never, of course, said “dyn-o-mite.”

Art Kass, the head of Buddah Records—which had hits with Gladys Knight & the Pips, Bill Withers, Curtis Mayfield, and the Isley Brothers—noticed. He said, “We’re going into a recording studio and you’re going to lay down a real good ‘Dyn-o-mite!’”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said.

When you have a talking doll created in your image, keeping people from pulling your string is hard.

Dyn-o-mite! The Black Prince has arrived! . . . People always ask me, Brother Jim, how can you live in the ghetto with all those cockroaches and everything like that? Well, I think cockroaches are the cleanest animals on earth. Every time you see them, they’re in the bathtub!

The album, which I dedicated to my mother, sold half a million copies. But I did not then and still never have said “Dyn-o-mite!” on stage during my stand-up.

The same week I was in Washington, DC, to record the album, I was invited to tour the White House. President Gerald Ford was not in at the time, but the house staff—which was almost completely black—made me feel at home. After all, the White House is our house too.

I also visited the Smithsonian—or should I say “attempted” to visit. The afternoon I was there hundreds of high school kids were also there, as they generally are. They spotted me and went crazy, screaming, “J. J.! J. J.!” They ran after me, gathered around, and asked for autographs and for me to take photos with them. I did what I could, but the situation got out of control and would not stop. There was always someone wanting more. Finally, the security guards saw the chaos and restored order.

I was uncomfortable about signing autographs anyway. Coming from where I had come from, I did not feel I was better than anyone else. I thought it was egotistical to think my signature was important, except on a check! I always preferred a handshake. I still do. For me, shaking hands is more real, more personal, more honest.

One day, early on in
Good Times
, I was doing the
Mike Douglas Show
with Brenner and was taping at the Six Flags amusement park in New Jersey. Half a dozen kids came up and asked for autographs. Brenner took all of their pieces of paper and signed them. I told him, “I don’t do that,” and moved away from them. Brenner gave me a nasty look and finished his autograph session. When the kids left, he turned to me. “Don’t you ever fuckin’ do that again when I’m with you.” He was very angry. “If you don’t want to be bothered, just go back to where you came from, where you were just another guy on the street. Then no one will ask for your autograph.” That was the only time Brenner ever had a cross word with me.

Lear heard about what I was doing—or not doing—and ordered me into his office.

“You need to sign,” he said. “You’re making people unhappy.” We may have argued a lot, but I always respected Lear. He was my Uncle Norman.

I have signed autographs ever since.

A white person asked me for an autograph.
“Will you sign this for my friend?” she said.
“Is your friend black?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll print.”

Through the second season the black and white press continued to cheer
Good Times
. John J. O’Connor, the esteemed TV critic of the
New York Times
, was right on target:

Black viewers are being afforded material that provides immediate personal and psychic identification. . . . Whites are being given glimpses of black life that, however simplified, can’t help but weaken artificial racial barriers. When an ordinary black family becomes a mass-public favorite, at least one change is no longer in the wind. It’s here, right in front of our eyes. . . . The Evanses of “Good Times” are, in style and personality, considerably more than whites in blackface. It is their struggle for economic and social survival that provides the common denominator for a mass audience. The dividing line between “us” and “them” becomes less racial, more socio-economic.  . . . Never underestimate the power of being silly on television.
(February 2, 1975)