I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (13 page)

In the coming months, I began to test the roadways. I never had a driving instructor. Ginnie helped out, but trial and error was my main teacher. I never used the freeways or the main boulevards like Sunset and Wilshire. Traveling long distances was difficult, but I found backstreets. I would stick with the local streets to slowly build up my confidence. Stop signs were my best friends. Basically, my rule of thumb was to keep it under 20 m.p.h. After a year, I was ready. At age thirty-three, I drove to the DMV, passed the driving test, and got my license.

I was educated by the Jesuits. When you are educated by the Jesuits, you are supposed to be intelligent. If that’s true, then the most intelligent thing I ever did was marry my wife, Ginnie.

For the past forty-three years, we’ve had a pretty smooth marriage as those things go. Like all couples, we’ve had fights, but they never last long. I’ve found that fights in marriage are generally about something other than the topic you are arguing over.

Ginnie and I had our first fight over thumbtacks. We were newlyweds, and I was helping her line some drawers. This was in the days before sticky paper, so the drawer paper had to be anchored with thumbtacks. Shortly into the project, I informed Ginnie that I was out of thumbtacks.

“How could you be out of them?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t have any more. That’s how I’m out of them.”

“What do you mean? We’ve done the same amount of drawers and I haven’t used all of mine,” she said, holding up her allotment.

“I put six in each drawer, one in each corner and two in the middle to hold the paper down.”

“Bob, you should only use four in each drawer.”

We didn’t talk for the next three days.

They say love is blind, and it probably is. When you are engaged, you see these little funny things about your future wife that you think are so cute. From time to time, Ginnie’s parents would ask her to do something that she thought wasn’t reasonable and she would get her back up and refuse to do it. In those pre-matrimony days, I thought it was pretty cute. The more they would try to push her to do it, the cuter her resistance became.

But eventually you come to grips with all these little traits and see them for what they are. Years later when Ginnie would refuse to do something, I would sit back and think, “You are the most stubborn woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Another thing I’ve learned over the course of marriage is that women argue a lot differently than men. In the case of my marriage, it’s magnified. I’m a Virgo, and we’re very logical. Ginnie is a Sagittarius, and they tend to be more emotional. Perhaps this is why Ginnie and I once had a fight over something that never happened.

I woke up one morning and greeted her with a “Hi, sweetheart.”

She didn’t respond. Right away I could see that she was angry. I did what all men do—an instant replay of yesterday. Let’s see. I got up. I complimented her on breakfast. I picked up my clothes and put them in the hamper. I spent the day on the golf course with the guys, and so on. I couldn’t find any obvious failings.

“You’re mad. … What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I had a dream that we went to a party and you spent the entire party talking to this beautiful young lady.”

“Honey,” I protested. “That was a dream.”

“Yeah, but it’s just the kind of thing you would do.”

The most serious problem we ever had came just after we were first married. I returned home from work one day, and Ginnie tartly informed me that the mail was waiting on my desk. I went into the spare bedroom in our apartment that doubled as my office to see what was wrong.

There was a letter from a woman who lived in Colorado. It began: “Dear Bob. I’m sorry I couldn’t take your advice. I went ahead and had our child and I named him Bob.”

Ginnie was mad because she thought it was something I should have told her about before we got married. Calmly, while frantically showing her my travel logs for the past several years to prove that I hadn’t been anywhere near Colorado, I explained that I didn’t know this looney-tune lady and that this tryst never happened.

I’m pretty sure Ginnie believed me at the time, but after really getting to know me over the last four decades, I’m sure she believes me now.

As in every marriage, my wife has tried to change my behavior for the better over the years, ridding me of bad habits and instilling in me the manners that help me function in polite society. Clothing, for example.

It’s hardly an understatement to say, I’ve never been a clotheshorse. I simply wake up, put on what’s comfortable, and go about my day. If I’m doing a TV show or a movie, it’s even easier because the wardrobe person tells me what to wear. In
Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
, I played a doorman, so I wore a doorman’s outfit. In
Elf
, I wore a green elf’s costume with a tall, pointy hat. And so on.

But with Ginnie it’s different. We’ll be getting ready to go to a party. I’ll slip on a dark blue cardigan, some royal blue slacks, a yellow-striped shirt, and a pair of gray socks. It used to go like this:

Her: “Bob, you aren’t going out like that, are you? That’s a joke, right? You’re just telling me you don’t want to go.”

Me: “What are you talking about?”

Her: “The way you’re dressed. That’s a joke. You aren’t really going to go out that way.”

Me: “What’s wrong?”

Her: “Those colors don’t even come close to going together.”

Me: “Oh, really? I had no idea.”

I’m not color-blind. I just have no eye for what goes with what. So after a while, I changed my tack. Now, it goes more like this:

Her: “Bob, you aren’t going out like that, are you?”

Me: “No, of course not. I was just waiting for you to tell me what to wear.”

Ginnie’s dad had a great theory about clothes. He’d say, “You should always look like you don’t need the work.” He was a fastidious dresser, and when he’d go to casting calls, he would wear his finest suits. The message was, if I don’t get the job, no big deal. I don’t need the money.

To heck with that—I’ll take the money.

Ginnie also changed our entire family’s behavior. We were never ones to tell each other “I love you” when we hung up the phone or said goodbye. She always did, and we began to pick up on this. When my mother was in a nursing home in her later years, my sister Mary Joan would visit her. When she left, she would tell Mom that she loved her. That’s a nice habit for any family to get into.

Despite the craziness of show business, with all the traveling and odd working hours, Ginnie always tried to maintain some semblance of a normal lifestyle when our kids were growing up. Even when I was performing for four and five weeks at a time in Las Vegas, she would pack up the kids on Fridays after school and fly to Vegas for the weekend.

The hours in Vegas were a little strange because I lived a nocturnal existence. My shows were at eight o’clock and midnight, and our family dinners were sometimes at ten o’clock, which the kids loved, mostly because it was late. After sleeping late, we would spend time together during the day. When I played the Sands, the hotel would put me up in a three-bedroom suite with a private pool. We even went to church on Saturday evening.

Once when I was playing the Riviera and Bernadette Peters was my opening act, my daughter Courtney made friends with Steve Martin, who was going out with Bernadette at the time. Courtney was six months old, and she was in her baby crib in my dressing room. When Bernadette took the stage, Steve would stop by my dressing room. Steve’s routine was the same every time: He would walk in, say hello to Ginnie and me, and then he would stand over Courtney’s crib and watch her. He didn’t make faces or gestures. He just watched her. Five minutes later, he would tell me to have a good show and leave.

Vegas was never a kids’ town, but there were places to amuse the children, like the bumper-car park frequented by the local kids of the cocktail waitresses and blackjack dealers. A hairdresser once told me a story about living in Vegas. She was doing a woman’s hair, and her client offhandedly asked her if she flew in and flew out every day. No, the hairdresser explained, she actually lived in Vegas. The woman couldn’t grasp the concept that someone was raising a family in Vegas.

It did get lonely when the kids left. On Sundays, I would drive them to the airport, and they would fly home with their babysitter, Rhonda. Ginnie would stay until Monday to prevent me from having that sinking feeling of my entire family heading home and leaving me behind.

Generally I played Vegas six to eight weeks each year. In the summer when the kids were off from school, I would try to book myself at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe. The casino would give us a beautiful, fully staffed house on the lake with a boat. During the day, we’d go on picnics or swim off the pier. Winters were for skiing and sledding for the kids.

I don’t know how normal any of this was, but the kids accepted it as our way of life.

In 1970, I had been on the road doing a series of shows. I was playing the Desert Inn, and the opening act was Edie Adams. She told Ginnie about this wonderful place in Washington State that she had just worked called Ocean Shores. Ginnie immediately decided that we should go there because we hadn’t spent enough quality family time together. And, like your average, upper-middle-class American family, we should rent a Winnebago and drive.

“A family vacation would be a bonding experience,” she said. It would be a chance to be with the kids and get to know each other better. Parents and kids alike would embark on a time of discovery, learning, and togetherness— not to mention bickering and exhaustion.

Back home, I rented a Winnebago and we filled it with our two sons, Rob, six, and Tim, three; our rambunctious Irish setter, Lady; and enough Jif peanut butter to sink a small boat.

This was 1970, very early on in the evolution of recreational vehicles. Driving an RV is completely different from driving a car. You have to drive a Winnebago from the middle, not from the front the way you drive a car. On any long vehicle, the center is behind you, and you have to maneuver accordingly. Hence the ominous sign you often see on large trucks: “Caution: Vehicle Makes Wide Turns.”

Being a typical man, I hadn’t read the manual. While I was finding the center, I put a few scrapes on the Winnebago, but nothing major. Every time I made a left turn, the contents of the refrigerator spilled onto the floor.

“Bob, you didn’t read the manual, did you?” Ginnie would shout.

“No, honey … I didn’t.”

These mishaps dented my confidence a bit and made me tentative. The Winnebago’s height clearance was fourteen feet, so whenever I saw signs on the overpass that read fifteen feet, I didn’t quite trust them. I’d slow down and listen closely for a scraping noise. But after whizzing under a few at 40 m.p.h., my confidence grew exponentially.

At night, we would camp in a motorhome park. After leveling the Winnebago, I would fill up the water tanks. Ginnie would shower first, followed by our sons. I was always the last to shower, and, without fail, the water always gave out halfway through my shower. I made a mental note as to which half I had washed, so the next day before the water quit I could wash the other half.

To take a break from the campgrounds—and so I could have a hot shower every few days—we occasionally stayed in hotels. We relied on one of those guidebooks, but the book didn’t always have the critical details.

Early one evening, we pulled into a hotel with several motor homes in the parking lot. Upon further inspection, I discovered that all the motor homes were carrying elderly couples. I decided we should find another place—or risk being kept up all night by the paramedics.

By 11:00
P.M
. the kids were cranky and Ginnie was nagging me to find someplace, anyplace. I pulled into the first motel I saw and went inside to check in. When I asked for two adjoining rooms, the desk clerk shook his head and laughed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You don’t have connecting rooms?”

“This is Seafair weekend,” he told me.

“It’s what?”

“Seafair weekend. You won’t find a hotel around these parts for fifty miles.”

We pressed on and finally found a place that had a vacancy.

The next day we drove to the hotel where we were going to be staying for a few days. It was Polynesian-themed and its entrance had large wood columns with a thatched roof held up by exotic-looking slanted beams.

As I pulled up to the entrance, the driver in front of our Winnebago motioned for me to change lanes. Without thinking, I maneuvered into the other lane. Unfortunately, the overhead clearance was significantly reduced by the slanted beams. I heard this terrible grinding sound, followed by a loud
thump
, and turned around to see our rooftop air conditioner had crashed through the roof and landed in the middle of the living space.

My three-year-old son, Tim, was standing next to the air conditioner, surveying the wreckage. “Bad daddy! Bad daddy!” he chastised.

Luckily, no one was hurt except for my rented Winnebago. I was in a real predicament. I was in rural Washington State on Seafair weekend with an air conditioning unit in the middle of the floor and a gaping hole in the roof, and I needed to drive back to Los Angeles. The only option was to wake up early the next morning and drive thirty miles to Tacoma to have the air conditioner and the roof repaired.