Still Foolin' 'Em (13 page)

I started performing in Las Vegas frequently, and one night at the MGM Grand I had a special guest in the audience: Mickey Mantle. We’d stayed in touch since meeting on the Dinah Shore show. He would call me when he came to Los Angeles, and we would have drinks or dinner, and I would see him in Atlantic City at the Claridge Hotel, where I performed and he was a spokesman. Once, I walked into my hotel suite and the message light was blinking. I called, and the operator gave me my favorite phone message ever: “Mickey Mantle called—he’s in Room 777.”

But this was a different Mantle now. No longer the iconic player, he’d become a vulnerable, insecure man who drank too much. I watched him be the special guest at a fifties-themed party for high rollers at the hotel. It was sad. He narrated a highlight film of his career and made inappropriate jokes. Then he posed for pictures as all of these tipsy strangers dressed in high school letter jackets, poodle skirts, and sweaters put their arms around him. From the look on his face, I figured this was more painful than his leg injuries. I think he drank just to get himself through the agony.

That night in Vegas, we had dinner, and one of Mickey’s younger brothers soon joined us. Mick’s twin brothers were just average players; they’d never made it to the majors. Mickey seemed uncomfortable as his brother, who was a dealer at one of the casinos, sat down. I immediately saw why: the younger brother stuttered. Mickey looked embarrassed. As we ate, Mickey, three drinks in already, was quiet. At one point the brother said, “D-D-Did M-Mickey t-tell you wh-what was the long … est homer h-he ev … er h-hit?”

Mickey abruptly got up and excused himself. “Where’s the john?” he asked the waiter.

Once Mickey was gone, his brother said, as clearly and as smoothly as anyone, “Mickey hit a homer in Joplin that went over the fence and into a car of a passing train that was on its way to Kansas City. So his longest home run was two hundred miles!” I was stunned. Mickey returned, as did his brother’s stutter. Then the serious drinking started. After midnight, I got him to his room. My hero, the strongest, fastest man in the history of baseball, needed help to get into bed. I was no longer the awestruck eight-year-old fan; instead I was the confident one, helping a friend who seemed so lost.

Another night, at the bar of the Regency Hotel in New York, my now good friend Bob Costas and I stayed up with Mickey for many hours as he again put one drink away after another. Bob was as devoted to the man as I was; in fact, he still carries a Mickey Mantle baseball card in his wallet. We spent the long night reminding Mickey of great things he had done on the ball field. These feats were as vivid to Bob and me as if we were watching them at that moment, but to Mickey they were faded memories. Some he didn’t remember at all. Mickey’s sadness was what upset me most. That he could be the biggest and brightest comet in the baseball universe and then crash like this on reentry was difficult to comprehend. At times, it wasn’t even fun to be with him. This was my hero, and I wanted to help him; I just didn’t know how.

One night we started talking about our fathers. Mick’s dad had taught him how to play. He’d made him a switch-hitter; he’d even named him after a Hall of Fame player, Mickey Cochrane. Mantle idolized his dad, and when his father died when Mickey was just nineteen, he was crushed. His father was only thirty-nine, and an uncle of Mickey’s also died young, both from Hodgkin’s. Mantle had thought he’d never make it to forty. He used to joke, “If I knew I was gonna live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”

That night I told Mickey that I’d lost my father when I was fifteen. “He taught me how to play, too,” I said, “and took me to see you, but he also taught me about comedy.” I told Mickey that making my dad laugh had given me the same feeling Mickey must have had when he hit a homer or made a great catch and looked into the stands and saw a smile on his father’s face or got a nod. He was very moved when I said, “We both spent most of our careers looking at an empty seat.” The difference between us was that Mickey felt he had failed his father—that he’d never been as good as his father had thought he should be. We understood each other in a different way now. Even though he was the great Mantle, and my own career was now going strong, somehow we were both still teenagers missing our dads.

*   *   *

Soap
continued to do well, but pressure on our sponsors caused us to be canceled after the 1980–81 season. We had done ninety-four episodes, and I was very proud of how far we had brought Jodie. I was glad it was over, but my sense of relief was tempered with
Okay, now what?
As much as I felt ready to do something else, something else hadn’t materialized. Then NBC’s president, Brandon Tartikoff, a young and brilliantly creative man, approached me with the idea of starring in a comedy variety show. Having loved my HBO special, he gave me a six-show commitment slated for the summer; if it worked, it would be added to the fall schedule. My own fucking show!

The producers, the network, and I started putting the show together. It was a struggle from the get-go. The network wanted a middle-of-the-road show, and I wanted something edgier. We compromised and assembled a good writing staff, a mix of veterans and younger writers. The pressure was enormous. On
Soap
I’d been one of a great ensemble; now the entire show’s success depended on me. It was called
The Billy Crystal Comedy Hour
, so who do you blame if it flops?

My brother Rip, who knew me better than anyone, was a writer on the show, and he made a great suggestion. Every time Latin actor Fernando Lamas appeared on
The Tonight Show
with Johnny, he made me laugh. His charming attitude was infectious, and I had started to imitate him. I would call friends on the phone impersonating Fernando. David Steinberg—not the comic, but a very funny man himself—was now working with Buddy as my manager, and when I’d call his office as Fernando, he’d improvise with me. “Fernando, how is Esther?” he’d ask, referring to Esther Williams, Fernando’s wife. “Dahling, she looks mahvelous,” I’d say, and for some reason we’d just crack up. No matter who David brought up, when he asked how they were, Fernando would reply that they looked mahvelous. Then David asked Fernando how he felt, and Nando replied, “It doesn’t matter, because it’s more important to look good than to feel good.” Like a prehistoric kind of tweeting, it caught on virally, and soon people were calling the house asking to talk to Fernando.

In the office as we were creating the show, I was doing Fernando all the time, so Rip’s idea was to run a skit called “Fernando’s Hideaway,” where I would play a Latin-lover talk-show host and interview our guests. The piece would be improvised, so the guests would have no idea what questions I would ask them. I wasn’t sure myself, and I loved the spontaneity and danger of it. My Fernando wasn’t as smart as Mr. Lamas. In fact he was a tad dim-witted and incredibly unprepared. Morgan Fairchild and Robert Urich were the first ever guests in the Hideaway, and Morgan was the first person I told, “You look mahvelous.” I could feel the audience reaction to Fernando. They laughed every time I said, “You look mahvelous.” The first two shows were a little rough, but they were helped by guests like Robin Williams, John Candy, Rick Moranis, and Dave Thomas and musical guests like Manhattan Transfer and Smokey Robinson.

After we taped the first two shows, Rock Hudson had a heart attack and, sadly, couldn’t continue on his new series. Since we already had two shows in the can, NBC threw us on the air, with only two weeks of promotion. People mostly knew me as Jodie, not as an all-around performer, and there wasn’t enough time to market the show properly. The time slot could not have been worse—we were up against
Fantasy Island,
which followed
Love Boat
, two huge hits at ABC. France had a better chance against Germany. Reviews were good, but our ratings for the first two airings, as predicted, were weak. It was a terrible situation, because although the show was slowly finding itself, the audience wasn’t finding the show.

I arrived at my NBC production office to tape our fifth show feeling like we were starting to get better. Our material for that night was very funny, which boosted my confidence. But everyone looked down when I walked in. Earlier that day, I’d received phone messages from friends calling to see if I was all right. I didn’t think anything of it, other than that my pals knew how tired and stressed I was. Then Buddy came in and told me that we’d been canceled after only two shows had aired. He handed me the trade papers and the
New York Times
and this was the toughest blow of all. Everyone had known but me. Just two shows? A show like this needed time to gain momentum. I wasn’t even told directly that we were canceled? I felt as low as I ever had.

My mom had taught me never to give up, and Janice wouldn’t let me feel bad about myself. It was very hard, but slowly I regrouped. I went back on the road and started writing new material. I would go to the Improv and work tirelessly until I had new pieces. Little by little, performing took some of the sting away. The imaginary whispers—“His show was canceled, he’s finished”—when I walked into a restaurant started to fade away.

I then got a dream job, opening for Sammy Davis Jr. at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe for one month. We had met briefly once a few years before, but this was to be twenty-eight nights with the greatest entertainer I had ever seen. He was also a fascinating man and an incredible storyteller. “One night I’m smoking weed with Gary Cooper,” he’d say, and you knew you were in for a good one. I would get to my dressing room two hours early just so I could hang out with him. Along with Ali and Mantle, I idolized Sammy because he could seemingly do anything. I also started to realize something: I could be him.

When you spend as much time as I did with Sammy, you can’t help but talk like him. I got to study his cadence, his vocabulary, his intonations, his different laughs, how he walked, and how he sang, and privately I started to do him.

Opening night, I did a strong set and Sammy followed me out on stage and told the audience a great story of how I had visited him in the hospital and helped get him well. The audience gave me a huge round of applause.

Wonderful story, except it had never happened. Next show, a different story with the same theme: Billy is a great guy and we’re the best of friends. I went to the soundman, who had tears in his eyes. “Nice thing you did for Sam,” he said, and after humbly thanking him, I asked him to tape Sammy’s openings for me. I have twenty-five stories that Sammy told; none are the same, and all are about all the wonderful things we did together, which we never actually did. It was fantastic. I didn’t mind at all; in fact, I looked forward to it every night because he just kept making me look better and better. It was show business to Sammy—that’s it, and that’s all.

I watched Sammy perform every night. He was electric onstage. Everything you’ve read or heard was true, except that being up close to the genius of it was like getting to look at a precious stone in perfect light. His energy, his love for performing, and his respect for the audience were simply astonishing. On our closing night, I had just started my act when I heard Sammy laughing in the wings. He never watched my show until the last moment, and then he followed me out onstage. I looked over and there he was, laughing so hard he was stomping his foot, and pointing at something on the stage. Sammy used a teleprompter so he could follow the lyrics of new songs. It was hidden in a speaker so the audience couldn’t see it. It was also a video monitor, and that night, courtesy of Sammy, there on the screen was a porno film. For a full half hour that graphic film played while I did my act and Sammy laughed. I had to think of my grandmother to keep God from stiffening me again. Working with Sammy was like getting to be friends with Mickey, a dream come true.

*   *   *

Soon after that, Rob Reiner asked me to play a small part in a “rockumentary” he was making called
This Is Spinal Tap,
the hilarious fictional documentary about England’s “loudest band.” Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer brilliantly improvised the entire film and wrote and performed all the songs. My scene involved a promotional party thrown by Spinal Tap’s record company. I was the boss of the catering company, called Shut Up and Eat. We were all in whiteface mime makeup, and I engaged in a heated discussion with one of my inexperienced waiters (Dana Carvey); “Mime is money” was my big line. The movie, now a classic, launched Rob as a major director. After that, I did my second HBO stand-up special, called
A Comic’s Line,
which attracted the attention of Dick Ebersol, who was now the producer of
Saturday Night Live.
In March 1984, Dick booked me to host
SNL.
It was nine years after I had been bumped.

I loved every second of that week. Walking into 30 Rock again and working with the cast in that studio was exhilarating. The show went well, and Dick asked me to host again later that season. That summer Dick called with a proposition: if he could get Martin Short and Christopher Guest to be regulars on the show, would I consider joining the cast, which also featured Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jim Belushi? I knew instantly that I should do it. I was now thirty-six years old, I wasn’t getting any movie offers, and being on the road and playing Vegas wasn’t the career—or the life—I had wanted. Janice and I talked about it with the girls, and we all moved to New York for the adventure that would be my year at
SNL.

The girls were eleven and seven, and the time in New York gave them the little “edge” that was missing from their California lifestyle. They experienced what it’s like to live in the greatest city in the world. They were able to be around our family, and they got to watch winter turn into spring. We took them to museums and shows, the Bronx Zoo, Yankee Stadium, Radio City Music Hall. We showed them the places we’d gone to as kids, and we pointed out the statue of George M. Cohan.

Being home and doing the show reenergized me. Often I would walk from our apartment on Thirteenth Street to Forty-ninth Street, where 30 Rock is. The people, the noise, the smells, the chaos in the city gave me new ideas almost every day. The 30 Rock building itself is unique. An aura hits you when you walk into the lobby and carries you right up to Studio 8H,
SNL
’s home. The Yankee Stadium of comedy.