Still Talking (7 page)

Jackie once came into the Downstairs at the Upstairs with Mike Nichols. She parked a major sable in the coatroom-so before the show I went right in there and tried it on. I had never seen her more than ten inches tall in a magazine; for all I knew, she could have been that heightand here I was in living Technicolor wearing her perfect sable that came down below my fingers and dragged on the floor. Her gloves were in the pocket, a wonderful perfume was in the air. I was astonished. She was always underplaying, wearing those elegant little cloth jobbies. She could have come to temple with me in that coat.

The maitre d’, Archie Walker, seated her smack in the middle of row one.

Having her there in front of me was surreal. The whole audience pretended they didn’t notice her, but when she laughed, they laughed, when she did

not laugh, nobody laughed. For a long time I refused to look at her. Then, when I did, her eyes dropped. Jackie did not want to be the woman whom I asked, “Where are you from? Married or single? Let me see your ring. Boy, didn’t you do well.”

Talking with women in the front row was increasingly important in my act.

You can tell who is married by the amount of attention you’re getting. If a couple is married, you have their undivided attention. The unmarried couples have a hand on each other; there is something happening between them. I avoid the woman who is really pulled together; she’ll be too uptight to talk. I go for the woman with a corsage, because if she thinks it’s hot stuff to wear one, she’s already open. Sometimes a woman in the audience will call out to me-and I know she’s a friend. And when I have true rapport with one person, she becomes everybody in the audience.

Women in the audience tell me their intimate secrets, sometimes something devastating. One time I asked a married woman about her husband, “Do you think he cheats?” She said, “Yes.” And he’s sitting right there! Another woman said, “He beats me up.” I said, “Call the police. Get out of the house.” Her husband beside her had paid for the privilege of having a thousand people know he’s a wife-beater.

These women have jumped the fence between remembering it’s an act and being onstage. For them there is no performance and no stage and we’re just talking about things, girlfriend talk. Everybody wants to come in from the cold.

The Downstairs was the place where career began to be Edgar’s and my whole life. It was our league-small-time show business on a level we could understand and enjoy. We were not dealing then with millions of dollars and high-octane lawyers and their egos and chicanery. The whole career did not seem to ride on our decisions. My every move was not amplified in the press.

We felt as though the Downstairs was our club, and in it Edgar was Edgar.

People said, “Let me check that with

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Edgar.” He was the paterfamilias, a role he loved and tried to achieve on the Fox show, one of the roots of our troubles.

Since neither Edgar nor I had a lot of friends, we also came to the Downstairs to socialize. A duck finds other ducks. I was at home with the comedians and actors, the writers and musicians and makeup people and agents, the bookers and managers-with that whole backstage world. With them I knew who I was. They gave me a place. They welcomed me in. I did not have to prove myself.

Everybody loved the club and was proud to be there, felt tremendous camaraderie. Of course I operated best in this atmosphere of total love.

Almost every night, after the last show when the doors were locked and the waiters were changing into their civvies, a little group would gather at the bar-Edgar; Archie Walker, the maitre d’; Rod Warren, my friend from my struggle days who wrote the revues for the Upstairs. Others would join us-Lily Tomlin when she was performing revues at the Upstairs, Madeline Kahn.

My opening act was Barry Manilow. Barry played as I went onstage and offstage at the end. He was a gawkylooking, bright, very ambitious kid who had an attach case filled with songs and jingles he was working onalways writing and arranging, always coming and going to TV networks and advertising agencies, always hustling. We liked him a lot.

This inner circle was part of my addiction to show business. We all had youth, playfulness, daring, all felt we were on the way up, but living dangerously at the caprice of the public and therefore full of humor-because survivors laugh more. In show business we are all children.

Nobody says, “Your skirt’s too short for your age.”

We laughed a lot about the owner, Irving Haber, whom we tormented and adored. He was a man in his late fifties, short, paunchy, loud, crude, and blustering, always yelling at the help. “Don’t throw away the swizzle sticks. You can use them again. Bunch of fucking assheads. You know what swizzle sticks cost? Ten dollars a thousand.”

We laughed about the nights when hundreds of people

were in line outside to get in and people inside were virtually standing on each other’s shoulders and every door was locked-and the fire marshal would come in and accept an envelope from Irving and say, “It looks fine to me.”

We laughed about the illegal aliens in the kitchen and the steaks that were green with mold in the refrigerator, about the people who ordered steak and the chef refused to cook it, and Irving said, “Wait, wait, we can scrape them off.”

Irving was an immigrant boy who grew up with the attitude that you can be generous, but in business you count your pennies and get ahead of the other guy before he takes advantage of you. He had worked his way up, gone to night school to be a CPA, was very smart, and opened a lucrative chain of sleaze-bag restaurants called the Gypsy Tea Kettles, each with a big kettle over the door and a blowsy woman inside who read your tea leaves. He did not need the Upstairs; it was a labor of love.

My six years there were a giant game, like checkers, Irving against Edgar and me, each trying to outfox the other. It was fun to say, “We beat Irving. ” But sometimes he won, and he knew it was a game and enjoyed it too. Basically, if I filled the Downstairs at the Upstairs, I won. If I did not, then we had to do what he said. All the rest was silly, so we could play about it.

I was being paid by the head, and Archie would give us an honest count of customers in the room. If there were 110, then Irving would tell us there were 94. “Irving,” Edgar would say. “There are a hundred and ten.”

“A hundred and ten?” he’d answer, astonished. “I swear to God, ninety-four.

“

“Irving, come and count.”

“Jesus Christ, where did they come from?”

The bar was set off from the showroom behind a glass wall where those customers could not hear the show. Since I was paid by the head in the showroom, I did not collect for anybody in the bar. But Irving would go through the bar collecting an extra two bucks and snap on the loudspeaker.

I would stop the act and yell, “Irving, I’m not

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saying another word because I can see people laughing out there.”

Irving would say, “Jesus Christ! Who turned the sound on? We’ve got to put a tape over the switch.” We had such good times.

The other side of Irving was jolly and generous. He cared a lot about the kids who did the revues in the Upstairs. If he walked into a neighborhood restaurant and saw one of them eating, he would pick up the check. When their parents came to a show, he told them what wonderful kids they were raising. He had a house in Mahopac, New York, and each summer invited everybody up there for a day of softball and a cookout.

But this same man could not bear to pay these kids decent wages, though they were making him big bucks doing two and three shows a night. When he found out they were making sandwiches for themselves in the kitchen after the second show, he went crazy, screaming, “No sandwiches! If youse want to eat, go down the street to the coffee shop. ” But they found a way to win.

Lily Tomlin walked into the kitchen and said to the chef, “I am sleeping with Mr. Haber, and he said my friends can have all the sandwiches they want.”

For a long time Irving’s brother had a good thing going, making sandwiches in the kitchen and selling them at lunchtime on the sidewalk to workmen.

When Irving found out, he kept the club locked until 6:00 P.m., and he fired the Puerto Rican day man who took the phone reservations and installed an answering machine.

Edgar and I liked the day man, so we had friends telephone and leave a message perfectly timed so the tape ran out in the middle of the last sentence. Here is what Irving heard when he played back the machine.

“Downstairs at the Upstairs? This is Harry Schwartz. Next Tuesday night I’d like to bring a party of twenty to dinner and the show. Money is no object.

It’s a birthday party. Please call me back at 478-09 …” Click. Within two weeks the day man was back.

In our games with Irving, Edgar always held the trump card. The club was small enough to be a little kingdom,

and as long as I gave Irving the kingdom by pulling in the crowds, Edgar had a lot of power. He could say, “Joan won’t go on.” Twenty years later at Fox, when he went up against Barry Diller, Edgar still thought he had that power, could still play that ace. Irving Haber knew it was a game-Ha, ha, now you outsmarted me-Ha, ha, now I outsmarted you. With Barry Diller, it was, Now I kill you.

Just the fact that all of us pretend to be adults is silly. We are role-playing. Everyone is an actor. Irving Haber was playing Benevolent Dictator to the Kids and Mr. Pinchpenny out of Dickens. My role was Innocent Performer Who Knew Exactly What She Was Doing. Edgar was Show-Biz Dabbler and Adviser to the Semigreats. During my Fox show, Barry Diller played Head of Studio, so he had to be very strong and very firm and certainly no-nonsense.

Life is a game to see how far you can get on the board before the opponent catches you. That is the fun-matching wits but really liking each other. I basically left The Tonight Show because the game turned into an endurance contest. Fox was so devastating because there was no humor about business in Barry. To him business was a struggle to the death.

4

…

THANKS to the titanic power of television, I rose rapidly in show business.

I was a guest on The Tonight Show about once a month, and each time I was seen by millions of Americans. To get on the show, all I had to do was call up and say I was ready. Life in those early days was simple: write my jokes in the daytime, and try them out at night.

Unfortunately I cannot take a pencil and write jokes. I am entirely verbal.

I need to sit with somebody and bounce ideas back and forth. To do this, I hired Rodney Dangerfield, who was just beginning to be known. By that time Edgar and I had moved to an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and Rodney would arrive looking like such a zhlub, the doormen would stop him in the lobby.

Finally Rodney told them he was there to deliver seltzer. Then they let him in.

We sat in the den, Rodney at the typewriter, I on the couch, and we would start bantering on some topic-any topic. Maybe something as banal as tape recorders. Rodney might say, “He was telling me he loved me … ” And I would say, “Yeah, how about, the marriage was …” And Rodney might finish it with “… on Fast Forward.” I might think of Heidi Abromowitz-“Her tape recorder has only one speed on it: Fast Forward. “

Then Rodney could say, “Yeah, she’s such a tramp, her tape recorder has only one button-Fast Forward. ” I might rearrange it, “Yeah, she’s such a tramp, the only button on her tape recorder is Fast Forward. ” Not a great joke, but that’s how it works. You just let the mind go. It’s a mysterious, wonderful process.

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At that time jokes were more difficult than usual. My act is mainly complaining about my life, and in those New York years I was content. There was no humor in being happy and having a terrific husband. Can you imagine Roseanne Barr with nothing to complain a!-. - pit? I was no longer a single girl, so my jokes described marriage. I told audiences that I knew nothing about marriage when I went into it. On my wedding night, I had a nightgown with feet. I said that Edgar brought his ex-girlfriend over. She said, “I’ve heard all about you”-and presented me with The Joy of Sex. I went on, “I know nothing about sex. All my mother told me was that the man gets on top, the woman gets on the bottom. I bought bunk beds.”

People were shocked. I was breaking new comedy ground with talk about women’s intimate experiences and feelings, with jokes like, “I have no boobs. I went to nurse my daughter. She sucked on my shoulder. I moved her to the breast, and she lost four pounds. ” But compared to the standards of today, my act then was extremely mild.

When I listen to Andrew “Dice” Clay, I marvel that I ever thought Dick was a proper name and blow was what you did to balloons. Sam Kinison insults everybodyincluding AIDS sufferers and Kurds who were killed by parachuted food supplies. He says all old people should be put to death after eighty-five, and brought a crippled dwarf onstage to call Jerry Lewis a son of a bitch. He insults Christians. Kinison pounds on the floor and shouts Christ’s last words: “Ouch! Ouch!” He’s outrageous but brilliant.

But Kinison and Clay are not being new. The public is just more tolerant, more accepting. And every generation rediscovers the past. Comedy does not change. We just dress it up differently. Men and women, our bodies, does money matter or doesn’t it-I’m so ugly that … these themes are still universal themes. On my show I recently had a hot young performance artist talking about how it felt to be pregnant. Robin Williams talks about his wife being pregnant. 1 talk about being pregnant. In the forties, the joke might have been “My wife’s so fat that when she sits around the house, she sits around the house!” In the nineties it might be, “My wife’s so fat that you don’t walk

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with her, you walk among her!” Comedy addresses the daily problems we all face. So thirty years ago we laughed about the dishwasher. Today we laugh about the fax machine.