I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (14 page)

To further complicate the situation, I had an interview scheduled the following morning with a reporter from a local newspaper. Rather than cancel, I had him ride along. It worked out fine. He sat up front next to me in the captain’s chair and shouted his questions over the whooshing sound created by the hole in the roof, and I shouted my answers back.

The Winnebago trip from hell was punctuated by the smell of peanut butter. Every day at lunch, the kids asked for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. By the end of the trip, Ginnie would get sick to her stomach from the smell. She thought it was because she made the same sandwich every day for two weeks. But it turned out there was another passenger aboard: Ginnie was pregnant with our third child, Jennifer, although she didn’t know it.

When we arrived back in Los Angeles, I drove Ginnie straight to the doctor in the Winnebago. “You better be pregnant because that’s the only way to explain why we’ve been fighting so much … and why we’re still riding around in this RV.”

They say that a man could never have a child because he couldn’t endure the pain of childbirth. But there is still plenty for a man to do. When Ginnie went into labor with our firstborn, Rob, it was around six o’clock in the morning. I was fast asleep.

The sound of a suitcase zipping and unzipping woke me, and Ginnie informed me that it was time to go to the hospital. My immediate reaction was to panic, but having read all these books about what to expect when you’re expecting, I knew that I had to remain calm.

“Have you been timing the contractions?” I asked.

“They’re five minutes apart,” she replied.

One of the library of books I read said that meant we were six hours away from birth. I began to calculate: We are forty-five minutes from the hospital. That’s another thing you discover: Every self-respecting obstetrician has his office an hour from the hospital and an hour from your home. This is for the father’s benefit so he can go crazy, because from the moment his wife gets pregnant, he has constant visions of not making it to the hospital fast enough and having to deliver the baby in the front seat of the car.

Calmly, I told Ginnie to finish packing. Just an FYI: You never use anything in the suitcase. The books tell you to pack a suitcase, but that’s just to give the wife something to do while the husband is getting dressed. The minute you arrive at the hospital, they take the suitcase and shove it off in a corner.

Next, I went into the bathroom, shaved, and put Band-Aids on my face. Ginnie was packed, and I was finally ready.

“Aren’t you going to call the doctor?” she asked.

“Of course, that’s a very good idea,” I said. “He should know about it. He should be there, or at least a representative of his.”

I went into the den, looked up his phone number, and called him. When he answered, I yelled,
“Baaaaby!”
and then hung up.

We went downstairs and got in the car. Everything was going smoothly on the drive, except for the three cars in front of us that were driving so slowly I thought they were practicing for a parade. About halfway to the hospital, Ginnie checked to see if I had called the doctor.

“Yes, honey, I did,” I assured her. “Dr. Miller will be there in about an hour.”

“Dr. Miller is my dentist. What the hell did you call my dentist for?”

“Well … doctors talk to other doctors. He’ll figure out what to do. Besides, if a cab driver can deliver a baby, then I’m sure a dentist can, too.”

When we reached the hospital, Ginnie’s contractions were three minutes apart. At this point, you think your troubles should pretty much be over because there are doctors and nurses everywhere.
Wishful
thinking. This is where your troubles begin.

The hospital we went to is strange because they have a parking lot where you have to insert a quarter into a small slot to open the gate. They don’t operate on the honor system. Apparently, they think you are going to drop off your wife and take off to Acapulco. Let me tell you, it’s not the easiest thing to hit that small opening with a quarter when you’re doing 20 m.p.h.

Without incident, we reached the admitting office and Ginnie sat down. The person behind the desk asked my name.

“Mr. Newhart.”

“All right, Mr. Newkirk, is this your wife?” she asked.

“No, she’s a hitchhiker. She was hitchhiking and she looked pregnant so I picked her up and dropped her off here because it’s right on my way to work.”

“I see. Well, we have to have the husband here to sign the papers.”

“I
am
the husband,” I interjected. “That was just a little attempt at humor.”

She wasn’t amused. “Okay, Mr. Newkirk,” she said slowly. “Do you have Blue Cross or any other insurance plan?”

I was growing more antsy by the moment knowing Ginnie’s contractions were coming faster. “Could I possibly answer the questions
after
you take my wife upstairs?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” she said. “We need your wife to sign the admission form after you answer all of the necessary questions.”

“Well, if you wait about fifteen minutes, all three of us can sign the form.”

Upon hearing this, she panicked. As it turned out, she was a desk clerk and not a nurse and therefore would not have known what to do if the baby popped out in the lobby. She helped Ginnie into the elevator, and we headed upstairs to the delivery rooms.

They had two wonderfully titled rooms. One was called the “labor room” and the other one was the “hard-labor room,” where presumably the woman giving birth could scream her head off. Ginnie chose the hard-labor room, and I was told to wait.

If you are an expectant father, finding out any information from hospital personnel is next to impossible. The expectant father is the lowest form of life. Even maintenance workers will have nothing to do with you. There are people running around with various pans of one kind or another and worried looks on their faces. I’m not even sure they are nurses. They’re just people hired to run around looking worried because this makes the expectant father feel like everything is under control.

These days, the father stands at the mother’s side and feeds her ice chips. Back then in the sixties, fathers waited in the fathers’ room. It’s sort of a torture chamber they devised to drive the fathers nuts while their wives are having the babies. There was one guy in there whose wife had already given birth so he was superior to everyone else. He was chewing on a cigar and gloating. I decided to try to get some information out of him.

“They just took my wife in to the hard-labor room,” I mentioned. “What’ll it be, fifteen, twenty minutes?”

“Oh, no, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “More like five, six, maybe even seven hours. You see that poor guy over there who is humming and not making any sense? Thirty-two hours he’s been here.”

Thankfully, everything went smoothly. I had only been waiting four hours when the nurse walked in and gave me the good news.

“It’s a boy,” she said. “Congratulations, Mr. Newkirk.”

Marriage and fatherhood heighten the disillusion that we all think we are born handy. We confidently believe that we can fix things around the house, as if it’s part of the collective male brain that was further enhanced by eighth-grade shop class.

Well, it’s not, and being pigheaded about it can become expensive.

One Saturday morning over breakfast, Ginnie instructed me to call a carpenter because we needed to replace a swinging door leading from the garage out to the backyard area.

“I can do that,” I assured her.

“Do you know how to hang a door?” she asked.

“It’s a door,” I said, brushing her off. “What’s so hard about hanging a door?”

I was sure that I was equal to the task because I had once had a summer job in a woodworking plant. The company made faux-cedar chests. They would take a chest made of pine or another cheap wood and then wrap it in sheets of glue and press thin layers of cedar on the chest. It turned out, I was a superstar at this.

On my first day on the job, one of the foremen assigned me to the glue machine.

“Let’s take a standard order, which is ten twelve-inch pieces of glue,” he said. “I’m going to take this chalk and then I am going to mark twelve inches. I am going to roll out the glue until it reaches twelve inches, and then I am going to use this little razor on top to cut it.” He paused to allow all of this to sink in. “How many more pieces of glue would we need to fill this order?”

“Nine,” I said.

“Have you worked this machine before?”

I assured him that I hadn’t.

“All right,” he said. “Let me give you another one. This is eight inches. What are we going to do with the chalk?”

“Put a mark at eight inches.”

“Okay, the order calls for nine glue sheets. You’ve done the one. How many more are you going to do?”

“Eight.”

“You’ve worked this machine before, haven’t you?” he asked in amazement.

Notwithstanding my apprenticeship in the mock-cedar-chest business, it turns out that hanging a door is one of the most difficult things you can do.

I drove to the hardware store to buy the supplies. I began to feel a tad intimidated just waiting to be helped. Standing in line with me were professional workmen. You can spot these guys instantly because their hands are covered in bandages from cutting themselves up, and their arms are scraped from falling off a roof or two. When it was my turn, I asked the salesman for a door.

“You want a hollow door or a solid door?” he asked.

“Uh … solid door,” I said, reasoning that it would be stronger.

By the way, you don’t want a solid door for a swinging door. A solid door weighs fifty pounds and a hollow door weighs five pounds, creating the need for two people to hold the door while a third person attaches the hinges.

The salesman scribbled on a piece of paper. “What are you going into?” he asked.

“What?”

“What is the house made of? Cement? Stucco? Wood?”

“It’s stucco,” I guessed. “And I’m going to need some screws.”

“What do you want? Half inch? Three-quarter inch? Inch-and-a-quarter?”

I guessed again. “Inch-and-a-quarter.”

“Are you going to shield them?”

“Am I going to shield what?”

“The screws.”

“Yeah, of course. I wouldn’t put screws into stucco without shielding them.”

After buying all the necessary saws, planes, and levels, I headed home with my solid door, inch-and-a-quarter screws, and shields for the screws. I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging the door. When I finished, my back ached. My arms felt like soggy noodles. And the door had a gaping space at the bottom from where I had sawed too much off.

The following day I called a carpenter. By this point, I was in for three times the cost, with a garage full of tools and an unusable door.

When we moved into our second house, I called in the pros. This, however, comes with a whole different set of problems. For starters, you have to speak their language or you can’t get anything done. Contractors have a particularly complicated jargon.

We wanted to install a fireplace in our den, so I pointed to a corner where I thought it would fit nicely.

“That’s a bearing wall, you know,” the contractor said.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot. We can’t have a fireplace on a bearing wall.” I nodded. “Maybe we could warm up the feeling of the room by putting in some lights and crown molding.”

“Nope, you’ll be going into a soffit.”

Years later, I did complete one house project that I was proud of because it utilized my skills as a comedian. I noticed that all the houses in the neighborhood had signs to ward off prowlers: “Caution: Attack Dog” or “Armed Guard on Duty.” I drove down to the hardware store and ordered a warning sign that read “Armed Dog.”

People were so conditioned to the other signs, no one ever said a word about mine.

CHAPTER EIGHT

They Should’ve Pulled
My Psychologist’s License

My father did finally notice me when I became successful. Around 1978,
The Bob Newhart Show
went into syndication. My sisters used to tell me that my dad would call around to the local stations and ask them why they weren’t running his son’s show. When I returned to Chicago to shoot a commercial promoting the show, I arranged for him to be in the spot with me. That’s what it took to get his attention, but that’s not why I did the show.

By the time I had my third child, I was somewhat financially stable, but I was also traveling more than I liked. As the kids grew older, it was hard for them to travel because of school, friends, and activities. Sitting alone in hotel room after hotel room, I often thought about cutting down on my days on the road.

The salvation came in 1971 when my manager, Arthur Price, asked me if I would like to do a TV show. Absolutely, I told him. A TV series would be steady work, and it would get me off the road and allow me to be home nights and weekends like nine-to-five working parents.

After leaving the talent management firm Bernard, Williams and Price, Artie cofounded the TV production company MTM Enterprises with Mary Tyler Moore and her husband, Grant Tinker. He also continued to manage Mary and me. At the time, MTM had the hot hand in town in TV with
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, and CBS wanted another show from MTM.