I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (18 page)

The idea for the movie came from the speech that Tom Hanks gave when he won the Academy Award for best actor for
Philadelphia
. I’m not sure who keeps track of such statistics, but I’m pretty sure
In & Out
is the only full-length feature film based on an Oscar acceptance speech. That just goes to show you how good a public speaker Hanks is—or more like how much practice he’s had accepting acting trophies.

In the speech, Hanks paid tribute to his real life high school acting teacher, who was already out of the closet. But that got the satirists thinking: What if a movie star outed his teacher before the proverbial billion people watching the Oscars? That could certainly prove problematic for the entire school, particularly the principal.

This was much harder than playing the principal in those John Hughes films whose toughest job is dealing with the angst of pimple-faced kids. In
In & Out
, there was a teacher who was about to be married who was gay. He had been outed on national TV by his prized acting student, and the straightlaced school was under siege from tabloid reporters.

When director Frank Oz called to offer me the role of the principal, he was selling me all the way. “I really want you for this role. I’m not going to tell you it’s funny, you know it’s funny,” he said.

I wanted to work on the movie because I immensely admired Frank and his films like
Little Shop of Horrors
and
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,
as well as Kevin Kline, who had already committed to play the teacher. But I had a dilemma. My granddaughter had just been born, and she was coming to visit me in Los Angeles at the same time the movie would be shooting in New York.

“Frank, I have a problem,” I told him. “My granddaughter is coming down from San Francisco, so I have the choice of either waking up in the morning and seeing your face, or waking up in the morning and seeing my granddaughter’s face. It’s no reflection on you, but I’d rather see my granddaughter’s face than yours.”

Not only did Frank make the schedule and have me home in time for my granddaughter’s arrival, he did it in spite of the fact that I had come down with the flu and missed a week of shooting. Maybe he was just tired of seeing my face every morning.

I also played the President of the United States in the movie
First Family
. I didn’t model President Manfred Link on any particular president. I borrowed traits from four different presidents: the use of power of Lyndon Johnson, the pettiness of Richard Nixon, the humanity of Gerald Ford, and the folksiness of Jimmy Carter.

Actually, President Link was the submarine commander promoted a few grades and then elected almost by chance. In fact, he became president through the back door. A week before the election, the favorite candidate was shot, so he stepped in to fill the slot on the ballot and was elected. Not surprisingly, he was unprepared for the task.

The movie took a weird turn along the way from script to screen. It was originally about nuclear energy falling into the wrong hands, but it ended up being about large vegetables that are tainted by radioactivity. I don’t think the audience was able to establish the connection between the large vegetables and a clear and present danger to society. Suffice it to say, this was not
Dr. Strangelove
, with the threat being the end of the world as we know it; that’s about as big as it gets.

So in the scheme of movie presidents, Michael Douglas in
The American President
and Kevin Kline in
Dave
would be considered two-termers like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. My President Link was more like William Henry Harrison, who got sick on inauguration day and died a month later.

On the other end of the power scale, I played an elf in the aptly titled comedy
Elf
. Actually, I was Papa Elf and Will Ferrell was my adopted son. You’d think this would be a badge of honor for my grandchildren, what with me playing a toymaker and all, but kids have no sense of irony.

For instance, they will be having Oreo cookies. You’ll tell them that they are going to turn into an Oreo if they eat another one, to which they defiantly respond: “No, I won’t. I could never turn into an Oreo cookie.”

Or I’ll explain to my granddaughter Taylor that she is nine and I’m seventy-five, which makes me eight times as old as her.

“Taylor, you will have to do all the birthdays you’ve had in your life eight times to be as old as Poppy,” I’ll say.

She’ll think for a minute and then say something like, “But I haven’t had my birthday this year, and I want a cookies ’n’ cream ice cream cake.”

So for my granddaughter Annabella, my playing a character is a tough concept to grasp. She can’t quite put it together.

“You are Bob Newhart,” she’ll say.

“Yes,” I tell her.

“But you’re also Poppy. …”

“Yes, I am.”

“And you’re an elf.”

Yep.

Now that I have mentioned two of my grandchildren, I need to mention the other five: Maddie, Caroline, William, Timothy, and Griffin.

CHAPTER TEN

Smoking and Drinking

For most of my life I was a chain-smoker. In nearly every photograph we have from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, I’m holding a cigarette. I always smoked onstage, as did many other performers in those days. I was so addicted that if I woke up at night to go to the bathroom, I’d light a cigarette to smoke on the walk.

Smoking is absurd, if you really think about. That was the premise of my routine “Introducing Tobacco to Civilization.” In the routine, Sir Walter Raleigh calls the head of the West Indies Company in England from the colonies to tell him about a new find called “tobacco.”

The uses of tobacco are not obvious. Think about listening to someone try to explain tobacco who is not familiar with it:

It’s a kind of leaf … and you bought eighty tons of it! Let me get this straight. You bought eighty tons of leaves. … It isn’t that kind of leaf. What is it, a special food or something? … It has a lot of different uses. Like what? … Are you saying, “snuff?” What’s snuff? … That’s when you take a pinch of tobacco and shove it up your nose … and sometimes it makes you sneeze. I imagine it would! … It has some other uses. You can chew it, put it in a pipe, or shred it and roll it in a piece of paper. You stick the rolled paper between your lips and you light it on fire. … When it starts burning, you inhale the smoke! It seems you could get the same effect from standing in front of a fireplace.

Consider that this routine appears in the filings of the court record in the landmark tobacco industry litigation undertaken by the federal government against the tobacco companies—in two different places.

I starred in an antismoking movie called
Cold Turkey
, which was written and directed by Norman Lear of
All in the Family
fame. The premise of the 1971 movie was that a tobacco company would put up $25 million to any town that could quit smoking for an entire month.

Led by Reverend Brooks (played by Dick Van Dyke), the fictitious town of Eagle Rock, Iowa, populated with 4,006 heavy smokers, takes up the challenge. My job, as Merwin Wren, the PR man from the tobacco company, was to keep the town smoking, because we reasoned that it would be bad for business if an entire town could kick the habit. It was, as the movie’s tagline put it, “The battle of the butts.”

The message of the movie didn’t faze me a bit. I smoked during filming, and so did most of the people on location in Greenfield, Iowa—despite the fact that the city’s real town council had voted to ban smoking just before production began.

My realization about the evils of nicotine came one summer day in 1985 when I developed a nosebleed that just wouldn’t stop. Of course, Ginnie did what every wife would do under the circumstances: She called her gynecologist. Actually, he was a close friend of ours, Maurie Lazarus, and he told us to go immediately to the nearest hospital.

We were at our house in Malibu with the girls, Jennifer, who was fourteen, and Courtney, who was eight. So after Ginnie had arranged for my manager, Arthur, and his wife, Patty, to watch the girls, we were off in an ambulance to St. John’s in Santa Monica.

It turned out I had a condition called polycythemia secondary. It’s like the reverse of leukemia. Due to excess nicotine in my bloodstream, my body was overproducing red blood cells, thereby causing the uncontrollable nosebleed. The doctor explained that if I had not reached the hospital as quickly as I did, I could have died.

Before I was out of intensive care, the tabloids had gotten hold of the story and were bombarding MTM and my home with phone calls. The PR man from MTM, Larry Bloustein, fielded one call from a tabloid reporter. Larry assured the reporter that I was fine and had a severe nosebleed and was just taking some time off. The reporter stopped him in midsentence with a chilling revelation.

“Larry,” he said. “I have a copy of Bob’s hospital records right in front of me and it states that he has polycythemia secondary.” Which, of course, was true. But, thankfully, the secondary type is nowhere near as severe as primary polycythemia.

Obviously, I had to stop smoking. Not being able to quit cold turkey, I started using one of those kits that lets you down easy with nicotine patches. With the patch glued behind my ear, I would buy a pack of cigarettes and dump half the pack into the trash. A few weeks later, I increased my dumping to three-quarters of the pack. Once I got down to four cigarettes a day, I reasoned that there wasn’t much difference between four cigarettes and none.

So I’ve stopped smoking, but I still drink. And I’m a pretty good drunk, too. I mean, I
play
a pretty good drunk.

I am three-quarters Irish and one-quarter German, which makes me a very meticulous drunk. My father’s side was half Irish, half German, my mother is full Irish. Come to think of it, I don’t know of any German comedians. Most Germans don’t have a sense of humor. They are very literal. Someone once said that more funny things are said at a cocktail party in Paris than in an entire year in Germany.

I’ve found that the interesting thing about a drunk is that the drunk thinks that he is the only one who knows he’s drunk. He thinks he’s really putting it over on the other people and that they are not aware that he’s bombed. To him, there is no reason to suspect that he has had five martinis even though he might h-h-h-have tr-tr-tr-ouble en-n-n-n-nunciating.

Of course, you realize that you have been overserved when you wake up with a hangover. Here’s a guy from a routine I wrote who has the daddy of all hangovers. When he comes downstairs the following morning, his seven-year-old son is playing with his toys.

Rob, don’t play with the dump truck, just leave the dump truck alone. … Don’t play with the vroom toy, just leave the vroom toy alone. Daddy doesn’t feel well. Daddy has a cold, Robert. … Another cold. Yes, I know … I know Daddy had a cold last weekend. Grownups get weekend colds. … You get a cold from going from a warm place into a cold place and from a cold place to a warm place … and from booze, yes. Who told you you could get it from booze? That’s where Mommy said Daddy’s colds come from? Have Mommy come in—and don’t slam the door.

His wife walks into the room.

Hi dear. … I feel fine. I know I was drinking last night. I’m just sitting here watching television. … Picture tube’s been out a week, huh? God, I thought I was going blind. … Yes, yes, I know I have your dress on, dear. You don’t have to tell me. … That’s why the milkman waved at me this morning. It didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense at the time. … What does Fred want for breakfast? Who the hell is Fred?. … My old army buddy. I insisted he stay with us last night. Honey, I was never in the army. How the hell could I have an old army buddy named Fred?

Then they talk about his schedule for the day.

I thought I’d sit here for a while and then maybe in a couple hours I thought I’d try to make it to that chair over there. If that goes well, I thought I would try to stand up tomorrow.

I’ll never forget when I experienced the daddy of all hangovers while filming
Catch-22
. As I mentioned earlier, we were shooting in a small pueblo in Mexico called Guaymas. To reach Guaymas, you fly from Los Angeles to Tucson, Arizona, change planes to Hermosillo, Mexico, and then drive two hours to Guaymas.

As if the isolated location wasn’t enough to make us hit the cantina, Mike Nichols had called all of us together at the beginning of filming and explained our collective roles in the film. The cast was an eclectic mix: Orson Welles, Martin Balsam, Art Garfunkel, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, Norman Fell, Richard Benjamin, and Bob Balaban. Mike informed us, “You people don’t exist. You are purely figments of Captain Yossarian’s imagination.”

By his actions, Orson seemed to disagree. He kept trying to direct Mike. After a take of a scene, Welles would turn to Mike and say, “There’s your cut, Mike.” Mike would reply, “Thank you, Orson, but I’m going to make a cut somewhere else.”

Mike saw us as the Greek chorus whose purpose was to underscore the catch-22: You can’t get out because you don’t want to fly, and only insane people would fly under these conditions, so, therefore, you are not insane as long as you want to get out. Which is how a lot of us felt about the reality of our situation.