I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (22 page)

It was 1972, and I was about to begin
The Bob Newhart Show
. Fred and I got to talking about his work schedule on
My Three Sons.
It was very lax. The show was in production for nine months, but Fred had a provision in his contract that he would tape all his scenes in three consecutive months.

Out of the blue, Fred volunteered to me that he was feeling guilty because he had worked only eighty days last year and had made $800,000 (which is like $40,000 a day in today’s dollars). That stuck with me.

Several weeks later, my father-in-law, Bill Quinn, was doing a guest spot on Fred’s show. They were sitting together, waiting for a scene to begin. Fred told Bill that Sunday had been a rough day because plumbing problems forced him to call a plumber.

“Do you know what plumbers get on Sunday?” Fred asked. “Forty-five dollars an hour.” Fred paused. “Bill, you and I are in the wrong business.”

There have been two great moments in golf for me. The first happened on the thirteenth hole at Bel-Air, which is a par three. I teed off and hit my first ball out of bounds, which is a two-shot penalty, and I put the next shot in the cup. It’s the only time I ever hit the ball off the tee and into the hole. A perfect hole-in-three.

Undoubtedly, the highlight of my golf career was playing a round with Jack Nicklaus in a Pro-Am in Palm Springs. We teed off, and I hit my regular 200-yard drive, followed by my second shot. Jack got up and he hooked his ball in the woods. He was stymied, so on his second shot, he had to play it out 90 degrees. His ball ended up five yards behind mine.

Jack and I were both laying two, so I turned to him and said, “You’re away, Jack,” meaning that he would hit before me because he was farther from the hole. How often do you get to say that?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Famous People I’ve Met
(Including Don Rickles)

It happens to some of us: we are mistaken for someone famous. For me, it’s Paul Newman. Sort of.

When people suddenly come upon me, they will occasionally blurt out, “Oh, Mr. Newman.” They know it’s Newsomething, so they soon pause and correct themselves. “Oh, I mean Mr. Newhart.” I have attempted to use this to convince my wife that people think I look like Paul Newman. Her reply is always, “You don’t bear the slightest resemblance to Paul Newman.”

Some years ago, Ginnie and I were at Disneyland with our kids, Rob, Jennifer, and Courtney, and the Rickleses and their children, Mindy and Larry. As we were walking through the park, I turned to Ginnie and said, “Oh, great. People think I’m Paul Newman.”

Ginnie shook her head. “Would you please cut that out?” she said. “You don’t resemble him in any way. Now watch the kids, because I have to use the ladies’ room.”

When she was in the ladies’ room, a young man came up to me. “Mr. Newhart,” he said, “I love your show. Would you mind signing an autograph?”

“I’d be glad to,” I replied. “But would you do me a favor? Just stand over by that bench, and when a redheaded woman comes out of the ladies’ room, walk up to me and say, ‘Mr. Newman, I loved you in
Hud
. Would you please sign an autograph?’ ”

On cue, as Ginnie walked out of the ladies’ room, he ran over to me and did as I asked. Upon hearing the kid address me as Mr. Newman, and mention his affection for
Hud
, a puzzled look came across Ginnie’s face. As we walked away, she kept shooting me glances of “I don’t see the resemblance …”

Of course, after a forty-five-year career and more than fifteen seasons on network television, people do occasionally recognize me. The men think I’m an old army buddy and the women think I’m their first husband. Buck Henry once said that I’m the guy who has been at everybody’s Thanksgiving dinner table.

Sometimes people will come up to me and say, “Wow, you sure look like Bob Newhart, but I guess you’ve been told that.” My reply, “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before, fella.” At that point, they usually put the voice and the face together.

I guess I just don’t have that grabbing, leadingman look. I’m shorter than people think I am. I’m not actually any shorter than I am, but I am shorter than people think I am. If you must know, my hairline started receding when I was fifteen. It was probably from all the stress of watching my hair thin during the two preceding years.

The writers of my shows have used my lack of movie star looks for humor. In one episode of
The Bob Newhart Show
, Emily’s dashingly handsome, wildly egotistical tennis pro laments to Bob, “You have no idea of the problems that we incredibly handsome people have to face.” Bob ponders this, sighs, and says, “No, I suppose not.”

Different writers, same joke a decade later on
Newhart
. The beautiful Julia Duffy says to me, “Frankly, being attractive can be a real burden. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

Or as Emily herself put it, “Bob, what I’m trying to say is that I just never went for those good-looking guys. That’s why I married you.”

But I did fight back in another episode when I told Emily, “This may come as a shock to you, but in high school, I was considered great looking.”

Her response: “You’re kidding!”

“I think it was my hair. I had great hair. I was the first kid in school to have a flattop with a ducktail.”

Before I went on television, I was often mistaken for a guy named Fred Neff, whom I’ve never met. People would drive by as I walked down the sidewalk and yell, “Yo, Fred, how are you? Why don’t you give a call sometime.” I would run alongside the car yelling, “I’m not Fred! I’m not Fred!”

Most of us have a double somewhere because there are only so many nose sizes, eyebrow thicknesses, and hairstyles to go around.

It’s not a big problem to be mistaken for Paul Newman. It’s strange being mistaken for Fred Neff, but that’s not a problem, either. At least I don’t get mistaken for Adolf Hitler.

Imagine the poor guy with a little mustache and a piece of hair falling in his face who does look like Hitler. Every time he gets on a plane, he knows he is going to get mistaken for Hitler. Inevitably, the seatmate will grow incredibly nervous. He’ll greet the guy with “
Heil
…I mean hi …” He’ll tell the Hitler look-alike he was just in St. Louis, seeing his buddies from World War II, but then he’ll nervously backtrack. “We were all conscientious objectors. We didn’t care who won. We didn’t really follow the war all that closely.”

If Dean Martin were alive, he would be laughing uncontrollably at the section you just read. I appeared on Dean’s show twenty-four times, and he was the easiest person in the world to make laugh. Dean just liked to have a good time.

Dean never rehearsed. In fact, Dean didn’t come into the studio all week. He only showed up on Sunday to do the show. The story went that NBC asked Dean to star in a variety show. In order to kill the idea without being too crass, Dean said yes, but that he would only come in one day a week. Instead of telling him that was impossible, the network agreed. So Dean would play an early round of golf and then appear around 1:00
P.M
. on Sundays to do his show, because his feeling was that he wasn’t going to blow an entire day doing television.

The guests rehearsed with his producer, Greg Garrison. Dean would sit in his dressing room, where he had a monitor showing the rehearsals. Sometimes he’d watch, other times he’d get caught up in a conversation about golf with the writers. Having not seen the rehearsals, he often had no idea where the routines were going, but he liked working without a net.

Once Dean played a store clerk and I played a man who was returning a very intimate gift from his wife, a toupee. From the moment I asked for a private room to discuss the return, Dean began smirking.

“Is it underwear?” he asked.

“No, it isn’t underwear. My wife bought me a toupee for our anniversary, and I’d like to return it.”

“Well, do you have it with you, sir?”

I furrowed my brow and pointed my eyes upward. “Under the hat …”

“What model is it, sir?”

“I don’t know what model it is. … It’s the crew cut with the widow’s peak.”

“Oh, our Mr. Wonderful model.”

Dean was trying to stay in character, but I knew he wouldn’t make it. He was desperately trying to hold back his laughter, but at this point it was becoming contagious. The entire routine was in danger of imploding. But I pressed on, which was like feeding minnows to a hungry shark.

I explained that I wanted to return the toupee because people were laughing at me because they knew it wasn’t my real hair. “You see, we went to this party, and I bent down trying to put cheese dip onto a cracker and the toupee fell into the cheese dip. … Everybody stopped having cheese dip.”

Dean was laughing so hard, tears formed in his eyes.

“It may be a laughing matter to you, sir, but it’s not to me,” I deadpanned. “The hostess started crying … and we spent about two hours trying to fish it out of the cheese dip. Anyway, I took it home and put it in our washer-dryer. … We have one of those with the window, you know. … Here’s another problem. … The kids like to sit and watch it when it sticks to the glass so they’re mad that I’m returning it.”

“Would you like a full exchange?” Dean managed to spit out.

“I’d like a straight man who didn’t laugh.”

That one was pretty funny, but Dean also loved a gag I did that was as dry as beef jerky. Greg came to me and said that they needed a short bit to kick off a show, so I wrote a routine about a plate spinner.

On the air, I explained to Dean that I was from Eastern Europe and that I was a plate spinner in the circus. In my routine, I could spin five plates on the top of two sticks and keep them going for half an hour.

Dean asked me if I could show him. I explained that no, I couldn’t because someone stole
“de plates on de plane and I only have sticks.”
He asked me if I could do it anyway. I told him,
“Yea, I do vitout de plates.”
So I launched into the plate spinning routine full-bore, intensely moving the sticks and pretending to juggle plates. It broke Dean up something fierce.

I met the Queen of England. It was 1964, and I was asked to come to London and give a command performance along with Lena Horne and Brenda Lee. My
Button-Down Mind
albums sold extremely well in London, owing to their reserved humor. When I told Ginnie about the invitation, the first thing she said was, “I have to buy a new dress.”

We were living in New York at that time because I was starring in
The Entertainers.
We went dress shopping, and Ginnie narrowed it down to two dresses. One was priced at $400 and the other was $750. She asked me which one I liked. I told her to go for the $750. “How many times do you get to meet the queen?” I reasoned.

We flew to London, but the airport was fogged in so we were diverted to Frankfurt. The entire way from London to Frankfurt I was thinking, a $750 dress and we may never get there. But the fog lifted and we eventually arrived in London.

I went to the theater for rehearsals. As the show’s producer, Lord Lew Grade, was giving out our stage directions, I asked him when my wife and I would meet the queen.

“Only you get to meet the queen,” Lord Grade informed me. “Spouses do not have an audience with her majesty.”

So I met the queen backstage before the show. She was predictably reserved and gracious, and she had cue cards telling her who each person was. Meanwhile, Ginnie sat in the audience next to my agent, wearing her $750 dress.

I’ve had the chance to rub elbows with several presidents, but no really funny stories came from those encounters. I met both Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan in the White House. I met Gerald Ford, neither at the White House nor on the golf course, and I met Bush 41 at a non-partisan meet-and-greet reception at producer Jerry Weintraub’s house. I had a photo op in the Oval Office with Bush 43 when I received the Mark Twain Prize.

I never met JFK, but I campaigned for him because he was Catholic. I’m not sure my priest ever came out and said as much, but everyone knew that unless you helped elect the first Catholic president you would go to hell.

I was also one of the entertainers at JFK’s infamous birthday party in June of 1962, the one where Marilyn Monroe sang her breathless version of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” I didn’t actually see that because I performed on closed-circuit TV. I did stay at the Carlyle, JFK’s favorite hotel. I didn’t, however, bump into him in the lobby.

During Reagan’s first term, I performed in the East Room of the White House for a bipartisan governors’ conference. Before the performance, Ginnie and I were greeted by Ronnie and Nancy. For about twenty minutes, Ronnie and I exchanged funny stories. A colonel on the White House staff told my road manager that it was very rare for the president to spend so much time talking to a guest. That colonel was Oliver North.

At the governors’ event, I performed “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue.” Halfway through the routine, it dawned on me that there were rumors of Lincoln’s ghost inhabiting the White House. I also threw in some nonpartisan political jokes, such as: “It’s eleven o’clock and you’re out of the state, do you know where your lieutenant governor is?”

In my stand-up act, I avoid political jokes. My feeling is that the late-night talk-show hosts will have done a similar joke even better. Also, with political humor in normal circumstances, you split the audience in half.