I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (23 page)

One exception: Al Gore’s secret service code name was…Al Gore.

When Jimmy Carter was president, I nearly met him. The Rickleses and my family had a VIP tour of the White House when Jimmy Carter was president. We didn’t actually go in the Oval Office, but we looked through the door. Carter’s sweater was there, but he wasn’t.

Don Rickles and I are best friends. I know that might seem strange to those who know Don only by reputation, but
somebody
has to be his friend. Just to make sure I don’t forget, Don gave me a doormat that sits just outside the front door of my house. It reads: “The Newharts: The Rickleses’ Best Friends.”

The beginning of my friendship with Don was a lesson in how a comedian’s act can differ from the real-life person.

It was the sixties, and both Don and I were playing Vegas. To be precise, I was in the main room at the Sands, and he was in the lounge at the Sahara. Status is one of the primary differences between the main room and the lounge. The main room is high status, the lounge lower status. I never let Don forget this.

Ginnie opened the local paper and discovered that Don was in town. She decided to call his wife, Barbara. Though she and Barbara had been friends in the past, they hadn’t been in touch for a few years. Ginnie reached her and made plans for us to have dinner with her and Don, and then to see Don’s last show, which was at 2:00
A.M
.

The four of us ate in the Sahara coffee shop, the only place there was back then. Over dinner, Don was telling us how much he hated being on the road all the time. He painted a bleak, sympathetic picture. Though he lived in Los Angeles, he was constantly in Vegas. Barbara couldn’t always make the trip to Vegas, so he was alone much of the time. He loved being a family man, but all the travel got in the way of spending quality time with his daughter, Mindy.

Later, as we were walking in to see Don’s third show, Ginnie said to me, “He is one of the sweetest men I have ever met. He is such a family man and his values are so solid.”

“Honey,” I cautioned her, “his act is a little different than the man you just met.”

We sat down, and soon Don walked onstage. When the applause died down, he opened his act with this: “Well, I see that the stammering idiot from Chicago is in the audience tonight with his hooker wife from Bayonne, New Jersey.”

In its heyday, Las Vegas was the place to perform. I played the Copa Room at the Sands, where the Rat Pack, Steve and Eydie, and Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin all appeared regularly. That was a great room, and it had what was called the “Burma Road,” which was an upper section that opened if the room was full. If the Burma Road was open—and it often was—the show was a sellout.

Tickets to sold-out shows were solid gold because there was still an intimacy. Capacity was 750, even with the Burma Road open; there were no 3,000-seat theaters like there are today. The high rollers always sat in the middle of the front section. You could tell who they were because during the show they would sit there sketching on the napkin and talking to themselves. “Let’s see, I can get $50,000 on a second mortgage …”

That was the Vegas I liked. You didn’t ask the club owners what they did before they got into the casino business. It was a much looser place. When the Rat Pack was in town, you could feel the energy in the air. Everybody was partying, every room was full, and you never knew who you were going to see.

Since then, Vegas’s identity has changed a few times. For a while, it became a family vacation destination, sort of a Disneyland with activities for grownups, like Celine Dion, Danny Gans, and Clint Holmes. But the hotels found the family thing didn’t work, so it’s now become “What happens here, stays here.” Personally, I don’t enjoy the corporateness of it. One of the more gut-wrenching sights I have ever seen in my life was the implosion of the Sands to make room for the Venetian.

In the sixties, through our good friends Moe and Lillyan Lewis, Ginnie and I became friends with Ed Sullivan and his wife, Sylvia. When I was appearing at the Frontier, Ed and Sylvia came to my first show one evening and I introduced them to the audience. After the show, I waited for them to come backstage. It was considered good form for a fellow entertainer to come backstage and tell you that they enjoyed the show, even if they didn’t.

Ginnie was with me backstage. We waited and waited, but they didn’t show up.

“Did you insult Ed?” she asked me.

“Why would I insult Ed Sullivan?” I said. “I didn’t insult him. I said some glowing, nice things about him.”

“But he didn’t come back.”

It was getting close to eleven and the next show was at midnight. I needed to eat between the shows, so I told Ginnie that we couldn’t wait any longer. As we were walking through the Frontier to the restaurant, we saw a group of thirty Japanese tourists. In the center was Ed Sullivan, signing autographs.

“So I make that out to … Nakoweamaso … and how would that be spelled? Naka … Nakua … Nakit … Nakowasowi. …”

As I said before, ever since I’ve known Don Rickles, I’ve taken to calling him Chauncey Gardiner after the character in
Being There
, or sometimes Rain Man, the character portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the film of the same name, because he’s so good at what he does and so bad at everything else. In a night club, he is absolutely in total control. In life, he is not.

Don would go to Toronto to play the Boom Boom Club and ask the bellhop how to get there. The bellhop would say, “It’s real easy. You go down three blocks and turn left. Then you go two blocks and you will pass the Paramount Theater. Then you turn right and walk two more blocks and it’s right there.”

“Okay,” Don would say. “I go down two blocks …”

“No … you go down three blocks …”

“…and turn right…”

“No…you turn left…”

“Let me see if I’ve got this. I go down …”

With that, the bellhop would volunteer to drive Don to the Boom Boom Club.

If Don can avoid doing something, he will. We were sitting around his den one day when he turned to a comedian named Bobby Ramson. “Bobby,” Don said, “you’re good at that. Would you open the window?”

Ginnie and I have traveled the world with Don and Barbara Rickles, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at the movies from our trips. Because Don didn’t know how to operate the video camera, I was always saddled with the job. Consequently, I was never in any of the pictures.

Finally, one year before we headed off to Milan, Barbara interceded. “Donald, you have to learn how to operate the camcorder,” she said. “It’s not fair that Bob isn’t in any of the videos. It’s like he wasn’t even on the trip with us.”

After hiring a guy to come over to his house and demonstrate how to use the camera, Don felt reasonably confident that he could shoot some video. On our first day outside of Milan, we walked to a small village. We happened upon a fountain and decided to videotape ourselves. I reached for the camera, but Barbara insisted that Don was ready. The three of us stood by the fountain, and Don videoed us. Everything seemed to go smoothly. The little red light came on, and we all smiled and waved.

I, for one, was pleasantly surprised. But then on the walk back to the hotel, a thought popped into my head: He didn’t turn off the camera. Nah, I told myself, don’t be silly. I decided to ask anyway.

“You turned off the camera, right?” I said to Don.

“What?”

“When you finished shooting, you turned off the camera, right Don?”

“Ah, damn it, Newhart,” he muttered.

And so to commemorate our trip, we have ten minutes of Don’s feet walking down a cobblestone street in Lake Como. In keeping with my perverse sense of humor, I play it as often as I can.

On another trip, the group voted to take a Mediterranean cruise. Actually, the vote was 3–0; I abstained because I wasn’t wild about being on a boat. The ship was nice, but it wasn’t very big and I didn’t know how I would handle the rough water. Nevertheless I was game.

In the planning stages, Ginnie informed me that there was only one penthouse. I told her we should flip for it. No, she said, Don really wants it. Fine, I told her, let him have it.

We boarded the ship and found our staterooms. Ginnie and I had a beautiful room, but it wasn’t half the size of the penthouse. But what Don didn’t realize was that the anchor was right next to his bedroom window. Every morning on the trip, we pulled into port at 6:00
A.M
., and he was awoken by the
clunk, clunk, clunk
of the anchor being lowered.

Don had been in the navy in World War II, and he told me that he was seasick every day. On his ship, they had what were called “running silences,” where the seamen were to man their battle stations with minimal noise. But every time they sounded the silent alarm, Don became incredibly nervous at the thought of being attacked by the Japanese. While running to his post as a gunner’s mate, he would drop his helmet and it would bounce down the stairs with a
clang, clang, clang
. The rebuke would come from the commanding officer: “Seaman Rickles, are you trying to warn the Japanese?”

With that naval experience under his belt, sailing on a luxury cruise liner was nothing for Don. The Rickleses had once been on a small cruise ship and experienced rough weather, so every time the ship tossed we would consult Don as to how bad the conditions were.

One evening, the ship hit choppy water with twenty-foot swells. Ginnie was having a terrible time getting ready for dinner. She looked liked a Picasso painting, with eyeliner going up her forehead on one side and down her cheek on the other. I went to the bar, where we planned to meet the Rickleses for a drink before dinner.

Ginnie kept calling Barbara and asking her to ask Don if the waves were as high as they had been on a ship they had taken to Russia—a very rocky crossing. Each time Don would say, “Oh, no. This isn’t rough at all. That was much rougher.” I knew the swells were at least twenty feet because the bartender told me that was the point at which you begin to feel the boat toss. Ginnie called one final time to tell Barbara she was ready and would meet them in the bar.

“We’ll meet you in the dining room,” Barbara said. “Don isn’t feeling all that well.”

The great sailor, Seaman Rickles. His shaky entrance into the dining room is one I’ll never forget. I only wish I had it on videotape.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

People I Wish I’d Known

In my lean years of comedy work, I once did a routine on television about a character named Telfer Mook. I made up the name, and I filed it away for further use with others such as Denut Crown, Willard Hackmeister, and Patrick M. Doyle, noted lecturer and author. A month later, I received an angry phone call from a man named Telfer Mook. He was a real person who demanded that I stop making fun of him.

I wouldn’t have minded meeting Telfer Mook. For starters, we could’ve talked about the origin of his first and last names. But he was too upset about being mocked on television to carry on much of a conversation. Truthfully, I wasn’t that distraught to have never met him. But there are a handful of people, famous and not, who I wish I met because I love their stories.

Two comedians I wish I’d met are Joe Frisco and Jimmy Edmundson.

Joe Frisco performed the “jazz dance,” which was also known as the Jewish Charleston, but he was best known for his stutter. No one ever knew if Joe really stuttered or if it was a comedy device. When people stutter, a lot of times the listener will try to finish the sentence, and get it wrong.

“I am ggggoingg to the bbbbb …”

“Burger King?”

“… aaaathroom.”

You’re never quite sure where it’s going, which is why stuttering works so well in comedy.

Joe used stuttering to great effect in his act, drawing out stories and punch lines. It was particularly convincing because he delivered it with a friendly, gap-toothed smile.

Joe always talked about being broke because he played the horses. Once he told a story about the time he was staying in some flophouse when he ran into a fellow comedian who didn’t have a room.

“You can stttttay with me bbbbut you’ve ggggot to come up the fffffire escape because they’ll chchcharge me double,” Joe says.

So the guy scales the fire escape and climbs through the window of Joe’s room. A few minutes later, the phone rings. The night clerk is calling to tell Joe he’s aware that someone is staying with him and that the hotel will have to charge the double-occupancy rate.

“Oooo-kay,” Joe says. “But ssssend uuup another GGGGideon Bible.”

Joe had a different outlook on the world than most people. One day, he was called in by the IRS because he owed them money.

The IRS officer tells Joe that he has to pay something. “Oooooo-kay,” Joe says. “I’ll pppppaay ffffive ddddollars a week.”

The agent agrees, and Joe leaves the office. In the lobby, he spots a friend of his and asks what the problem is. The guy tells Joe that he owes the government $3,000 in back taxes. Joe instructs the guy to follow him, and he walks back into the agent’s office. Pointing to his friend, Joe says, “Pupupuput him oooon myyyy tab.”

Jimmy Edmundson had a very different delivery. He was called Professor Backwards for his ability to instantly say words backward. Jimmy was very cheap. He had this code he worked up with his manager to find out where his next date was and how much money he was being paid. He would call person-to-person and ask for Mr. Swanson. His manager would say, “Mr. Swanson is not here.”