I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (24 page)

Jimmy would ask, “Do you know where I can reach him?”

“Yes, he’ll be at the Fontainebleau Hotel the fifth through the eighteenth.”

“Do you know what room he’ll be staying in?” The room was the money.

“Yes, he’s in room five hundred.”

Remember, this is all on an officially unconnected person-to-person call.

“Oh. I thought he was going to be staying in room seven-fifty.”

“No, as a matter of fact, he’s lucky he’s not in room two-fifty.”

When Jimmy Edmundson died,
Saturday Night Live
reported that Professor Backwards was killed in a failed burglary. His neighbors ignored pleas of “Pleh! Pleh!”

I can’t help myself, but I love that obituary.

I would’ve loved to have had a drink with W. C. Fields. He was one of the those rare legendary characters. Fields was a big drinker and a fallen-away Catholic—his casting director at MGM was always after him to go to church and straighten out.

It seems that every comedian has a story or two about him. My favorite is the one about Fields standing backstage in a vaudeville house waiting for a guy to finish so he could perform. Suddenly, Fields became infuriated. “That guy is doing my act!” As the guy walked offstage, Fields decked him.

A couple of weeks later, Fields was onstage performing. He finished and walked offstage. The same guy came up to Fields and said, “You stole that from me you son-of-a-bitch!” Fields thought for a second and replied, “He’s right, I did steal it from him.”

Once Fields was called to testify in a civil suit. His attorney went to the judge and explained that Fields was an alcoholic and his body required him to drink. The attorney asked for permission to have an alcoholic beverage in the courtroom. The judge refused, but the attorney persisted. Finally, the judge agreed to let Fields have a pitcher of vodka because it looked like water. The only problem was that every time Fields poured himself another drink, he would hoist his glass in a toast to the judge.

Fields lived on the fairway at the Lakeside Country Club, or the drinker’s golf club for short. Though Fields was a lousy golfer, he supposedly liked living near the grounds because during Prohibition he had crates of booze sent by boat across nearby Toluca Lake.

One afternoon, Fields was sitting in his backyard tipping back a few cocktails when a golf ball sailed in. Two guys soon followed and asked if they could retrieve the ball. Fields obliged and chatted with the men. Feeling magnanimous, Fields asked them if they had any dinner plans. They didn’t. Fields insisted they be his guests at Chasen’s after they finished their round of golf.

An hour later, the guys appeared at Fields’s house. They told him they needed to change clothes first, so Fields volunteered to drive them. Fields followed their directions and ended up in front of a church. Turns out, the guys were priests. They changed into their robes, and Fields drove them to Chasen’s.

Fields wasn’t much of a religious man. His friend Bill Grady, who was head of casting at MGM, was always after Fields to go with him to church, but Fields always found a reason why he couldn’t.

When Fields and the two priests walked into Chasen’s, the first person they saw was the MGM casting director who was always trying to convince Fields to find religion. The casting director took one look and said to Fields, “That’s about as cheap a stunt as I’ve ever seen in my life, and you should be ashamed of yourself.” Then he turned to the two priests and said, “Neither one of you sons of bitches will ever work in another MGM movie as long as you live.”

In his final days, Fields took to reading the Bible. The story goes that Gene Fowler visited him and asked a devout atheist why he was reading the scriptures. Fields replied, “I’m looking for a loophole.”

I met Laurel, but not Hardy. It was 1960, and Oliver Hardy had already died. I called Stan Laurel and asked if I could meet him. I had always been a great admirer of their material because it holds up so well. That and it’s funny.

Laurel lived on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica with his sixth or seventh wife, who was Russian. This was before the days that six or seven wives was acceptable for performers. He had had a stroke on his right side that wasn’t fatal; Hardy had a stroke on his left side that was.

Laurel’s incredible laughter immediately took me back to my childhood and their routines. Laurel and Hardy’s theory of comedy was tell them what you are going to do, do it, and then tell them why you did it. I loved how they constantly broke the fourth wall and talked to the audience. Laurel would turn and say, “Did you see what he just did?”

I wish I would have met Hardy.

In my mind, Peter Sellers was probably the best film comedian ever. He was a complicated man haunted by powerful demons, but he was an absolute comic genius. Apparently, his gift of mimicry was unsurpassed. He had an uncanny ability to replicate people he had just met. Unwittingly, he paid me one of the highest compliments of my career.

A year or so after my first album came out, I was standing in line at the grocery store, and I bumped into the British actor Graham Stark, who was a friend of Sellers’s. Graham introduced himself.

“Peter Sellers is big fan of yours,” he told me. “When your record came out, he bought thirty copies and gave them out to the cast and crew of
Dr. Strangelove.
”

When I worked on
In & Out
, Kevin Kline and I used to take turns quoting entire scenes of
Dr. Strangelove
to each other. I’ve seen the movie at least thirty times. Sellers was extraordinary, playing Strangelove, President Merkin Muffley, and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. My kids always knew what room I was in because they could hear me laughing hysterically at Peter Sellers in
Dr. Strangelove
.

I met Sellers briefly, but he never mentioned the album.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I Don’t Know How to End This

My wife came up with one of the most famous endings in television history. We were at Marvin and Barbara Davis’s Christmas party when I mentioned to Ginnie that the current sixth season was going to be the final year of
Newhart.

Newhart
began in 1982 when I went to my manager, Artie Price, and told him that I wanted to get back into TV. He told me that was fine, but asked me not to tell anyone. Then he called CBS and said, “I may be able to talk Bob into coming back to TV.”

I met with Barry Kemp, who had written for
Taxi
, to kick around ideas for the show. I asked him about the setting. He pictured New England. I told him that I had in mind the Pacific Northwest. “Great,” he replied, “we’re both thinking America.” Of course, we ended up setting the show in the Stratford Inn in Vermont, which seemed like a nice compromise.

We made the most of the setting. I loved the speech in the pilot episode where my character, Dick Loudon, informed a group of ladies from the Daughters of the American Revolution about the truth of the inn. “Ladies, according to my information, in the winter of 1775 when all your ancestors were staying here, the Stratford wasn’t so much an inn as it was a house of…Let me put it this way—there is every reason to believe that you are not so much daughters of the war for independence as you are daughters of a three-day pass.”

Like
The Bob Newhart Show
,
Newhart
was filmed in front of a live audience, and I came out before the show and performed a short warmup act. Having the audience affected the show greatly. The Darrells, for instance, were supposed to be a small diversion in one episode, but the audience response was so overwhelming that they became recurring characters.

In the episode, I found the body of a witch in the basement of the Stratford, and it freaked out my wife, Joanna, who was played by Mary Frann. The minister, played by my father-in-law, Bill Quinn, told us we had to get rid of the witch because it couldn’t be buried in hallowed ground. I went to the telephone book and found an ad that read “Anything for a buck.”

Not wanting to scare off the workers, I called and told them we needed some work done in the basement. Larry, the guy who answered, told me that they couldn’t possibly get to it until next Thursday. I told him it was urgent, and he asked what it was.

“We have the body of a witch in our basement,” I blurted out.

“We’ll be right over,” he said.

When they arrived, Larry introduced himself, as well as his brother Darrell and his other brother Darrell. The Darrells didn’t speak. They were like something out of
Deliverance.
I casually asked Larry how he was doing, and he told me that he had hurt his back last week crawling under a house.

“That sounds like tough work,” I said.

“It wasn’t work,” Larry said. “I just enjoy crawling under houses.”

Newhart
had great characters and that made the show so much fun. I enjoyed playing Dick Loudon, who was comfortable being a middle-aged man. Dick’s dream of writing his books in the picture-perfect Vermont countryside while running an inn had come true. He was earnest, easygoing, and orderly, which made for an amusing combination.

But by the end of the sixth season, I contemplated ending the show because the network was tossing us around the schedule. Contractually, I had the right at the end of six years to pull the plug on the show. After
Newhart
established a beachhead at 9:00
P.M
. on Mondays, CBS shifted us to 8:30 and then to 9:30 so it could launch new shows in our successful time slot. I thought it was unfair to the show. We had established 9:00
P.M
. as a hit time slot, and they were acting very cavalierly toward a successful show. Nobody seemed to know when we were on—not even us.

By the middle of the eighth season, I was sure it was time to move on.

“When it’s the last year,” Ginnie had said to me at the Davises’ Christmas party, “you ought to end it in a dream sequence where you wake up in bed with Emily and you describe this weird dream you had of this inn you owned in Vermont and the strange people.” It was perfect because there were so many inexplicable things in the show: The maid was an heiress, her boyfriend (who became her husband later in the show) talked in alliteration and you couldn’t understand him, the handyman missed the point of everything, and there were these three woodsmen, but only one of them talked.

Right away I had known it was a great idea. Coincidentally, Suzanne Pleshette had been at same Christmas party with her husband, Tommy Gallagher. Ginnie had told Suzanne about the ending she had come up with. She thought it was a hysterically funny idea and said, “I’ll do it in a New York minute.”

Once the writers at
Newhart
started on the episode and began fleshing it out, I worried that the script would somehow be leaked to the press. To combat the problem, we hatched a fake finale and wrote a decoy script. The story was entirely plausible, too. In the episode, Bob gets hit by a golf ball, dies, and goes to heaven. At the pearly gates he is greeted by God—played by George Burns.

Sure enough, a couple of weeks later the
National Enquirer
ran the headline: “Bob Gets Zapped by Golf Ball, Dies and Then Meets … God!”

As for the real idea, we didn’t tell the cast or the crew. Only the producers, the director, Dick Martin, and myself knew right up until shooting day. I told the cast that morning. Mary Frann was a little upset at the concept, and truthfully, there was some concern about how people would react.

To maintain the surprise until the last minute, we had the old set blocked by a floating set that could be moved on cue so the audience couldn’t see it until we were ready. After the crew returned from dinner break, we told them we had added a scene. Dick directed each cameraman where to shoot and told them not to move no matter what happened. Then, we let the audience into the theater.

Dick called “action,” and the floating set moved to reveal the original bedroom set from
The Bob Newhart Show
and two bodies in bed. The audience reaction was immediate and the applause and screams rocked Stage 17. They recognized the set from the other show, and they knew where we were going.

“Honey, honey, wake up,” Bob Hartley implores Emily. “You won’t believe the dream I just had.”

Emily switches on the light. “All right, Bob. What is it?”

“I was an innkeeper in this crazy little town in Vermont. The maid was an heiress; her husband talked in alliteration; the handyman kept missing the point of things, and then there were these three woodsmen.”

“That settles it,” Emily replies. “No more Japanese food before you go to bed.”

“I was married to this beautiful blonde. …”

“Go back to sleep, Bob,” Emily says, switching off her light.

“Good night, Emily,” I say, switching off mine.

“What do you mean beautiful blonde?” she says, switching her light back on.

“Go to sleep, Emily. You know, you really should wear more sweaters.”

I had people tell me later they were alone in a hotel room watching and they stood up and went,
“Yes! Yes!”

The show didn’t air until three weeks after the taping date. We sent the tapes to critics with a letter imploring them not to disclose the ending. Amazingly, the secret didn’t leak out.