Still Foolin' 'Em (24 page)

After we wrapped the film, I started planning a big event: my fiftieth birthday party. This was a big one. Fifty is the last stop of middle age. I felt much more reflective. I wasn’t as anxious as I’d been about turning forty; I found myself thinking that life is short. My dad had died at fifty-four, and I knew how hard he’d worked for us, but I wasn’t sure he’d had enough fun in his life. I wanted that to be a goal for myself. I had been very fortunate in my career, doing all kinds of things I hadn’t thought I would get a chance to do. Only one experience was missing: Broadway. I started making notes for a one-man show that I’d had in the back of my mind. I wrote a four-page blueprint of a show about me and my family and my relationship with my late father. I called it
700 Sundays
—for the number of Sundays (his only day off) we were able to share before his death when I was fifteen. When my mom came out for my birthday party, she brought tons of photos and audiotapes and home movies that she wanted me to have. Little did I know how much they would mean to me when, six years later, I would use them as I began the process of creating the show. But I didn’t do anything with the four-page outline then, except file it in my desk drawer. I wasn’t ready yet.

Doing
Analyze This
had put me in a good frame of mind, and I invited two hundred friends and family members to my fiftieth birthday party. Janice and I rented the ballroom at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and had a set designer turn it into an old-fashioned nightclub, complete with red leather banquettes, that we called “Club Fifty.” March 14 fell on a Saturday that year. The day was normal. I worked out in the morning with my friend and trainer, Dan Isaacson. My mom joined us for a while. She had gotten heavy late in her life, and Dan said, “Helen, there are a lot of good diets for people your age.” She replied, “I don’t need a diet—I put on some weight after the last baby.” Which was me. I went to get the mail, and my fucking AARP card had come. Did the card have to arrive on the very day I turned fifty? Did they think,
Hey let’s ruin his day and send him this reminder that he’s an old fart?
I said to Janice, “Hey, honey, I’m old now, which means you are officially a trophy wife.”

That afternoon, I was reading the paper in the kitchen when the phone rang. Janice answered it and said, “Oh, he’s right here. I’ll put him on.”

“Who is it?” I mouthed. Janice just shrugged. I took the phone and said hello.

“Kid, this is Ted Williams. How ya doing?” I had never spoken to him before, and that strong voice almost knocked me over. How had he known it was my birthday? Janice had this wonderful smile on her face as Ted continued: “Listen, your lovely wife tracked me down and invited me to your party tonight, but, kid, the good Lord is pitching me tight. So I can’t make it, but I love what you do. When you do the Oscars, it’s like watching a great hitter. You see the pitch and wherever it is, you hit it solid. You don’t foul any off. I love to see that.”

I was in shock to be on the phone with him, but I managed to say, “Ted, is everything hitting to you?”

“You bet,” he said. “It’s a great metaphor, isn’t it?”

To this day I think he’s the only Hall of Famer who has used the word “metaphor” in a sentence. He continued, “Hey, I read that you own a piece of that team in Arizona.” Janice and I had bought a tiny interest in the Arizona Diamondbacks.

“Yes, I do, Ted.”

“Well, that’s where I’d like to play. With that dry air, you hit a ball with the right kind of spin, it’s going to keep going. Man, I’d hit .285 there.”

“Only .285?” I asked the last man to hit .400.

“Billy, I’m in a wheelchair,” he replied. Before we said our good-byes, he told me he had sent me a gift and hoped I would like it. Like it? He’d sent a large photo of himself with Babe Ruth and had signed it to me. Wow.

The party was spectacular. Jack Sheldon and a fifteen-piece dance band were onstage, and Wolfgang Puck was in the kitchen. The party wasn’t just for me; I also wanted to thank my friends and family for always supporting me. Marty Short sang a few songs, my hero Mel Brooks got up and sang with the band, my brother Rip belted out a few, and then Rob Reiner went up onstage and acted as a host as one after the other of my good friends, including Richard Lewis and Christopher Guest, got up to speak. Marc Shaiman performed a funny personalized song he’d written. Janice also sang a song for me, Jenny and Lindsay made a beautiful toast, and then Joel and Rip presented me with a large gift-wrapped present, flat and roughly seven feet tall. It was the door of my bedroom from our house in Long Beach, which I had decorated with decals of ballplayers of the fifties. That fantastic gift is now the door to my office closet. Sometimes when I’m having a bad day, I look at that door and wish I could open it and go back in time.

Janice then announced a gift from George Steinbrenner. It was a World Series ring from 1996! My name had been engraved where the player’s name goes. His card read, “To our 26th man, Happy Birthday, your pal, George and the New York Yankees.” Wait, it gets better. Janice then told the crowd, “You know, I can do impressions also. Here’s Mrs. Muhammad Ali.” She started to do her own impression of Ali, which got big laughs, and then she stopped and said, “Why am I doing him? Here he is.” And Muhammad Ali walked out. Some people—like me—almost fainted. Janice had arranged the whole thing. “Happy Birthday, little brother,” he whispered in my ear. “Gotcha.”

My mom always said, “Do something special on your birthday.” The party was the perfect way to end my forties and start fresh in my fifties. It was a time to take stock. Who was I? Was I the Oscar host who did
When Harry Met Sally
…,
City Slickers,
and
Midnight Train to Moscow,
or was I the guy who got dissed by Orson Welles, told to fuck off by Charles Bronson, and punched by Joe DiMaggio? Oy.

Kiss Me Twice

I guess when you write a book covering your first sixty-five years, there has to be at least one scandal, so here’s mine: for over three years I had an amazing affair with Sophia Loren. We made love everywhere. At her villa in Italy, in the back of a Maserati, on a hilltop overlooking the Mediterranean, and once behind the monuments at Yankee Stadium during a rain delay.

I was thirteen when our trysts started, and they went on and on, sometimes happening twice a day (once five times in an afternoon), until I was sixteen and saw Joey Heatherton on
Hullabaloo.
But that was a fleeting moment of lust compared to the enduring memories I share with Sophia. My Sophia. If only I could meet her someday, I said to myself. If only.

Funny how things work out sometimes. In 1992, I was now a grown man and had just hosted the Oscars for the third straight year. It was a great night for many reasons: the show was going well, I was in good form, and, most importantly, it was the only time my mother was in the audience. We had watched the Oscars together so many times, but rarely the whole thing. Proving that nothing changes, even back in the fifties the show would run long, and so this little New York schoolboy would be sent off to bed around—you guessed it—sound effects editing. Before getting into bed, I would brush my teeth and hold the toothbrush like it was an Oscar and thank people! “And to Clark Gable: man, we had fun.” (Years later, whenever I hosted the show, I kept a toothbrush in my breast pocket, just to remind myself where I’d come from.) In the morning when I got to the breakfast table, I would find, in my cereal bowl, a paper napkin on which Mom had written out the names of the big winners.

You can imagine what it was like for me that night walking out onstage, the audience applauding my entrance and me getting to catch my mother’s gleaming eye. I could see her smile and shake her head in proud wonder at me, her little Shredded Wheat eater, hosting the show it had once seemed I’d never be old enough to watch to completion.

I almost lost it; for at that moment as I walked out onstage, seeing my mom, thinking about my dad and my brothers, where this whole journey had started, my emotions ran wild like a rioting soccer crowd. But I held it together, and of all the times I’ve hosted (nine—which means that if I host every year from now until 2022, I’ll catch Bob Hope), it was my favorite.

Once the show was over, my brain spun with a jumble of thoughts and questions. Was it okay? That worked, that didn’t, should have, shouldn’t have, glad I talked to Jack in the audience, good ad-lib there, I knew that joke would kill—man, that was fun! There was more adrenaline than blood in my veins as I made my way to the Governors Ball.

My family had yet to arrive, and sitting at my mom’s place setting was an older man. From the back he looked familiar, and as he sensed I was standing there, he turned toward me. It was Burt Lancaster! Burt Elmer Gantry,
Sweet Smell of Success, Trapeze, Apache,
Jim Thorpe, Doc Graham, and assorted pirates Lancaster! I’d never met him before.

He smiled that huge movie-star smile, which lit up his huge movie-star head, and out of nowhere asked, “Have you ever been an acrobat?”

“Uh, I did tumble a bit in school…” I weakly responded.

“You move like an acrobat,” he said.

I had no idea where this was going, but before either of us could say another word, I heard a woman’s voice with a beautiful accent call out, “Billeee, Billeee.” It was the voice from my dreams. I turned, and there was Sophia Loren.

I flashed what in my mind was a debonair killer smile, which, as I think about it later, was probably the goofy grin of a thirteen-year-old. She motioned me over to her with her index finger, just the way all of our encounters had begun. I walked toward her like a zombie in a trance, and being the Jew I am, all I wanted to do was apologize.

She reached out her hands to me, and I grasped them as she pulled me closer to her. (Just writing that sentence almost gave me a chubby.)

“Billeee, kiss me twice…” She turned her head as I kissed first her right and then her left cheek. She told me how much she’d enjoyed my performance (as the host) and how she loved my acting in movies, that I reminded her of Cary Grant in a way, all the while holding my hands and looking at me with those seductive dark eyes. She was so beautiful, and yet something was different about her. Then I realized that this was the first time I was looking at her without a staple in the middle of her body.

I turned to see that my family was now sitting down and my mother was talking to Burt Lancaster, making motions probably showing him how I indeed could do back flips when I was seven. I didn’t care. At that moment, it was just me and Sophia.

*   *   *

The next year I was hosting again and was in the wings watching the show and going over what to say during my next appearance when I felt a mouth close to my left ear. “Billeee, Billeee…” The gentle aroma of her perfume and her breathy whisper made me break out into an instant sweat (another almost chubby). I turned, and there she was, taking my breath away again. “Kiss me twice,” she said. Then she looked me in the eye and said, “This is special, I want you to meet someone,” and I’m thinking,
Threesome.

Kiss me
twice
.

She left for a moment and returned with Federico Fellini!

“He loves you, Billeee,” Sophia said.

“Mr. Fellini…” I began, but he put his hand up and shook his head as if to say, “Don’t talk.”

“Billeee, you drive this show like it is a race car. You take the turns, you hit the straightaways, you are a maestro.” Fed—we were now on a first-syllable basis—was then interrupted by the stage manager telling him, “One minute—I want to get you to your mark, sir.”

“Billeee, before I go,” he said, taking my hands in his, “please, kiss me twice.”

That almost spoiled everything, but it was Fellini! They left together, and I stood in the wings and thought,
Oh my god, isn’t this WILD!
I never want to lose that feeling of awe when I meet great artists. Later, at the ball, we had a drink together and I hobnobbed with the two of them. One more champagne and I would have asked Fellini, “Why 8 1/2, why not just 8?”

In 2011, Sophia called and asked me to host an evening honoring her at the academy. We showed clips of her magnificent career, and then I brought her up onstage and interviewed her for almost an hour. My first question to her set the tone: “You are Italy’s greatest export to Hollywood. Why is there no good pizza in L.A.?” She laughed and relaxed and we had a great conversation. If this was a date, I was in. As I drove home that night, I couldn’t help but think how rare it is that two former lovers—even if only one of us knew about the affair—can end up as friends. Funny how things work out sometimes.

Still Foolin’ ’Em

I stared at myself in the three-way mirror. I was wearing an unbuttoned tuxedo shirt, underwear briefs, formal black silk socks to the knee—I call them talk-show socks because if you’re on a show and cross your legs, you don’t want skin to show—and my patent leather shoes. I carefully pulled my tuxedo pants on so as not to catch a heel on the newly sewn hem. One usually puts his shoes on after his pants, but Alan King taught me to put my shoes on first because you don’t want to bend down to tie them as you’ll break the crease in your pants. I silently went over my thoughts and jokes as I slipped the suspenders over the shoulders of my pleated shirt. On the mannequin form was a brand-new tuxedo jacket, its beautiful black satin lapels shimmering in the glow of my dressing room lights. I didn’t put it on yet—not the right time. I stared at myself in the mirror.
Hmm,
I thought,
this is who I am now. A little older, a little wiser.
“Still foolin’ ’em,” I muttered, as I always do before facing the crowd.