Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny (20 page)
Read Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny Online
Authors: Marlo Thomas
W
hat do Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Wright and George Lopez all have in common? Every one of them reveres George Carlin as one of the greats.
On the set of
That Girl
, with a clean-cut, buttoned-up, relatively unknown George Carlin.
Chris told me that Carlin once said to him, “I’m not in show business—I’m a comedian.” Leave it to Carlin to make that distinction. He also said, “I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.” It’s hard to believe that a radical rabble-rouser like Carlin was once out there auditioning for jobs on episodic television. But he was, and, in fact, he landed such a job—as Ann Marie’s agent in the first season of
That Girl
.
Because so many comics told me what an inspiration Carlin was to them, I went back and watched one of those early episodes. I’d forgotten what Carlin looked like in that part. How odd it was after all these years to see him with a close-cropped haircut and in a suit and tie, trying to play a buttoned-up guy. Every now and then you could see him break out of the straitjacket he was in. With a rasp in his voice and a hint of a mug, for a brief moment he would become what we would later admire as pure Carlin. Mostly, he was just trying to be a good boy and color inside the lines. But it wasn’t his gig. And he knew it.
One day he just disappeared. We didn’t hear of him again for a few years. Then all of a sudden, there was this startling new comedian rocking our world—and that’s when we met the real George Carlin. You can only wonder how many great talents never had the guts to walk away and try to find their own voice. It wasn’t that George couldn’t play the part of Ann Marie’s agent—it was that the form wasn’t roomy enough for his genius. Like Seinfeld said, “If you can do stand-up, that doesn’t mean you can do anything else. And if you can do anything else, that doesn’t mean you can do stand-up.”
WORDS TO LAUGH BY . . .
“Women like silent men. They think they’re listening.”
—George Carlin
“I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.”
—Jon Stewart
“The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot.
The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.”
—Sid Caesar
“I can’t think of anything worse after a night of drinking than waking up next to someone and not being able to remember their name, or how you met, or why they’re dead.”
—Laura Kightlinger
“
I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.”
—W. C. Fields
Q: What’s the difference between a Rottweiler
and a Jewish mother?
A: Eventually, a Rottweiler lets go.
—The Internet
E
ven though we traveled around the country, growing up in nightclubs, when Terre and I were little girls, one of our favorite things to do was sit on the floor with our portable pink phonograph and play story records.
Loretta Young reading
The Littlest Angel.
Bing Crosby’s
The Happy Prince. Bozo the Clown, Cinderella, Snow White.
We’d lie on our backs and look up at the ceiling and see all the pictures in our heads. It was a great thing to do on a rainy L.A. day.
When Terre’s first child, Dionne, was around five, I was reading to her from the books she had in her room, and I was shocked by how outdated they were. They all told the same old stories, starring the same old prince, promising the same old happy ending. None of the books had any new ideas encouraging Dionne to dream her own dreams.
“I can’t believe you’re giving her the same stuff we grew up with,” I said to Terre. “Didn’t it take us half our lives to get over these stories?”
“That’s all I’ve been able to find,” Terre said. “Why don’t you try?”
Obviously, I thought, my sister hadn’t looked hard enough. So off I went to the bookstore, confident that I would return with an armful of inspiration. But Auntie Marlo had a lot to learn. Not only had nothing changed, but in some cases things had gotten worse. One book I’ll never forget was called
I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl!
The pictures were cute, but the captions were appalling.
“Boys are pilots, girls are stewardesses.”
“Boys are doctors, girls are nurses.”
“Boys can eat, girls can cook.”
“Boys invent things, girls use what boys invent.”
I almost had a heart attack in the children’s book section.
How could this be? After all the marches, the consciousness-raising, the literature? I thought back to Terre’s and my old records and wondered,
How hard could it be to create an album for Dionne, with stories and songs that she could lie on the floor and listen to, and see pictures in her head that would awaken her imagination instead of putting her mind to sleep?
Girls use what boys invent, indeed!
It couldn’t be preachy. It would have to be entertaining and have some razzmatazz. This was not the
Littlest Angel
generation—these kids had rock concerts blaring from the TVs in their living rooms. And it would have to make kids laugh. That’s the only way they’d get it—and
remember
it. Who was it who said, “What is learned with laughter is learned well”?
We’d make fun of all the old stories and outmoded ideas of what boys and girls can do. And we’d go to showbiz talent, not kids’ writers, to create the material—people like Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Sheldon Harnick, Herb Gardner and Shel Silverstein.
My friend (and co-producer) Carole Hart and I began to develop the album by sitting around with the writers and talking about our own childhoods, and what we would have liked to change about them.
“I’d like to have heard that it wasn’t a sissy thing for a boy to cry,” Herb Gardner said. And Carol Hall wrote the terrific song “It’s All Right to Cry.”
“I’d like to have read one story about a princess who wasn’t blond and didn’t get married to the prince at the end,” I said. And Betty Miles updated the ancient myth, “Atalanta,” all about a king who holds a cross-country footrace, offering his daughter’s hand in marriage to the young man who wins. But in Betty’s version, the princess (now a
brunette)
joins in the race, so that if she wins, she can decide for herself whether she will marry at all.
I always loved the last line: “Perhaps someday they will be married, and perhaps they will not. But one thing’s for certain. They will live happily ever after.”
The ever irreverent Shel Silverstein wrote a piece called “Ladies First,” about a spoiled little girl who insists on being given special treatment just because she’s a girl—pushing ahead of everyone to be first in line and constantly announcing, “Ladies first, ladies first.”
At the end of the story, tigers appear and surround a camp of children, and try to decide which one to eat first. Misunderstanding, our little heroine cries out, as always, “Ladies first, ladies first.”
Shel’s last line hammered home the point: “And so she was. And mighty tasty, too.” (A tough punishment, but these were tough times.) The kids loved it. It was like a comic spin on a Grimms’ tale.
We were all on a mission, obsessed with changing the world, one five-year-old at a time. For one track on the album, we came up with the great idea of interviewing kids and asking them questions to illustrate how children don’t harbor sexist ideas.
We gathered a group of preschoolers and taped their conversations.
“What would you like to be when you grow up?” we asked one curly-haired four-year-old girl.
“I want to be a singer or an ice skater,” she said. Good—nothing sexist there.
“Would you like to be a doctor?” we asked, leading the witness.
The little girl got an adorable look on her face and burst into giggles.
“No!” she said. “Mans is doctors.”
My God, she was four. We were already too late.
WHEN IT CAME TIME
to cast the album, we recruited a terrific group of performers, including Harry Belafonte, football player Rosie Grier (who, playing against type, sang “It’s All Right to Cry”) and a sweet fourteen-year-old Michael Jackson. With his creamy dark skin and pillowy Afro, Michael winsomely sang “When We Grow Up” with Roberta Flack. A line of the song would one day be haunting.
“We like what we look like. We don’t have to change at all.”
If only Michael had held on to that notion.
All of the pieces on the album came out of our own experiences, and we soon realized we were rewriting our childhoods. But it was lyricist Bruce Hart, Carole’s husband, who came up with the timeless words,
Free to Be . . . You and Me
—and his title song, with music by Stephen Lawrence, spoke of rolling rivers and galloping horses, marvelously capturing a child’s passionate desire for freedom.
“When We Grow Up”: On the set with Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack.
I called Gloria Steinem and told her I wanted the money earned by
Free to Be
to benefit women and girls.
“Why don’t you join me, Letty Pogrebin and Pat Carbine in forming the Ms Foundation for Women,” Gloria said. “It will be the first women’s foundation in the country.” It was the perfect fit.
I broached with all of the artists the idea of donating their time and talent. They agreed enthusiastically to help out this new foundation called “Ms.” But when Carole was working out the details with Mel Brooks, he said, “I’m happy to do this for Marlo, but I don’t understand what it has to do with multiple sclerosis.”
So much for my communication skills.
FREE TO BE . . . YOU AND ME
became more than we had imagined, first a record, then a book, then an ABC-TV special—which turned out to be the most difficult version. The execs at the network were terrified of the program’s messages. They begged us to take out “William Wants a Doll,” a wonderful song written by Mary Rodgers and Sheldon Harnick. Telling little boys that “It’s All Right to Cry” was bad enough. But telling little boys it’s okay to cuddle a doll? That was dangerous.
Another Carol Hall song, “Parents Are People,” featured Harry Belafonte and me singing the various verses in different locations around New York City. The message of the song was unmistakable: Dressed identically and working at the same jobs, Harry and I happily declared that “Mommies and daddies can be anything they want to be.”
Anyone sounds good in a duet with Harry.
In one of the scenes, Harry was pushing a baby buggy, singing about daddies, while I pushed a buggy alongside him, singing about mommies. That caused a furor. We were already “corrupting” little boys with songs about dolls and crying. But now we were insinuating that Harry and I were married. The racial implications were way too threatening to the network, especially for a primetime children’s show.
Voices were raised and feathers flew—but in the end (and with the threat that we’d go to CBS), all of the songs stayed in.
And guess what? The world didn’t come to an end.
The show won an Emmy and a Peabody, the book became number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list and the record went gold. We were floored by the impact it all had. My little message for Dionne had gone straight to the hearts of moms and dads and aunties and uncles and, most of all, teachers, who embraced it as a way to teach the kids in their lives a new way of thinking about themselves.
But for me the most astonishing reaction would come years later, when I interviewed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for my book
The Right Words at the Right Time
. When I left a message at her office, I wasn’t sure she’d even know who I was. But when she returned my call, she told me that she had always loved
Free to Be
.
“Really?” I asked. “Did you read it to your children?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “and I always take it with me when I speak on feminism.” That was the best review of all.
But I’ll never forget the words of the
Boston Globe
critic the day the show aired:
“Keep your children away from the set tonight.”
In 1972, the world wasn’t changing as fast as we hoped.
AROUND THIS TIME,
my father was campaigning for a local Los Angeles politician whose platform, I thought, was particularly questionable. Dad was a conservative Republican, and I a liberal Democrat, so we usually left politics out of our conversations. But I had to comment on this.
“Dad,” I said, “how can you campaign for this guy? He’s a creep. And, frankly, I think it looks really bad for the whole family.”
As usual, my father had the perfect comeback.
“Oh, I get it,” he said. “I’m free to be you . . . not free to be me.”
The man was hard to beat.
