How I Got This Way (13 page)

But Garrison had one more surprise for me, something I didn’t ask for or would have ever imagined possible. He had an idea for a big finale to the infomercial that he would create through the magic of modern television technology. He wanted to simulate Dean and me together, dressed in our tuxedoes, running down those original winding steps that looked like piano keys—something Dean had done so many times at the start of his show—singing a duet of the great old number “Baby Face.” I remember being knocked out when I arrived at the studio early that morning and saw the famous lighted staircase glowing on the dark set. He led me through the moves, and what you ended up seeing was Dean and me, side by side, laughing and singing and finally landing on an original pair of the high-backed stools where Dean always finished the song that he’d started up at the top of those stairs. This is a funny business I work in, where anything and everything can happen. But I never would have dreamt of performing a bouncy duet with Dean Martin. And even though he wasn’t really there—not that I didn’t
feel
his presence, because I swear that I actually did—it was one of the biggest thrills of my television career. Plus, what a beautiful bookend to that prom night at the Copa so many years ago when I saw him for the very first time!

But I should also mention that, about a month after we shot the infomercial, a huge box arrived in my New York office. It came from Greg Garrison, and when I opened it, lo and behold, there was one of those same high-backed stools that Dean had sat on to start his show each week. The same one I’d perched myself on during our magical duet. And whenever I need to feel a special jolt of Dean’s easygoing aura, I climb up onto that stool, and after a moment or two, I always feel better, all over again.

Chapter Twelve

DON RICKLES

T
he name Don Rickles began catching my attention back in the late fifties. At the time, believe it or not, he aspired to become a serious actor, and had just made his movie debut with a small dramatic role in the Clark Gable–Burt Lancaster submarine picture
Run Silent Run Deep
. But by then, showbiz insiders knew there was nothing serious or silent about this one-of-a-kind guy. Already his reputation had caught fire as a young, brash comic who’d been tearing it up across the major nightclub circuits, sending shock waves and also drawing raves, whether in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, or eventually, of course, Las Vegas. There, at the Sahara Hotel, his after-hours lounge performances truly put him on the map, especially when Frank Sinatra and his gang of pals made a habit of dropping by to catch Don in action. I remember later on reading that mid-sixties classic
Esquire
magazine story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” so beautifully written by Gay Talese, who’d followed Frank and company into one of Don’s shows and described Rickles as “probably more caustic than any comic in the country. His humor is so rude, in such bad taste, that it offends no one—it is too offensive to be offensive.”

Sinatra fell in love with him years earlier when entering a Miami club where Don greeted him from the stage: “Make yourself at home, Frank. Hit somebody!” They would become great friends for life, and to this day, one of the most famous stories to ever come out of Vegas happened during the sixties when Rickles walked up to Sinatra at a restaurant and asked for a favor. Rickles had been sitting at a table across the room with a young lady he was trying to impress. So he told Frank it would mean the world if he could wait a few minutes and then come over to their table and say hello. The girl, he said, would be knocked out. Sinatra agreed to play along, and after a while he strolled over—with every eye in the place on him—and gave Rickles a warm and cheerful “Hi, Don, so good to see you!” And Rickles turned from the girl and said, “Not now, Frank. Can’t you see I’m busy?” That story gets laughs even after being retold a thousand times, and I still love it.

Anyway, as I said, I’d been hearing early buzz about this fierce and funny Rickles character back when I was just a young TV reporter in San Diego, still a couple years away from starting my local Saturday-night talk show. But I was always on the lookout for an entertaining story to use on the newscasts. And one day I heard that Rickles was coming to town—not to perform but to meet, for some reason, with the Advertising Council of San Diego. It was a lunch gathering set at the upscale US Grant Hotel, and since the town was a much less thriving place in those days, the council had no more than about fifteen members. I got myself invited and took a seat at the far end of the long table where I could keep a close eye on Rickles, who sat at the head. As the council went over its business, I could see that Rickles was clearly wondering how in the world he’d gotten involved with whatever these dull, serious older businessmen wanted from him. Here was the hot rising star of the club scene stuck with this rather humorless bunch who, I’d guessed, probably hadn’t even heard of him yet. I waited anxiously for Rickles to go to work on them. I could tell he couldn’t wait to bite into those advertising guys and then get out of there. Finally he was introduced. He stood at the table and, one by one, demolished them. I had never seen anything like it. He just ate them alive. He didn’t know them, of course, but how they were dressed, who their clients were, their whole life existence—everything about them—was now being examined by Rickles in the most hilarious way. To the letter, he was everything I’d read about—and I loved him immediately. After the massacre, I timidly approached him and asked for an interview. He was not thrilled about it, but we went outside in the sunshine where my camera crew was set up and we began. He started with my name.
Regis
. He had never heard it before. It was fresh meat for him. He beat me up pretty good on the sidewalk that day and I still loved it. I marveled at his attack, his perception, his style of humor. He had a way of sizing you up and then letting you have it like you never had it before. He was sensational.

Last year, on our show, I asked him if he remembered that interview and got the same Rickles I’d first met those fifty years earlier—pure Rickles: “Yeah,” he said, his eyes rolling up into his head. “You had a blue tie. And I had brown cuff links. I didn’t forget it. And that’s how our life began. And now I can’t dump you. I’m trying to get rid of you, and I can’t.”

Our next go-round came after I left San Diego for my first national television hosting job (yes, the Westinghouse debacle). My producers asked me who’d I love to have on my new show. I began with Don Rickles. They called his manager, Joe Scandore, who made a deal not for one appearance but for three. I was thrilled. I didn’t think he remembered me, but I didn’t care. This was the guy I wanted on my show. I knew enough to position us on two stools facing the audience up close.
Let them share the pain,
I thought. I knew what fun he would have with them, and it worked. They were his sitting ducks, in row after row. He gave me the best experience that I would have on that show.

A few years later on
The Joey Bishop Show,
Don was booked as a guest, but Joey was leery of him. Rickles was unpredictable. He would get off on an opening rant about me and then turn to Joey. That meant it was Joey’s turn to take the heat. Comedians, as I’ve mentioned, can be very competitive when sharing the spotlight, and Joey, who was as competitive as they got, knew that whatever he’d say to Rickles would be turned around into a joking attack on him. So Joey went on the defensive. He realized that the less he said to Rickles, the less ammunition Rickles would have. Finally, at one point, he actually said nothing. At all. The silence was deafening. I was getting nervous until Rickles leaned over to Joey and said, “What’s the matter with you . . .
are you a mute
?” I never forgot that line and the laughs it produced, which I’m pretty sure did not thrill Joey.

The sixties brought quite the influx of comedians from New York to Los Angeles, which was, after all, closer to Vegas, where stand-up jobs were so often popping up. Plus, in L.A., maybe they could get a movie, maybe a TV series or regular guest shots on other shows. It was a new world of opportunity. One of the best results of this westward movement was the way they would assemble for all the showbiz banquets or luncheons or, funniest of all, the Friars Roasts, which featured all the greats—Jack Benny, George Burns, Danny Thomas—the list could go on. Most of them had marvelous stories that they’d perfected over the years. Routines that were built line by line, with steady laughs in between, and as each story progressed, it would get funnier and funnier until they reached the punch line, which was usually a scream. Everybody who took the podium was dynamite, but the one who would always close the show was Don Rickles. And that’s because no one could follow him. And they all knew it.

In the seventies, I’d gone back to news and become the entertainment director of KABC-TV. That meant a routine of doing movie reviews and also regular interviews with Hollywood stars. My favorite target to chase down, of course, was Don. I tried to make a point of covering most every function he attended, and our interviews dependably became great fun for both of us. Soon enough, we got to be friends. I found him to be a classy guy, always very well dressed, and he had a lovely wife, Barbara, who was perfect for him. Once I took a camera crew to Las Vegas to spend an afternoon in his suite with him before his show that night, talking about his life and his recent trip to England with Bob Hope for a royal performance and how Bob held his breath when Rickles got up to speak before the queen. Everything worked out—even the queen laughed. But I noticed, then and always, that everywhere Rickles went, there, too, would be his dear friend and valet, Harry Goins. Harry was a sweet, quiet man who’d met Rickles when he was a bartender at the old Slate Brothers Club on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, where Rickles had played many times. Don formed a warm bond with Harry and told him if his break into the big time ever came, he would take Harry along with him. Well, one day when that break arrived, Don did not forget his promise. He called Harry, and they were together from that point forward, with Harry keeping Don’s life organized both at home and on the road. Harry was family, even a part of the act. One thing I learned during that Vegas trip was that despite all of his antics, Rickles was the kind of friend who stayed loyal and faithful.

Anyway, our Vegas interview stretched into a three-parter, which concluded with the cameras following us down in the elevator to the Sahara Hotel’s show room, by way of navigating through the massive kitchen, where Rickles gently chided the help with threats of deportation, and then on to the side of the show room to capture those waiting moments before his grand entrance. Finally, with that trademark trumpet blaring his toreador theme, he made his way like a bullfighter through the raucous crowd, which was already on fire, cheering him on, wanting their inimitable Rickles experience, which he was about to unleash on them.

So went our Hollywood days, but even after I returned to New York in 1983, our relationship continued to grow, both on and off camera. Every time he passed through Manhattan we’d do another interview, and eventually began something of a ritual where we’d go at it, one-on-one, in the Bull & Bear saloon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. We would each take a bar stool, and once the tape rolled, no one would be safe—the camera crew, Gelman, the bartender, whoever was around him. Rickles was always dynamite, starting the very first time we did it back in 1994. He then happened to be on the road with Sinatra, who was also headquartered at the Waldorf, which made for an irresistible topic. That exchange went like this:

DON:
Sinatra’s up in his suite, and I said, “Frank, you wanna come downstairs with me and do Regis Philbin?” He threw up his breakfast.

ME:
What if we went upstairs and barged in on Frank? Don, I’ve never asked you for anything. I’d love to see Frank. How about it?

DON:
You have two daughters, right? Would you like to see them again?

Over the years when he came to town, we always found time to go dine with our wives, Barbara and Joy, among other friends and new acquaintances. One night he wanted to go to Rao’s, the most difficult restaurant in New York to get into. Located way up in East Harlem, it had for many years been a notorious gangster hangout, and even now, it still maintains that original mystique: the same tables and chairs, the same bar, the same slightly forbidding charm. Happily enough, Sonny Grosso, one of the New York cops who broke up the French Connection gang, invited us to join him at his regular Monday-night table there. Naturally, Rickles loved the place, and the small, exclusive crowd was thrilled by his presence. In no time, he was on his feet doling insults out around the room, with everybody loving it and Don loving it even more.

Somewhere along the way, with the help of the famed William Morris agent Lee Solomon, I developed my own nightclub act. Slowly, it began in the waning years of the Catskills resort show rooms, then moved on to New Jersey’s Club Bene, before I started becoming an opening act in Atlantic City for the likes of Steve and Eydie, Sergio Franchi, Tony Bennett, and, yes, God help me, one weekend with Don. Having seen him at work and knowing him all those years, the idea of suddenly sharing the same stage with him gave me the terrors. Just knowing he’d be backstage watching me perform was almost enough to keep me at home hiding under the bed. But he was wonderfully encouraging in private. On the other hand, since this was such a major kick for me, it made for a fun chance to tape an interview with him during the course of our special premiere, weekend engagement together. I would ask him to give a review of my act, something we could run on
Live!
the following week.

Here, for the record, is a little snippet from that warmhearted appraisal: “Hey, Regis, can I tell you something?” he began. “If we work together again, so help me, I’m going to the VA, and I’m going to ask to be sent back to Vietnam. The war’s over, but I’m going to just stay there in the jungle and blacken my face so nobody finds me. I never want to see you again, Regis. Really. Don’t come around anymore.” Of course, I was cracking up, even as he started playfully shoving me out of his dressing room. Not that he was finished with me yet: “The voice is weak! You stink! How’s that, Regis? You stink. You’re not good. You stink. And stay out of my life, Regis.
I never want to see you again! I hope you get a boil on your neck!
”

But the double billing of our acts was terrific fun—I loved it—and through the years we worked together at various places all over the country. Those were nights I will always remember. The show he’d put on backstage was just as good as whatever happened later onstage, with Rickles in his formal shirt swaddled under a bathrobe, minus his pants. (It’s the old-school showbiz rule: Pants go on last, before heading to the stage, so the pleats won’t be disturbed.) Sometime before, Harry Goins had sadly passed away, and Don luckily enlisted the help and watchful guidance of Tony Oppedisano, known to all as Tony O, who had accompanied Sinatra, in his later years, all over the world as his road manager and dedicated compatriot. But by now, Frank was gone. So were most of those great comedians from the sixties. But here was Don Rickles, heading toward his mid-eighties, still going out there onstage and firing away at his multigenerational audiences, giving them what they expected, a brash and feisty night full of laughs, the way no one else ever could.

And as the years go by, I realize more and more what a beautiful friend he is. We still work together now and again. And we talk on the phone all the time. If he doesn’t hear from me for a while, he’ll call up and start yelling at me, half seriously, about keeping in steadier touch—but only showing again what a wonderfully sensitive guy he really is. A true gentleman—and gentle man. I couldn’t have ever imagined Don as my friend fifty years ago when I sat in on that San Diego advertising meeting, but that’s the way it worked out. I never did stay out of his life, after all. And I love him.