I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (9 page)

Then the album started selling. Everywhere.
The Button-Down Mind
shot to No. 1 on the Billboard record charts, and soon became a true phenomenon. The format was so new that it was called a “spoken-word” album, not a comedy album.

When the record hit, word got back to me from the neighborhood where I grew up that Louie Jordan, a childhood friend, proclaimed, “He was always the funniest guy on the corner.” Of course, that wasn’t exactly a guarantee of success. There are a lot of guys on a lot of corners in Chicago, but I appreciated the acknowledgment.

Warners wanted a sequel immediately, so I wrote some more and recorded
The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back
. I used every available piece of material, including “Bus Driver’s School.” The second album was released at the end of the year, and it quickly shot up the
Billboard
charts to No. 2, right behind the first album. Just like that, I had the top two albums in the country.

Playboy
magazine hailed me “the best new comedian of the decade.” Of course, there were still nine more years left in the decade so there was plenty of time to be supplanted.

The culmination of my surreal year came at the 1961 Grammy Awards saluting the best of 1960. I won best new artist of the year, best comedy performance for
The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back
, and album of the year for
The Button-Down Mind
. In the album of the year category, I beat out Frank Sinatra. It just got back to me recently that Frank was mad that he didn’t win. Amazing. But then again, it didn’t take too much to upset Frank.

It turns out my two albums held the No. 1 and No. 2 spots for two consecutive weeks. This record stayed in place until the simultaneous release of Guns N’ Roses
Use Your Illusion I
and
II
in 1991. When my daughter Jennifer delivered the news that Axl Rose had supplanted my record, I was philosophical about it. “Well, you hate to lose a record, especially when you don’t know you hold it, but at least it went to a friend.”

Really, I didn’t know I had the record. What good is a record if you don’t know you hold it?

Seriously, the sales statistics of my first two albums were impressive. I’ve read that
The Button-Down Mind
sold more than one million copies and outsold every album made by the Beatles in the sixties.
The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back
sold more than 500,000 copies. However, I’ve never seen the actual figures. After many years, my representatives and I decided to audit Warner Bros. Records.

And, no, I don’t know Axl Rose.

Everyone has probably heard stories about the fuzzy math used in Hollywood accounting. Without getting into the technical minutiae, the big complaint is that the studios deduct “expenses” from profitable films, TV shows, and records before paying the artist’s share. These expenses include overhead, which are things like leased BMWs and fuel for the company jet, and marketing costs, such as running the same ad five times in the first half hour of
The Young and the Restless.

Being a trained accountant, I figured I would have an advantage in the audit.

Not so. There were bigger problems than ledger entries. Warners called back and said with a straight face that the records had been destroyed in a fire. Apparently, the fire was just in the Ns; it didn’t touch the Ms or the Os.

Lately, however, I have begun to receive royalties on the albums on a quarterly basis. I’m not exactly sure how they calculate them without all the financial records and contracts that burned up in the Great Warners Office Fire of ’73, but they apparently have a formula. Just last week I received a check for $1.18.

Shortly after
The Button-Down Mind
hit the record charts, I was playing the Hungry Eye in San Francisco, and the line wrapped around the block. It seemed that everybody had to see this new comedian. I didn’t exactly think of myself as a celebrity, or even a bit celebrity, but I appreciated the attention.

One night during this sold-out, standing-room-only engagement, the stage manager came into my dressing room and told me that Vivien Leigh was in the audience. As if that wasn’t enough to make me nervous, he told me that she wanted to come backstage after the show and say hello.

Sure enough, five minutes after the show ended, Scarlett O’Hara was in my dressing room. Having divorced Sir Laurence Olivier, she was with her boyfriend, John Merrivale. The stammer I used in my act suddenly became part of my normal speech.

“Would you care to join us?” she asked me. “We are having a party at the Fairmont Hotel.”

“I, uh, I have another show to do …” I apologized.

“What time do you get through?”

“Usually about one-thirty in the morning,” I confessed, feeling like the janitor who works the night shift.

“That’s fine, the party would still be going on,” she said, tossing out, “It should be fun. Clifton Webb and George Cukor will be there.”

Wow
, I thought. I rushed through an abbreviated third show and caught a cab to the Fairmont. The party was in the presidential suite. For my first true party of movie stars, it immediately impressed. The martini glasses were iced. There was music playing and people were dancing in the middle of the living room.

Vivien Leigh glided over and greeted me. She apologized that George Cukor wasn’t feeling well and consequently had turned in early. “He’s sorry he missed you,” she said.

She introduced me around the room, and I began chatting with some of the guests. Clifton Webb sidled up next to me and introduced himself. Then he asked me if I would like to dance.

As hard as I tried to reverse roles and quickly come up with a line like “my dance card is full,” I couldn’t. Notwithstanding the fact that he had been a professional ballroom dancer since the age of nineteen, I politely declined. From then on, whenever I saw a Mr. Belvedere picture, my mind would wander back to that time.

My other auspicious invitation was from Bob Finkel, the producer of the 1960 Emmy Awards telecast—the
national
Emmy Awards. He called and asked if I could perform my “Abe Lincoln” routine on the show. I was working at Freddie’s, so I asked the owner for three days off. Reasoning that my appearance on TV would be good for business, he agreed to extend my run by three days to cover the lost days.

From the moment I arrived at the auditorium for rehearsals, I was in awe. Steve Allen was hosting and his players group, Tom Poston, Don Knotts, and Louie Nye, were all there. In his squeaky voice, and with his head bobbing, Don Knotts walked up and introduced himself to me. I wasn’t prepared to be treated like I belonged. As it turned out, I even ended up being called upon for overtime duty.

Mike and Elaine were performing on the show and they wanted to do a routine about shampoo. The producer, Bob Finkel, nixed the idea because Clairol was a major sponsor and they deemed the routine derogatory toward shampoo. When Mike Nichols heard the news, he insisted they were going to do the routine anyway. Told that they absolutely could not, Mike and Elaine walked.

It was the afternoon of the show, and Bob Finkel and the show’s head writer, Ed Simmons, came into the makeup room and asked me what else I could do. I volunteered “The Submarine Commander.” They asked if it would fit into the theme of the Emmy Awards, which was “television.” I performed a version of it for them. Both Bob and Ed, as well as the makeup people, seemed to like it, and they went off to figure out how to fit it into the show’s theme.

In the wake of the album’s release, my brand of humor quickly became synonymous with the “button-down mind.” It’s a catchy phrase, but I had nothing to do with it. The phrase was concocted by someone in the marketing department of Warner Bros. Records when we were trying to decide on a title. My suggestion was
The Most Celebrated New Comedian Since Attila the Hun.
Though the admen didn’t like my title, they agreed to use it as the subtitle.

So how did they come up with the “button-down mind”?

Four of the routines on the record were about advertising or marketing: “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue,” “Nobody Will Ever Play Baseball,” “The Khrushchev Landing Rehearsal,” and “Merchandising the Wright Brothers.” At the time, the uniform of the day on Madison Avenue was the button-down collar, so someone made the connection and I became synonymous with this ad slogan.

After the album broke, my price for performing stand-up skyrocketed from basically zero to $500 a week. I booked several dates at the new rate. Then I was offered an eye-popping $2,000 a week to play Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe. I wondered what the catch was. Do they beat you up between shows? Why in the world would they pay somebody $2,000 to tell jokes as the opening act for Peggy Lee?

No matter; I accepted.

When I arrived, I tracked down the entertainment director to learn the protocol for a stand-up earning two grand as an opening act.

“Am I supposed to gamble part of the money?” I asked. “You know, as a kick … a reinvestment in the casino. Because it seems like an awful lot of money.”

“No, no, we don’t want that at all,” he said. “We’ve had other performers gamble away their paychecks and they do terrible shows because they end up working for nothing. We don’t want you to gamble at all, just entertain the gamblers.”

With another Chicago winter looming and several choices brought on by the success of the album, I accepted a six-week job at the Crescendo in Los Angeles, largely because I knew the weather would be pleasant. I figured this whole bubble could burst, so I’d better take advantage of the sunshine when I could. The job called for me to headline for the first three weeks and to spend the second three weeks as the opening act for the piano player Errol Garner.

Truthfully, it was always in the back of my mind that one day I would walk up onstage, nobody would laugh, and the manager would toss me out into the street. Or worse, the audience just wouldn’t show up, which tells you, “We know your trick; we’re on to your trick.”

As I was packing for L.A., I received a phone call asking if I could come out a day early. A prominent entertainment attorney named Greg Bautzer wanted me to perform at a private party at his house. He was offering me $1,500 for the night, which is what I was being paid for an entire week at the Crescendo.

It turned out to be an informal audition to the big time. I’ll never forget standing in the middle of Greg Bautzer’s living room, doing “The Driving Instructor.” I looked one way and there was George Burns. Seated in the back of the room was Danny Kaye. Up front was Jack Benny. In my insecurity, I was reviewing my performance as I went:
Jack knows that I am timing this all wrong
….
Wait, he’s laughing
….
He’s still laughing
….
George is laughing, too
….
Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

Jack Benny actually became a fan of mine. He and his wife, Mary Livingstone, and George Burns and Gracie Allen came to the Crescendo to see me one night. I performed “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue,” and Jack loved it. After the show, he came backstage and said, “If I’m ever in the audience, finish the routine you’re doing and do ‘Abe Lincoln.’ ”

Years later, I obliged Jack. I was playing the Palmer House in Chicago, and I spotted Jack in the audience. It was my closing night, and he was opening the following night, so his presence wasn’t wholly unexpected.

By this time, I had come to feel that “Abe Lincoln” was too long (and thus I’ve even shortened it for this book). Audiences’ attention spans had shrunk, which was largely the result of the quick hit comedy of
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
, and I could feel them getting restless during some of my longer routines. My job as a comedian was to adjust to this cultural shift, so I cut “Abe Lincoln” in half.

After the show, Jack appeared backstage and listed everything I had left out. I could fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but I couldn’t fool Jack Benny any of the time.

I traveled constantly to take advantage of the offers that were pouring in, living from motel to hotel. I grew tired of looking at phony fruit bowls bolted to the tops of television sets and getting locked out of my room on the way back from the ice machine. The closets all had those hangers with the small hooks that are talking to you, warning, “You don’t really think you can take some of these, do you, Bob?” To rail against the system, I thought about stealing fifty or so and then having a small pole installed at home so I could use the hotel hangers.

It’s not just the hangers. Everything in the room is accusatory: The sheets and towels have the name of the establishment stamped on them, the pictures are screwed into the walls—usually crooked—and the bathrobes have signs in the pockets that say “Available for purchase at the hotel gift shop.” As if I’d steal a used robe.

There was plenty of downtime on the road, and I had difficulty filling it with any productive work. I was beginning to learn that there’s a certain satisfaction at the end of a day of having transferred a pile of papers from one side of a desk to the other. In comedy, the papers seem to stay stacked in the same place for days on end.

When it came time to write a new routine, I’d play a game with myself called “The Writing Routine.” I’d be sitting in a hotel room, and I’d get mad at myself. “Okay, you’re gonna have to write a routine. You haven’t written a routine in a while. It’s good discipline to sit down and write.”