Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (20 page)

Swank
was not the pornographic magazine we know today, I assume?

Entirely different, and I don’t say that with pride. Mr. Goodman—his own brother called him “Mr. Goodman”—told me to publish a “takeoff” on
Esquire
. This was difficult. I had a staff of one, the magazine was published on cheap paper, and it contained dozens of ads for automotive equipment and trusses, which are medical devices for hernia patients.

When I was there, it wasn’t even soft-core porn; it was flabby porn. There was no nudity, God forbid, but there were some pictures of women wearing bathing suits—not even bikinis—and winking. There were also stories from the trunk—
deep
in the trunk—from literary luminaries such as [novelist and playwright] William Saroyan and Graham Greene and Erskine Caldwell [author of the novel
Tobacco Road
]. When sales lagged, Mr. Goodman instructed me to “throw ’em a few ‘hot’ words.”
Nympho
was one that was considered to be arousing.
Dark triangle
would be put into play when the magazine was in desperate straits. We once used it in an article called “The Rock-Around Dolls of New Orleans.”

In doing research for this interview, I read issues of these magazines and found many of the articles to be incredibly funny and entertaining.

We tried to keep to a high standard, within the limits of our pathetic budget. Some awfully good writers passed through the company. The adventure magazines had huge circulations and were mostly geared to blue-collar types, war veterans, young men—up to one million readers, with no paid subscribers. But their popularity faded when World War II vets grew older and more explicit magazines became readily available. The only reader I’ve ever actually met in person is my brother-in-law.

Were these types of magazines called
armpit slicks
?

Only by the competition. They were also called
jockstrap magazines
.

Believe it or not, there was a lot of status involved.
True
magazine considered itself the Oxford University Press of the group and sniffed at us. We, in turn, sniffed at magazines we felt were shoddier than ours. There was a lot of sniffing going on.

We published a variety of story types. People being nibbled to death by animals was one type: “I Battled a Giant Otter.” There was no explanation as to why these stories fascinated readers for many years.

“Scratch the surface” stories were also a favorite. These were tales about a sleepy little town where citizens innocently go about their business—girls eating ice cream, boys delivering newspapers—but “scratch the surface” of one of these towns and you’d find a sin pit, a cauldron of vice and general naughtiness.

The revenge theme was popular, as well—a soldier treated poorly in a prison camp, who would set out to track down his abuser when the war ended. And stories about G.I.s stranded on Pacific islands were a hit among veterans—especially if the islands were populated by nymphos. “G.I. King of Nympho Island” was one title, I recall.

Sounds convincing.

Mr. Goodman always asked the same question when we showed him a story: “Is it true?” My answer was, “Sort of.” He’d take a puff of a thin cigar and walk off, apparently satisfied. He was a decent but frightening man.

Walter Kaylin, a favorite contributor, did a hugely popular story about a G.I. who is stranded on an island and becomes its ruler. The G.I. is carried about on the shoulders of a little man who has washed ashore with him. There wasn’t a nympho on the island, but it worked.

Who, by and large, wrote for these magazines?

Gifted, half-broken people—and I was one of them—who didn’t qualify for jobs at Time-Life or at the Hearst Company. I don’t think of them as being hired, so much as having just ended up there. In terms of ability, I would match them against anyone who worked in publishing at the time. We just didn’t look like the cover models for
GQ
.

Walter Wager was a contributor, and he went on to write more than twenty-five suspense novels, including, under a pseudonym, the
I Spy
series. He had a prosthetic hand that he would unscrew and toss on my desk when he delivered a new story. Ernest Tidyman worked for the company; he wrote the
Shaft
books and the first two movies. Also, the screenplay for
The French Connection
.

In the early sixties, I was editing
Swank
when Leicester Hemingway—pronounced “Lester”—came barreling into my office. He was Ernest’s brother, and he looked more like Ernest than Ernest himself. He called Ernest “Ernesto.” He was bluff and cheerful and handsome in the Clark Gable mold. He had gotten off a fishing boat that very day and wanted me to publish one of his stories. How could I say no? This was as close as I’d ever get to the master.

He left. I read the story. The first line was “Hi, ho, me hearties.” It was totally out of sync with what we were doing, and it was unreadable. I remember it being called “Avast.” So, I was in the position of having to turn down Ernest Hemingway’s brother.

A few years later, I went to a party given by George Plimpton, and I met Mary Hemingway, the last of Ernest’s four wives. I told her that I’d had the nicest meeting with Leicester. “What a wonderful man he is.”

“That
swine
!” she said. “How dare you mention his name in my presence!”

Apparently, this highly decent man was considered the black sheep of the family—at least by Mary. And that’s really saying something.

How many stories did you have to purchase for all of your magazines in a typical month?

Fifty or sixty.

Per month?

Yes. I was an incredibly fast reader—a human scanner. My train commute to work took more than two hours each way, a total of close to five hours. I got a lot of work done on that train—much more than I do now with a whole day free and clear. I wrote most of
Stern
on that train.

My best move at this job was to hire Mario Puzo, later the author of
The Godfather
. The candidates for the writing job got winnowed down to Puzo and Arthur Kretchmer, who later became the decades-long editorial director of
Playboy
. I knew how good Kretchmer was, but I needed someone who could write tons of stories from Day One, so I hired Puzo in 1960 at the princely salary of $150 a week. But there was an opportunity to dash off as many freelance stories as he wanted, thereby boosting his income considerably. He referred to this experience as his first “straight” job. When I called him at home to deliver the news, he kept saying in disbelief, “You mean it? You
really
mean it?”

Was Puzo capable of writing humor?

He was concerned about it. Now and then, at the height of his fame and prominence and commercial success, he would look off wistfully and ask, “How come Hollywood never calls me for comedy?”

There is some grisly humor in
The Godfather
. As for setting out consciously to write a funny book—I’m not sure. At the magazines, one of the perks as editor was that I got to choose the cartoons. There was an old cartoon agent, a real old Broadway type who stuttered. He would come stuttering into the office carrying a batch of cartoons, each of which had been rejected eight times already.

Mario insisted he could have done a better job of choosing the cartoons, but I never allowed him to try. It was the only disagreement we ever had.

What sort of stories would Puzo write for you?

You name it—war, women, desert islands, a few mini-
Godfather
s. At one point we ran out of World War II battles; how many times can you storm Anzio, Italy? So we had to make up a few battles. Puzo wrote one story, about a mythical battle, that drew piles of mail telling him he had misidentified a tank tread—but no one questioned the fictional battle itself.

There has never been a more natural storyteller. I suppose it was mildly sadistic of me, but I would show him an illustration for a thirty-thousand-word story that had to be written that night. He’d get a little green around the gills, but he’d show up the next morning with the story in hand—a little choppy, but essentially wonderful. He wrote, literally, millions of words for the magazines. I became a hero to him when I faced down the publisher and got him $750 for a story—a hitherto unheard-of figure.

Do you think this experience later helped when he wrote
The Godfather
?

He claimed that it did. If you look at his first novel,
The Dark Arena
[1955], you’ll see that the ability is there, but there is little in the way of forward motion. He said more than once that he began to learn about the elements of storytelling and narrative at our company.

I can’t resist telling you this: In 1963, Mario approached me and somewhat sheepishly said he was moonlighting on a novel, and he wanted to try out the title. He said, “I want to call it
The Godfather
. What do you think?”

I told him that it didn’t do much for me. “Sounds domestic. Who cares? If I were you, I’d take another shot at it.”

A look of steel came over his face. He walked off without saying a word. He was usually mild-mannered, but the look was terrifying. Years later, he always denied being “connected,” but anyone who saw that look would have to wonder. The thing is, I was right about the title. It would have been a poor choice for any book other than
The Godfather
.

In the mid-sixties, after the sale of the book, I heard him on the phone to his publisher, asking for more money. They said, “Mario, we just gave you two hundred thousand dollars.” He said, “Two hundred grand doesn’t last forever.”

Wonderful man—perhaps not the most intelligent person I’ve known, but surely the wisest. On one occasion, he saved my life.

How so?

I became friendly with the mobster “Crazy” Joe Gallo when he was released from prison in 1971. The actor Jerry Orbach, who starred [in 1967] in one of my plays,
Scuba Duba
, was also a pal of Joey’s.

Joey had a lot of writer friends—he had read a lot in prison. He loved [Jean-Paul] Sartre but hated [Albert] Camus, whom he called a “pussy.” When Joey was released, there were about fifty contracts out on his life. He was trying to soften his image by hanging around artistic types. His “family” would hold weekly Sunday-night parties at the Orbachs’ town house in Chelsea. I attended a few of these soirees, and I noticed that every twenty minutes or so Joey would go over to the window, pull back the drapes a bit, and peer outside.

I told Mario that I was attending these parties, and that I wanted to bring my wife and sons along. The food was great—Cuban cigars, everything quite lavish. The actor Ben Gazzara [
Husbands
] usually showed up, as did Neil Simon, and a great many luminaries. Mario considered what I told him and said, “What you are doing is
not
intelligent.” And that was it. I was invited to join Joey and a group at Umbertos Clam House the very night [April 7, 1972] he was gunned down. Mario played a part in my saying I had a previous engagement.

Let’s talk about the characters you create: They are often very likable, even when they shouldn’t be. One character, Harry Towns, who’s been featured in numerous short stories and in two novels since the early 1970s, is a failed screenwriter and father. He’s a drug addict who snorts coke the very day his mother dies. He sleeps with hookers. He takes his son to Las Vegas and basically forgets about him; he’s much more concerned about his own body lice. And yet, in the end, Harry Town remains very funny and likable.

The late Bill Styron [author of
Lie Down in Darkness
and
Sophie’s Choice
] paid me a compliment that I treasure. He said, “All of your work has great humanity.” Maybe he said that to all of his contemporaries, but he seemed to mean it. I tried to make the character of Harry—for all of his flaws—screamingly and hurtfully honest, and that may have provided some of whatever appeal he has. I’m a little smarter than Harry; he’s a bit more reckless than I am.

I have about a dozen voices that I can write—my
Candide
voice, the Noël Coward voice—but I keep coming back to Harry.

One Harry Towns story, “Just Back from the Coast,” ends with Harry watching the NASA moon landing in his ex-wife’s house, with her overseas and his child off at summer camp. He’s alone. Your characters, including Harry, tend to be very lonely, but your life seems like it was anything but.

I’m not sure what other lives are like—but one of my favorite words is
adventure
. With that said, for a Jewish guy an adventure can be a visit to a strange delicatessen. I have plenty of friends, acquaintances, family, but much of the time I enjoy my own company. Most of writing is thinking, and you can’t do much of it in a crowd. Whenever I used to duck out on a dinner with “the guys,” Mario would defend me by saying, “Bruce is a loner.”

Can the following be verified? That in the 1970s, you were the one-armed push-up champ at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side New York restaurant that was a gathering place for writers?

Yes.

How many did you do?

Who knows? I was probably too loaded to count.

Were you surrounded by a crowd of famous authors, cheering you on? Was Woody Allen anxious to compete?

Not really. But we would have various athletic contests, generally beginning at four in the morning. There were sprints down Second Avenue, for example. It got more macho as the evening progressed.

I remember [the film director and screenwriter] James Toback trying to perform some push-ups and running out of steam. The restaurant’s owner, Elaine Kaufman, said, “Put a broad under him.”

Is it true that, in the late sixties, you got into a fistfight with Norman Mailer?

Yes, at a party he was holding at his town house in Brooklyn Heights. Mailer was looking for a fight. Instead of getting mad, I patted him on his head and said, “Now, now, Norman. Let’s behave.” We made our way to the street, and a crowd formed. We circled each other and we tussled a bit. Eventually he dropped to the ground. I helped him up and he embraced me—but he then bit me on the shoulder. I saw the bite marks once I got home. I rushed to the hospital for a tetanus shot. I was afraid I was going to begin to froth at the mouth.