Rubber Balls and Liquor (19 page)

My answer: “Seeing Wayne Newton, live.”

Again, not the funniest answer in the history of American comedy, or even in the history of Hungarian comedy, but you'd never know it from the howling fits of laughter that burst from the studio audience—a good deal of which had not been prerecorded.

My real answer: “Having a child.”

Valerie, a woman who actually made a chunk of her living singing at funerals, disagreed—a fool move that was right up there with trying to get booked at a graveside gig.

And I said as much. I followed Penn's lead and yelled out, “You fool!”

This in turn got another big response from the audience, and from the other celebrities, who were by now wondering when it might be their turn again. But they'd have to wait a while, because David and Valerie were unwilling to trust that I might actually know what I was talking about. They kept throwing to me, because of course they had no choice, and I kept answering the question correctly, in a mildly amusing way, and they kept disagreeing with me. Or, I'd offer up some ridiculous answer that couldn't possibly be true, and then they'd go and agree with me. We were getting nowhere. Then we'd break for commercial, and come back and continue on our way. Six or seven times, we went back and forth in this way, and each time I'd shout down to David or Valerie, “You fool!”—each time, to wild fits of hysterical and suspicious laughter, a good deal of which had not been prerecorded.

Finally, after we'd all had just about enough, I correctly suggested that the word
smog
comes from a combination of the words
smoke
and
fog
, and Officer Dave very smartly agreed with me … putting us all out of our misery.

It was, we were told, the single longest game in tic-tac-toe history—that is, if the producers of
Hollywood Squares
could even be trusted with tic-tac-toe history. All these years later, I still get stopped by people in airports who pull me aside and shout, “You fool!” Naturally, I assume they're referring to this interminable game of
Hollywood Squares
and to the catchphrase that developed on the back of it, although I suppose it's possible they're just referring to me in general.

And that might have been that, except that it wasn't, because we've reached the point in the story where careful readers are probably asking themselves, “Where the fuck is Fonzie?”

Good question. Remember, I promised to get back to our friend and admirer Henry Winkler before too terribly long, and I think we can all agree that it's been too terribly long enough. What happened was Whoopi Goldberg and her producing partners decided they'd had enough of the
Hollywood Squares
business and announced they'd be leaving the show. It's like they looked up one day and realized,
Hey, this is syndicated afternoon television. What the fuck are we doing?
This worried me, at first, because I'd carved out a nice little niche for myself, on these particular fringes of the entertainment industry, along with a nice little paycheck. I'd come to rely on these things. A little bit of money, a small measure of fame, an endless supply of complimentary beverages delivered directly to my upper-right-hand corner square … it all added up, and now I didn't want it to be taken away. Like every other self-centered, semi-celebrity person in show business, I considered the situation in terms of what it meant to me, to my career, to my bank account—and at just that moment it didn't look so hot.

For a couple weeks, I thought seriously of becoming a tire salesman, but then it was announced that the show would be continuing, and that Henry Winkler would be one of the new producers, and I thought,
Ayyyyyy
. I was in. Golden. Good to go.

This guy loved me, I remembered. After all, how could I forget? I still had that cum-stained sports jacket I was wearing when he gushed all over me. I'd called the Smithsonian, so they could put it on display, right next to Fonzie's leather biker jacket, but they hadn't come by to pick it up just yet.

(“Whatever you do,” the Smithsonian people said, “don't send it out to the cleaners.”)

So I set these developments aside, and figured I was all set. With my great and admiring pal Henry Winkler now in charge, a part of me thought they might even change the format and start calling it
Hollywood Square,
and I'd be the entire show.

But then I went to the set the next day and I could tell something was amiss. Or, maybe it was afoot. I can never tell with those two.
Afoot
,
amiss
 … something was
off
, let's just say that. The tip-off was that people came up to me and said things like, “We're really going to miss you around here, Gilbert.” Call me crazy, but I started to get an uneasy feeling that things weren't going to work out. And, sure enough, they didn't. The new producers wanted to give the show a whole new vibe, a whole new energy—and for some reason, when you think in terms of a whole new vibe, or a whole new energy, there's a tendency to think of anything but me.

To his great credit, I don't believe Henry Winkler was involved in this particular decision. It was his partners, deciding to go this other way. It was nothing personal, they all said. They had this really great idea, they all said. Something no other game show producer had ever thought of before. They wanted to hire only A-list superstars. The new guys got together and thought,
Hey, we've been going about this thing all wrong
. For years and years, they'd booked celebrity guests like Charley Weaver and Jo Anne Worley and Gilbert Gottfried and figured that was good enough, when all along they should have been asking Clark Gable and Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. It had just never occurred to them, that's all. So now they were sitting around, trying to freshen up their tired old show, saying, “Let's get Tom Cruise to be the center square.”

Or, “What about Julia Roberts, is she still big enough? We'll put her on the ‘maybe' list.”

And then they'd start making a flurry of phone calls that would never go anywhere and they'd wind up hiring some guy from a toilet paper commercial. It never occurred to them that Robert De Niro might have something better to do. Or that Leonardo DiCaprio felt his name was long enough without adding, “… to block.”

In the meantime, people at home were writing in, wondering what had happened to Gilbert Gottfried. I wouldn't exactly call it a groundswell, but it was certainly swell. Out there in the heartland, where people actually watch this stuff, I'd struck some sort of chord. It turned out that television audiences actually liked me up there, in the upper-right-hand corner, cracking mildly amusing jokes in a slightly offensive manner. At the very least, they noticed that I was gone, which was something. (It wasn't a lot, mind you, but it was something.) And yet for a long, long time, I never heard from my pal Henry Winkler on this. Well, this wasn't entirely true. Every once in a while, I'd pick up the phone and hear someone say, “Ayyyyyy!” and then hang up, and I could only assume it was Fonzie, letting me know in his own way that even he couldn't rescue me from the vast wasteland of washed-up television game show stars.

But that's Hollywood for you, right? At least, that's Hollywood for
me
.

 

 

10

Celebrity Depth Chart

I'm a firm believer in fame and fortune—mostly, mine. Tell me how much money you have in the bank, or how famous you are, and I'll tune right out, but take an interest in how well
I'm
doing and we can be friends for life. Or at least for the time being.

It's interesting to me that these two markers of success often go hand in hand. I can understand this, because one has quite a lot to do with the other, but on the other hand in hand that's not always the case. You can be world-famous and poor as dirt. Or, you can be one of the richest people on the planet and nobody has heard of you except the people you pay to mismanage your money or give you unnecessary career advice.

The fortune part of being successful is not terribly interesting, because you can measure it, so long as it doesn't involve too many offshore investments. You can attach a number to it and right away you know where you stand. There's nothing to interpret or take into account because it's all right there. The fame part, however, leaves a little something to the imagination or to your own inflated sense of importance. This is especially interesting in the weirdly self-indulgent world of celebrity where I happen to live—a place where those of us who have deliberately set out in search of fame are constantly measuring where we stand in relation to every other person who ever wanted to be famous.

Or maybe it's just me, doing all this measuring. Yeah, I suppose it's possible that I'm the only pathetic loser in the loosely affiliated club of celebrity who keeps running tabs on his place in the pop cultural firmament. Personally, I don't believe that this is the case, but I must allow that such a thing is possible if I hope to come across in these pages with anything resembling credibility.

(And speaking of credibility, I'm told that if you stand back and look at things in just the right way, and if you catch these aspects of character in just the right light, credibility in this regard has been known to resemble envy, but keep in mind I have no personal experience in this area. It's just what I've been told.)

It is, however, an absolute truth that with each rung on the ladder of celebrity we climb past another pathetic loser on his or her way up or down. Line us all up and take us all in, all at once, and by some measure or other we celebrities and semi-celebrities and
wannabe
celebrities will be slightly more or somewhat more or substantially more famous than the person on the adjacent rung—or, slightly less or somewhat less or substantially less famous, as the case may be. (Which, in my case, is very often the case, as the case may be.)

And so, since my credibility has been lightly tossed into question—and here I might have used the word
thrown
in place of this light tossing, except I've never been particularly good at sports and I've been told I throw like a girl—I feel compelled to let you readers in on a little secret: there's a list. Yep, it's true. We keep score. Just to be clear: you didn't hear it from me, but there is definitely a list. I'm not at liberty to say where this list is kept, or who is charged with keeping it, but you'll have to trust me on this—me, and the editors of
Us
magazine, but that's as much as I'm going to say.

Rest assured, we celebrities know where we stand, at all times. We always know which pathetic loser is just above us, and which pathetic loser is just below, and what we have to do to improve our position on the leader board. For one of us to rise, another must fall.

Consider: as of this writing, I am looking directly up the skirt of Lauren Tewes, the hardly remembered actress who is perhaps best hardly remembered for her role as Julie McCoy, the cruise director on TV's
The Love Boat.
If you're keeping score, Lauren Tewes is resting on rung #1,163, while I'm perched somewhat halfheartedly on rung #1,164. Just below me, at #1,165, is Florence Stanley, the gravelly-voiced actress who is perhaps best hardly remembered for playing Abe Vigoda's wife on TV's
Fish.

(Careful readers will note that Florence Stanley has been dead since 2003, but in my defense for being just barely ahead of a dead sitcom actress let me point out that Florence Stanley lives on in reruns, and in the hearts and minds of devoted
Fish
viewers. Also, without really realizing it, I seem to have played a role in improving her standing by referring to her in a throwaway aside during a previous chapter—and by
throwaway
I of course mean
lightly tossed
. Before that ill-advised reference, which I'm trying to cut in editing, poor Florence was all the way down at #2,713, which just goes to show you the power of a
lightly tossed-off
aside in a minor work of semi-celebrity nonfiction.)

(Confused readers will wonder just how it is they're supposed to pronounce Lauren Tewes's name, and just how it is that a guy like me can be marginally less famous than someone whose name you can't even pronounce. But that's the sheer genius of Lauren Tewes's celebrity, if you must know. You're not supposed to say her name out loud. Legend has it that something bad happens in Bangladesh, or quite possibly Piscataway, whenever someone tries to speak her name. That's the elusive power of Lauren Tewes and her particular brand of celebrity. We dare not give it voice. We merely acknowledge it, and admire her body of work, and move on.)

My current position on the celebrity ladder presents another one of those delicious ironies I wrote about earlier, because
The Love Boat
itself served as a kind of barometer of fame. If you were on your way up the celebrity ladder, but not yet high enough to have any sort of name recognition or public following, the producers would never have considered you for a guest-starring role. If you were so high up on that celebrity ladder that when you looked down at us little people we appeared through your rose-colored glasses as specks or ants or squirming bits of sperm as they might seem through a microscope, then you would have never considered the producers' requests for you to sign on for a guest-starring role. You needed to be in just the right spot, at just the right time, in order to win a coveted trip aboard the
Pacific Princess
—kind of like being just famous enough to accept an invitation to appear on
Hollywood Squares,
only with motion sickness and a lovely, all-you-can-eat buffet.