Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (6 page)

Judd:
You’re always able to make the next movie.

Albert:
I can make the next movie tomorrow. The thing that keeps me hesitant is the third act. What I mean is: The first act is writing, the second act is making, the third act is releasing. And if I can just get over that, nothing would stop me.

Judd:
Do you ever just think,
I’ve done so much—I’m a highly respected person—who gives a fuck about all that?

Albert:
Yes, I do. Listen, I like acting. I liked acting in your movie. I liked
Drive.
I like taking these parts, and that’s satisfying. I run into a lot of people who are really nice about “When’s your next movie coming out?” And I think about it. I just have to make sure I’m at that place where the third act wouldn’t bother me.

Judd:
Does that get worse as you get older?

Albert:
It probably gets better as you get closer to the end. It would be funny to think,
Oh, I have terminal cancer, but I’m worried about the cards.

Judd:
I’ve been done with
This Is 40
since the end of May, and it comes out at Christmas. It’s a seven-month gap, which is like telling a joke and waiting seven months to see if people laugh. It’s torture.

Albert:
There’s no real immediacy in movies. Even in comedy albums, the irony is, if I didn’t bring a comedy album to a friend’s and sit down and listen to it with them, I never heard my comedy albums played. I’ve never heard reactions to them.

Judd:
That’s what’s interesting about Twitter. I get tweets every night where someone says, “I’m watching
Freaks and Geeks
right now.” It’s a great way to connect with people who are watching your work at that very moment. Do you have that experience?

Albert:
Yeah, but Twitter is the devil’s playground.

Judd:
It sucked you in. You’re addicted now.

Albert:
I don’t know if I’m addicted. It’s a horrible waste of time for the writer of it, the reader of it. We will lose the war to China because of Twitter.

Judd:
So why are you still doing it?

Albert:
Well, because I always liked the ability to comment on a good story of the day. And it’s the easiest thing when you read the morning newspapers and then you go: “Look at this—they’re bombing Europe.” And it’s amazing, whenever you do anything political, I’m sure you know.

Judd:
The vitriol.

Albert:
“I hope you die!” It’s just so funny to me.

Judd:
If someone says, “I hope you die,” and I tweet back at them—

Albert:
They say, “No, I love you.”

Judd:
Yeah. Every time.

Albert:
Every time. I know. I love that. And they are so shocked. I had a guy that said, “Go drive your car into the ocean and never come up, you vile piece of shit.” And I said, “All of that from that comment?” And the guy said, “Oh, my God, I didn’t know you’d answer back. I love
Modern Romance
!”

Judd:
So you’re not currently writing a movie? Do you have notebooks? Do you have ideas?

Albert:
I have tons of ideas. One of the reasons I didn’t go into it again was I am enjoying acting and there were so many movies I turned down as an actor because I was making my own movies. Every time I see
Boogie Nights
—you know, I got offered the part that Burt Reynolds got. And I remember going into a screening room and seeing Paul Thomas Anderson. No one knew him yet, and I watched
Hard Eight
, and I thought,
Oh, this is good—this is someone you would like to take a chance with.
But I was just getting the money to make
The Muse
, and if you’re writing and directing and starring in a movie, you can’t stop.

Judd:
You said you were friends with Harry Nilsson?

Albert:
I was. He was one of these comedy-freak guys. He would come and see my shows and he was very sweet and a massive drinker. I didn’t drink and I wound up being the driver. And then he introduced me to John Lennon, because they were best friends. I spent a lot of time with Harry Nilsson and John Lennon during those May Pang years, when he was out here. Those guys would get rowdy, but John Lennon was certainly a fun person. And John Lennon, again, was a frustrated comedian. All these guys—comedy, to them, was the holy grail.

Judd:
So three single guys running around.

Albert:
Harry wasn’t even single. He was married. His wife was very forgiving with him leaving and coming back the next month. Look, sometimes it was too much. He was friends with Keith Moon. The Who were staying in Century City, and Harry said, “Come over. Keith is here—we’re having a thing.” Now, listen to this. I had just done a
Mike Douglas
in the afternoon and flew back from Philadelphia. And I come walking down the hall, and the housekeeper says, “Oh, you were on
Mike Douglas
—you were wonderful.” “Thank you so much.” I go in the room, and in about twenty minutes Keith Moon threw the television out the window. It was sixteen stories up. And now the room is destroyed, and I’m going:
I was recognized—I got to get out of here! How can I get out of the Century Plaza without being seen?
Because I know in court she’s going to go, “The guy on
The Mike Douglas Show
!” You know? And I’m sitting there with Keith trying to be a Jewish mother: “Don’t throw the TV. If you want to get your frustration out, go run around the block, because the TVs, they don’t want them thrown out the window.”

Judd:
So how old are you when you’re hanging out with John Lennon? Are you, like, twenty-three?

Albert:
Twenty-five.

Judd:
And did you grow up so much around show business that it didn’t blow your mind?

Albert:
It’s a great question, because nothing blew my mind in show business, and he was the only person—the first time I met him, Harry said, “Get in that car there,” and I got in the backseat, and there was John Lennon, and the one thing I prided myself on in my comedy, you know, I’m not a person that was ever on. I was funny. I knew when to stop. I wasn’t that manic on, and I was on with him, and I didn’t know how to get out of it. I didn’t know what to do. And he said—that still remains the greatest thing to me—he leaned over and said, “I’ve known you for a thousand years.” And I just never felt bad again.

Judd:
That’s right in the post-Beatles moment.

Albert:
He was going through a lot. He was separated from Yoko, but I remember my album,
Comedy Minus One
, had just come out and was in
Tower Records. So he and Harry and I went in. He bought them all. He bought three boxes of them. Then he drove down Sunset and hurled them out like Frisbees. And again I’m going, “Don’t do that. You’ll get a littering fine.” Boom. He’s just throwing them out on the street. So it’s good and bad. I mean, it helped my
Billboard
number, but now they are all over Sunset.

Judd:
Was that inspiring creatively?

Albert:
It was interesting to know what they think of comedy. They love comedy so much. It’s a language they don’t speak as eloquently. As much as you listen to the Beatles and say, “How do you write that song?” they’re going, “How did you say that? Where did that come from?”

Judd:
Were you doing stand-up in those years?

Albert:
I started on television. I had five years of network television before I ever got up on a stage. The first thing I ever did was in 1967. This guy Bill Keene had a little talk show at noon, and Gary Owens took over for a week. He knew about this dummy bit I used to do, this ventriloquist thing, and I was on
Keene at Noon.
From that I got an agent and three Steve Allen shows in 1968. I only had one bit. I did that and then I made up two other bits.

Judd:
Did you have to show them before?

Albert:
No. No. It was a time when people trusted you. They said, “What are you going to do?” “I’m going to do this—it will be four minutes.” Almost nobody laughed, but Steve Allen laughed so hard. And that was the laugh you needed. From that, in ’69, I was offered a spot as a regular on a Dean Martin show. Then, from ’70 to ’73, I must have done eighty variety shows. There were so many. Glen Campbell. Helen Reddy. The Everly Brothers. Johnny Cash.
Hollywood Palace.
After all of these shows, I did Merv—I did Merv Griffin’s CBS show fourteen times. And then, after all these years, I got a call from Neil Diamond. His manager said, “Would Albert want to open for Neil?” And I had never done that.

Judd:
You’d never done it live, on the road.

Albert:
My first couple of months was taking television bits and trying to make them fit into a live act. Eventually I felt comfortable onstage, but I
went back to doing primarily television. In the early 1970s,
Dick Cavett
was very hot. And I hadn’t done
Johnny Carson.
I’d done everything but, and I said to my agent, “I’d like to do
Dick Cavett.
I think that’s a cool show.” And they didn’t want me, and I went to
The Tonight Show.
By default. And that was one of the lucky breaks I had. I did, like, forty of those shows. Half of them don’t exist, because it was during those years in the seventies where they erased over the tape. It breaks my heart. I would do a new bit every time for Johnny, and that was a hell of an experience. Just once every five, six weeks. Make something up in the bathroom and go do it on
The Tonight Show
.

Judd:
That’s a lot of bits.

Albert:
A lot of bits, but you had Johnny’s confidence, and it didn’t matter if the audience laughed. Johnny laughed, and that’s all that ever mattered. But eventually they laugh. When Johnny laughs, they laugh.

Judd:
Did you develop a friendship with him?

Albert:
I would pay my respects and go to Las Vegas and see his stand-up, and he wasn’t an easy guy to be a friend with. He came into my dressing room one night before the show out of the blue and he sat me down and said, “You need to be married.” And this is a guy that’s been married three times.

Judd:
How old were you when he said that?

Albert:
I was twenty-eight. And I said, “How come?” And he said, “This is too hard to do alone.” Now, by the way, he’s right on that account. But I didn’t want to go through four wives just to accomplish that.

Judd:
How old were you when you got married?

Albert:
My forties. And I was very fortunate when I met Kimberly—things gelled. There weren’t all these problems, everybody who has these relationships. I was an expert at it. I made
Modern Romance.
People used to stop me on the street. I get this a lot, where they honk their horn and roll down the window and a couple says, “We got married because of
Modern Romance.
” I don’t know what to do. I feel so bad.

Judd:
What does that mean?

Albert:
I don’t know.

Judd:
That means, “We both like it.”

Albert:
That means they’re both screwed up. I had a very wise person tell me that he thinks marriage, when you’re younger, you keep thinking you can fix things. That’s what people do. And you can’t really fix anything. It shouldn’t be a massive difficult thing every day. Life’s difficult enough. You can fix little teeny things. If a person likes to eat their peas off a plate, and you like to eat them in a bowl, you might win at that. But that’s about it.

Judd:
Were you a difficult person to date?

Albert:
I wasn’t a bad boyfriend. I had relationships with some of the women who were in the movies. And I wasn’t a cheater. I was a pretty loyal guy.

Judd:
You weren’t like the guy in
Modern Romance.

Albert:
Very early on I was. I had a relationship that was immensely physical without the other components. And when you’re young, that’s confusing, because you’re being told, Well, what do you think relationships are? They are physical. But you need a little bit of everything. I tried my hand at the most funny women, but I’m not a person who believes you want a person like yourself. You want key things in common, but you don’t want the nutsiness to be the same, because that’s too much.

Judd:
What kind of dad are you? What are the TV rules?

Albert:
TV isn’t an issue. It’s more the screens. It’s the games, and there’s rules about that, and there’s nothing before homework. They are not big TV watchers during the day. They are at night. When I was a kid, that’s all we had, and I watched a lot of it. We could trick our parents and say it was good for us.

Judd:
What are your kids into?

Albert:
My daughter, Claire, is an amazing singer and writes songs. And is a good writer. And very creative, and can draw. Jake is the funniest kid I know. He’s got a real sense of humor. He’s become a reasonable magician.
I take him to these places on the weekend where they have what’s called Magic: The Gathering. And there’s like forty people who look like they work for Microsoft and my son. And he wins most nights. But the most important thing is that they’ve got good souls. They’ve got good hearts. They know what kid to befriend when that kid needs it….I don’t see the kind of cynicism that you see in other people.

Judd:
In us.

Albert:
Yeah, well, I don’t think I was a person who made fun of other kids. That wasn’t my style of comedy….I’ve never talked this much about myself.

Judd:
Do you like the idea of your kids going into show business?