Still Talking (8 page)

In the sixties my breakthrough joke came just after Melissa was born. I said on Carson, “When I had my baby, I screamed and screamed. And that was just during conception. ” That joke was quoted all across America. People were calling Edgar to ask, “What did she say?” That’s how repressed we all were in those days.

But those jokes also shocked because they came from a winning young girl in a nice little dress and pretty little pearls, her hair in a cute flip. I was everybody’s married daughter saying things no lady would ever talk about in public.

In those days funny women were expected to look weird and ugly and therefore nonthreatening to the ladies out front. At that time the two top female comediennes were Phyllis Diller and Totie Fields. A major part of Phyllis’s act was her wild drag-queen outfits, the gloves, the long cigarette holder and crazy hair, and that mad, cackling laugh.

When she came to see me at the Downstairs, I had no sense that she might have been envious of me. She laughed the loudest and afterward was gracious and charming. That night she looked as if she, could have been the head of the Mellon family, so chic and pulled together and understated. Little did I know that twentyfive years later, people would be saying “She’s so different in person” about me.

Totie was a throwback to the tough, vulgar Catskill comics-a chunky woman with pudgy hands and silver nails and Sammy Davis Vegas rings. She was probably sorry she did not have twelve pinkies so she could have a ring on every one. She was a brilliant comic, singing a couple of songs, talking, doing routines about panty hose, about her husband, George, about being fat. She came out of the lowest levels of show business, from toilets, a fat girl doing strip joints. And she was a total professional who knew how to work an audience, how to sell a joke.

Totie was a gutter fighter who must have been contemptuous of this earnest college graduate with a circle pin and a small delivery, this comedy parvenue who she thought had never paid any real dues in comedy, never done three shows a night in Sheboygan-and was coming into her territory. I could not understand why certain major clubs around the country refused to book me, and I learned later that Totie Fields was spreading the word that I was dirty and vicious, not funny.

Much later, in the mid-seventies, she lost her leg to diabetes and sent me a sweet letter from the hospital telling me she had watched me on Carson and liked my routine. A few months after that, when I was performing at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, there was a knock on the dressingroom door and it was Totie, alone, a hundred pounds lighter, limping badly, going blind, and brave, brave, brave. She had climbed two flights of steep metal stairs with her wooden leg to tell me she was in the audience and loved the show.

We talked for an hour-muted and soft. The room was garish with gangster furniture and flower arrangements. Sitting on the red velvet couch was this skinny lady with her cane. We talked about jokes-what works and what doesn’t work-about club owners we knew, funny things that had happened, and where comedy was going. This night was a rite of passage for me and, I hope, for her, too.

I adored Totie in that hour. We were just two women alone together; we both knew that she was dying and I would never see her again.

While choosing my material for the Carson show, I was extremely tense. In this business if you aren’t worried, that means you’re not working hard enough-which means you will not be around very long. The preparation was like studying for a test: Am I up-to-date? I would ask myself. Can I make this better? Are people bored with these subjects? The first time a joke comes to me, I’m tremendously amused, but after that I coldly rate them: good, medium, lightweight-fillers or killers.

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Everybody’s appearances on The Tonight Show are loosely scripted-like a rigged Ping-Pong match. I would arrive early at NBC and go over my routine line by line with a talent coordinator, working out the questions I wanted Carson to ask and my answers: “Have Johnny ask me, `Are you entertaining a lot?’ and I’ll say, `Well, Edgar had his ex-girlfriend, Fatima, over and .

. .’ “

The coordinator decided what would make Carson laugh, and when the lines were set, I memorized everything so I could act them out-and then put my notes in my purse to study onstage during the commercial breaks. When the show was over, I marked the material not usedpreparing already for the next time. I was the woman who keeps the crusts and makes bread pudding.

Waiting to go on, I would sit in the dressing room gazing at the monitor, studying with horrible fascination the guests who were not doing well, watching Johnny stop laughing and the guest speed up or slow down and twitch and stumble and sweat. In those early days I would be terrified, wondering, My God, is it the audience? Or the guest? Or Johnny?

I would hear reports on Carson-“Johnny’s in a good mood,” or “Watch out for Johnny; he’s upset.” You did not really have to be told. If his mood was bad, the halls backstage were quiet, the makeup room empty while he was there. Nobody wanted to be picked on, get that displaced anger, his cutting, sarcastic remarks. On the air he might not play with you during your spot, might just turn off and leave you marooned in silence. He would even sometimes behave this way with people he liked.

The stage manager would bring me from the dressing room to wait behind the curtain. As soon as I could hear what was happening onstage, the adrenaline would begin to pump. But maybe Carson would go off on a tangent, and I’d have to wait a few beats longer to make my entrance, and the adrenaline would fall away. Then suddenly I would hear Johnny say, “Now let’s bring her out”-and the energy would flash through me again. It’s a miracle I didn’t have a heart attack ….

The lights always blinded me at first as I would go to

the guest chair and fumble with my dress. At that moment I never looked at the audience. The whole relationship was just the two of us. I would start by saying, “Johnny, Johnny, if you only knew … ” as though a camera had been snuck into an intimate lunch with my brother, the confidant I told everything to because he wouldn’t tell a soul. That was the game I played in my mind. And Johnny went along, listening and commiserating with me.

Carson played me like a harp. He knew where I was going, knew when to come in and when to lean back. We were George Burns and Gracie Allen, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. I do not think Johnny Carson is in tune with many people, but I believe that somewhere inside him I was a kindred spirit, absolutely in tune comedically.

As a standup comedian, Johnny had an easy, WASPy charm. He came up as a boyish MC, and he never seemed to want to develop any great routines. You never thought, Jesus Christ, that was funny-like Woody Allen’s moose routine, George Carlin doing the Seven Words You Can’t Say, or Bill Cosby doing Noah. But Carson is still one of the great straight men of the century. He is a brilliant reactor who becomes the audience, asking its questions, having its reactions. This is extremely difficult. He has to know when to cut in with a question, when to stay out, when to make the face, when to be sincere, when to lean toward his guests and be entre nous, when to look at the audience and give the joke an extra twist. He has to know when a joke is big enough to sit back in his chair and laugh out loud.

His timing must be masterful. If he comes in with “How fat is she?” one beat off, the joke won’t work, because comedy is half music. So much has to do with rhythms and timing-when a beat comes, when a rest comes. If somebody sets you up wrong, it’s like a conductor tapping his baton; you have to stop, reset yourself, and start again.

Johnny never left me alone in the lifeboat. If a joke wasn’t working, he didn’t turn to the audience and give them a look that said, “She’s a kook,”

while he rowed away and left me sitting there.

I felt so grateful to Carson, so loyal, I refused for nearly

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two years to go on Merv Griffin’s show when it started in 1965. I would not appear on any network but NBC. I thought I was back in college-NBC, rah, rah, rah. I bought an NBC T-shirt. They were my family, and a family is sacred-your own through thick and thin.

Johnny Carson worked because he’s an old friend. America wants to be with someone comfortable at night. You have to laugh and cry over and over again with someone before you feel comfortable. Look at Phil. Look at Oprah. Look at the years it took to establish their shows. Look at Jay Leno. He’s wonderful, he has great humor, he’s ebullient. We know him. I think and hope he’ll do well.

I adored Johnny Carson. His leaving late-night television signified the end of an era, an end to his audience’s youth. Many performers of an older generation-whom you won’t see on Letterman or Arsenio-have lost their final theater. And Johnny’s absence, of course, will leave a big gap in America’s viewing habits.

He was kind and considerate to me. Many people thought he was aloof, but he is a loner who has nothing to say to a lot of people, and I understand that; I am the same way. Johnny was proud that he had found me. He found a lot of people-Woody Allen and Bill Cosby-and they moved on and became his equals. But I constantly thanked him for turning around my life, for saying, “She’s right,” and bringing me the career, the husband, the major break of doing Ed Sullivan:

I started on The Ed Sullivan Show right after I became pregnant. Edgar had shown no interest in having a child during the first two years of our marriage. I was caught up in my career and had never been the one who went “kitchy-koo” to that baby in the park, never said to the neighbor, “Oh, let me baby-sit little Tiffany.” I did not reinvite people who brought their kids over.

But one day while I was performing in Detroit, I stopped at a soda fountain for coffee and an English muffin, and a dark-haired woman came in with a baby. It was so cute, bundled up to twice its size in a snowsuit. They were

having a great time together, blowing on a straw, the kid laughing. The relationship was so tender and dear, so total, I said to myself, “I want one of those.”

I was shocked at this revelation. Shocked! But suddenly it was the right next step. For the first time, my life was stable and structured. 1 did not want to be telling jokes in nightclubs all my life, and part of growing out of that would be having a family. I had never been able to lavish love on anybody without thinking they might say, “Oh, stop it,” and make me self-conscious. My mother was wonderful, but basically cold. My father was preoccupied. Edgar was not a sponge for love. I was a touchy-feely person surrounded by repression.

Buried in me was a need to have somebody really, really, really my own, a babe I could kiss all over, up and down those little toesies. God knows I need love, but loving is what is truly wonderful. Having somebody to go home to, somebody to care for and worry about, is what takes you out of yourself. Being loved does not fill you up in the same complete way.

From that moment in Detroit I could not wait to conceive. I threw away my birth-control pills and telephoned the Roman Catholic archdiocese to find out about the rhythm method of birth control-how to take your temperature every day and avoid the days you are most fertile. The information was invaluable. Backward.

I was pregnant within two months. Edgar was just as thrilled as I was. He loved seeing me so happy, and I think, too, he was proud of this proof of manhood. He was no longer the outsider, the bachelor friend on the fringes of adult society. He was a family man with a rightful niche. By that time, after Frieda’s death, we had moved to Park Avenue, and now the proud father-to-be went out and rented a larger apartment on Fifth Avenue.

I put on maternity clothes after six weeks. I talked constantly to everybody about my pregnancy, figuring if I talked enough, God would not allow any problems. My baby was my friend from the day that rabbit died. I had read that if you talk directly to a baby growing inside you, its brains come alert faster. “Okay, sweetie puss, here we

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go,” I would be saying as I drove alone in the car. “The sun is shining.

When you see the sun, you’re going to love it. Your father wants to name you Carl or Carla. Trust me, that will never happen.”

Pregnancy went right into my act. I told audiences I was such a fabulous mother, I was breast-feeding my unborn child-and I was carrying so low, the kid’s feet were sticking out. Then I’d lean toward the audience and say, “Want to see?”

I complained that I was carrying so big, I looked like a mother kangaroo with everybody home, and felt like such a big fat tub, I was looking for a college kid to carry the baby for me. Then I could be down in Jamaica and she would just call me up and say, “Guess what? The kid’s here.” “Great!”

I would say. “What did I have?”

By then I was performing regularly on The Ed Sullivan Show, and when I tried to use those jokes-television was so strait-laced in those days-Ed said he would not even allow the word “pregnant” on the air. We finally compromised on “Soon I’m going to be hearing the pitter-patter of tiny feet.” Now movie stars are posing pregnant-and naked-on the covers of national magazines. Some change.

I first did Sullivan in 1967 because of a mistake. Ed had agreed to book Johnny Rivers, the folksinger. But by then in his career, Ed was getting more and more confused from what I think now was early Alzheimer’s. “Next week we’ll be having Joanie Rivers,” he announced on the air. So they had to let me in the door.

But before the final okay, Ed Sullivan wanted to see my act. So Edgar and I reported to his apartment in the Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue. In bright sunlight he sat behind a lacquered French desk in his living room on a pretty Louis XVI chair. I stood in front of the desk like a child before a teacher and said, “My hairdresser, Mr. Phyllis? We’re very, very close.

As a matter of fact, he was one of my bridesmaids.”

The most powerful man in TV entertainment sat stonefaced. He never smiled.