How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

by Lenny Bruce

  She looked pleasant as she sat me down on the polyethylene-covered furniture. “Mr. Bruce, I want you should feel very relaxed wid me; efter all, you and I boat know things about life.”

  I thought to myself, Christ, who is going to believe this Hebrew National is a Greek? Well, maybe they would introduce her as a symbol of brotherhood. A Greek who lives in an old Jewish neighborhood and has assimilated.

  “What I’m gettin’ et, is, you are dishonest cheating me.”

  “Oh?” I said. After all, her prize was supposed to be a refrigerator-freezer combination, a washing machine and a TV set. I was going to get the refrigerator, she would get $50, and the producer would get the rest of the prizes.

  “Don’ ect tricky wid me, Sonny.”

  “Tricky? What the hell are you getting at?”

  “One tousend dollars, that’s what I’m getting at . . . I talked to my son in Westchester dis mornin’, end I told him to watch me on the telewision. He sed to me, ‘I’m so heppy for you, Momma, how much are you getting?’ I told him $50. Vell, he’s leffing so hard, I said, ‘Oh, I’m a comedian?’ He says, ‘Momma, you are de beggest sucker in de world, people are always teking edventage of you.’ Well, that is the trut, Mr. Bruce, people hev always made a good-time Benny out of me.

  “He told me that Shirley Beck, who lived downstairs from us when we lived in Laguna Beach last year—was it last year now, let me see, Vera was 32 years old, and Helen was pregnant in June, yes, last year—Shirley was on the Groucho Marx show and got $1000, and Mr. Bruce, $1000 is not $50.”

  “Is that right, Mrs. Stillman—$1000 is not $50? Do you realize that if this information gets into the wrong hands, our country could be in great danger? Now, look, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but gonsa geschikta”—which means ‘the whole thing’—it’s always good to throw in a couple of Yiddish words when you’re debating with a member of the older generation—“is for our refrigerator, which I need, and that’s the reason I’m getting you on the show. And for doing this for me, I want to give you $50 from my own pocket. The rest of the prizes are a washing machine and a TV set that the producer wants for letting me get you on the show in the first place. Now, I don’t know where any $1000 is going to come from.”

  “Vell, dat’s your headache already. I’m not doing it for a penny less than $1000.”

  I left her house a beaten man. I’m such an impulsive nut that as soon as I had heard about getting the refrigerator, I had promised ours to a couple who had just been married, and they were so happy about it. . . . I told Honey the bad news. She said, “That’s all right, Daddy, the old one is plenty good.”

  “Yes, but I promised to give it away, and I can’t disappoint these people.”

  “Why do you have to use Mrs. Stillman? Get another woman.”

  Of course! It still wasn’t too late. I was supposed to bring Mrs. Stillman down to the studio to sign her release the next day. Honey knew a woman of about 60 who made most of the strip wardrobe for the girls. She was very good-natured. We called her on the phone and she was perfect.

  The only slight problem was that they already had the wedding picture of Mrs. Stillman blown up ten feet high by four feet wide; and Mrs. McNamara, the seamstress, was about five feet, nine inches tall and weighed 160 pounds.

  I briefed her, and then we met the producer. “This is Mrs. Stillman,” I said, “our basket case.”

  “Well, she doesn’t look too much like her wedding picture. How the hell tall is her husband?”

  “Oh, he was a big man,” she said without missing a beat.

  The show was 36 hours away.

  And then I got a call from one of my best friends, a saxophone player. He was broke, and he had a chance to make some bread in a recording session, but he needed $50 to get his alto out of hock.

  It came to me in a flash.

  “Joe,” I said, “your mother’s going to give you that fifty dollars.”

  “Are you kidding, Lenny? She hasn’t got fifty cents. And if she has, she’s already spent it on wine.” Joe’s mother was the sweetest, best-natured woman I’ve ever met, but she did like her Napa Valley.

  I explained the TV deal to Joe, and he called his mother and then called me back, saying that it would be a perfect deal. Joe’s mother would be Mrs. McNamara, posing next to Mrs. Stillman’s picture, who was supposed to be Mrs. Polous, who was going to give to her Greek nephew—who was going to be deported—$7000 that she had been saving for him ever since his Uncle Nicholas had died. Then George and his Horn & Hardart sweetheart could be married, and I would get my refrigerator, and Joe’s mother could have $5 for wine (which I gave to her as an advance), Joe could have his $50 to get his alto out of hock, and the producer could go straight to jail if anything went wrong.

  At 8:30 on the morning of the show, Joe’s mother and I met the usher as we had been directed to do, and he sat her in a special seat, with me next or her. The people who were going to be “surprised” always had to be seated in the right seats so that the cameraman knew where to pick them out.

  Luckily, the producer of Your Mystery Mrs. came late, and when he saw Joe’s mother sitting next to me, clutching her brown paper bag twisted into the definite shape of a wine bottle (and she really was boxed—I had never seen her so drunk—and just think, she’d be on television in ten minutes), he kept staring at her with a what-the-hell-am-I-losing-my-mind-is-that-the-same-woman-who-was-up-in-my-office? look.

  Before the program started, a warm-up master of ceremonies told some disgusting water-closet-humor jokes. Then he explained about the applause. And then the show was on:

  “Somewhere in this fruitful land, someone nice needs a helping hand . . . and we present, with love and kisses (Organ fanfare.) . . . Your Mystery Mrs.!”

  The first act was a light, what they call humorous, bit. Four men were onstage behind a rig with their pants rolled up to their knees, so that you could see only their legs. If this woman could pick her husband’s legs, she and her husband could win a round trip to Holland to attend her father’s funeral.

  I heard a strange sound and my heart stopped. Joe’s mother was snoring. I gave her a good pinch and brought her out of it. When the announcer said, “And it’s lucky you, Mrs. Nicholas Polous!” the camera panned to her just in time to see her kissing the brown paper bag. I whispered, “Go ahead on up there, please. Don’t forget, you’re not doing this for Joe’s alto but for my icebox.”

  It took her two years to get up to the stage.

  The m.c. observed very quickly that his next guest was drunk. “Mrs. Polous is certainly a brave woman, folks. She was just discharged from the hospital this morning, and against doctor’s orders she’s here. I’m going down to help her.” This got the audience’s sympathy, and his quick thinking turned round one into a winner.

  They flashed the wedding picture on the screen, and you would have had to be blind not to have seen that this was not Mrs. Polous. There was a weight difference of about 80 pounds—which difference you might buy; people do lose and gain weight. But they don’t grow seven inches. Mrs. Stillman was a little tiny woman. Joe’s mother was even bigger than Mrs. McNamara.

  But when they flashed the picture on, all the women in the audience gave one of those “Oh, isn’t that sweet?” sighs. The announcer reminisced about the wonderful life that Mr. and Mrs. Polous had shared, and how brave she was, and how he knew that she was comforted by the memories of her late husband.

  And all Joe’s mother kept saying was, “Yeah, he was a hell of a man!”

  The m.c. didn’t quite believe what he had heard the first time, and he sort of laughed to cover up, but she kept saying it: “Yeah, he was a hell of a man!” He sensed she was going to go into a stream of profanity, and when I looked up inside the glass booth, I saw the producer staring down at me, nodding his head slowly and mechanically.

  All of a sudden I saw a cue card that the audience saw, too: “GET TO THE PRIZES AND GET HER THE HELL OFF!” This certainly confuse
d the studio audience. A brave woman like that, who had just gotten out of the hospital? Is that way to talk about her? Get to the prizes and get her the hell off?

  “. . . And a beautiful refrigerator with a double deep-freezer compartment will be sent to your home . . .”

  The show was over, and I hustled Joe’s mother into a cab, after she insisted I go back and get her the wine she had left under her seat.

  I came home with a bottle of champagne and two hollow-stemmed glasses. Honey loved that kind of glass, and she loved champagne. She was standing in the doorway with an I’ve-got-bad-news look on her face.

  “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

  “I just got a call from guess who—Mrs. Stillman. Her son in New York watched the show and saw her picture being used. He called his lawyer and they’re suing for invasion of privacy.”

  And sue they did. But everything turned out OK. I got the refrigerator, Joe got his alto, his mother got her wine, and Mrs. Stillman settled out of court.

  Naturally, though, the producer lost his job. I felt sort of bad about that, but soon enough he was producing a show twice as big as the Your Mystery Mrs. package. And this one is still running; still successful.

  All of which goes to prove the old adage, “You Can’t Keep a Good Crook Down . . .”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was starting to get desperate for us financially, and Honey said, “OK, I’ve got a chance to strip.”

  “Oh, Christ, no. I don’t want you to go back to stripping!”

  “Well, I’ll just go stripping for two weeks, and that’ll be it. I’ll play Las Vegas.”

  The thing was just to get enough money to make payments on the car—$120 a month. I had it all figured out. I got a room for seven dollars a week. I ran an ad in the paper: “LENNY THE GARDENER—LET ME EDGE, CLEAN AND MOW YOUR LAWN FOR $6.00.”

  And I lived, just for the hell of it, on 15 cents a day. I cooked for myself. I was making $90 in a burlesque joint, plus the money I got from gardening. I had Honey’s picture up and flowers in the window of my room, just like a shrine.

  I had never been separated from her before, and I just couldn’t wait for the two weeks of stripping in Vegas to end. But the night she was supposed to come home, she called up and said she had a chance to stay over for two extra weeks.

  “Are you kidding? Come home.”

  I begged and begged and begged, but she stayed there anyway. That was a telltale sign of where I stood in the marriage. I started eating more crap and more crap. I was a complete slave. I was really hung up on her.

  Eventually, Honey and I were to get divorced.

  I finally had some guts and got rid of her. She left me.

  We kept breaking up and going back together at my insistence. She was always better at holding out.

  After you break up and go back again enough times, you get hip to one thing: the time of day you break up is very important. If you run away in the middle of the night, there’s no place to go. You can’t wake your friends up, and in a small town you’re really screwed. It’s best to break up on your day off, in the afternoon. You get out and you go to the movies. Otherwise, like a schmuck, you’re standing on the lawn at three o’clock in the morning with a pillowcase full of clothing and the door locked behind you.

  That’s when you’re not proud that you’ve “lived next door to someone for 15 years and didn’t even know their name.”

  When I got divorced, a couple of major magazines, like Time, asked me, five years later, that dumb question: “What happened to your marriage?” I figured I would throw a real stock line and they would know I was putting them on and they would cool it.

  “What happened to my marriage? It was broken up by my mother-in-law.”

  And the reporter laughed—“Mother-in-law, ha, ha, what happened?”

  “My wife came home early from work one day and she found us in bed together.”

  “In bed—that’s perverse.”

  “Why? It was her mother, not mine.”

  One thing about getting divorced, it gave me about an hour’s worth of material. That’s not bad for an eight-year investment.

  But I didn’t know how screwed up I was over Honey until one night she came into the club where I was working and sat ringside with some guy. I completely fell apart, and was able to do only a nine-minute show.

  Guess who I saw today, my dear . . .

  How can I ever get married again? I’d have to say the same things to another woman that I had said to Honey. And I couldn’t say the same things to another woman because somehow that would be corrupt to me.

  I wrote half a musical, and I did blues from it on the Steve Allen show:

  All alone. All alone.

  Oh, what joy to be all alone.

  I’m happy alone, don’t you see.

  I’ve convinced you, now how about me?

  All alone.

  I’ll get my own pad. I’ll really swing. If you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them, I’ll go one better: I’ll live with a lot of them. I can really fix up a pad. I’ll get hi-fi stereo, a bullfight poster, a black coffee table—no, I’ll get a coffee table and make a door out of it—and a pearl-white phone. And sit back and relax and finally be all alone. All alone.

  Honey used to look so good standing up against the sink. I don’t want a sharp chick who quotes Kerouac; I just want to hear my old lady say, “Get up and fix the toilet, it’s still making noise.”

  All alone. All alone.

  I’ll just sit in my house all alone.

  Ah, but it’s better to be all alone.

  No more taking out the garbage,

  Hear her yakking on the phone.

  I gave her everything,

  Even my mother’s ring.

  But to me she was so petty.

  She didn’t know her best friend.

  Sometimes I wish she were dead,

  But it would probably take her two hours to get ready.

  When she’s old she’ll be sorry.

  Her future spells a murky gloom.

  I’ll be rich and famous

  And she’ll live in a furnished room.

  It’ll be too late, I won’t hear her moan.

  I’ll be living in my Nob Hill mansion,

  Rich and all alone.

  All alone. All alone. I’ll be happy and rich,

  And all alone.

  Yeah. I’ll be an old man in an empty hotel suite, and nobody’ll want me to co-sign.

  Four years of working in clubs—that’s what really made it for me—every night: doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it, getting bored and doing it different ways, no pressure on you, and all the other comedians are drunken bums who don’t show up, so I could try anything.

  The jazz musicians liked me. I was the only hippy around. Because I was young, other people started to work the same clubs for nothing, just to hang out, the way you do when you’re young. Hedy Lamarr would come to see me work, and Ernie Kovacs. Every joint I worked, I’d start to get a sort of following.

  “You should get out of this place,” I would be told, “you’re too good for these shithouses.” But I knew I wasn’t ready yet. I was still thinking in terms of “bits”—you know, “I’ve got my so-and-so bit, and I’ve got this other bit. I’ve got two complete shows.”

  Then, after a while, instead of just getting material together, little by little it started happening. I’d just go out with no bits.

  “Hey, how come you didn’t do any bits that show?”

  “Well, anything is a bit if I do it twice.”

  And I really started to become a craftsman, where I could just about structure anything into humor.

  Up until 1957, I had never gotten any write-ups. I had worked all these burlesque clubs, where they just had the ads for the club—the names of the girls in the show, and then on the bottom they had:

  Lenny Bruce, Master of Ceremonies

  Three Shows Nightly 9:30, 11:30, 1:30

  L
adies Invited, Plenty of Free Parking

  Now, when I went to San Francisco I stopped working these burlesque clubs and I worked the so-called straight clubs, such as Ann’s 440, where I would be the only act.

  Ordinarily an opening at a small club—and Ann’s 440 was a damned small club—would get no attention at all. But when I opened there, the press got wind of it, and I really blew the town apart.

  Hugh Hefner heard about me, and he came to San Francisco to hear me. He arranged for me to come to Chicago and work at The Cloister. They offered me $600, but I had been working Ann’s 440 on a percentage and getting $750 a week (not bad after coming from a room where I was making $90), so I asked for $800 at The Cloister, and if they held me over, I would get $1250 a week.

  I hadn’t realized till then how much material I had, because here were places where I wasn’t merely m.c.ing between 15 strippers. I could just wheel and deal for hours and hours. And the same people started coming every night, and there was always something different, and it would really drive them nuts. I had a whole bagful of tricks which I’d developed in the burlesque clubs.

  There was already this “in” kind of thing with all these musicians who had heard of me, but the controversy that actually did, let’s say, “make” me was the bit I called “Religions, Inc.”

  I had gotten a job as a writer at 20th Century-Fox. They were working on a picture called The Rocket Man, and Buddy Hackett told them, “Lenny’s very good, he’s funny and he can create and everything. Why don’t you let him have a crack at it?”

  So they told me to read the script over the weekend.

  The average writer knocks out 15–20 pages a day. I went and did about 150 pages over the weekend and I came back and really impressed the hell out of them. They changed the whole theme of the picture.

  The story was about these kids in an orphan asylum. It was just a cute little picture. Nothing unusual. I added to it—there was a Captain Talray who had a space show for kids. He goes to the orphan asylum and he gives the kids all these toys. And Georgie Winslow is the last kid he sees, and he doesn’t have a toy left for him, and so the kid is really sad. But then a space gun appears—Pchewwwww!—a magic gun.