My Anecdotal Life

by Carl Reiner

  Which brings us to 1946, and the spirited negotiation my agent and I had with Herman Levin, anent a leading role in the road company of Call Me Mister.

  HERMAN LEVIN

  Carl, did you see the show?

  ME

  Before I left for the summer—you were kind enough to give me two free tickets. Sensational show!

  HERMAN LEVIN

  And a sensational part for you, right?

  ME

  Right!

  HERMAN LEVIN

  So, how much will you pay to play that sensational part?

  [Those were Herman Levin’s exact words, and he stared at me waiting for an answer.]

  ME

  Well, as much as I would love to play the part, I can’t afford more than fifty dollars a week.

  HERMAN LEVIN

  Tell you what, instead of you paying us, how about signing a run-of-the-play contract and we pay you two hundred dollars a week to start, and, if you’re not dismissed after two weeks, we’ll up your salary to two hundred fifty.

  [I looked at Maurice, who nodded his approval, and I started to nod mine but stopped when Herman Levin held up his hand.]

  HERMAN LEVIN

  Before you take the deal, there is one proviso. Under no circumstances are you to petition me for a raise. Two hundred fifty dollars a week is it! I don’t want you sending me your great reviews from out-of-town critics and saying you deserve a raise. I expect you to get great reviews—if you don’t get great reviews, you’re not doing your job—and should give us a refund.

  I accepted Herman Levin’s deal and signed the contract. We opened in New Haven, played a week, then a week in Philadelphia, then the important opening in Boston. The financial success of the entire tour depended on how well we did here.

  Opening night at the Shubert Theater was an exciting and exhilarating experience. From the opening number, in which we hear a trainful of returning servicemen sing “This Train Is a Goin’ Home Train,” to every sketch and musical number that followed, we could feel and hear the audience’s approval. At the curtain calls, the applause that greeted each principal as he or she stepped forward was loud and prolonged. We all were hoping that this first-night reaction would translate itself into at least a month’s run at the Shubert.

  The following evening, after reading the rave reviews that the show and all its performers received in the local newspapers, including the “important for business” review in the Boston Globe, our beloved stage manager, Biff Liff, who went on to become a force on Broadway, shouted to everyone as we came through the stage door, “Send out your laundry!”—an old show business phrase that trumpeted a long run, a phrase that has become obsolete with the advent of one-day service.

  The show ran not a month but almost five months, and broke a twenty-five-year-old record for touring companies held by The Student Prince. I could not imagine life getting any better than this. A lead in a hit show, a loving, pregnant wife, and a career-enhancing opportunity right next door!

  Adjacent to the Shubert Theater was the Hotel Bradford and its famed nightclub, the Bradford Roof. Their marquees were side by side. One read Call Me Mister and the other, Now Playing at the Bradford Roof, Willie Shore. One afternoon, Maurice Lapue called from New York and proposed a deal he insisted that I not pass up—a week’s engagement at the Bradford Roof!

  “Think about it, Carl,” he pitched, “your name on two marquees. Call Me Mister with Carl Reiner at the Shubert, and Now Playing at the Bradford Roof, Carl Reiner! In person in both places! Nobody has ever had his name on two side-by-side marquees!”

  I was flattered, frightened and, at twenty-four, fearless but not feckless.

  “Maurice,” I pointed out, “you know that my name isn’t on the Shubert marquee.”

  “It will be as soon as I call Herman Levin. He’s no dope—he’ll see its publicity value.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t see how I can do eight shows a week…”

  “Carl, the curtain comes down at eleven-oh-five, you leave your makeup on, change into a tux, run upstairs, and do a midnight show.”

  Maurice could not convince Herman Levin to put my name on the marquee, but he convinced me that playing the Bradford Roof was the opportunity of a lifetime. He arranged for me to see Willy Shore at his midnight show. What I saw was a man in total control of his material and his audience. He “killed the people,” as the saying goes, and I realized that with my material, I couldn’t even harm the people. I told Maurice that playing the club might be a problem.

  “What’s the problem? The money? Two bills, almost what you get from Mister—and for less work.”

  “No, the problem is that I don’t have a real nightclub act.”

  “Just do what you did at Lake Spofford.”

  “It’s not a polished act, and I don’t have opening and closing songs, like all nightclub comedians have.”

  “So, polish up your act and find a couple of songs—you got a whole week before you open. Problem solved!”

  I spent the week choosing material that I thought would be appropriate for the gig and found not an opening song but a calypso song that I thought amusing, “Men Smart, Women Smarter.”

  Scattered about the club on the exciting opening night were many of the cast members of Call Me Mister, among them Bob Fosse, Betty Kean, Howard Morris, and Buddy Hackett, who were there to support me, and they did. They all laughed louder and applauded longer than they would have were they being honest.

  The following day, Buddy Hackett, who went on to become one of the truly great nightclub performers, shook my hand and told me that I “really stank.” I learned from that engagement that I was not cut out to be a nightclub comedian. I hold in awe those chosen few who, night after night and year after year, stand up in clubs and make audiences scream with laughter. Of the old guard, at their best, there were none better than Buddy, Shecky Green, Danny Thomas, Milton Berle, Jack Carter, Jackie Miles, Jan Murray, Alan King and later, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, who took stand-up comedy to a new level. I’m sure I left out some great comedians who deserve to be mentioned, and I assume you’re adding them to my list right now.

  The sad thing about the Bradford Roof engagement is that, even though I was bad, the business was good enough for them not to fire me. I had to honor my contract and finish out the long, loooooooooooong week.

  Two weeks before ending our run in Boston and going on the road to play in Buffalo, Toronto, Detroit, and Cleveland for a week each, Estelle, who was now in her ninth month, left our Boston apartment and returned to her mother’s Bronx apartment to await the arrival of our baby—who checked in at Beth Israel Hospital on Saturday night, March 6, 1947! I received that happy news backstage, right after the show’s finale. I was able to fly down, late Saturday night, there being no show on Sunday, and see my wife and Robert, the healthy, six-pound, twelve-ounce baby boy whom we had wrought, and she had delivered. It was a happy time for us but not an easy time, especially not for Estelle, who had been in hard labor for thirty-eight hours while I was jumping around on a stage in Boston. That weekend, I stayed long enough to see that Estelle had weathered a difficult birth, and that it was worth the effort. Robbie was a beautiful, alert baby, and an excellent nurser.

  A word in praise for my wife. In those days, among modern mothers, there were very few who considered nursing their babies. Most pediatricians made themselves indispensable by encouraging new mothers to make their lives easier by bottle-feeding their babies. A nursing mother has no need to pay the good doctor a weekly visit to adjust her baby’s formula. Estelle actually had to scrounge around for information about how to breast-feed a baby, a primary function that is as natural as … breast-feeding! She got it not from her pediatrician but from her friend, Bessie Smith, a black social worker who was raised in the South, the home of breast-fed people. She recommended The Rights of Infants, a slim, great how-to book that still sits on a bookshelf in our home.

  You may think that I am spending an inor
dinate amount of time on this subject, but if it weren’t for breast-feeding, there was little chance that our new little family would have been together for a memorable, year-long road tour. When Estelle joined me in Chicago, Robbie was six weeks old. I had missed four weeks of his first days on earth, but in the next six months, I missed only the hours I spent performing at the Blackstone Theater.

  Before arriving in Chicago, the show was wonderfully received in the four cities we played, and my reviews were such that I was tempted to send them to Herman Levin and ask him to reconsider the no-raise-under-any-circumstances oral contract he had coerced me into making with him. Two incidents occurred that gave me even stronger motivation to dishonor our producer’s ironclad edict. Someone had sent Biff Liff, our stage manager par excellence, a column from the Chicago Tribune that was written by Claudia Cassidy, the paper’s esteemed, all-powerful drama critic. I ask your indulgence while I attempt to counteract the effects of my dismal failure at the Bradford Roof with a positive personal story that still thrills me to recall.

  Claudia Cassidy had seen Call Me Mister on Broadway and hated everything about it. For some dark reason, we shall never know why, she wrote a particularly venomous critique of the wondrous Jules Munshin. He had to have done something unspeakably horrid to her to have provoked such vindictiveness. Miss Cassidy had suggested in her article that if the road company was anywhere near as bad as the one playing on Broadway, then we would do ourselves and the local theatergoers a service by bypassing Chicago or just closing down.

  The management was nervous, as well they should have been. The show’s financial success depended on a Chicago run at least as long as the run in Boston. To add to the cast’s anxieties, on the eve of the Chicago opening, our leading lady, Betty Kean, comedienne and tap dancer extraordinaire, and much beloved by the company, had flown to New York for a short weekend visit that turned out to be a long forever visit. She would not be coming back to the show, and no one had a clue as to why she made this untimely decision. Subsequently, we learned that she was pregnant and had been advised by her doctor that her pregnancy would be jeopardized if she continued performing the strenuous musical and dance numbers.

  We arrived in Chicago on Sunday, which gave us two whole days to find and rehearse a suitable replacement for our multitalented leading star. To find someone who could do the comedy sketches and sing and dance as well as Betty seemed an impossible task. The management solved it by hiring two people to do her part. Marilyn Day, a beautiful young singer with a thrilling voice, would do the musical numbers, and Charlene Harris, a versatile comedienne and one of the understudies, would perform the comedy sketches. In two days, by rehearsing as hard as Ruby Keeler did in Forty-second Street, Marilyn and Charlene made themselves ready for our Tuesday opening.

  If we were lucky, Claudia Cassidy, who had suggested we bypass Chicago, would bypass our show. No such luck. On opening night there she was, sitting in her usual seat, pad in hand, ready to break our hearts and destroy the producer’s dreams of another record-breaking run.

  That night’s performance turned out to be one of our very best. The emotionally charged cast members, all pulling hard for our two courageous, underrehearsed replacements to succeed, caused a company-sized adrenaline rush. We all knew we were “doing good,” the audience knew we were “doing good”—but did the person with the poison pen recognize this, or would she tell our potential ticket buyers we “did rotten” and to spend their money elsewhere? During the performance, Biff Liff kept an eye on Miss Cassidy as she scribbled notes on her program. He was looking for some clue to her mood, but she sat solemn faced. Midway through the second act, she dropped a not-too-subtle clue by springing from her seat, bolting up the aisle and out the theater.

  The following morning, Claudia Cassidy’s review was one that none of us was anxious to read. She started by writing that “nine times out of ten the duplicate of a hit Broadway show is usually inferior to the original,” and reiterated how she had disliked some of the performances in the original cast. She went on to say that what she saw at the Blackstone Theater last night “deserved a salute!” She singled me out and heaped upon me the kind of praise an actor dreams about getting from anyone, but especially from a hard-nosed critic. In praising me, Miss Cassidy took a sadist’s pleasure in revisiting Jules Munshin’s performance and ripping him again. Jules Munshin, who had a prodigious talent and was a bona fide sensation in New York, could easily have sued her for slander and won.

  The last line of the unexpected review, which I am copying from a brittle Dead Sea Scroll-like, browned newspaper clipping dated May 15, 1947, reads: “… but most of all, Mr. Reiner, who easily could have his name in lights if that were the true reward of stardom.”

  If ever there was a time and a reason to reopen salary negotiations, it was that moment! Because Betty Kean’s roles were being performed by two actors, I became the nominal comedy star of the show. I didn’t get my name in lights, but I was now listed first in the program’s Who’s Who in the Cast. However much I was tempted to ask for a raise, I honored Herman Levin’s edict, no raises, no matter what, and went about my business—and business was great! Everything about Chicago was great—and exciting, especially my new role as a father.

  For the six-month Chicago run, Estelle and I lived with our baby in a one-room apartment at the New Lawrence Hotel. We slept on a Murphy bed that we pulled down from the wall the first day we moved in and kept down for the entire stay. We cooked on a two-burner hot plate that was set up in a small alcove, in which were crammed a small sink and a small refrigerator. One might call our quarters cramped, but very, very cramped would be more accurate. However, we were too happy and too involved in learning how to raise an infant to feel anything but lucky to be where we were.

  After a few weeks, the show was on its tracks. Performing it every night and twice on matinee days was still pleasurable but had become routine. On the other hand, the backstage dramas were anything but routine. Two of the performers—Bob Fosse and his dancing partner, Marian Niles—fell in love and became life partners—temporary life partners, as it turned out. Robbie attended his first big church wedding when he was three months old. I have an eight-millimeter film record of the bride and groom coming out of the church, followed by Estelle and a tiny Robbie, in the arms of the gallant William Warfield.

  There were other backstage dramas that ended not in marriage but in angry outbursts—many of these triggered by cast members who were outraged with having to share a dressing room with, as one upset party put it, “You selfish, son-of-a-bitch, pain-in-the-ass, never-spring-for-a-fucking-box-of-Kleenex, no-talent phony!” I don’t remember what the pairings were and what other major bones of contention there were, but among the warring roommates were:

  Buddy Hackett, an extraordinarily creative and bright comedian who was as unpredictable and volatile as he was creative; Alan Dreeben, (a.k.a. Alan Dexter), a lover of automobiles (the classic Duesenberg in particular), and one of the most brilliant and unsung comedy talents ever; Howard Morris, an army buddy with whom I had worked at the NYA Radio Workshop, and later on Your Show of Shows, was now caught in the backstage crossfire, and I felt that the least I could do for an old friend was offer him a safe haven in my dressing room; and William Le Massena, a gentleman, a classically trained actor, and possessor of a deep, booming voice, which he used effectively to rail at his “slovenly, thoughtless, self-centered bastard” of a roommate.

  Starting in the second month of our Chicago run, I had a steady stream of disgruntled boarders sharing my cramped dressing room. I’m not quite sure of the order, but I remember Buddy Hackett stomping in, carrying all of his costumes rolled up in a ball.

  “I can’t take it up there with that fuckin’ shithead!” he announced, tossing his costumes on the floor. “Can I change in here for a while, just until I kill him?” Buddy let the shithead live, and soon returned to his dressing room.

  Alan Dreeben was my roommate for the longest spell and, at o
ne time, I believe I had two squatters sharing my space and venting their spleen. Since I was the only member of the company who had a baby, I think they looked upon me as a father figure. There was no denying that, at twenty-five, I had inadvertently become a stabilizing influence in the company and, as it turned out, this was not a bad thing to be.

  Alan Dreeben was the only member of the company to own a car. When he learned we would be in Chicago for six months, he ran out and bought a shiny, good-as-new secondhand, six-hundred-dollar Ford. He loved that six-cylinder sedan and treated it with the care and respect he would a Duesenburg. He told us each day where he had driven “her” and how that “little beauty purred” when he opened her up on Lake Shore Drive. One matinee, Alan, who was in my dressing room putting on his makeup, was called to the backstage pay phone. I was coming up the alley to the stage door when I heard some madman cursing the “sick damned world” and the “dirty rotten bastard sonofabitch bastard bastard” who “should be arrested, shot, and kicked in the balls!” A moment later I heard the madman groaning and straining, and then a strange splintering sound, as if something was ripped from a wall. I learned, when a big block of metal came bouncing its way toward me, that Alan had torn an entire phone box from its mooring and shot-putted it in my direction. I managed to avoid getting hit, but I was unnerved. Alan had learned from his wife, Betty, that some kid, firing a BB gun, had made a small hole in his beloved car’s windshield! Alan continued to scream about this “sick, fucking vandal” and stopped only when I reminded him that we had a show to do. It was after the “flying phone missile” incident that I composed the following letter.

  July 15, 1947

  Dear Mr. Levin,

  Neither for my good reviews in Boston, Buffalo, Toronto, Cleveland, and Detroit, nor for the sensational review I received from Claudia Cassidy am I asking you to reconsider my position. I would never ask you to give me a raise for doing the job I contracted to do, but I am for a job that was not covered in our original deal—a job that has been thrust upon me by circumstance. I trust that our company manager, Max Gendel, has kept you abreast of what has been going on backstage for the past couple of months.