My Anecdotal Life

by Carl Reiner

  For my noncontracted work as the company psychiatrist, I ask you now to consider some appropriate compensation.

  Very truly yours,

  Carl Reiner

  Two days later, I received Mr. Levin’s response.

  Dear Carl,

  For rendering services not covered in original contract we are adding thirty-five dollars a week to your current salary.

  Best regards,

  Herman

  I like to think that my brilliant and attractive daughter, Annie’s, becoming an eminently successful psychotherapist is in small part attributable to a psychology gene she inherited from me, but, on reflection, she is more likely to have inherited that talent from her mother.

  * * *

  The summer of ’47 was insufferably hot. Our room at the New Lawrence Hotel was not air-conditioned, and all we could do was swelter and curse. One sleepless night, in a desperate attempt to find relief, I stuffed our bedsheets and pillowcases into the small refrigerator and let them chill for ten minutes, and it worked! The sheets got ten minutes of relief, but the moment we unfurled them in the hot air, they lost their chill. Yet another creative idea gone awry.

  All things considered, the six months we spent in Chicago were among the most memorable and confidence building of my young theatrical life. We were sad and happy to be leaving Chicago. Sad to leave a town that made us feel welcome and sad that the show would be closing after we played two weeks in Los Angeles and two in San Francisco, but happy to be going to the West Coast, to Hollywood, where great things could happen to further our careers. It was not lost on any of us that Jules Munshin and Betty Garrett had been plucked from the Broadway cast and signed to MGM film contracts.

  The train ride to Los Angeles was another experience I cherish. My last long train ride had been completely uncherishable. It was on a rattling troop train where I and fifty other soldiers, who slept in double-decker beds, reacted violently to the tainted beans served at dinner, and all got the midnight runs.

  In contrast to that wartime nightmare, here I was with deluxe accommodations and great company. A private room, a wife and a six-month-old baby, who was adorable and adored by his parents and the entire cast. Howie Morris, Bob Fosse, Marian Niles, and Biff Liff kitchy-cooed the heck out of Robbie, as did most of the chorus girls, who fought for the opportunity to baby-sit him. Robbie spent most of the trip sitting on some pretty girl’s lap, hypnotized by the moving panorama of America that passed outside the train window. He had just learned to crawl and spent a good deal of time wiggling his way up and down the aisles. To this day, I believe that Rob’s healthy immune system is due to his having introduced bacterial-fighting antibodies into his system by stuffing old cigarette butts and chewing gum wrappers into his mouth. Actually, he did this just the one time. After that, his crawling was monitored by caring, guilt-ridden parents.

  In Los Angeles, we checked into the Hotel Figueroa, which was walking distance to the Biltmore Theater. It was now a year and a half since the original show opened, and audience interest in sketches and songs about servicemen returning home was waning. We didn’t feel any pressure about doing anything more on opening night than just giving it our best. I recall Alan Dreeben reading aloud bogus newspaper articles, in which he described the excitement and interest Daryl Zanuck, Sam Goldwyn, and Louis B. Mayer had in coming to the show, hoping to find another Judy Garland, Gene Kelly or Danny Kaye. Little did we know how prophetic he was.

  The reaction from the Los Angeles theatergoers was all we could ask for. The laughs were big, the applause was sustained, the curtain calls were unforced. I went home feeling that I had done well. Until after I visited the West Coast MCA office and met the agent who had been assigned to represent me, I had no idea how well I had done. My new representative was very young, and agent-style overcomplimentary, promising to investigate possible film work for me. I left feeling pleased that someone, even though he looked to be sixteen years old, was interested in my future.

  As I walked into the basement garage to retrieve my rental car, a parking attendant poked his head out of a booth and asked if I was Carl Reiner. When I told him I was, he said, “Phone call!”

  It was my wife. She had called my agent, who transferred the call to the garage.

  “Honey, get to a radio as fast as you can,” she ordered, “tune in five-seventy! Someone from the station called and said that George Fisher is coming on the air in sixty seconds to talk about the show!”

  I had no idea who George Fisher was, but I knew I couldn’t get to my car radio in time, so I asked the attendant if I could change the station on his radio. He was happy to oblige. I heard a man announce himself as “George Fisher, Your Hollywood Correspondent” and go on to say that he and motion picture producer George Jessel had attended the exciting opening night of Call Me Mister. He then proceeded to give me the kind of review that I still find too embarrassing to repeat. Even my dear mother would have questioned whether or not I was being too highly praised. It far outdid the review I got from Claudia Cassidy. Mr. Fisher gave me the kind of hosannas that Einstein might have gotten had he chosen to go into comedy. He ended his review by spelling my name slowly and then, with great urgency in his voice, he shouted: “Mr. Reiner, if you are listening to this program, please pick up a phone and call George Jessel at Twentieth Century Fox immediately! Sitting on Mr. Jessel’s desk, there is … A BIG, FAT MOVIE CONTRACT, WAITING FOR YOUR SIGNATURE!”

  And then to make sure I heard it, he repeated that information, told us again he was George Fisher, and signed off.

  I was trembling! The parking attendant invited me to use his phone. I got the studio’s number from information and called George Jessel. “Georgie” Jessel! The former vaudeville comedian, the original star of the Broadway play The Jazz Singer, Toastmaster General of the United States, eminent eulogist, personal friend of Daryl F. Zanuck, and now working as a film producer for Mr. Zanuck. I thought, It’s like in the movies!

  His secretary, expecting my call, put me right through. Here now is a close-to-verbatim conversation I had with the man who had a “big fat contract sitting on his desk waiting for my signature.”

  “Mr. Jessel, this is Carl Reiner, I heard George Fisher’s radio program and he said—”

  “Yes, I know!” he said, quickly, “I’m glad you called. Carl, you were very good last night. Look, I don’t want to make a tsimmes (a complicated Jewish dish made with carrots and prunes), but I’d like to see you at my office this afternoon, if you can make it.”

  I made it! It was my first visit to a movie studio and my first meeting with a movie producer, and was I ever impressed.

  “Mr. Jessel is expecting you.” a secretary said, pleasantly. “He’ll be with you shortly.”

  I could not believe this was happening. I had started to worry about my future and wondered if I’d ever get another job. For eleven months I had not received one offer, and I began to think what insecure actors often think: “My career is over!” Now, sitting in George Jessel’s outer office, a small jolt of self-confidence returned, along with a weird premonition that a job offer was imminent.

  I was smiling dreamily when a short, middle-aged, dapperly dressed, neatly toupeed George Jessel breezed into the waiting room, handed his secretary a note, rattled off a string of instructions and, without ever glancing at me, reached down, squeezed my arm, and said, “Be with you in a minute, kid.” He then walked to his office door, stopped, reminded his secretary to check his lunch reservation, kissed the tip of his middle and index fingers, touched them to the mezuzah on the doorframe and, without looking at me, said, “Carl, give it a kiss and come into my office!” I did as I was told.

  Mr. Jessel’s office was large, well-appointed, and looked like all the big producers’ offices I had seen in movies. Before offering me a seat, Mr. Jessel took me for a guided tour of his walls, on which hung framed photographs of Mr. Jessel in the company of presidents, vice presidents, generals, admirals, senators, governors, and every mov
ie star or celebrity worth draping an arm around. He ended the tour by reaching into his desk and pulling out an eight-by-ten glossy of him and Lana Turner. She was wearing a revealing white, skin-hugging satin gown.

  “Would you like have this?” he asked as he started to sign it. “You spell your name with a C, don’t you?”

  I nodded yes to both questions. He handed me the photo, then snatched it from me and with his pen drew a little cross on each of her nipples.

  “Just calling your attention to Lana’s first-rate bosom!”

  With that, he settled himself behind a gigantic, highly polished desk and invited me to sit in a club chair opposite him. He offered me a foot-long cigar, which I declined. While he was lighting his, I glanced at his desk to see if my “big fat contract” was lying atop it, as George Fisher said it would be. It wasn’t atop it as far as I could see, but it might have been in a drawer or under a stack of papers.

  “So, Carl,” he said, officially opening the meeting, “I sat in the first row last night—did you see me there? The hell with the small talk. You were terrific and so was the show. I predict that you’re going to have a big career … and what I’d like to propose to you is—”

  The phone rang and he picked it up, listened for a moment, sighed wearily and said, “Put him on! Overseas call,” he explained to me. “I’m executive-producing this movie in Paris and the producer and director call me every other minute to solve problems they should be solving. They can’t make a decision on their own. Hello?… Yes, I just told you to put him on.”

  “The director is a real shmuck!” Mr. Jessel informed me. “Hello, Buddy, what’s the problem? I see … well, I can’t help you unless I know what they are.… All right, read them to me.”

  Mr. Jessel listened impatiently, looked over at me, and shook his head. “All right, all right, calm down. I’ll tell you what you do … shoot them both!… That’s right, shoot them both!… You’re welcome.”

  He hung up the phone hard and took a deep breath. “They’ve written two endings for the film, and they can’t decide which one to shoot, so they call me from Paris. Me, I have to make the decision. I told them to shoot both endings. Those idiots can’t make a decision without me. I don’t know what the hell I’m paying them for.”

  Mr. Jessel flipped on the intercom, and barked, “Honey, hold my calls! I do not want to be interrupted.”

  He then turned his attention to me. Sighing the sigh of a man who carries all the world’s burdens on his shoulders, he asked, “Now, what was I saying?”

  I started to tell him that he was proposing something to me, when the phone rang again. He picked it up angrily, started to berate his secretary but stopped abruptly and stared at me while continuing on the phone, “Yes, yes, I want to talk to him.”

  “Sorry, Carl, but this is an important call,” he explained, “for both of us. It’s our casting director.”

  His eyes were locked on me as he acknowledged the voice on the phone. I have never been privy to a more exciting one-sided phone call.

  “Yes, yes, I know the role,” Mr. Jessel said, studying my face, “and I know the type you’re looking for.… You’re not going to believe this, but that actor is sitting in my office right now, not ten feet away from me, and I guarantee, he will knock shit out of the part.… Reiner, Carl Reiner … Yeah, it opened last night … he was great … Just a minute, I’ll ask him.”

  Mr. Jessel turned to me and, very matter-of-factly, asked what my schedule was. I told him, and he relayed it to the casting director.

  “He wants to know when you close in Frisco?”

  “In four weeks,” I answered.

  “Four weeks,” Mr. Jessel relayed.

  George Jessel listened intently to his casting director, shook his head, and said, “Are you sure … because this Reiner kid would have knocked shit out of the part.”

  The two heartbreaking operative words in that sentence, “would have,” rang in my head as I watched Georgie Jessel hang up the phone. I thought, Would have knocked shit out of what part? I never did find out.

  “Too bad, kid,” Mr. Jessel said, coming around from behind his desk, “but they’re shooting your scene while you’re in Frisco.”

  “My scene?”

  “The one you would have been great in. Those are the breaks! Here,” he said, handing me the autographed photo of him and Lana, “don’t forget your picture!”

  He put his arm around my shoulder as he escorted me to the door.

  “You’re a very talented kid, and there’ll be other films and other parts,” he assured me as he shook my hand. “We’ll be talking soon, you can bet on it!”

  I’m glad I did not bet on it, because it was twenty years before we talked again. I was at a Writer’s Guild dinner where he shook my hand, and said, “I’m very pleased to meet you! Love your work, Paul.”

  * * *

  If Georgie Jessel had not lured me to his office with the big-fat-contract-on-my-desk bait to publicize his position as an important executive at Twentieth Century Fox, I would have missed out on having “My First Hollywood Heartbreak” as a symmetrically satisfying ending to “My First Best Job.”

  4

  A Stroke of Naïveté

  (A SHORT TALE OF SHMUCKERY)

  I am not sure that there is such a word as shmuckery, but if there isn’t, I will be happy to contribute it to Messers Funk or Wagnall or whoever is in charge of dubious acquisitions for their dictionary’s next edition. Shmuck is Yiddish slang for “penis” and is used in impolite society to designate someone who does nincompoopy things. For a good part of my life, I have been an active member of that discipline.

  * * *

  I was eighteen years old when I was offered what I consider to be my first well-paying, professional job in the theater. For an eight-week tour of Southern Colleges and High Schools as a member of The Avon Shakespearean Repertory Company, I was to be paid thirty dollars a week!

  I traveled by bus to Atlanta, Georgia, the farthest I had ever ventured from my parent’s Bronx apartment at 2089 Arthur Avenue. It was the first time I had seen For White Only and For Colored Only signs on drinking fountains and public toilets. I had heard about their existence but actually seeing the signs and watching people heed them was very unsettling. I encountered many eye-opening and eye-blinking experiences in my eight weeks traveling through the deep South, but I will not cite examples of the old South’s demeaning and bigoted practices of legal shmuckery, but I will recall for you a tale of my own personal shmuckery. The passage of the Civil Rights Bill in 1964 helped the South to rid itself of its shmuckerian ways, but I, sad to say, from time to time, still struggle with mine.

  Our first day of rehearsal for As You Like It, being held in the ballroom of the Hotel Tallulah in Atlanta, was most exciting. I had just finished auditioning for the role of Orlando in As You Like It and was rather pleased with myself. I didn’t quite understand everything I was saying, but I said it all with conviction, a strong voice, and a slight Errol Flynnish English accent. During a break, the managing director of the company, Frank Selman, beckoned me to him. I had never met him. His younger brother, Harold, who was in his fifties, had been my contact with the company and was directing the rehearsal. Until the elder Selman had elected to retire a year or so earlier, he had been the star of this company. He was a most impressive man, radiating the air of a great actor. Walking with the aid of a cane, he slowly made his way to me. He seemed to be smiling, but as he approached it became clear that he was scowling. I concluded that he probably could see that I was a fake and was coming to fire me.

  Mr. Selman brought his aquiline nose close to my less aquiline one, scanned my face, and instead of saying “Get off this stage with your phony accent,” said, with an absolutely beautiful timbre in his voice, “Say after me!”

  He delivered this as Boris Karloff might have, with an English accent and a slight lisp. “Thay afther me!” is what I heard.

  Frank Selman then spoke the following from w
hat I later learned was Richard the Third. His voice boomed, spittle sprayed from his mouth—his right hand trembled as he slowly raised it. The louder he spoke, the more spittle he sprayed, the weirder he looked—one cheek going limp, one eye drooping, his contorted lips and mouth struggling to deliver these words. “Now—ith—the winter of our—dithcontentt,” he declaimed, “may—gloriuthh-ttthummer—by the thhun—of—yawwwwk.…”

  Mr. Selman stopped and said quietly, “Thay!”

  I assumed two things: that Mr. Selman wanted me to “thay” what he had just said and wanted me to say it exactly as he had said it. I reasoned that his performance, with his face taking on a gargoyle’s look, was planned—he was depicting a character who was ugly and crippled. In my mind’s eye, I saw Quasimodo, replete with the hump on his back and the face Charles Laughton affected in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It made great sense to me.

  I, who take pride in being a fair impressionist, outdid myself. I channeled Mr. Selman and impersonated his voice, his grimaces, and his pantomime to perfection, palsied hand and all. My lisping on the words, “discontent,” “glorious,” “summer” and “son of York,” even to the volume of spit, was identical to his. When I finished declaiming “may gloriuthh thhhummer by the thhhhun of yawwwwk,” an eerie silence descended in the room. The dozen or so actors who had witnessed my “audition” were all staring at me. Mr. Selman, too, was staring at me with his good eye, the eyebrow above it fully arched.

  After trying to determine whether I was a complete idiot or just an actor who follows directions too well, Mr. Selman smiled crookedly, and said, “Very good, young man, very good indeed.”

  The most astonishing aspect of this incident was that I was blithely unaware of what I had done, until a fellow actor, Gene Lyons, who would become a close and dear friend, came up to me, and asked, “Hey, what the hell were you doing?”