My Anecdotal Life

by Carl Reiner

  Three weeks after I had told everybody who meant anything to me that I was going to New York to direct my play, I received another call from Alex Cohen who informed me that because of some financial setback, he would be unable to mount our show for a September start but we could in February, if I were available.…

  A few days after I stopped saying “Shit!” and convincing my loved ones that I really wasn’t disappointed because I had known it was too good to be true, my dogged agent Mike Zimring called to tell me that Alan King, Walter Hyman, Gene Wolsk, and Emanuel Azenberg, who had just formed a production company, had read the play, loved it, and if I agreed, “could be ready to start production yesterday!”

  On November 28, 1967, Something Different, the play I wrote as busywork for my bored secretary, opened at the Cort Theater in New York City. It sported a stellar cast that included Bob Dishy, Linda Lavin, Gabe Dell, Maureen Arthur, Claudia McNeil, Helena Carroll, Victoria Zussin, and Messers Jones, Mansfield, Starkman and Battle, four sets of ten-year-old identical twins. To give you some sense of the play I will, with the permission of Samuel French, Inc., offer a short exchange of dialogue from Act One, Scene Two.

  Bud Nemerov (played by Bob Dishy) is a renowned and celebrated playwright—who had written only one play in his life, Seven Times Seven, Plus One, which everyone in the world has either seen or read.

  In the following scene, Bud, the egocentric and distracted husband and father and his scheming, cuckolding wife, Beth (Linda Lavin), are having an ongoing argument about whether or not their ten-year-old sons are really twins. Bud is suspicious they’re not, because one boy is white and redheaded and the other boy is black. Bud is questioning the “twins” as they stand before him.

  BUD

  Just a moment, children.

  KEVIN AND BEVIN

  What is it, Dad?

  BUD

  Why is it you always talk together?

  BETH

  [interrupts]

  You know very well, dear, it’s because they’re twins. Isn’t that so, children?

  KEVIN AND BEVIN

  We’re not sure.

  BUD

  Aha! You’re not sure, eh? When’s your birthday?

  KEVIN AND BEVIN

  July 14, 1956.

  BUD

  How tall are you?

  KEVIN AND BEVAN

  Ten foot two.

  BUD

  Ten foot two?

  KEVIN AND BEVIN

  Together.

  BUD

  What was the name of the play I wrote before you were born?

  KEVIN AND BEVIN

  Seven Times Seven.

  BUD

  Hmmm?

  KEVIN AND BEVIN

  Plus one.

  BUD

  How long did it run?

  KEVIN AND BEVIN

  Four years, nine months, three days.

  BUD

  How many good reviews did I get?

  KEVIN AND BEVIN

  Twelve out of twelve.

  BUD

  Close your eyes. What color is your hair?

  KEVIN AND BEVIN

  Black and red.

  BUD

  What color are your legs?

  KEVIN AND BEVIN

  Black and blue.

  BUD

  [Checks legs, finds bruises]

  The scene continues with Bud becoming more and more aware that something is not right in his household.

  Early in the first act we learn that for twelve years Bud has tried and failed to write another play. In desperation, he tries to recapture his muse by re-creating the physical conditions he had when he wrote his great play. At that time, he was living in his mother’s cramped Bronx apartment, so in an attempt to re-create that atmosphere, he brings into his elegant Scarsdale mansion, among other items, his mother’s old coil refrigerator, her kitchen table where he sat when typing his play, a beautiful, buxom actress (Maureen Arthur), whom he hires to play his mother (his actual mother is unavailable to play herself because she lives in Florida), and a dozen cockroaches, which he buys from an exterminator (Gabe Dell).

  At our first out-of-town tryout in New Haven, we previewed a three-act play. The first two acts were a satire of plays of the theater of the absurd, and the third act, which I felt was the play’s raison d’être, and for me the most innovative part of the package. Something Different was a play-within-a-play-within-a-play-within-a-play-within-a-play and I was proud to have written something original. The reaction of the opening-night audience in New Haven was mixed. There were huge laughs in the first two acts and in the third act there were fewer laughs and huge walkouts. Half the audience left and the other half remained to cheer. The cheering half were mainly Yale students who tossed around words like “daring,” “imaginative” and “genius,” and the other half were older folk tossing around words like “He should be arrested,” “Why did you bring me here!” and “Feh!”

  In the third act, the exterminator who was playing a Nazi in the play-within-the-play, was beaten to death by the rest of the cast which, to the audience, looked as if it was scripted. However when the curtain came down, a call for a doctor was heard over a loudspeaker and a hush fell over the entire theater as a doctor came on stage and pronounced the actor (Gabe Dell) dead. In the-show-must-go-on tradition, the cast took a curtain call—all but Gabe Dell. A solemn cast, appearing to be genuinely shaken, did not acknowledge the scattered applause but looked toward the wings to where Gabe had been carried. The siren of an approaching ambulance is heard—becoming louder and louder as the final curtain falls.

  By the time the show arrived in New Haven, the cast had been rehearsing for four weeks. I had been directing during the day, rewriting during the night and rehearsing new third acts the following day. I averaged three or four hours of sleep a night, and I was ready for someone to tell me how to make “that damn third act work!” I had already written four or five versions, so when two wise old Joes, Stein and Mankiewiecz, came backstage to talk to me after a performance, I listened.

  Joe Stein, who had adapted my first novel, Enter Laughing, for the stage and Sholem Aleichem’s Tevya, (Fiddler on the Roof) got to me first.

  “Carl, you’ve got a perfect two-act, Feydeau-type farce,” Joe S. advised, “you don’t need that third act.”

  I had never read Feydeau but I assumed he did good work. Joe M., who I didn’t know but admired for writing and directing All about Eve, told me that I “was digging in sand!”

  “No playwright,” he informed me, “including Aeschylus, has ever been able to write a satire about a satire. Drop the third act, and you got a hit.”

  They saved my life, those good Joes.

  For the Boston engagement, I took what was good and funny from the third act and mulched the material into the first two acts—and damned if it didn’t work! We had a sold-out, laugh-filled two-week run in Boston. Elliot Norton, the venerable drama critic of the Boston Globe, did not know what to make of it, and his review reflected his confusion. He called me “a nut cake” and used phrases like, “unparalleled uproar” and “idiotically funny.” For some reason, I was not upset and accepted Mr. Norton’s gracious invitation to appear with him on his local television show to discuss and/or defend my play. It was positive experience and helped sell tickets.

  The show got an unequivocal rave from Frank Rich. Yes, the Frank Rich, the powerful and insightful drama critic of The New York Times, who terrified playwrights and producers for years and is now an even more brilliant editorialist for the same paper. At that time, Frank Rich was the drama critic of the Harvard Crimson and was the first freshman in the history of the school to hold that position. As I say, his review was a rave, and his analysis of the play was superb. I remember thinking This boy will go far. Some small-minded people might think that he praised the show so highly because, at that time, he was dating my equally brilliant daughter, Annie, and might have envisioned becoming my son-in-law. Well, sir, Annie, who didn’t have to sidle up to me
so I would continue to be her father, had the same positive reaction to my play that Frank did.

  I would have to say that the Boston critics treated us fairly and helped make our run in their fair city a successful one. However, a different set of critics and a different fate awaited us in New York.

  We had many good reasons to feel optimistic about our New York opening. The Boston audiences were going away from our show “good-mouthing” us, and there were other indications that we had a better than fair chance at success. Two of my dear show-business friends, Mel Brooks and Neil Simon, whose opinions I valued, did not seem to be lying when they told me that they loved the show. I do know for certain that William Goldman, who won an Academy Award for screenwriting Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, was a fan of the play.

  In 1967, William Goldman, who let me call him Bill, came up with a most original idea for a book on the theater. He called it The Season, and he chose a half dozen shows that were slated to open that season and asked the producers to allow him to attend and write about the first read-through of their play, their first runthrough, the first paid preview, the first out-of-town opening, and finally the Broadway premiere. Our play was one he had chosen. He made two or three unscheduled visits, and when I asked him why the extra visits, he said, “Your show makes me laugh—and I enjoy laughing.”

  When Bill was in Boston, he interviewed me in my suite at the Ritz. He asked me about the problems I encountered doing double duty as playwright and director. I admitted to having a couple of gut-churning sessions with two members of the cast recently, that were rather loud and heated, and this was, as Jackie Mason would say, “not in my nature.” Bill remarked that I seemed to be remarkably calm and centered, considering the pressure I was under. He asked what I did to relieve tension. I had no answer.

  Bill included in his chapter on Something Different an observation he made on leaving my suite. After commenting how well I was handling the stress of the job, he noticed me sticking out my tongue and examining it in the hall mirror and asked what was wrong.

  “I think I burned my tongue,” I said, “but I don’t know how. I haven’t had any hot coffee or soup. It might be a vitamin A deficiency.”

  “Or”—he said smiling—“unreleased tension that you stored in your tongue.”

  I knew his diagnosis was right, but for the record, since Boston, my tongue has never again tensed up.

  One more digression, and then on to the Big Apple. I think it is unfair to mention that I had problems with two of the cast members, that is, unfair to the actors, at whom I didn’t yell. I have shouted at only three actors in my career as a director, and I was wrong to lose control in all three cases. The only shabby excuse I can offer is that I yelled to release the pressure in my tense tongue before it exploded in my mouth and blew out my teeth. The two hapless victims of my wrath in Something Different were Linda Lavin, one of the theater’s most gifted actresses, a Tony Award–winner for her performance in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, and the late Claudia McNeil, who thrilled us as Sidney Poitier’s mama in Raisin in the Sun. The third was Mary Tyler Moore, to whom I have already apologized in an earlier chapter.

  I don’t think that there is a playwright extant who does not blame the drama critics’ cruel and wrongheaded reviews for their play’s being a flop. Here now is my sad but true tale of critics and their power to kill, or in my case, to maim. If I were to title my tale of sour grapes, it would be, “Shut up, Walter Kerr, You’re Too Late!”

  Most playwrights will tell you that opening-night audiences are traditionally not as demonstrative as a regular audience. Many opening-night seats are filled by relatives and friends, who are rooting for you and are looking around to see how well the play is being received by other friends. The more sophisticated well-wishers are also keeping an eye on the critics. My perceptive daughter, Annie, who had seen the play many times during its Boston run and had given it a glowing review, was seated in the third row. During the first intermission, she came to me and complained about the man who was seated next to her.

  “He smells of liquor and is distracting everyone around him. Dad, not only did he come in after the curtain went up but he fell fast asleep as soon as he sat down,” Annie reported angrily, “and he’s snored during the whole act! Someone should wake up that drunk and ask him to leave!”

  “Honey, we can’t,” I explained, “that drunk is John Chapman, the New York Daily News drama critic!”

  I had heard that Mr. Chapman often imbibed before reviewing a show but seemed to be able to do his job well enough to remain the newspaper’s first-line critic. I don’t know what filtered into his consciousness, but he gave Something Different one of the shortest and most dismissive reviews in history. I think he did mention that the audience seemed to be having a good time, but he had no idea why.

  I do not mean to imply that our show failed because of Mr. Chapman’s review. The situation then, as applied to criticism, is ostensibly the same now. The only review that can make or break a show is the one offered by the critic of The New York Times—and herein lies the rub. Walter Kerr, the venerable and distinguished Times critic for two decades, had that week decided to semiretire, and became the editor of the paper’s Sunday Drama Section. Stepping into Mr. Kerr’s shoes was Clive Barnes, an intelligent and decent man, who would be reviewing his very first play as a drama critic. Until this eventful night, Mr. Barnes had been the newspaper’s dance critic.

  His review of Something Different was of a proper length and quite literate but it was apparent that he did not understand the play or its references. I attribute this to his having been born and bred in England and having no interest in, or knowledge of, how a Bronx-bred neurotic Jewish playwright thinks, talks, or behaves. His review was what Manny Azenberg called a nonreview. It listed the actors, praised some of them, and offered the readers the kind of information about the play that would not send them running to the box office.

  Now comes the second chorus of my sad song. The audience reaction was everything we hoped for but sadly the size of the audiences was not. It seems that good word of mouth depends on there being enough mouths in the audience to spread the good words. In spite of excellent reviews in the New York Post, Variety, the Newhouse newspapers and practically all of the radio and TV critics, nobody was dashing to our box office; some ambled there but not enough.

  (Less than two minutes ago, I looked for and found dog-eared copies of those reviews, and if my publisher doesn’t think I’m being too defensive, tasteless, or self-aggrandizing, I am tempted to photocopy them and add them to the end of this diatribe—it is getting to be that, isn’t it?)

  On the third Sunday after our opening, something happened that caused all four of our producers, our stars, and me to call each other in case we had not read Walter Kerr’s rave review in the Sunday Times. Had Walter Kerr’s review come out the morning after opening night, we might have lasted more than the three months we did.

  When I heard of our show closing after a hundred performances, I took solace in knowing that John Barrymore’s acclaimed performance of Hamlet had closed after one hundred performances, and Richard Burton’s Hamlet closed after one hundred and one. Burton insisted on doing that one extra performance. One-upping the great Barrymore was a triumph of sorts. Such is the ego of us folk in show biz.

  Besides the brilliant comic performances of Bob Dishy and the rest of the talented cast, there are three incidents related to the show that tickle my fancy and feed my ego—and who among us doesn’t enjoy being tickled and fed?

  Ego feeder number one: This was related to me by Gabe Dell. During a curtain call, a little old man ran toward the stage waving his hands and shouting angrily at the audience to stop applauding. Gabe said that he was ready to jump off the stage and subdue the maniac when he realized that the little old man was Groucho Marx, who, without his painted-on mustache, looked like any little old man. The audience had no idea it was Groucho until they heard him speak. He asked the audien
ce if they agreed that Something Different was the funniest show they had ever seen. When they applauded, he told them that it was their responsibility to keep the show running by stopping people in the street and spreading the word.

  Just recently, another little old man who was seated next to Groucho that night confirmed the story. That other little old man, thirty-five years ago, was Groucho’s young son, author and playwright Arthur Marx.

  Ego Feeder number two: The lovely, talented actress Joan Hackett came up to me at a restaurant, introduced herself, and proceeded to tell me about having a matinee ticket for Something Different. For fear of being late, she had rushed to the theater from her dance class without changing out of her leotards. She told about a line and a piece of business that Bob Dishy did that made her laugh so hard that what she feared might happen did happen.

  “I peed in my leotards,” she admitted, “and couldn’t stop! I sat through the whole show with water squishing in my Capezios.”

  What the ad men could have done with that! Something Different has them rolling in the aisles and peeing in their leotards!

  Ego feeder number three: About four or five years after the show closed, I found myself in London with my wife when a man, who heard my name, asked if I was the Reiner who had written “that terribly amusing play with the four sets of identical twins.”

  (Yes, four sets, It’s explained at the end of the play—get a copy from Samuel French, Inc., if you must know why four sets.)

  I remember saying, “You saw my play? You’re a member of a very exclusive group.” I really was excited that someone from another continent, a gentleman who spoke with the most British of British accents, knew about my play. I couldn’t let him go without debriefing him. He might have more to say about “that terribly amusing play.”

  “Did you like the play?” I asked, fishing for a compliment.

  He smiled at me, bent his head forward, pointed to a spot on his forehead, and, with a Rex Harrison lilt, asked, “Do you see this?”