Make 'Em Laugh

by Debbie Reynolds

  Then he discusses how such televisions could have changed history, winding up with George Washington at Valley Forge and stating that it could have saved George Washington’s soldiers from getting frostbite there.

  “In fact, my ankle still bothers me now,” he says, and after telling the crew to make it night again on the set, goes back to rejoin the action.

  This is only a taste of the great Burns and Allen humor. There are also hilarious visual jokes. Thank goodness for YouTube. Do watch this episode and try not to fall off your chair laughing.

  After their TV series ended, Gracie retired from the act. She died of a heart attack six years later. George never remarried, even though he lived another thirty-two years. He continued working until he was in his nineties, following his philosophy of never turning down a job because you don’t know where the next one is coming from.

  George’s philosophy also included carrying over the same things in television that people liked in vaudeville. He produced shows that featured beautiful girls and animals. In his act, George would sing little snippets of songs like “How could you believe me when I said I loved you when you know I’ve been a liar all my life.” Then he would put his cigar in his mouth and wait for the laugh, conducting the audience with his cigar movements. Great shtick.

  Halloween with my daddy, Ray Reynolds, while I was still living at home at our house on Evergreen in Burbank. I did our makeup myself! Daddy didn’t have his teeth in, so his smile looks really funny. He had no teeth but a lot of love.

  When George was eighty years old, he won an Academy Award for his role in The Sunshine Boys. Later he played God in three movies, the first of which, Oh, God!, was a big hit. He used to say, “Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

  In addition to being a man of great humor, George was generous. When you drive around Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, you’ll see George Burns Drive and Gracie Allen Drive. He was a great man who was lucky to find a great woman with talent that equaled his. Bless him.

  JACK BENNY

  I met Jack in the 1950s, around the time I met Eddie Cantor and many other comics in that circle. Jack was adorable, polite, cuddly. Everyone loved him. We were good friends. Another graduate of the vaudeville circuit, Jack did radio and was under contract for movies for several years at MGM before making the leap to TV. The Jack Benny Program ran from 1950 to 1965. What a wonderful, talented man.

  Jack had the best timing in the business. He could make an audience laugh just by taking a long pause. He created a character famous for being cheap. One of my favorite bits involves Jack walking along and humming to himself. A man on the street comes up and asks if Jack has a match.

  “A match? Yes. I have one right here.”

  “Don’t make a move,” the man says. “This is a stickup.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “A stickup? Mister—put down that gun.”

  “Shut up. Now c’mon. Your money or your life.”

  Jack takes a long pause, clearly perplexed. The audience roars. The thief grows impatient.

  “Look, bud, I said your money or your life!”

  Jack throws up his hands. “I’m thinking! I’m thinking!”

  In addition to being cheap, Jack’s comedy character claimed to be thirty-nine years old his whole life, a trick that was copied by the Gabor sisters. He also was famous for playing the violin badly. Jack himself was actually a serious musician who owned a very expensive Stradivarius that he donated to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in his will.

  Once he was asked to perform with a symphony orchestra. He wanted to do well, and asked me if he could stay at our house in Palm Springs to practice. I was working on a film, so the house was empty. I called the German couple who lived there and took care of the house to tell them that Jack would be our guest for a few weeks. My housekeepers didn’t complain but they had to endure weeks of Jack’s violin practice. Jack’s hard work paid off. The concert received very good notices, which made Jack very happy.

  When I played my first Las Vegas gig at the Riviera Hotel, I went all out on producing a great show. My friend Bob Sidney directed. He had been the choreographer on my 1954 movie Susan Slept Here. Bob had me swinging in big birdcages in that film, in addition to many other athletic dance moves. The opening number for my show lasted seventeen minutes. I did a long medley of current songs with a full orchestra and seven dancers. Then I would do another sixty minutes of singing and dancing with some time for costume changes and impressions.

  One night Jack came backstage. Always sweet, he complimented me on the show but said, “Why are you working so hard at the opening? Just tell five jokes.”

  Very sage advice. Jack also helped me with my comedy timing.

  “Don’t rush the moment,” he advised. “Let the audience catch up with you. Wait for them.”

  That’s what Jack did when he worked with Bob Hope. He just stood still, staring at Bob until he felt the time was right to respond. He also told Bob not to speak too quickly. It was wonderful to watch them work together.

  Once I learned from Jack to wait, I was able to develop my own style. Only Don Rickles can do that fast insult style. Johnny Carson and Jimmy Stewart had styles similar to Jack’s. Johnny especially had great comedic timing that was made more effective by waiting for the audience.

  In May 2001 I was invited by the Film Society of Lincoln Center to participate in their tribute to Jane Fonda at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. Jane’s brother, Peter Fonda, was also there to honor her, along with Vanessa Redgrave, Lily Tomlin, Sydney Pollack, and Sally Field. When I took the stage, I did a full Jack Benny. I stood on my mark in front of the microphone and slowly took in the entire hall from stage right to stage left, looking longingly at the beautiful chandeliers and breathtaking architecture. Finally I leaned in to the microphone and said, “I married the wrong Fisher.”

  Grabbing the tail of this little guy was only part of the fun when I was making The Second Time Around. I always did whatever it took to get a laugh! Thelma Ritter stole more scenes than this calf.

  Another piece of Jack’s wisdom was “Don’t try to be a comic. Be an entertainer. Don’t just tell jokes. Tell stories. Your life is ridiculous and madcap and absolutely crazy. Tell the truth about your life.” Jack Benny instilled that in me.

  GROUCHO MARX

  Groucho Marx was another great vaudevillian who made the transition from working in theaters to film and television. He made more than a dozen movies with his brothers, hilarious films like A Day at the Races, A Night at the Opera, and Horse Feathers. From 1950 to 1961, when TV was new, he hosted a game show called You Bet Your Life. Groucho asked the contestants questions about themselves, and often responded with spontaneous jokes about what they said. The contestants were always an unrelated man and woman who usually had something quirky about them. After being introduced by the announcer, Groucho would greet each couple and inform them, “Say the secret woid and divide a hundred dollars.” (The amount rose to $1,500 in later years.) If a contestant said the secret word, a stuffed duck would drop down on a cord from the ceiling, with the word hanging from its long, rounded bill. The duck itself was an exaggerated version of Groucho, complete with an unruly mop of dark hair, bushy black eyebrows, horn-rim glasses, a big mustache, and a bow tie at the base of its long neck. The only thing it lacked was Groucho’s trademark cigar.

  One evening he was talking to a woman who revealed that she had seventeen children.

  “Why so many children?” he asked her.

  “Well, I love my husband,” she replied.

  Groucho waggled his eyebrows and said, “I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.”

  Groucho was a frequent guest at my home for parties or dinner. Under his jacket he would always wear a T-shirt with his own picture on it. One night in 1970 we were both guests on Dick Cavett’s interview show. Dick did two segments with me, then Groucho joined
us for the third. Dick introduced him as “one of the funniest men alive.” Groucho came out, stood in the performing area, and as the applause died down began singing his song from the movie Animal Crackers.

  “Hello, I must be going.

  I cannot stay,

  I came to say

  I must be going.

  I’m glad I came

  but just the same

  I must be going.”

  His lady friend, Erin Fleming, came out to join him, and sang the second verse. Groucho sang the third verse, gave Erin a peck on the lips, then followed her as she exited. He stopped as she moved behind the curtain, and came back toward the interview area. Dick met him halfway, and escorted him over to me.

  Groucho took me in his arms, dipped me backward, leaned in, and kissed me on my lips.

  “From one woman to the other?” Dick said, pretending mild shock but smiling.

  “They’re all alike to me,” Groucho told him.

  We sat down and Dick asked Groucho if he knew me.

  “I could tell you a tale about Miss Reynolds but your hair would stand on its end,” he said.

  Dick encouraged Groucho to tell it. Groucho turned to me.

  “I’ve known Miss Debbie Reynolds, I guess . . . I guess seventy-five years.”

  As the audience laughed loudly, I punched Groucho playfully on his lower lip.

  Then Groucho mentioned that he’d visited me once in the hospital when I was ill.

  “I’m a very kind elderly gentleman,” he said. “I visited her to be nice to her, and because I’d always been fond of her husband. I don’t remember which one it was.”

  This time I socked him on the arm and wagged my finger at him.

  The audience laughed through all of this, and continued to do so as Groucho explained to Dick that he’d visited me to check out the rumor that I wasn’t all I was cracked up to be. This was in the days before breast implants, when girls enhanced their busts with “falsies” or padded bras. It was so unusual that there was a stripper named Carol Doda in San Francisco who was famous for having her breasts enlarged with silicone injections. Dick asked Groucho what I’d been wearing, whether it was one of “those silly little nighties they put on you.”

  “Well, she had something like that.”

  “That was my own nightgown,” I told them.

  “It was a nightgown that revealed quite more than even the doctor had seen,” Groucho added. “I only went there to confirm the rumor that everything that Debbie had was part of her.”

  “And you’re here to tell the tale.”

  “No, I didn’t get any of that.”

  The audience howled with laughter. I raised my hands in mock alarm, said, “Oh, my dear!” and slapped Groucho on the arm again.

  I felt I had to get things under control.

  “I was in the hospital, and he called me up,” I said, explaining to Dick and the audience what had happened. “I was very pleased that he did call me. And he said, ‘I’d like to come over and visit with you.’ I was kind of surprised. I mean, he’s a busy man. And he came over to the hospital—we’re going back thirteen years or something like that—and in comes Groucho and he has a little interview with me concerning how I like show business or show people, or whatever. I didn’t know he was copping a little look up there. I wasn’t aware of that. I thought we were just visiting and talking.”

  I turned to Groucho and said, “After all these years, Groucho.”

  That night I was wearing a summery pale green Empire-style dress with a full, billowy skirt and short sleeves. Both the sleeves and my décolletage were decorated with large white flowers. Groucho’s face was to me the whole time I was delivering my monologue, but his eyes were fixed lower, although the audience might not have been able to see this.

  “But I’ve always defended what you had,” he said when I finished. “And I still do.”

  “Well, Girl Scouts can have those things, too,” I pointed out, and said to Dick, “You have to watch out for Groucho. He doesn’t really mean what he says.”

  Dick said to Groucho, “You told me once that you can’t insult anybody. Even when you actually try to, they take you as being funny.”

  “I have not insulted Miss Reynolds,” Groucho said, and added, as though he wasn’t sure of my name, “Reynolds?”

  “We’ll be the judge of that,” Dick said with a smile, and cut to a station break.

  It seems that Groucho really was preoccupied with my chest. Sometime after the Cavett show he ran into Carrie in front of the famous Nate ’n Al’s Deli in Beverly Hills, and told her about how he had visited me and my breasts.

  The visit that Groucho was talking about on the Cavett show and outside the deli had happened in 1959, when I was making Say One for Me for 20th Century Fox. I’d tripped over a cable on the set, banging up my knee, and developed a blood clot. This could have been fatal if it dislodged and landed in my heart or brain, so the studio had insisted that I go to the hospital. Groucho had come to the hospital to interview me for a book he was writing about old Hollywood. He knew how much I loved the stars like Mary Pickford and Harold Lloyd. But it seems he was more interested in my breasts. I wonder if it was Groucho who started that rumor in the first place. I never heard anyone else mention it.

  Groucho wasn’t the only man with my breasts on his mind. At around the same time, I was recording the songs for Say One for Me with the Fox orchestra. The conductor, Lionel Newman, was a scamp. He was always teasing the ladies, clowning around with actresses like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. When I showed up one day to work with the musicians, Lionel made a crack about me in front of everyone. He said something like “Nice breasts, Debbie. You really look sexy.”

  Maybe I should have been flattered, but instead I complained to the head of the studio, Darryl F. Zanuck. Lionel told the guys that Mr. Zanuck told him not to make any more wisecracks about me. When I came in the next morning to do another playback with the orchestra, Lionel was quiet. For about ten seconds. I was sitting on a stool in front of the musicians, waiting to start work.

  “I’ll tell you, Debbie,” Lionel said. “Even though I got chewed out, you still have nice breasts.”

  All I could do was laugh with him.

  During a break with the musicians while recording the music for Say One for Me. Composer Sammy Cahn, Lionel Newman, and lyricist Jimmy Van Heusen. Why is Lionel smiling?

  In my 1968 movie How Sweet It Is!, there’s a scene in a kitchen where Jim Garner and I are having a fight. I’m wearing a raincoat. Jim calls me a middle-aged mother. I flash open my coat, revealing my blue bikini, and say, “Is this the body of a middle-aged mother?”

  I’ve never felt self-conscious about my body. But, unlike some of my girlfriends at MGM, I was also never known as a pinup girl. I guess it’s flattering to have had Groucho Marx and others admire me that way, because now I live in Beverly Hills and my boobs are in San Diego.

  BOB HOPE

  Bob Hope was a comedy institution, yet another vaudevillian who made his way through every genre of show business. Most famous for his seven Road pictures with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, he did many specials for NBC over the years, always ending with his theme song, “Thanks for the Memory.” He hosted the Academy Awards nineteen times. He loved playing golf, a sport he shared with several of our presidents that he had as friends.

  Bob was also a notorious womanizer. Being married to his lovely wife, Dolores, for sixty-nine years never stopped him from having affairs. Once in Las Vegas he introduced me to his current mistress when Dolores was only a few feet away. I was shocked.

  We did a lot of shows together. On one of his specials, Jack Benny and I were guests. Of all things, Jack and Bob played college students. The fact that they were in their sixties didn’t seem to bother them. In another sketch, I played an Eva Gabor type, covered in ostrich feathers, jewels, and chiffon. I did the whole bit with my Hungarian accent that I’d worked up from being friends with Eva.

  Dor
othy Lamour, Jane Russell, and I were Bob’s guests on another special. (Jane had starred with Bob in his 1948 western comedy movie, Paleface.) Dorothy and Jane were doing a read-through with Bob. I don’t know where I was that day. Dorothy warned Bob that he couldn’t give me a joke with a punch line that ended with the word “fork” because I would surely make something of it that might not play on TV. Bob hated improvisation. Every word he spoke was always scripted. Jane told me later that Bob just cut the joke.

  Bob loved a laugh. Our friend Phyllis Diller gave him credit for launching and helping her with her career. They talked on the phone every day to share jokes. Bob had a recording device next to his phone so he could keep all the jokes Phyllis told him. If he didn’t like the joke, he would tell her to think of another one. They were thick as thieves about the material. Bob lifted material from other comics. Dean Martin borrowed from Jerry Lewis. Every comic called on Bob for material.

  Like George Burns, Bob lived to be a hundred years old. During his long life he did so much for charities all over the world. The other thing he was most famous for was the work he did with the USO entertaining our troops, beginning in 1941 with World War II. He did fifty-seven tours, the last one in 1990 when Bob was eighty-seven. For his ninety-ninth birthday, the military honored him for his many years of service to the troops. I felt privileged to be asked to speak. At the end of my speech, I was thrilled to be able to tell Bob, “Thanks for the memories.”

  6

  The Royal Treatment

  This is a clip from the May 20, 1959, issue of a Salt Lake City paper, the Deseret News and Telegram:

  DEBBIE PLAYS CINDERELLA FOR

  BELGIUM’S BAUDOUIN

  HOLLYWOOD (UPI)—Bachelor King Baudouin of Belgium met an array of glamorous movie stars Tuesday but he seemed to have eyes only for Hollywood’s newest bachelor girl, Debbie Reynolds.