One of the brightest new Vegas stars was Buddy Hackett. The rotund comedian was considered one of the great stand-up comics of his time. Years in the business would make him a dominant force onstage, but his beginnings were as just another Hanson’s Drugstore straggler. Jack Carter grew up near Hackett. “He and I were from the same neighborhood in Bensonhurst. My father had a candy store and his father had an upholstery store. He used to hold the nails when they upholstered, and that’s how he got his ‘side mouth’ like that.”
Hackett’s father invented the day bed. “He never made a quarter on it,” said Hackett. “He wouldn’t take out patents. He kept saying, ‘I can make a better one.’ He was up at four every morning, but just made enough to get by.”
Hackett entered show business in 1945. He observed comedians at the Concord in the Catskills, eventually gaining the gumption to try it himself. He did impressions in Brooklyn beer parlors and eventually secured a role in the road company of the musical Call Me Mister with an unknown Carl Reiner. Dealing with Broadwayites brought him to the Hanson’s scene. He befriended fellow bums Lenny Bruce, Frank Man and comedy writer Marvin Worth. “According to Lenny, it was possible that pound for pound, Buddy Hackett was the greatest comic talent in the world,” said Honey Bruce. “Lenny couldn’t wait to get backstage after the show to see Buddy. When they met, it was clear that the regard was mutual. Their minds meshed at the same RPM; they played off each other fast and funny.” Frank Man says, “It was me, Lenny Bruce, Buddy Hackett, Marvin Worth and [comedian] Bob Leslie in that clique. We’d all hang around and get high. At that time Hackett had a lot of money. The owner of Montrose Motors in Brooklyn, Frank Faske, was acting as his manager. He’d give Buddy as much money as he ever needed. He had a Cadillac and the finest tuxedos. We’d all go back to my apartment and get high.”
Hackett went to Los Angeles and played a highly successful engagement at Billy Gray’s Band Box, a room at Beverly and Fairfax that featured and played to many the comedian’s comedian. Seen by a showbiz crowd, he was signed by Universal-International to replace an ailing Lou Costello in the movie Fireman, Save My Child. When Lenny Bruce landed in Los Angeles, Hackett brought him to Universal and they punched up the Donald O’Connor musical Walking My Baby Back Home. Eventually the studio cut him loose, telling Hackett, “You’re a fine comedian, but we don’t know what to do with you.”
Marvin Worth teamed with Arne Sultan and they wrote for The Steve Allen Show. Worth and Sultan wrote a comedy record for Hackett called Seven Lively Highs. It dealt “with the different humorous aspects of getting high under the influence of alcohol, marijuana, heroin and sordid other drugs.” They had a deal with United Artists, but the record was canceled when Hackett abandoned such associations. “One day Buddy came to us,” says Man. “He said, ‘I can’t hang out with you guys anymore. I get too paranoid. My eyes get too red. I’m afraid they’re going to arrest me. I’m going to start hanging out on the golf course with Alan King and people like that.’”
Hackett started spending time at the Englewood Golf Club, owned by comedians Joey Bishop and Phil Foster. He bought a ranch house in Leonia, New Jersey. He befriended playwright Sidney Kingsley, who cast Hackett in the Broadway drama Lunatics and Lovers, for which Hackett would win a Donaldson Award for Male Debut. Max Liebman cast Hackett in the sitcom Stanley. Comedy writers William Friedberg and Neil Simon wrote the pilot, but were fired when they asked Liebman for a piece of the show. NBC replaced them with a kid from its Writers Development Program—Woody Allen.
Critics hailed Liebman as a genius during the days of Your Show of Shows, but he was a paradox of knowledge and ignorance, unable to achieve another success. He knew how to create grand-scale entertainment, but also considered Neil Simon disposable, told Carol Channing she was talentless and told Mel Brooks he wasn’t funny. Stanley premiered September 24, 1956, and critics were miffed: “Hackett is a good comic; has ample know-how and a likeable quality, but the material handed him in the opener of this new NBC show isn’t the kind which is apt to give him much of an audience.” The sitcom had no sense of focus, a rotation of writers working on spec and an arrogant producer who felt he knew best. Woody Allen said, “Liebman was too strong a personality and too wrongheaded about what was going on.” The show was canceled, despite having as its costars Carol Burnett and Paul Lynde. Hackett returned to clubs.
Hackett’s first post-Stanley engagement was at the Copacabana with Ella Fitzgerald. He spent the next ten years turning his act into a potent force, but his best-known routine—speaking in pidgin English and taping his eyes back to play a Chinese waiter—was one of his worst. He was best when working free-form. “Hackett is a strange character,” wrote Variety after he returned to Billy Gray’s Band Box. “To the Band Box partisans he’s the apple in their strudel. In any other spot he’d click as vigorously as a cricket scraping his hips. Material schmaterial.” But it was precisely Hackett’s ability to veer from a set act that made him exciting to watch. He was one of those rare acts that comedians found as funny as the general public did. Woody Woodbury says, “Hackett was the comic. Rickles and all those guys would be on their knees to Buddy.”
As his status heightened, he grew nasty for no discernible reason. Actor Marvin Kaplan was with Hackett on the set of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. “I was leaning on a couch, and he threw a knife at me. Threw a knife at me!” Hackett’s violent side frequently involved weapons. His friend and fellow comic Pete Barbutti says, “If Buddy Hackett wasn’t Buddy Hackett—he would have been certifiable.” Barbutti was once with Hackett in the greenroom of the Sands Hotel when Hackett started firing a gun. “Jack [Entratter] was sitting there saying how Totie [Fields] always did good business. Buddy was saying, ‘That fat Jew broad! I hate her!’ He was going on and on. Her picture was on the wall above Jack’s head. Buddy reached under the couch, grabbed his gun and shot the picture off the wall.”
One day Hackett shot up a car in the hotel parking lot. “He showed up for work at the Sahara and someone took his space,” says Barbutti. “If that happened to you or me we’d put a note on his window. Not Buddy. He pulled out his gun and shot out all the windows, the headlights, the tires, reloaded—and shot it up again . . . then went in and did his show like nothing happened.”
After Lenny Bruce died, Hackett assumed the title as dirtiest comedian in the business. Vegas tourists used to his impish television persona were shocked when Hackett opened his mouth. “He got very X-rated,” says Freddie Roman. “I once asked him why. He said, ‘Because there’s no more challenge. I know I’m going to get laughs when I do my regular act, but I want to get the audience to hate me—and then see how long it takes to win them back.’”
Buddy Hackett and comedian Shecky Greene were Vegas superstars and close friends. Hackett’s gun-toting and Greene’s drinking coalesced one night in a violent desert struggle. “Buddy found me in a bar and came in with a portfolio under his arm, a gun in the portfolio,” says Greene. “I fired a guy that worked for him who was also my gardener. Buddy came in and said, ‘That man needs new teeth.’ I said, ‘Well, go buy him some new teeth!’ He said, ‘No, you should buy him some new teeth because you fired him.’ We went across the street and started gambling. And drinking.”
“They walked over and Shecky put down something like three hundred dollars and rolled a seven,” says Barbutti. “He had six hundred and said, ‘Let it ride.’ He rolled eleven and he had twelve hundred and stuffed it in Buddy’s pocket.”
It was enough to help out the fired gardener, but by that point both Greene and Hackett were blotto. “We made a lot of money,” says Greene. “We’re walking across the street. As I’m walking, Buddy stands in the middle of the street and says, ‘You know something? You’re a Waldo!’ I said, ‘What?’ He’s in the middle of the fucking street! I said, ‘I’m a what?’ He said, ‘Not only that . . . you’re a double Waldo!’”
Greene says he had no idea what that was
supposed to mean, “but it’s something you should never call me when I’m drinking.” Greene continues: “So now I walk back. I said, ‘I’m a fuckin’ double Waldo?’ He’s got the gun out. I punch him in the fucking stomach! As I’m walking away he comes running and jumps on my back! I flip him over my back. I put my foot on his throat. I said, ‘If you get up, Buddy—I’m going to kill you.’ I reached down, took his gun and car keys and threw them into the desert. I said, ‘Now don’t get up.’ About three hours later my phone rings. ‘Hi, Shecky. It’s Buddy. You know, if someone was with us this morning they would think we didn’t like each other.’”
Hackett’s violent side never affected his standing as a regular in Walt Disney films or his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show. He was considered a fearless comic, but many of his relationships were strained. “Buddy did some terrible fucking things,” says Greene. “He was like the devil. You never knew what was going to happen with Buddy. But he was a brilliant comedian.”
Shecky Greene was a star comedian in Vegas during the 1950s and 1960s. To this day the name “Shecky” is used in parodies of old-fashioned comedy. Jack Carter says, “After a while people were saying, ‘What are you—Shecky Greene?’ They use his name like a phrase. Shecky’s name is used as a symbol for comedy.”
While the name is meant to symbolize those comedians who are out of touch, the truth is that Shecky Greene was one of comedy’s great nonconformists and a far cry from an uncreative hack. When other comedians finished their final performance of the night they’d rush to where Greene was playing to soak up his brilliant madness. “One of the greatest I ever saw in a nightclub!” says comedian Pat Cooper. “I saw him climb the curtain and do twenty minutes from on top of the curtain! He destroyed an audience.”
There being little modern memory of what Greene’s act consisted of, the symbolic nature of his name is distorted. His contemporaries say he was irreverent and unforgettable—yet ask them what he said onstage and nobody has a clue. He was a creature of the nightclub—flying off on wild tangents, climbing walls and fighting owners. It was a free-form approach to comedy that a five-minute television spot could not convey. He was praised by legend Jack Benny, idolized by subversive Lenny Bruce and saluted by genre-expanding Ernie Kovacs. Greene was a genuine comedian’s comedian.
Greene started in a comedy team with the future founder of the Comedy Store, Sammy Shore. Shore says Greene was difficult. “He was always putting down show business: ‘I hate this fuckin’ thing. Fuck show business!’ And then he’d do another twenty minutes.”
“I really didn’t want the fucking business,” says Greene. “Every job that came saved me from quitting. A job started at fifty, next one was seventy-five, then it went to one-fifty, then it went to five hundred . . . I kept on going like that and couldn’t quit. I kept on lying to myself: ‘I’m going to go back to college.’ I saw people like Joan Rivers [with] that drive. I never had that shit. I just went and had my little nervous breakdowns with my depression.”
He suffered from anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder in an era when such things weren’t diagnosed. Comedian Don Sherman says, “Only in show business can a man look that uninhibited [onstage] and be experiencing such fear. The last thing he looked was frightened to the audience.” Greene was not a drinker until he landed in Vegas, where he discovered that booze quelled his anxiety. Soon he was Dr. Shecky and Mr. Hyde. “When Shecky drinks he turns Las Vegas into Dodge City of a hundred years ago,” wrote columnist Jim Bacon. “One explosive night, he rambled through Caesars Palace, knocking statues right and left off their pedestals.”
“He’d come offstage and he’d be crying like a baby and shaking,” says Pete Barbutti. “So he’d drink. It became a mood-altering drug for him and he would do these terrible things. He’d hit people. He drove his Cadillac into the fountains at Caesars Palace.”
“I was completely drunk,” says Greene. “I was completely insane. I forget what time it was in the morning. They gave me my car. They always gave me my car when I was drunk because they loved to see what was going to happen. I was driving about one hundred miles an hour. I hit a post. The post broke in two, went across my car, I swerved across the street, hit two signs and went right into the fountain.”
No charges were pressed. Woody Woodbury explains, “In the old days if you got drunk and the cops stopped you, one cop would get out of the police car and he’d drive you home.” Greene says, “In those days we had a different situation in Vegas. They would just talk to the sheriff’s office and that was the end of it. I never even got a ticket.”
Greene’s success in Las Vegas brought television offers, but his offbeat style was not easily translated to the small screen. “I was signed by NBC and they offered me different kinds of pilots which I turned down. I got terrible depressions, so I never really worked on anything. The Las Vegas lounge was perfect for me. Every night was a different show. Every night was improv. When I finally got back into main rooms, you more or less had to have an act, and that wasn’t who I was. I wasn’t an A-B-C-D comic.”
Barbutti was influenced by his style. “Comics would say to me, ‘You need to organize your routines! You need a beginning, a middle and an end!’ Growing up in jazz, I would say, ‘Can’t you go free-form?’ They’d say, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ When I came to Vegas I went to see Shecky and he had no routine at all. An hour and a half later I was laughing so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. He didn’t have a beginning, he didn’t have an ending, he was just the funniest guy in the world for ninety minutes.”
Greene’s nonconformity infuriated Frank Sinatra. He wanted Greene for the Rat Pack, but Shecky had no interest. Sinatra didn’t take rejection well. One night a real-life incident became Greene’s most famous joke: “Frank Sinatra saved my life once. I was jumped by a bunch of guys in a parking lot. They were beating me with blackjacks. Sinatra said, ‘Okay, boys—that’s enough.’”
Sinatra did indeed have Greene beat up. It happened while they were in Miami Beach filming the movie Tony Rome. “We were going to the bar. Frank and I were on the second tier and this guy Terry, one of The Boys, goes to put a chair there. Sinatra throws the chair down. Terry says, ‘Whadja do that for, Cheech?’ Sinatra says, ‘What are you gonna do about it?’ Sinatra leaves and he’s walking right down the middle of the street. We followed him back to the hotel and all hell broke loose. He was going to cancel the movie because this thing happened.
“He used to say, ‘You’re gonna get it, Shecky.’ I used to say, ‘Frank, what am I gonna get?’ He loved me. I didn’t love him. He said to me one day, ‘Without a doubt, you’re the sickest fucking human being I’ve ever met.’ So I took him by the head and put him in front of the mirror. I said, ‘There’s one sicker.’ He didn’t say a fuckin’ word . . .
“One day I come in drunk out of my mind about three o’clock in the morning. In the hotel five guys jump on me. The one guy was Fischetti who comes from a very noted family in Chicago. He always went to hit people with blackjacks. He kept on hitting me and the blood kept pouring down.”
Greene sobered in later years, but his insistence on the free-form style meant his act would never find posterity. He was the first Las Vegas lounge comedian—a historical distinction—but the improvised material that so impressed other comedians is now lost to the ether. For those who only know the name as a symbol of the old-fashioned, it’s surprising to hear the opinion of his contemporaries, like comic actor Marty Ingels: “For the most part he is considered the underground—and the underground’s number one guy.”
After Greene Don Rickles was the next Las Vegas lounge comedian. Rickles graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1946. His prestigious schooling equipped him for dramatics, but his secret ambition was comedy. He quietly admired the comedians at Hanson’s and would stand in awe as Milton Berle walked past him, en route to his office upstairs. He said Berle “represented what I thought comedy was a
ll about.” Rickles was shy in the presence of the loud, established drugstore kibitzers. “The first time I met Rickles was at the stage door of the Roxy when I was appearing with Tommy Noonan,” says Peter Marshall. “He was like a little fan. He wasn’t going to be a comic—he was going to be an actor. He started hanging around Hanson’s—and then he started doing Jack E. Leonard’s act.”
Jack E. Leonard was the primary insult comedian from the late 1940s through the 1950s. Initially he did the Chicago presentation house circuit with comic actor Billy House. Jack Waldron, a substitute insult comic from Club 18, took Leonard under his wing and asked Berle to get him gigs in New York. He moved up the ranks quickly and was hosting NBC’s Broadway Open House in its final days. Leonard and Rickles had little in common. Their styles were dissimilar and their careers at different levels. Rickles was in Long Lake, New York, in the summer of 1949, working as a low-level social director at the Sagamore Hotel, while Leonard was a burgeoning star.
That autumn Rickles walked into the office of Phil-Web Attractions across from Rockefeller Plaza. It was known that agent Willie Weber gave inexperienced comedians a chance. Columnist Ralph Pearl wrote, “Weber is a man who spent his life peddling second rate acts.” Weber’s portfolio included forgotten comedians Pat Henry, Mickey Shaughnessy and Eddie White. He represented Jackie Gleason when he was a nobody and booked Gleason at Club 18. Weber was small-time, but he mentored those rejected by everyone else. His son Stu was a Catskill booker and his grandson Steven Weber became a television star. Comic Don Sherman says, “I was raised by Willie Weber. He had all the little clubs owned by Mafia guys tied up.”
The Comedians Page 18