The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Weber sent Rickles on runs through Baltimore, Detroit, Montreal and Philadelphia. When they weren’t interested in a comic, Weber lied and told bookers that Rickles was a harmonica virtuoso. “Rickles did hundreds of shows for this guy Willie Weber before anybody ever heard of him,” says Will Jordan. “Hundreds of nightclubs all over the country, hundreds of shows. His act had nothing to do with insults. We’re talking 1949–1950. Rickles would do a bit about a guy in a movie theater sneaking a smoke.”

  Nothing to do with insults—and just as little to do with comedy. Rickles was equipped mostly with the dramatic pieces he’d learned in school. “He had very little of an act,” says comic Leo DeLyon. “He would imitate Peter Lorre doing an Edgar Allan Poe piece.” It was the cornerstone of his early days, the dramatic soliloquy. “The Man with the Glass Head” was based on an Edgar Allan Poe story, one which Peter Lorre had been doing on the presentation house circuit. Rickles decided to do it himself. “He had glass over his head,” says Sammy Shore. “I don’t know what the hell it was.”

  Dramatic soliloquies did not sit well with drunken nightclub crowds. Heckling was inevitable. When it happened Rickles responded—and the insult shtick was born. “From that he would go off on millions of tangents with the audience,” says DeLyon. “That became his whole persona, insulting and handling them.”

  Rickles crisscrossed the country. He became a regular at Murray Franklin’s bar in Miami Beach. Woody Woodbury says, “We’d go see him at Murray Franklin’s. When he was first starting out he was making anti-Semitic remarks. My friend Al Schwartz would say, ‘I don’t wanna go in there because the Jews hate him.’ I said, ‘He’s Jewish.’ It was before he was accepted for what he was. Those young Jewish kids didn’t understand what the hell he was doing. They wanted to come over the goddamn bar and kill him.”

  “I met him in Philadelphia,” says Jack Carter. “He used to work at a place called the Celebrity Room, which was in a back alley. I used to get him dates and we’d go out. He was a nebbish. He was scared to death of women and had no social life at all.”

  “We were working bad joints in Washington and Baltimore and there was this after-hours club called the Alibi Room,” says comic Dick Curtis. “In those days you couldn’t sell booze after midnight. This was a private after-hours club and Rickles was the emcee. He was working so blue, just for strippers and dirty comics.” In 1958 a new manager entered his sphere and told him to keep it clean. “The guy who took over his career was a Mob guy named Joe Scandore,” says Curtis. “He straightened him out. Scandore was an Outfit guy.”

  Scandore and his brother ran a large nightclub in Brooklyn called the Elegante. They opened it with money from their father, the owner of a massive cardboard box factory. Comic Art Metrano says, “I was told right off the bat, ‘Don’t fuck around with Joe Scandore.’ He was pretty well connected. I performed at the Elegante on Ocean Parkway and he was very kind to me, but people also said, ‘Don’t do anything wrong.’” Willie Weber’s client Lou Marsh says, “You didn’t fool around with Scandore. Scandore . . . I mean, I’m not saying anything but . . . Joe . . . had a way of doing things.”

  It was rumored that the Elegante was a front for Johnny Biello, a mobster who worked for the Vito Genovese crime family. “I clicked at the Elegante,” Rickles wrote in his memoir. “That’s where my style came together. And Joe was there to witness the whole thing. Joe liked me so much he bought my contract from Willie Weber and decided to manage me. Leaving Willie wasn’t easy, but he understood. No hard feelings.”

  Court documents indicate the feelings were harder than Rickles lets on. In February 1959, Weber filed suit against Rickles in New York Supreme Court for breach of contract. Rickles appealed to have the motion dismissed, but failed. Scandore’s people then paid Weber a private visit—and suddenly the suit was dropped. “Weber never got a chance to revel in the glory of Rickles’ enormous success because he was replaced,” wrote columnist Ralph Pearl. “He died heartbroken and disillusioned.”

  “Rickles and I had the same manager early on,” says comedian Frank Man. “Scandore was with the Mob. They provided the money and they got you the right jobs. I didn’t want to get involved with anything like that, but they were all Mob-connected. He seemed like a nice guy.”

  Scandore made Rickles his primary focus and used his extensive connections to build his career. “Scandore was a devoted manager of Don Rickles,” says producer George Schlatter. “He devoted his life to Rickles and did a helluva job. Nobody fucked around with Rickles or Scandore.”

  Scandore sent a relative, Peter Danizlo, to Miami Beach to secure a venue that could showcase Rickles on a nightly basis. They took charge of a bar at the Admiral Vee Motel and named it the Riot Room. “If you can fight your way in and don’t mind being insulted—you might take a flier at the Riot Room and Don Rickles,” reported columnist Herb Kelly opening night. “The dolt and the dullard won’t dig it. Only the hip will get a kick out of it.”

  The insult thing clicked, although Rickles was terrified of actually hurting feelings. He was known as a kind and charitable man. “Jackson Heights—there was a newsstand there,” says Will Jordan. “One day, I was going into the city and there was Rickles [working] at the newsstand. He wasn’t broke. He was doing it as a favor. That’s what Rickles is really like.”

  When Rickles went to California, the Hollywood mobster Mickey Cohen got a phone call. “Frank Costello called me and said, ‘Hey, you’re gonna get a kick out of this guy, he’s a good kid. Go in and see if ya can give him a hand. The people back here like him.’ So I went in and I caught Rickles and Jesus Christ, I never heard anybody like this guy.”

  Rickles got his West Coast break at the Slate Brothers in Los Angeles. Located on La Cienega Boulevard’s Restaurant Row, it was a small room run by the former presentation house dance act of Henry, Jack and Syd Slate. Rickles was an emergency replacement after the Slate Brothers fired Lenny Bruce for swearing onstage.

  Rickles was booked next at Gene Norman’s Crescendo on the Sunset Strip. Norman remembered Rickles as “a very sweet man, but very insecure. After every show he’d come up to me and say, ‘How’d I do? How’d I do?’ Looking for approval.”

  Rickles was the opening act for singer Frances Faye, but Joe Scandore presented him as if he were the star. “His manager tried to stop the [lighting] man from turning off the spotlight on him,” says Gene Norman. “Faye’s manager nearly had a fistfight with Don’s manager.”

  Stan Irwin phoned Scandore and asked if Rickles would perform in the lounge at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. Irwin was enjoying success with Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Prima and Smith, the first and only lounge act at the Sahara, were outdrawing the headliners in the main room. Irwin wondered if a comedian could do the same. Don Rickles was an experiment.

  The Sahara lounge shows ran late. The last Rickles show of the evening started at 5 A.M. Many celebrities wandered through the lounge and were perfect targets. Show people loved it and started to hire Rickles on their programs as a result. Johnny Carson adored him and used him often. Meanwhile, Jack E. Leonard was losing out.

  Leonard was pridefully dismissive as Rickles made a name for himself. “He got everything from me,” said Leonard. “He’s big, real big, but I’ll tell you—I can still destroy Don Rickles.” Earl Wilson wrote, “Jack E. Leonard still considers himself too big a star to worry about competition.” But in private, he brooded. “Jack E. Leonard said Don Rickles stole his act,” says Stan Irwin. “He truly believed that.”

  Most of Rickles’ contemporaries also believe it. “Rickles denies he copied Jack E. Leonard—but of course he did,” says Will Jordan. Peter Marshall says, “It was Jack’s act. Don took it and expanded on it.” And Sammy Shore concludes, “Rickles was very funny and became what he became—but it was all from Jack E. Leonard.”

  “There just weren’t enough places for them to both work,” says Shecky Greene. “Cons
equently, Rickles was getting popular, and that bothered Jack. He’d say, ‘Shecky, he’s doing me! He’s doing me!’ I’d say, ‘Jack, he’s not doing you. You are doing you and he’s doing him.’ But I watched the demise of Jack E. Leonard.”

  Rickles contested the accusation and said that he never ever emulated Leonard. “He was so wrong, and so were a lot of other people. They compared me to him. Jack was a funny guy but Jack was the kind of guy that did put-down things in a set routine. Whereas mine, I don’t tell jokes. He was more of a jokester. I do situation things that become a joke. So we were so different but he insisted on saying, in a kind way, he said, ‘You know, kid, you’re doing me.’ Which was not the case.”

  When the Friars Club roasted Rickles for the first time, it got Jack E. Leonard to host the show. He opened, “Friends . . . welcome once more to the Eichmann trial. I want to tell you what a thrill it is to be here in honor of one of America’s great Americans . . . who has been doing my act for about twelve years now. I am here to make a citizen’s arrest. I don’t mind the guy doing my act, but the son of a bitch stole my [bald] head too. I also want to thank Johnny Carson for creating a monster.”

  Soon enough Don Rickles was a star and Jack E. Leonard was forgotten. Robert Klein saw Leonard perform at a nightclub around that time and sensed a sadness in the man. “After the show Jack went to a restaurant a couple doors down and I followed him. I thought there would be people and pretty girls and this and that—but nothing. There he was—eating by himself. He looked so lonely.”

  Rickles was simply the more talented of the two—and worked much harder. Rickles paid his dues, got some powerful help along the way and surpassed his detractors. He was criticized by Groucho Marx, who said, “A comedian will never be a star unless he is loved. It may be therapeutic to let out venom and hostility, but it’s not the type of material that will make his name live through the ages. That is why Don Rickles will never be a star.” Contrary to Groucho’s prediction, Rickles is indeed loved, he is a star, and his name has lived through the ages.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Stand-up’s Great Change

  Stand-up was about to get personal. For the first half of the twentieth century comedians performed without referencing their personal lives onstage. When Frank Fay changed the game in vaudeville he changed it only so much. Fay spoke not of himself but of others. The comedy was always about some elusive guy:

  “Did you hear about the guy who . . .”

  “A fella was walking down the street when . . .”

  In the mid-1950s no longer was it “a fella” walking down the street. For the first time comedians told the audience: “I was walking down the street.”

  Old comedians joked about their mother-in-law even if they weren’t married. An abstract, nonexistent mother-in-law suffered the brunt of their ridicule. Seldom was a comedian’s material moored in reality. Seldom did a comic expose his real side. Jack Benny may have played on being cheap and Milton Berle may have talked of joke thievery, but they were fictional characteristics. What they sold to their audience was an illusion.

  Stand-up was impersonal because few comedians wrote what they said. With the references generic, a comedy writer could sell the same routine to multiple people. A handful of comics like Morey Amsterdam and Nipsey Russell devised their own material, but even that conformed to a generic point of view. Without a personal stamp it was easily pillaged. Stand-up comedians copped from the popular joke books of Billy Glason, James Madison, Joe Miller and Robert Orben. They offered “1001 sure-fire gags for any occasion.” Other comedy writers transcribed jokes right off the radio and sold them. It created a landscape of homogeneity.

  James Madison was founding father of these jokebooks, according to comedian Fred Allen. “For twenty years—from 1898 to 1918—a man named James Madison published an annual collection of monologues, cross-fire jokes, sketches, minstrel-show afterpieces and parodies. This assortment of humorous matter sold for one dollar and was known as Madison’s Budget. If a comedian found six or eight jokes in the Budget that he could adapt to his act, his dollar investment had returned a hearty dividend.”

  Journalist Bill Treadwell complained about joke recycling in 1950 and blamed Joe Miller. “Every joke ever written eventually gets back to a guy called Joe Miller. His old joke book has been a comedy bible to vaudeville clowns and radio comics, not to mention nightclub emcees. The first edition contained some 247 original anecdotes and sayings. In later editions the number increased to over 1,500.”

  Madison and Miller cornered the market during the vaudeville years. They were displaced by Robert Orben in the nightclub age. “I ran into the famous Robert Orben books,” says comic Don Sherman. “He would break down a monologue. He’d talk about driving to a nightclub and then he’d have fifteen different driving jokes. Through that you would construct an act.” Orben later became a speechwriter for Gerald Ford.

  Some comedians invested in topical jokes, failing to acknowledge their expiry date. According to Joe Laurie Jr., “The end of World War II found comics holding the bag for about $150,000 in unused and usable war gags.” God forbid they write something.

  Norm Crosby pieced together his first nightclub act using material he’d seen on The Ed Sullivan Show. “I was doing everybody’s material. I would watch Ed Sullivan on a Sunday and I would take a joke or a gag or a line from all the comics. I took from Buddy Hackett, Jan Murray and Red Buttons. I took just a thought, an idea, a gag, a line, just something—not stealing really. Because when you have no writers, no knowledge of writers, and no material of your own, you know, it was okay to do that.” That attitude would change. The 1950s bred new hostility to joke thieves.

  Material was not the only thing that was derivative in the life of a tuxedo comedian. Even the names of the comedians were the same. There were guys like Buddy Lester, Buddy Lewis and Buddy Hackett; Joe E. Brown, Joe E. Lewis and Joe E. Ross; Joey Adams, Joey Bishop and Joey Forman. An inexplicable number of them were named Jackie—Jackie Clark, Jackie Curtiss, Jackie Gayle, Jackie ­Gleason, Jackie Heller, Jackie Kahane, Jackie Kannon, Jackie Mason, Jackie Miles, Jackie Wakefield, Jackie Whalen, Jackie Winston, Jackie Vernon, Jack E. Leonard . . .

  “It was a street thing,” says Don Sherman. “Jackie! Lenny! Billy! ‘Get Jerry to run to the store!’ It was a term of affection. Although the name Jackie doesn’t work after the age of thirty.”

  “I used various names when I was starting out,” says character comic Chuck McCann. “I used the name Jack Frost. I came onstage and the people shouted, ‘Jack Frost—get lost!’ So I dropped that. Every comic in the world was named Jackie. I used Jackie McCann at one point. That didn’t work either.”

  Comedy conformity was attacked in the mid-1950s, as coffee­house comedians Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Jonathan Winters instigated a paradigm shift and revolutionized stand-up for a new generation. Together they killed off the Jackies and inspired those with an artistic sensibility.

  “I didn’t know anything about Lenny Bruce when I got his album,” said George Carlin. “What it did for me was this. It let me know there was a place to go—to reach for—in terms of honesty of self-expression. The 1950s was when comedy changed forever for the better. Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, Nichols & May, Jonathan Winters was a departure from what had gone before. Thus, the old order, the Catskills way of playing it safe and avoiding controversial subjects, disappeared. I heard my first Lenny Bruce and my life changed.”

  In 1953 Lenny Bruce left Hanson’s Drugstore and moved to the West Coast. He brought along his old-fashioned act, but in time he would shed that skin and emerge an artistic revolutionary. He got stoned among the Beats and distanced himself from his old persona. In a reversal of the trajectory of most comics, he first played big-time presentation houses and became a strip club emcee after. Comedian Slick Slavin was one of the first to encounter him in Los Angeles. “I got a booking at a place called the York Club i
n South Central. I wanted to get a feel for the place so I went in on a Sunday. Lenny Bruce was the act. He was wearing a tuxedo and doing impersonations of Al Jolson. I figured he was the squarest guy I had ever seen.”

  The impressions bided time until Bruce invented something new. He paid the bills writing material for impressionist Al Bernie. It was Bernie who connected Bruce with Frankie Ray Perilli, the comic who became Lenny’s manager. Perilli says, “When I got to Los Angeles, I went to this club called Duffy’s. That’s where this owner let Lenny do anything he wanted.” Duffy’s was a Franklin Avenue strip club where the stakes were low and the crowds apathetic. It was where Bruce met jazz saxophonist Joe Maini, the man who taught him how to handle a syringe. “Joe was extremely influential on us in those days,” said Honey Bruce. “It blew my mind the first time I discovered him in the bathroom with a belt around his arm, inserting a needle in his vein. That’s when Lenny and I started getting the desire to use.”

  The venue and the drug use gave Bruce a feeling of freedom. He improvised, and his act entered new realms. “He’d take off on the bosses,” says Perilli. “‘These two guys, man. There’s a girl singer on the show and the boss is in love with her, dig? She can’t get a job and this asshole bought her a nightclub so he could get laid.’” This material was wild for 1953. “None of the stuff I saw Lenny Bruce do in strip joints did he ever do on his albums,” says Will Jordan. “His talent came from ad-libbing, being on every night in a strip joint where you could be as dirty as you want and making the musicians laugh. We were always told, ‘Do not make the band laugh.’ He did exactly the opposite and that worked for him, because the band sense of humor, the musician’s slang, began to dominate in the 1950s. Every time I saw him he was doing something very different, very dirty and very original. He would do an abortion doctor and use the microphone as some sort of instrument. He would talk about jerking off the Frankenstein monster.”