Beyond these pivotal early friendships, the tide quickly began turning in the right direction for all of us after moving to the Bronx. While my mother eventually found steady employment as a hotel bookkeeper in Manhattan and my sisters completed high school, I attended PS 90. Though I continued to excel in sports, my lackluster grades would hardly qualify me for a place in the National Honor Society. It’s not that I necessarily hated school, didn’t do my homework, or resented authority figures. The simple truth was that even with my grandfather living with us, I really didn’t have many male adult role models, especially since most of the guys I grew up with were fatherless also (or so it seemed).
In 1945, our family was dealt another difficult blow when my grandfather Jacob died of natural causes at the age of eighty-six, not long after my Bar Mitzvah. Despite his advanced age, he seemed immortal and his death came as a complete shock. Then, in 1946, we were forced to give up our apartment because the building had been sold and the new owner wanted it for himself—even though he was very lenient about it and gave us six months to find a new place. At that time, however, World War II had recently ended and there was a severe housing shortage in New York. There was also virtually no new construction, and so, with few alternatives, my mother decided to take a suite at the Le Marquis Hotel on 31st Street and Madison Avenue where she worked as a bookkeeper.
During my teenage years and into my early adulthood, we continued to hotel hop many more times, and although we felt like nomads, it wasn’t all bad. I loved the excitement and diversity, something that sort of compared to being a poor real-life male version of Eloise, the fictional children’s book character who lived at the Plaza.
As much as I enjoyed the adventure, however, I found myself faced with a bit of a dilemma when it came time to select a high school. Though we were living in Manhattan, the most logical place still seemed to be Taft in the Bronx, which Helene and Kala both attended, and which was coed. But this was never a viable option, because some girl had been felt up in the galoshes closet, and my sisters informed my mother that Taft would be a bad influence on me.
My choices were either Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, which I didn’t have the grades for, or Aviation High School in Long Island City, which I had no interest in. Instead, it was decided that I would attend the all-boys DeWitt Clinton High School on Mosholu Parkway back up in the Bronx. In those days, DeWitt was considered one of the country’s best public high schools, and it has boasted a raft of A-list alumni—including Ralph Lauren, Neil Simon, Stan Lee, Paddy Chayefsky, Garry Marshall, Richard Avedon, and comedians Jan Murray, Robert Klein, and Tracy Morgan.
The downside was the ninety-minute commute by subway twice a day. While occasionally I read, usually I found more dangerous ways to keep myself occupied, oftentimes by hanging my arm out the window of the moving train, running up and down the car, and having mock fistfights with my friends. Our shenanigans didn’t end there, and while I hated schlepping to the Bronx every day, the good part was that after school I got to play different sports with guys from the old neighborhood. Usually, we played stickball, softball, or basketball, and I was always up for a game no matter what time of year it was.
During the summers, meanwhile, I escaped the sweltering city heat by returning to Connecticut, where my Uncle Joe owned a summer home on Oxoboxo Lake in Uncasville right outside of Norwich. Though being away may have cost me my first girlfriend, who burst into tears when she found out I was leaving and later wound up marrying one of my best friends, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. Aside from the change of scenery and exposing me to new things, it also kept me away from peer pressure because by the summer before my final year in high school, many of my friends in the city were already experimenting with drugs, including marijuana and even heroin.
I also spent one summer as a lifeguard at Tamiment resort in the Poconos when I was seventeen. It was there that I first saw comedians such as Imogene Coca from Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows performing live onstage. Although it would be years before show business became my chosen profession, it made quite an impression on me. I also met and became very friendly with the brother of George Shapiro, the award-winning comedy manager who later went on to represent Jerry Seinfeld and Andy Kaufman.
Yet no matter how enamored I might have been with show business, I began to think about my future in more realistic terms as I approached high school graduation in 1950. Like most Jewish mothers, mine probably hoped that I would become a dentist or a lawyer or an accountant, although she never said anything, and I certainly didn’t have the ability for any of these professions. I also wasn’t about to subject myself to the City College of New York’s entrance exam, much less four years of college, since I’d already suffered the disappointment of having my grade point average plummet because of DeWitt’s foreign language requirement.
Initially, I decided to set my sights on simply trying to find gainful employment. My first job after graduation that summer was in the Catskills, the famed and predominantly Jewish Upstate New York resort region where almost any comedian and singer who was anybody in those years got their start.
We never had the financial means to vacation there, but I’d long been intrigued, especially after hearing about the stars that performed at places like Grossinger’s, the Concord, and Kutsher’s from our neighbor Arlene Strauss. Everyone called her “Crazy Arlene” and she was loaded by our standards. Her family was one of the few we knew in the Bronx who had a television when the medium was still in its infancy. Though there were only a handful of stations, and you had to turn on the set to let it warm up at least thirty minutes before your show came on in order to get a halfway decent reception, owning a TV then was considered the ultimate status symbol that few families could afford. Arlene and her mother used to let me and about five or six other kids come over and watch Milton Berle’s comedy-variety extravaganza Texaco Star Theater, which was the show that forever made him one of America’s biggest stars, along with earning him the nicknames “Uncle Miltie” and “Mr. Television.” (Years later, after becoming a semi-regular at both the New York and Hollywood Improvs, Milton and I wound up as good friends right up until his death in 2002. Milton knew everybody and everybody knew him. Even though we were pals for nearly fifty years, I was always in awe whenever I was in his presence.)
During my second summer in the Catskills, I got a job at the Sha-wan-ga Lodge in High View, New York. I was hired as a boat boy, but while I was there, I also got more exposure to live comedians and singers. They were all “somebodies” and as it turned out, I got to be a “somebody,” too. Not long after my arrival, I became the assistant stage manager, eventually playing the straight man to a burlesque comic named Sammy Smith.
My responsibilities also consisted of dancing with the mostly middle-aged female guests at the hotel, many of whom were married and had kids not much younger than me. When I say “middle-aged,” I should add that any woman over the age of thirty qualified as middle-aged to me, and I found many of them to be quite attractive. Of course, I had the good sense not to pursue any of them romantically. I was also still a teenager, just barely out of high school.
Needless to say, I had an incredible summer and did very well there, but when it came time to return to New York that fall, I again realized I needed to find something steadier. I got a job as a hardware store stock boy in lower Manhattan, making a dollar an hour, which I hated, and where I only lasted about three months, even though it cemented my lifelong love affair with hardware stores. After that, I worked in the test kitchen of General Foods at 250 Park Avenue, around the corner from Grand Central Station. By 1952, however, it gradually occurred to me that I might want to reconsider college, and so I decided to study for the Brooklyn College entrance exam at the urging of a high school teammate of mine who was now on the Brooklyn College football team.
While I loved the camaraderie of it, picking up the pigskin again was also the worst thing that had ever happened to me up
to that point—and the most painful. During our first practice, I intercepted the ball in the backfield, ran through the line, and was tackled from behind and thrown down, landing on the ground face forward. As I got back up on my feet, I realized my nose wasn’t broken and I felt like a new person.
It wasn’t long after when I decided it probably wasn’t in my best interest to remain on the team. And similar to my lackluster academic performance all the way through grade school and high school, I wasn’t any better when it came to college. Around the same time, I also began receiving draft notices and—voluntarily—decided to enlist in the army even though it was the height of the Korean War. After basic training in Pennsylvania, I was sent to biological warfare school just outside of Tokyo. Following three weeks there, I was posted to Korea, where all of the war was going on in the middle, with nothing happening in the south and north. Our unit literally went from Busan right up the peninsula to the main line of resistance in about a day and a half, as seemingly endless convoys shuttled men and equipment.
And then the next thing I knew, I was out on the front line in the middle of nowhere during the Battle of Pork Chop Hill on my first day in action. It was just like something out of a movie, and years later there was one called Pork Chop Hill starring Gregory Peck.
When we got to that battle, we were all dressed in freshly pressed uniforms and clean shaven. The rest of my guys were standing about fifteen yards behind me, throwing grenades up in the air. The sound was deafening and it worried me that I was at such close range, so I pleaded with them to throw the grenades to me with the pins in them, and to let me pull them.
At first, everything went fine, but then as I leaned forward and tried to duck for cover in one of the trenches, I was struck in the right leg and both arms by an enemy grenade. Minutes later, a piece of mortar also went through my helmet and scratched my earlobe as I was being hoisted up onto the mobile army surgical unit. By comparison, however, I got off easy, because the next thing I noticed, while being transported on the back of the tank, were five dead Chinese soldiers in the trench. One of them had his arm wrapped up in a bandage and he had lost a hand.
I was still recuperating in an Osaka military hospital, where I’d stay for four months, when a cease-fire went into effect and the war officially ended. After being discharged from the hospital and being awarded the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman Badge (CIB), I spent the next three weeks attending personnel management school. For the remainder of my twenty-one-month enlistment, I had a clerk’s job just outside of Tokyo at Camp Zama. While I yearned to return to civilian life, my time in the military taught me survival skills that would later prove beneficial in many unexpected ways in the comedy world, and I’m grateful to have had the experience.
I came back to the United States in August 1954 and immediately reported to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, although it would take nearly another month before my discharge became official. In between reuniting with my mother and sisters, I decided to return to Sha-wan-ga Lodge in the Catskills, where they put me in charge of security. I then moved back in with my mother, who was now living in Rego Park, Queens, and decided to give higher education one last try, first enrolling at the City College School of Commerce. Soon after, a letter arrived, informing me that I was eligible for more money from the GI Bill because of the injuries I had sustained in Korea, so I immediately transferred to New York University. Like I had during high school, I commuted every day to NYU’s Greenwich Village campus by subway, this time from Rego Park. I also enthusiastically threw myself into my studies in a way I hadn’t before. But it would take another two years after graduating with an advertising degree in 1957 before I finally landed my first “real” job in advertising.
My older cousin Leon, who was like a surrogate uncle to me, had already had a successful run producing television commercials, most notably with George Clooney’s aunt, Rosemary Clooney, who was then a popular singer and recording artist best known for such hits as “Come On-a My House” and “Mambo Italiano.” The problem was that Leon no longer worked in advertising. With no connections, I knew that getting a job in a New York agency would be next to impossible without starting off in the mail room, so I didn’t even bother to apply.
Instead, in 1961, I decided to give Boston a try, where I quickly found work as a junior account executive at a small agency called Marvin & Leonard Advertising. Like me, they were two New York Jews who’d recently moved to Boston; they’d taken over the company after the previous owner retired. They had an office on Lincoln Street, and all of their clients were shoe manufacturers.
They were very nice men who paid me an extremely generous salary. I also had a great apartment in Beacon Hill and a very active social life, but as ideal as things were, working in advertising quickly grew boring even though I did it for nearly two years. And remaining in Boston as a single person also gradually lost its appeal.
The turning point was hitting thirty, plus my mother no longer needed my financial help because she was now collecting social security and had recently inherited $5,000 from my Uncle Sid. So when the question became, “What should I do next?” the answer seemed immediately obvious. That’s when I made the decision to move back to New York in the summer of 1962 to finally try to do something in show business.
I knew I didn’t want to be an actor, but I also knew nothing about becoming a Broadway producer. Still, I wanted to be one, and I decided to go for it. I also made up my mind that I was going to mount my first show within a year.
TWO
Broadway Bound and the Unexpected Detour
I returned to New York in June 1962. I still don’t know how I ever thought I could make it as a Broadway producer, but failure was the furthest thing from my mind. The one thing I knew for sure is that I no longer wanted to work in advertising. I also knew that I needed to find a way to support myself before I could find my first show to produce.
Fortunately, my wonderful brother-in-law Gene, who owned a luncheonette on Madison Avenue, hired me as a waiter and let me work whenever I wanted. Another job I had for about three months was selling magazines over the phone, where one of my biggest sales was to the ex-wife of George “Bullets” Durgom, the legendary talent manager who represented such A-listers as Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and Sammy Davis Jr. She bought twelve subscriptions from me on the same day. After that, I did so well they eventually offered to promote me to manager, which I turned down, because I knew I wasn’t going to stick around long. However, between this and working for my brother-in-law, I was able to share an apartment with a wealthy friend of mine from Boston named Burt Caldwell.
Burt moved back to New York around the same time I did to work for his family’s tennis court installation company, and the Alphabet City apartment we shared was definitely a major step down from what I’d been accustomed to in Boston. It was a roach-infested hovel with exposed electrical wiring, a tub in the kitchen area, and no bathroom sink, which meant the kitchen is where we had to shave. The neighborhood was also riddled with drugs and crime in those days, and I couldn’t believe that someone with all Burt’s money was actually living there.
Even so, as two single guys, we had an amazing time in Manhattan. It was exciting and alive, especially at night, and I really liked Burt because he didn’t take himself too seriously. It was also around this time that I began dating Silver Saundors, the woman who eventually became my first wife and indirectly helped plant the seeds for the Improv. We tied the knot nearly six months after the club opened, and although the marriage ultimately didn’t work out, we had two wonderful daughters, Zoe and Beth. I also credit Silver for making me keep the menu prices down in the beginning.
We first met in the summer of 1961 at Logan Airport in Boston where she was on a layover from Nantucket, and we both happened to be on the same Eastern Airlines flight to New York, before I’d moved back there. She was five feet five with blonde hair and movie-star looks that I found very striking. Silver, then twenty-seven, was a chorus girl
in the Broadway company of Fiorello!, which impressed me. I was intrigued, too, when she told me how she’d been named after Sime Silverman, the founder of the show-business bible, Variety, where her father was an editor.
SILVER SAUNDORS FRIEDMAN, Budd’s ex-wife:
Budd kind of sidled over to me from out of nowhere. I was wearing a yellow car coat and a kelly-green hat. In all truthfulness, I was kind of dressed like a crazy person, but the ensemble went well together as far as I was concerned. This obviously must have made an impression on Budd, because the first thing he said to me was, “I bet you’re from New York.”
That was his opening line, and I was like, “Pardon me?”
And he goes, “I can tell from the way you’re dressed that you must be from New York.”
I’d missed the previous flight because I overslept that morning, and I was in no mood for small talk, so I said, “Yes, I guess I am if you say so.” I was very aloof about it, although Budd was evidently unfazed because the next thing he did was ask me out for a drink if we couldn’t get on the flight. I reminded him that it was one o’clock in the afternoon and told him I didn’t drink at this hour, so he asked me out for a soda instead.
Then an announcement came over the loudspeaker that the flight had been delayed, so we ended up going to this little bar near the gate. I ordered a glass of tomato juice while Budd ordered wine and we sat for about a half hour. I then politely excused myself and went back over to the gate to stand in line. Meanwhile, Budd had somehow managed to get on the plane ahead of me because by the time I finally got on board he was waving me over to the seat next to him. It turned out Budd was going to New York to meet up with some friends and he asked if he could come see Fiorello!.
“Everybody can see the show,” I said.
“Can you get me a comp ticket?” he asked. I told him no, but when I said that I could get him a discounted ticket, he was still undeterred and asked for my phone number.
The Improv Page 3