How to Succeed in Business Without Really Crying

by Leifer, Carol

  No surprise, Bette went on to be brilliant on Seinfeld (I’m still kicking myself that we didn’t submit her for a guest actress Emmy nomination). But more important, it showed the kind of heart Bette Midler has. Tragically, Marge passed away a year later from cancer, but that Bette episode was truly a highlight for her.

  With Jay Leno in the green room of Late Night with David Letterman.

  The nicest celebrity I’ve ever known is Jay Leno, the host they kept rewarding for ruling late night by replacing him. I’ve never seen Jay pass up an opportunity to take a photo with a fan or give an autograph when someone asks. He used to call it “The Rule of Ten.” When you’re nice to somebody, they’ll go back and tell ten people about their experience with you. Word gets around when you’re nice. But the phenomenon is an equal-opportunity employer. It also gets around when you’re a rude douche; that intel goes “Rule of Ten,” too.

  So even if it’s not in your nature to be nice, think about it strategically. When I was coming up, I once went to a studio where they made demo reels, or a compilation of TV appearances. It was, and is, a great tool to send around a video of your best stuff. For my reel, I worked closely with an editor named Grant Heslov, who went on to become George Clooney’s producing partner and win several Academy Awards. Needless to say, Grant is a major player now. And when we run into each other, I enjoy ribbing him about our “creative collaboration” from way back when. But suppose I had a feature project that I wanted to pitch to him. Wouldn’t it suck if I had been a tool when we worked together, and he remembered that? It would be hard to even get in the door to see him.

  There’s another interesting person I knew from a long time ago, a woman who was a waitress when I was performing at the Improv in L.A. in the mid-1980s. Her name is Callie Khouri, and she went on to win an Academy Award for writing Thelma & Louise. She’s currently the executive producer and creator of the ABC drama Nashville. I wouldn’t mind being interviewed for a staff job at that show one day, so thank the good Lord I wasn’t a comic who was a real creep to waitresses. Because there were plenty of those. I love so many of the comics I’ve met over the years, but there are others who treated the waitstaff like inmates, yelling at them, refusing to call them by their names, displaying all the qualities that eventually made them the lonely, self-loathing middle-aged ex-comics they turned out to be.

  So, right from the beginning, make it a habit to be kind. In the techno-world we live in, it’s super important because the nasty stuff can trip you up real quick. Particularly with e-mail. I often get e-mail messages that make me mental, sent by people who are being real jackasses in any number of ways. I’ve made that dreadful mistake of replying right away, with all the vitriol fresh on my fingers and spilling all over the keyboard. Because of those situations, I’ve made a firm rule for myself. When an e-mail gets me hopped up, I wait twenty-four hours before responding. (Speaking of e-mails, a note to Kohl’s: You can stop sending them to me. I know you’re having a sale. You’re always having a sale.)

  No harm, no foul, right? It’s always acceptable business etiquette to respond a day later to an e-mail. But more important, during that twenty-four-hour period I’ve cooled down and am able to send a less emotional response, using words that spellcheck knows. Oh, how I wished I’d made that rule for myself earlier in the game.

  So, “be nice.” Turns out your mom wasn’t so clueless after all. On the other hand, “eat your vegetables” … well, I still have a problem with that one, and I’m a vegetarian.

  Party at my pad in 1983. (That’s Jay’s wife, Mavis, in the middle.)

  CHAPTER 7

  BAD VIBRATIONS

  My least favorite class in school was gym. Ugh, who had the patience for it, especially in the middle of the day? Putting on a red “skort” (one of the earliest uses of this fashion nightmare) and then spending the entire next period smelly and sticking to the back of your chair?

  Even worse was being sent to the school psychologist. You knew you were a certifiable whack job if you had to take a walk down that lonely hall to the man in the argyle vest smoking a pipe. And yet looking back, those experiences, ironically, provided two of the most important takeaways from my education: Keep your mind resilient. Keep your body strong.

  Because any business endeavor is a challenge. To stay at the top of your game, you’ve got to take care of yourself, mentally and physically. In terms of your psyche—whether an argyle vest is involved or not—strong coping mechanisms are essential for dealing with the inevitable vicissitudes on the roller coaster ride that is your career. (Note to my freshman English teacher: I not only spelled “vicissitudes” correctly, but I used it in a sentence, too.) I hope I’m giving you plenty of strategies throughout this book that will help your mental health, and I’ll return to the topic later in this chapter.

  On the skort side of things, moving your ass is highly underrated, for both mind and body. You look good as a result of regular exercise, but more important, it keeps your head in the right place. As a writer, I find that connecting to my body via exercise has become the essential counterpart to spending so much time inside my brain. When I’m pent up, angry, or frustrated—all of which consume a startling amount of my time—nothing sweeps the streets of my head like a good spin class. Even driving to the class is relaxing.

  I practically live at a place called Blazing Saddles in Sherman Oaks, California. (Check it out. But if you like it, please don’t crowd up my morning class.) When I’m on that bike, I think of everything that’s making me ballistic; I stare it down and run it over. It’s like road rage, except no one gets hurt, just slightly toned. The best part is that, many times when it’s a really fierce workout, I’ll find solace in knowing that this will probably be the toughest part of my day. (Let’s remember that I deal with jokes, not plutonium.)

  So learn to love to sweat, and try to learn it early in life. If you never exercise, the last thing you want to hear from a doctor when you’re forty is “You better start.” (Actually, that’s the second-to-last thing you want to hear from a doctor.) If you wait until middle age to try to get into shape, you might find yourself exhausted just from shopping for workout gear (even if you’re doing it online).

  Working out, of course, helps you keep the weight off (should bookstores shelve this book in the “Health and Fitness” section?). Personally, I am fanatic about staying trim. I’m even a lifetime member of Weight Watchers (you’d think they’d send me a cake or something, but no). And I’m fanatic because I discovered that absolutely no good comes from being heavy. Even people who get on televised weight-loss shows can’t be too happy they got the gig. (“Hey, Mom! Hear the good news? I’m so obese that I’m going to be on a TV show where people yell at me because I’m fat, and every week they put me on a scale used to weigh livestock. Mom? You there …?”)

  In the late eighties I let myself go, weighing in at one hundred and fifty-nine pounds (oh, the relief of not hitting one-six-o on that scale!). And it was nothing short of a nightmare, the six months I lumbered around at that tonnage. It culminated one night at the Improv, where I removed my sweater midset and a heckler yelled out from the audience, “Sooie!!!!!” It was one of my worst moments ever as a stand-up, and I’ve got quite the Rolodex of “worst moments” to choose from.

  In fact, pardon this slight detour to hear about my actual worst moment as a stand-up comic. After my third appearance on Late Night with David Letterman in 1982, my agent got a call from one of the Beach Boys, the late Carl Wilson, asking if I could open for the group at Harrah’s Casino in Lake Tahoe over Christmas week. I was, naturally, thrilled to get this opportunity. Unfortunately, I was a little too green for the opponent that is a casino crowd. Needless to say—but I’ll say it—the gig was a nightmare. First off, the ever-polite and professional Beach Boys would tune up during my set. Not having an agent or manager with me on the gig, I had to be the fun agent of change, asking them timidly if they could stop doing that. (They didn’t.) Then, at the New Year’s
Eve show, I got a table right up front crowded with drunk frat-house boys. Not only did they chant “Reefer! Reefer!” during the first five minutes of my set (mocking my last name … good one, college boys), but they followed up by pulling on my microphone cord as if it was a fishing line. Absolutely no one from the casino was policing the room, which left me to desperately pull back on the cord as if I were Papa Hemingway and the frat house boys a group of marlin. This memory still has the power to wake me up in the middle of the night in a cold, panicky sweat.

  But getting back to our discussion of flab …

  At this stage in my career, nothing spells “old” like becoming a big pot-bellied lug. I’m committed to keeping my weight down simply because so many of my contemporaries have just said “screw it” and let the pounds roll on. It’s depressing.

  I’m not, of course, belittling obesity or its effects. (Well, minimally I am.) For many people, being overweight is a lifelong struggle over which they have little control. But there are others, myself included, who are not in that group. And I’ve seen more than a few of them—us—give up, become lazy. It’s like they’re saying, “You win, world!” To me, that attitude communicates “I don’t care much about myself. So how much am I going to care about this job?” (Depends on what kind of vending machines they’ve got in the office, I guess.)

  Similarly, I still have friends who don’t get annual checkups. They avoid going to a doctor for many reasons—usually because they’re scared of what they might find out. Or maybe they already have a lot of old magazines at home and don’t feel a particular need to go to some office to read a bunch more. Whatever the reason, these folks don’t get checkups, and eventually they don’t need to. It’s crazy. They wind up with a diagnosis of cancer or some other horrible disease that could have been caught early; they might have been able to save their lives if they had just done the whole nine yards with a routine physical. So do yourself the biggest favor ever and go see the good doc—one who has diplomas on the wall and plastic models of body parts you can play with when no one is in the room. Sure, it’s embarrassing to be asked gross and personal questions. But always remember that “dying from embarrassment” is just an expression.

  Now let’s return to the subject of your head, the body part in use right now (I hope) as you read my book. First, let me come right out and say it: I highly encourage you to go into therapy. And I say that without even meeting you, because I don’t have to. Trust me, you’ve got problems. Everybody does. I’ve been in therapy for most of my adult life, still valiantly trying to work out my problems in the proper location of a board-certified shrink’s office. Because if I’ve seen anything over the course of my career, it’s that people who’ve never dealt with their issues will take them out somewhere along the work road, where they don’t belong. To staggeringly self-sabotaging results.

  But I’m fair. If it’s not therapy, then just find someplace safe where you can work on your problems, as long as it’s legal and doesn’t hurt anyone else.

  I’m also a big fan of journaling. I’ve found it very useful to always track my goals and expectations so there’s a reality gauge on paper. When everything’s down in black and white, you’ll have visible evidence of what eventually drove you to drink.

  The biggest recent change in my life came when I started practicing transcendental meditation (TM), which I had assumed was something for old hippies or Beatles. But my friend Jerry Seinfeld, who is neither of those things, has been an ardent enthusiast of TM for as long as I’ve known him. In 2009, I accompanied him to a Change Begins Within benefit concert at Radio City Music Hall, an event to raise funds for the teaching of TM to at-risk youths, veterans, and other groups. Jerry performed (and killed, natch), and the benefit got me interested.

  Now, we all know that when you attend an event that’s dedicated to lauding something, it’s hard to leave without being affected by it, even if it’s an Herbalife seminar. But something really connected with me that night about TM—mostly the testimonials of people who shared how it had completely changed their life. Howard Stern and his wife, Beth, were there. (That’s three name drops in two paragraphs, for those of you counting.) And being a longtime fan of his show, I knew what a TM fan Howard was.

  So when I hung out that summer with Howard and Beth (yes, I’m “hung-dropping” now), I mentioned how I was intrigued by TM but intimidated by the idea of learning it. Coincidentally, Beth had just learned the basics a day or two earlier. Upon hearing how quickly she was able to pick it up, I was no longer so overwhelmed by the concept. When I got back to L.A., my partner, Lori, and I took the TM introductory class, and the technique was as easy and natural as promised. (Interested? I’ll give you the simple, exact advice that Howard gave me: “Go to TM.org.” That’s literally all you need to know to get started.)

  TM has had a profound effect on my life these past few years. I am a much calmer, more centered, happier person. Any stress that’s thrown my way, I can now disassemble it so much more effectively. And I sleep like a friggin’ baby (that’s first use of the phrase “friggin’ baby” in any publication that I know of). I used to need a lot of sleep meds to get through my crazy schedule traveling to gigs, but I don’t need any now. Plus, doing TM has really freed up my creativity. (Maybe that’s not evident from this chapter, but it’s true.) I know I’m starting to sound a bit like a snake oil salesman, but as far as I’m concerned, TM is truly a miracle waiting inside everyone. Did I mention TM.org?

  Whether or not you try TM, or therapy, or a spinning class, or some other method, the point is this: Take care of yourself. When you work at keeping your mind and body in shape, you’re sharpening the best tools in your career arsenal. And if, like me, you have unpleasant memories of high school gym class, find strength in knowing that the skort need never be part of future employment endeavors.

  CHAPTER 8

  I’M HARRY DEAN STANTON’S MOMMY

  My partner, Lori, and I are sitting at a Simon and Garfunkel reunion concert, anxiously waiting for the show to begin.

  We’re at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and we have amazing seats, one of the perks of being with a big talent agency. Your rep might not be great at getting you work, but pick a concert with hard-to-get tickets and you’re in! (Believe me, I stayed at my last agency a few years longer than I should have because of said bonus.)

  As we’re sipping a couple of beers, Lori looks behind us at and says, “Hey! Isn’t that Harry Dean Stanton over there? And isn’t he sitting with Jack Nicholson?!” I turn around to see that Lori was indeed right. Wow! We’ve got even better seats than they do.

  Then Lori says, “Why don’t you go over to Harry Dean Stanton and say hi? Didn’t you have dinner with him and a bunch of other people not too long ago?” My partner, who has the memory of an elephant, was very much correct (as you can see from the opposite page). I did share a great night with Harry Dean Stanton and a bunch of comedian friends at the Palm Restaurant. Richard Belzer is a good friend of Harry Dean’s, and he invited some comics and comedy writers (among them Dom Irrera, Jim Vallely, and Jonathan Schmock, who used to make up the comedy team called the Funny Boys). As I recall, a lot of alcohol was consumed that night and we had a pretty rollicking good time. The dinner lasted easily three hours. I’m usually the lone female at these comedian dinners, so at some point in the evening, it’s de rigueur that I get an extra-special dose of attention. And if memory serves me correctly, the spotlight on me that evening was a rousing chant of “Mommy! Mommy!” that serenaded me as I downed a shot of tequila.

  (My nickname among my comedian pals is “Mommy.” As in, Ronald Reagan calling his wife, Nancy, “Mommy.” I’m not exactly sure how I got it, but it’s stuck for a million years now.)

  Back to the Staples Center: “No way,” I said to Lori. “I’m not going over there. Especially because Jack Nicholson’s sitting over there, too!”

  “But what do you always tell me when we go out?” Lori shot back.

  I wanted
to dodge her question, even though I already knew the answer. Sheepishly I confessed and said, “I always tell you to tell me to go over and say hi to people.”

  Busted!

  As much as I didn’t want to take the trek back to Harry Dean—and Jake Gittes from Chinatown—Lori was correct. I’ve never gone wrong over the course of my career by going out of my way to say hello to people, not just close friends, colleagues, and acquaintances but even people I barely know. True, if you’re not a natural glad-hander—or maybe if you’re just not in the mood—it can be hard to muster the courage and approach someone you don’t know well. But even if it’s never fun doing it, it’s always the smart thing to do. I’ve found that some really cool things can come from just casually running into someone in a social setting.

  That fact fired up my chutzpah. Yeah! I thought to myself. It’d be stupid not to say something to Harry Dean. For God’s sake, we broke three kinds of expensive bread together! He called me Mommy in a group setting!

  So, I got up.

  And I strolled over to Harry Dean (and Jack), keeping my demeanor very up and positive. (I’ve learned that if you approach celebrities in a meek and mild manner, you’ll have a security person in your face in no time.)

  “Hey, Harry Dean!” I said. Then, pointing to myself, “It’s Carol Leifer. Richard Belzer’s buddy?”