How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am

by Charles Grodin

  Copyright © 2009 by Charles Grodin

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grateful acknowledgment is given to Carson Entertainment for permission to reproduce letters sent to Charles Grodin by Johnny Carson.

  Springboard Press

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  Springboard Press is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. The Springboard name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: April 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55464-0

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Author’s Note

  Growing Up in Pittsburgh, PA

  My Grandparents and Other Loved Ones

  From Thirteen to Eighteen Years Old

  High School

  Girls

  Dad

  University of Miami

  The Military

  The Pittsburgh Playhouse

  More Mistakes

  To Hollywood and Back

  Uta

  Don’t You Dare Show Up!

  A Kiss with Troubling Ramifications

  Getting Better and Getting Banned

  Mad Men

  Lee Strasberg

  Julie

  Doctors

  The Woman in the Hotel

  Candid Camera

  Endings

  Special Agents

  Critics

  The Graduate

  The French Girl

  Simon and Garfunkel and My Politics?

  Benefactors

  Steambath

  Appearing on Johnny Carson and David Letterman to Show the Real Me?

  Memorable Encounters with Icons

  The Unexpected

  A Most Formidable Woman —or Something

  The All Knowing

  I Go to Washington

  Co-ops

  Midnight Run

  CNBC

  The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Felony Murder Rule

  How Naïve Can I Be?

  Lousy Treatment of Kids

  Highly Unusual Experiences That Make Me Not Miss Show Business

  Why I’m Getting Increasingly Skeptical

  What Did You Say?

  Proceed with Caution

  Socializing

  Regrets

  Peter Falk

  Henry

  Jack Paar and Regis Philbin

  Paul Newman

  Jack and Bob

  Elie Wiesel

  My Family

  The Diary

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Illustrations

  To all of us who are finding life a lot harder than we had in mind

  Author’s Note

  This book is the result of an effort to write about the events that informed my actions and values. It covers the 1940s to the present. I figure if I try to understand myself better, it may help me better understand others. Well… maybe not, but it can’t hurt.

  Growing Up in Pittsburgh, PA

  My first memory of something having a powerful, lasting effect on me came when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

  I was a six-year-old growing up in Pittsburgh. I asked my brother, Jack, who was twelve, if the Japanese would be coming to Pittsburgh. He said, “Yes, they will.” I asked, “Well… they won’t be coming to our house, will they?” He said, “Yes, they will.” I said, “Well… I’m going down to the basement. They won’t come down there, will they?” He said, “Yes, they will.”

  Amazingly, that’s the only tense moment I’ve ever had with my brother. Decades later, he did once give me a look when I commented on his orange golf pants.

  I met my lifelong friend Herb Caplan when we were four years old. We had moved into a small house with a wall connecting to another small house, which had a wall connecting to another small house. Herb and I shared a wall. When we were around ten, we would pound on it to get the other’s attention and yell through it, mostly saying, “I’ll meet you outside in five minutes.” Amazingly, our parents didn’t complain, or more likely they weren’t home.

  Herb always has been and remains today one of my closest friends and one of the wisest. On my birthday, he said, “It’s only a number,” and if you read the obituaries you easily see what matters is not the number of your years but the state of your health. Recently, he said to a mutual friend who was complaining about this ache or that pain, “You can make yourself old.” In other words, we can choose different ways to see things. Choose happy or at least positive thoughts. That may seem obvious, but how many of us do that?

  Herb and I have had a lot of laughs over the years, but the best one he gave me recently. It’s a true story.

  When Herb’s father, Larry Caplan, was in his eighties, Herb would accompany him into the doctor’s examining room. The doctor once asked his dad, “Mr. Caplan, are you afraid of death?” Mr. Caplan said, “No, but I’d like to know where I’m going to die.” When the doctor asked why that was important, Mr. Caplan said, “Then I won’t go there.”

  My sixth through tenth years coincided with World War II. The headlines in the papers (there was no television then) were all about the Allied forces and the Axis forces. I knew the Allied forces were us and Great Britain and some other countries, and the Axis forces, the bad guys, were Germany, Japan, and Italy.

  Although it wasn’t really true, I somehow thought our Allied forces were doing great from the beginning. I had no doubt about the outcome. My inherent optimism that has served me so well through life showed itself very early.

  In the years since the war, I’ve only encountered the Japanese in Japanese restaurants. They’re always extraordinarily nice, although I get a little nervous when they do their hibachi thing and start flipping those knives around, but I would be nervous if anyone started flipping a knife around.

  In the forties, the president was always President Roosevelt, the heavyweight champion of the world was Joe Louis, and the New York Yankees were the baseball champions. Those were the constants.

  One day in 1945, when I was ten, I was walking home from Hebrew school and heard a radio on someone’s porch on Mellon Street where my father’s parents lived (as did Gene Kelly’s family). A voice on the radio said that President Roosevelt had died. It was my first visceral experience that there were no constants. Everything has an expiration date.

  Around the same time, a young friend of mine, Jerome Wesoky, was roller-skating down a hill at the corner of my street and hit a streetcar that had stopped to pick up passengers. He went under it. The conductor, not knowing, started up and the trolley went over Jerome, killing him.

  Mr. Schwartz, who ran the grocery store at the corner, stood between the crane lifting the streetcar off Jerome and us kids who went to see what was going on. Thankfully, he made us turn our backs. Again I learned there are no constants. At ten, that was abundantly clear.

  Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, right around that time I was impeached as president by the teacher of my fifth-grade class. She said it was because I talked incessantly. I find that hard to believe, but that’s what she said, so it’s probably true. I mean, why would someone make that up about a ten-year-old president? Besides, I’m perfectly capable of talking incessantly now, so I’m not a good witness for myself.

  That was the first time I was removed, fire
d, kicked out—whatever you want to call it. Not that much later I got kicked out of Hebrew school for asking, I have to assume too many times, what the Hebrew words we were being asked to read on the blackboard meant. I honestly can’t imagine I was rude, but looking back, I’d say my persistence in asking was considered rude by the rabbi. I always saw persistence simply as persistence, especially if it’s done with respect, which I promise you is always how I persist. At least, that’s my perception.

  Getting kicked out of Hebrew school turned out to be a most fortunate experience, as it resulted in me studying with the father of my best friend, Raymond Kaplan. Rabbi Morris Kaplan was the only teacher I encountered in grammar school, high school, college, or acting class of whom I can say, “Now, that’s a teacher!” At least, the only one I’d give an A.

  Rabbi Kaplan wove spellbinding tales from the Old Testament. I remember walking down the street alone with him when I was about eleven. It was 1946. I asked him if we can dream when we die. He said, kindly, “No, sonny boy.” That hit hard.

  Years later, when I visited him in Los Angeles where he had become the head of the league of rabbis, I told him I had married a gentile girl. He put his head in his hands and sobbed. When he regained his composure, he said, “Children of parents who are Jewish and another religion become the biggest anti-Semites.”

  My daughter, Marion, considers herself Jewish even though the tradition is that a child takes the mother’s religion. Marion also has as big a heart as anyone I’ve ever known. If a loved one is dying, I can’t handle being there, which I see as a major flaw. I come only if asked. Marion, without being asked, crawls into bed beside the person.

  So I had been impeached as president at ten and kicked out of Hebrew school at eleven. By the time I reached high school and our economics teacher, Mr. Kennedy, kicked me out of class, I was used to being kicked out. Again, it was for the same rap, asking too many questions or the same question too many times. I got high grades, and I always assumed that if I didn’t understand something, some of the other kids wouldn’t, either, but wouldn’t say anything, so I jumped into the breach and was again kicked out. I learned early on that if there was a breach that needed jumping into and no one jumped, I would.

  Unbeknownst to me, of course, all this being kicked out at a young age actually had a highly beneficial effect, because by the time I got into show business and was kicked out—fired—or threatened to be kicked out, I was used to it, so it lessened the blow. As time went by, without realizing it, I was developing a thick skin regarding criticisms I didn’t agree with, so I was able to handle rejection, from what I’ve observed, better than most, who are often overwhelmed by it.

  My Grandparents and Other Loved Ones

  Ajoyous part of my life in the 1940s was summertime in Chicago, where my grandparents, my cousins, and my aunt Ethel and uncle Bob lived.

  I had occasion to speak of my grandfather, who was a Talmudic scholar, many years later when Ellis Island opened its new computer center. One of the other speakers was Irving Berlin’s granddaughter. She said when her grandfather came to this country he was so impressed he wrote “Blue Skies.” Joel Grey then got up and, accompanied by a piano player, sang “Blue Skies.”

  When my turn came to speak, I said, “When my grandfather came here, he wrote ‘Green Skies,’ but it never really clicked with the public.” The audience laughed, but my son told me the man behind him sneeringly said, “This guy— always with the jokes!”

  Spending over a decade of summers as a kid with my grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins was a treat. My bumpy moments with them came years later. Once my aunt Ethel looked up at me and really started to bawl me out about something. Oddly, I was amused, because I couldn’t figure out what it was about. My cousin Fred recently told me my aunt was confronting me because of a hard time I had given some television host she liked. If that’s true, my aunt would be one of the millions who didn’t know I was joking with the hosts. At least the hosts knew.

  My cousin Fred also told me recently that my grandfather was widely admired. “Congregants would come from all over to hear his witty interpretation of the Talmud.” I was particularly struck by that when my wife read me something from a journal she had kept when our son, Nick, was growing up.

  We had a Brazilian nanny who would come to Connecticut from New York on the train during the week to help look after our boy, who was then three. Nick listened as Regina told my wife that a man on the train had given her his card and asked her to go out with him. She showed the card to my wife, and my wife told her that Merrill Lynch was a financial organization, and according to the card this man was the head of one of its divisions, but Regina declined to go out with him, because, as she put it, “I don’t know him or his family.” Nick at three, listening to all this, asked, “So you’re not going to go out with him?” Regina said, “I don’t know him, so I can’t.” Nick persisted. “So you’re not going to have dinner with him?” Regina again said, “No, I really don’t know him, so I can’t.” Nick then said, “It’s all right. He’s my banker.” Oh, if life worked differently, would my grandfather have enjoyed Nick!

  My grandfather worked with me on my Bar Mitzvah, which took place in Chicago. He was then an old man with a long white beard. I will never forget him looking up at me from his chair and saying in appreciation, with a heavy accent, “a nomber von.”

  My only other memory of my grandfather talking to me was when he sat on the edge of my brother’s bed in the bedroom we shared trying to convey to me that I should work harder to please my father. He pointed to his head and said in a deep, guttural voice, “Your father—his head is mmmmmmm,” as if to say my father already had more than enough on his mind without having to deal with any problems with me.

  As I recall, his crucially important words went right by me because I was so struck by the sight of this elderly Talmudic scholar with the big black hat and long white beard sitting on my brother’s bed.

  Even though my father and my uncle Bob gave them money, my grandparents had to take in boarders to help meet the bills. For a small fee, my grandmother would wash the boarders’ clothes in the bathtub with a scrub board. Clotheslines were stretched across the back porch.

  The boarders were not allowed to prepare food in my grandmother’s kitchen. She was, of course, strictly kosher, as was my mother. I never understood the purpose of keeping a kosher kitchen, yet I who never stopped asking questions never asked why we separated meat from dairy. I’m sure it was explained to me at one point, but I forget, because I never had any interest in ritual. I’m only interested in character and behavior.

  My grandmother Jennie Singer, along with her daughter, my mother, were my angels of goodness in childhood.

  My female role model was my cousin Phyllis, who was warm and friendly and quick to laugh. When she was dying of cancer, I was going to fly down to Florida to spend some time with her. When she said, “My stomach is filled with cancer,” she amazingly expressed no self-pity. She said to me, “Everyone wants to see you, but I’d rather see you alone.” Before that opportunity presented itself, sadly, she died. When Phyllis had had her first child she named him Ted, after my dad, maybe because my dad helped support Phyllis and her younger brother, Fred, after their mother died and their father abandoned them.

  This one ranks with my favorite memories of Chicago. When Phyllis’s son Ted was about five years old, he spotted my great-uncle, Chiel Flassterstien, who he thought was his recently deceased great-grandfather, or Zadie as we called him. Ted said, “Zadie! I thought you died!” Without missing a beat, my great-uncle Chiel responded, “I came back.”

  In my early twenties I went to my cousin Fred’s wedding in Chicago. My grandmother was in the hospital. I went to see her. She was her usual cheerful self with me. From my earliest sight of her she filled my heart with love that never wavered. I don’t remember her ever looking at me without a smile on her face. After our visit I kissed her and left. Halfway down the hall, I remembered so
mething I forgot to tell her. I turned around to go back to her room , but when I got to the door, I didn’t go in, because of what I saw. Jennie Singer didn’t see me, because she was convulsed with sobs. She knew she had just said goodbye forever to her grandson.

  From Thirteen to Eighteen Years Old

  I was very fortunate to grow up in a household of role models. My father, mother, and brother all worked hard, and I don’t remember any nasty comments about other people ever expressed in our house. That doesn’t mean they loved everyone, but they were never nasty or hostile. I’m sure that’s why today I’m good at cutting slack for others, as I hope they’ll do for me.

  When I was in eighth grade in 1948, I was the seventh man on my grammar school basketball team. I loved playing basketball. As years went by, I was in a league at the Y with some of my teammates from grammar school. A fellow named Bill Goren who worked at the Y and was a friend of my family observed me playing. He called me into his office one day and said, “The other boys seem to be developing their skills more than you.” I said, “I know.” He asked, “Why is that?” I said, “I don’t know.”

  I thought about it in later years and came to the conclusion that basketball for me was always just fun. If you really wanted to excel, you had to go full out to beat the other guy, something I really wasn’t interested in doing.

  About twenty years later when I was in a pickup basketball game with other men, playing in my usual have-fun style, I remembered the conclusion I’d come to about excelling at basketball. In the middle of the game I thought to myself, If all you need to do is really put out much more effort to excel, why don’t you do it right now and find out if you’re kidding yourself? Though it might sound self-serving, I have to say that the minute I went full out, I dominated the game. In competitive sports, if you’re not ready to give everything you have every moment, don’t even bother showing up. Of course, that largely applies to life itself.