by Danny Aiello
Inside the Improv, a barroom at the entry led into the main performance space. A small stage was set against an exposed brick wall that would soon become the trademark of the place.
To me, Budd Friedman was the real attraction, one of the most honorable men I ever met in the business. He had opened the Improv in the early sixties after he had served during the Korean War. When I compared our experiences in the military, mine paled next to his. I drew a long straw twice, while Budd was one of the heroes who got wounded in the famous charge up Pork Chop Hill.
The night I started at the Improvisation, Budd took me under his wing. When I asked if he could give me a general job description, he said, “I’m not sure myself. I’ve never had a bouncer.” He paused to think. “Do not hit anyone. Unless they’re attacking me,” he added with a smile.
I like this guy, I thought. He’s just making it up as he goes along.
“Heckling’s fine,” Budd said. “It’s part of the scene. But it can get out of hand, and you will have to be the judge of that.” If customers walked out without paying the check, the waitresses were held accountable and would have to reimburse the club. “So help them out and keep your eyes open,” Budd said.
The gig was six days a week with Sunday off, starting at eight p.m. and lasting until the stage went dark and the crowd left, usually at around three a.m.
“When I’m not around,” Budd told me, “you may have to take on other responsibilities, like emceeing.”
I didn’t know how I felt about that. The idea made me anxious and excited at the same time. The closest I had gotten to a microphone was in the announcer’s booth at the Greyhound bus terminal.
I realized that I hadn’t asked Budd one of the most important questions of all. “How much do I get paid?”
“One ninety-five a week.” Relief and gratitude flooded through me. It was enough to keep the wolf away from the Aiello family door.
Landing the bouncer gig at the Improv turned out to be one of the most important steps of my life. It was there that I got to know people who gave me the confidence to pursue a career that I would never have thought possible.
The list of performers I met at the club reads like a who’s who of comedy and entertainment: David Brenner, David Frye, Richard Pryor, Andy Kaufman, Steve Landesberg, Robert Klein, Rodney Dangerfield, Jimmy Martinez, Mike Preminger, Marvin Braverman, Bobby Alto, Buddy Mantia, Marty Nadler, Buddy Hughes, Jimmy Walker, Doc Pomus, J. K. Kleinhaus, Larry Reed, Vaughn Meader, Bette Midler, Ray Serra, Anthony Conforti, Joe Peck, Freddie Prinze, Lenny Schultz, Elayne Boosler, Liz Torres, J. J. Barry, and Raymond Johnson. You may not be familiar with some of these people, but they were all talented and great to get to know.
During my time at the Improvisation, I met Jerry Stiller and his wife, Anne Meara. They appeared at the club frequently. From their comedy teamwork on TV variety shows, the two of them were already well-known to the public, but they came into the Improv to work new material. Audiences went wild for them. Of course, both Jerry and Anne would later go on to sitcom renown, with Jerry playing grumpy fathers on Seinfeld and The King of Queens.
I spent two and a half years employed at the Improv. Sandy was now a “comedy widow” six nights out of the week. I had a single line in my repertoire, which I memorized and delivered flawlessly: “How many are there in your party?”
The work wasn’t complex. The situations I dealt with were mostly black-and-white. My job as bouncer was to post myself near the end of the bar, at the entrance to the main room. “Look big,” is what Budd told me. That was easy enough. It came naturally. If anyone hassled the comics, or if anyone in the audience was loud or obnoxious, I’d stroll over and introduce myself.
Budd acted as the emcee for the evening’s acts, breaking some of the biggest names in comedy. I watched Rodney Dangerfield perfect his “I don’t get no respect” act at the Improv. While Budd didn’t think the late David Brenner was a particularly funny guy and told me never to put him on in prime time, I loved him. Whenever I took over emceeing duties in Budd’s absence, I’d give David a plum position in the lineup.
Before she took off into the heights of stardom, Bette Midler was the darling of the Improv. Budd acted as her informal manager and adviser. In those days, she was already on Broadway doing Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof.
The great songwriter Doc Pomus collaborated with Bette on material back then. He used to arrive in a cab outside the club. Because he was a paraplegic, I would pick him up and carry him inside. We’d park his wheelchair while Bette sang and did her routine. Bette would soon go on from the Improv to sing at the Continental Baths in the Ansonia Hotel. After that, there was no stopping her.
With all the comedians coming up, I never, ever had the feeling that I could do stand-up. I could never be a “monologist,” one of my favorite words back then. To this day, I believe that stand-up is the most terrifying kind of performance. It’s a high-wire dance—it’s physical, mental, and spiritual hell. And you are all alone up there. If you don’t kill, you bomb.
Working as a bouncer, I tapped into my personal hatred of rude behavior. Loud talking, heckling, drunken boorishness—if you indulged in any of that business while at the Improv, you were mine, baby. I was on your ass in a heartbeat. I felt simpatico with the performers. If they were willing to put themselves out there, risk everything just to try to make you laugh, I figured the least you could do as an audience member was to be polite.
Just to indicate my attitude, I’ll tell you about one night when a guy named Doug Ireland started to sound off at the Improv. I found out later he was the press representative for Bella Abzug, the most outspoken female politician of the day. Ireland was also a huge man, maybe five-ten and four hundred fifty pounds. That night he was with a drunken crowd of staffers of Mayor John Lindsay, and this guy obviously thought his position gave him the liberty to be a loudmouth.
He was talking and interrupting the acts. I went over and told him that he needed to shut the fuck up and that I didn’t want to have to come back. Then I took up my post again near the bar. But Ireland wouldn’t quiet down.
“All right,” I said to him, returning to his table. “Out you go!”
I still recall the bleary, arrogant look Ireland gave me. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re the loudmouth prick who’s leaving the club.”
He then made a huge mistake: “Does your fucking mother know you talk like that?”
On the street, there’s a time-honored code about how you react when someone insults you. You give him a second chance. You don’t start in with the fists right away. You ask your opponent to repeat what he just said. If the asshole backs away, maybe he can avoid a beat-down.
In this case, I duly invoked the warning. “What’d you say to me?”
Doug Ireland didn’t take the hint. “I said your mama—”
He didn’t get all the words out. I punched him on the top of his fat head so hard that he fell forward and split apart the tabletop. The Lindsay minions all of a sudden became a lot less drunk. They somehow managed to carry the massive, unconscious Ireland from the club, which was no easy task.
Worried about possible retaliation from city authorities, who could have easily closed the Improv down with a bogus building or fire inspection, Budd put me on ice for a couple of weeks. He was nice enough to make it a paid vacation. No political blowback ever developed, and Doug Ireland never showed his face in the Improv again. After my two-week suspension, I was back in the mix.
A great mood of camaraderie held sway around the club in those days. Even after hours, the Improv comics, singers, bartenders, and regulars would hang out together. Almost every night after closing we’d board what we used to call the “bagel express” to go out as a group. Budd had a bagel delivery guy, Hy Lipstein, who pulled up outside the Improv at around four a.m.
Hy was a fan. He filled the walls in the back of his truck with eight-by-ten photos of comedy stars and actors. The whole g
ang would pile in among the racks and racks of fragrant bagels. With Hy Lipstein rolling through the deserted streets and us holding on for dear life in the back, we’d head east toward the Brasserie, a French bistro that was open round the clock.
One big happy Improv family, bagel-trucking it through the night.
* * *
These were great days for me as a workingman but not so much as a family man. I worked nights and slept during the day, which made it difficult to spend much time with my kids. I was preoccupied with making a living. My youngest son, Jaime, bore the brunt of my being away from home a lot.
Jaime was the third in line behind Rick and Danny, and I think he always felt that number three was not a very good position to be in. He was born in March 1961, four years after Danny and six years after Rick.
As he grew to school age, I was a nine-to-five man at Greyhound. While I still spent as much time as I could with my boys, it was my wife who kept tabs on my youngest son. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Jaime needed his father’s attention. My work circumstances made that impossible. Things became even more difficult when I became night supervisor at Greyhound. When Jaime went off to school in the morning, I was just getting home. I would be asleep when he got back from school.
Things began to turn around one summer when I was offered a position at a bungalow colony in Monticello, New York. In addition to my gig as an Improv bouncer, this would be a second job for me. My family and I would run the food concession. We couldn’t afford to rent one of the bungalows, but if we operated the concession, lodgings would be thrown in for free.
I came up every weekend to help run everything with my wife and children. It was at the colony that I learned what an outstanding basketball player Jaime had become, largely without help from me. During those beautiful Catskill weekends, he and I played basketball with each other, as well as softball and paddleball. We made up for lost time.
Even though I couldn’t be there much, those were some of the happiest days we had as a family. Sandy and the children remained at the colony for the entire summer season, two years in a row. I spent only Sundays and Mondays. The remainder of the week I was back in New York, working nights at the Improvisation.
A couple of times Jaime would drive home with me to see his friends. Keep in mind that I had to be at work by eight p.m. I would always lie down for a while before going in to the club, and my son would spend a couple of hours with his friends while I slept. But he would eventually get bored and ask to go back to the Catskills.
I never wanted to disappoint him. I felt guilty not seeing him all week, so I would drive back to our summer bungalow, drop him off, then immediately turn around for the return trip to New York City. Eight and a half hours on the road.
Besides running the food concession, once in a while I would perform for the colony guests. It was nothing too formal or spectacular. I would sing one song, the Beatles hit “Something.” I followed Budd’s lead and tried to emulate him as a master of ceremonies.
The colony couldn’t afford to pay big money for entertainment, so I asked a few of the Improv comics, including Rodney Dangerfield and David Brenner, to come up and perform. Also pitching in was Steve Landesberg, soon to become popular on the ABC sitcom Barney Miller. All the Improv guys did the colony gigs largely as a favor to me. I was like a booking agent for them, but one who didn’t get a fee.
* * *
If my time behind the microphone at the bungalow colony represented my out-of-town tryouts, then I guess emceeing at the Improv was my informal, unofficial New York debut. I’d get up, introduce the acts, and manage not to make a fool of myself. Doing it over and over, stepping in whenever Budd wasn’t there, allowed me a tiny seed of confidence.
I was just getting my feet wet. No one heckled me. I took one small step, then another and another. Some nights, I would even act as a straight man for one of the comics.
Once in a while I got jobs through my contacts at the club. The comic and impressionist David Frye hired me on as his road manager at $500 a week. Budd gave me permission to leave my post at the Improv and go on Dave’s West Coast tour with him. Even though Frye called me his road manager, I was basically a step up from a gofer. The guy was a huge, happy drinker, so one of my main jobs was to make sure his whiskey flask was filled.
But there were some chores I refused to take on.
“Look, kid,” Dave said to me during his first club appearance on the tour, even though I was far from a kid at this point. “I’m up there, I got to pee all the fucking time, so you got to clear the ice bucket whenever it fills up.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. Dave’s drinking and his weak bladder made him have to go urgently and often. He incorporated it as part of his routine onstage, ducking back behind a screen to tap a kidney every ten minutes or so.
“If you think I’m going to empty your pee-filled ice bucket, that’s not happening,” I told Frye. He backed off and got some poor busboy from the club to do it instead. Better him than me.
Dave did uncanny impersonations and was one of the best at what was even then a dying art. He impersonated everyone from Jimmy Cagney, Clark Gable, and a host of other Hollywood stars as well as political figures such as Richard Nixon.
One night in San Francisco, he was doing Cagney at the upscale Fairmont Hotel. Whenever he impersonated the actor, he’d wave his arms a lot and walk in an exaggerated manner. The Fairmont had a thrust stage that reached out into the audience. Dave-as-Jimmy strutted forward, saying Cagney’s signature line, “You dirty rat!” Only he kept going until he walked right off the end of the stage.
I watched in disbelief as Frye’s legs kept moving even though he was treading air, like the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote. I thought he was going to break his legs. But somehow he landed without falling, managed to stay upright, and continued walking, right out of the club. He never came back. The audience members roared, thinking it was all part of the act.
All this exposure to the ins and outs of show business was paying off for me in the form of increased confidence. At the Improv, my comfort level developed to where I would go onstage myself, not to do comedy, but to sing. I still didn’t have the guts to perform for an audience, so I waited until everyone but the staff had left the place. Then I serenaded the empty tables and chairs.
I did the same tune every time I got up, “Some of These Days,” a song that the red-hot mama Sophie Tucker made famous, a song that every singer in the world had done before me. I belted it out, giving some of my first onstage performances at four a.m. in a deserted comedy club.
An actor who hung around the Improv was always trying to encourage me to go into acting. Carmine Caridi was a legit guy with a lot of stage credits on his résumé, so support from him really meant something.
“You! You’re a natural!” he would tell me. He was always like that, brimming with enthusiasm for people. “Yeah, Danny, you should do it!”
“I’m too old,” I said.
“Knock it off,” Carmine responded. “You’re still a young guy.”
“I’m too old to begin acting,” I said insistently. “I live in a fucking project up in the Bronx. I have kids to support.”
It’s not like he’d bug me about it all the time, but Carmine didn’t give up, either. He used to watch me on the stage at the Improv when Budd had gone home and I would step in as emcee. When I sang or did dramatic readings, I’d look out and see Carmine there. Gradually, the outlandish idea he was selling me—that I could work professionally as an actor—began to stick.
I ventured into doing late-at-night monologues from The Godfather. The movie hadn’t been made yet, but I did a few of Sonny’s speeches from Mario Puzo’s bestselling book. I thought I was Sonny Corleone. The Puzo language was flowery and distant from what I heard on the street, but it sounded good up onstage.
As an actor doing a monologue, there was a psychological barrier between the audience and me. I could be anyone I wanted. For a short time, I wasn’t me,
I was the character. It felt like a revelation.
In the beginning, doing those lines from The Godfather, I was very shaky and shy, because I was ill equipped. I learned that the key to a successful monologue is to be prepared. I worked on phrasing, emphasis, pacing. In those early days, I had a simple approach to acting: pure, unadorned energy.
I was half-hoping nobody would see me. Deep down, though, I actually dreamed I would somehow magically be discovered. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I started to be more of a regular on the Improv stage. With Raymond Johnson on the piano, teamed up on vocals with Buddy Mantia and Buddy Hughes, I’d do backup singing for Bette Midler or Robert Klein.
When I finally told Sandy that I thought I might try acting for a living, she actually laughed. I didn’t blame her. I thought the whole idea was pretty unlikely myself. But some stubborn, hidden dream within me wanted to come true. No matter what anyone said, no matter who laughed or who ridiculed my hopes, the dream would not die.
Sandy thought I might try acting for a year or two. After the inevitable disappointment, I would get it out of my system. Then I’d settle down with a “real” job.
The next step and sensible move for me would have been to sign up for some acting classes. That would have been the advice of show business professionals. But I felt I was too old and too much in a hurry to take the traditional path. In order to learn the craft of acting, I decided that I would have to study it on the run.
I remember when I first started carrying scripts around. The reaction of the guys at the Central Park ball fields was typical.
“Now you’re an actor?” they’d say, shaking their heads in disbelief. They knew me as a ringer, as an athlete, as a long-ball hitter. They had me pretty well pegged. It didn’t make sense to them that a big tough guy like me would try his hand at what they were doing. Acting was their game, not mine.
What happened next represented one of those curveballs that fate tosses at you every once in a while. Most of the time you whiff at them. If you’re lucky, though, you can hit one out of the park.