Still Foolin’ ’Em

by Billy Crystal

  Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. A fantastic tale. Moses frees the slaves who were building the pyramids, we’re lost in the desert for forty years, cross the parted Red Sea, get to the Holy Land, and we celebrate by eating cardboard and a fish called gefilte that is so lacking in flavor you have to cover it with horseradish and bitter herbs. Not one fucking chocolate bunny. We do have eggs, except they’re hard-boiled and served in salted water. My mouth is watering as I type this.

  Every year at the lengthy Seder service, we ask the four questions. Why is this night different from all other nights? And it’s not: it’s ten-thirty and we still haven’t eaten! Two hours in and we’re still suffering and still lost for forty years. How is that possible? Forty years? I never figured it out until I drove with my grandparents.

  “Make a left.”

  “No, it’s a right.”

  “What did the guy say?”

  “I don’t know, I thought you were listening.”

  “I’m not the driver, the driver should listen.”

  So, we wandered in the desert for forty years. And when we did get to the Promised Land, we claimed the only place in the Middle East that doesn’t have a drop of oil under it. So much for Jews being the chosen people. You can almost see God and his staff laughing at the water cooler.

  But the bottom line is, I want to reconnect with God, I want something to hold on to because I want to believe there is something better, something after this. And I hope there is. After all my disillusionment, I want to believe. I’m just afraid that after I die, I’ll get to the pearly gates and God will say to me, “Billy Crystal.”

  “Yes, God.”

  “Come here,” he’ll say.

  I’ll make my way over.

  All the people of my life who have gone before me will be assembled, watching.

  God will lean in close, put his almighty hands on my shoulders, and with an angelic look he’ll whisper, “Count to ten, turn around, kiss your parents and grandparents, and come back onstage … and never discuss what I just told you.”

  My Twenties

  Three years after I met her, Janice Goldfinger (she heard all the jokes) and I were parked in the driveway of her family’s house. As we finished listening to “Cherish” by the Association in her secondhand Chevy Impala, Janice said, “So we should get married.” It wasn’t the big, down-on-one-knee romantic event I’d been starting to contemplate, but as I’ve come to know over all these years, when Janice wants to do something, she does it. So basically, she asked me. As soon as she said it, I said, “Of course we should, I love you.” I was twenty-one; she was twenty.

  As I was about to go into her house and ask her father for her hand and the rest of her, here’s what my scorecard looked like: It was 1969 and Vietnam was raging, I still had a semester to go at NYU, and I really didn’t know what I was going to do when I graduated. Otherwise, things were perfect. The one thing I did know was that I wanted to spend my life with Janice. I didn’t have any money for a ring, so my mom graciously gave us her own cherished engagement ring, and we put the small diamond into a new setting and I gave it to Janice under the statue of George M. Cohan in Times Square. Corny? You bet. It still wasn’t that “Oh my God” moment, but to this day every time we pass the statue we smile and hold hands, and we feel a lot better about ourselves than the people who got engaged under the statue of Joe Paterno at Penn State.

  I was a film and television directing major at NYU’s School of the Arts (it had not yet been “Tisched”). Not sure why I didn’t audition for the acting program. Maybe I thought if the acting thing didn’t work out, at least I’d have something solid to fall back on. I’d come to NYU after two great years at Nassau Community College, where the theater program had been my home. I acted in plays and musicals, and I directed as well. I did stock in the summers, and this put an end to my baseball career.

  In the film program at NYU, my fellow students were kids like Oliver Stone and Christopher Guest, and one of my film professors was a bearded, long-haired young genius named Marty Scorsese. An intense guy, he taught a production class and a history of film class. His passion for making movies was strong, and even though I felt nervous around him, his love of the history of cinema inspired me. I made a few student films that weren’t very good (Marty confirmed that). Though I loved learning the principles of directing, I needed to be onstage. I had done summer stock and was also the house manager for You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, a musical that ran in the East Village. I tore tickets, directed people to their seats in the tiny theater, sold drinks and souvenirs at intermission, and knew everyone’s parts. I could have gone on for any actor in the musical, including Lucy.

  I was barely earning enough to share a tiny eighty-dollar-a-month apartment in the East Village with David Sherman, one of my oldest and dearest friends, dating back to junior high. He’s now a doctor and we live near each other in Los Angeles. Back then, he was in medical school and I was in film school, and we would switch and do each other’s homework. This meant he would go see a movie, and I would illegally dispense drugs to his patients.

  We lived at 325 East Fifth Street, next door to the police station that would later be the home of Kojak. There was a red-haired detective at the precinct—I’ll call him Sergeant Dinkus—and he was always busting music great Miles Davis. Oftentimes, Davis’s red Ferrari would be towed and sitting in front of the precinct, and Sergeant Dinkus would be lecturing the pissed-off jazz man. “Don’t come down here looking for trouble!” he’d say. Miles would say, “I wasn’t looking for trouble—I’m just looking to buy some heroin.”

  “Down here” meant the East Village, the center of the sixties’ cultural revolution. Plenty of today’s balding boomers were then long-haired, peace-loving hippies who believed that we shouldn’t be the world’s police dog—including me, with my bushy “Jew ’fro.” It was the perfect time to be young and angry. We hated LBJ, and then we really hated Richard Nixon. We despised the war, because it meant we could be drafted right away to fight for something we didn’t believe in. The disaster of Vietnam fell on the heels of the violence of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations. National Guard units patrolled college campuses, students were killed at Kent State, and the Democratic convention in Chicago was chaotic. The country was divided between a mass of angry, idealistic people who felt that the government was blowing it and those who didn’t. Other than that, it was a fun time.

  The Lower East Side of New York had an electric energy. Head shops and restaurants were everywhere, and the Fillmore East was around the corner. It was the best music venue in the city, home to Hendrix, Zappa, Janis Joplin, and Dylan. It had also originally been a theater, and I’d seen my first movie there, Shane, when I was five. Next to the theater was the Central Plaza, a catering hall for weddings and big events and, for fifteen years, the place where my dad had produced jazz concerts. We grew up going there, and it was now an NYU building housing dance and theater studios. One of the studios was in the very ballroom Dad had used for his weekly jazz events. Alongside the Plaza was Ratner’s restaurant, which had been a well-known spot in New York for years, but the young people that now packed the streets had given it a new life. When you’re as stoned as everyone was in that neighborhood, a dairy restaurant with great whipped cream desserts is an oasis. David and I went there a lot. David had a heavy beard that he could grow as fast as Nixon. One day after a few hits on a joint, he shaved one side of his face, dividing it right down the middle. A little high, we sat down in Ratner’s, and the waiter came over and asked David what he would like. The clean-shaven side, which was facing the waiter, ordered something, and then David turned his head and the bearded side ordered something else. David then got into an argument with himself, constantly turning his head. It was truly funny, but after a few hits, it was hilarious. Ever try to keep a straight face in front of someone who hasn’t laughed since the Great Depression? The waiter simply stared at
David. Ratner’s waiters were mostly older Jewish men, weary messengers of matzoh-ball soup who had seen everything—everything but the straggly group of tripping, incense-smelling, “peace now” folks, many of them bearing a disturbing resemblance to Jesus Christ. Their table-side encounters sounded like this:

  “VATZ IT GONNA BE?” asked the waiter; I’ll call him Murray.

  “Man, I’ll have the LIZARDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF YOUR EARS!” screeched the lost soul whose LSD-glazed eyes looked like slices of blood oranges.

  Never losing his cool, Murray answered, “Oh, the special.”

  I had two great friends, Al Finelli and David Hawthorne, from Nassau Community College. They were funny and talented actors, and we had a great chemistry together and were always improvising sketches. We talked about forming a three-man comedy group someday, but it didn’t seem possible because of the uncertain future we were all facing.

  As my graduation from NYU approached, I was terrified. On December 1, 1969, the first draft lottery was televised. It was the ultimate reality game show: 366 Ping-Pong balls with the days of the year printed on them rolling around in a device usually used for Bingo night at the senior center.

  One by one the balls were pulled (as mine were as I watched) and the fate of thousands of young men was decided. We’d been told that guys with the first 195 birth dates chosen were definitely going to be drafted and more than likely would soon be on their way to Nam. I was in a night class at NYU, and we all watched the dates numbered 100 to 199 on television. I wasn’t in that group, but I didn’t know about the first ninety-nine. I ran home and called my mother. “Mom, are you watching the lottery?”

  “No, dear, there’s a two-hour Bonanza on. Hoss got bit by a snake…”

  Great. Finally, on TV, I saw that I wasn’t in the first ninety-nine, so I lit a joint. Then I wasn’t in the 200-to-249 group, so I lit another; then 250 to 299, another; 300 to 349, and I was giggling. Finally March 14 came up, number 354! I went to Ratner’s and had a big piece of cake, and a side order of the lizards that were coming out of the waiter’s ears.

  * * *

  I called Janice first, of course. It seemed we were free and clear of the army and that scary war. Before the draft, I had been interviewing at some Long Island high schools for possible teaching jobs, which would mean a deferment, but in my heart I knew teaching wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Now, with the draft out of the way, I called Dave and Al and we formed a comedy group first known as We the People and then 3’s Company and started to work on the Coffee House Circuit. These were nightclubs on college campuses, mostly on the East Coast. We traveled all over New England and New York and Pennsylvania, spending three nights or sometimes a week performing at a school, meanwhile living in a dorm. We made $350 tops, which was split three ways for a week’s engagement. So I’m talking big money: $117 a man divided by three days is $39 a day, but in 2013 money, that’s at least $40. At the same time, I was substitute teaching at Long Beach Junior High, which I had attended. It was strange to have lunch in the faculty dining room with teachers who had taught me. I could never call them by their first names.

  In June 1970, Janice and I were married. After a large, beautiful wedding, we left for a five-day honeymoon disaster in Puerto Rico. By “disaster” I mean that Janice got terribly sunburned (“Don’t touch me, it hurts”) and I caught on fire in a restaurant. The waiter was showing me the flaming lobster dish I’d ordered, and without my knowledge, the flaming sauce dribbled onto my suit sleeve. I’m telling the waiter how great the lobster looks and he’s suddenly throwing water on my left arm and ripping off my burning jacket. If that wasn’t bad enough, the shirt I had on was too big for me, so we’d shortened the sleeves with safety pins and rubber bands. With my jacket scorched, I ended up sitting there looking like a little boy wearing his father’s shirt, next to my lollipop-red bride, who was in constant pain. (“It hurts to sit down.”) Now, that’s romantic.

  June 4, 1970. I did.

  We spent most of our honeymoon running lines for the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which I was opening in shortly after we returned. I played Rosencrantz, and Janice played everyone else. Over the course of our marriage, she has played, among others, Sally (before Meg Ryan did), Curly from City Slickers, and even Hamlet. Though she’s not an actress, she gave Ken Branagh (who played Hamlet in the 1996 movie; I was the gravedigger) a run for the money. Seeing the mother of my kids, in a nightgown, say, “Alas, poor Yorik, I knew him well” is something I’ll never forget.

  As Janice and I settled into our married life, the comedy trio continued to perform, but we couldn’t break through. I loved Dave and Al, but inside I knew I was really a stand-up comedian. I started to think about how to go out on my own, which seemed very daunting. The group finally caught a big break when we were signed by David Frost to make an appearance on a network special called That Was the Year That Was.

  It was hosted by Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber, a popular comedy team at the time. Our sketch documented the making of the first marijuana commercial. (It was our best piece.) I played a stiff Ted Baxter kind of actor who gets progressively smashed as he does take after take, smoking “the product.” We taped the show, and the audience loved it. We knew that appearing on a network program could really help get us going, so on the night of the broadcast we had a party to celebrate our television debut. What we didn’t know was that the network wouldn’t air the sketch because it was about pot. Our agent couldn’t reach us, so there we were, first all excited, then freaked out as the show went on and on and no 3’s Company. Finally, Jack and Avery said good night, the credits rolled, and there we were, waving and smiling, standing next to the hosts. They were able to cut us out of everything but the closing credits. The phone started to ring. It was the relatives: “Very good waving,” “You looked good, Billy, I like the way you wave.”

  Things continued in this vein, the three of us always taking chances that never panned out. After a while, it gets lonely at the middle. My anxiety got worse and worse. Then Janice got pregnant. I have to admit, I was kind of shocked when she told me. It happened so fast. The Crescent should be this fertile. We weren’t set up financially for a child. Janice had a good job, which she would have to stop at some point, and the substitute teaching brought a cool forty-five bucks a day into my Swiss bank account. The most money I had ever made with the group in one year was $4,200. After a few years like this, we were audited because I had well over $12,000 in travel expenses. Janice did our taxes at the time, and when the auditor sternly asked her, “Why is he in this business?” Janice simply said, “It’s in his blood.”

  Now I was to become a father, before I could legitimately call myself a comedian. The responsibility of adding a new person to the world—not to mention our tiny apartment—was overwhelming. Still, I felt sure it was coming time for me to leave the group and go out on my own.

  As the pregnancy progressed, we took Lamaze classes and, being the suburban hippies we were, decided to try natural childbirth. The relaxation exercises and the breathing techniques worked great in the class, and once Janice started having contractions … “THIS FUCKING HURTS! GIVE ME THE FUCKING SHOT!” I’m still not sure why I screamed like that; Janice was the one in labor. Actually, there were no drugs used of any kind … by Janice. I, on the other hand, was totally smashed.

  Being the youngest of three brothers, and the uncle of a one-year-old nephew, I was sure we were going to have a boy. When the doctor, who had grown fond of us during the pregnancy, came out of the delivery room (in those days husbands weren’t allowed in), he turned to me and asked, “What do you think it is?”

  “Boy,” I said with full confidence.

  “No, schmuck, it’s a girl.” It hit me right between the eyes. Not the schmuck part, the girl part. How do you do girls? When I held beautiful eight-pound, four-ounce Jennifer Amie for the first time, she looked so calm and peaceful and safe, and my first thought was “I’ll have to pay for the whole
wedding.” Then came fear. I was afraid that I couldn’t be everything I would need to be. Would I be patient, would I be smart enough, was I emotionally prepared to handle a child? How would I make a living? I was barely able to handle myself, but a baby?

  Babies are the toughest take-home exam of your life. I got off to a bad start when my gag mechanism freaked out at the first whiff of baby poop. When I put Jenny on the changing table for the first time and removed the diaper, I was staring at a few ounces of Dinty Moore beef stew. Instantly I started choking, my eyes watering.

  “Oh, this is gonna be great,” Janice laughed from bed as I hovered over the changing table, gagging.

  Over the next few months, I learned how to relax, and once I could dispose of the scuba gear, I came to understand what it’s like to love someone more than yourself. At the six-month mark, Janice went back to work, and I became a “motherfather.” It was a difficult decision for Janice to be apart from Jenny, but she and I were a team and something significant had happened. The group had been seen by Buddy Morra, who was Robert Klein’s manager and worked with the best managerial group in show business. Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe were the aristocracy of comedy managers. They handled Woody Allen and Dick Cavett, among others, and also produced Woody’s films.

  So Buddy and his partner, Larry Brezner, took us on and got us a few jobs. After a while, though, Buddy and Larry pulled me aside and said they didn’t think the group was going to bust through, but if I wanted to go it alone as a stand-up, they would be there for me. That was all I needed to hear. My anxiety had progressed to “eleven” when I got a call from a friend who needed a comedian for a ZBT fraternity party at NYU—did I know anyone? I lied to him, saying that I had been working on my own, and for twenty-five dollars, he hired me. I hung up the phone, thinking, What did I just do? Then I threw together a few ideas and rehearsed in front of Jenny, who, even at eighteen months old, was a tough critic. A few days later, when I nervously walked into the fraternity house, there were Buddy and Larry and Jack Rollins himself! I was supposed to do twenty minutes (which I didn’t have), and I ended up doing an hour or so. I just exploded. I don’t remember much of what I did to this day, but Buddy and Larry were thrilled. I was euphoric, and also guilt-ridden. I felt like I had cheated on my pals. Finally, I broke it to Dave and Al, and I went out on my own and never looked back.