by Robert Klein
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My World as a Child
Contents
My World as a Child
Acknowledgments
Pre-Preface
Preface
Post-Preface
One Careful Parents
Two Challenging Mrs. Graux
Three The TeenTones
Four Push Like You Mean It
Five Joe College
Six Boy Hero
Seven New Passions
Eight Tales of a Busboy
Nine Ducks in a Row
Ten Yale and Beyond
Eleven Summer Stock and Hard Knocks
Twelve Foreign Affair
Thirteen The Second City
Fourteen Learning How
Fifteen L.A. and Me
Afterword
Photo Captions
About the Author
For Mom and Pop, my sister Rhoda, and my son, Allie, light of my life
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mark Gompertz of Simon & Schuster, who originally proposed that I write this book. His warm encouragement and guidance were invaluable. Gratitude to Allie Klein, my number one son, for his patience and comments regarding my manuscript. Beth Thomas, copyeditor, did a fine job making things clearer and more to the point. Thanks to Mel Berger, my literate literary agent, who appreciated my work and gave me more than ten percent of his support. Thanks also to Rory Rosegarten, my manager.
Pre-Preface
One of the most important elements of a book is its subject matter. One cannot overestimate how significant the content of a book is with respect to its overall quality. This is a generally conceded notion among literary people, though there are several revisionist contrarians in the intellectual strata of Canada who feel that the cover of a book is far more crucial to its value than what’s inside. This matter has been argued many times by greater minds than mine, and certainly more eloquently. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that while the cover is of no small importance, the essential element—the factor that determines whether a book is good or bad, the thing that no book should do without—is the assemblage of words on its pages. It was with this in mind that I set out to write a book.
The important question was what the book would be about. This presented a perplexing dilemma on which I spent many long hours thinking of ideas, some of which excited me, most of which I dismissed. After thoughtful consideration, I decided to write a book about sixth-century Chinese pottery. I typed one word—“The”—and immediately hit a creative brick wall, which found me sitting in front of the computer, alternately motionless and banging my head against the wall in frustration. I felt hard lucky to be cursed so early in the project with that most dreaded affliction of the author: writer’s block. I got up from the keyboard and cleaned the cat box after which I washed the windows after which I vacuumed the house after which I made a five-pound pot roast and watched it cook for three hours. I went back to the computer, and there was still no result. I could not understand why I, a creative person, was making no progress in writing this book, as I got up from my chair for another round of distractions.
It was while cleaning the porcelain bidet in the master bedroom that the answer dawned on me: I don’t know a fucking thing about sixth-century Chinese pottery. Why this had not occurred to me before, I cannot say; maybe I thought I knew something about sixth-century Chinese pottery. I happen to believe that an author should know what he’s writing about, though those same Canadian intellectuals feel that ignorance of the subject of one’s book is a blissful approach to writing. I respectfully disagree. Wasn’t it William Faulkner who said “Write about what you know”? Maybe not, but it still strikes me as highly pragmatic advice, given my multiple failures in trying to write books about: sea turtles, circumnavigating the world, building jet engines at home, the social structure of chickens, and fungi of the skin. All of these subjects interest me, especially the pathology of dermal mitosis–athlete’s foot—which aroused my curiosity after I saw a nifty Learning Channel documentary. Interest is one thing, knowledge is another. My knowledge of all of these subjects could fill, to the brim, a paragraph.
What do I know about? The subject that I have spent the most time learning about and know quite well is: me. I have spent numerous decades hanging around with myself, observing me, experiencing what I experience from the intimate to the mundane. Nobody knows me like I knows me, and I knows me well. What do I writes about me? I writes what I feels; and why am I suddenly talking in slave dialect? In a young lifetime of memories and their concomitant stories, a few rushed to the front of the line, begging to be told. The book is about the adventures of a child who becomes a young man: how he thinks and dreams and lusts and fears and laughs and handles adversity.
Sound interesting? You bet. So if you’re reading this in the bookstore and have come this far, don’t dare put it back on the shelf and fail to buy it. Mrs. Linda Bradstreet of Cummings, Minnesota, did just that and died of a virulent fever two days afterward. Harold Dugan of Sinclair, Maine, perused this book and read this very piece before he placed it back on the shelf and left the store. He was run down by a car, suffering brain damage that destroyed his already impaired sense of taste. Take no chances, buy this book. Or borrow it from the public library, which apparently also mitigates the unpleasantness that results from not buying it. This book is, in places, emotional dynamite, so please don’t sue me if you go out and do something radical under its influence. It is also comedic nitroglycerin, causing many laughs from the reader: large, physical, bellyaching laughs. Though they make the spirit soar, these laughs can cause injury to the cheeks, abdomen, and lips, as well as raise the blood pressure. Despite those side effects—which, as with a pharmaceutical company, it is my ethical obligation to reveal to you—my book is well worth the read. And believe me, I am completely objective.
Preface
I think it was in the seventies that I first met my editor. I seem to remember bell-bottom jeans and sideburns, both huge. In any event, it was in the last century, in my dressing room after a performance. He was working for a publishing house. “You should write a book,” said the guy who would become my editor. He had a huge head of curly hair growing out in all directions like a sunflower; it was the first time I had ever seen a Jewfro. “Really, I think you should write a book,” he repeated. Write a book. I liked the sound of it, to be able to say: “I wrote a book.” It appealed to me greatly to share something in common with Doctorow, Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald, and Melville, minus a minor aspect or two—like the content.
His suggestion aroused in me that lifelong respect for the written word and the individual who writes it, passed on to me by my father and several of my teachers. To be a writer, automatically conveyed the notion of intelligence and erudition, never mind that the opus might be kindred to Curious George Vomits at the Circus, a book with more pictures than words. I had seen Dale Evans, Roy Rogers’s partner in the saddle, on The Mike Douglas Show, promoting her latest book about her favorite subject, Christian faith. I believe Mike said it was her fourteenth book, which sent the audience into applause and awe. Ms. Evans acknowledged it by smiling proudly. Then Mr. Douglas asked her the most relevant, highly literary question: “Let me ask you this about your book, Dale: How long does it take you to turn out one of those babies?” This was hardly a question in the mode of a New Y
ork Times book critic. I do not mean to be patronizing, but Dale Evans, no doubt a good-hearted person, was hardly a woman of letters, though she could say she’d written fourteen books. I put the idea of writing a book on hold.
“I still say you should write a book,” said this editor when I bumped into him twenty years after he first said it.
“So you still think I should write a book?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Well, the idea is intriguing, I must say. I’ve performed on television, Broadway, in movies, on records, and of course the comedy material I write and perform. I’ve written articles for magazines and a screenplay for Warner Brothers. I should write a book.”
“Oh, you should,” he said.
“You know something? I absolutely agree, it’s a great idea, writing a book. I’ll write a book.”
“I think you definitely should,” he said.
“You’re right, it’s time I wrote a book.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said. “You, my friend, should . . . write . . . a book.”
“A book about what?” I said. There was a twenty-minute silence. “Well, that’s not important, we can always think of something later,” I said.
That’s the reason I wrote this book. Because I should write a book.
Post-Preface
Writing can have its ups and downs, its roller-coaster swings; it can run that sort of bipolar, high-tide-low-tide gamut, from the stuff that’s exceptional to the stuff that stinks to no stuff at all. There are the good days when I can’t wait to get to the keyboard to pour into it a fusillade of imaginative ideas. And there are the difficult days of staring at a blank screen without a cogent thought to my name, listening to the whooshing sound of the idle computer mocking me. There is a creative progression and retrogression to most artistic pursuits, but when there is more ebbing than flowing, the going gets rough. Writers can be left wondering if they will ever write a decent word again: self-pitying, baffled as to how the muse who was so ubiquitous yesterday could abscond so rapidly today.
Even given all the pinnacles and low points in creating a book, no aspect has been more difficult for me than choosing a title. I think it can be generally agreed that a title’s main purpose should be to attract the potential reader’s eye, regardless of its pertinence. Relevance, as a criterion for choosing the name of the book, can weigh the process down with dull titles that won’t sell, such as: “Some Stories About When I Was Younger” or “Boy I Had Fun and Was Terrified and Had Sex in the ’50s and ’60s” or “Robert Klein: My Early Life, Vol. I.” I want a title that will grab book lovers and suck them in like a magnet, making the purchase of this book inescapable. I have a meeting with my editor from Simon & Schuster about the matter. “Have you come up with a title yet?” he asks.
“Yes, I believe I’ve come up with a real winner, can’t miss.”
“Splendid, what is it?”
“Well, I’ve given it a lot of thought, and all things considered, I’d like to call the book Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”
“How can you use that title? It’s already the title of another book.”
“You can’t copyright a title; there’s no legal reason why we can’t use it,” I say.
“It’s not a question of legalities, it’s the title of one of the best-selling books of all time, for God’s sake.”
“Precisely,” I say. “Can you think of a better reason to use it? It worked very well for them. It’s tried and tested.”
“But the reader would be expecting an entirely different kind of book,” he says.
“That may be true, but by the time they realize it, they will have already paid for the book and read some of it, and we will have made the sale.”
“Don’t you think that’s rather unscrupulous, to deceive a person buying the book like that?” he says.
“Don’t you read the trades?” I say. “Haven’t you noticed how difficult it is to sell books? We need all the help we can get. Besides, you’re not supposed to tell a book by its cover.”
My editor is getting frustrated. “You simply cannot use the title of a book like that, only recently a best-seller.”
“I’m beginning to see your point. Too recent. How about The Old Man and the Sea? That title sold millions.”
“No, that won’t do, either,” he says.
“The Bible?”
“No, no, no.”
“Portrait of the Artist As—”
“No. You know something? You’re crazy,” he says. “A better title for you would be ‘A Young Man Who Became an Annoying Lunatic in His Old Age.’ Now get out of my office.”
“Wait just a minute, no, no, just a minute. Say that again.”
“Get out of my office.”
“No, not that, the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“The title, I think you got it.”
“ ‘A Young Man Who Became an Annoying Lunatic in His Old Age’? I was just being sarcastic.”
“I don’t care what you were being, it’s perfect: ‘A Young Man Who Became an Annoying Lunatic in His Old Age.’ A little long for the talk shows, but right on the money. It covers every aspect of what a good title should. It’s bizarre and eye-catching, plus it’s perfectly apt. It also assuages that ethical hang-up of yours, since nobody has used it before.”
My editor is at his computer furiously searching for something. I assume it’s a fine-print escape clause in my contract. “I’ll be damned. You can’t use that title,” he says. Then he reads aloud from the computer: “A Young Man Who Became an Annoying Lunatic in His Old Age, translated from the Farsi by Mohammed El Farouq, published 1938, Sunlabi Publishers, Tehran. How do you like that?”
“Bad luck,” I say. “Well, at least the book is written, that’s twenty-five percent of the whole deal right there. Can you give me another six months on the title, or think of one yourself?”
“Get out of my office.”
“ ‘Get Out of My Office’? No, that one doesn’t do it for me. It’s not catchy enough, and they’ll think it’s about someone who works in an office.”
“Get out of my office,” he says.
“You really like that one, don’t you. I’ll give it some thought. But I’d like you to keep an open mind, too, so don’t give me an answer now, but just think about Gone With the Wind, would you?”
Chapter One
Careful Parents
My grandparents came from the two largest cities in Hungary—Budapest and Debrecen—in 1903. My mother and father were born and raised in Manhattan, and my childhood and that of my sister, Rhoda, were spent in the Bronx, so the great outdoors was not exactly in the lexicon of my urban parents, being a concept as alien to them as reading the catechism. The only hunting my father ever did was for bargains at Macy’s, though he did bring home a copy of Field & Stream once that he found on the subway, and read it on the toilet. When he moved his bowels he liked to price kayaks. My mother hated eating at outdoor barbecues and was particularly disgusted by insects, so when a picnic was unavoidable, she never packed rye bread with seeds, because the seeds looked like ants. She made a big deal about mosquito bites and the danger of infection, and I got the impression early on that the world outside our home was a dangerous place. Any contemplation of an activity that involved risk was discarded as foolhardy. As a result, I was not destined to be an explorer or a test pilot or an airborne ranger or a motorcycle daredevil.
My mother and father were careful, cautious people; wary people. This ensured the certainty of careful, cautious children; wary children. In my sixteen years living in our apartment building, there was never a crime committed on the block. Nevertheless, when our doorbell rang, my sister and I were instructed to always ask: “Who is it?” and never open the door unless there was a response and the respondent was someone known to us. Anyone else had to be viewed through the peephole in the double-locked steel door. We lived on the sixth floor and viewed the world through we
ll-placed window guards and stern warnings about leaning out too far. Parental invocations repeated over and over again like mantras became well absorbed and governed a good deal of how I dealt with my childhood world. This was, of course, their purpose. “Be careful, be careful, watch out, watch out, don’t take any chances, it’s not safe, it’s not safe, that can take your eye out, stop that, you’ll get hurt, you can lose a leg doing that, don’t take candy from strangers.” These were just a few.
Not unexpectedly, caution became my modus operandi. My entire childhood was pervaded by endless warnings and pleadings and reminders of dire consequences: “Watch out for that lamp cord! If you’re going out at night, wear white so the cars can see you! Never touch a light switch with wet hands! My God, don’t cut that bagel toward your neck!” Statistically speaking, the possibility of severing one’s head while slicing a bagel seemed remote indeed, yet Ben and Frieda Klein took no chances. Danger lurked everywhere. Even the garbage incinerator had a poster full of warnings promising five years in prison for throwing carpets or naphtha down the chute. I didn’t even know what naphtha was, but I pitied those naughty souls in Sing Sing who were doing hard time for throwing it out with the garbage. I felt equally bad for those criminals who, in a fit of pique or defiance, had torn the tags off their mattresses. Yet it was their own fault, as they should have been forewarned by the clearly visible printed admonition.
This atmosphere of constant vigilance and circumspection put a definite crimp in my activities. For example, it was the passion of the little boys on the block to act out the movies we saw every Saturday at the David Marcus Theatre on Jerome Avenue. Period pictures like Robin Hood and movies about pirates, the ones with dueling scenes, were special favorites. We would fashion swords out of appropriate pieces of wood or branches that we found where we played, in the vacant lots that would not be built on for another five years. One day my father, in his bellowing voice, called me to supper from the sixth-floor window while I was in the middle of a furious duel with Michael Newman from Apartment 2F. Then my father screamed at the top of his lungs a bone-chilling addendum to the dinner call, that embarrassed me in front of all the other pirates: “Stop it now! You’re gonna take your eye out! Oh, you’re gonna get it when you come up here! Are you gonna get it!” I reluctantly cast away my sword, which everyone leaped for because it was a beauty. I had spent much time shaving the bark and shaping a large twig from the sumac trees that abounded in the area and had survived the ecological insult of cast-away junk and discarded tires. Alas, I was not as hardy as they were, and it was I who had to face my furious father.