by Robert Klein
We were clearly the hit of the afternoon, but I assumed nothing until I was summoned into an office where Sahlins and Patinkin asked me if I could be in Chicago by April 1. I told them I was getting a haircut on that day, but there was a chance I could break the appointment.
Happily, I discovered that Willard had gotten the nod as well, though his decision was more difficult, as he had to consider the welfare of his partner in a comedy act, Billy Braver, who was not chosen. I could not help but think that these boys had hired just the right guys for the job.
In the next few weeks, I wrapped up my affairs, so to speak, at the cockroach-infested pad on 153rd Street. The William Morris Agency informed me that they wished to sign me to a two-year contract. I was thrilled to get an agent: that magical, must-have, elusive commodity for the just-beginning actor. It seemed fitting for such an important episode, the legitimization of my entry into show business, that I take my father to the offices in the Mutual of New York Building for the official signing. Pop and I were ushered into the plush office of Lee Stevens, an important agent who was on the rise in the company. He was six foot three, with piercing eyes and lots of charm. There were several eight-by-ten glossies of stars on the wall, particularly Walter Matthau, one of Mr. Stevens’s clients. Benny was impressed, looking around, shaking his head in admiration at the expensive decor and the beautiful view of Manhattan, as he clutched his fedora.
A beaming Bernie Sohn was there and greeted me warmly, but it was Lee Stevens who was in charge in that room. He recounted a story about his Russian immigrant father. Lee was an attorney and a wealthy, accomplished businessman and theatrical agent. Yet, he said, his father was most proud of one of Lee’s lesser accomplishments: the fact that he was a notary. In an old Russian village, that position was the pinnacle of respect. I sensed that he was patronizing Benny, who had been born in New York and knew the difference between a law degree and a notary, which was usually found in a drug store. There was some back-and-forth small talk, and then Mr. Stevens came to the point. “Robert, we see a bright future for you. We are the oldest and best agency in the business. We would like to sign you to the William Morris Agency.”
There was a pause. “How many floors do you have in this building?” my father asked.
“I beg your pardon?” said Lee Stevens.
“How many floors does your firm occupy in this building?” my father repeated.
“Four,” said Mr. Stevens.
My father turned to me. “Sign,” he said.
Thus began a tenuous, sometimes bumpy thirty-nine-year relationship. My nervous, skeptical father staked me to the tune of six hundred dollars for my journey to Chicago. He gave me a few words of encouragement, no doubt impressed by my hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week salary, and I promised to pay him back, which, happily, I wound up doing many times over.
Elizabeth and I had spoken several times, New York to Munich. These were the conversations not of lovers but of friends. I, for one, was so focused on my impending career move that when she told me she had met a man and “he reminds me of you, Robertzien,” I was both jealous and flattered. His name was John Vinocur, and he was the New York Times Bonn correspondent, who eventually would run the International Herald Tribune. Jimmy Burrows had gone to Oberlin with Vinocur and assured me he was a good guy. For whatever reasons, I was not the classic torch case. We each seemed preoccupied with important life events, and that seemed to be that.
So it was that I crossed the George Washington Bridge in fair weather, headed for points west in the Ford Galaxie, full of a positive spirit that bordered on exhilaration. I fully realized my fortuitous turn of events. I took nothing for granted and savored what was happening to me as much as at any time in my life. I had just finished reading Moss Hart’s Act One, and his experience seemed to perfectly parallel mine. In fact, the whole signing episode had reminded me of the book. Sudden success; the big time, or at least my idea of it; the prosperous good life; the well-deserved “all is well” chill of contentment down the spine.
I arrived in Chicago and checked into the Lincoln Hotel on Wells Street. I called the Second City Theater and got Sheldon Patinkin, the director. “Where are you?” he asked.
“At the Lincoln Hotel, Room 1102. Where is The Second City?”
“Look out the window and down,” he said. And there it was, with the ornate decorations, ball-shaped objects, and sculpted faces salvaged from the old Chicago opera house. In a short while, we new members of the cast met at the club, as it was often called: Fred Willard, Alex Canaan, Joan Bassie, and myself. Bassie was a sweet but serious actress who had been classically trained at the Royal Academy. She had a British affect to her excellent diction, though she was a product of Chicago. Canaan was a tall, handsome leading-man type, and rather a surprising choice for Second City; he proved to be a good straight man. We watched the performance of the English troupe the Oxford Cambridge Revue, then performing at the theater, while the regular Second City company, including David Steinberg and Judy Graubart, was on a tour sponsored by the Theater Guild. Everything English was all the rage, since the Beatles had descended on North America the year before. This revue was reminiscent of Beyond the Fringe, the British comedy entry that had been a recent hit on Broadway. It wasn’t quite in Fringe’s class, but it was funny and intelligent and political, and the English accents seemed to highlight all of those qualities.
There was an actress in the company, a tall, curvy-hipped woman with short blond hair and blue eyes, named Gaye Brown. She was descended from a theatrical London family and somewhat bigger than life. When we were introduced to her after the show, she greeted the three tall, young, male new arrivals with eyes that drank us in, and said in a perfect put-on cockney: “Ain’t they lovely.” She was irresistible. Gaye (her real name was Gabriella) was subletting David Steinberg’s neat little apartment on Wells Street, a block down from the theater. I would spend much time there with her.
Steinberg was then the undisputed leading actor at Second City, and he was soon to return from the tour. I looked forward to meeting him. I would quickly regret that his tour did not last indefinitely. Sheldon Patinkin was generous with answers to my many questions, from finding a place to live, to how the company worked, its history, and the relationship among the actors in such close, intimate, highly competitive confines. The one subject that seemed to halt him was David Steinberg. It was not that David wasn’t brilliant or didn’t deliver on his well-earned reputation for intelligent comedy. It was that Sheldon feared that David, whom he knew very well, would see the new cast members as fodder for his nimble stage machinations, in which, more often than not, he performed a kind of monologue with his fellow actor as a handball wall to bounce off of. “Watch out for Steinberg,” Sheldon said.
“You’ve got to watch out for Sheldon,” Steinberg said as I looked north at Lake Michigan and Lincoln Park from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the twenty-fifth floor of his new, return-to-Chicago apartment in the Constellation, an exquisitely elegant luxury building. He had invited me for lunch. He was subletting from Chad Mitchell, whose trio was on tour and had been at the top of the charts in a kind of Kingston Trio redux mode. Mitchell was the same guy who later did hard time for a grand marijuana scheme.
David was as charming as could be, and our politics seemed to coincide, as well as our love for Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. He was highly intelligent and funny as hell and keen on flaunting his Jewishness. He struck me as a total mensch. “Sheldon is a great guy, but he can be manipulative,” he said. “I’ll bet he warned you about me.”
“As a matter of fact, he did,” I said, astounded.
“Don’t believe any of that stuff. We’ll be just fine.”
Steinberg soon proved a better improviser than a prognosticator. From the start, he hustled to get the best parts in the best scenes. He had several brilliant, prepared monologues and characters that he would work into our improvisation session that followed the regular show. His “sermons” were a staple. He had one for each
of several well-known biblical characters, his knowledge of the Bible reflecting his orthodox Jewish upbringing in Winnipeg. The trouble was that they were set, polished comedy pieces that were not being improvised on the spot as advertised, and we all knew it. I resented having to introduce such scenes with “David Steinberg will now do an improvisation based on your suggestion, Moses.” When he worked with other actors, he dominated the scene. He would maneuver his colleague into a chair and proceed to pace back and forth behind him or her, shouting and cutting them off. Aside from the Marx Brothers, he worshiped the eccentric brilliance of Severn Darden, one of our illustrious predecessors at Second City. Severn had developed a weird professorial character who spouted Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard and was reminiscent of Groucho but with Harpo’s rubber squeeze horn. David liked to do his version.
In a scene with him, dialogue was difficult; when you tried to speak, he would cut you off with a horn ten times louder than Harpo’s. It turned out that Joan Bassie, Alex Canaan, and I were the stooges. For some strange artistic reason, Fred Willard and Judy Graubart (who was going with Steinberg at the time) were able to perform perfectly good scenes with David, while I and the others were mincemeat. Despite his ego, Steinberg recognized Willard’s talent immediately, as I did. In fact, our admiration for Fred was one of the things we agreed on completely.
I was frustrated but played to my strengths, among which was improvising music. They called it “make a song” at the theater. Bill Mathieu, the music director, accompanist to the group since its inception, was a wonderful improvisational game player with a golden ear and fine instincts. Like me, he was a devotee of baroque music in general and Bach in particular. We would take a suggestion from the audience of some news event or book title and cook up a Bach cantata or Handel oratorio. We did Broadway musicals and jazz riffs and folk songs, all right off the top of our heads, or, more properly, from the depths of our brains.
Bill Mathieu’s brain was deep indeed. He turned me on to books like Psychotherapy East and West, pointing out that there were other explanations for human behavior than those of Freud and other Western thinkers. He was especially interested in religions of the East. He made me hear that music went beyond my beloved Bach, so that I could appreciate Thelonious Monk, Beethoven, the Romantics, and even the unconventional work of Stockhausen and John Cage and Ravi Shankar. My passion for Bach, however, reminded Bill that he had neglected the old master, and his ardor was reignited. Before long he was practicing sonatas and partitas and The Well-Tempered Clavier, which he would play for me privately. I had heard only recordings of these pieces. It was my first chance to hear an accomplished player from a few feet away, where I could touch the instrument and feel the vibrations, the way the music was designed to be heard, as opposed to in a large concert hall.
Despite my breaking-in problems with Steinberg, I was happy to be in the company, which was clearly respected in Chicago. It was a bastion of liberalism on the north side, and was visited by the likes of Studs Terkel, Mike Royko, and Dick Gregory, while the powerful office of Mayor Richard Daley looked upon it with a wary eye. Though we nailed Lyndon Johnson plenty onstage, the dictatorial mayor took his share of hits as well. I enjoyed imitating Daley’s plodding Chicago accent, especially in a popular blackout scene (a short scene that ends with a joke and the blackout of the lights for emphasis) called “No Pictures.” In this blackout, Mayor Daley would come out of a building or off a plane, waving away the news photographers with “No pictures, no pictures, sorry, no pictures.” The photographers immediately say, “Okay, okay,” and walk away, leaving the surprised mayor standing there like a jerk. The primary political character of the scene was interchangeable: It could be Daley or Lyndon Johnson or Governor George Wallace of Alabama, anyone we hated.
After the show, the bar downstairs was a lively place, with constantly running silent comedies, Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, projected onto a screen on the wall. A good many of the regulars were old intellectuals, leftists, and general Chicago eccentrics. I noticed a fair number of youthful patrons, some of whom were bright young women and Second City fans.
Knowing my musical proclivities, Sheldon introduced me to a young musician named Helen Razeur. She was an attractive girl of Russian Jewish stock, with an enormous head of thick, dark hair and expressive hands. She was, most impressive to me, a cellist with one of the finest orchestras in the world: the Chicago Symphony. Helen invited me to hear chamber music at the Lincoln Park West apartment of a wealthy patron of the orchestra, who would serve a hearty pasta dinner to the players and listeners. I was in awe, as if I had been invited into the Yankee dugout to meet the guys. These musicians were among the best in the world, and participating for the sheer joy of playing. To hear the richness of these violins, violas, and cellos, plus a nine-foot grand piano, in a wood-paneled library room was ear-opening, as with my experience listening to Bill Mathieu. I couldn’t take my eyes off Helen as she bowed her way through a Beethoven quartet, eyes flashing, head bobbing expressively with the emotion of the piece. I envied the magnificent eighteenth-century cello her legs were wrapped around.
Later, to her immense amusement, I revealed my jealousy, and she put such thoughts to rest by suggesting that while I could not properly produce the sound of her cello, I was, in the main, more versatile. She could play me very well indeed, in the best sense, this passionate woman. The ultimate convergence of art and sensuality was achieved when she played, impeccably, Bach’s sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied cello for me, alone, in her chamber. She was naked. The encore was magnificent. This private concert is one of the lasting, wonderful memories of my life.
* * *
It was announced that David Steinberg and Judy Graubart were going to London to do a run of The Second City on the West End. I felt happy enough to give him a going-away party.
With some experience under my belt, and Steinberg safely across the Atlantic Ocean, I became more confident onstage and proceeded to flower at The Second City. Fred and I improvised a slew of scenes, including one of my favorites, the war-movie sketch. In this scene, Fred plays a gung ho colonel who comes to me, the general, to bitterly complain that his outfit will not be in the first wave to hit the beach in the impending attack. We played it dead seriously. “These boys have trained for months, General, you can’t throw them in to mop up after the attack. They belong in that first wave.”
I point to an imaginary chart on the wall. “This is not about your boys, Colonel, this is about winning a war. You will do as ordered and come in with Fourth Battalion in the third wave.” The exchange becomes more emotional, with raised voices and tempers. No war-movie cliché is missed. Fred says, “Can we forget about rank for a moment, Bill? Take off the stars and talk man-to-man?”
“Sure, Biff. Man-to-man. Smoke?”
“Thanks.”
A tense pause ensues as we mime lighting and smoking cigarettes, followed by a rapid-fire exchange: “Hell, Bill, you and I were together at the Point.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“The point is this.” Than Bill Mathieu begins playing the navy hymn or some other inspirational martial music under our dialogue. The courageous colonel makes his last plea: “My men are chomping at the bit, Bill. They are a primed, razor-edged outfit, ready for that first wave.”
“I’m sorry, Biff. The orders stand. Fourth Battalion will go in the third wave.”
Fred gets into my face angrily. “Dammit, is that your final word, Bill?”
“Yes . . . Colonel! Your outfit will go in the third wave.” I salute and turn my back to the audience to look at my chart.
Fred is on his way out when he suddenly stops, faces the audience, and does a silent jump for joy, while wiping his brow with a cowardly “Phew, that was a close one” expression. Huge laugh. Blackout. Right on the money.
Speaking of money, I had begun a ritual every Friday of going to the Aetna State Bank on Fullerton Avenue and depositing ninet
y bucks from my pay of $150. My “take no chances” father was constantly warning me to take my money and “salt it away.” “You never know when a rainy day might come. A penny saved is a penny earned.” He was a man who never earned quite enough, like Mr. Micawber; though, unlike the Dickens character, Ben Klein owed nobody. He had even passed up the opportunity in the late thirties to buy a beautiful home, because he refused to owe the bank money. He preferred to pay thousands over a lifetime to rent a small apartment, and in the end, he owned nothing.
In any case, it became a satisfying hobby to watch my bank account grow. When it got to about $750, I proudly told my father that I would be returning the money he had staked me for my Chicago adventure. “Nah, nah, nah. You keep the money. This is small potatoes. Eventually, I’m looking for you to support me. Then we’ll talk about the six hundred dollars.” Sweet and funny.
I was a working professional actor, and I’d become entirely comfortable with my surroundings. It was a relentless schedule of performing, six nights a week, Mondays off. Saturday nights were brutal, with two shows plus the improvs. Lots of young couples attended the performances, and occasionally I envied them their Saturday date while I labored and sweated in a funny hat like a court jester. Fred Willard and I had a running gag seconds before we would start the show, bedecked in some of the primitive costumes and props taken from the box backstage. We would say things like “Look at us, standing here on a Saturday night in funny hats, entertaining these people for money. What’s wrong with us?”
But there was no way we would have changed places with anyone in our audience, even the great-looking, self-confident guy at the table in the second row with the beautiful woman all over him who was laughing at us. At that moment, I was sure she would have preferred us to him. It was a wonderful, productive existence, and Chicago was the perfect setting for it. It was not New York, but it was a bustling, vibrant city nonetheless, enough of an adventure for a twenty-three-year-old boy with one of the best jobs in town.