The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  Eventually, David Steinberg and Judy Graubart returned from London, Sheldon Patinkin took some time off, and Paul Sills, the company’s original director and guru of improvisation, directed our new show, called Through the Eyes of the Inmates, or God Is Only Sleeping. This was an unexpected opportunity to work with one of the pioneers who had started it all. In David Steinberg’s absence, I had blossomed into a much more confident performer. Paul was the epitome of the genius behind the stars: the guy who didn’t sell out, who stayed in the Chicago-Wisconsin axis, exploring his theatrical ideas to the fullest, regardless of commercial considerations. His mother, Viola Spolin, had literally written the book on improvisation, called Improvisation for the Theater. There was a story about the two nuns who taught drama at a college in St. Louis, who showed up at the theater one afternoon, on a pilgrimage to meet Viola. Viola’s improvisation hypothesis was this: When you are improvising with another actor, the only thing that counts is what is here and now and immediate. What you see and hear and smell and touch is the essence of the improvisation. Paul discouraged us from playwriting, that is, talking about your kid brother in Dallas or what you used to do when you were in college. Onstage, your fellow actor’s hat or birthmark or smile is much more important to the scene, and this keen tuning in to what you’re facing keeps actors alert and creative. If you’re stuck, you can always mime taking a round object out of an imaginary cabinet and begin a whole new discussion on what it is. With great difficulty, I got Paul Sills’s point, though he was a tough taskmaster. He may well have been a genius, but he was an impatient one. What ticked me off was that he was constantly praising Steinberg (and he was not a praise kind of guy), while he seemed to have no patience with the rest of us. I was jealous. He seemed to be mysteriously tolerant of David’s technique of using his fellow actors as lampposts.

  Then there was Fred Willard. Fred had no intention of changing his style for Sills or anybody else. He improvised the wrong way, he was guilty of constant playwriting, and the results were, more often than not, brilliant and hilarious. Paul Sills was confounded by Willard, so scolding and lectures were ineffective. Paul even exhibited some rude behavior toward Fred when he intentionally held a loud conversation with the pianist while Fred performed onstage. I have had a modicum of experience with geniuses. The term, of course, is a somewhat subjective matter, and unhappily, it has been too frivolously applied to individuals of modest accomplishment—like Yanni. Paul Sills’s ideas and techniques were imaginative, original, and opened the way for rich improvisations that were developed into theatrical scenes of substance. The problem was that Paul’s ability to communicate these ideas as a director of actors—what we call, in the twenty-first century, communication skills—was inversely proportional to his prowess as a theatrical master. He would gesticulate with his hands like a Talmudic scholar, fingers closed at the tips, his body would sway, and one would hear a torrent of words in a Jewish Wisconsin lilt, impatient about why we couldn’t understand a simple direction or find “the truth” onstage. All I remember is: “The ting wid da ting wid the ting you’re doin’ here. You take the ting here, and what’s your relationship with this girl? Why would she care about you if you’re not truthful, isn’t that da ting?”

  Slowly and a bit painfully, I caught on to the idea. To this day, it is the technique through which I improvise my stand-up comedy material. Instead of another actor, I use the audience, the room, the theater, a noise. It is all in the now. I may begin speaking about something I saw in the paper, and the audience reaction will cause some more thoughts and observations to pop out of me spontaneously. The point is that except for a few lines I may have thought of in advance, it is the “now” part that creates the most dynamic improvisation.

  Viola Spolin was a gray-haired woman in her fifties, a free spirit who favored hoop earrings, shawls, and jeans. She was a middle-aged Bohemian, an avant-garde hippie type who enjoyed a few pops at the bar between tokes of cannabis sativa. She was a Second City icon who had invented a complex set of improvisational games and exercises that, passed on to her son, had created a revolutionary approach to theater. She never worked with the company, though she was active in the Second City community, working with talented novices who were future Second City performers and mega–movie stars. The problem for me was that Viola had taken a shine to me, less than half her age, and had begun running her hand up and down my thigh as we sat at the bar, going dangerously close to my genitals. This seduction continued for a few nights until it became necessary to check the bar to see that she was not there before I entered. In retrospect (since I am older now than Viola was then), I do not blame her in any way; nor, actually, did I blame her then. I was simply incapable of dealing with it. Visions of Diamond Lil danced in my head. Viola continued to be touchy-feely with me, even while discussing improvisation. I decided to take it up with Paul Sills. In bringing up the subject, I would have to ask as peculiar a question of a colleague as one could ever imagine.

  “Paul, can we talk for a minute privately? Uh. Your mother—and you know how much I respect Viola’s work—has uh . . . been coming . . . well, on to me physically. On a number of occasions, she’s had a few belts of brandy and well . . . rubbed my thigh at the bar. It’s a little embarrassing. I don’t know what to do.”

  He looked at me, not the slightest bit embarrassed, with amusement. “That’s Viola,” he said.

  I could not have imagined saying, “That’s Frieda,” were I in Paul’s shoes, but he had a point. His mother was not some incompetent ancient but a brilliant and imaginative woman. It was her business, he reckoned. When I told this story to a female acquaintance, she rebuked me for not dealing directly with Viola. The problem was that I was twenty-three, and she was an idol to the Second City community, a person in authority. Still, my friend’s take was acknowledged and absorbed. Today, how would I feel if a woman went to my son, Allie, to complain that I was behaving improperly?

  My life in Chicago went on, in a wonderful atmosphere of vitality, a sense of freedom mixed with professional discipline and the opportunity to interact with creative people. Avery Schreiber, Jack Burns, Severn Darden, Dell Close, John Brent, and others stopped by the theater and improvised scenes with us. I also met a host of smart, lovely women drawn to the Second City flame. I met Northwestern students, aspiring actresses, improvisers, and waitresses just one paper away from a Ph.D. who were biding their time. There were Republican Evanston debutantes who talked politics over dry martinis in the bar, while Charlie Chaplin, on the wall just behind them, championed the poor and mocked the rich. In my perceived deprivation in the matter of sex, I was ideologically neutral. There was no way that I, playing the politically progressive, hip actor whom the girls perceived as cute, would throw Muffy or Sissy or any of these pretty young women of privilege out of bed merely because of strong political differences. In this new situation of relative promiscuity, I had the feeling that I was making up for lost time, since I had been a slow starter in the sexual-experience department: a geek with fantasies of naked women who turned to bronze when I touched them.

  At that point in my life, I never met a sexual experience I didn’t like. There were twelve women during my thirteen-month tenure in Chicago with whom I was intimate. I was not in love with any of them, but that did not preclude tenderness between us, or raunchiness. I was on a learning curve in all aspects of my life, professional and private, and sex was no exception. Some of the girls were so adorable that I fantasized about marrying them and having children. Again, as with Judith Silverman in college, it was what I ultimately wanted, I guess.

  After about six months in Chicago, I had become very confident about my work, and I informed my agents that I wished to return to New York as soon as possible and become a star. David Steinberg felt the same way. Harry Kalcheim, a senior William Morris agent, would come out periodically to check on my progress, and David’s, too, as we were both signed with Morris. Irvin Arthur of CMA would visit Fred. Fred was content not to hurry t
he matter, but David and I would petition old Mr. Kalcheim to start setting up things for New York. He would praise our work and say, “Just have a little patience. This is the perfect training ground for you.”

  “But Harry.”

  “Just be patient.”

  Around February 1966, there was talk of sending our company for a New York run. This was incredibly exciting news: the opportunity to showcase my stuff in front of the most important audience and critics I could imagine. When the plan was confirmed, it was decided that we would not do our current original show, but a series of classic sketches that had been performed by our classic predecessors. My comfort onstage, which had been nurtured in Steinberg’s absence and continued with his return, even in my scenes with him, was now subjected to the terrible competitive test of who would do what and how much in the New York production. David, of course, would get the most, which I did not mind. It was disconcerting, however, to have the feeling that if I did not speak up and hustle, I could wind up with close to zilch for this, my New York debut. As we got closer and closer to the big event, David lobbied ever harder for additional scenes, like his sermons, as well as those wonderful parts that Alan Arkin had originated that David did so well.

  Then one day, after I had poured ketchup over my french fries, I took a bite and experienced a pain in my gut as if someone had knifed me. The same thing happened with pizza, pepper, coffee, and almost anything that wasn’t bland. I assumed I was getting an ulcer. My old fraternity brother Mike Geller was interning at Cook County Hospital, ministering to the down-and-out; his most interesting patient was a prostitute who had PAY AS YOU ENTER tattooed above her vagina. He prescribed Sparine, a stomach relaxant, to ease my condition, which it did. I was determined to relax and take good advantage of this fine opportunity instead of wasting my efforts on futile competition with David.

  The show at the Square East, adjacent to the NYU campus, got mixed reviews. Mostly, the critics complained that we were doing previously presented material, and there is no doubt that they had a point. In hindsight, Sheldon and Bernie should have had more confidence in some of the material we had created. Stanley Kauffmann was the Times critic who reviewed us. Though I enjoyed his film criticism in The New Republic, he was singularly underwhelmed by our efforts. In a final blow, he mentioned in passing the names of the actors, but he forgot to include mine.

  We closed in four weeks, but we had been noticed by the business. Judy Graubart and I did an animated Ruffles potato-chip commercial in which she was the mother’s voice and I was the father’s voice. The baby kept repeating “Ruffles have ridges” as we tried to understand him. It became a classic, and even at union-scale pay rates, it earned us each about twenty-five thousand dollars over three years.

  But far more important—I had my first Broadway audition coming up: for Mike Nichols.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Learning How

  After returning from Chicago in 1966, I shared a huge West End Avenue apartment with two friends I had known since junior high school. It was an exuberant time. I was no longer financially dependent on my father, as I had a tiny nest egg and a modest salary from my first Broadway show, Apple Tree. I was truly on my own: free and twenty-four.

  Each of us who shared the three-bedroom apartment had a room of our own. This was fortunate, not to say convenient, considering the various activities occurring at the pad, as we liked to call it. There was no more need for bizarre signals to warn one’s roommate that he was approaching. No more embarrassing intrusions, like opening the door and seeing either hairy or smooth buttocks pumping happily away, depending on who was on top.

  I performed eight shows a week at the Shubert Theater, albeit in the small chorus with a few speaking lines, and I would moonlight ambitiously after the curtain came down by going down Forty-fourth Street to the Improvisation Club to try out stand-up comedy material. Before leaving the theater, I would frequently smoke a few puffs of the dried leaves of the cannabis sativa plant. This would put me in a slightly more receptive mood, to inure me to the terrifying fact that in an hour’s time I could quite possibly be onstage, in front of a crowd of people who were not laughing, thereby making a humiliating ass of myself. I would share the sativa with my friend James Saxon, who was the lead dancer and assistant choreographer of Apple Tree, as well as an original cast member of West Side Story; he was one of Jerome Robbins’s premier dancers. James was an incredible cut of a man, six feet tall, with what appeared to be a six-inch waist and pure muscle in all four quarters. He was married to a beautiful dancer. Women loved him, and the feeling was mutual. He was a martial-arts expert, which came in handy, as his choice of ballet dancer as a profession did not sit well with certain parties in the rough neighborhood of his youth. The wonderfully incongruous thing was, James had been a tough New York City street kid.

  We would have a short smoke and spray the shit out of the windowless dressing room with Air Wick; then I would go off to make people laugh, and he would go off to cheat on his wife. Initially, I carried a twenty-five-pound Wollensak tape recorder to record the improvisations that tripped off the top of my head. In a short period of time, I acquired the latest lightweight tape recorder, which, though still reel to reel, used small reels. Soon technology came to the rescue, as audio cassettes came on the market, and I would record my work on a still more diminutive device without having to thread the tape into the machine. Years later, at an event I hosted with Dick Clark to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Sony Walkman, I related this saga to Mr. Morita, the founder of Sony. He was fascinated by the fact that not only music lovers would use the device. Though he showed a sudden acute interest in comedians, he appeared to have little or no sense of humor.

  I actually got the idea from watching an ambitious young woman comedian named Joan Rivers use a tape recorder at the Improv while her husband-manager, Edgar Rosenberg, watched with a studied eye and took notes. It was at the Improvisation that I learned the art of stand-up comedy. Starting in the mid-sixties, the Improv was a place where professional performers could get up and do a turn in an informal, leisurely atmosphere, though a few amateurs made their way to the stage as well. The audience was largely composed of off-duty actors and performers, well before the club’s reputation gained hold and civilians began packing the place. It was the only venue of its kind, and would be copied hundreds of times over in the comedy clubs that dot the American landscape today.

  This was different from the Hootenanny Nights held in the Greenwich Village clubs like the Bitter End and Café Wha?, where people could get up and attempt imitations of the Kingston Trio or Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Those were once-a-week affairs when the headline act had the night off. For the most part, the performers there had less polish than the Forty-fourth Street crowd. The Improv had no booked act working nightly; instead, it had a steady stream of established and up-and-coming performers, and some not so up-and-coming, who would drop in and sometimes get up to perform. One might hear that Liza Minnelli was coming or that Jackie Vernon was going to try out some new jokes for his next appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was here that I first saw Lily Tomlin, who made the occasional trek uptown from her semipermanent perch at the Duplex, a little club in the Village. Rob Reiner and Richard Dreyfuss (we called him Ricky) came in several times and were great laughers and very encouraging to me. They promised to be my guides when I came to Los Angeles.

  This anticipation about who might be dropping in became the club’s true charm. It certainly wasn’t the architecture or the location. Forty-fourth Street and Ninth Avenue was hardly upscale then, and it was amusing to see the celebrities make their way through a gauntlet of drunks and panhandlers. The club had a tiny stage occupied mostly by a piano, next to which was a storefront window that allowed the more aggressive denizens of the street to make faces and expose themselves while a performer was on. The parcel of land on which the club stood was rumored to have been part of Aaron Burr’s farm in the eighteenth century. If this is so, his
remaining legacy must have been the men’s room, and it was undoubtedly during his tenure that it had last been cleaned. It was a toilet that could make you hold it in forever and never sit down, bringing to mind my mother’s admonitions to me as a child: “Don’t ever touch a public toilet seat! Put paper on the seat. Squat. Hover. Use someone else’s ass if you have to.” In order not to touch anything in the tiny, filthy room, I would push open the door with my buttocks and come out with my washed hands held fingers up, like a surgeon after scrubbing. The phone booth was located near the toilet, and was approximately the same size, which caused confusion for newcomers. Many was the man who looked for the men’s room in the phone booth, then saw the men’s room and was sorry he hadn’t peed in the phone booth.

  The club served food quite late, and the chef, a moody Latino named Louie, distinguished himself by attacking the owner’s wife with a knife after an apparent crack about his meat loaf. His temper was exceeded only by his mediocrity at the culinary arts, though the fare was hearty and appreciated at the midnight hour.

  I first walked into the club in October 1966, after Apple Tree opened to successful reviews. David Steinberg had told me about the Improv, and I decided to get up and perform. Bud Friedman and his wife, Silver, owned the club. Bronx-born Bud loved the role of host and developed several affectations, such as wearing a monocle and ascot, that drew impertinent remarks from the comedians whose jokes he would borrow for his introductions. He was a Korean War veteran and had a vicious scar on his leg to prove it. Bud knew I was a professional appearing in a Broadway show, so he invited me to get up anytime.

  Several cast members from Apple Tree, including the play’s stars, Alan Alda, Barbara Harris, and Larry Blyden, came to give me support the first time I performed. Though I was nervous, the result was a resounding success, after which I was approached by a strange man in a black suit and red tie who was ceaselessly tugging at his collar in nervous discomfort. “You were brilliant, man,” he said, “and I’m a tough cocksucker, but you have to come here every night for three years to get it right.” I had never seen him before, but he seemed to be royalty at the Improv. Then he got onstage and absolutely tore the place apart. While delivering drinks, a waitress bent over in front of him. He looked at her ass and said, “That’s what we need around here: new faces.” His jokes were funny, and the attitude he used in delivering them was hilarious—a kind of everyman loser always tugging at his collar, even though, in a bow to comfort and a blow to tailors, the collar was two sizes too big.