by Erica Heller
I would, however, better understand his need to know if a work had “landed,” as he liked to put it. Had it been noticed at all? Plays are produced and fail; books are published and then pulled from shelves. Was it seen? Did it move anyone? I understand that fear now, as I could not when I first met him, but I know now that you harvest and love the feedback you do gain, and you listen to those who understand what you tried to do. Tenn often spoke of consummation with an audience, and it is out there, no matter how badly or indirectly your work might have landed. Would Tenn understand this now? With a list of all the things produced and written and said, would he finally believe that there had been consummation with audiences and readers?
Works surprise us as time goes on, as do the men and women who created them. Wayward children, Tenn called some of his plays, but sometimes they return home and care for their creator. I would want to talk about the care that has come home to Tennessee Williams. He spoke of finding a home, a safe place where one is loved, and I would like to assure him that he is home, he is safe, he is loved.
James Grissom has written for HBO, Showtime, and CBS, and his first book, Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. He is now at work on The Lake of the Mind: Brando in the Night when he is not suing Republicans.
— 49 —
“He wasn’t a big hugger, but I always hugged him, never wanting him to die.”
RICHARD LEWIS (CLOSE COMEDY PAL) AND JONATHAN WINTERS
QUESTIONNAIRE
1. Which pal would you choose to have lunch with?
Lenny Bruce is right up there, but in real life, Jonathan Winters was the man. He was like hanging with Picasso.
2. In a sentence or two, describe your past relationship with this pal.
I worshipped him since I was twelve. Neither of us got much support growing up or entering comedy, and when each of us did, we were both crazy alcoholics. I’m close to twenty-three years sober now, and Jonathan was fifty-three years sober when he passed.
3. Did he have a profession?
I don’t know. Is being God a job? The man was a genius. Not just a brilliant fine artist, but the king of improvisation.
4. When/at what age did he die?
Eighty-seven years crazy and young, in 2013.
5. Where would you usually meet for lunch? At home? At a restaurant?
He lived near Santa Barbara in a gorgeous home with his painting studio about ninety miles from my home in Hollywood. I would meet him whenever he was free and felt up to it and I was available. I usually picked him up, often with my wife, Joyce, and occasionally pals I introduced him to, and took him to the Biltmore Four Seasons, about five miles away. He loved to eat!!!!!! I must have treated him to about nine hundred thousand meals. Meeting him now, I’d try for Sunday brunch at the Biltmore Four Seasons in Santa Barbara. He was like a hysterical kid in a chocolate factory, but food wasn’t important to me around Jonathan. I wanted as few distractions as possible while listening to his free-associating.
6. Would you show up alone?
Rarely, as I loved sharing his genius. Proud of his clean comedy after he retired from the stage, he was so R-rated afterward (when he wanted to be). Trust me, Pryor and Lenny would have sat at his feet like a guru, endlessly. He was that astounding.
7. What emotions do you imagine would be felt on both sides at first seeing each other?
Well, it’d be very emotional. I can only hope that I wouldn’t collapse, weeping and wailing. See, he became a father figure immediately to me. My father died young and never saw me perform. Winters and I connected on a surreal spot in the universe. We both destroyed each other when we talked about real truths.
8. Would you embrace?
He wasn’t a big hugger, but I always hugged him, never wanting him to die.
9. What would you both order?
I have crazy eating habits. Winters could eat an entire elk and octopus in three minutes. He loved to eat. I vowed to him that he’d never pay for a meal with me and no matter how much he ate, he never did.
10. What would the general mood at the table be?
Total insanity. Plus, if the restaurant was jammed, oftentimes people loved seeing him and us together. But the killer was that he played the room like a nightclub. He would entertain fans for hours on end. And he loved women. His great wife was ill well before I met her, and he loved to flirt with chicks, and they loved it.
11. Would you raise questions/issues you’d never expressed while he was alive?
Are you nuts? For me, it was like talking to God! Two crazy, insecure drunks, now both sober, successful, and with thousands of stories and mutual friends. It was a dream come true. I’d often call him on a three- or four-way call and put on pals like Albert Brooks, who I swear didn’t talk for sixty minutes, and when Winters hung up, Albert was blown away and wanted to make a documentary. But I felt the need to protect my buddy as he took pride in being remembered as a “clean” icon.
12. Would there be laughing? Crying?
We would scream with laughter. I would cry. He had a peculiar way of laughing at my jokes, which to me, was like hitting a home run out of Yankee Stadium. Imagine making an idol laugh.
13. Bringing Winters up-to-date on your life in the interim, how would he respond?
He loved me like a son. He helped me stay sober. Occasionally when he wasn’t looking for laughs, he was deadly serious with advice. I called him from the road. He left me thousands of messages in different dialects. I cannot overstate how much of a genius he was!
14. What would your overriding emotion during lunch be?
Insanity. Every meal was like Duck Soup. I often brought along a few thousand dollars in singles and fives and poured it over his head. He laughed crazily. Although he had money, many from his generation treated money like a way to prove their success with jealous family members.
15. Would recriminations be expressed?
Absolutely none.
16. Would you order dessert? If so, what would it be?
He ate a bit of everything on the menu. Everything. He needed to leave the Biltmore oftentimes on a gurney. (Slight joke.)
17. How long would lunch last?
HOURS!!! Then afterward, sometimes, we’d go back and hang at his home. Occasionally, when he needed to come to Hollywood, he’d plan lunch at Musso and Frank’s and invite some of our friends. It was complete bedlam.
18. How would you say goodbye? Tearfully, with relief, with exhaustion?
With terrible, overwhelming sadness that I’d never see this man again. I loved him so much, he was so precious to me, I can’t even really describe it. But I’d also be thrilled that he was still a treasured best friend who respected me.
19. Who would pay?
Always me.
20. Would the lunch reverberate in your mind for very long?
Always. After hundreds of hours sharing tales both dark and hilarious but always the truth, looking back at having done this with a childhood idol felt like a surreal trip of pure joy.
21. Would there be things you wish you had said?
I always told him that I loved him profoundly and considered him the greatest, and this lunch would be no different. What more could I have said? Of course, I’d probably also attack my own self-esteem, secure in the knowledge that his respect for me was a true gift and an honor, and that he even considered me a part of comedy history. He had, really, a father’s love for me, and also incredible pride.
22. In summing up, how was the lunch?
Worth every bit of the seven thousand dollars I spent. And much, much more.
Regarded by his peers as a “comic’s comic,” the New York Times said, “This renowned comedian, often considered to be the heir to Lenny Bruce, is a master of long-form storytelling who turns his endless neurotic energy into brilliant comedy.” Comedy Central has recognized Mr. Lewis as one of the top fifty stand-up comedians of all time. In addition to his outstanding career as a sta
nd-up comic, this Renaissance neurotic has written books, appeared in major films, and starred in two home-run television series. His latest, Curb Your Enthusiasm, is set to begin its tenth season. The secret to his success? In his own words, “I go on a long tour and make people happy that they’re not me.” After a rocky beginning, Richard is especially grateful for being sober now for more than twenty-four years. Also, a great source of pride for him was when, in 2017, the historic New York City Friars Club named the men’s room after him. He lives in LA with his wife, Joyce, and their dog, Luna.
— 50 —
“I don’t do children.”
ERICA HELLER (DAUGHTER) AND JOSEPH HELLER
Now I owe you a real lunch with my father, what would actually happen, so let’s rewind, shall we? This time, I’ll try to sift through a lifetime of unanswered wishes, scoop them out, and be pitilessly objective instead of losing myself in the healing, lapping waves of burnished nostalgia, which couldn’t be less likely or appropriate.
In 1998, the year before my father succumbed to a massive heart attack, he gave an interview to Lynn Barber, a brilliant, gimlet-eyed journalist for the UK’s Guardian. In the article, he boasted that “I don’t do children,” and he wasn’t kidding. He didn’t even “do” his own. In a different interview he explained that a particularly prized skill of his was that “I can feel things for people and then just make myself stop feeling them.” Indeed he could.
Our relationship had always been strained, fractious, a purblind arabesque at best. When he died, suddenly, at the relatively young age of seventy-six (for someone who took such meticulous care of himself), we were not speaking. He’d always had a mile-wide bitter streak that I seemed to incite for as long as I could remember. As a verbose child, with my ringlets and dimples, I was his precious, chubby, precocious darling. He took me everywhere with him, like Edgar Bergen took Charlie McCarthy.
But then, according to a lifelong family friend, Dolores Karl, everything changed when I was about four. One night, at a dinner party my parents gave, loud shouting—my father’s—could suddenly be heard coming from my room during dessert. Dolores and another family friend, George Mandel, rushed into my room to find my father poking a finger in my face and screaming, red-faced, about what it hardly mattered. It took the two of them to pull him away from me, with George pleading, “Joe, please, she’s only four years old.” After that night, nothing was ever the same. A vein of disdain, blackly bilious contempt, was unleashed that would only mushroom and burgeon exponentially for the rest of our days together.
Ours was not a happy household. My mother was an Olympian worrier; in fact, her reaction to a phone ringing, for her entire life, was “Uh-oh.” From my fatalistic father, I got a near daily forecast of pain, disappointment, and horror as I grew up, and an in-no-uncertain-terms message that he had little if any expectations of me. I had a learning disability in school (alas, there was no such dignified name for it then) and remained a poor student all the way through college. To my father, this only meant that I was deficient, insubstantial, destined for nothingness. If I was ever proud of myself (extremely rarely), he would quickly douse my spirit. I was never permitted to be happy or hopeful. In college, I got pregnant the first time I’d ever had sex, and when my father found out, I got the silent treatment for one year (to the day), except for the many times he asked me, though I was visibly scared, miserable, and traumatized, how I could possibly have done this to him. He took all my clothes and belongings and tossed them out in our hallway, at the elevator. He was done with me.
While I was still struggling through high school, he was already trying to convince me to take a civil servant’s job with a pension later on, telling me I was almost certainly going to grow old alone, unloved, without money. It was a forecast Cinderella’s sisters would even have found brutal.
At my first ad copywriting job, at around twenty-three, I pessimistically mailed in an op-ed piece I had thrown together to the New York Times. When it was accepted for publication, I was beside myself with joy, an emotion quite alien to me. But Joe Heller had to rain on even that parade. Clearly proud and very excited when I called my parents to tell them, my father didn’t miss a beat: “Well you’d better enjoy it the day that it’s printed, kiddo, because the next day, someone else will be in that space.” He was such a skilled and almost effortless voice of my very own apocalypse.
By then, I was so used to his need to dominate, I barely noticed it. There were exceptions, however. Somewhere along the way in high school, I met a dazzling, brilliant, beautiful boy who treated me like a goddess, made me laugh the way no one else could, and astonished me with his intelligence, intense warmth, frisky spirit of adventure, and abundant wisdom. We read each other’s minds. I was uncharacteristically happy until my parents decided that my friend’s skin was the wrong color, and they cruelly put an end to it. It was like surgery without blood. To this day, that boy, now a man who has accomplished an almost outrageous amount in his various fields, remains a fixture in my slide carousel of past delights, intermingling pleasure with a tingling, sorrowful, furious regret.
I remember one night when I was sneaking out of the family apartment to go to a party with this boy, before my father gleefully excommunicated him. All dressed up, I ran into my father as I was leaving the apartment and, looking me up and down, he said: “Well, I see you’ve found a way to mask all your defects.” This was Joe Heller–speak for: You look pretty. Over the years he frightened away boyfriend after boyfriend, often without explanation or even alerting me. Whatever affection he had in him, seemed to go to the series of dogs our family adopted. To them he would coo and talk baby talk. (He didn’t tell them they should take a civil servant’s job, selling tokens down in the dank, gloomy subway.) He was often side-splittingly funny, I’ll give him that, but his humor was perpetually laced with cruelty and almost always at someone else’s expense.
When Something Happened was published in 1974, and an entire chapter was called “My Daughter Is Unhappy,” I was hardly surprised but deeply, deeply hurt. Especially when he compared looking at his daughter’s future to looking into a “cold, empty grave.” My privacy, as well as my mother’s and brother’s, had been horrifically violated. Asking him how he could’ve possibly written about me in that way, his customary riposte was: “What makes you think you’re interesting enough for me to write about?” Things went from worse to worst. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990, right after my parents’ long, scalding divorce (he had treated my brave, witty, beautiful, and unfailingly loyal mother hideously for years), I ventured out to East Hampton one summer afternoon, where my dad was then living, to ask him for a five-hundred-dollar loan in order to get more tests done, see more doctors. “Can’t do it, kid. It was a bad tax year,” he offered, adding: “Get it from your mother,” knowing full well (because he parsimoniously controlled her purse strings) that my mother didn’t have it. But really, what could I expect from a man who, having gotten tired of his wife of thirty-eight years, actually pulled her in front of a mirror one day, counted her wrinkles out loud as the blood drained from her face, and asked her, chuckling, “See why everyone thinks you’re my mother?” Heartless, but not quite heartless enough, the next day he presented her with a majestic, outrageously priced Russian sable coat. He kept her head spinning and the rest of her off balance until their only interactions were hostile manifestly untenable. When it finally became unbearable for him, meaning he was bored, tired of the game, and ready to go live with his mistress (the latest of many), he dragged my mother through a bitter, totally pointless, expensive court trial for their divorce. By then, I think he was at least just a tiny bit bonkers. Both before and after this marriage, years would go by with undiscussed, unexplained silences from my father, a cutting and sad, hurtful habit my brother seems to have unfortunately inherited, along with much of Dad’s talent. Sadly, my brother is my own very powerful phantom limb. And so it happened that when Dad died, we were not speaking. I had always loved
him just as much as I’d hated him, and I had worked tirelessly my entire life, begging for a few unconditional crumbs of acceptance, but they were never forthcoming. There was no trail home.
Near the time of his death, I was about to marry an Amsterdam-based Dutch artist. My suspicion is that Dad would’ve taken a brittle disliking to anyone who loved me, and the idea that I was happy now and optimistic about a cozy, productive, loving future with someone evidently enraged him. I was, after all, not playing the part he had so unfailingly groomed me for, the defeated, unloved loser. He instantly let me know that if I married this merry, puckish Dutchman, we would never speak again. We didn’t.
Several weeks later, I took my vows on a blustery, chilly Nantucket beach (it was November), and I was uncharacteristically jubilant. The happiness didn’t last, of course; the marriage was an absurdly convoluted and mostly ill-fated fiasco, but the point was, even if Father Knew Best about this (he really couldn’t stand my husband), I never got a call from him on my wedding day, or the Sunday we were featured (at my husband’s insistence) in the “Vows” column of the New York Times, which Dad had surely read. Instead, several weeks after my marriage, I got a middle-of-the-night call from his second wife (after calling just about everyone else in the tri-state area, including my brother), telling me that my father was dead. The show was over. The curtain had come down for the very last time. There would be no more doomed chances to try to patch things up, wrangle some affection, gain his respect, be friends. But as Robert Benchley famously wrote, “Death ends a life, not a relationship.” My father has been gone many years now, but I still see myself at least partly as he saw me, and I can never forgive him for that. It is a battle I face every day and am determined to win, with or without him. Yet even now, I hold tender feelings for him. I see him as a tortured soul. How would you like your first book to have been Catch-22? Imagine the pressure put on him by himself and others to equal or surpass it? Imagine losing your father while still a small child, in a poverty-stricken household. Imagine completing eighty-six bombing missions in World War II and that when you’ve returned home, the horror of that war keeps you screaming almost every night in your sleep. It all makes sense to me now, with almost two decades of beneficial clarity. He did the best he could, except that with me, that turned out not to be very good at all.