Growing Up Laughing Read online

  Growing Up

  Laughing

  My Story and the Story of Funny

  Marlo Thomas

  * * *

  WITH GUEST APPEARANCES BY

  Alan Alda • Joy Behar • Sid Caesar • Stephen Colbert

  Billy Crystal • Tina Fey • Larry Gelbart • Whoopi Goldberg

  Kathy Griffin • Jay Leno • George Lopez • Elaine May

  Conan O’Brien • Don Rickles • Joan Rivers • Chris Rock

  Jerry Seinfeld • Jon Stewart • Ben & Jerry Stiller

  Lily Tomlin • Robin Williams • Steven Wright

  * * *

  For Terre and Tony,

  who lived it all with me

  in the house on Elm

  Contents

  The Set-up: A Prologue

  Chapter 1 - Celebrations

  Chapter 2 - A Kid at the Studio

  Chapter 3 - The Boys

  Chapter 4 - Socks and Moxie—Jerry Seinfeld

  Chapter 5 - The Wives

  Chapter 6 - Stirring the Sauce with Joy Behar

  Chapter 7 - Hotels

  Chapter 8 - Comedy Begins at Home—Billy Crystal

  Chapter 9 - On the Road

  Chapter 10 - The First Laugh—Robin Williams

  Chapter 11 - The Funny Barber

  Chapter 12 - He Said/He Said—Ben & Jerry Stiller

  Chapter 13 - aka Orson

  Chapter 14 - Testifying with Chris Rock

  Chapter 15 - Beverly Hills, My Neighborhood

  Chapter 16 - My Dad

  Chapter 17 - Harry and the Parakeet

  Chapter 18 - Angelo’s Boy—Jay Leno

  Chapter 19 - Miss Independence

  Chapter 20 - My Big Brown Eyes

  Chapter 21 - Killing and Dying—Alan Alda

  Chapter 22 - Comedians in Their Dressing Rooms

  Chapter 23 - A Phone Call with Mr. Warmth—Don Rickles

  Chapter 24 - The Two Dannys

  Chapter 25 - Turn-ons with Conan O’Brien

  Chapter 26 - The Bow

  Chapter 27 - Twenty Questions for Stephen Colbert

  Chapter 28 - Dinner at the Goldbergs

  Chapter 29 - The Survivor—Joan Rivers

  Chapter 30 - Obsession

  Chapter 31 - Fall-Down Funny—George Lopez

  Chapter 32 - Tony’s Pilot

  Chapter 33 - Oh, Donald

  Chapter 34 - Lew Parker

  Chapter 35 - The Comedian’s Comedian

  Chapter 36 - Growing Up Free

  Chapter 37 - One-Girl Show—Lily Tomlin

  Chapter 38 - Rose Marie

  Chapter 39 - The Book on Kathy Griffin

  Chapter 40 - Capra, Orson (the Other One), and Me

  Chapter 41 - The Wright Stuff—Steven Wright

  Chapter 42 - Growing a Feminist

  Chapter 43 - The Joke on Me

  Chapter 44 - The Making of a Wisenheimer—Tina Fey

  Chapter 45 - The Reluctant Interview: An Improv

  Chapter 46 - The Storyteller—Whoopi Goldberg

  Chapter 47 - Against the Odds

  Chapter 48 - Legends of Comedy

  Chapter 49 - The Elm House

  Chapter 50 - Mother and Marge

  Chapter 51 - The Only Jew in the Neighborhood—Jon Stewart

  Chapter 52 - St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Credits and Permissions

  Copyright

  The Set-up

  A Prologue

  Sometimes in the wee hours of the morning I’d hear that funny sound of an audiotape being rewound. Running backwards it sounded like a Swedish movie. I’d get out of bed and go into Dad’s study. And there he’d be—listening, taking notes, going over his act from his last engagement and getting it ready for the next.

  “You hear that, Mugs?” he’d say. “That’s a big laugh, but the one after it is weak. See, they’re tired. You have to pace the laughs. I’m gonna put a song in here. Then I’ll come back with the Whoopee routine.”

  He had an ear for the rhythm, the music of the comedy.

  “You can never lie to the audience,” he’d tell me. “They’ll follow you down any yellow brick road as long as you don’t lie to them. Once you go off that road, you’ve lost them.”

  My father’s respect for the audience was his compass. When he hunched over the tape recorder like that, he was shaping the act for them—not for himself, not for the critics. And when I went to Las Vegas and saw the act working the way I had watched him put it together, it was exciting. I felt like a co-conspirator, a rooting section, a student—not only of his, but of all of the funny guys he hung out with and with whom I grew up.

  I was a lucky kid to have a seat at the table (often our dinner table) with those comic warriors who had the audacity to stand up in a room full of strangers with the conviction that they could bring them all together in laughter. The stories of those times have been humming in my head all of my life, and I decided at last to write them down. They also bring back the many wonderful performances I have seen.

  Father-daughter evening out. Most dads take their kids to a movie. We went nightclubbing.

  My father, Danny Thomas, was famous for telling looong stories. He would take his time setting up the story and the characters in it. There were always big laughs, and along the way some smaller ones that made you chuckle. And even in his shortest jokes, you could see the characters.

  As the funeral cortege passed by, an old man approached

  a cop on the corner.

  Old Man: “Who died?”

  Cop: “The gentleman in the first car.”

  How did he know when to swing for the fences and when to just put the bat on the ball? What inner voice told him the best rhythm, the best sequence? He knew that the big laugh, the killer laugh, would only come if what came before was carefully, artfully built. But how did he know?

  On February 8, 1991, my family occupied the front pew of Good Shepherd Church in Beverly Hills, inconsolable and in disbelief, unable to speak through the tears.

  Daddy was the gentleman in the first car.

  Since then, I’ve thought about all that I had the chance to witness. The performances, the love of the work, the banter of his friends. Growing up with all this, it’s no mystery where my sense of humor and my appreciation of the craft of comedy come from.

  And it made me wonder: How did the seeds of humor get planted in the DNA of the comedians who fill our lives with laughter today? How do we explain the need that all comedians have—that childlike “Watch me!”? Why didn’t Seinfeld and Tomlin choose law? How come Conan and Whoopi didn’t wind up selling ties at Macy’s? What made Sid and Milton run?

  So in addition to my own stories, I asked some of the men and women who make us laugh to open a window onto the funny in their lives. And they took me down the unpredictable and sometimes desperate road that led to their own unique brand of comedy. They shared some very honest personal thoughts with a little girl who once had a seat at the table with the giants on whose shoulders they stand today.

  I asked my father once if he’d been in the army. He said not as a soldier, but he had spent a year behind front lines, entertaining the troops with Marlene Dietrich in North Africa, Europe and the Pacific.

  “Oh, so you weren’t a real soldier,” I said.

  “No, we didn’t carry the guns,” he said, “but we helped heal the boys who did. You know, Mugs, right after the Red Cross comes the U.S.O.”

  —Marlo Thomas

  New York City, Summer 2010

  Chapter 1

  Celebrations

  Did you kill ’em, Daddy?”
>
  “I murdered ’em, honey! I left ’em for dead.”

  Dialogue from The Sopranos? No, just a call from my father, the morning after his opening night at the Sands in Las Vegas (or the Chez Paree in Chicago, or the Fontainebleau in Miami, or any number of other nightclubs around the country).

  I didn’t realize until I was older how violent the language was for a profession that was so filled with laughter. It was life-and-death, all right—to all of them. But what a celebration when Daddy left ’em for dead. We were big celebrators anyway.

  We celebrated everything in our family. My grandmother (the Italian one—my mother’s mother) never missed a holiday, and sent us elaborately decorated cards on every conceivable occasion, with all the good parts underlined, followed by exclamation points. Tucked inside the card was always a hanky and a dollar (or, as we got older, two dollars). What a character she was. She looked like a dark-haired, dark-eyed Sophie Tucker (her idol, by the way) and sang in that same kind of husky, raucous voice.

  But Grandma did Sophie one better—she also played the drums. In her seventies, she was playing drums with her little band called Marie’s Merry Music Makers. In a beer garden in Pasadena. During the week she billed herself as “Danny Thomas’s Mother-in-Law.” On the weekends, to get the younger crowd, she billed herself as “Marlo Thomas’s Grandmother.” She was some entrepreneur, my grandma.

  Grandma and her beer garden band. That’s her on the drums—flowers in her hair and a big smile on her face.

  Of course, everyone tried to get her to act her age and give up the drums—or at least the beer gardens. My mother wished she would just retire to babysitting and making pasta. My father wished she was Bob Hope’s mother-in-law. I adored her.

  In a family of celebrators, there is always work to be done, and the work was divvied up. My sister, Terre, was the cake committee (she still is, to this day). I, being the oldest—and having a bike—was in charge of buying the cards. I’d ride over to Beverly Stationers on Beverly Drive, where Gladys, the ever-present, ever-dependable proprietor, helped us pick out school supplies each fall. She was also the maven of the card section. Sometimes she’d have a few already put aside for me. I’d pick out something clever and funny for my card; something with a sweet princess and a loving message from Terre; and one with a picture of a lion or a puppy from little Tony.

  One year on Father’s Day, Terre had gotten Bailey’s Bakery to create an elaborate cake with pictures in frosting of all the characters on Dad’s TV show. I had done my job of choosing a custom card from each of us, and after dinner the ceremonial opening of the gifts began.

  My present was first. As was the custom, Daddy would read the card aloud, and since mine was always a funny one, we’d all laugh. If it was really funny, he’d read it aloud again, and the laughter would start all over.

  Then came Terre’s card. Daddy read it aloud. Inside, the saying was beautiful—Hallmark had outdone themselves. It was about how Dad was “the best father in the world,” “caring and loving,” a man who would sacrifice anything for her, who guided her and who was always there for her. Quite beautiful. Tears all around. I was very proud. But then Daddy looked up from the card.

  “Terre, do you believe all of this?” he asked.

  “Yes, Daddy,” Terre said.

  Daddy paused. “Because if you really believe what’s written in this card,” he said, “you’d do the things Daddy wants you to do, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Like right now. Where is your retainer?”

  “It’s upstairs, Daddy.”

  “Upstairs?! I didn’t spend my hard-earned money for you to put your retainer in a drawer upstairs. It belongs in your mouth!”

  His voice rose. “I bought it for you so you would grow up to have beautiful straight teeth, with a smile to be proud of.”

  His voice got even louder as his body began slowly rising out of his chair. Suddenly, the festive room had become very quiet.

  Terre looked at me accusingly and said, “You couldn’t have given me the other card?”

  Within seconds, the tense standoff in the room had dissolved into what was more customary under the Thomas roof: laughter.

  This still makes me laugh.

  And my father? She murdered ’im.

  Terre—looking angelic (without her retainer) on the day of her First Communion.

  Chapter 2

  A Kid at the Studio

  I sat on the lap of director Henry Koster for weeks. I was eight years old, and my father was filming a movie at Warner Bros. with child star Margaret O’Brien, who was nine. It was summer and school was out, so I went to the studio with Dad as often as I could. I loved the whole workday, which began with cueing my father on his lines as we drove to the studio. He’d tell me how well I read Margaret’s part, and I’d feel so proud and useful.

  Then we’d get to the set.

  And I remember watching as Dad and Margaret worked on the scene that we had rehearsed in the car.

  And I remember wishing she’d fall over in a dead faint. And then somebody would shout, “Is there a little, dark-haired girl here who knows these lines?” And I could rush in and save the day.

  It was so much fun for a kid to run free around the studio—wandering through the wardrobe and makeup departments, visiting other sets, going to lunch in the commissary and sitting next to a man dressed like a pirate or a cowboy.

  But the best part was watching the filming from Koster’s lap. He would wave his arms around me as he directed the action. Then when the take was over, he’d bellow in his thick Hungarian accent, waving his arms, “Cut! Print it! Very good! We try it again.” He’d never say that the scene was bad. It was always, “Very good. We try it again.”

  Dad working with Margaret O’Brien. Was I jealous? Was I ever.

  Margaret and me. I knew all of her lines, just in case . . .

  My Lebanese grandparents were visiting from Toledo that summer. My grandmother was a saint—but I didn’t like my grandfather. He was kind of mean, and I was scared of him. I can still feel the sting on my legs where he swatted me with a pussy willow branch because I was playing with a dog in his tomato garden.

  Our dinner table was always a raucous affair, with everyone speaking over everyone else, telling stories and laughing. It was obvious that Grandpa didn’t like this kind of commotion at the table. He preferred kids to be seen and not heard.

  One night, I was pushing my food around the plate, as always, so it would look like I had eaten most of my meal. I was a terrible eater.

  “Finish your vegetables,” my father admonished.

  I didn’t.

  “I see your children don’t listen to you,” my grandfather muttered under his breath.

  Embarrassed in front of his father, Dad pushed his chair back with a loud scraping noise and stood up, looking as if he was going to spank me. I jumped up, shocked and frightened, and ran from the table.

  “You’re being disobedient, young lady!” Dad yelled as he chased me around the room.

  I ran right into the corner. He was coming at me. I was terrified.

  Suddenly, I stopped, spun around, waved my hands in the air and yelled in my best Hungarian accent, “Cut! Print it! Very good! We try it again!”

  My father literally fell over laughing. My grandfather was disgusted with all of us. And I had learned a good lesson: Laughter is the best way to get out of a corner.

  Chapter 3

  The Boys

  What fun they all had together. Milton, Sid, Jan, George, Phil, Red, Joey, Harry. They just loved to laugh—and to make each other laugh. Our dinner table was like a writers’ roundtable, with each of my father’s pals taking his turn trying to top the others. They were always attentive, and never heckled one another as each one “took the floor.” Some jokes were told, but many of the biggest laughs came when they made fun of themselves.

  It was a known fact that no one was funnier “in a room” than Jan Murray—and my da
d was a sucker for him. One night, Jan told a story about trying to get Frank Sinatra’s autograph for his son’s admission counselor at Northwestern University. He felt like an idiot asking one of the guys for an autograph, but the counselor wanted it, and Jan wanted his kid to get into the college.

  The way the story went, all the boys were at a casino in Miami. Jan walked up to Frank with a little piece of paper and asked him to sign it. But Frank brushed the paper aside and said that if it meant getting Jan’s son into Northwestern, he’d send the man one of his albums. Jan said, no, that wasn’t necessary. The guy just wanted an autograph.

  “Nah, it’s no trouble,” Frank said. “I’ll send him an album and a signed photograph.”

  But Jan was fixated on just getting that autograph. He followed Sinatra around the whole weekend, toting this little scrap of paper—sidling up to Frank at the gambling table, slipping it under his stall in the men’s room, pushing it on him while he was schmoozing some blonde in the lounge. The whole weekend—Jan flapping his paper, Frank pushing it away.

  I remember watching Jan tell this story one night at our house, wringing the absurdity out of each beat, building the frustration and idiocy of the situation to such a height that he had my father so convulsed with laughter that Dad was lying on the floor in total surrender, howling.