Growing Up Laughing Read online

Everything else is bandaged, except for this one little slit. Doctor walks in, looks him in the face and says, “I don’t like the look of that eye.”

  ANOTHER JOKE FROM JAY . . .

  This man always wanted to meet the Pope; he’s been making donations to the Catholic Church for years. Finally he gets invited to the Vatican, and he’s so nervous. He’s in a room with about fifty people also waiting to meet the Pope, and he’s at the end of the line.

  The Pope comes in and starts going down the line. There are kings and queens and senators and heads of state—and in the middle of the line, there’s a homeless man in this long, filthy, raggedy coat. The Pope walks down the line and blesses each person, and when he comes to the homeless man in the raggedy coat, he puts his arms around him. Big hug. The American thinks, “That’s unbelievable! Here are these kings and queens and senators, and they get a little papal blessing, and this homeless guy in a filthy coat gets a hug. I’d do anything to get a hug from the Pope.”

  So he steps out of line, goes up to the homeless guy, and says, “Look, give me that jacket!”

  The guy says, “You don’t want the jacket.”

  The American says, “Yes I do. I’ll buy it. Here—I’ll give you a thousand dollars. Give me that coat!”

  So the homeless guy gives him the coat for a thousand dollars, the American puts it on, messes up his hair, and gets back in the line. The Pope walks by, sees the American, puts his arms around him and whispers into his ear:

  “I thought I told you to get the hell out of here.”

  Chapter 19

  Miss Independence

  When I was growing up, my nickname was “Miss Independence,” and it fit. I was clearly of the I can do it myself persuasion, and though my dad had warned me that show business was a very difficult business—especially for women—I believed I could get where I wanted to go on my own. Still, the stories were legend, and scary, about how pretty young women were eaten alive at the hands of casting directors, directors and studio heads.

  My desire to be an actress had always been a sore point with my father and me. He had come to see me in all of my school plays, and he always left worried.

  “She’s got ‘the bug,’ ” he would say to Mom.

  After two years of college, I was restless and told my parents I wanted to go to New York to study acting. “Finish college first,” Dad said. “That way you’ll have something to fall back on.”

  The day I graduated from USC as an English teacher, I handed him my diploma and said, “This is for you. Now I’m going to study acting.”

  I remember one night around that time, we were arguing about this during dinner. George Burns was at the table, and listening carefully to the back-and-forth. After a while, he took my side.

  “What do you want her to be,” he asked Dad, “a milliner?”

  A milliner. What a choice. But it took the air out of the argument, and made us all laugh. Then George said something that I found touching and revealing.

  “To tell you the truth, Danny,” he said, “I feel sorry for anyone who isn’t in show business.”

  And so I just kept on plugging. I studied, did workshops, appeared in plays (even got good reviews), auditioned for everything I could, took meetings, knocked on any door that I could find. And I was getting nowhere.

  Finally, my father couldn’t take watching my frustration any longer and begged me to let him help me by setting up a meeting with a producer friend of his, Mike Frankovich at Columbia Pictures. I immediately felt uncomfortable about the meeting, but I went anyway. I sat across from Mr. Frankovich at his big mahogany desk feeling both desperate and hopeful.

  He began by telling me what a great guy my dad was—a brilliant performer, a terrific golfer. After a while, I tried to bring the conversation around to me and my work. Mr. Frankovich looked at me dismissively.

  “Why would a lovely, educated, well-raised girl like you want to be in this lousy business? Why don’t you marry your boyfriend, settle down and give your father some grandkids.”

  I was totally demoralized. I called my father, told him about the meeting and drew a very clear line.

  “Please, Dad,” I said. “Don’t ever—ever—make any more calls on my behalf. I’m going to have to do this on my own.”

  But as I continued to try to make my way, it continued to eat at my father that I, his beloved daughter, was pounding the pavement in vain. So one night, he decided to talk to me about it.

  “If you were a solo performer,” he said, “like a singer or a comic, you’d always be able to find work, just like I always can. But actors are too dependent on others for a job. They need a writer, a director and other actors. Too many things have to fall into place.”

  And then he said in very plain language that he thought I should give it up—that it was a long shot that lightning would strike twice in the same family, and that I should rethink what I wanted to do with my life.

  The more he spoke, the more upset and insistent he became.

  “You’re an educated young woman. You could be a senator, for God’s sake! Why would you pick something at which you cannot succeed?”

  I couldn’t believe it. After all the years of unconditional love, of encouragement, of support in everything I did as a kid, he had withdrawn his belief in me.

  I got up from the table and walked to the doorway. Then I turned back to him.

  “Not only am I going to make it,” I said in a fury, “but someday you and your partner, Sheldon Leonard, are going to want to hire me and you won’t be able to fucking afford me!”

  And I stormed out.

  Later I learned that my mother had overheard it all, and had immediately gone to my father.

  “Don’t you think you were too tough on her?” she said. “Maybe you should go after her.”

  “No, let her be,” Daddy said. “If she really wants it, she’ll have to face a lot tougher rejection than this.”

  YEARS LATER, after I had my own television series, my father and I were standing together in the wings of a Las Vegas showroom, watching Terre at the microphone, singing her heart out to the crowd in one of her first professional engagements. Tapping her foot as she sang, she looked adorable and sounded great. She has the loveliest voice—a lot like my mother’s—and as I watched her, I thought back to all the times when we were younger, when she would sing along to Doris Day records. My eyes filled with tears. I was so proud of her.

  “Isn’t she good?!” I said to Dad.

  My opening night in a summer stock production of Gigi. Dad didn’t want me to be an actress. But he was there.

  He stood there, his arms crossed, his unlit black cigar in his mouth.

  “She’s very good,” he said. “But she’ll never make it. She’s not angry like you were.”

  We’d never know. Six months later, like Mom, Terre left singing behind, followed her heart and went home to raise a family.

  Chapter 20

  My Big Brown Eyes

  I guess it was inevitable that I’d go into the family business. I started by doing plays in little theatres in and around Los Angeles—Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre, the playhouses at Laguna, Ojai, San Diego. Getting laughs from an audience clicked right into my DNA. The sound, the rhythm of the comedy, came out of me like a song that had been playing in my mind all my life. And I was never happier than when I got to sing it.

  The one thing I wasn’t ready for was that every review and interview compared me to my famous father. Would I be as good as Danny Thomas? As funny? Last as long? God, it was scary. Would I ever be able to get out from under his giant shadow? And be judged on my own? Would I ever be seen just for myself? I felt I had no place to hide, no place where I could fail unnoticed. And how do you learn if you can’t fail?

  But I just kept going, mostly in comedies—Gigi, Two for the Seesaw, I Am a Camera, Blithe Spirit, Under the Yum Yum Tree—and some not comedies—Our Town, Glass Menagerie, View from the Bridge. I had gone to USC for four years to become an
English teacher, but I had studied for this all of my life.

  One summer, I was doing a light comedy called Sunday in New York with John Aniston, Jennifer’s father, at the Civic Playhouse in L.A., when David Dortort, the producer of the hit TV western Bonanza, knocked on my dressing room door. He asked me if I could do a Chinese accent. Silly question to ask an actress.

  “Of course, I can do a Chinese accent!” I said.

  “Great,” he said. “I’ve got a wonderful part for you.”

  He needed to fill a guest role on the show that had been written especially for the actress Pat Suzuki, who had just scored a big success on Broadway in Flower Drum Song. The episode was to shoot the following week, but Pat had the flu and wouldn’t be able to fly in from New York. David had been searching for another Asian actress with the same kind of “spitfire,” as he called it, but was having no luck. That’s when he got the bright idea that I could do it. All I needed was a little eye makeup and a decent accent (which I said I had) and he’d have his perfect Tai Li, a Chinese mail-order bride for the character of Hoss, played by Dan Blocker.

  Once he left my room, I anxiously called Sandy Meisner, the great acting teacher, to find out how I could learn a Chinese accent in three days. I had studied with Sandy for a year in Los Angeles, when he took a hiatus from the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York to help 20th Century Fox build a new stable of stars from young hopefuls. It was a great idea for the studio, and a terrific opportunity for budding actors to study with a master—for free. I was one of the kids Sandy chose. It was an exciting year, and even though Fox didn’t pick up the option on any of us, I had made a friend in Sandy.

  When I reached him, he told me to go to Ah Fong’s, a Chinese restaurant on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, and hire one of the waitresses to come to my apartment to work with me. By spending time talking with her, Sandy said, and having her read my part on tape, I would easily pick up her accent.

  Yup, that’s me—as a Chinese mail-order bride

  on the TV western Bonanza.

  So I went to Ah Fong’s, ordered dinner (Peking duck, always) and tried to figure out how to propose this idea to the waitress without sounding like I was offering a different kind of proposition. But she was as young as I was and happy to make the extra money. So we did what Sandy suggested.

  The next step was to look Chinese. I don’t think David Dortort realized how hard that would be. They tried “applications”—tiny pieces of rubber to make my very round eyes look oval-shaped. They tested me on film with them, but I could barely see. I also kept blinking, like I had something in my eye. Well, no wonder—I did. So that didn’t work. Then they tried creating the look just with makeup, and we tested that, too. Better, but my eyes were still too round.

  Nothing was working, and time was running out, so they pulled a classic Hollywood maneuver: They wrote into the script that Tai Li had a Persian mother.

  So with a cockamamie accent and not too oval eyes, I played the part of a Chinese mail-order bride (with a Persian mother) who turned out not to be the supplicant bride Hoss had hoped for, but, instead, a feisty revolutionary girl who was trying to unionize the Ponderosa.

  Just as my character was becoming successful with her mission, Hoss was to pick me up angrily and throw me into a water trough. Dan Blocker weighed close to 300 pounds. He was huge. So when he threw my 98-pound body into that tiny, half-filled trough, I hit it with a thud. Tears poured down my face, but on film the splashing water hid them. So, thankfully, I didn’t have to do the scene again.

  I took away three things from that experience: (1) a bad back, (2) the realization that I was not a stuntwoman, and (3) the lesson that you should always politely ask the director to try not to kill you.

  Funny about my eyes. When I was a little girl, my grandma, the Lebanese one, would take me to the grocery store with her. The man behind the counter would always give her a piece of candy for “your granddaughter with the big brown eyes.” My grandmother would then spit on my head three times to shoo away the bad spirits who might have overheard him and be jealous.

  When my agent sent me to meet the casting director for the detective series 77 Sunset Strip, the first thing she told me when I arrived was how beautiful my big, brown eyes were. I was, of course, pleased. Then the

  director came in.

  “Look at her eyes!” the casting woman said. “Aren’t they great?” The director heartily agreed, so now I was really pleased. Boy, I thought, my eyes are really going to do it for me.

  I was given a part and I was ecstatic—I didn’t even have to read for them. The scene would take place in an operating room. The man lying on the table had a time-bomb planted in his stomach that was about to go off—it needed to be removed and defused in just seconds. I played the O.R. nurse and wore a surgical mask, so all you could see were my eyes. I was told to look from the patient to the clock at several intervals during the scene. Back and forth, forth and back, back and forth. The idea was that the ticking clock and my darting eyes would dramatically build the tension of the scene.

  No wonder I didn’t have to read for them. They only needed a pair of big brown eyes. Had I known, I would have spit on my head, turned around three times and headed for the door.

  But I had lots of little jobs like that in the early days. No one was really paying any attention to me at the factory-like William Morris Agency, except for my childhood pal Barry Diller. Barry had been a close friend of Terre’s since they were little kids, and was always at our house. He was family. So when he became the assistant to Marty Dubow, a big TV agent at William Morris, he also became my secret agent. Typically, assistants were only supposed to answer the phone. But Barry would sneak a peek at the casting breakdowns on his boss’s desk and get me an audition for whatever small roles were available on TV. I’d land a part, get paid $400, and you’d have thought we’d robbed a bank. We were like Mickey and Judy, putting on a show in the barn.

  Shortly after that, I was sent out on a call to read for Elizabeth Ashley’s New York replacement in Neil Simon’s comedy hit Barefoot in the Park. A chance to work on Broadway! I was so excited—and I was ready. The role of Corie Bratter was just the kind of part I had been playing for the past few years—vivacious, optimistic, funny.

  When I got to the theatre, my heart sank. There was a very long line of young actors—male and female—waiting outside to audition for Mike Nichols, the director; Saint Suber, the producer; and Neil Simon. Then a man came out to the line and gave us each a number that signified who we would be reading with. My partner was Marty Milner. I didn’t know him then, but years later he would have a successful TV series called Route 66.

  But that day we were two little nobodys among hundreds of nobodys. We finally got in and read for Mike Nichols. He was extremely encouraging and kind. He laughed at what we did, and when we were finished he hopped onto the stage, gave us notes and asked us to do it again. That was a good sign.

  The next day I got a call to come back. After reading for them just one more time, I was told I had the part. I was beyond thrilled—that is, until I found out that I hadn’t been reading for the New York replacement after all. Penny Fuller, Ashley’s understudy, had been promised that plum. Instead, I was being offered the year-long national touring company.

  I turned it down. My agents were stunned and asked me why.

  “I just cannot travel this country for a year being compared to my father,” I said. “I’ll go crazy giving interview after interview answering questions in every city, not about my work, but how it feels to be Danny Thomas’s daughter. It will be a nightmare for me. It will kill my spirit.”

  My agents threatened that I would never again be taken seriously after turning down such a break. That stopped me.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Who did the great Anne Bancroft part for the national company of Two for the Seesaw?”

  Silence.

  So I didn’t do it.

  Months later, I read that they were cast
ing for the London company of Barefoot. I knew that would be just what my spirit and I needed—to get out of the country, go where my father wasn’t so well known, and stand or fall on my own. I wanted to try out for it, but I was afraid my agents had had their fill of Barefoot and me and wouldn’t be supportive.

  I paced in front of a phone booth in Greenwich Village and finally got the guts to call Mike Nichols at his office at Warner Bros. I feared he wouldn’t take the call—but he did. I asked him if he remembered me. He did. I asked him if there was a chance I could read for the part of Corie for the London company.

  Silence.

  “What a good idea,” he said.

  I don’t know if it was the sweat from my hands or the tears from my eyes, but everything was so slippery that I actually dropped the phone. I got the part and went to London.

  We had a terrific cast. English actor Dan Massey played the Robert Redford part, and Kurt Kaszner and Millie Natwick had come from the New York company to re-create their roles. We “toured the provinces,” as they say, trying out the play in Bournemouth, Brighton and South Sea. They’re summer resorts, really, so most everything was closed up, and our only entertainment was each other. So we all hung out together and became close friends. (Dan and I became even closer.)

  Giving ’em hell as Corie in Barefoot in London.

  I’ll always remember the opening night at the Piccadilly Theatre in London. The audience laughed nonstop, but nothing was as funny as what happened just offstage. Dan was a terrific actor, but he had a hard time with the last moment of the play, when he had to laugh hysterically as he drunkenly headed for the door. Everything had gone so well up until then. We were on the five-yard line, and I remember thinking, Go for it, Danny! But that night when he opened the door, Kurt was standing on a chair—out of the audience’s eyeshot—bent over, and all you could see was his bare butt with a daisy sticking out of it. Dan laughed hysterically all right. Only problem was, I had to chew off half my cheek not to laugh, too. God, it was a funny sight.