Jack in the Box, page 8
Except one afternoon … strutting his stuff, and reveling in his vaudeville glory, the cane went up for the expected third toss and came down, clanging with a hideous bang just outside his reach, skittering left to the proscenium. Without batting an eye, he looked out at Rob and me sitting in the orchestra seats, and ad libbed, “So these two Jews…,” as if beginning a shaggy-dog joke. As I erupted in laughter, he added quickly, “No, you can’t do dat!” and I roared from the stalls, “Yes, you can!” And just that quickly, something that seemed almost accidental became the centerpiece of his performance, and reason alone to see the revival. Jerry would throw the cane a few times, and then deliberately drop the thing, and, instantly, begin by saying, “So these two Jews…” and supply, while recovering the cane, a hilarious joke from his endless catalog, honed over three or four decades of club acts in Vegas and across the globe. Getting the requisite laugh from the audience, he’d toss the cane higher than ever, catch it behind his back, slam it into the floor, then, tucking it under his arm sail into his sensational ending, bringing the musical to a welcome full stop in the process.
As the production toured, I would find myself, and Rob, as well … not watching every scene of every performance, but what we call “spot-checking”: going to the back of the audience and witnessing various different scenes just to see if the pace and the energy were consistent with our best efforts. But, as God is my witness, if I was present in the theatre on any particular night, either in New York or on the road, I never missed a single performance of “Those Were the Good Old Days,” because whatever else he was, I realized that this performer was perhaps the last avatar of an art form long gone from the annals of American stagecraft. The others who used “accidental” mistakes to ply something of their signature skills—W. C. Fields, Bobby Clark, George Burns, Jack Benny—they had all vanished now, and along with their demises went the breathtaking skill of reading the audience and giving them exactly what they wanted in a way no other living performer could emulate.
It would be nice to leave this anecdote and memory with the burnished glow I intend, but truth requires that I complete the report. If it proved true that a reformed Jerry Lewis in this particular instance refused to vary the script a jot during his sole occupancy, we must remember that “nine-year-old” Jerry was still much in evidence somewhere under the surface. So during his specialty number in the second act, he was free to do pretty much as he wished. The audience, the show, everything that existed around ten fifteen on any particular evening was captive while he threw, dropped, and spun out an ever-expanding list of classic jokes. What began with one or two stories at first, depending on the night and his whim, could be expanded. In fairness, they were, indeed, sensationally funny. And even more amazingly, they got funnier! He had the perfect clown’s sense of not following one really solid joke with a lamer one. And as his fingers became increasingly numb to the seriously repetitive pain of catching the cane over and over at his age, he couldn’t depend that he would make it happen every time. That necessitated, of course, the instant improvisation of swiftly riffling through his memory of various jokes and coming up with a killer to finish and top the last one, which, to his credit, he managed to do every time I witnessed the number. Yes, every time!
And in fact, the list grew. I realized he had the first, say, eight or ten jokes pretty much “organized,” with that bona fide stunner for a finish, but when we took the show to London and the West End, the opening night nearly gave me a heart attack. The show was chugging along most promisingly until the second act, when we got to Jerry’s big number. The cane went up, the cane came down, and the cane began to drop with almost alarming consistency as he pursued his usual routine. Ten … eleven … twelve … thirteen!… I was getting frantic because, in all reality, the more he tossed, the less feeling he retained in his fingers that would enable him to nail that final catch, and despite the fact that we were debuting now a series of ever-bluer jokes, making his audience hysterical, I had no idea if he could actually pull it off.
Fifteen … joke!… sixteen … fumble and joke, and seventeen! The cane caromed into the orchestra pit, and Jerry stared stony-faced out into the howling house. He turned to the wings, where his favorite ensemble member stood just out of sight, flinging the hoped-for last toss out to him, and as cool as you please, he rattled off the single funniest joke, and by far the bluest, I had ever heard—tossed his final attempt up, caught it, bounced it on the floor, and finished to tumultuous applause. I myself have no memory for jokes; I could never retain them, perhaps because my own father was so gifted and so proficient in delivering them, and although I can be funny from time to time when appropriate, it’s never with a joke. It’s perhaps poetic justice that I cannot recall this last and most brilliant of Jerry’s litany: I knew him well enough to know he’d not relish anyone else stealing it.
But that was Jerry. My Jerry. He’d call from the road, only if he had a worry or a question about a piece of business not landing for some reason, never straying from the path, and ever grateful that finally, he was able to settle a score with his own father, who had been singularly unimpressed by Jerry’s meteoric career in film and television. As a former vaudevillian himself, Jerry’s dad, Danny, had genuine contempt for every other aspect of show business, dismissing his superstar son airily with “Until you play Broadway, you’re nothing!”
That stung, and that stayed. It was a gulf between deceased father and son that Jerry couldn’t reconcile. Years before, something called Hellzapoppin, starring Jerry, began a pre-Broadway tryout and died on the way. So Damn Yankees was going to be his only shot at answering the withering challenge of his late father. I’m sure that was the singular reason he behaved so beautifully on- and offstage … He was honoring his father’s edict. So much so that on the occasion of his first performance of Damn Yankees at the Marquis Theatre before a packed audience, Jerry made his entrance to tremendous applause, played the first scene immaculately in the requisite fireman’s hat and garb, and exited down left, whereupon he gleefully shouted loud enough for the entire first ten or fifteen rows of theatregoers to hear … “THE JEW’S ON BROADWAY!”
I assume it was also loud enough for his late father to hear, but, so far as I recall, it was the only time he went off the written script during the entire run.
6
Simon Says
Stars come in varying degrees of power and appeal. And then there is the provenance of the much-celebrated auteur
Neil Simon and me relishing one of his laughs during a rehearsal at the Old Globe theatre, circa 1988
1.
Neil Simon was intimidating. No question about it. I don’t think he thought he was, and I don’t think it was exactly intentional. I mean, that benign, oval face, those oval glasses, the small mouth, lips together, with the ends only slightly tipped up—the initial impression was anything but intimidating. There was a nearly permanent twinkle in his eye. He was tall—that might have contributed, because you didn’t somehow imagine he would be. And I don’t think, over the ten-plus years I had the privilege of knowing him, or being near him, I ever heard him raise his voice but once.
Amazing, really. Mezza voce, even-toned, the words perfectly measured, as if tailored, he said what he said in a kind of comforting key, no italics, no exclamation points, even. He got the message across economically, and with just a hint of lift. Comic, you know? Light and comic. But he could kill. And, of course, that would make all the difference.
There were ten years or so, all told, when he was wed to Marsha Mason, then and now one of my closest and most beloved friends. She was the crux, really; she was the axis around which all this inevitably wound. She and I first met in the early seventies in San Francisco, when she played one astounding and sensational season as leading actress in Bill Ball’s company, ACT, during its residency then at the noble Geary Theater. She’d come bleary-eyed from the numbing experience of daily television in New York—fled was more like it, fled for her life. There was a tiny opening, one of those opportunities you could miss if you so much as blinked. Michael Learned, then married to leading actor Peter Donat in Ball’s company, had just been tapped to play the mother in a new, important television series, The Waltons, so there was suddenly a huge void in the roster of actors at ACT. Michael had been playing in ACT’s successful production of Private Lives, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and which had been scheduled to tour, when the cry went out for an actress “familiar with the role.” Marsha was at the time, in truth, about as familiar with the clipped cadences of Coward as she might have been with Swahili folklore, but there it was … that infinite, tiny opening … and without glancing for an instant at the abyss below, she leapt through that opening and into the astonishing rest of her life.
She arrived off the plane with “most” of the text under her belt and her heart in her mouth to face her first rehearsal the very next day, and I don’t think anyone knew for a long time that she had never even seen Private Lives, let alone appeared in it. But she was nothing if not game, and nothing if not gifted, and young, and gorgeous, and sexy, and massively equipped, and as such she made the role her own, and the tour became something of a triumph.
So much so that Bill Ball, amazed, enchanted, and not believing his luck, offered her the full next season with the company, which happened to include the role of Roxane in his singular, stunning production of Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as the roles of Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, and Abigail in The Crucible.
Oh yes. And since I had recently been employed to revive Ellis Rabb’s production of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It with You—the play that saved his company, APA-Phoenix, with a year’s hit run on Broadway—she was also meant to be my leading lady, Alice Sycamore, in that production. It’s fair to say that across the entire continent that year, no other American actress had a workout remotely as challenging and, in a sense, as impossible as that. With repertory playing now a figment of theatrical past, perhaps never again!
The initial autumn repertory of 1971 for ACT being Cyrano de Bergerac, A Doll’s House, and You Can’t Take It with You meant that Marsha was literally never out of rehearsal. Ever. And with both the Edmond Rostand and the Ibsen leading off, I had the unhappy problem of never having her available to rehearse with me. The Kaufman and Hart farce, being a true ensemble piece, made me, as the director, enormously anxious, and in each brief moment of passing each other, when she and I might cross in the halls, or on the street near the theatre, she melted with apologies and assurances that in “just a day or two,” she’d be free, and was so excited, she couldn’t wait. Truth to tell, with both Roxane and Nora on her plate at the same time, she could use a few laughs.
Somehow she showed up. And somehow, once more, she made yet another leading role her own on this march to “Marsha-dom” in which we were all willing participants. She and I became instant best friends, and, believe me, the competition was intense, but something ignited between us then that has endured over nearly fifty years, and we settled in happily for the duration.
But professionally, Marsha was aloft now and just beginning to ascend higher. While that year was unfolding, she was coming to the attention of influential people in film down in Los Angeles—she landed roles in Blume in Love and, immediately after, the lead in Cinderella Liberty, which, hard on the heels of that amazing rep season, was to earn her her first Academy Award nomination, as well as the attention of major casting people in New York, who were casting Neil Simon’s new fall effort, The Good Doctor, a series of charming Chekhovian sketches starring Christopher Plummer. There was a flashy role for an ingenue, and Marsha read for it and landed it. There was no holding her back.
Nor Neil, it would appear. His first wife, Joan, whose memory is enveloped in a kind of impenetrable mystic halo approaching unreality, had died soon before Neil and Marsha met. It was cancer, it was severe, and depending on whom you speak to, the marriage was either one of those legendary pairings (see Barefoot in the Park, for example, which grew from it) or a thicket of considerable unhappiness and deception. It finally didn’t matter. What did matter, however, was the alacrity with which Neil reacted to his proximity to this stunning new actress making her debut in one of his gentler, less starry efforts. Within three weeks they were happening, enthusiastically supported by his daughters Ellen and Nancy, who were enchanted with her, and eager for their dad to be happy once more. And in yet another blink of an eye, they were married, both for the second time. The astonishing announcement swept across the country like lightning, and back at ACT, actress Joy Carlin, peering into her makeup mirror as she received the news, calmly offered a shrewd judgment. “Well,” she said to no one in particular, “he’s really funny, and she loves to laugh … It makes sense to me!”
2.
If The Good Doctor didn’t qualify as one of Neil’s major hits, the marriage certainly seemed to. They settled in Beverly Hills on Chalon Road, and I arrived for a short visit just after they’d moved in. Marsha had taken to her new life like another of the roles she had recently faced and ingested … She brought joy and warmth and enormous enthusiasm to a home that seemed earlier not to have necessarily enjoyed a superfluity of any. The girls were ecstatic, and Neil wore a tiny permanent smile on his face, as if it were, in a sense, a lapel pin, secure and bright. How amazed I was, in one of those delightful visits, to see this young woman from St. Louis calmly and sensitively interviewing a middle- aged married couple for staff positions, instructing them, firmly disciplining them, and running, by necessity, this wildly different household from anything she had ever known before. I sat at a dinner table one night with the likes of Ray Stark and his wife, Frances, daughter of Fanny Brice; director Herbert Ross and his dynamically powerful wife, Nora Kaye; and, across from me, the great English drama critic Kenneth Tynan, already nearly dead from emphysema, chain-smoking throughout the meal. Neil was presiding at one end of the table, and at the other was Marsha, cool and in seeming command, as if she’d been doing this her entire life. She had most assuredly “come a long way from St. Louis!”
Neil gave every indication of liking me without ever drawing me closer. But we got along, and, in my way of secret warfare, I managed to make him laugh, as I had with various other major figures I’d met along the way, which I always considered a small badge of courage, somehow. Silly, but true. But in these occasional visits to Chalon Road, where I was put up in one of the girls’ rooms, Neil began a kind of routine that both pleased and tortured me. He had witnessed, by this time, the production of Porgy and Bess that had effectively launched my career on Broadway, that huge, overblown, massive effort of virtually all of George Gershwin’s original and yet unheard score that could be packed into three hours, and he had been suitably impressed. I recall him saying, of “Oh Lawd, I’m On My Way,” Gershwin’s glorious finale, “Imagine…! Creating that entire evening of just phenomenal music and still having that melody in your back pocket at the end.” Neil knew something of creative resources.
So, yes, although I probably seemed a bit off-center to him—the Globe connection, the litany that embraced Shakespeare as well—we related easily, and he would inevitably hand me, at the conclusion of the evening, something like the first eighteen or twenty pages of whatever he was working on, saying that no one had seen it yet, and he wasn’t sure about it, but why didn’t I have a look and let him know what I thought at breakfast the next day?
Can you imagine? A hungry, clearly ambitious young director gets a first peek at the next Simon blockbuster! And how were those pages? Well, he was pretty much at the top of his game in those years, so even the opening pages of something second-tier, like God’s Favorite, was pretty much stuffed with one laugh after another, and in a dozen or so pages, you got only the cream; you didn’t yet get meat and/or potatoes. Remember, it was mostly Neil in those early years, categorically destroying the time-honored tradition of how comedy had evolved, the laying of the dramatic tracks before letting loose the reins of farce. I remember distinctly my own production of William Congreve’s great The Way of the World, composed of five acts, and if I recall clearly, there wasn’t a single laugh until Lady Wishfort made her entrance at the top of act 3! Not so for Neil … If you weren’t laughing in the first ten minutes, he went back to work until you were. So, yes, those first pages of God’s Favorite and California Suite were chockablock with fresh, insouciant deliciousness, and I would reluctantly put those new pages down beside my bed, turn off the light, and wonder if this “gift” of early insight could possibly be a step to an evolving trust. Would one of these plays ever be destined for me?
No, no, they weren’t. At least not for a few more years. We’d meet over breakfast the next morning, and I would coo on cue, and he would dissemble … Perhaps he’d keep going with it, maybe it would go back into a bottom drawer of his desk for a while, he wasn’t sure. There was one astonishing morning with just the two of us having our coffee while he contemplated his early and abandoned consideration of a female version of The Odd Couple, having listened the day before to Marsha and the beautiful Andra Akers reading a few scenes for him. He fretted that Marsha didn’t seem “to hear his rhythms.” I took umbrage. What was he talking about? She was, to me, one of the most adaptable and intuitive actors I had ever encountered. The Goodbye Girl, which he ultimately wrote out of genuine love for her, of course, easily disproved that bizarre theory, and there were years when she seemed to be the principal interpreter of his work, a muse giving both wit and depth to the breezy writing that, for a while, was all him, and all the rage.
