by Carl Reiner
I graduated from Evander Childs High School in June of ’38 at the age of sixteen. Being a year and a half younger and light-years less mature than my sexually adventurous peers made me feel like an outsider, a feeling that still dogs me. But hey, who’s complaining! Being an “outsider” has given me the quiet time to ponder ways to behave like an “insider,” which I think I have mastered.
My first day at P.S. 92 was a traumatic one. That morning, I awoke with a slight nausea and no appetite. My mother, or Bessie, as my father called her, was able to coerce me into eating a big bowl of hot cereal by reminding me that “all over Europe people are starving to death!” After wiping stray grains of Wheatena from my face with a damp dishtowel, my mother straightened my knitted blue tie and then walked me to school. Before abandoning me in the schoolyard, she ran a comb through my hair and warned me to “be careful!” and “pay attention to the teacher!”
With hundreds of other pupils, I waited anxiously for someone in charge to tell me where to go. That someone turned out to be a thin, stern-looking woman who, in a deep authoritative voice, introduced herself as Mrs. Mahler.
“Stop all that talking this minute!” she ordered, “Now form two lines in front of me—in size place, quickly, quickly!”
We formed the two lines and size-placed ourselves as best we could, which was not good enough for Mrs. Mahler. She grabbed a few misfits by the shoulder, dragged them to their proper place in line, and shoved them in. She announced that she was our third-grade teacher and ordered us to follow her to our spanking-new classroom. I was not happy with my new teacher, my new school, or the bloated feeling in my stomach. Mrs. Mahler instructed us to “find any seat for now and sit down!” I found the one farthest from her desk and sat in the last row. In Miss Thomas’s second-grade classroom, I had sat in the first row. Miss Thomas was very different from Mrs. Mahler. Miss Thomas was really pretty and spoke with a soft voice. She liked me. My classmates called me teacher’s pet, which I hated.
Miss Thomas had once asked for volunteers to be in a Christmas show she planned to put on in our classroom. A petite blond girl volunteered to tap dance, and a tall boy said he would like to sing a song. Miss Thomas, disappointed that there were only two volunteers, asked if there was anyone else who could do something to entertain.
“I can put both feet behind my head,” I shouted out, “and walk around on my hands!”
Without being asked, I demonstrated my talent for Miss Thomas. The class giggled, then laughed, and applauded loudly. For an encore, I kept one leg behind my head and hopped around on the other one. Miss Thomas thought it so entertaining that she arranged to take our little show on tour. We played the kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. At the risk of appearing immodest, I must say that my contortionist act garnered the most applause and, more importantly, a big approving smile from Miss Thomas.
As I watched the sour-faced Mrs. Mahler take a fresh piece of chalk from a box, I could never envision myself becoming her pet. However, I did find a way to distinguish myself in her classroom. It was soon after we had settled in our seats that Mrs. Mahler told us how lucky we were to be going to such a beautiful new school and hoped we would find some way to show our appreciation for having been given this opportunity. At this moment, a huge, ear-shattering, triple-flutterblast of a phart escaped from me. The huge breakfast I had force-fed myself to help out the poor people in Europe who were starving to death had backfired. The laughter I had received for my contortionist act in Miss Thomas’s class was nothing compared to the reaction I evoked by passing wind. The room full of third-graders were doubled over with laughter and couldn’t hear, or refused to hear, Mrs. Mahler screaming at the top of her lungs, “Beeee quiyyyet!”
“That was not funny!” Mrs Mahler shouted, “and will not happen again—not in my class!”
She looked about the classroom and glared at everyone. It appeared that she glared at me with the same intensity and for the same length of time as she did the other pupils.
She doesn’t know who pharted, I thought, she doesn’t know!
When Mrs. Mahler sat down at her desk and cast a quick, knowing glance my way, I knew that she knew!
For the six months I was in Mrs. Mahler’s class, I avoided making eye contact with her. I never raised my hand to ask a question or to answer one or to ask permission to use the boy’s room. Whenever I chanced to see her in the halls, I either hid behind someone or turned and walked the other way. I never thought to share my feelings of shame and embarrassment with anyone. I kept my guilty secret for a long time, but ultimately, I, like all immature adults, was able to find the loud passing of gas to be funny. When I first saw the now-famous pharting fugue Mel Brooks so tastefully orchestrated for his film, Blazing Saddles, I laughed louder and longer than most people in my age group.
3
My First Best Job
Before I sat down to have breakfast this morning, September 14, 2002, I had not intended to write “My First Best Job.” My plan was to begin the process of putting the chapters of this book in some kind of order. I was having the last spoonful of oatmeal when I read in the obituary section of The New York Times that William Warfield, a man I had known fifty-five years ago, had passed away at the age of eighty-three. It saddened me. It was 1947 when he and I trouped together in the road company of the Broadway musical revue Call Me Mister. Seeing his name triggered a raft of memories, memories too dear for me not to include in My Anecdotal Life.
William Warfield deserves a much fuller documentation of his life and musical triumphs than I am prepared to give him in this reminiscence. Anyone standing in the wings each night for a year as I did and hearing his rich bass-baritone voice sing “The Red Ball Express” and “The Face on the Dime,” could have prophesied that Bill Warfield would someday become a great concert artist. He starred as Porgy in Porgy and Bess and inherited Paul Robeson’s role in the film remake of Show Boat. I would not have foreseen the international acclaim he would receive for his interpretations of German songs (lieder), but then I am not all that musical, as I admit in Chapter 8.
The cast for Call Me Mister was chosen at open auditions for actors, singers, and dancers who had served in the armed forces and were honorably discharged. Bill Warfield, Bob Fosse, Buddy Hackett, and Howard Morris were among the group of performers who were chosen by that process, but I found my way into the show through a back door.
I had been discharged from the army eight months earlier and had been unable to find a job. My wife, Estelle, and I lived on our unemployment checks. Her check, for having worked at Sperry-Rand as an isometric draftsman, drawing three-dimensional blueprints of planes and tanks, was $31 a week, and mine was $21 a week for my work securing our country’s freedom by touring the Pacific in an army musical entitled Shape Ahoy!
Our combined $52 a week was just enough to buy food, some clothes, and pay the rent on our two-room sublet apartment in a Ninety-seventh Street brownstone. During my three-and-a-half-year army career, I had a fair amount of success as a comedian and hoped someday to work in nightclubs. I was anxious to go to these clubs and see the reigning comedians. The most written-up and talked-about comedian at that time was a fellow named Danny Thomas. He had been a tremendous hit at the 21 Club in Chicago and was now packing them in at Le Martinique, an elegant restaurant-nightclub on West Fifty-seventh Street. It was out of our league, as our entertainment budget allowed for moviegoing but no upscale nightclubbing.
While Danny Thomas was setting records at Le Martinique, I was traveling downtown every day to try to see agents who might get me in to see producers who might be interested in allowing me to audition for a part in a play, a musical, a radio show, or a lowly club date. After one of my unproductive sorties, I stopped in to the Walgreen’s Drugstore on the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Broadway to call my wife and tell her that I had struck out again. Walgreen’s was known to all out-of-work actors as the place to go when you had no place to go. It was a place to find a kindred spirit will
ing to discuss “the sad state of the theater” and “how impossible it is to find a good agent, or a part in a good play, or a producer who recognizes talent when he sees it.”
Walgreen’s also sported the longest and busiest bank of phone booths in the city, phone booths that some actors treated as their private offices. After telling Estelle I was coming home unemployed and depressed, I hung up and started to leave. I stopped when I noticed a small black change purse lying on the floor of the booth. I picked it up, opened it, and found a veritable fortune, twelve dollars! The purse had most likely fallen out of some woman’s pocketbook. I was torn between turning it in to one of the cashiers or turning it into two dinners and a show at Le Martinique. I decided on the cashier, because that’s what my father would have done. It was the right thing to do. I snapped the purse shut and carried it and my newspaper in my right hand. My trench coat was draped over my left arm, and I carried my snap-brim fedora in my left hand. I wouldn’t blame you if you’re thinking, “Why is he boring us with these stupid details? Who cares what he’s wearing or in which hand he’s carrying his newspaper?” but these seemingly unimportant, inert items soon took on a life of their own.
My resolve to give the purse to the cashier was firm. As I approached the cashier’s station, I slowed to listen to an internal debate on good and evil that I was having.
DR. JEKYLL
Hey, look! There are three cashiers on duty.
MR. HYDE
Yes, and to which one will you give the purse?
DR. JEKYLL
The most honest-looking one, of course!
MR. HYDE
AnBefore starting rehearsal, Herman Levind which one is that?
DR. JEKYLL
I don’t know. They all look a little …
MR. HYDE
… like they can’t be trusted to return the purse to its rightful owner? You know, there is nothing in the little purse that identifies the owner.
DR. JEKYLL
What are you suggesting?
MR. HYDE
I’m suggesting that they’ll keep it. The woman who lost it probably has no idea where she dropped it.
DR. JEKYLL
Are you saying that I don’t turn it in?…
MR. HYDE
Turn it in, and you turn down the opportunity to see Danny Thomas at Le Martinique!
After wrestling with my conscience, the part of me that had to see Danny Thomas at Le Martinique told my conscience to shut up. I didn’t fully accept the decision to keep the purse, so I kept it in my hand. The Dr. Jekyll in me was hoping that the woman who had lost the purse would be standing at the cashier’s station, and I would say, “Oh, good, I was just about to give it to a cashier.” While I was thinking this, Mr. Hyde was walking me to the door.
In trying to leave Walgreen’s, I morphed into the Man of a Thousand Thumbs. I fumbled getting on my trench coat, pulling the purse and newspaper through one of the sleeves. I dropped my hat, retrieved it, and spent an inordinate amount of time moving my hat, my paper, and the purse from hand to hand as I struggled with the belt of my trench coat and my conscience. It seemed like hours before I finally made it through the revolving door. No thief, except for Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run, has ever made a more graceless and bumbling getaway.
My wife and I went to Le Martinique that night and sat at the very back of the club. For eleven dollars and a dollar tip, we had the cheapest item on the menu and saw a brilliant comedian-storyteller whose mesmerizing performance forced me to reconsider my plan for a career in nightclubs.
Very soon after our night of stolen pleasure, I secured an agent, Maurice Lapue, who handled promising young talent at MCA, one of the two big agencies in town. He arranged for me to audition for the job of social director at the Lake Spofford Hotel in New Hampshire. Maurice Lapue came by his shiny, black, slicked-down hair legitimately. In an earlier life, he and his wife had been a successful adagio dance team, Maurice and Cordoba.
The audition took place in one of the small conference rooms in the MCA office complex. I was prepared to do some of the comedy routines I had developed in the army, and some I had cobbled together since becoming a civilian. I had an audience of two, Mr. Abe Jacobson, an elderly, sour-faced hotel owner, and Mr. Lapue, the adagio-dancer-turned-agent. I remember doing my foreign radio commercials in French and Italian double-talk; a takeoff of an English drawing-room comedy, playing multiple parts; and a piece that I had performed in the army, “Monty the Talking Dog,” a talented canine who did surefire impersonations of movie stars. For roughly thirty minutes, neither Mr. Jacobson nor Mr. Lapue moved a muscle. A rivulet of flop sweat ran down my chest and pooled in my navel as Abe and Maurice stared at me stone-faced. I had asked them if they’d heard enough and, amazedly, they shook their heads and, in unison, said, “Keep going! Keep going!”
Midway through my act, another unsmiling face peeked into a small window in the entrance door. I had no idea who this eavesdropper was, but since the room was soundproof, he was more like an eyedropper. As soon as I finished the nightmarish audition, Lapue and Jacobson started to confer, but Maurice stopped when a tapping on the little window got his attention. It was the eyedropper beckoning Maurice to come out into the hall.
Being alone with someone who had just sat through your whole comedy act without cracking a smile could be added to the dictionary as a definition for the word uncomfortable. Abe Jacobson squinted at me for a long moment before he spoke. He said something that had never before been said to me.
“Mr. Reiner,” he offered, pontifically, “you seem to me … to be a very resilient young man!”
“Well, thank you, that’s very uh…”
I had no idea what the heck he was talking about.
“Young man, you spend a summer with me at Lake Spofford,” he said, breaking into a smile, “and with your resilience and my experience in coaching young comedians, I can predict a big future for you in our business.”
I wasn’t sure whether he meant the hotel business or show business. I told him that I was surprised he thought so well of me since I didn’t hear him laugh even one time.
“I laugh internally when I’m concentrating,” he explained. “Just so you know that I’m a man who puts his money where his mouth is, the salary is one hundred twenty-five dollars a week for ten weeks, and—are you married?”
“Yes, I am!”
“… and room and board for you and the missus.”
Wow! One hundred twenty-five dollars a week! Un-friggin-believable, to borrow an army expletive. The most money I had ever made in my life!
No sooner had Mr. Jacobson said that he would work out the details with Maurice Lapue than a serious-faced Maurice returned, hurriedly discussed the deal with Mr. Jacobson, complimented him on being “a very perceptive judge of talent,” and sent him on his way.
“Carl, while you were auditioning,” Maurice said, smiling devilishly, “did you notice a man looking through that little window at you?”
“Yes, I did. Who was that?”
“Herman Levin, the co-producer of Call Me Mister.”
“Oh, great, I read that he’s holding open auditions. I was going to the theater—”
“You don’t have to go anywhere, he wants you to play the Jules Munshin part in the road company!”
“Oh, sure,” I said, laughing, “the man looking in that little window wants me to play the lead in Call Me Mister. He couldn’t hear a word I was saying!”
“No, Carl, he couldn’t hear you, but he could see you, and he liked what he saw!”
Impossible as it may sound, that is exactly why I was hired. Herman Levin saw an actor who moved, gesticulated, and looked very much like Jules Munshin, the actor whose performance in the show had made him a star overnight. Within a short time, both Jules Munshin and his co-star, Betty Garrett, were in Hollywood playing alongside Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in the film version of the hit musical On The Town.
I couldn’t believe it! Herman Levin h
ad allowed me to bypass the open auditions and hired me, “sight unheard” and without consulting his co-producer, Melvyn Douglas. I thought, “Boy, this Herman Levin guy is some gambler!” I later learned that he was also some negotiator!
What a day! Two good offers for two good jobs from one lousy audition.
I told Maurice that I preferred to work on the legitimate stage rather than on a casino stage.
“You can do both,” Maurice informed me. “Rehearsals for the show don’t start until mid-September. You’ll be finished at Lake Spofford by the end of August.”
My postwar prospects, in one short afternoon, had gone from dismal to dizzying.
It was the happiest of happy times! I was happy doing at Lake Spofford the kind of social directing I had learned to do four years earlier at Allaben Acres. I was happy that my stand-up routines were well received and that Mr. Jacobson was happy that I was as resilient as he knew I’d be. Best of all, both Estelle and I were happy to know that she was pregnant. We received that news soon after I signed for the two jobs. How much happiness can one man take? Obviously all he can get!
If you guessed that this unfettered happiness is ultimately met by a counteracting dose of despair and disappointment, you are mostly wrong but a little right.
After an absolutely glorious summer of good work, good eats, a daily dose of the magnificent view of the White Mountains, and one vain attempt at playing golf, I was itching to start my first job as a paid-up member of Actors Equity!
Before starting rehearsal, Herman Levin requested that I meet with him to discuss my deal, but before I describe that meeting, I thought that it might be interesting to list all of the jobs and all the emoluments I had received before I signed to do Call Me Mister. If I were not computer semi-illiterate, I would have illustrated my work history with a nicely designed graph, but this will have to do.
