by Carl Reiner
22
Honoring Renoir and Embarrassing Others
For no good reason but to amuse myself, I have decided to tell this true story in the form of a play.
CAST
(as themselves)
in almost alphabetical order:
Barbara Bain
literate blond actress
Martin Landau
wide-mouthed distinguished actor
Jeffrey Hayden
smiling dinner guest/film director
Jean Renoir
beloved honored guest/film director
Dido Renoir
beloved wife of beloved guest
Estelle Reiner
hostess par excellence/jazz singer
Carl Reiner
hostess’ helper/author
Aaron Ruben
short reconteur/writer-producer
Sandy Ruben
excellent conversationalist/personal manager
Connie Russell
excellent vocalist/wife/mother
Eva Marie Saint
former high school cheerleader/actress
Mike Zimring
most civilized of all Hollywood agents
Act One, Scene One: Mike Zimring’s office of the William Morris Agency. Carl Reiner and his agent, Mike, are discussing another of Mike’s clients.
CARL
Mike, I gotta thank you. In my wildest dreams I never thought I’d actually meet Jean Renoir, let alone be invited to his house for dinner. And he seemed to like my movie (Enter Laughing). By the way, I appreciate your suggesting it.
MIKE
I didn’t, he asked to see it.
CARL
I know you set it up, and I’m glad you did. What a night! Estelle and I haven’t stopped talking about the man. He’s so lovable.
MIKE
I warned you, to meet him is to fall in love with him. That’s one of the reasons I hate introducing him to my friends. He’s getting on in years and can’t socialize as much as we would like him to. It’s frustrating.
CARL
Mike, Estelle and I were talking. Dido really put herself out making that great meal, and we’d like to reciprocate. Do you think she and Jean would come to dinner at our house? My friends are dying to meet Renoir. Could you ask him?
MIKE
Hey, Carl, I handle Jean Renoir for films, not for dinner parties. Call him. I bet he’d love to come.
Scene Two: the Reiner home.
Later that day.
[Carl enters house, Estelle meets him in foyer]
CARL
[Taking off jacket]
So?
ESTELLE
I called everybody, and half of them had something planned for that night.
CARL
Damn. How many are coming?
ESTELLE
Everybody! They changed their plans when I told them we’re serving tête de veau and that Jean Renoir would be here, and after dinner we would screen La Grande Illusion.
What I am trying to establish in these first two scenes is that Jean Renoir was a much-loved man, that we were planning to serve calf’s head vinaigrette for dinner, and screen his classic film after it. I thought I did it fairly well, but seeing how much paper I used to give you so little information, I conclude that my effort to playwrite this story is not cost efficient.
All of the guests who were on my cast list did show up and were as thrilled as we were to be a part of what turned out to be the most memorable of all the memorable dinners that we had ever given. Estelle felt, as I do, that guests really appreciate it when you exert that extra effort to present a meal that is not only delicious but rarely served in a home. What better choice for a dinner honoring our French film legend than the classic tête de veau, an elegantly prepared peasant dish about which we have been raving since eating it at the elegant Lucas Carton, a two-star Parisian restaurant. We went blithely about preparing to produce this exotic meal, unaware that there was not a calf’s head to be found in all of Beverly Hills nor its neighboring towns. After dozens of attempts we finally located not a calf’s head but a cow’s head. So committed were we to serving this meal that we went forward and Estelle managed to deliver a darn good facsimile of the original. If we are to believe our guest of honor, and who would question a man who sports a Légion d’honneur on his lapel, our tête de cow was “better than,” or he might have said, “bigger than,” any he had ever eaten. Jean Renoir’s French accent was rather thick and I might have misunderstood him; however, there was no doubt that the dish was a hit.
You may think that I am lingering too long on what we served but the night’s menu plays a key role in this tale. To complement our pièce de résistance, Estelle served a side dish she had created which received kudos, and, more importantly, requests for second helpings. Lucas Carton would kill to get his hands on Estelle’s recipe for sauteed cabbage in Champagne–sour cream sauce.
Earlier that day Mike Zimring called me to say that Dido was concerned about Jean’s stamina.
“You know,” Mike said, “Jean is getting on in years and has difficulty staying up too late. He is usually in bed by ten, so unless we can eat dinner pretty early, the old gent might not make it through his movie.”
So excited was everyone to see La Grande Illusion and hear the great filmmaker discuss the making of his masterpiece that all were in their seats and ready to eat at six o’clock sharp—even one chronically late friend, whom I would single out if I thought he were curable.
When I say that we screened the film in our den, I don’t want to give the impression that we had an elaborate screening room in our home. I had a window-shade-type pull-down screen onto which I projected Jean Renoir’s personal print on the sixteen-millimeter projector I received as a gift for my appearance on This Is Your Life.
Before I started the projector I thanked M. Renoir, who insisted we call him Jean, and told him how fortunate we all felt that he had lent us both his presence and his print of La Grande Illusion for the screening. He said that he felt fortunate there was a print to lend. He had not owned or seen the film since the war. Adolf Hitler found this masterwork, this brilliant treatise on the madness of war and of the people who perpetuate war, to be dangerous and inflammatory anti-Nazi propaganda. He had ordered all prints of La Grande Illusion to be torched. The Gestapo were successful conquering all of Europe and burning every print that existed. By the end of the war, only a few terribly abridged versions of the film existed, lovingly spliced together from snips and clips by editors who knew the value of this work of film art.
Jean Renoir told us that a year or so earlier he had received a call from a man in Paris who said that he was cleaning out a cellar and found a big metal container full of funny flat cans that had the name Jean Renoir written on them. The cans contained a kind of bluish-looking film.
“It looks like some kind of spoiled film,” the man guessed, and wanted to know if Renoir had any interest in looking at them before he tossed them out. Renoir knew immediately that this was the original negative of the film Hitler had thought he destroyed. What Jean didn’t know was that the negative was in pristine condition.
“So,” Renoir joked, “you never know what you’re going to find in the trash.”
After the viewing, all of us had the same reaction: the film had lost none of its beauty and power. For the next two or three hours, M. Renoir told us wonderfully personal stories about each member of the cast. I was surprised to learn that the star of the film, Jean Gabin, had no experience as an actor before Renoir cast him. I was also happy to watch Erich von Stroheim again being the philosophic German officer. In my career I have impersonated Herr von Stroheim many times, General von Cluck in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid being my last and most successful thievery.
The most wonderful and terrible part of the evening was that it lasted until one o’clock in the morning. Wonderful that all of us had, as Mike Zimring prophesied, fallen deeply in love with this utterly irresistible old man. Wonder
ful that Estelle and I had hosted a party at which our guest of honor felt comfortable enough to stay three hours past his curfew. But terrible that an evening that went so smashingly could turn sour in the flush of a toilet. It happened at exactly 12:40 A.M. Yes, Detective, I can be sure of the time, because out of concern for M. Renoir’s comfort, I kept checking my watch. It seemed no one wanted the evening to end.
It was at precisely 12:40 A.M. that I detected a smell coming from the powder room, which is located less than ten feet from the bar, where all our guests were gathered. Three or four or more of our guest had made use of the powder room in those last eventful minutes, the last being the prime suspect, a beautiful blond who, in every Raymond Chandler–type novel would be the last to be suspected. But I was a more than credible eyewitness who would swear that the awful smell emanating from the powder room was not present before the three-time Emmy Award–winning actress, Barbara Bain, had gone into it. I will testify under oath to hearing the flush moments before smelling the smell. Estelle and I traded glances and grimaced, with a what-the-hell-is-that? expression on our faces. Barbara Bain came blithely out of the powder room and smilingly rejoined the crowd. No one seemed to smell what my wife and I were smelling, or if they did they were acting as though they didn’t, which, with this group, was possible, considering that Eva Marie Saint and later in his career, Martin Landau received Oscars for acting. Estelle and I, with small eye and head signals, left to confer in the kitchen.
“Oh, my God,” one of us said.
“It’s gotta be the cabbage dish,” I think I said.
“It’s never had that effect on anybody before,” I think she said.
“Did you put anything different in it?” I know I asked.
“What do we do?” she said.
“Get Renoir out of the house,” I said, “at his age these fumes could be lethal!”
We went back into the den only to find that Sandy Ruben was missing. To our shock, she had dared to use the powder room. The stench was worse than ever, and she, like Barbara Bain, came out of the gas chamber smiling. I suddenly remembered that a few minutes earlier the other beautiful blond, Eva Marie Saint, had preceded Barbara into the powder room. I began to wonder if I was in danger of fingering the wrong blond. Then I thought, there is no chance that this is the work of one of our lovely, delicate women. It had to be one of the men. While these thoughts ran through my head, I did all the things polite hosts do to hint to their guests that the evening is over. It literally took another ten or fifteen minutes to herd all the suspects out the front door. Yes, I considered them all suspects. No one person could have created such a pungent bomb.
After the good-byes at the door, and as far as I was concerned they were perfunctory, because all I could think about was finding the source of the offensive odor, and wondering why no one but my wife and I seemed to be aware of it. I sniffed my way from the powder room to the bar and found that the odor was becoming increasingly bad as I made my way to the little pantry that abuts the bar. I considered that it might be a broken pipe that flowed from the powder room and the bar and pantry area. At two in the morning I traced it to the crawl space under the house. I could hardly wait for morning, when I could call some foul-smell expert to find and repair what needed to be repaired. A plumber, along with someone from the health department, diagnosed our problem. Three factors came into play that almost ruined our wonderful evening. If these factors had converged during dinner or at the screening, I would not be writing this anecdote—or maybe I would, but it couldn’t have as happy an ending.
The three factors:
1. One of the small mesh-covered vents in the foundation that allow air to flow under the house was ajar.
2. A stray cat had, weeks or months earlier, squeezed itself through the small opening and had not been able to find its way out.
3. A Santa Ana wind kicked up and, without a permit, blew through Beverly Hills. A particularly strong gust had whooshed through the crawl space under our house, wafting the aroma of putrefying cat up through the basement and into our house.
A gas-masked city worker, wearing heavy work gloves and carrying a very long pole with tongs at the end, removed the poor animal, fumigated the area, and earned our undying respect and admiration.
The following morning each of our guests received this letter:
The morning after
Dear __________
It was neither the woman to your right nor the man to your left nor Estelle’s Champagne, cabbage, and sour cream dish, nor her magnificent tête de vache nor anything to do with the powder room or its users, it had to do with a poor benighted, putrefying cat who had lost its way under our house. Its presence may have never been known had not a powerful Santa Ana wind blown in from the desert and under our home at 12:45 A.M. this day. I hope you didn’t, as I did, falsely accuse Barbara Bain for fouling our lovely atmosphere. The woman has been completely exonerated.
Fondly,
Carl
For the next day or two we received calls and notes from all the “suspects,” who admitted that they had all thought as I did, and were relieved to discover the truth. What a great and talented group of dissemblers! They would not, for one moment, let on that the glorious evening we shared, honoring Jean Renoir, stank to high heavens.
23
Perpetual Papa
Lenny Grotte and I were seven or eight years old when we had this discussion about the First World War, which had ended about ten years earlier.
“We won the war,” my friend Lenny insisted, “because we had lots more big boats with big cannons and guns and bullets and airoplanes with machine guns and bombs and we had a gigantiker army with a zillion soldiers with rifles and bayonests!”
“My papa wouldn’t need no zillion soldiers with rifles,” I boasted, “he coulda won the war by using straggedy.”
I didn’t know exactly what “straggedy” was, but I knew that my father knew, because he knew everything and had told me many times that there was always a better way to do something if you used your brains and found the right “straggedy.”
I had great respect for my father and never doubted that whatever he told me was true. Since then I have learned that you can’t win anything with “straggedy,” but a proper use of strategy can, at times, help to win baseball games, elections, and a tic-tac-toe match.
When I was small, I thought Papa was tall. He was a couple of inches taller than his two brothers, Harry and Max. At five foot four, Papa was the tallest one in our family; my mother was five foot two and my brother, at age eight, was at least a head shorter than our parents. Papa always walked tall, holding his head high and his shoulders squared. When my brother and I grew to be six feet and six two respectively, I asked Pa how we got to be so tall.
“You take after your grandfather. He was tall,” he said proudly, “almost five foot six!”
He attributed some of our growth to the daily tablespoonful of cod liver oil he insisted we take.
In 1900, at age fourteen, my father, Irving Reiner, né Usher Reiner, left his home in Czernowitz, Romania, and traveled to Vienna to accept a position at a large jewelry store as a master watchmaker. In those days, to be certified as a master watchmaker, one had to be able to make all the parts of the watch except the mainspring. My father, his four brothers, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and for generations back, we’re not sure how many, were all watchmakers. My father, hoping that my brother, Charlie, and I would find careers that would not tie us to a workbench, chose not to teach us how to repair watches.
To define my father simply as a watchmaker is not giving him his due. In these next pages I would like to give him that.
I always knew my father was special because he did so many things that my friends’ fathers didn’t do. Here is a partial list of some of those things.
My pop was a self-taught violinist and flautist. In 1906, when Pop was twenty, he emigrated to America, found a job in Union City, New Jersey, bought a Bohemian-crafte
d violin for the princely sum of $500, an ebony flute, two how-to books of instructions, and proceeded to teach himself to play both instruments and how to read and transpose music. After auditioning for the Leo Prinz Symphony Orchestra, my best memory of the amateur forty-piece orchestra’s name, he was invited to play second violin and/or first flute at the free weekend concerts that the orchestra gave in public parks, libraries, and prisons.
He did all of his concertizing before he married my mom, and for one year after my brother, Charlie, arrived. I remember fondly the stacks of music portfolios sitting in the corner of the bedroom and his playing me to sleep with sweet-sounding flute solos, and his always obliging me when I asked for “one more, just one more!”
But mostly I remember my pop inventing things—a lot of things. Among his inventions were:
1. a timing attachment for a camera that allowed the photographer to step into the family picture he was snapping (1913) (a Japanese inventor patented a similar device six months before my father applied. I still have Pop’s prototype timer);
2. a self-winding wristwatch (1927–28);
3. an automobile clock (patented 1930);
4. an electric clock, powered by a flashlight battery (patented 1930);
5. a high-voltage, low-amperage battery to power a clock for a hundred years without being changed or recharged (1930–53, patented 1953);
6. a clock powered by the above quasi-perpetual battery (1930–1953, patented 1953).
THE GENESIS OF THE CLOCK THAT INSPIRED THE CHAPTER TITLE “PERPETUAL PAPA”
