by Carl Reiner
A word about these stars and the tremendous guilt I suffered for allowing the show’s producers to intrude on the lives of these busy people by asking them to fly across the continent just to help me receive a prize. It is only because it was the Mark Twain Prize that I have managed to exorcize this tremendous guilt.
I thought, as I looked over at Charlie, This son of a gun beat the odds, or at least improved them enough to be with us on this day.
When President Clinton arrived, we were all invited into the Oval Office to meet and be photographed with him. He was as charming and gracious as everyone who has ever met him said he was. While the official White House photographer snapped away, the president paused to chat with every one of my family and friends and to hand me the award, a beautifully wrought bronze bust of Mark Twain. I introduced the president to my brother. When I mentioned that Charlie had been in eleven major battles in World War II from the North African campaign to the landing at Normandy and had been awarded a Bronze Star, President Clinton shook Charlie’s hand warmly and came down to Charlie’s eye level by sitting on the corner of his desk.
“D-Day, Omaha Beach?” the president asked.
“Utah Beach.” Charlie answered. “D-Day plus four.”
For the next fifteen minutes Charlie and the president chatted about that fateful day, and I was amazed at one exchange they had. When Charlie first mentioned that his outfit landed on Utah Beach, the president surprised Charlie by asking, “Your outfit took Ste. Marie l’Eglise and St. Malo?”
“Yes,” Charlie answered, “how did you know that?”
“I read a lot,” said the president, smiling.
By being assigned to Utah Beach instead of being in the first wave of young GIs who stormed Omaha Beach, the men of the First Army’s Infantry Divisions missed being among the 52,000 casualties who fell that day.
Charlie talked about how lucky he was to be with the Thirty-seventh Infantry, Ninth Division of the First Army, and wondered why they had been chosen to land on Utah Beach. Charlie’s guess was that either the Supreme Allied Command had decided that the soldiers of the First Army needed a break, because they had been in ten major campaigns and were battle weary—or maybe they just tossed a coin.
During the first ten minutes of the President Clinton–Corporal Reiner World War II conversation, a White House aide reminded the president that his helicopter was on the front lawn ready to fly him to New York. The president smiled, said he would be out in a few minutes, and turned his attention back to my brother.
“Charlie,” he asked, “did you get to Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day?”
Charlie said that he did not.
Wow, I thought, Charlie and I, in the Oval Office chatting with the president of the United States! It’s at such times that the litany “If only my parents were alive to see this!” pops into my head.
A lot of things have been said and written about President Clinton, some true, some false, some flattering, some derogatory, some deserved, some not—but that afternoon, I was privy to a moment that allowed me to discover something about President Clinton that I am pleased to pass on.
He described that 50th Anniversary of D-day as being an extraordinarily moving and emotional one for him. He talked about an old friend from his hometown who had accompanied him to the site on which he had stood fifty years earlier. I don’t remember the man’s name, but this gentleman was one of the many courageous soldiers who clawed their way up the Normandy slopes to engage the enemy. The president related how his friend stood next to him and scanned the thousands of white headstones marking the plots where thousands of our boys were laid to rest.
“After a long moment,” the president said, “he pointed to a bluff nearby, and said quietly, ‘That’s the spot where I saw a bomb hit my brother and blow him to pieces.’ He then looked about,” the president continued, “and with tears welling up in his eyes, the old man pointed to another area on the hill, and said, ‘And over there, a few moments later, I saw my other brother get blown away.’ The old gent started to cry like a baby, and it got to me. I couldn’t hold back. I just let go and cried with him.”
While he was relating this, the president’s voice cracked and his eyes filled with tears. He wiped his eyes quickly when his aide came by to remind him that the helicopter was waiting. President Clinton had a few more words for Charlie that I did not hear. He shook his hand, said a blanket good-bye to our family and friends, and left. His eyes were still damp when he shook my hand, and I thought about all the jokes and comments his detractors had made about his use of the phrase, “I feel your pain.” He might have overused that phrase, but that day, I saw firsthand and up close a man who had the compassion and the capacity to actually feel someone else’s pain.
That day, on October 25 of the year 2000, all of us returned from whence we came, some to New York, some to Los Angeles, and Charlie, Ilse, and their daughter to their home in Atlanta, Georgia.
For the next four months, Charlie and I spoke by phone every day and we discussed his physical condition, the state of the world, and the screwed-up presidential election. Often, we would reminisce about our parents, who had left us many years ago. We thought of how much they would have enjoyed getting the dozens of wonderful photos of President Clinton posing with members of our family. We pictured our mother, Bessie, stuffing those photos in her purse, sitting down on “her bench” in Bronx’s Crotona Park and showing off those pictures to all of her friends, acquaintances, and unsuspecting passersby. Charlie and I agreed that it was a miracle of miracles that he was able to make that trip and be at the show. He worried that he might not be around to see it aired. It was to be televised four months hence on the 28th of February.
With the help of his wife and his daughter, caring nurses, and modern medicines, it looked as though he would get to see himself at the Kennedy Center. A couple of days before the show aired, I called to tell him that I had sent a tape of the show by Federal Express so he could play it at his leisure, and he was happy about that. He was also very happy to report that he was feeling wonderful.
“Guess what I did today?” he said, sounding the way he did when he called me from the tuxedo rental store, “I got out of bed, slipped into my shoes, and went outside for a walk.”
He had, a couple of months earlier, managed to take a short walk and retrieve the mail from their curbside mailbox.
“Charlie, you’re kidding! You actually felt well enough to walk down to the mailbox?”
“Not to the mailbox,” he said proudly, “to the street. I walked on the road, and without my cane. I went for about half a mile.”
“That’s a long walk.”
“You’re telling me? I was too tired to walk back!”
“How did you get back?”
“Elaine picked me up with the car … I was pooped!”
Incredible as it seemed, I believed him, I guess because I wanted to believe that he was getting better.
A few minutes later when I spoke with Ilse and my niece, Elaine, they told me that the half-mile walk was in his mind.
“But,” I argued, “he sounds exactly like himself!”
They explained that he went in and out of fantasy, and that he got very tired and went to sleep very early every night. They were glad that the tape of the show was coming the following morning, because mornings were when he was most alert. They didn’t think he would be able to stay awake until nine o’clock to see it on television.
Charlie did not get to see himself on tape or on television. He didn’t get to see himself looking handsome in his rented tuxedo or hear again all the lovely things I was moved to say about him. He passed away early that morning.
Corporal Charles Reiner was given a military funeral with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery on March 4, 2001. He was eighty-two years and three months old, and he is missed.
Also by Carl Reiner
Enter Laughing
All Kinds of Love
Continue Laughin
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The 2,000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 (with Mel Brooks)
How Paul Robeson Saved My Life and Other Mostly Happy Stories
MY ANECDOTAL LIFE. Copyright © 2003 by Carl Reiner. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
ISBN 0-312-31104-4
First Edition: May 2003
eISBN 9781466866607
First eBook edition February 2014
*Bald-headed jokes! I wrote and encouraged other writers to write jokes about Alan Brady’s baldness (my character on The Dick Van Dyke Show).
*In Hershey, Pennsylvania, the town that smells of chocolate, I had injured my back during a performance of the Broadway bound musical, Alive and Kicking, and a local doctor taped it with wide strips of adhesive tape. After five days of performing wearing the corset-sized Band-Aid, I asked Jack Gilford, my dear friend and fellow cast member, to help me remove it. Jack believed that it would be less painful if he yanked the tape off quickly and decisively. I and my raw, skinless back, wept for days, but somehow I managed not to miss one performance.
*I recalled two events I emceed many years earlier which I think a worthy companion to the above piece. On the following pages, you will find “A Recipe to Remember.”
