Still Foolin’ ’Em

by Billy Crystal

Once we started shooting, Meg was spectacular. All day with the camera either on her or on me, she had sensational orgasms. My reactions to her became more fun to do as she came up with new little moans and groans. Months later, when Rob had finished his first cut of the picture, we had a test screening in Pasadena, California. The movie was playing really well, and then came the orgasm scene. The laughs were enormous, and when Estelle said her line, the place exploded. I was sitting in the back with Rob and we just grabbed each other’s arms. We knew we had something special.

  * * *

  After When Harry Met Sally … came out, Michael Fuchs asked me if I’d be willing to go to Moscow and do a stand-up special for HBO. Michael had created HBO and was always looking to expand television’s boundaries. If people were paying for TV, he felt, they should be getting something they couldn’t see on network television. It would be the first time an American comedian would perform in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was in power, and the wall had not yet come down. I found the prospect daunting but intriguing, so I joined Michael and a small group of HBO executives that included Chris Albrecht, who was Michael’s right hand at the time and would become the programming genius behind The Sopranos and Sex and the City, and we made a trip to Leningrad and Moscow to get a feel for the country and its people and see if performing there was possible.

  Leningrad—St. Petersburg now—is a beautiful city, with lovely bridges spanning the Neva River. We met with “humor officials,” who told us of their concerns about this proposed show. It was very similar to what I was used to, actually: Russia’s humor officials were the same dour comedy-development execs we have in the States. What was I planning on talking about? they asked. Could they see the script? We explained that we were just doing research at this point. We had a KGB man with us at all times, and probably a few others watching us.

  While we were there, the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur arrived, and the Jews in the group who were feeling guilty that they weren’t home with their families, or just merely feeling guilty, wanted to go to synagogue. We found the only temple in the city still standing, which was moving in itself. Leningrad had once had twenty-four synagogues, but all the others had been destroyed over time, a stark reminder of what had happened to the Jews in the Soviet Union. Our group of ten or so men tried to go in, but we were refused entry by an elder of the temple because we didn’t have head coverings (yarmulkes). We explained that we were Americans whose roots were in Russia and asked, in the spirit of our ancestors, would the rabbi make an exception and let us in to say our Yom Kippur prayers? Again he refused us, pointing to our bare heads. We left angry and frustrated, but across the street we found an outdoor market, and somehow somebody was selling a black velvet painting of Elvis, which we bought for two dollars. With a Swiss Army knife we cut some circles out of it, and we put the new “Elvis yarmulkes” on our heads. We confronted the elder with our new yarmulkes, and reluctantly he let us in. Elvis had entered the building.

  The aging interior of the temple was still beautiful, but it had that musty aroma of an old apartment. Though it was a large place where men traditionally sat downstairs and the women upstairs, only a handful of people were there. On this, the holiest of days, most synagogues in the United States are jammed, so we all felt the same sadness. If the pogroms and the anti-Semitic Stalinist regime hadn’t happened, this place would be full. There weren’t many Jews left in the city, and those who were still there were apparently reluctant to be seen going to synagogue. I imagined what it must have been like to be a Jew living here in my grandparents’ time—it seemed dreary and scary enough in 1989. As we boarded the train to Moscow, I still wasn’t convinced I could do the show. The train leaves at midnight, and when you wake up you are in Moscow. Midnight Train to Moscow sounded like a title to me; I thought, Now if I only had a show to go with it.

  The people in Moscow were more open to us. The lines we’d heard about, of Russians waiting for goods, were everywhere. Around three each afternoon, when work was done, the longest lines were for the liquor stores—or as I called it, “Unhappy Hour.” Soon the streets were littered with tipsy Russians. One evening we had arranged a meeting with one of the Soviet Union’s top comedians at a restaurant overlooking Red Square. We were going to videotape our conversation and perhaps use it in the show. Sitting at our table, we watched the entrance to the restaurant, not knowing who we were looking for. Man after man entered and glanced around for a table, and I somehow knew that each one wasn’t “him.” Then a thirty-five-ish beleaguered-looking man walked in and paused. He slouched a little and had a tinge of anxiety in his eyes. “That’s him,” I said, and it was.

  We greeted each other warmly and, through his translator, started talking shop. He and I had many things in common. He also didn’t sit down before a show and instead he paced in his dressing room; he ate at the same time I did before a performance. He said he made love to his wife the night before every big performance and asked if I did. I said I didn’t know his wife, but if he insisted, I would. I asked if he liked it when his family was in the audience, and he responded through his translator, “No, I am Jewish, too.” But a few nights later, when we went to see him perform in a large theater, he simply sat down and read a text of his comedy that had been approved by a committee! He wasn’t a stand-up; he was a sit-down comic. It was hard to fathom that his material had been censored.

  One thing I did keep thinking about was my own Russian ancestry. My grandmothers were both from Russia, as was my dad’s father. What if I made the show about finding my roots? The idea started to percolate. It could be funny but also have a soul. With another family member’s help we found thirty or so distant cousins still living in Moscow. It was by chance—and choice—that some of my family remained in Russia while others flourished in America. Some saw that the revolution was coming and decided to flee, while others thought, “We will stay, it won’t be so bad, and we’ll come later.” They never did. Who would I have been if my grandmother didn’t get out at the age of fourteen? Probably a really funny tractor driver in Minsk.

  When we returned to Los Angeles, I started to write the show with Paul Flaherty and Dick Blasucci. Our idea was to begin with a parody of Field of Dreams, with the voice that said, “If you build it, they will come” instead being the voice of my grandmother, urging me to go to Russia and find my roots. “If you go there, take a jacket,” the voice—Christopher Guest—whispered. For the stand-up portion of the special, I studied Soviet television to see what people were watching. Charlie Chaplin movies were being shown almost every day, and he was referred to as “the Little Jew.” Which, by coincidence, is the same thing they called him when he tried to join a country club in Hollywood.

  I created a Chaplin “silent movie,” wherein I would imitate Charlie live onstage, underscored with Tchaikovsky played by the brilliant and funny piano player Marc Shaiman. We wrote a scene where Gorbachev, looking to westernize his country, has a meeting with an American producer. With a makeup job complete with bad hair plugs, I played the slimy producer who brings the concept of creating a theme park called Lenin Land. We built a scale model of the Disneyland-like park, and a disbelieving Gorbachev watched a tiny roller coaster go right through dead Lenin’s head.

  And speaking of Lenin, in a fantasy of who I might have been if history were different, I played a guard at Lenin’s Tomb who is a practical joker. One is not allowed to make a sound inside the tomb, but I use a hidden fart device to crack up the stoic soldier next to me, while I blame it on an American tourist. My favorite piece was a monologue where I played a man waiting on line, inspired by the thousands of stone-faced Russians I had seen standing on lines for goods. Many times, they didn’t know what the line was for; they’d merely joined it. My character is hoping for food, vodka, or raspberries that don’t have worms in them, all the while talking about what it’s like living there. It was a ballsy piece to do for the Russians, because it confronted them with the reality of their own lives. Finally I wrote a postconce
rt scene that has me leaving on the midnight train, and I bump into a young girl, who, in the magic of Field of Dreams, turns out to be my grandmother on her way to America. My sixteen-year-old daughter, Jenny, would play her own great-grandmother.

  The story was strong, but I was worried about the actual performance. How do you do stand-up for the Russians? I decided I needed to speak Russian for the first few minutes, and remember, this was before Rosetta Stone. I wrote about ten minutes of welcoming jokes; then David Bromberg, a Russian American comedian who was our technical adviser, translated them into Russian, and I learned them phonetically. For the Pyshkina Theater, a lovely old building with a long history, we created a backdrop of a poster of a Russian worker, and then before I knew it, we were ready, rehearsed, and, weirdly enough, very confident. We made a visit to the American embassy, and upon meeting the ambassador we were advised to talk in a whisper and were moved to a corner of the room so the conversation wouldn’t be bugged. The only request he made was for me to work clean and not embarrass anyone. Next we shot some handheld reality video on the streets of Moscow from my point of view. Standing at the entrance to Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square, we witnessed the changing of the guards. High-stepping soldiers with guns on their shoulders marched by us, their kicks almost reaching the level of their chests. I softly started singing “One” from A Chorus Line in time with their steps: “One singular sensation, every little step he takes.” I had to sing softly because our KGB man was standing near me; from the look on his face, I figured he had not seen the musical. I played other characters as well, including my NYU professor Martin Scorsese, who commented, “I told Billy to gain forty pounds and call the show Raging Bolshevik.”

  The Russians were always looking for a “taste”—in other words, a bribe. If we needed something that had been promised but not delivered, the KGB man would tell us that giving him $500 and a dual-track ghetto blaster might help. We provided exactly that a few times, most notably when we’d been promised that the lights of the Kremlin would be on in the background of a late-night scene. Of course they weren’t. We came up with the loot and even threw in a second ghetto blaster, and lo and behold, the lights were on for two weeks, even after we left.

  Sometimes it seemed that the only thing the Soviets had in common with us was that over there, the conservatives also thought all actors were socialists. The country, for all its great literature and music and scientific accomplishments, was unsophisticated. The windows of the big department stores were crudely decorated. Stylish clothes were rare. News coverage was scarce. It was 1989, but it felt like 1956. Chernobyl had shaken the nation a few years prior to our visit. Good food was now hard to find; at the few nice restaurants, a meat dish was more than likely horse. Several times we had to admonish the crew members for stuffing cheese and other goods from our catering truck (it had come all the way from England, of all places) into their coats at the end of the day. As scary as we found the Soviet image, they were a vulnerable people who seemed to want what America had. I sensed that the citizens were starting to realize that they had been handed a bill of goods and unrest was growing.

  One night Janice, Michael Fuchs, and I went to dinner at the home of one of my new cousins. It was very emotional. They looked like all the relatives I’d known as a child. Their facial structure, even their personalities felt so familiar. As they showed us their family albums, I again thought about the twist of fate that had allowed me to live and thrive in America while this part of our family remained behind the Iron Curtain. We laughed at familiar family stories, and I invited everyone to the performance at the Pyshkina Theater. I started as a comedian by performing in front of my relatives. Now, halfway around the world, I would not only be performing in the country they’d come from—but once again in front of my family.

  We were to do two shows, which would be cut together into one for the HBO special, but the size of the audiences was a mystery to us. We hadn’t done much advertising, just a simple poster with a black-and-white photograph Janice had taken of me. It read, “An Evening with American Comic Billy Crystal.” Which was better than the original poster: “An Evening with Another Little Jew.”

  As the beautiful sounds of Shaiman rehearsing his Tchaikovsky filtered into my upstairs dressing room, I looked out the window and was surprised to see a long line of people, young and old, waiting to get into the theater. I’m not sure how much they knew of me, yet they seemed excited that someone from America had come to perform for them. I had no idea what to expect. Would they laugh? Were they allowed to laugh? Would they be angry that an American was making fun of them? Getting off to a good start was the key, so I kept rehearsing my jokes in Russian.

  The moment before I go onstage is always one of intense, quiet energy. I gather my thoughts, then let them go. I think of everything and nothing. Most comedians will probably describe the moment before they go on in the same way: Your brain opens up to a new part of you. It hears everything, it remembers everything; you feel powerful and intuitive. I always remain in good physical condition so my body feels strong, my legs always underneath me. I enter into a sort of hyperreality. I need to listen to every sound the audience makes, to feel what they are giving back, and then in milliseconds decide what and how to say the next line. That’s a comedian’s toughest challenge: saying one thing while thinking a few beats ahead and making decisions about what to say next without looking like you’re going through mental machinations. In Moscow, these tasks would be coupled with an audience that might not have any idea of what I was about to do. If they were used to a comedian sitting onstage reading his edited script, what would they think of me? I simply kept looking at my notes, trying to remember key words. This wasn’t my honed act. Where could I have tried it out? The Russian Tea Room? This was all new material I had never performed before. Oh, and most of the people in the crowd only spoke Russian. Still, for some reason—perhaps the danger of it all—I felt relaxed and confident as I got dressed.

  First moment on stage with Gorbo.

  David Bromberg warmed up the crowd. “How many of you have relatives in prison?” he joked. He explained who I was, and what a big moment this was for Soviet-American relations and American television. He then introduced me, and I walked onstage to a strong round of applause. I went over to the wings, where it looked like I was shaking someone’s hand. I was—it was a life-size cutout of Gorbachev with a movable arm. When the audience saw this, I could feel their astonishment. The American had already done something a Soviet comic could not do: make fun of the boss. A few people looked around, probably thinking that soldiers were coming to take them away for laughing. In fact, there were some soldiers in the audience, and they were laughing as well. I then launched into my jokes in Russian, my accent strong: “I am the first American comedian to come to Moscow, with the exception of Ronald Reagan.” I told them how similar we actually are: “You have the Russian circus, we have Congress, you have Baryshnikov … we have Baryshnikov.…” Again the audience was delighted. They loved the Chaplin piece; I got them to do “the Wave” with me, hundreds of Soviets standing and throwing their arms in the air as the wave moved around the theater, something never before seen in Russia; and both shows went as well as any performance I had done in America. I had hoped I would be able to do twenty-five minutes or so, and in both performances I did an hour, ending with the man-on-line monologue, which brought the Soviets to their feet, cheering and throwing flowers to me on stage.

  As I bowed and waved good night I saw my new family applauding their cousin. It was just like being in the living room in Long Beach.

  The next night we finished our shooting at a lonely train station outside Moscow. Jenny and I did our scene together, and it was truly magical. Acting with my daughter, already a fine actress, portraying her great-grandmother on her way to a new life was the perfect ending to this whole experience.

  * * *

  After hosting the Grammys for three years, I was asked to be a presenter at the Academy Awards.
The show that year was a disaster. The now infamous moment of Rob Lowe singing “Proud Mary” with Snow White opened the show, and the rest was chaotic. Still, when I walked out there that night to introduce Gregory Hines and Sammy Davis Jr., I felt that I was in the right place. I was now part of the movie community. A few months later, Gil Cates asked me to host the Oscars the next year. He was producing the show for the first time. The Oscars had become a laughingstock, and together our goal was to make the show something special again.

  By then When Harry Met Sally … was a big hit, and Nora had been nominated for Best Screenplay. The movie had also been nominated for the Golden Globe as Best Comedy, and Meg and I were nominated for Best Actor and Actress in a Comedy or Musical. At the Globes I was sitting near Steve Martin, who was nominated for Parenthood. When our category came up and we both lost to Morgan Freeman for Driving Miss Daisy, I ran over to Steve and said, “Let’s go up there and ask who finished second.” As Steve and I approached the stage and asked the question, the look on Cybil Shepherd’s face was priceless. (Yes, we did it, and you can Google this one, too!) Steve is one of the truly great original funny people. I’m sorry that moment at the Globes is the only chance we’ve had to work together.

  As the Oscars approached, I had this strong feeling of Wow, I’m really going to do this. I am hosting the same show Bob Hope and Johnny Carson did. When I was growing up in the fifties and early sixties, the Oscars was always a special event. We gathered around our black-and-white television set to watch the glamorous Hollywood stars sitting together having a wonderful time. The show had such class and dignity. Back then, the only awards shows were the Emmys and the Oscars, and watching them, I felt as if I’d been granted a special one-night pass to sit in the palace with the legends. Bob Hope was usually the master of ceremonies and appeared almost regal in his formal tails. He was funny and charming, and although I didn’t get most of his jokes, it didn’t matter because the camera cut to Gregory Peck laughing, or to Jimmy Stewart or Jack Lemmon or Anthony Quinn sitting with some gorgeous movie star on his arm. Even though our DuMont TV set was black-and-white, I could see every color. Now I felt that I had been handed the baton in a relay race and it was my turn to run. Following in the footsteps of Hope and Carson was a huge responsibility, and I wanted to be great.