There was Gil back onstage where he belonged, talking to the crowd and revealing all these different crazy, amazing, funny, sad, heartwarming, courageous, silly things from his very long life in TV, in front of the camera and behind it.
Having observed it all from the back of the theater by the bar, Milt had been astounded by the sheer power of Gil up there, like he was radiated by some kind of mystical light that all 350 people in this theater could see and feel. They had laughed at everything he said without any kind of patronizing quality to their laughter, even when what Gil said hadn’t been very funny.
They were with him, and standing in the back by the bar, Milt could witness it all happening. The genuine affection was palpable, electric. Milt’s neck hairs had been standing up the entire time.
Gil had pointed out a few of the semi-celebrities who were in the audience, and everyone applauded at each name, even though none of them were exactly Robert DeNiro. If Jessica Chen had been there, Gil hadn’t pointed her out. Milt was sure of that.
Milt had seen it on the faces of each audience member, whether they were a fan or not, someone who had known Gil Gladly, personally or not, young or old, regardless of how they looked or who they were. They were all spellbound, captured, captivated by Gil up there onstage who did not stutter once. Not once.
Gil Gladly had victoriously led the audience in chants of his signature catch-phrase, the namesake of the documentary: “Good Golly!”, before pointing the microphone in his hand toward them:
Audience: “Gil Gladly!”
Gil: “GOOD GOLLY!”
Audience: “GIL GLADLY!”
This right here was why Milt Siegel had made Good Golly, Gil Gladly. It was there in the faces of each audience member, and he knew it would be there in the faces of all of those at home who would soon be watching the film on Netflix or whatever once they sold the damn thing.
Gil was a very real part of all of these people’s lives. He was there—almost watching, if you will (not to get too creepy)—as they grew up. He was not “just a guy on TV” to them. He was real.
It didn’t matter that some in the audience were not kids. In fact, almost none of the audience were kids, Milt realized all at once. Looking around, all the white and grayish hair, the glasses and beer guts and Cosby sweaters…. He surmised that the average age here was probably forty. There they were, these thirty-somethings, these forty-year-olds, these fifty-and sixty-year-olds all chanting along with Gil’s call-and-response as though they were children again watching his show or earlier precursors like Captain Kangaroo, Bozo the Clown, and Howdy Doody.
All of this went through Milt’s head as he had been watching the audience members, old and young alike, so transfixed on Gil Gladly up there on stage making them laugh…and occasionally making Milt cringe a bit from some of the more revealing and vulgar things Gil could never help himself from saying, including badmouthing the new administration of the Balloon network and lamenting that “the people there running the place into the ground” were “too stupid to realize they should reboot KidTalk, but, oh well…life goes on.”
And you know what? These were all fucking adults here. So, Gil Gladly could be vulgar and raw and real. Fuck it, as Gil himself would say. He came up in the late seventies Jersey comedy club scene. What would someone expect from a guy like that? He was practically reared in his early days as a merchant marine…well, a “merchant marine” of the entertainment world.
This was who Gil Gladly really was, and the audience here could take it.
Milt had felt lucky and even grateful he could see it for himself, there with Gil glowing up onstage, radiating this amazing energy that had at one time captured the entire nation, maybe the world…for five to ten years of successful ubiquitous television appearances.
Here and now, this energy was simply less diluted. It was the real Gil, not the TV-friendly Gil. And that was fine. Even if some of what he said was a little.…
Then there’d been that moment at the end of the proceedings, before Gil got off the stage. That very last moment when Milt really felt the connection between himself and Gil Gladly, the real Gil Gladly, the true human beneath it all—as imperfect as that human may have been—and knew that, yes, Gil was the genuine article.
It all made sense, it made it all worthwhile, all the panic and worry, stress and struggle, and doubts and sacrifices. Milt was glad he knew Gil Gladly. He was glad he had made a film about Gil Gladly. He looked across the audience up to Gil on the stage and locked eyes with the man himself. Milt smiled at Gil Gladly, nodding. We did it, Gil!
Gil may have responded by nodding back. Or he might not have.
….and Milt was in the lobby, smiling so bright and being interviewed by different people using their phones as though they were actual TV cameras and hugging people and crying and laughing and smiling, enjoying the shit out of every fucking second of this moment that lasted for two hours.
CHAPTER 16
There Milt was, sitting at an outdoor café in Malibu, walking distance from the most magnificent stretch of beach he could possibly remember from his film school days.
It was the day after the screening, and Milt still felt, well, not hungover, but tired. Then again, he was always tired. Truth was, Milt hardly ever felt hungover, just as he’d never had a bad psychedelic trip. He learned a few years back that his mom was the same way, making him feel this was some kind of genetic superpower she’d passed down to him. He’d never asked his dad about his drug experiences, but that was for another day.
At least now Milt had a valid reason for being so exhausted. He had just premiered his two-years-plus-in-the-making documentary about Gil Gladly to an audience of nearly four hundred people. And they had loved…every…second…of it. Probably.
He had been pretty fucking drunk. He’d been drinking almost the entire day, starting with that unproductive Blake Douglas meeting in the morning.
Had he missed out on one of, if not the prime experiences of his life? Again? Milt did have a tendency of doing that. He would drink…then drink and drink and drink…then he’d miss out on these spectacular events he was a part of, and it would be fun and all, as the screening had been, but…man.
He had been there, and yet…had he missed it?
Milt was sitting across a large white table under a grand, extra-large, gold-colored, and sparkling umbrella blocking out the wondrous, warm sun. The surprisingly warm but welcomed misty breeze from the nearby ocean spritzed his face. To his right, the towering palm trees that had always looked so fake to him (and more or less were) were out beyond the table in the near-empty parking lot. It was Monday, and most people had actual jobs. Although, then again, this was Malibu, so maybe not.
Across that table was the skinny and stunning-at-sixty-something Jayne Manning, with perfectly hemmed shoulder-length silky platinum hair, large turtle shell glasses that made her look particularly like Anna Wintour, and a shimmering diamond necklace around her perfect but noticeably pulled-back-through-more-than-one-surgery, tanned neck.
Jayne Manning had been a longtime girlfriend of Gil Gladly’s back in the “early days,” when Gil had first made his way out from Jersey to LA to perform at what would become the world-famous Comedy Claque. The same Comedy Claque stage that would rear such enfant terribles as Robin Williams, George Carlin, Pryor, Seinfeld, and the rest of the gang in the late seventies, early eighties.
Though Gil wasn’t anywhere near their league (and he had conceded this more than once in multiple interviews and in Milt’s documentary), his tenure at the Claque did help him find his way to the talent scouts at Balloon, still in its infancy at the time, and the rest was pop culture history.
Jayne Manning was one of the handful of people that Gil had connected Milt to over the years. Gil had thought Jayne and Milt would get along, especially since Jayne was very interested in old television history, a specialty of Milt’s. Milt didn’t much care for anything after the late nineties, but he loved talking with people about Mr. Ed
and The Beverly Hillbillies, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, George Burns, and the pinnacle of it all, The Twilight Zone.
Milt had at one time written an entire series for the now defunct Grantland about the meta-comedy of Green Acres. He was paid for his time in Groupon Bucks, which he never learned how to use.
It made sense that Jayne Manning would have a preternatural love and understanding of television history, as over the years she had become one of the preeminent producers of television. In fact, she specialized in creating series that were more or less knockoffs of these older programs she so admired, and could mine for good ideas no one else remembered.
Alas, she was an old maid by this point. Ageism being as strong as it was in the industry, Jayne Manning hadn’t had a new show in fifteen years. As she had told Milt more than once over the phone, she hadn’t exactly been trying that hard. She had made her name, her reputation, and—most importantly, as she had put it—her money. She didn’t need much more than that.
This get-together at the Malibu outdoor café would make for the first face-to-face between Milt and Jayne, despite their having conversed on and off for the better part of the last three years via phone and email.
Jayne had been at the premiere the day before and Milt pretended to remember meeting her after she claimed to have come up to him after the screening when everyone was hugging and slapping him on the shoulder and shaking hands with him, telling Milt what a great job he’d done.
The fact that Jayne Manning had claimed to have come up to him after the screening, something he had blacked-out on, made Milt once again ponder over whether or not he’d met up with Jessica Chen at the screening…if she had been there at all.
It didn’t matter, though. He was here, having let Frankly sleep it off back at Gabe’s. Milt had taken a Lyft, and it hadn’t been cheap. But there was no way he was going to miss meeting up with the one and only Jayne Manning, has-been at this point or no, particularly after all of the good will he’d created over the years of correspondence.
Sure, one would have thought that someone with the kind of money Jayne was always bragging about could deign to come to him, but as with most Malibu and Calabasas folkle, she wasn’t about to leave her ultraglamorous, ultra-glorious, ultra-gorgeous fortress of solitude, and certainly not for someone like Milton Siegel. She may have been a has-been, but he was a not-yet at best and a never-was at worst.
Jayne was talking about how much she understood why Milt had left LA. The traffic, the terrible people, the traffic. She herself had been a New York gal for so long and never thought she’d move out to and live in “HelLA.” At some point, though, this was where the work was and she had to come out here. She did, about ten years ago, when her career was already more or less finished.
She leaned back in her chair, breathed in deeply, and exhaled deeper still somehow, stretching out her arms as though to hug the sky and the air and the bright-bright golden sun above in the spellbindingly perfect cloudless, turquoise sky. “I mean, what’s so bad about this?” she asked, beaming radiantly.
Milt was still preoccupied with the money he had spent on the Lyft coming out here (and the money he would have to spend getting back to Gabe’s place, nearly forty-five fucking minutes away). He justified it in his mind as something he had to do, a meeting he had to take with a powerful woman who could maybe in some small way make his life slightly better.
And he was preoccupied with just how drunk he had been the day before at the fucking screening!
He had earlier in the morning hit up a few people who he knew had been there to see how bad he had been, find out if he had said anything strange in any of the video interviews and shit he had taken a part in. Typical press people were one thing, not that there had been more than one or two there, but he was genuinely nervous about the amateur YouTuber types who were always haunting these kinds of geek events and shoving their phones in your face, recording you TMZ-style without any kind of fact checkers or editors, accountability or sense of responsibility, aside from getting what they could to go viral. Why would they bother getting you to sign a release to use the footage? It was for “online” and so all responsibility went pffffftttt!
Everyone he called said he was fine. They didn’t really notice anything, they’d said. Which worried Milt a little, because this response seemed somewhat placating. He had obviously been pretty damn tipsy at the thing, so they should have noticed something. But it was LA, and this was one of life’s many clichés that existed because they were true. No one in LA/Hollywood really noticed anything about anyone else. It was the capital of self-obsession.
Which in this case had been a good thing.
Milt had gotten a text message back from Adam-Anthony Andrews saying that, yeah, people could tell Milt had “had a few,” but they were cool with it because it was just as clear Milt was “having a good time” and “enjoying the success of the screening” and “deserved to be a little ‘giddy.’”
Meanwhile, Jayne Manning prattled on and on across from him, talking about what she thought of the movie, and how it was good but still needed a few tweaks, and how she and all of their old friends always found it so funny the way Gil Gladly had been the one person alive to “make a career out of having a severe stutter.”
And how she continued to get such a kick out of watching Gil, after KidTalk and his other smaller programs and such, making such a big deal out of said stutter in order to get more press for himself and to keep himself seeming relevant whenever he couldn’t land any “real” work.
And how she remembered in particular that one Inside Edition segment on Gil in the late nineties when he was talking about what a “challenge” it was to have his stutter. “I just can’t stop thinking about him gazing out the window in his house, looking past the curtains and, I guess, contemplating his life and his stutter, I suppose.…” Then Jayne burst out laughing, falling forward onto the table and pounding the table with her long, perfectly manicured fingers in a fist, her two loose diamond bracelets jangling.
Being “not hungover” but still preoccupied by money woes and how he had been the day before at the screening, and whom he had met and not met, and if there was anything weird with him online now during any interviews he had done while so completely fucking stupidly sickeningly blotto, he felt slightly uncomfortable that Jayne Manning was relentlessly unburdening herself about all these emotions she had about her former boyfriend, who also happened to be the whole reason the two of them were meeting here right at this moment.
Gil’s marriage came up. Gil had married his wife Mandy only a few years after he had left the East Coast and he and Jayne had broken up.
Again, Milt was flabbergasted that Jayne could be so forthright not only about her conflicted feelings about this but also the fact that she felt so confident saying, “Mandy must be one of the strongest people in the world to put up with all of Gil’s stuff,” and, “If it hadn’t been for Mandy, Gil never would have made it this far,” and, “He needed someone there to hold his hand and keep him going through all of this. Some of that even came up in your documentary during your interviews with her!”
It made Milt feel weird to hear it so bluntly from someone who was supposed to be a close, longtime friend of Gil’s, but she was right. Mandy had talked in the film, and more so in the full interview Milt had conducted with her, about how she was the one who had to keep Gil on track during his tougher periods and still kept him understanding that everything would be okay and that the world wasn’t “out to get him” and wasn’t all laughing behind his back about his stutter or his lack of on-camera work over the past few years or whatever it was.
Gil Gladly was very lucky to have Mandy as his wife. And yet why bring it up like this at the table now? And in a way that seemed less informative than defensive? Or maybe even aggressive?
Then the conversation really took an uncomfortable turn when Jayne brought up Gil Gladly’s infamous kid.
“I understand why he wouldn’t have wante
d you to bring it up in the doc,” Jayne said with a yawn that she covered with her jangling, braceleted hand. “But if you’re going to show the full story of the man, you as the director must figure out some way to work it in.”
Milt hadn’t thought it was really his or anyone else’s business what had happened with Gil Gladly’s son. It was similar to how they had only barely scratched the surface about Gil’s worsening heart condition in the doc. There were some things that clearly belonged in there, and some stuff that clearly did not, that were more private affairs. In the end, yet again, Gil basically paid for the goddamn thing, so he was in charge. Milt didn’t want to argue with that or rock the boat. He felt lucky just to be there.
Yes, there was a series of revolving rumors about Gil Gladly’s son, who had mysteriously died under strange circumstances no one really knew about back in the late nineties, back when things like that could more easily get swept under the rug and forgotten before 2007 arrived and brought with it the electronic panopticon of social media and blog dominance of the private lives of famous and even semi-famous people like Gil Gladly.
The whole world is watching!
Gil hadn’t wanted anything about his son in the doc, he didn’t want to talk about it during any of the interviews Milt conducted with him, and that was that, Mattress Man.
Yet, here was Jayne Manning, ready to spill some beans, with Milt wanting to hear none of it…when he was saved by the vibration once more. Milt pulled out his phone, checked who it was, and immediately shot up out of his chair.
“Sorry, Jayne, one sec,” Milt said. “I hate when people do this kind of thing, but I gotta take this real quick. We’re doing this huge event in Chicago and the people who have been helping us put it on are, uh, not very helpful.”
Selling Nostalgia Page 19
