by Howie Mandel
I’d like to dedicate this book to
Terry, Jackie, Alex, Riley, Al, Evy, and Steve … the Mandels.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
IN COMEDY NOBODY CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM
ONE WELCOME TO ME
TWO OCD AND ME
THREE A SENSE OF HUMOR
FOUR YUK YUK’S
FIVE I WILL SUPPORT HER WITH A RUBBER GLOVE
SIX A DRAMATIC TURN OF EVENTS
SEVEN UH-OH
EIGHT HOWIE LOU’S A FRIEND
NINE ANOTHER DAY AT THE ORIFICE
TEN THE LITMUS TEST
ELEVEN THE FIVE-MILE RADIUS
ELEVEN AND ONE-HALF UH-OH, IT’S WORSE
TWELVE SHIT HAPPENS
THIRTEEN STAND-UP AND BE COUNTED
FOURTEEN HERE’S THE DEAL
EPILOGUE
GOODBYE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was devastated. I was humiliated. And I was probably finished, both professionally and personally. Those thoughts were racing around my head just minutes after doing Howard Stern’s radio show.
This is not a joke, nor did it feel funny. It was sometime in the late 1990s, and I was in the middle of a national press tour. Either I was promoting my dream come true, a nationally syndicated daytime talk show, The Howie Mandel Show, or it might have been right on the heels of its cancellation, when I wanted people to know I was still out there, hopefully funny, and available for work. I can’t remember the date or exactly what happened, but I will never forget my feelings.
I had been in the business for twenty years as a stand-up comedian, actor, and now host, so I pretty much knew what to expect from these interviews. Most people ask the same soft-ball questions.
But Howard Stern is a different animal. His show is about entertainment and controversy, sometimes at the expense of his guests. Even Steven Spielberg might have to sit between two midgets and a hooker and participate in Howard’s circus while he’s trying to plug his Holocaust movie. You must bring your A-game and be prepared to roll with whatever is thrown your way.
Howard Stern’s setup is unlike any other. Normally, you just sit face-to-face with the host and answer questions and focus on being informative and entertaining. But on Howard’s show, anyone can chime in at any time from anyplace in the room. Robin, a lovely young lady who has been his sidekick since he started in radio, sits in a glass booth off to the side. Fred, a longtime staple of Stern’s show, usually sits someplace behind you. At that time, Jackie the Joke Man, who either provided comedic input verbally or passed along material to Howard, was also there. This was the regular irregularity of this show. Now add to this a guest whose name I cannot remember. I would have preferred two midgets and a hooker, because this interview would prove to be far more dangerous. It was tough enough as it was because of Howard’s setup.
The mystery guest was wearing a T-shirt and loosely fitting sweatpants. Howard was playing a game where listeners had to guess this guest’s special talent. I immediately became a radio show contestant, and I too had to join the guessing game. Being able to see him wasn’t an advantage.
After many, many calls and repeated clues from Howard, nobody had guessed correctly. Finally, Howard revealed this guy’s special talent. The man stood up, loosened his sweatpants, and dropped them to his knees. It was like going to a show where the curtain is dropped and the main attraction is revealed. He had a huge penis, the likes of which I have never seen.
I don’t know how to describe what I saw. You hear of men with large penises. The best way to describe this was a large penis with a small man on the end.
With Howard calling the play-by-play, the guy began doing tricks with his member. He wrapped his penis around his leg clockwise and tied it into something of a knot. This guy was an amazing talent. I have no idea where he is today, but he’s probably huge—not as far as success goes, but wherever he is, he’s huge.
The whole event was so Howard. He presents the biggest, craziest penis ever seen—on radio.
I was awash with different emotions. The first was jealousy. That was followed quickly by discomfort. I’m not a homophobe, but there is nothing more disconcerting than a man sitting next to you playing with his penis. I was supposed to be there promoting myself, but I felt as though I were sitting on a two a.m. train back to Brooklyn—not that I’ve been on a two a.m. train to Brooklyn, nor would I expect the man next to me to be playing with his penis, but I don’t have any other point of reference for this experience.
When the penis manipulator finished his tricks, Howard said goodbye. The guy zipped up and headed toward the door. As a little boy, I had been taught to wash my hands after going to the bathroom, even if I had touched nothing but my own penis. This guy I had been sitting next to didn’t piss, but I promise you he touched his penis. Wait, I’m thinking, where are the hand wipes? As any person would, he grabbed the knob, pulled the door open, and was gone. He might have been gone, but in my mind, there was so much more of him still in the room than needed to be.
Now that he had left, it was my time to shine. My job would be to chime in from time to time with some witty repartee. That being said, I don’t believe my repartee was witty, if even existent. My entire focus was on that doorknob that I knew I would have to handle.
As Howard went on, I felt like Charlie Brown in Peanuts when the teacher speaks and all Charlie hears is “Waw, waw, waw.” All I could think about was how I was going to get through the door without touching the knob.
The next thing I seem to remember hearing is Howard thanking me for stopping by. In fact, if you listen to a tape of the broadcast, it may not be anything like this. I’m just telling you what was going on in my head.
After the goodbyes and thank-yous, I headed toward the door. When I reached the threshold, I very casually, and as naturally as I could, asked, “Can somebody open the door for me? I don’t want to touch the knob because the guy had his penis all over his hands, and his hands touched the door.” I didn’t think it would be an issue.
But Howard wanted me to open the door myself.
I didn’t want to. He had touched his penis and then he touched the doorknob.
This back-and-forth lasted through the commercial break, and soon we were back live on the air. Howard announced that Howie Mandel wouldn’t touch the doorknob because it had penis residue on it, and the drama escalated.
I stood there for what seemed like an eternity. Though I wasn’t physically trapped, I was mentally trapped. At this moment, nothing else existed for me but this problem. I had no awareness that this back-and-forth was being broadcast nationally. I was making no effort to be funny or entertaining. I just wanted to get out of that room, so I lifted the veil of funny and went to honesty.
I said something to the effect of: “The joke is over, I cannot touch this door. As much as I imagine this is entertaining, this is real. It’s something that I cope with and talk to a therapist about. It’s a real issue, and it’s part of a bigger condition called OCD. Obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
That admission was a major event in my life. The fact that I had told Howard Stern that I have a serious mental issue and see a therapist for it may not seem like anything to you, the reader, but this was a big hammer that landed for me. It was like revealing my darkest secret.
I remember feeling heart palpitations, a shortness of breath, and an anxiety attack coming on, which is why my memory of the story is somewhat clouded. I could not touch that doorknob. Truthfully, I don’t know what Howard was saying. I do know that I told him what I was suffering from was real. I do know that I was panicked. I do know that I wasn’t in the mode to entertain. And I do know that it didn’t feel good.
As serious as all this was to me, I’m sure it meant
nothing to him. I don’t believe that anybody in the room felt they were witnessing something of great consequence. Even so, many times when I’m being serious like that, people don’t realize that I am being serious. In comedy, nobody can hear you scream.
Finally, somebody opened the door and let me out of the studio. As the door closed behind me, a real sense of devastation came over me. If there is a palpable feeling to devastation, that was it. I had just told the world that I’m a nutcase.
My mind was racing. What are the consequences of talking about this? First and foremost, I said something that was personally embarrassing and would be embarrassing to my wife and children, who have no interest in being in the public eye, least of all as a relative to a mental case. Are people not going to hire me? Every show costs millions of dollars and employs hundreds of people. Why would the producers risk putting someone at the helm who has mental issues?
I know this sounds crazy—no pun intended—but you have to realize that I was born in 1955 in Toronto, Canada, and having mental health issues and going to a psychiatrist was not the norm. Society has always attached a stigma to mental health issues, and I’m very much a part of that culture. Outwardly, I seemed to be striving and functioning, but my mental health was not something I talked about publicly. It was certainly not something I talked about on a comedy radio show. If I was going to discuss such a serious subject, it would be with my family, my friends, or my therapist. And maybe if I talked about it publicly, I would do it eleven years later in a book. But not on The Howard Stern Show.
I was truly devastated. I walked down the hall, and it was very dark. It probably wasn’t, but it felt dark. Then I got into the elevator. The door closed, and it was even darker. The elevator went down, which was such a great metaphor for how I was feeling. In my mind, everybody was calling everybody else and saying, “Did you hear Howard’s show? Howie Mandel’s a mental case.” My kids were already being ridiculed. My wife was holed up in the house. At USA Today, they were stopping the presses. CNN had a breaking news flash. The world was coming to a halt to absorb this news.
I walked out of the elevator and through the front door onto the street into a teeming mass of humanity known as Manhattan. Even though I felt I was standing amidst millions of people, I had never felt more alone. My head was hung. I didn’t want to make eye contact with anyone.
I heard a voice. I kept looking down at the sidewalk, and I saw a pair of feet in my periphery. A man’s voice said, “You’re Howie Mandel.”
My heart sank. I thought, This is it. This is the precipice of devastation, and I’m about to go over it. Without looking up, I revealed shamefully, “Yep.”
“I just heard you on Howard,” he said excitedly.
“You did …”
“Are you really a germaphobe?”
This random guy on the streets of New York was about to begin the public ridiculing that I had brought upon myself. “Yes,” I mumbled.
“And you’ve got OCD …,” he continued.
And now I was descending closer to hell than I ever imagined. Running into traffic to get away from this guy was starting to look like the only option. “Yes, I do,” I confided.
There was a long pause. And then came the two most dramatic words that I have ever heard. They were the words that changed my life and probably are the reason I am writing this book. He said, “Me too.”
He walked away and left me standing with those two words in my head. That was the first time I realized that there was at least one other person who shared my pain. I’ve always had people around me who help me and take care of me, but they don’t share in my personal misery. Nobody is inside my head. But there was one guy on the streets of Manhattan who shared what I’m feeling. I was not alone.
The walk out of Howard’s studio, down that hall and into the elevator, and onto the streets of Manhattan was one of the darkest trips of my life, because I didn’t know what I had done or what would happen next. But in the days, weeks, months, and years after that guy said, “Me too,” I found there were countless others. People contacted me to tell me they have OCD and that they’re working through it in therapy. They would ask me to tape a message to their son so he knew that he wasn’t alone. They would thank me for talking about OCD publicly. As much comfort as I feel in knowing that I’m not alone, they took comfort in knowing that there is somebody else who suffers as they do.
Without knowing it, I had done myself a service. To date, I’m not aware that revealing my OCD or discussing it has ever cost me a job. OCD has cost me peace in my own head, which it does constantly. There’s nothing I can do about that—though talking about it and writing about it is a deterrent from sitting quietly and letting myself sink into that hole.
It was the one moment when I publicly revealed the most intimate part of who I am. In this business, people always think they know you. In my career, this feeling has been fractured because my persona has always been so different. I’ve been the wacky guy who put the rubber glove on his head as a comedian. I’ve been the voice on Bobby’s World to five-year-olds and their parents, who weren’t the same people who knew me from comedy. I’ve been an upstart intern on St. Elsewhere, which was a highly acclaimed prime-time drama in the 1980s. I’ve been the empathetic game-show host on Deal or No Deal and the prankster on Howie Do It. But as big a fan as you might be of any of those personas, each one contains only a small piece of me. The closest to who I am each and every day is the person who couldn’t escape from Howard Stern’s studio.
November 29, 1955. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Mount Sinai Hospital. Howard Michael Mandel was born to Albert and Evelyn Mandel. I have absolutely no recollection of my infancy, but I’m told I was the happiest, most idyllic child, not to mention the cleanest child known to man.
As excited as my mother must have been about having me, she tells me that she felt like a child herself. She was just twenty-three, and my father was twenty-nine. She was really nervous about her baby boy and wanted to protect him from the evils of the world at that time—the Commies, nuclear proliferation, and, most important, the invasion of germs. Whenever somebody came over to see her baby, God forbid they should touch little Howard’s teeny fingers. As soon as they left, she would take me into the bathroom and scrub my hands with soap and water. If somebody sniffled and touched my crib, my mother would mark the spot in her mind. She would remember that it was two inches to the left of the headboard, and again, as soon as that person left the room, she would hit that spot with the Lysol, putting me back in my sterile environment.
You might think this was over the top, but the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. The first and all recollections I have of visiting my grandparents on my mother’s side were of approaching the house and seeing my “bubbie” outside the front door on her hands and knees, waxing the concrete veranda. Waxing. Concrete. Outside. There was no way she was going to allow anyone to track filth into her home. She believed that this was the first line of defense toward maintaining a safe environment—that is, if you ignored the fact that it was very easy to slip and break your neck before you rang the doorbell. Let’s weigh the odds here: no dirt on your feet, or a broken neck. She seemed to lean in favor of no dirt on the feet.
Once you were inside, not much changed. As in many homes in the Northeast and Midwest, inside the door there was a tray where you could remove your boots so you didn’t track mud and snow into the house. I know there was a boot tray, but my grandmother’s was covered in newspaper, because God forbid the boots should touch the tray. In fact, I don’t think I ever touched any of the furniture or carpets in her house because it was all covered with plastic. Everything was hermetically sealed in its place.
So when I now see a picture of me as an infant, posed on a chair in my living room and separated from that chair by a sheet of plastic, it seems to make some sense.
I started my life with the cleanest of slates, so to speak. Everything went swimmingly well for Howard for those first two and a half years in
what was metaphorically a perfectly chlorinated pool. But then comes my first memory of infancy. I may not be accurately depicting the facts, but I promise you I’m accurately depicting my memory.
In the last week of October 1957, my mother disappeared. My dad went off to work during the day, driving a cab, and a strange woman showed up at the house to take care of me.
I think her name was Mrs. Weatherburn. I can’t remember her name as accurately as I can remember the fact that she wore dentures. I didn’t know what dentures were at the time, which made things worse. In addition to being terrorized by the fact that my mother was gone, I had to deal with an old woman who would go into our bathroom in the morning, put her fingers in her mouth, rip out all her teeth in one piece, brush them in front of me, and then put them back into her face.
I felt as if I were living in a horror movie. You have no idea how scared I was. Every day after my father went to work, I was left alone with a lady who ripped out her teeth. All I wanted was my mommy. But Mommy had gone away. I felt like a small, human Jewish Bambi. In the span of seven days, I went from gleefully happy to utterly miserable.
At the end of the week, my dad informed me that we were going to pick up “the baby.” I remember this as clearly as yesterday. I can tell you honestly I had no idea what “the baby” meant. He seemed excited about “the baby.” He could have said we were picking up a lemur. It would have meant the same thing to me.
I want to clarify what “the baby” was. In the fifties, when women were pregnant and ready to give birth, they checked into the hospital for a week. At that time, children were not welcome as visitors in the maternity ward, which is why I didn’t see my mother for a week. All this makes sense to me now, but it didn’t then.
We drove to Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto. I hadn’t been there in almost two years, and I didn’t recognize the place. It was a cold, gray, drizzly day. We parked in the back of the building, and my dad disappeared inside to get “the baby.”
