by Howie Mandel
My agent called, and The Tonight Show booked me for the following week with Joan as the host. Though I was never going to be on the show with Johnny Carson, it was still The Tonight Show. It was worth coming so close to death and risking my life to perform in front of Joan Rivers.
Let me explain how an appearance on The Tonight Show worked. Comics would come onstage and perform. If they were good, they would be invited back. But the real key to success was being asked by Johnny to join him on the couch after your performance. Making it to the couch was the brass ring.
Luck happened to be on my side. Joan booked me as one of the stars of the hit NBC show St. Elsewhere. So rather than being introduced and doing my stand-up act, I would go directly to the couch. I approached it as I would doing stand-up. I put together the routine that I wanted to do. In a preinter-view, I gave cues to Joan in the form of questions that would trigger these comedy pieces. By her asking me how I was, I could launch into my prostate exam routine directly from my stand-up act.
When I arrived at the NBC Studios in Burbank, I felt as though I had climbed a mountain and reached the pinnacle of my career. It was the scariest, most exciting feeling on earth. I thought that every eye in America would be on me at eleven-thirty that night. This was The Tonight Show, the Ed Sullivan Show of our time. I had heard stories about Elvis and the Beatles performing on Ed Sullivan. This was the night that Howie Mandel was going to be on The Tonight Show. In my mind, however I wore my hair that night, that’s how everybody would be wearing it next week.
I went on, and my seated performance did as well as any of my stand-ups. Afterward, I felt that if nothing else happened in my career, I had made it. From that night forward, when I told people I was a comedian and they asked me if I had been on The Tonight Show, I could say, “Yes.” I was a comedian.
But it got better. The next day, I received a call from The Tonight Show. Johnny had watched me and wanted me to come back when he was there. I could not believe this was happening. What a twist of fate. Just a few months earlier, I had been told I would never be on the show, but I had made it happen. Now I would be on twice in three weeks—and the second time with the Johnny Carson.
I had set my precedent. Even though it was with Johnny, I was still going to do my comedy from the couch. But there was a protocol. I had to go over everything I was going to do so there were no surprises. I called Jim McCawley and told him all the bits I had planned—except one. I knew he would not let me do it if I told him. I was sure it would either make me or break me on The Tonight Show. If it did break me, at least I was going down on the biggest forum in comedy.
The big night arrived. Standing backstage, just hearing Johnny Carson’s voice saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, Howie Mandel,” was like an out-of-body experience. I made my way to the couch and was mesmerized by the image of Johnny. He had been a staple in my house since childhood. Now here he was without the frame of a TV set around him. He asked me a question. I answered. Big laugh. He asked me a second of the planned questions. Bigger laugh. This continued throughout our preset routine. And now the moment of truth.
I had reached break point. I was ready to take the chance. I could hear what would become the Nike catchphrase screaming in my head: Just Do It!
I asked Johnny if he liked 3-D movies. He seemed to be taken aback, as if to say, “Where is this going?” Having no choice, he replied that he did. I pulled out a pair of those silly 3-D cardboard glasses and actually asked Johnny Carson, the king of late-night comedy, to put them on. He did.
Next, I pulled out a small stuffed animal. I could only imagine the horror on Jim McCawley’s face as he was watching the monitor backstage. And then with reckless abandon, I threw it at Johnny’s face. It hit him right between the eyes. “Doesn’t it look like it’s coming right at you?” I said.
His response seemed to take an eternity. Finally … he sat back in his seat and just started laughing. The audience joined him. I had arrived.
I went on to appear on twenty-one episodes with Johnny Carson. Then came the day I probably went too far.
I was in the middle of shooting a Blake Edwards movie entitled A Fine Mess. Jim McCawley called me on the set three hours before The Tonight Show taped and said that Sammy Davis Jr., the lead guest, had backed out for health reasons. Jim, who had now become a friend of mine, told me he was really in a jam and begged me to come on the show.
“I’ll be honest with you,” I told Jim. “I’m shooting a movie. I’ve got absolutely nothing.”
I knew how they operated. They needed a set routine. The last time there had been a surprise was probably when I whipped the stuffed animal at Johnny. I myself was also pretty meticulous about my television appearances. I told Jim that I didn’t have time to come up with seven minutes of good material, run it by him, and prepare to perform it all in the next three hours.
Finally, I relented. “Jim, I will do it, but here’s the deal,” I said. “I’ll try to come up with something, but I won’t have time to go over it with you. Are you okay with that?”
He said that he was. I hung up the phone and thought, Now what? I started wandering around the studio, searching for ideas. I ended up in the art department, where I spotted a thirty-foot-long saber-toothed tiger made of plaster. I asked one of the guys how much it would cost to put it on a dolly and ship it to NBC in Burbank.
I negotiated with the guy and settled on $500. I wasn’t even sure why I was asking for the saber-toothed tiger. I seemed to be an audience to my own life.
For whatever reason, my attention was then drawn to the left-hand corner of the room, where there was a giant carrot. I pointed to the carrot—and I heard myself say, as though I believed it was a great idea, “Is there any way you could tie the carrot on top of the saber-toothed tiger?” The guy looked at me strangely, nodded, and proceeded with the help of two other men to tie the carrot on top of the tiger. To this day, I have no idea why I wanted this.
I then called Jim McCawley and told him there was something coming and they needed to accept delivery. He didn’t ask what it was, and I didn’t tell him. He agreed and said, “This is going to be great, thank you so much, Howie.”
A few hours later, I’m standing behind the curtain at The Tonight Show, ready to go on. The guy who opened the curtain had become my friend over my twenty-one previous appearances. He was always incredibly warm and friendly. This time he’s just looking at me and at the giant saber-toothed tiger with a carrot tied on top as if I’m an idiot. I begin to feel nauseated. As I hear the band play, I start to lose confidence. This is a bad place to lose confidence. It’s like being at the deep end of the pool, putting your foot out, and losing your balance before you realize you can’t swim.
And then I hear Johnny say, “Ladies and gentlemen, the always funny Howie Mandel.” I’ve always been very superstitious. I believe you should never utter anything out loud about things you have no control over, or circumstances will turn against you. It drives everyone around me crazy. When I’m driving somewhere and the passenger says, “Wow, the freeway is pretty clear,” I snap at the person to shut up for fear I’m about to hit a traffic jam. During a flight, if someone comments, “This is a smooth flight,” then we are surely going to experience extreme turbulence. So now I think, Why did he say “always funny”?
The curtain opens, and the audience roars. I can feel the love. I come out pulling a rope attached to a dolly holding the giant saber-toothed tiger. People are laughing and applauding.
When I reach the platform where Johnny’s desk is, the tiger’s two large front paws won’t go up onto the riser. I try to lift the head and pull the tiger toward me, but I can’t budge it. I turn to Ed McMahon. “Ed, can you give me a hand?”
This was about forty seconds after I heard “the always funny Howie Mandel.” Forty seconds doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but in television it’s a lifetime. The applause had died down, and all I could hear were murmurs.
Ed stands up. “What do you want me to do?”
“You lift and I’ll push,” I say. I walk around the back and try to push the tiger onto the riser as Ed pulls. One paw clears the lip of the riser, but not the entire tiger.
I turn to Doc Severinsen and say, “Can you help push?” Doc looks at me strangely, puts down his trumpet, and walks across the stage to the tiger.
So now Doc and I push and Ed pulls. The saber-toothed tiger with the carrot on its back finally lurches up onto the riser, coming to rest directly in front of Johnny, blocking the camera’s view of him. Through the earpieces the cameramen are wearing, I can hear the control room barking instructions: “Camera two, camera two, go left.” For twenty-five years, they had used the same camera angles, but because I’m there with the saber-toothed tiger and a carrot, the cameras now have to be moved. Things are happening that have never happened before.
Doc and I keep pushing the tiger and Ed keeps pulling. By now I’m sweating. Ed is sweating. Doc is sweating. The entire riser is completely blocked by the thirty-foot tiger. Finally, after about two minutes of maneuvering and sweating in total silence, the tiger is where I believe it should be. Ed sits down, and Doc returns to his place with the band.
I walk around the back of the tiger and sit in the seat next to Johnny, out of breath and covered in sweat. Johnny is just sitting there, tapping his pencil. It’s quiet. He looks at me, and I look at him. He says, “Well …”
“Well, what?” I reply.
Johnny gestures at this monstrosity sitting in front of him. I have not felt this kind of discomfort in front of an audience since I opened for Diana Ross. Johnny has just asked me, after what seemed like an eternity of horrible silence, to explain what this was. I am fully committed. There’s no turning back, so my answer to Johnny is this:
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I’ll never forget the look on Johnny’s face. I thought that was the joke. I truly believed it would be funny to go so far out of my way to set something up and have the payoff be absolutely nothing. That night, I learned that some things look better on paper than when they are actually executed. I told him I would be willing to talk about anything else—family, career, health—but please, I did not want to discuss this, referring to the saber-toothed chaos filling the screens of America’s television sets.
After very few uncomfortable exchanges, he turns to the camera and says, “All right, we’ll be back with more right after this.”
The band plays, and the show goes to commercial. Stagehands hurry out onstage and remove the giant saber-toothed tiger with the carrot on its back. There is no eye contact between Johnny and me—or me and anyone else, for that matter. We come back from commercial. Remember, right before the commercial Johnny had said that he would be right back with more. Johnny immediately says, “Our next guest is the lovely Connie Stevens,” or whoever it was. I guess he didn’t mean more of me.
That was that. I was cut off. Later, I was informed by Jim McCawley that I had made Johnny very uncomfortable. I was never invited to do The Tonight Show with him again. I continued to appear with Joan Rivers and Garry Shandling when they guest hosted, but never again with Johnny. You know what? I get it. Johnny was the best there has ever been, and he didn’t need to feel uncomfortable or be thrown off his game by Howie Mandel arriving with a saber-toothed tiger and a giant carrot.
Looking back, to be honest with you, I realize I did this for the reason I do a lot of things. I did it on impulse, without knowing what was going to happen next. Just like I’m ending this chapter impulsively, without knowing where this book is going next.
For my entire life, my impulsive behavior has known no boundaries—that is, up until now. My tomfoolery—a word I haven’t heard since 1962. You know what? Let’s change that to monkeyshines. No, make that high jinks. Forget it. My wife has mandated that the stuff I do should not be done within a five-mile radius of where we live.
I cannot tell you in how many places in my neighborhood I’m considered persona non grata. Most of this starts out innocently enough and just ends up evolving into a problem.
If you have ever seen me in public, you will notice I carry a backpack. It’s armed with hidden camera equipment. If I get the urge to document my impulsive behavior, I could, number one, entertain myself later, and number two, possibly convince a broadcaster to air these gems on various shows. Many a time you might have seen one on Regis or as a “Hidden Howie” piece on The Tonight Show. I say “many a time,” but the truth is that most of the time they were just for my personal entertainment, never to air.
Here’s an example.
It was Halloween, and I wandered into a makeshift costume store. On an impulse, I found the manager, told him who I was, convinced him to let me work behind the counter. I told him that if I was able to capture something with my hidden camera, he could possibly watch it on The Tonight Show. This never made it on the air, but if the manager happens to be reading this book and is interested in seeing what we actually captured, come on over to my house. I take that back. My wife is right behind me as I write this and she said, “No, you can’t come over.”
My first customer was a woman. She asked for a bird costume. I told her to follow me and took her to the back of the store to a large display area.
“What I need you to do is turn around, pull down your pants, pull down your underpants, and bend over,” I instructed.
She looked at me as if I were out of my mind. “What are you saying?” she asked.
“What did you ask for?”
“I asked for a bird costume.”
“Right, so I need for you to pull down your pants and underpants and bend over,” I repeated.
“What are you going to do?”
“Well, I will start with your rear and glue feathers on you,” I said very earnestly.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. She stared hard at me. “Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“Are you Howie Mandel?”
“No, I’m not,” I replied. “I work here. Just pull down your pants and let me put feathers on you.”
She stared at me, then opened her mouth, and the words that followed were indescribably devastating. “You are Howie Mandel,” she insisted. “And I am your daughter Riley’s teacher, and you have a parent-teacher conference tonight.”
I ripped off my hidden camera glasses and thought, Oh, my God, I just told my daughter’s teacher to bend over so I could stick feathers on her ass. I pleaded: “I’m so sorry, I was just trying to do something for The Tonight Show. Please, I apologize. I went too far.”
The teacher seemed to accept my apology, but I still had to tell my wife. I went home and explained the situation to Terry. Enough was enough. She instituted a five-mile radius: no hidden camera pieces, pranks, or practical jokes within five miles of our home.
She never said anything about in the home. There were times that my practical jokes weren’t impulsive or funny. Sometimes they were meant to be just practical.
One day when my oldest daughter, Jackie, was just six years old, I took her to a sporting goods store to buy some floaties. She happened to see the camping section and began crawling in and out of the tents. She asked what they were for, and I explained what camping was.
“Daddy, Daddy, I want to go camping with you,” she begged. “Please, please, can we go camping?”
When a little girl looks up at you with those saucer eyes, there’s no denying her. I agreed to take her camping someday. We bought the floaties and the tent and left. I thought she would think I was a great dad because I had bought a tent and promised to take her camping. Little did I realize that I would have to follow through.
For weeks, she kept asking me when we were going camping. Now, if you know me or you’ve been paying attention so far, you know that for me, roughing it is checking into a hotel without twenty-four-hour room service. I have enough trouble touching a doorknob in public, much less a piece of wood a squirrel has pissed on.
Finally, I came up with what
I thought was a brilliant idea. I told her she could help me set up the tent in the backyard and that night we would go camping … in the yard. This way we would be camping, and I could use my own toilet. She was so excited, and I had found a good alternative to roughing it in the wilderness.
We went out into the backyard to build the tent together. It was father-daughter bonding like you’ve never seen. She was so proud of me. It was four poles and a piece of cloth, but as a Jew, I felt I had really constructed something.
Jackie’s bedtime was eight o’clock, which was just after dark. She put on her pajamas. I took a flashlight and a little radio to the tent, and we crawled into our sleeping bags. We started talking about camping. She was mesmerized by everything I had to say for about six minutes, and then she fell asleep at 8:06 p.m.
Now I was lying there quietly in the dark in my backyard. It was a little cold, and honestly, now that she was asleep, it was not fun. So at 8:09 p.m. I came up with a plan.
I jostled her and woke her up. Groggily, she looked up at me. “What, Daddy?”
“It’s morning,” I told her.
She looked outside. “It can’t be, it’s still dark.”
“When you’re camping you get up in the morning before the sun rises,” I explained. “That’s how you camp.”
“But I’m really tired,” she said.
“Do you want to go in the house and sleep until the sun comes up?” I asked.
“Okay.”
I carried her into her room and tucked her in bed. I then went down to the backyard, packed up the tent, and came back into the house. I tucked myself into my own bed at about ten-thirty p.m.
In Jackie’s mind, we had spent an entire night in the wilderness. She thought I was such a hero. She never forgets the time I took her camping and woke her up before the crack of dawn. I never told her the truth. There was no joke, but it was very practical. As I write this, I feel tremendously guilty. I know she will read this book, and that is why I’m confessing. But honey, we did go camping. The only difference between your memory and reality is that in your memory, you went out one night and camped. In reality, you went camping for nine and a half minutes. The important thing is that I love you.
