by Howie Mandel
I’m writing this at the end of the day. I’m thrilled to say another day and I didn’t die. But there’s always May 21.
I now realize that neither my career nor my life has been about blazing a trail. I’m just wandering along a path, and every so often shit happens. And I don’t mean shit in a derogatory sense. From the moment I walked onstage at Yuk Yuk’s to the day I moved to Los Angeles to the reading I did for Brandon Tartikoff, I was always cognizant of being in a place I didn’t plan on being.
One of those reflective moments happened in New York in October 1987. I had sold out two shows on the same night at Radio City Music Hall. After the first show, I went up to my dressing room and looked out the window onto Sixth Avenue. I’ll never forget that image. It was unbelievable. Barricades had been set up, and the police were handling traffic control. I was looking at a mass of humanity clogging the streets of midtown Manhattan whose only reason for being there was Howie Mandel. Seven thousand people were pouring out into the street, leaving the first show, as another seven thousand people were trying to get in for my next performance.
Every experience up to that point had been wonderfully and indescribably surreal. Less than a decade and a half earlier, I had been sitting alone in a Howard Johnson’s at one a.m., trying to get a few strangers to laugh at my vagina routine. Now fourteen thousand fans were paying to see me at the storied Radio City Music Hall. Even my personal life seemed surreal. I was now the father of a little girl. It was hard to fathom that the irresponsible carpet salesman who would lie shirtless on the floor and creep out customers was now somebody’s dad.
St. Elsewhere was in the midst of its critical and commercial success, I was doing two hundred sold-out concert dates a year, and I had begun to star in films. I had the opportunity to appear in A Fine Mess, directed and produced by Blake Edwards, the legendary filmmaker of the Pink Panther movies, Victor Victoria, and 10. Though I don’t believe the film made anyone’s top ten list, it was a great experience for me.
One day in a quiet moment, Blake told me a story that touched me in a way I just can’t shake. It was the story of a man who was in his therapist’s office, curled up in the fetal position, in the deepest and darkest of depressions. He had been crying inconsolably for weeks, and every muscle in his body ached with anguish. The therapist was at her wits’ end. She had used every tool in the arsenal of the psychiatric and medical community to rescue this man from the depths of his misery. Cognitive therapy had not worked. Meds had not worked. She was bent on not losing the battle with his living hell. Alas, she was about to recommend the most powerful tool to rescue this man from his agonizing desperation: laughter. Laughter, after all, is the best medicine.
The therapist had read the paper that morning and seen an ad for the circus, which had been in town for two weeks. The last show was that night. The featured act was Socko the Clown. He was renowned for being able to make anyone laugh at any time. No one who witnessed Socko for even a moment could keep from laughing. He was the living embodiment of laughter. She figured if this man could experience even a single moment, he would be pulled back from the brink. What were the chances that she would see the paper on the final night? She was sure luck was on his side. The therapist was thrilled to announce, “I have the solution. I know this will work. Tonight, I will take you to see Socko the Clown.” The man slowly lifted his head and looked up at the therapist. With tears streaming down his cheeks, in the most agonizing voice, he revealed, “I am Socko the Clown.”
This story turned out to be eleven times better than the film. But in Hollywood, you are only as successful as people think you might be, so even before A Fine Mess was released, I was offered a deal at MGM. This yielded my next cinematic treat: Walk Like a Man, a film depicting a boy raised by wolves. I can’t tell you how many endless afternoons director Mel Frank wanted to rehearse with me. He would bring me to his house in Brentwood and have me crawl on all fours. Frustrated with my progress, he had the studio hire a trainer to help my technique.
During my Christmas vacation, MGM sent a trainer to Waikiki, Hawaii, to work with me. Every day at the Sheraton Waikiki when I came up from the pool in the afternoon, this woman would make me run up and down the halls on all fours, forty or fifty times. As embarrassing as it was, I thought, Oh, my God, I’m a movie star.
I thought this must be the Method training that actors went on talk shows to discuss. They would tell stories about how they gained fifty pounds or grew their hair long and didn’t shower for a week to get in character. I was crawling in the hallways to become Bobo the dog-boy.
They hired Christopher Lloyd to play my brother just after Back to the Future was released. They cast Cloris Leach-man to play my mom. Everybody was on board, but it just never felt right to me.
I’ve never been the same since Walk Like a Man. To this day, my back hurts from crawling around on all fours for three months. In one particular scene, Christopher Lloyd was supposed to pull a bone out of my mouth on the count of three. I’ll write it one more time: on the count of three. Not two. As the director got to two, Christopher pulled with all his might. I felt a crazy-ass pain as I heard a snap reverberate throughout my head. If you happen to see the movie today, during the dinner scene when he pulls the bone out of my mouth, it looks as though a piece of meat is flying in the air. That is not meat. That is my front tooth.
After that film, I did Little Monsters with Fred Savage of Wonder Years fame. I lived for three months over a summer in Wilmington, North Carolina, with ninety-degree heat and 90 percent humidity. To make matters worse, I played a monster. I would arrive at four a.m. and undergo five hours of makeup. They adhered latex to every inch of my exposed skin. Now I know what it feels like to be a penis wearing a condom on a hot summer night.
Not every film was as physically demanding. The easiest to date has to be Gremlins. I happened to land the voice of Gizmo. He’s the little fuzzy creature that starts the whole thing. All I had to do was spend a couple of weeks in an air-conditioned sound booth, without any makeup, making ridiculous sounds.
To this day, people will approach me and say, “I loved the Gizmo voice.” I’m not trying to burst their bubble when I tell them that the Gizmo sound is the same sound I use for Bobby in Bobby’s World. Not to drag it down any further, but the Bobby voice is the same sound I used for Skeeter on Muppet Babies. It’s not as if I don’t have a vast array of sounds. I was also Bunsen Honeydoo and Animal on Muppet Babies.
I eventually started to turn down roles. It was so hard for me to relinquish control and sit on set for three months and then wait another six months for an audience reaction. Eventually, film offers stopped coming my way. I can say with near certainty that there will never be a Howie Mandel Film Festival.
By the end of the 1980s, I had sold out comedy concerts, done dramatic acting on a critically acclaimed medical series, and starred in various motion pictures. And now once again, another turn. I was approached by two old friends, Jim Staahl and Jim Fisher, who had a deal at Fox Kids Network. They wanted to develop the Bobby character into a Saturday morning cartoon series.
Up until now, Bobby was a voice I was doing at the foot of my parents’ bed and a vulgar-spewing little boy in my stand-up act. I had no idea how to hone this into a program for kids. Purely out of a lack of ideas, we started talking about things that happened to us in childhood and to our own children. These stories became the background for the show. Bobby’s World was eventually nominated for Emmys, was syndicated worldwide, and became a Happy Meal. Wow, shit happens.
Nobody was more excited about my career than my father. When I was shooting on set, he would fly to L.A. and hang out on the soundstage of St. Elsewhere or any movie I was doing. He also loved being on the road. When I toured, he would fly to my shows. He’d stand in the wings, always laughing no matter how many times he had heard the same routine. If I was featured in a small article in People, he would go into every 7-Eleven and open the magazine to the page with me on it. I felt as though a
ll of it—every performance, my entire career—was just for my dad. I had come a long way from standing at the end of his bed trying to make him giggle.
One day in January 1989, my mother called me in tears. “I think there is something definitely wrong with your father,” she said.
My heart dropped.
My father, who had been a smoker until five years earlier, had a cough that wouldn’t go away, so he went to our family doctor. He got an “uh-oh.” The doctor sent him for a lung X-ray. When my parents called for the results, the doctor asked them to come in for a meeting. They both knew that it was a bad sign if they couldn’t get the results over the phone.
I tried to put on an optimistic face. I told my mom that we didn’t know what the results were and that I would fly in and meet the doctor with them. I got to Toronto the next day and went directly to the doctor’s office.
We were sitting in the waiting room. I excused myself to go to the bathroom. Without my parents knowing, I went into the doctor’s office and told him that I was Albert Mandel’s son. I asked him what he had seen on the X-ray. He said that my father had inoperable lung cancer. The doctor then informed me that my father had no more than one month to live. There couldn’t have been a more dire diagnosis. Those words shook me to my core.
“Okay, I’m going to get down on my knees and beg,” I said to the doctor. “You cannot tell them that he has one month to live.”
“What?” he said.
“You cannot tell them,” I repeated. “Don’t lie, but avoid telling him he’s dying.”
“I don’t believe in that,” he said.
“I do.”
I believe the only thing that can help people through tough times is hope. If they are going to die, they are going to die anyway. They die the moment you tell them, because they lose hope. People always say, “You have to get your affairs in order.” I don’t know what that means. Maybe that’s because I don’t care about material things. What’s important to me is the quality of life right to the end.
I begged the doctor not to tell them. I think the fact that he had seen me on TV playing a doctor helped, because he finally agreed that only if they didn’t ask directly, he would not deliver the death sentence.
I returned to the waiting room. It was the hardest acting I’ve ever had to do. In the face of the worst news I had ever heard in my life, I regained my composure and sat back down next to my parents. They had always been there for me. Now, for the first time in my life, I was trying to be there for them.
They didn’t know I had gone into the doctor’s office. My mom asked what took so long. I told her some lame joke about having a bladder infection because it wouldn’t come out. I made a few more jokes. They were the hardest jokes I have ever made, and they weren’t the least bit funny. I was just trying to act as though I hadn’t heard what I’d just heard.
When the receptionist called my father, we all went into the office where I had just met with the doctor. Very professionally, he clipped my father’s X-rays to the backlit wall. No layman could conclude anything by looking at them.
The doctor measured his words. “How do you feel?” he asked my father, who responded that he was congested. The doctor nodded and took out his prescription pad. “I’m going to prescribe these pills, which may open up your airways,” he said. “If you take this pill, you should feel better.” My mother and father were both too scared of the answer to ask the question. I knew the doctor wouldn’t lie and that if they had asked if it was cancer, he would’ve had to say yes.
The fact that he had told my father to take some pills to help his breathing made all the difference in the world. When my parents walked out of that office, my father had a little hop in his step even though he was coughing and could barely breathe. They had obviously expected the worst and now with no mention of cancer had a glimmer of hope.
We got in the car and drove to Max Milk, a convenience store. My father bought a lottery ticket. Nothing says hope and future like a lottery ticket. We went home. He clearly didn’t feel well, but he hadn’t been given a death sentence.
My feeling is that what you don’t know doesn’t bother you. I’ve never believed more in my life that ignorance is bliss. We all know we are going to die. I don’t need to know when. I don’t need a date. I couldn’t live knowing when I was going to die. There are a lot of people who think it’s better to know all the details, and I respect that. But it seems that everybody should call that for themselves, instead of a doctor making that decision for them.
My father became progressively sicker. Ten days later, he was hospitalized. I took him to the ER and admitted him. They checked him into a room and helped him undress and put on a hospital gown. They gave him a plastic bag for his belongings, sweatpants, shirt, and glasses. To this day, I have that bag on a shelf in my bedroom.
My mom and I went home that night from the hospital, and I told her the prognosis. I’m pretty sure that she already knew, but not having heard it from the doctor, she hadn’t been forced to face it.
Lung cancer is a cruel disease, and for the next three weeks, I witnessed the most harrowing things happen to my father. It was like watching somebody slowly drown or choke to death. I can’t think of anything more horrific. I was in his room at his bedside, and I watched him die. It was horrible. There aren’t words to describe that feeling.
My father was gone, and it was so hard to fathom that I would never see my dad again. I now believe in the afterlife, but I didn’t up until that moment. Even on a scientific level, energy cannot be destroyed, it can only change form. There is no more tactile an energy than the life force.
I don’t know if you’ve ever sat in a quiet room at a desk doing work and felt that somebody was watching you. There wasn’t a noise, you just had a sense, and I’m not talking about sound or sight. You turn around and there is a person there. You didn’t hear or smell that person; you just felt his life energy.
When my father was pronounced dead, I had a feeling that he was still there. He wasn’t in his body, but he was in the room. Four or five minutes had passed. The nurses were disconnecting various medical machines from the body. Impulsively, for reasons I can’t explain, I screamed, “Dad, please, Dad!” at some entity I felt in the room. I sensed that energy come back down into his body, and then he took one more huge gasp and released. Everyone in the room was taken aback, because he had been pronounced dead minutes earlier. He was gone, but from that moment on, I have always felt he is constantly with me.
I had never even been to a funeral, and now I had to help arrange one. I was amazed at how things were all taken care of in a very businesslike manner. The funeral home director began telling me what I would need. In the Jewish religion, we sit shiva, which is a seven-day period of mourning. There are certain rituals involved in this, and everything needed was available for rent from the funeral home. Most people probably find that convenient, but I found it really strange.
The mortician made his pitch. “People will come to your apartment to visit you after the burial, so for twelve dollars a week you can rent a big plastic container where people can put their boots,” he explained. “For an extra sixteen dollars, we can include a coatrack.”
This is not a bad thing, but it truly is a little like a used-car lot. I’m not knocking the mortician, because he is providing a service. I just find shopping for coffins weird. It’s a wooden box that goes into the ground, never to be seen again. There was one with a Star of David on top and another with brass hinges for an extra $300—does it really matter?
After we buried my father, we returned to my parents’ apartment to sit shiva. As is customary, friends send trays of food to comfort and feed the mourning family. They had worked out a schedule between them: “You take lunch on Tuesday, I will handle Wednesday.” Each day, we thanked the people who brought the trays and then spent the rest of the afternoon talking about how great the lox was. “His death was terrible, but you know something, this fish is tremendous.”
For seven days, there was a constant flow of people in and out of the apartment paying their respects. On one particular afternoon, an elderly man approached me and asked if I was the son. I said that I was.
“Can I just say your father was a great man,” he said.
“Thank you very much, sir,” I said.
“I’ll never forget your father up on that hill in Acapulco,” the man said. “Boy, could he sing.”
I nodded politely until I realized what he had said. “My father didn’t sing.”
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t think my father sang, and I don’t remember him going to Acapulco.”
The man looked confused and then asked, “Is this the Levinson shiva?”
“No, that’s on the sixth floor,” I said.
“Please excuse me,” he said.
Instead of leaving, he made his way over to the fish platter, took another serving, wrapped it in a napkin, and then left for the Levinson affair.
On shiva day four, a man my father’s age approached.
“You’re Howie,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I was good friends with your father, and I just want to say he will be sorely missed.”
I was about to say, “Nice to meet you,” but all I got out was “Nice to—” as he then turned on a dime and ran out of the apartment. I wasn’t sure what had happened or if I had done something wrong.
As he was running toward the door, I noticed that he had dropped something. It looked like a piece of candy in a shiny cellophane wrapper. I bent down to pick it up. As I touched it, my fingers sank into the candy. I held it closer to my face to smell the substance. It hit me: Oh, my God, it’s shit! This guy just shit his pants. The turd had dropped down his pant leg onto our living room carpet. As bad as that might sound, it was much worse. This man’s shit was now all over my fingers. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t breathe. I just began to scream.
