Rubber Balls and Liquor Read online

  It was a great, great moment in my career, I’ll admit. Not quite a highlight, but certainly a light, as I will soon make clear. Allow me to further set the scene: Wayne Newton was pretty much oozing his Vegas-style warmth and insincerity from the stage, introducing war veterans and public officials and a few other show business types who were marginally more and less famous than me. He’d give a little shout-out to each person, and there’d be a tiny wave of recognition or admiration or whatever was appropriate, and then he’d make a grand showing of sending over a bottle of champagne to that person’s table, typically to enthusiastic applause.

  Then he got around to me. Finally. Or at least I thought he was finally getting around to me, but he took such a long way around that for a beat or two I couldn’t be sure. On his way to wherever he was going he said, “Ladies and gentleman, what a great honor it is for me to introduce you to a dear friend of mine. And what a great honor it is for me personally that he took the time from his own busy career to come out and see my show.”

  At this point, I started to think he might have been talking about me, but only because he’d already introduced just about everybody else in the audience. There was no one left, really. Plus, in all likelihood, management was by now all out of champagne, so even if he was finally getting around to me I’d probably just get a glass of water out of the deal.

  Then he motioned to the lighting guy up in the booth. He pointed toward me and said, “Can we get a spotlight please?”

  And then, with a wave of Wayne Newton’s magic hand, the spotlight shone on my table, so I did what most people do when an impossibly bright light is shined in their eyes. I put my hand against my brow like a salute, and squinted like a Navajo Indian and made a concerted effort to look out at the crowd through the glare.

  A highlight, no. A light, yes.

  “Gilbert Gottfried, ladies and gentleman,” my lifelong pal Wayne Newton declared from the stage, as if he were introducing the Pope. To a roomful of Jews.

  To thunderous applause, he introduced me. Well, maybe not thunderous applause, but it felt for a moment like it might rain. Then my good show business friend Wayne Newton said a few more nice things about me and went back to his show, and as he snapped his fingers in time to the next song I couldn’t help but think, Hey, what about my fucking champagne?

  It was a reasonable thought, wouldn’t you agree? I mean, here he’d just given out a dozen bottles of champagne, to lesser luminaries than me. Some of these people were so far down on the ladder of fame it might as well have been a step stool. I didn’t even like champagne. I just wanted what was coming to me, but instead I sat there like an idiot, waving from the narrow cone of spotlight that shone briefly on my table.

  A couple songs later, my good friend Wayne Newton motioned for the lighting guy again. He shined the spotlight on my table again. In time to the opening bars of the next song, Wayne Newton said, “Let me tell you something about my good friend Gilbert Gottfried, ladies and gentlemen. You know, when you’re a performer, the last thing you want to do on your night off is go out and see a show. That’s why it’s such an honor to have this man in my audience. He’s a comedian. He’s a movie star. He’s so talented, I hate him.”

  (This was my good friend Wayne Newton adopting a playful, teasing tone.)

  Then he waved his hand again and said, “A round of applause, please, for my good friend, Gilbert Gottfried.”

  There followed another round of applause, because these Vegas crowds tended to do what they were told, and the next thing I knew Wayne Newton was deep into his next song and I was still without my bottle of complimentary champagne.

  I was outraged. Well, maybe not outraged, but somewhat put out. Like I said, I didn’t particularly care for champagne, but that wasn’t the point. The point was it felt to me like I’d been snubbed—relegated to a lower rung than I surely deserved.

  Soon, there was another lull in Wayne Newton’s between-songs patter, and he asked the lighting guy to seek me out again. This time he said, “And hey, if you don’t have plans tomorrow night, go see my good friend Gilbert Gottfried at the House of Blues. And if you do have plans, cancel them.”

  Still, no champagne—and yet I’d somehow gone from a little put out to a little bit thrilled. Why? Well, this was the sort of inter-celebrity repartee I’d grown up admiring, the kind of back-and-forth that might have passed between Frank Sinatra and one of the lesser Rat Packers. It was all so inside and corny, and I loved it and hated it all at the same time. Still, it felt exactly right and good and cool. I could almost forget for a moment that my good friend Wayne Newton was wearing a sequined jumpsuit.

  Now, the curious thing about this exchange was the Vegas factor, which must be considered. In Vegas, Wayne Newton is a much bigger deal than he is in the rest of the world. Nothing against my good show business friend Wayne Newton, who is generally considered Las Vegas royalty. In Hollywood, however, he’s more like one of the huddled masses. In that theater, on that night, he had me by a couple hundred rungs, easy, but anywhere else we were a pretty even match. Hell, on the Hollywood Squares set, I could bring him up as the butt of a corny joke. Anywhere else, he would have sent over that bottle of champagne—which, anywhere else, I would have promptly thrown right back at him, if I didn’t happen to throw like a girl.

  You never know where you might stand on the depth chart of celebrity, from one day to the next. You can be up one day and down the next, and the day after that you’re nowhere. It’s harsh and cruel and arbitrary. Some days, you’re all these things at once. At some other low point in my career, I found myself on the same famous plane as Marlee Matlin. Sort of. At least, it was a plane.

  Perhaps a bit of setup is necessary. Readers will remember Marlee Matlin as the once famous Academy Award–winning deaf actress who eventually found herself typecast as a deaf person. Or maybe they won’t, but that’s not the point. The point is that I looked a lot like Marlee Matlin’s interpreter. Marlee Matlin was so famous after winning her Oscar that she traveled for a brief while with a full-time interpreter, who just happened to look like a short, whiny Jew who told filthy jokes and disrespected women for a living.

  And, as much as it pains me to admit, for that same brief while this interpreter fellow was a couple dozen rungs ahead of me on the celebrity ladder, as I recall. Everywhere I went, people would look at me with an odd flash of recognition, and I’d think for a moment that they were trying to place me, from a particularly memorable role in this or that film, but then it would turn out that they had me confused with Marlee Matlin’s interpreter. They’d come up to me and say, “Hey, Marlee Matlin’s interpreter, could you please tell Marlee she’s a silent inspiration to deaf people everywhere?” Or, they’d just flap their hands and make all these foolish gestures and signals as if they were trying to communicate in a secret language based on foolish gestures and hand signals.

  On many occasions, Marlee Matlin would show up at an industry event or awards show and someone in charge would come out to greet her and wonder why the hell she’d brought Gilbert Gottfried with her. One talk show host even thought we were dating—which would have been just fine with me, if anyone had thought to ask.

  Most young actors, they get their first big breaks in Hollywood and people start confusing them with Robert Redford or Paul Newman. Me, I got confused as Marlee Matlin’s interpreter—which would have been helpful in the unlikely event that a casting director ever uttered the phrase, “Quick, get me a Marlee Matlin interpreter–type!”

  Okay, so that’s the setup. Now, here’s the payoff. A couple months into all of this mistaken identity business, I was on a plane to Los Angeles when someone tapped me on the shoulder. (See, I told you there’d be a plane.) I turned around and it was like I was looking in the mirror. It was him! Marlee Matlin’s interpreter. Apparently, while I’d been going about my days, getting confused for him, he’d been going about his days, getting confused for me. It was a regular two-way street, and now that we had bumped in
to each other on it he thought he’d introduce himself. Marlee Matlin was sleeping, a couple rows back, so we passed a few pleasant moments chatting and comparing notes. (It turned out he had some of the same difficulties getting laid, which led me to believe it wasn’t just me, after all…) We talked and talked. He was a pretty good guy—and, a good talker. Or maybe he was just so excited to be talking with his mouth that I couldn’t shut him up.

  After a while, one of us came up with a genius idea. I’d like to take full credit for it, because it really was a genius idea, but I suppose it’s possible that Marlee Matlin’s interpreter might have had a hand in it—and when you suggest that someone who’s fluent in sign language had a hand in giving voice to an idea, that’s really saying something.

  Anyway, it was decided that I would switch seats with this guy, so I tiptoed back to Marlee Matlin’s row and sat myself down right next to her. Remember, she was sleeping, so I made it an extra-special point to be especially quiet, so as not to disturb her.

  Then I elbowed her in the ribs.

  Now, what happened next was a little surprising, because I’ve always heard that deaf people have a heightened sense of vision and smell, just like blind people are supposed to have a heightened sense of hearing and smell, and so on. One sense is supposed to compensate for the other, right? But that couldn’t have been true, I realized, because Marlee Matlin’s sense of vision wasn’t so hot. She took one look at me and just assumed I was her interpreter. Of all people, you’d think she would have been able to tell the difference, but my cover wasn’t blown just yet. She gave me a look that said she was terribly annoyed with me, her interpreter, for having elbowed her in the ribs.

  At any rate, that’s how I interpreted her response.

  Then Marlee Matlin made a low, moaning kind of noise that might have been a line from The Elephant Man or The Miracle Worker or The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  I couldn’t think what to do or say at this point, so I started making some furious hand gestures. This is what you do when you’re stuck in a tense moment with a deaf person. If I couldn’t make myself understood in my own language, I would make the extra-effort and communicate in hers, so I made an OK signal with my right hand, and poked my left forefinger through the hole, over and over. I hoped she would take some comfort in this, because I seemed to remember that this was the universal sign for asking a deaf person out on a date. Then I cupped my right fist, as if it was gripping a cock, and pretended to pound it against my pursed lips, also over and over. I seemed to remember that this was the universal sign for asking a deaf person if she’d like to get to know you better. Then, after a while of this, I didn’t trust that I was effectively communicating my offer of friendship, so I started sticking my tongue in and out of my mouth and in the direction of my cupped fist that was meant to be gripping an imaginary cock. I wanted to emphasize the point that I really, really wanted to be her pal.

  Apparently, something was lost in the translation, because poor Marlee Matlin took great offense at these gestures of friendship, and she grunted another few lines from The Elephant Man or The Miracle Worker or The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Then she reached for the Call button above her seat, thinking perhaps the stewardess could save her from this unpleasantness.

  Now, before you go off and tell all of your Facebook friends that Gilbert Gottfried is a filthy, despicable misogynist who’s so pleased with himself that he can cast aspersions in the direction of all womankind, even a handicapped woman who can’t defend herself without an interpreter, please note that I was once named by the editors of a magazine as one of the Top 50 Unsexiest People in the World. Take note … and then you can go telling your friends and relations that Gilbert Gottfried is a filthy, despicable misogynist. Not only was I named to this Top 50 list, I was number one, which I guess could also mean that I was at the very bottom of the list. I was even lower than Osama bin Laden. It’s one of my biggest accomplishments, and the good news here is that the list wasn’t published just once in the pages of this one magazine. It was picked up by news organizations all over the place.

  At first, I was a little insulted by this particular kind of attention, but then as I became more and more known for my appearance at the very top of the list—er … the very bottom—I decided to take another, more positive view. I was the best, after all. The best at being unsavory. The most unpleasant. The biggest turnoff. I ended up getting more press out of my appearance on that list than anything else I ever did. It even turned up in newspapers in Russia and India and China, just to make sure I wouldn’t get laid anywhere in the world. Not that I needed any help not getting laid, because by this point I’d pretty much become an expert in the field.

  One final point, before moving on: now that I’ve spent these past few pages demeaning all of these women, I can’t help but wonder if there is an alternate universe, anywhere in the cosmos, where a group of tiny, whiny starlets are sitting around sipping lattes and waxing nostalgic about the leading men they never had. I can close my eyes and picture it (especially the waxing part). Cindy Crawford is sitting at a table with Elle Macpherson and Halle Berry and Michelle Pfeiffer, going on and on about … me! Don’t laugh. It’s not so far-fetched. It’s merely fetched. It could happen. It could be that, right now, Cindy Crawford is sitting down with her girlfriends, saying, “Oh my gosh, do you think I have a chance to suck Gilbert Gottfried’s dick? Nothing would make me happier, or feel more complete as a woman. Ever since I got my first Vogue cover, this has been my dream. Fingers crossed, girls!”

  It’s a nice picture, don’t you think? Just give me a moment while it comes into focus.

  I think we can all agree that there’s certainly a strange little dance that comes along with being famous. And, it’s certainly fun to watch as we hopeful celebrities scramble up and down that damn ladder—especially during the Academy Awards, when they start showing the annual dead person montage. As celebrity barometers go, this one’s pretty telling. I look forward to it all year long. I read the obituaries or listen to the news and think, Oh, this guy won’t make it onto the dead person montage. Or, This guy will probably get a full-screen tribute. For the bottom-rung celebrities, they usually put a bunch of smaller stills into the same frame, but the top-rung stars get our undivided attention. The really, really big stars sometimes get a whole clip, to open or close the segment, and it’s usually followed by a loud and sustained applause.

  Just this past year, for example, Kathryn Grayson died a week or so before the Oscar broadcast and I caught myself wondering if she’d make the cut. Now, chances are you’re reading this and thinking, Who the hell is Kathryn Grayson? Well, she was an actress and opera singer who appeared in a bunch of movie musicals, including Anchors Aweigh, with Frank Sinatra. If you didn’t grow up sleeping on the couch in your parents’ living room, staying up until all hours watching movies on the black-and-white television, there’s a good chance you might never have heard of Kathryn Grayson, but that wasn’t me. I couldn’t say with any great degree of certainty, but there’s a good chance I jerked off to her, at one time or another. At some point during her career, she might have topped out at #314 on our celebrity depth chart, although to be fair there were probably only six or seven hundred celebrities at the time. However, at the time of her death Kathryn Grayson was probably charting at #3,000, give or take a couple rungs.

  Farrah Fawcett? She’d spent a couple years in the double digits, at the upper reaches of fame, so you’d think she’d be remembered on Oscar night for her work in Sunburn and The Cannonball Run. As it turned out, though, the folks in charge of the dead person montage that year didn’t even think poor Farrah deserving.

  Go figure.

  It’s a fickle business, show business. For Hollywood stars like myself, our place on the celebrity ladder is only as secure as our last hit movie, our last sold-out show, our last scathingly funny performance at a Friars Club roast.

  I can only hope that when my time is up and I’ve told my last offensive joke, the f
olks in charge of the dead person montage will honor me and my life’s work with an appropriate tribute. Right now, I’m thinking a still from Hot to Trot, the Bobcat Goldthwait starrer, would be a fine and fitting send-off. It didn’t exactly launch my career, that picture, but it didn’t kill it—and, if you’ve paid any attention to my career over the years, you’ll know that’s saying something.

  11

  Cheating Death

  You haven’t lived until you’ve had a near-death experience. I know this because I’ve had two of them, although most people would only count the first, and even then they’d argue that I didn’t come close enough to dying to start writing books about it. They’d also argue that I didn’t come close enough to dying because I’m still here, not dead.

  There’s no pleasing some people, is there?

  Before I go any further with this line of thought, I offer a word of caution. Or maybe it’s a word of apology. To be accurate, it’s not just one word, it’s quite a few, and here they are (in no particular order): it troubles me, a little bit, whenever a semi-celebrity like myself comes out in public and thumps his chest and boasts that he has survived some terrible ordeal or illness or accident, as I am apparently doing here. (I can’t help myself!) It’s a slippery slope—and if you’ve never been on a slippery slope, trust me, it can get pretty slippery. If you’re not careful, you might hurt yourself.

  You see it in the semi-celebrity press all the time. Someone who can’t even get booked on The Wendy Williams Show (which, if you’re not familiar with it, is kind of like The Arsenio Hall Show with bad hair), winds up on the cover of People magazine, announcing he or she has survived a near-death experience, like it was some sort of career move. That’s not me. (Oh, please, don’t let that be me.) I’m not some poor schmuck talking trash about beating cancer or tonsillitis or anal warts. Whenever I see that, I start to think the disease is listening in and getting angry. It’s just a matter of time. It’s like when someone is in a street fight, getting his ass kicked, and then the guy who’s doing the ass kicking decides he’s handed out enough of a beating or maybe he’s just bored so he starts to walk away. And then the person who was getting his ass kicked grows a pair and stands up and shouts, “Yeah, you better walk away, you fucking pussy!” And then whoever it is doing the beating gets pissed and comes back and finishes the job. I feel that way about any disease. It’s never a good idea to piss it off.