Rubber Balls and Liquor Page 8

  It was a professional highlight, although I must confess that the kits seemed to prevent more than just burglaries. They also prevented me from getting laid or impressing any women.

  The closest I came to landing an actual show business job was working the concession stands in Broadway theaters, selling T-shirts and drinks and overpriced candy. I got the job through another comic, who also needed to support his stand-up habit. The way it worked was that one guy owned the concessions in a bunch of different theaters, and we struggling comics or out-of-work actors would move from theater to theater, wherever we were needed. There were a lot of great shows playing on Broadway at the time, so I got another fine education. It was like taking an extension course, after watching all that television. There was American Buffalo, with Robert Duvall and John Savage. There was Equus, with Richard Burton. For a while, Richard Burton had to take a temporary leave, which I believe was what he did of his senses every time he married Elizabeth Taylor, and he was replaced by Anthony Perkins.

  The best part about working the concessions at Equus was the show’s famous nude scene. After I sat through the show a time or two, I had it all timed out. I’d go downstairs and relax in the lobby and listen for a certain speech, which was my signal to hurry back to my post in time to watch this girl take her clothes off onstage. This was another career highlight—for me, not the girl. My only regret was that I couldn’t jerk off to it. There were too many people around, and the couple times I tried I came all over the overpriced candy, which I was told was bad for business.

  (Who knew?)

  For another stretch, I worked the concession at a show called A Matter of Gravity, with Katharine Hepburn. This, too, was a career highlight—once again, for me. Katharine Hepburn was one of the few Broadway stars who took the time to talk to us lowly concession workers. The routine was we’d have to get to the theater before the doors opened, and she would be there early before heading to her dressing room to get into costume, and a lot of times we’d all hang out in the lobby or at the foot of the stage, swapping stories, although by swapping I really mean listening to Katharine Hepburn’s stories. I can’t imagine she would have been all that interested in hearing about the time I came all over the overpriced candy at Equus or the time my buddy shit all over that girl from the audience while he was fucking her—and, tellingly, I knew enough not to bring up such matters of gravity.

  Katharine Hepburn’s big thing was to keep the theater properly ventilated. She hated that it was so stuffy inside that old theater, and insisted that we fling open the doors as soon as we arrived. We were all very much in awe of the great Katharine Hepburn, so we did just that. We were all so damn eager to please. Whichever one of us got to the theater first would make sure to open the doors and air the place out. She seemed to appreciate it.

  Some days, I’d find myself heading to the theater a couple hours before curtain time, just for the chance to hang out with my new pal Kate, and shoot the shit about our mutual acquaintances, Cagney and Bogart and Tracy. She’d talk about them as intimates (and here it helps if you imagine me doing a pitch-perfect Katharine Hepburn impression): “Jimmy and Bogie and Spence.”

  (It also helps if you add the lilt and quiver to Hepburn’s late-in-life voice, although it’s tough to bring across Parkinson’s on the page—at least it’s tough to do so with anything resembling good taste. Try this: hold the book a few inches out in front of you as you read, and then start shaking it like a rattle. Very briskly. Or, if you’re listening to me in an audio format, turn the volume up and down, and play with the pause button. That should do it.)

  James Cagney had just published his autobiography, and one day Hepburn came in and gushed, “Oh, you simply must read Jimmy’s book. It’s a wonderful book, Jimmy’s book. It’s just marvelous, Jimmy’s book. It’s so inspiring, Jimmy’s book.”

  And on and on …

  A few days later, Kate was in a foul mood because we’d apparently forgotten to open the doors. She was a tough old bird, even then, and she flashed us looks that made us feel like morons. There’s no denying that we were, in fact, morons, but we didn’t appreciate being made to feel that way by such a legend of stage and screen. Then the great Katharine Hepburn stormed about the theater in a huff, making a big show of throwing open the doors herself, in such a way as to give off the impression that it was so very difficult to get good help these days.

  The next day, she came in early and called us all onto the stage. The theater was empty. This time, we’d all made certain that the doors had been flung open. We couldn’t imagine why we had been summoned. When we got to the stage, we saw that she was carrying a big pile of books—Cagney’s book, it turned out. She gave each of us a copy, which she of course signed. It struck me as the most generous, heartfelt gesture, which is why I felt like such a shit when I took it down to the Strand later that week and traded it in for a couple bucks. And get this: the guy at the Strand said he would have given me a couple bucks more if the book had actually been signed by the author, instead of by a tough old bird like Katharine Hepburn, so I felt bad about that, too. I mean, how hard would it have been for Kate to have asked her precious Jimmy to scrawl his name on a couple extra copies of his book?

  And so if you went to see Equus or American Buffalo or A Matter of Gravity during the middle 1970s, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with my early work in the theater. There’s also a good chance that if you were kind enough to tip the guy behind the concession stand or the coat-check guy the money never made it into my hands, because the jerk who owned the concession kept all the tips for himself. We got back at him by doubling the price of his drinks and pocketing the difference—which, after all, we certainly felt entitled to. I mention this in case any of you want to try again and forward the money to me through my publisher. After all, if you were satisfied with my work and wanted to show your appreciation, I’d hate to cheat you out of the opportunity.

  5

  My Brilliant Career

  I must apologize for this chapter title, because it doesn’t accurately reflect my assessment of my life’s work. Don’t misunderstand, I enjoy my work as much as the next person (okay, maybe just a little bit more), but I’m not one of those Hollywood types who is so full of himself he tosses around words like brilliant or luminous or astounding to describe his talents, at least not in public. Actually, luminous isn’t half-bad, and I think I’ll start working it into conversations about me (which, to be clear, are some of my very favorite conversations) because it can refer to my many and varied gifts as an actor and comedian, as well as to the supple softness of my even-toned, healthy-looking skin.

  Let me just finish up about this chapter title, because I don’t feel great about it. Believe me, if there was a hardly seen Australian movie called My Mediocre Career or My at One Time Promising But Ultimately Disappointing Career, I would have almost certainly used that instead. But I’m stuck with brilliance, I guess. It’s the story of my life, really. It’s like I stepped in shit and it’s been following me around on my shoe. I just can’t get rid of it. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. For years now, it’s all I’ve been hearing—and, frankly, I’ve had it up to here with all this talk of my sheer comic genius.

  “Up to where?” you might say.

  My point exactly.

  And so, my career …

  I bounced around those New York comedy clubs for years and years. Occasionally, I climbed onstage and told jokes. Most of the time, people waited politely for me to finish my act and didn’t bother saying anything to me afterward. Even my fellow comedians tended to ignore me, unless it was to share a story of fucking and shitting on some after-hours stage. However, a few people made the mistake of telling me I was funny, and like a fool I chose to believe them. Unfortunately, the people who told me this didn’t happen to be seated in the comedy clubs in and around New York where I tended to perform, so I had to content myself early on with mostly smiles of recognition from audiences that would have probably preferred th
e comedy stylings of some other young comedian. And yet, over time people started to laugh, against their better judgment. I could only assume they were laughing at my jokes, and not at me directly, but I was not about to question their laughter. It was enough that I was working in bigger clubs, in better time slots, when people were actually eager to be entertained instead of kept awake.

  Despite my best efforts, I looked up one day, one month, one year and realized I was having some small success on the comedy club circuit, which was about what I deserved. You know how it is: one small success leads to another, until you’ve strung together all these small successes and you’ve got nothing to show for it. That was me, until some people from MTV happened to see my act one night at Catch. Probably they were waiting for their waitress to bring them their drinks and they’d run out of things to talk about with each other, so they turned their attention to the annoying little man on stage. And it’s a good thing they did. They were looking for a way to kill time between music videos, it turned out. Now it’s gotten to where you’d have to be a detective to even find a music video on MTV, but in the early 1980s this was a revolutionary idea for them. They were producing a series of long-form, in-house commercials, which were really just brief comedy bits or stand-alone sketches. The MTV people had no idea what they were doing, really, which worked out well for me because neither did I. Happily, we found each other, and I ended up doing a bunch of these “in-between” segments for them. We did them all in one afternoon. Everything was ad-libbed, except for the part where we mentioned MTV. That part was libbed. At first, our agreement was that I would do all of this ad-libbing for free, in exchange for the exposure and some cheese and crackers, but as the day dragged on I started to whine a little bit. The MTV people didn’t know if this was just my annoying personality or some pathetic eleventh-hour negotiating strategy, meant to extort huge sums from their corporate accounts. Either way, the whining was effective, because they ended up paying me $500 for a day of work, which at the time was more money than I’d ever earned for one gig. (And this was before taking all that cheese and crackers into account.)

  I was so excited about my big payday, I had to tell someone. Like an idiot, I told my agent, who shared my enthusiasm long enough to say, “That’s great, Gilbert. How would you like to handle our commission?”

  I continued to work with this agent for many years. I kept meaning to fire her, but I didn’t know how. Finally, the agency fired her, so I didn’t have to. She never really got me, this agent. I don’t wish to give her name, but for the book let’s just call her Asshole. Here’s what I mean when I say she didn’t get me: when MTV started airing these spots, I kept hearing from everybody how funny and brilliant I was. That is, I heard this from everybody except this Asshole (not her real name). She kept telling me and anyone else who called to see about booking me that the reason the spots worked so well was because MTV must have hired a brilliant director. There was no other way to explain it, she said, because my act had never worked on television before.

  Looking back, I think my asshole agent thought of me as Rin Tin Tin—or, Lassie, if you prefer a more contemporary reference.

  One more thing about my asshole agent. She was soon replaced by another asshole agent. This one was a real go-getter. He’d seen my act and thought I was great, a real up-and-comer. (And, for those of you unfamiliar with the entertainment industry, when you combine a real go-getter with a real up-and-comer, it’s neither here nor there.) He went to his colleagues and said, “I just saw this comedian, Gilbert Gottfried. Does anybody know who handles him?” Nobody knew, so they looked it up and said, “Oh, he’s signed with us.”

  I didn’t have anything better to do so I started working with this guy. For purposes of the book, and to avoid the possibility of any legal action, let’s just call him my new-and-improved asshole agent. He was a real Hollywood type. He pushed me to sign with a manager, a public relations company, the whole deal. I was busy, busy, busy. They had me running all over town, taking meetings, reading scripts. I had everything a movie star should have, with the exception of work, money, fame and women. Other than that, I had it covered.

  MTV started showing the crap out of those things, and people began to notice me. One thing led to another—which it has a tendency to do, I’m told—and before long these one and another things were starting to look like a career. Or, something resembling a career. Bill Cosby called, looking for “that abrasive comic who’s always on MTV.” He wanted me to audition for a guest spot on The Cosby Show. It was the number one show on television, so my first reaction was that there had been some horrible mistake. When my asshole agent called with the opportunity, I thought maybe I was auditioning to be Cosby’s long-lost cousin, but they had something else in mind.

  I later learned that the producers originally wanted me to be one of the Cosbys, but when they screen-tested me I looked too black.

  My bad, homie. (Oh, and as another of my many literary innovations, please note this parenthetical stage direction: I’m punching my fist against my chest as I write this, and sticking out two fingers, and embracing my loyal readers with a figurative soul handshake and hug.)

  Here, I’d like to put my story on pause for a moment and share a show business observation.

  Early on in my career, I discovered the three biggest lies in Hollywood. In no particular order, they are:

  1. The check’s in the mail.

  2. We can fix it in editing.

  3. Gilbert Gottfried gets a lot of pussy.

  Okay, now let’s get back to our regularly scheduled story …

  Things were mostly hit-or-miss for me, when I was just starting out, only my “hits” seemed to take the form of angry comedy club patrons who wanted to slap me around because they didn’t think I was particularly funny, and my “misses” were so wide of the mark you could hardly notice I was even there. I went out on a lot of auditions, as I recall. I even auditioned for a part opposite a talking orangutan, which came as something of a surprise to me because I’d always thought orangutan was spelled orangutang. (Apparently, I’d confused the species with a wildly unpopular simian space drink.) Also, I wasn’t aware that orangutans could talk, but here again I was wrong. The part was for a pilot being developed by Barry Levinson, before he became known for being from Baltimore instead of working with apes. I actually got the job, although I’ve always suspected that Mr. Levinson might have mistaken me for one of the orangutans, because I hadn’t waxed my back that week and I’d been carrying some excess winter weight at the time of the audition.

  Surprisingly, the show wasn’t picked up by the network, but I did get some valuable experience out of the deal. I also developed some important contacts, because as we all know Hollywood is a town built on relationships, even though in this case those relationships were with a bunch of orangutans.

  A short time later, those key professional relationships came back into play when I went out on another audition for a show with orangutans. (Apparently, orangutans were well represented back then, because those fuckers were everywhere.) This show was a sitcom called Mr. Smith, and as far as I could tell it was about an orangutan that wore a suit and worked as a corporate executive. This was what used to be known in television as a high-concept, because the writers who thought it up were high out of their minds.

  Here’s a little bit more than you need to know about this low moment in television history: the role of Mr. Smith was played by three different orangutans, which the producers would shuttle on and off the set according to the animals’ moods—or, perhaps, to their particular emotive strengths, depending on the scene. There was also an animatronic monkey that would be wheeled in from time to time, for certain shots, only it was the most terrifying animatronic monkey anybody had ever seen. Even in the auditions, I could see that it didn’t work very well. It had dead, waxy eyes, and the mouth never quite moved in sync with the voice, and the hands couldn’t grab or grip the way they were supposed to. Basically, it looked like somethi
ng that would frighten a small child, especially if that child happened to be a member of a Nielsen family, which perhaps explains why the show never caught on.

  As it turned out, the “lead” orangutan was one of the same damn orangutans from the Barry Levinson pilot that went nowhere. When I first made the connection, I thought it could only mean that I would certainly get the part. After all, we’d gotten along so well. We’d had some laughs, and seemed to enjoy each other’s company, but apparently I’d rubbed this damn ape the wrong way. (And here I’d been thinking that all those moans and sighs and ape ejaculate were a good thing.) I know this because the animal seemed to remember me and sidled over to the producers’ table while I read my lines and announced that he refused to work with me.

  In the end, I didn’t get the part, but Mr. Smith did send over a nice note and promised to call me.

  Other actors and comedians, their careers seem to move on a kind of upward trajectory. Me, I just grabbed whatever I could, in my hit-or-miss way, and hoped for the best. The one thing I had going for me, people always said, was that I was funny. I’ve said this already, I know, but I’m of the opinion that you can never say enough nice things about yourself, and that some of these nice things are worth repeating. I suppose it’s possible that some of these people might have meant that I was funny-looking or funny-sounding. It’s possible, too, that I might have given off a funny smell, but what the hell did I care? Funny was funny.

  Eventually, funny took me all the way to the Saturday Night Live audition I wrote about earlier. I probably should have looked at this as my big break, but I didn’t know enough to be nervous. I just went in and told a few jokes and did a few voices and hoped the people would like me well enough to call me back.