B000FC0RL0 EBOK (24 page)

In the mid-1950s Anne was busy at Equity Library Theater, doing
Maedchen in Uniform
with Barbara Barrie (who would be so brilliant in Anne’s
After-Play
four decades later). Their director was a man named Walt Witcover.

For me, Walt was the teacher who taught actors how to deal with fear: Make the audience part of the play and they are no longer the faceless mass sitting in the darkness judging you. Create an intimacy between them and yourself, personalize them and they are no longer strangers.

In 1956, when Walt asked Anne, me, and Charles Nelson Reilly to do three one-acts, we jumped at the chance. It was the beginning of a long and warm relationship with Charles, one of the funniest men in the business.

Box and Cox; How He Lied to Her Husband; and John John, Sir John, and Tyb
were plays that represented three centuries of theatrical styles.

Anne and I had now been married three years. This was the first time we would get the chance to play opposite each other. Would it separate us, or was this what marriage was about? So here we were in Little Italy on Mulberry Street, rehearsing in Walt’s cold-water flat with a bathtub in the kitchen. Was this the beginning of a theatrical partnership?

Walt was not a blind visionary. Theater was his life. The weeks leading up to our opening in a small theater atop the Chanin Building at 42nd
Street and Lexington Avenue did not go smoothly. Anne and I were completely at odds. When I asked Anne recently why we hadn’t got along back then, she said, “I guess it’s because I hated the way you acted.”

“But,” I said, “was that any reason to throw a chair at me in rehearsal?”

“Yes, it was,” she said. Thank God she missed.

At the time I wondered whether the marriage was working out.

When we finally got to the opening, the big shock was that there was hardly anyone in the audience. The Chanin, we learned, had some kind of jinx. Nobody wanted to take the elevator to the top of a skyscraper to see a show.

What I had learned about playing to a small house—in this case, five people—was invaluable. I used all of Walt’s techniques, personalizing each member of the audience. I could practically smell them. I never got more laughs from five people in all my life. They became my best friends. What I’d learned then, I’ve since used at every nightclub performance. It meant being in the moment and bonding with whoever was out there.

At around this time I had started working as a team with a comic actress named Nancy Ponder. Stiller and Ponder (or Ponder and Stiller) never quite got off the ground. All we did was make each other laugh. But Nancy then introduced me to David Shepherd, the founder of the Compass Players. In 1959 we became replacements for Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Shelley Berman, who had split from the Compass Players and were now stars working on their own.

Compass, later to become Second City, performed both rehearsed pieces and suggestions taken from the audience that built a scene on the spot.

Nancy, Alan Arkin, and I worked on our improvisational techniques in David’s apartment on West 86th Street. Irvin Arthur, then an agent, booked us into the Alpine Village in Cleveland.

The Alpine Village was run by Herman Pirchner, an amiable, smiling impresario, who, we were told, had a circus background. We were the headliners. The opening act was Beverly, a blonde beauty who twirled flaming batons to Khachaturian’s “Ritual Fire Dance.” Alpine, a popular club in Cleveland, had a rising hydraulic stage similar to the one at the Paramount Theater in New York. Frankie Yankovic, the Polka King, usually sold the place out. Our big number was a sketch called “Fundador,” in which Alan Arkin played a young bullfighter and I an old one. Nancy
played the seductive lady in the grandstand flirting with the young toreador. The rest of the evening was to be made up of taking suggestions from the audience on which we were to build instant improvisations.

Before we went on, Herman, who was also the MC, asked how he should introduce us.

“The Compass Players,” we told him.

“And where have you played before this?”

“No place,” I said.

“Okay, I’ll introduce you as ‘Those international favorites.’”

That night we watched Beverly. The stage was pitch black except for her batons ablaze and flying through the air. The music was ear shattering. When she finished and the cheers subsided, Mr. Pirchner, wearing an elegant tuxedo, came out and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Alpine Village is proud to present as its star attraction, for the first time in Cleveland, those international favorites, the Compass Players.”

Alan, Nancy, and I strolled out together. We started to speak together to explain what we were there to do. It was as if we had turned the club into a classroom. The audience did not know what to make of us. When we asked for suggestions there was dead silence. We then took suggestions from each other. After we’d spent about twenty minutes talking among ourselves, the orchestra played us off. Pirchner ran backstage, a huge smile on his face, saying, “That was wonderful. The first show is always like that.”

Once in our dressing rooms we panicked.

“They don’t understand that what we’re doing is comedy,” I said. “Next show, why don’t we put Nancy in a chair and drag her out on stage like she was some kind of Egyptian queen. Then they’ll know we’re a comedy act.”

The second show, equally disastrous, had the audience dropping dinner rolls on the hydraulic stage as it lowered. The ride was dangerous, but at least we had something to eat.

The next day I said, “I know what’s wrong. We need clothes that make us look like we’re an act.” Everyone agreed so we went downtown and bought matching ponchos. Nonetheless, we bombed every night, every show. At the end of the week Pirchner, still jolly, walked in and said, “I’m holding you over.” We were doing the Gettysburg Address of comedy: They finally understood us when they got home. We still died each show. Two weeks later, we were back in New York. Why had he held us over?
Somebody finally turned the light on: “Don’t you realize you guys were a tax write-off?”

David Shepherd did not give up. Back in New York, Irvin Arthur was trying desperately to get us a booking on the
Jack Paar Show
. He got a one-night audition at the Den in the Duane, a small club on Madison Avenue whose audience loved avant-garde acts. Milt Kamen, Dick Cavett, and Lenny Bruce all worked there. It seemed perfect for us.

That night we entered the club as Mike Nichols was leaving. He said he and Elaine had just finished doing a set. He looked pained and a little sweaty.

“Mike,” I said, “How are you?”

“They’re tough,” he said. “Do you want a Valium? I’m having a Valium,” he joked, and he disappeared around the block. Minutes later Alan, Nancy, and I were introduced and went on. We did some set pieces that went over well enough. The lights went up and Nancy said, “We’d like to take some suggestions from the audience.” Sitting in the first row were two guys who had to be goodfellas. Next to them were two flaming redheaded ladies with beehive hairdos. I had an immediate connection to them. I still had a childhood need to make it with the tough guys. Suggestions were flying from the audience. Someone said, “A baseball player.”

“Okay, we got a ballplayer, what else?” Nancy said.

“How about a stripper,” another one hollered. The audience wanted to play. We just let them suggest until we got characters we were comfortable with.

“How about you guys?” I said pointing to the foursome. “What character would you like to see?”

“A politician,” one of them answered kind of sullenly. I was going to cheer him up.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll be a politician.” The name Carmine DeSapio flashed into my mind. I knew DeSapio was the Democratic district leader in Greenwich Village who had recently been jailed. I could run with this, I thought. “How about a place?” I asked.

One of them said, “Jail.”

“We’ve got enough,” Nancy informed the audience. “We’ve got a politician and we’ve got a jail.”

I took the stage first. I paced back and forth and ran an imaginary tin
cup against some imaginary prison bars. Alan Arkin quickly became a prison guard. I already knew my punch line.

I thought I was being hilariously hip. I was doing the headline in tomorrow’s newspaper.

I ordered Alan as the jailer to send out for a bottle of wine and a hooker.

“Who do you think you are?” Alan asked.

“I’m Carmine DeSapio,” I said.

“You got it, boss.”

Blackout. Huge laughs except for the table with the guys who’d made the suggestion. The two of them looked up at me. I could see that they were furious. I couldn’t understand why. They looked like they wanted to get up on the stage. “You son of a bitch,” one of them muttered, loud enough for me to hear. The women, aware of this, were trying to cool the guys down. The audience was applauding. We thanked them and headed back to the dressing room, congratulating ourselves on a great set.

Suddenly the door opened and there were the two guys standing there with the women behind them.

One of them grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out of the room into the hallway. He lifted me off the floor by the lapels and held me up against the wall fully a foot above his head, my feet dangling. He was very strong.

“Why did you say that?” he asked.

The guy behind him said, “We ought to kill you.”

One of the girls with the beehives implored, “Leave him alone, Joey, he’s only a comedian.”

“What did I say?” I asked.

“You said Carmine DeSapio, you bastard.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

“You don’t get it, you schmuck!”

“It was a joke,” I said, “I thought you’d laugh.”

I was still up against the wall and unable to believe what was happening. Now he started banging me against the wall. The girls kept pleading, “Leave him alone, he didn’t mean it.”

“I could kill him,” the guy said.

Suddenly he was relenting and I was being lowered to the floor. The guy had some mercy. As they left I kept thinking how I’d always considered
the stage a place where I could say anything. It had never occurred to me that it was also a place where I could get killed.

As they left I wish I’d taken Mike Nichols up on his Valium offer that night.

David Shepherd finally got Compass a three-month gig at the Crystal Palace in St. Louis, where we could put our improv techniques into practice. At my insistence David hired Anne at $75 a week to become the fourth member of the Compass Players. Although she had no improvisational experience, Anne agreed to come along.

We loaded Crab (still part of our family) and our two kittens (now cats) into David’s Volkswagen and drove to St. Louis.

Once we began performing, it was apparent that neither Alan nor Nancy nor I was comfortable taking suggestions and schmoozing with the audience. Anne quietly took over the job. With Anne taking the suggestions, Compass went from didactic to hip and entertaining. Anne sparked an instant intimacy and gave Compass a stand-up feeling. Anne’s chat became funnier and funnier. Some nights, the audience couldn’t care less about suggestions.

At one performance she said, “I need a setting.”

Someone shouted, “My pad.”

“Something you write on?” Anne asked.

“No, it’s where I live.”

St. Louis was where we learned that “pad” meant where you lived. St. Louis was a very hip town.

One night a woman wanted us to do a scene with a merkin. “What’s a merkin?” Anne asked. The audience was convulsed.

“You don’t know?” someone shouted. “It’s a toupee for the unseen hairy place on a woman’s anatomy.” Everyone in St. Louis seemed to know this.

Once, while Anne was asking for suggestions from the audience, Professor Irwin Corey, sitting in the back, shouted, “Why don’t you do an improv group taking suggestions from an audience?” I wanted to tell Irwin to go fuck off. In the Witcover sense, I felt that was as personalized as I could go.

Anne and I had learned that simply by taking suggestions, playing characters, and improvising a story, we were becoming writers. This was the beginning of what was to become Stiller and Meara.

When we had finished ten weeks at the Crystal Palace, David Shepherd
said there were no plans to continue Compass. Alan was going through a marital break-up and was caring for his son Adam. Nancy was in love with Jerry Zucker, an ABC Television executive. Anne and I were out of work.

We needed a vacation, so I bought a car. A Nash Ambassador with a hundred and twenty-five thousand miles on the odometer was a steal at seventy-five dollars. It had been American Motors’ breakthrough model. It featured a backseat that could open into a bed. The big Henny Youngman joke that year was about a guy who got a ticket for dirty sheets. The car had a new feature in family cars: It was equipped with a new four-wheel-drive transmission.

We decided to return to New York from St. Louis by way of Weston, West Virginia, where we’d visit Anne’s friend Ursula’s parents.

On the day we left St. Louis we had been travelling almost fourteen hours and were only a few hours from our destination, passing through St. Mary’s on the West Virginia-Ohio border. The road got steeper. We began to descend. As the Nash picked up speed, I applied the brakes. The pedal went to the floor—there was no pressure on the brakes. We picked up more speed. I looked at Anne, sitting beside me, and said, “I don’t think we have brakes.” We went faster and faster. I pumped the brake pedal, hoping this would produce some resistance. It didn’t. The pedal still went to the floor. My Adam’s apple was in my mouth. Anne didn’t seem at all upset. It was as if the two of us were meant to be together in whatever this was all about.

I rolled down my window. I could hear the sound of the wind whistling in my ears. I wanted to shout to passing cars, “No brakes!” beseeching them to inform someone ahead. In the backseat the cats in their kitty boxes were meowing, and Crab sat petrified, farting. I wondered how this tale would play in the newspapers. Anne started singing “Rock of Ages.” I figured we were going too fast for her to jump out. I started to pray in Hebrew. Does God understand Hebrew in West Virginia? As we kept picking up speed I could hear the whistling wind getting louder.
One minute,
I thought,
we’ve been free-falling at least one minute
. And there were still a couple miles to go on this huge hill.