B000FC0RL0 EBOK (26 page)

Bill Penn, who’d directed
Medium Rare,
called and asked if I would play Ozzie in
On the Town
for Lee Guber on the Guber, Gross, Ford circuit. I would be working with Jimmy Kirkwood (who was yet to write
Chorus Line
) and Jane Romano. I said yes even though it would mean being out of town. The words “getting paid” freed me from any hesitation about being away from Anne during her final weeks of pregnancy. Besides, the show was to close a few days before Anne’s due date.

At the same time, Ursula and her husband Pat Campbell told us of an available apartment on Riverside Drive in Washington Heights.

The apartment was a dream: five rooms on the fifth floor facing beautiful trees and the sunset every night. Morning and afternoon sunlight, something we had not seen in the three apartments we’d had in seven years, flooded all five rooms. One hundred twenty-five dollars a month.

I raced up to 160th Street and met the super and his wife. She was Hell’s Kitchen Irish, he was older and Jewish. The ethnic mix so similar to ours (and the one-month’s rent under the table) undoubtedly influenced them into renting us the apartment.

On the day of the move I was to start rehearsing
On the Town
. We hired the Crabtree Movers, a group of out-of-work actors who were part-time moving men. They were cheap, friendly, and totally honest.

As the furniture was being moved into our new apartment, I felt a sudden shortness of breath. Rehearsals were due to start later that day. I had never had a sick day, and suddenly I felt my life coming to an abrupt end. I could not breathe. I looked at Anne surrounded by Crab, the two cats, and tons of boxes and gasped, “I can’t breathe. I’ve got to call a doctor.”

“I’ll call Bob Weiner,” Anne said. Bob was a friend of ours and also something of a hypochondriac. He knew all the best doctors. Bob gave Anne the name and address of his doctor on 55th Street. She jotted it down for me on a piece of paper.

I jumped in a cab and got out in front of a house on East 55th Street that looked like a slum. The hallway was marked with graffiti. My breath was now coming in shorter bursts, and I was beginning to panic. I looked at the address on the paper. I had misread it. It was
West
55th, not
East
.
I flagged down another cab, jumped in, and told the driver I was having a heart attack. He sped off and got me to the building on West 55th Street in record time. He probably didn’t want me dying in his cab.

I ran to the receptionist and said, “I’m a friend of Bob Weiner’s and I’m having a heart attack. I can’t breathe. I’ve got to see the doctor.”

“There are people ahead of you,” the receptionist said, pointing to the many elderly and infirm people sitting and watching with indignation as I tried to buck the line. I couldn’t care less if any of these people were ahead of me. I started to speak louder. “You don’t understand. Shortness of breath. I’m dying.”

That got her. She ran inside. I looked around the waiting room. Angry faces seemed to say, “You’re young, you should be ashamed.” I ignored the deadly looks. I could see myself on the
Titanic,
the Captain shouting, “Women and children first!” Jerry Stiller exclaiming, “
Me
first!” as he jumped into a lifeboat.

The doctor came out, escorted me inside, and asked what was going on.

“I’ve got shortness of breath, I can’t breathe,” I said.

“Take off your shirt.”

I did, and he listened with his stethoscope.

“Anything?” I said, waiting to hear the bad news.

“Nothing,” he said. “Give him an EKG,” he said to the nurse. They hooked me up to wires and read the results. The results were normal.

“Well, it’s not a heart attack,” the doctor said. “What’s going on in your life?”

“I’m about to have a baby, this is my first day of rehearsal, and we just moved.”

“Stress,” the doctor said. “There’s nothing physically wrong.”

“Thanks,” I said, running out of the office past the angry waiting room. I was no longer out of breath.

“Give Bob a hug for me,” I shouted to the receptionist as, a moment later, I hopped a cab to the rehearsal of
On the Town
.

Not long after this, in August, 1961, I was performing in Owings Mills, Maryland, outside Baltimore when Kay Falk called to tell me Professor Falk had died. He’d been with students in a theater in Paris and collapsed. He died on August 31 at age 61. Kay asked if I could get up to Syracuse to be a pallbearer at his funeral.

When I arrived at Hendricks Chapel, I was told that the professor had
left instructions that I be his first pallbearer. I was overcome. Was I that important to him?

The chapel was full of students, teachers, and alumni. As the choir sang I could see his eyes looking straight into mine telling me I would someday make it as an actor. I could see the man who gave me strength when things got tough. As I and the others lifted the casket, the choir sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and we carried Professor Falk out. He was buried at a cemetery not far from the house at 128 Circle Road, where Kay could see him every day from her window. On Yom Kippur, when I say Kaddish for my mother, my father, my uncles, and my father-in-law, Eddie Meara, I also send up a prayer for Sawyer Falk.

For the eight years Anne and I had been married I had submerged my feelings about my Jewishness. But guilt about marrying outside my background was simmering on the back burner. I had never severed myself from my Jewish roots, nor did I want to.

Seven years after my mother died, Anne converted to Judaism. She said she was taking instruction so that we could raise our children Jewish. On July 24, 1961, Anne became Jewish. Why did she do this? I wondered how Anne’s father, a devout Roman Catholic, would take it. Did Anne consider this? She surely must have.

In hindsight, I could have waited to marry Anne. Anne too could have waited to convert, but didn’t. Anne’s conversion brought us closer together and we’ve never discussed it since, as odd as that may seem.

I was still in Baltimore in
On the Town,
when Amy arrived three days early. How could I not have anticipated this? How could work be more important than being with my wife when my first child was born?

When I reached the hospital the next day, I saw Anne and our beautiful baby girl, who smiled at me. I felt an immediate change within me, a loving feeling I had never experienced before. Something had been awakened. I wondered why we had waited so long.

Amy arrived only a short time after Sawyer Falk’s death, so we named her Amy Belle Sawyer Stiller. Amy means “beloved.” Belle is for my mother and Sawyer for Professor Falk.

Amy brought us luck. She brought Anne and me even closer together and motivated us. Anne and I had talked about doing an act together. Now we began writing and rehearsing.

Our first outing was at a Women’s Strike for Peace benefit at BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The performance consisted of two pieces. The first we called “Psychodrama.” It was an interview in which Anne plays a Geraldine Page-like character who talks about how psychodrama can help neurotics. She gives an inane description of how psychodrama works while all the time exhibiting off-the-wall behavior. Anne was hysterically funny.

In the second skit Anne played a stripper with a social conscience and I was a bogus doctor. We pretended to be pacifists seeking the end of nuclear testing, and our slogan was “Bump the Bomb.”

In the sketch I exhorted the audience to get up and bump.

“Peaches, our expert in bumping, will demonstrate how to bump.”

Anne, in a cheap tutu and clearly enjoying her work, does just that. “We must all ban the bomb,” she pleads in a sweet baby voice. “Let’s all get up and show the world how we feel about nuclear testing. Let’s all get up and bump for peace.”

The audience—the Women’s Strike for Peace audience, which really was trying to ban the bomb, had just heard Nancy Walker read letters from mothers in Hiroshima—was in shock.

“Get up!” Anne insisted. The audience cautiously obeyed.

“Now, I want everyone to put their hands behind their heads and bump.”

They did.

“Now didn’t that feel good? That’s wonderful. Now turn to the person next to you, and bump him or her. Think of this as an innocent orgy for peace.”

The peace-loving audience responded and was caught up in the ridiculousness.

I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s show the warmongers and politicians how we feel about nuclear testing. Let’s all sing ‘God Bless America,’ and
bump
.”

The audience joined me in singing “God Bless America.”

“Now let’s all march out onto the streets and get everyone to bump. Bump the cop on the beat, bump the fireman, the postman, bump the person sitting next to you. Come on, do it.”

The audience started marching up the aisle. They were ready to hit the sidewalks until we told them to stop, that we would need a permit. They applauded and laughed enthusiastically, and we left the stage feeling great.

Jerry Adler, a classmate from Syracuse, called not long afterward to ask if Anne and I would audition for Orson Bean’s upcoming Summerhill School benefit, to be held at the Alvin Theater. Jerry, who was stage managing, thought the psychodrama sketch would work. The Juilliard String Quartet, Orson and Jack Gilford, and Margot Moser and Larry Keith (who had taken over from Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison in
My Fair Lady
) were also performing.

The benefit audience loved us. We were told we were
original
. Our dressing room after the benefit was like something out of a 20th Century-Fox movie. Agents were swarming out of the woodwork. Art D’Lugoff, who ran the Village Gate on Bleecker Street, approached us.

“How would you like to play at the Gate?” he asked. “You can go on next week with Herbie Mann.”

An agent piped up, “I can book you into the Bon Soir starting this Sunday night.” The Bon Soir was a small, chic club on West 8th Street, a few blocks above Bleecker, which had headliners like Kaye Ballard, Phyllis Diller, Dick Cavett, and Felicia Sanders, one of the great cabaret singers of the 1960s. That gig sounded perfect for us, so we asked Art for a raincheck.

“Anytime,” Art said. “And I’ll pay you four hundred dollars a week.”

My mouth watered at the thought of that kind of money.

As instructed, Anne and I arrived at the Bon Soir on Sunday night. Its bar was the hippest—wall-to-wall laughers. If they laughed, we were in.

Our newfound agent met us. “I’ll be back here, waiting,” he said. “You go on after Louis Nye. It’s his last night here. This is an audition night, and if they like you they’ll probably hire you.”

Anne and I looked at one another. We had thought we were booked.

We were prepared to do “Psychodrama” and a piece called “The Farnsworths.” These particular Farnsworths, winners of a
Ted Mack Amateur Hour,
were siblings from Indiana whose parents had been killed in an auto accident. Anne sings “Bye-Bye Blues” while I tap-dance into the mike with my tongue and teeth. The untalented sibs are doing their first professional engagement after winning the talent hour. The pressure causes them to disintegrate in front of the audience.

We readied ourselves to go on. Louis Nye, the “man on the street” who would always come onto Steve Allen’s TV program with “Hi, ho! Steverino!” was tremendous in his closing performance. The audience was packed with Nye’s friends and well-wishers. As the customers were
paying their checks and departing, the maitre d’ walked briskly up to the microphone and barked, “Stiller and Meara!” We started “Psychodrama” as the crowd headed for the doors. No one was listening. I looked at Anne. There was disbelief on her face. Welcome to the world of nightclubs. I thought of the benefit we’d just done at the Alvin Theater. Where were all those people tonight? I realized we were unknowns; nobody cared about us. We finished the first sketch to faint applause. My shirt was wringing wet. Anne said, “Let’s get out of here,” but I wouldn’t leave the stage defeated.

“Let’s do ‘The Farnsworths,’” I said to Anne, desperation in my voice. I was sure it would take only a few more minutes to grab the audience. We did the sketch—still totally ignored. I was angry. How could the agent not tell us it was an audition and not a booking?

When it was over, we waited for him to come backstage. My black suit was still soaking wet. I felt as if we’d given it our all, and now I wanted some feedback. We did good, I kept telling myself. Where was our agent? The maitre d’ told us he had left.

We went home to Washington Heights. Amy was asleep. Eddie Meara, our baby-sitter for the night, asked how the gig went. “Terrible,” I told him.

I tried reaching our erstwhile agent for weeks. He never returned our calls. We later learned he was busy booking a new “wunderkind” named Barbra.

We decided to take Art D’Lugoff up on his offer.

“Do you think he heard about how we bombed?” I asked Anne.

“What’s the difference,” she said. “Let’s see if he meant it.”

“You mean about the four hundred dollars a week?”

We called him. Art was as good as his word. “You’ll open for Herbie Mann for four weeks. What do you say?”

“Terrific!”

There was still life on the planet.

We arrived at the Gate in the afternoon of our opening night. Amy was in a stroller given us by Fritz Weaver and Sylvia Short. We rehearsed “Peaches and the Doctor” as Amy watched. The Village Gate was big on jazz, with comedy the usual opener. Our names boomed out over the loudspeaker. “Here, for their first engagement at the Village Gate, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.”

I came out as the bogus doctor and talked to the audience about the
bomb, and how it was endangering all of us. About the need to stop nuclear testing. They seemed in total agreement. This was not a satirically minded audience, I thought. I then introduced Peaches, who, I said, was working with me to awaken the country to the danger of a nuclear war by bumping the bomb. “We want to bump the bomb,” I said. “We need your help.”

The onlookers sipped their drinks, chatting quietly among themselves, politely ignoring us. We didn’t seem to be interrupting their evening.