B000FC0RL0 EBOK (34 page)

“I hardly expected such elegance on a blind date,” Anne said. “I
like
French cooking. They’ve got some great
mussels meunière,
” she said, as if scanning a menu, “and their specialty is coq au vin.”

“Well, I do lean towards fish,” I said.

“Then the
poisson de maison
is what you want.”

“Good, here comes the waiter,” I said. “She’d like the
poisson de maison
and I’ll try the veal cordon bleu and some wine….”

“May I suggest a little Blue Nun?” said Jerry Della Femina as the waiter.

“Excuse me? I never heard of Blue Nun,” I said.

Anne said, “Wasn’t she on
The Ed Sullivan Show?
”

Della Femina broke up. He said, “That’s it. You guys have got it. Those are the people.”

I said, “But wait, when people laugh at a commercial, they usually don’t remember the product.”

“This time they will,” Jerry Della Femina said.

He was right.

“Have you got any Blue Nun?” people would shout over to our table when we ate at the Russian Tea Room.

“We bathe in it,” Anne would crack back.

“Do you really drink that stuff?”

“I drink it,” Anne would reply. “Jerry doesn’t. One in the family is enough.”

The tag line, said by the announcer, was always, “Blue Nun, the delicious white wine that goes as well with meat as it does with fish.”
The Wall Street Journal
in a front-page article said Blue Nun sales jumped 150 percent as a result of our commercials.

At Zabar’s, the legendary specialty food store on upper Broadway, a male shopper loaded with bags of eats remarked to me one day, “Jerry, what’s the delicious white wine that goes as well with meat as it does with whitefish?”

Anne and I were now spokespersons for Blue Nun. We read in
Ad Age
that we had broken the oldest rule in advertising: That funny could never sell a product. Jerry Della Femina said you could sell through humor. We proved him right. The sales of Blue Nun jumped from 140,000 cases a year to over 1,400,000.

The irony of those commercials is that we had actually done thirty takes. I remember noticing somewhere around take twenty-four that Anne always did it the same way. I could never do it the same way twice. It’s her parochial school background, I told myself. Those nuns making you do things, forcing you, made her one wonderful actress. At my school, they allowed me to do whatever the hell I wanted and look how it screwed me up. Next to her, I’m inept.

When we finished recording that day we took the elevator downstairs.

“Let’s have a drink,” I said to Anne.

“Okay,” Anne said.

“You did great,” I told her.

“You did great,” she said.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t do it better and faster,” I said, “but that’s the way I work.”

“I know,” she said. “We’re different.”

Years later I called Jerry Della Femina and asked him, “Do you remember doing thirty takes on that Blue Nun commercial?”

“Sure. You had it on the first take, but you were doing so great I figured we could make it even better.”

At that time, in the late 1960s, I had agreed to read the names of the Vietnam war dead at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as part of a protest organized by psychiatrists from St. Luke’s Hospital. I was one of many who agreed to read the names. My feelings about Vietnam were confused. As an actor, my life was concerned with day-to-day career decisions. As writers, Anne and I never really got into political issues. We dealt with man/woman stuff. It was a safe place.

But some part of me was upset by the terrible stories about the war and the casualties we saw each week on TV. When I heard of the protest, I didn’t want to forgo the opportunity to say something. I remembered what had happened during the entertainment blacklist of the 1950s. Blacklisting could be silent, too, I told myself.

On the day of the reading, I simply arrived at the cathedral and read some names. I was interviewed briefly by
The New York Times
. My name, along with that of Leonard Bernstein and others in the entertainment world, was mentioned in the story. We did not lose the Blue Nun account. During the following years, we wrote and performed in many, many commercials. We always insisted on a soft sell. That meant the spots had to be funny and have a punch line. Clients like the Amalgamated Bank, United Van Lines, Jack in the Box, Lanier, Harrah’s, and Food Emporium went along with us, resisted the hard sell, and came out winners.

Had we sold out? Siobhan McKenna and Maureen Stapleton were once asked in an interview what they felt about actors doing commercials. McKenna said it was obscene. Maureen said, “For an actor, poverty is the only thing that’s obscene.”

Thanks to Blue Nun and our appearances on the
Sullivan
show, people now knew our names. We were no longer the tall girl and the short guy. But they never got our names quite right. “Schiller and Myra.” “Jerry Stiller and Moira Shearer.” Trini Lopez once introduced us as “Stella and Maria.” Tony Martin, in a tent in Holyoke, Massachusetts,
just gave up and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, those people with the two
fechachta
names.” Bernard Levin, when he gave us a rave in the London
Daily Mail
, called us Steara and Miller. The next day he wrote a follow-up review saying, “The team I admired, was not Steara and Miller but Stiller and Meara—py amologies.”

Our Blue Nun popularity grew to the point that we were booked on a summer tour of Neil Simon’s
The Prisoner of Second Avenue
. One afternoon in Dayton, Ohio, Mary Ellyn Devery, our lifelong friend, who produced and managed the tour, came backstage with two nuns who politely asked if we’d autograph some bottles of Blue Nun wine, which they had in their handbags. They were in street clothes, of course. While doing
Prisoner
for John Kenley in Dayton we were assigned a police officer, Fred Sandoval, to “guard” us and make sure we were not harassed by autograph seekers.

“It’s not like we’re Robert Redford and Jane Fonda,” I told him. “You don’t have to guard us.” This did not deter him in his duties. Amy and Ben were out of school and traveling with us. Fred would entertain them backstage. One of his bits was taking a photo of Ben with a “Most Wanted” headline beneath his face. Here we were, in Sherwood Anderson country, with a cop making us feel like we were the Barrymores.

Perhaps it was because we’d done good business and the audiences had loved us that I innocently remarked to Fred on closing night, “Come see us if you ever get to New York.”

Some years later I received a letter from him. He described his arthritis and the terrible pain he was suffering. He mentioned something about coming to New York. Remembering my promise in Dayton, I wrote back, “Call us if you get in,” not expecting he would take me literally. One evening when Anne was in bed with the flu, I received a phone call at about 9
P.M.
“Jerry, it’s me, Fred.”

“Where are you?”“In New York.”

I was in shock. He named a fleabag motel on Ninth Avenue. Not the Waldorf, I thought.

“The room is terrible,” he said.

“I’ll be right over,” I told him. What could I do? I had made a promise.

When I reached the motel, there was Fred. Once so active and full of life, he now seemed crushed by his affliction.

I had no idea what to do, but I could see the pain he was in.

I looked at the dilapidated surroundings.

It suddenly hit me that the purpose of his traveling to New York was that he really believed me when I’d said to look us up. In Fred’s mind, Anne and I were Ozzie and Harriet from TV, the most ingratiating two people in the world. What would Ozzie do? I looked at the cheap paintings on the motel room walls, the windows overlooking a hostile city.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s late and Anne’s not feeling well, but you can’t stay here. You can stay with us.”

I checked him out of the motel and drove up to our apartment on Riverside Drive. Anne was asleep. I didn’t wake her. Fred and I talked about Ohio and then had a snack. I told him he’d see Anne in the morning when she felt better. He went to bed and I finished working on a script in my office/bedroom.

When I awoke in the morning, Fred was looking out over Riverside Drive and the Hudson River from one of our windows.

“How about lox and eggs?” I said. He looked at me bewildered. Eggs he knew. Lox was terra incognita, but I fixed it anyway. I brewed some coffee. Anne was still asleep. How could I tell her we had a guest? Let her find out for herself, I thought.

Suddenly the bedroom door opened. There was Anne, in a beat-up bathrobe, still groggy from the antibiotics.

Fred said, “Anne! How are you?”

I said, “You remember Fred from Dayton?”

“Dayton?”

“Yeah, when we did
Prisoner
for John Kenley.”

Anne’s face scrunched up as she searched for some connection. She said, “I look terrible. Don’t kiss me. I’m sick.”

Instantly, this man’s fantasy disintegrated. I was now just Joe Schmo introducing him to my sick wife. I suddenly felt like a fraud inviting him to the Big Apple to meet stars, as though I was trying to be someone I wasn’t. But I could only guess that, just like me, Fred had dreams. As far-out as they may have seemed, he tried to act on them.

We sat down at the table and talked some more about Dayton, John Kenley, and the good times we’d all had together. When breakfast was finished, Fred said, “I really have to get back.”

“Must you go so soon?” I said. I could sense he couldn’t wait to leave town for home.

“It was nice seeing both of you,” Fred said. “Give my regards to the
kids.” I wanted to say, “Come on, Fred, we’re going out tonight, we’ll see
Pippin
. We’ll paint the town red.” But if the truth were to be known, Anne and I never painted any town red. We were just actors putting on a show, and some people believed it a little too hard.

Thanks to the Blue Nun radio commercials, Stiller and Meara were still alive. However, we kept turning down lucrative nightclub offers around the country in order to stay in New York, where Amy and Ben were going to school. The only way we could stay together as a family was to stop performing together. We vowed that one of us always had to be with Amy and Ben. This led me back to the theater, where I no longer had to hear a metronome in my head, ticking, telling me that the audience had to laugh every fifteen seconds.

I wanted to get back to doing a play. But could I still act?

Walt Witcover cast me, Bob Snively, and Nancy Ponder in
Boubouroche
by Georges Courteline, a nineteenth-century French playwright. The show was performed in a former New York City jail and courthouse in the East Village. It was wonderfully received. But gone were the big checks.

It must’ve gotten around to the industry that we were bona fide stage performers. Together Anne and I did Next by Terrence McNally and
Last of the Red Hot Lovers
, selling out on the summer circuit. On my own I did
Red Hot Lovers
in Atlanta in early 1974 with Jane Curtin, who had not yet appeared on
Saturday Night Live
. Anne was to receive the first of four Emmy nominations for her work on
Medical Center
, so the split was paying dividends financially.

In 1974 Alixe Gordin, the casting agent of the old
Studio One
days, called and said she’d heard one of the Blue Nun commercials.

“I have a role for you in
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
. It’s a subway thriller, and you play a transit cop, Lieutenant Garber. You’re Walter Matthau’s sidekick.”

In the film, a New York subway train has just been hijacked, and the passengers are being held for one million dollars ransom. My first day on the set I was in my camper putting on my transit cop’s outfit when the assistant director knocked on my door saying they were ready to rehearse. I finished lacing my shoes and trundled over to the production trailer, where I met Matthau and screenwriter Peter Stone for the first time. I
knew the director, Joe Sargent, from my days apprenticing at the Cherry Lane Theater in the Village.

Joe introduced us.

“Walter, this is Jerry.”

“Hi, Jerry. You’re playing …?”

“Lieutenant Garber,” I said.

“And who am I playing?” Matthau asked.

“Revill,” Joe replied.

“Revill? What kind of name is that?”

“It’s the name of the guy you’re playing,” Peter Stone said. “Here, here’s the book,” Joe said, handing Matthau a paperback of John Godey’s
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
. “You’re a Transit Police lieutenant.”

Matthau started leafing through the pages. “Revill doesn’t sound right.”

“He’s black,” Stone said. “The guy in the novel is black.”

“I’m not Revill,” Matthau said. “I don’t feel the name is right.”

“Well, what name would you like?” Stone asked.

“I don’t know. Jerry”—turning to me—“what did you say your name was?”

“Garber.”

“That’s Jewish, right?” Matthau asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “The way I figure it.”

“Well, that’s what I should be,” said Matthau. “I’m Jewish. I should be Garber. Jerry, would you mind switching names with me?”

I couldn’t believe what I was listening to. Is this the way movies are made? Major decisions about character are made on the spot? This being my first movie, I’d immersed myself in the role. I’d worked on my character to the last, finest detail—to the extent that I knew Garber’s wife’s maiden name, his birth sign, and even the date his father and mother became citizens.

In as nonconfrontational way as possible, I said, “But I’m not Revill either.”

“Well, can’t we find you another name?” Walter said. “Let’s look at the book.”

The three of them and Gabe Katzka, the producer, started leafing through, looking for a name.

“Here, here’s one. Patrone. Rico Patrone,” someone said.

“How about that?” said Matthau. “You can be Patrone.”

All eyes were now on me. Would I accommodate everyone? A simple adjustment. A good actor can make an adjustment. But it’s not so simple: If Walter Matthau couldn’t be Revill, why should it be so easy for me to be Patrone?