Still Foolin’ ’Em Read online

  She lost her teeth because she never went to the dentist. Mainly because the Cossacks had killed him. None of my grandparents had good teeth. Sometimes when he was eating the Thanksgiving brisket, my grandfather’s dentures would be hurting so much he’d remove them at the table, keep them in his hand, and manually chew the rubbery meat until it was ground down enough to swallow. While we all watched in horror, he’d take the “chewed” meat, dip it in horseradish, put it in his mouth, and swallow it with a great sigh of satisfaction. He’d then say something inaudible, and Grandma would reply, “Don’t talk with your hand full, I don’t know what the hell you’re saying.”

  Take care of your teeth! It’s why we baby boomers should floss, it’s why we should brush, and it’s why we should go to the dentist, because we know dentists are important people, even though they weren’t smart enough to get into medical school. It’s sad … dentists don’t get the respect they deserve. You never hear, “Is there a dentist in the house?” That lack of respect started back in elementary school, when we were frightened of the dentist. Not wanting to scare us even more, they made dental hygiene cute. It was always “Watch out for Mr. Tooth Decay” and then a cartoon of some unhappy-looking animated guy. We don’t treat any other malady like that, except maybe for those cartoon yellow devils that live under my toenails. Which really exist, by the way. Come to think of it, if other serious maladies were treated in a fun way, they wouldn’t seem so scary. Don’t worry about erectile dysfunction, it’s Mr. Softie. Instead of incontinence, you get a visit from Mr. Pudding Pants. And good-bye, schizophrenia, say hello to Mr. and Mr. Bipolar.

  But let’s get back to teeth. Think about what they mean to us! Women say the first thing they look at on a man is his smile. Men are slightly different; we figure we’ll get to the smile after we check out her tits. But in the end, we all do love a good smile. Face it, the Mona Lisa wouldn’t be the classic it is if she had a little gap between her front teeth. Then she’d say, “Ith’s a niceth thpainting, ithn’t it, I think it thaptureth my thmile.”

  You would think that taking care of our teeth in 2013 would be easier than it was in 1963, but it’s not, and that’s because the whole dental experience has changed. Back then a dentist was a one-man show. He would clean your teeth, show you how to brush, do bridges, take X-rays, pull teeth, fill cavities, drill root canals, make appointments, validate parking, and rub your leg when he thought you were under anesthesia. The only specialist in 1963 was the orthodontist, who thought his job was to ruin your puberty. Now the whole dental experience is painless drilling, but everything else is a pain in the ass … and it’s all because of the specialists.

  When I turned sixty-five, I decided to celebrate by making an appointment for my cleaning. I showed up on time and read the Sports Illustrated from 2010 until the maître d’ (it’s L.A., don’t ask) escorted me to my examining room. The dentist came in, asked if I’ve been flossing, and, like we all do, I lied. Then he pulled a chunk of lobster meat from between my molars. I’m not sure, but I think he muttered, “Schmuck” as the jazz trio played him off and he left the room.

  Then the parade of specialists began.

  First it was the cleaning expert—the hygienist. She came in looking like one of the riot police in South Korea. On some people, a large Plexiglas face mask isn’t flattering. You can’t imagine the noise the tool made as she chiseled that stuff off my bottom teeth. I don’t have tartar; I have a coral reef. That’s why dentists’ offices always have fish tanks. You could sculpt Michelangelo’s David out of my plaque. Some hygienists use a laser; mine uses jackhammers. I feel like I’m being tortured. If Dick Cheney knew about this, we never would have waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we would have sent him to my dentist.

  Next came the X-ray technician, because God forbid the hygienist should have to do two things. The technician, Paolo (once again, it’s L.A., don’t ask), put a heavy lead blanket over my goodie basket and sprinted out of the room. That’s comforting. I figure with sixty-plus years of X-rays, my balls have been covered with more lead than a kid’s toy from China.

  Then the dentist came back in, after looking at the X-rays, meaning that he would be charging me for a second visit. He said, “Billy, you need a root canal.”

  “Now?”

  “Oh, I don’t do them—you’ve got to see Dr. Jack Wu for that. He can fit you in, in about three weeks.” As soon as he’d said that I needed the root canal, my tooth started to hurt. Freud would have had a field day.

  “Three weeks of this kind of pain?” I asked.

  “No, not this kind of pain—tomorrow you’ll have a worse kind of pain,” he assured me. “I’ll give you these pills I got in Mexico. They may constipate you, and if they do, call Dr. Ari Weitzman.”

  Great, another referral.

  “How about my wisdom teeth?”

  “Right now, they’re fine, but if you want them extracted, Dr. Abrams does uppers and Dr. Hunter does the lowers.”

  “So what exactly do you do?” I asked.

  “Oh, I do fillings and crowns and sit by the pool you paid for.”

  I currently have six dental specialists. I’ve had more people in my mouth than a Colombian hooker during a presidential visit. My dentist farms out everything. I’m looking at the pictures on his desk and I say, “Are those your kids?”

  He says, “Technically no, I didn’t handle that. I sent my wife to Dr. Feldman.”

  But I’m lucky. I go to a very prominent dentist. My dentist is the fifth guy. You know when they say, “Four out of five dentists prefer” whatever it is they prefer? Mine’s the one who doesn’t. When people find out he’s the fifth guy, they go crazy. “He’s the fifth guy? What’s he like? You gotta get me an appointment!”

  Once you find a great dentist, never leave them. I know guys who have been divorced three times but have the same dentist. And the main reason I go to my dentist: he gives a great shot. You don’t feel anything.

  The guy I went to before always hurt me, even though he’d warn me. “You’re going to feel a little prick in your mouth.”

  “If I do, I’m going to bite it the fuck off.”

  What was a twice-a-year visit when we were younger has turned into six months of appointments with specialists. Then by the time you’re done, the six months are up and you have to start all over again.

  But I go because my teeth mean so much to me. If I have all my teeth at sixty-five, it means I won’t need a nurse to cut up my meat like Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends do.

  If I have all my teeth, it means I won’t be mistaken for a twenty-two-year-old meth addict. And most of all, if I have all my teeth, it means I won’t be the only man in the world with a horizontal vagina for a mouth.

  My Thirties

  The girls were both fast asleep as I rearranged their blankets and softly kissed them on their foreheads. A great feeling of contentment filled me up. I was now a daddy with two beautiful daughters and a career that was picking up steam. After one last look at my sleeping angels, I joined Janice at our dining room table, across from the portly, red-cheeked man who had come to our home with the sole purpose of making me contemplate my demise. That was one of the perks of having more money: I could spend it on things like life insurance. As I listened to him drone on, I nodded and attempted to look interested, though in my mind I was stabbing him repeatedly with one of the new steak knives I had just received for my thirtieth birthday. That great feeling of contentment, gone in a flash. Nothing makes you feel older than sitting across from a life insurance salesman who keeps talking about your imminent death, making it seem like you’re going to keel over during the meeting and your kids and wife will have to live in an internment camp in northern California. The insurance man’s message was clear, however: you’re thirty, so now you are slightly “at risk.” Meaning you have the same chance of dying that the president of Iran has of showing up at a Seder.

  This was also the time that the “estate planners” entered our lives. “Who woul
d get the kids if you both were, say, MURDERED BY A MADMAN?” Awful things are possible, and we realized that, but just discussing who we’d want to raise the girls in the case of catastrophe caused a lot of anxiety. After running through all the familial options, we either got annoyed with each other or started to cry. So we thought of friends. “What about my fraternity brother Dan?”

  “WHAT? Jenny asked him for a piece of gum once and he said, Sorry, it’s my last one. He’s selfish.”

  Janice’s turn: “I could see the girls with Gwen.”

  “GWEN?” I snorted. “I can’t see anybody living with Gwen … except for her twenty cats.” Finally I made a peace offering: “Let’s go neutral. What about Regis Philbin? Always up, great sense of humor. Might be fun for the girls…”

  After seriously considering an orphanage in Russia, we ended up making plans we felt good about, but the process had forced us to realize that time was moving on and, worse, would eventually end.

  Soap was a big hit, but problems were starting to emerge. With so many characters, each story arc came around so slowly that it was hard for me to get a lot of screen time. I’d come home from a frustrating day at the studio feeling edgy and walk right into “Daddy!” The girls were tons of fun, but a five-year-old and a one-year-old are a lot of work, which feels like even more when you’re not happy. I was making the big mistake of bringing my work home with me. Meanwhile, Buddy kept nudging me to perform. “It’s been over a year,” he said. “It’ll get your mind going.”

  Finally, one night I went over to the Improv on Melrose, a terrific comedy room whose owner, Budd Friedman, was a great friend to comics. Budd had created the original Improv in New York City, which was the mecca of all comedy clubs. That night, I went with the intention of just watching, but I couldn’t help myself. When Budd introduced me, the audience gave me a huge ovation. Walking onstage as a television star sure was easier than as a nobody, but then you better be really funny. I wasn’t at first, but I kept talking about the show and playing Jodie and the odd things people would say to me—“Oh my God, it’s you, the fagelah”—and it got funny. I left a “tip” and was hooked all over again.

  After putting the kids down for the night, I’d perform at the Improv as often as I could. I started writing new pieces, and after an uneventful day at Soap, going to the clubs was like getting in a great workout at a gym. When Muhammad Ali retired, I was invited to perform at a televised All-Star party for him at the Fabulous Forum, in Los Angeles. We’d done a few other television shows together in recent years as his boxing skills had started to wane. He no longer was the floating butterfly, and the sting of the bee didn’t hurt as much. He’d lost an embarrassing title fight to Leon Spinks and then won the rematch, becoming the first man to win the heavyweight title three times. By this point I had developed my original impression of him so that it wasn’t just an imitation of his voice, it was a total portrait of the man. The piece was called “Fifteen Rounds,” and it covered fifteen big moments of Ali’s life, including his relationship with Cosell, all punctuated by ring bells. I played Ali from the age of eighteen until the thirty-six-year-old Ali loses to Spinks and plots his comeback. The last speech was a monologue that rose to a fever pitch, underscored by a full orchestra playing the stirring Rocky music. I was the last to perform at his retirement party, and once again the least known. Richard Pryor, Chevy Chase, and Diana Ross were just a few of the superstars who preceded me. But when I got onstage in front of twenty thousand people, all I could see was Ali.

  To this day, I think it was one of my best performances. The great Ali laughed and cried as he watched me play him—it was surreal. I wasn’t even finished when Ali himself led the standing ovation. Afterward, he came backstage. I was standing with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase, and Ali just walked through them. He lifted me off the ground. “Little brother, you made my life better than it was,” whispered the champ. He turned and left; there was nothing more to say.

  “Little Brother, you made my life better than it was.”—1979, the Forum, Los Angeles.

  (Photograph by Bruce W. Talamon © 1979. All rights reserved)

  The next night, I taped my very first HBO special. Michael Fuchs, the network’s creator, was the executive producer for my show. A visionary, Michael would become a big part of my career. HBO wasn’t yet the incredible network it is now, but it was already something unique. You had to pay to watch, and doing a special for HBO was just that: special. You could say whatever you wanted, uncensored, without commercials. At the time, mine was only the third or fourth stand-up show HBO had done. I didn’t want to just walk out onto a bare stage, so we built a set to look like the backstage of a nightclub, and I gave the show a story. It opened in the Stand-up Comedians wing of the Motion Picture Home, where a young reporter, Jimmy Brogan, was interviewing the now eighty-year-old me. (Clearly, even then I was looking toward my golden years, and wondering just how golden they would actually be.) Robin Williams and the very witty Martin Mull played themselves as old-timers (great makeup jobs!), and a young actor named Michael Richards made his television debut; he played an old and confused Chevy Chase tripping over bedpans and muttering, “Did I leave the show too soon?” We also had a Steve Martin look-alike with a limp arrow on his head and deflated balloon animals littering his room.

  The “interview” then became a flashback to the performance. Not thinking he’d say yes, I’d asked Ali if he would do a few minutes with me onstage as a surprise to the audience. “We will shock and amaze them, little brother,” he told me. The special was being taped at a small theater in Santa Monica, only two hundred seats. The Forum event we had taped the night before was being aired that night, but Ali wouldn’t let me down. He sat on an apple box in the alley of the theater, alongside our production trucks, and watched his tribute on a small black-and-white monitor until it was time to go onstage. The audience, of course, went nuts. I got him to imitate Cosell while I played him. It was hilarious. He even recited a poem to me before he left the stage: “I love your show and I admire your style, but the pay is so cheap I won’t be back for a while.” That night, onstage, I realized, Holy shit, Muhammad Ali is my friend. This was confirmed a few weeks later, when he called me to see if I wanted to run with him on a local country club golf course. “I would love to,” I said. “But that club is restricted.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “It means they don’t allow Jews.”

  “I’m a Muslim, and they let me in. I will never run there again,” he said, and he didn’t.

  * * *

  The special got great reviews and came at the perfect time, surprising fans of Soap who’d never seen me do stand-up. It also reconfirmed that as good as Soap was for me, it was also holding me back. I felt like I was a racehorse trying to run with one leg tied to another. Some weeks on Soap I would have only one line, and staying focused and content became a problem. Increasingly drawn to performing my act, I was now playing college arenas, Las Vegas, and other big venues. Finally I decided that I would convince Soap’s producers to write me out of the episodes in which my role was minuscule, so that I’d have more time to work on my stand-up. Never very good at confrontation, I rehearsed my speech over and over until I had it down. Then I arranged a meeting with Paul Witt and walked into the office with the usual lump in my throat. Behind his desk I saw a large terrarium. Walking slowly across the white sand was a tarantula the size of a poodle. The spider was the star of an ABC movie of the week called Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, and Linda Otto, the casting director who had also cast Soap, had given it to the producers as a present.

  I sat down and nervously began talking. “Um, it’s been hard to be happy here, um, especially when my story line is light and I have to be here all week for, um, one line, and it’s been months of that now, so, on, um, those weeks, could you, um, write me out, so I can go off and play some dates—”

  Paul stopped me: “I know we’ve hit a little dry period with Jodie,” he said. “But w
e love you here, and you’re a big part of this show.”

  At this point he reached for a small jar on his desk. “We have some new ideas that we’re talking about…” He unscrewed the top of the jar, reached in, and pulled out a live cricket. Then he opened the lid of the terrarium and dropped the cricket onto the sand. “Just be patient,” he said as the spider moved like a hairy hand toward the cricket, which now seemed more nervous than I was. “You’re so popular on the show.” In a moment, the spider RIPPED a leg off the cricket. “We need you here.” OFF with his wings, the spider having a fine feast. Oblivious, Paul continued: “Let me think about it. I’m sorry you’re so unhappy here, and we’ll figure something out.” The cricket seemed to be looking at me and crying as—BYE-BYE, HEAD—the spider ripped the cricket apart.

  The metaphor was too much for me. “Paul, you know what? I’m fine, I’ll get through this.” I never asked for anything again.

  * * *

  Janice and I bought our first house, and in December 1979 we moved in. We were supervising the moving men as they unloaded our furniture when two women in their late fifties approached us. “The house is happy it’s back in show business,” one of them said, as the other handed us a circular coffee cake. They told us they were sisters who had grown up in our house and now lived next door. Their parents were well-known vaudeville performers who’d had a mind-reading act. Their father, Harry Usher, was a magician as well and had helped create the famous Magic Castle in Hollywood. Their home—now ours—had been known as “the House of Usher.” Cue the spooky music.

  They showed us vintage photographs of the many stars who used to stop by the house. In our new backyard we saw Harold Lloyd, Walter Lantz (who had created Woody Woodpecker), Houdini’s widow, George Burns, Red Skelton, Walter Brennan, and many others. “Will Rogers used to ride his horse here all the time,” they told us, pointing to a spot in the front yard and giggling like cartoon mice. “Our folks would be so happy it’s you.”