It Happened One Knife (7 page)

Clearly, I’d have to find a way to get a comedy legend to show up every night.

I stood behind the screen with Lillis, Mitchell, Sharon, and Vic, who had shown up just a few minutes earlier. We spoke quietly, despite the fact that the crowd couldn’t hear us over their own conversations. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father approaching from the wings of the stage.

Vic looked at me with something resembling distaste and asked, “So, what are you doing about the missing film?”

Missing film? Did our copy of
Cracked Ice
go . . . oh yeah,
that
missing film!

“Anthony’s movie? I told the cops, and they’re investigating. What do you mean, what am I doing about it?”

“You know the kid can’t afford to make another print,” Vic countered. “You know this means I can’t make a deal with a studio. You don’t seem too concerned.”

“When did I get the responsibility for this? I’m not his father, or his agent.” I almost took the cigar out of Vic’s mouth just out of spite.

“Two people you know well could profit from recovering that film, and you could care less,” he said.

“If you want to get technical,” I told him, “that expression should be ‘you
couldn’t
care less.’ If I could care less, that would indicate that I care.”

“I don’t want to get technical,” Vic said with great finality. We stood quietly for a few moments, and I refocused my attention on the evening at hand. But Vic, while not physically resembling a Jewish mother in any way, had nonetheless managed to make me feel just a tad guilty.

“I’ll go out and do a short introduction, and then I’ll call for you, Harry,” I said to Lillis. “Do you want me to come back and get you?”

Lillis shook his head. “No, this guy can do it.” He tilted his head in Mitchell’s direction. “If I keel over from the exertion, he’s more qualified to carry me to the ambulance.” Then he turned to Sharon. “Unless the doctor would be willing. If I went into cardiac arrest, she could take off her shirt and examine me.”

Sharon had spent enough years married to me to know when she was needed as a straight man. “If you go into cardiac arrest, Harry, what good would it do for me to take off
my
shirt?”

Lillis smiled. “At least I’d die happy,” he said.

I stepped out in front of the screen and Anthony, up in the booth, turned on a spotlight we have for just such occasions. We’d also found an old podium in the basement when I’d bought the place, and we’d wheeled it out to use for the introductions. This was the first time we’d ever used it.

“Good evening,” I said, and the crowd immediately quieted. Sharon didn’t have to whistle like a construction worker this time. “Welcome to Comedy Tonight. We’re very excited to have you all here for a very special evening. Tonight, we are being visited by a legend of film comedy whose work is unparalleled, a man who clearly stands among Groucho Marx, W. C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, and Gene Wilder as a master in his field.”

“Larry the Cable Guy!” a teenager called from the crowd, and there was laughter.

“Yeah, him, too,” I said, plowing on. “Just a quick explanation. Mr. Lillis will come out and speak for a few minutes, and then we’ll have the first New Jersey showing of
Cracked Ice
in twenty years . . .” There was applause from the crowd. “And at the end of the evening, Mr. Lillis will appear again for a Q-and-A session. So please save your questions. We’ll send around cards for you to write them down during the film.”

I couldn’t see a thing beyond the first row with the spotlight in my face. Leo Munson, wearing his captain’s hat, which meant it was a formal occasion, was seated next to the woman who’d been laughing at Lillis’s jokes when I first met him at the Booth Actors’ Home, with a corsage pinned to her very tasteful lapel. I wondered if she was Harry’s date for the evening, but before I had the chance to speculate further, I heard the voice of an older man call out, “Why do we need cards? Can’t he
hear
?”

There was a murmur from the area of the shout. I thought I’d recognized the voice, but couldn’t place it. Trying to avoid an ugly scene, I turned toward the wings and shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, a true comedy legend: Harry Lillis! ”

The audience broke into loud applause, and Mitchell wheeled Lillis onto the stage. The audience, or at least those that I could see clearly, leapt to their feet, and Lillis, positively beaming, waved to them. The ovation went on for a good number of minutes; I wasn’t counting, but the thrill I got from that moment was enough to keep me grinning for a long time.

Or more to the point, it
would
have kept me grinning for a long time if, as soon as the din died down and the audience took their seats, that same voice hadn’t screamed out, “My god; he’s in a
wheelchair
!”

Lillis’s eyes narrowed, and he put a hand up to shield his eyes from the spotlight. If I hadn’t been standing immediately to his left, I wouldn’t have heard him mutter, “Son of a bitch.”

“
You sick, Lillis, or are you just old?
”

I tried to step forward to address the voice, but Lillis reached out and grabbed my right arm. “Don’t,” he said. “You know who that is, don’t you?”

And, suddenly, I did. I reached out my left arm, and shouted to the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen,
Les Townes
!”

Sure enough, Townes, dressed in a blazer and slacks and looking fit, walked up to the skirt of the stage, where we had built two small steps, and I helped him onto the stage. The audience, aware of the entertainment history they were witnessing, stood and applauded some more. Townes took a deep bow.

If I was speechless when I met Lillis, I was mortified when I met Townes. Here was yet another of my boyhood idols, and I’d almost exploded at him a moment before. It flashed on me at that moment that I should have sought Townes out when I’d found Lillis, and asked him to the screening tonight. But, given his reputation for being a gentleman, I hoped Townes would let me off the hook. He took a second bow, and then as he stood, gestured that I should lean in; he wanted to tell me something

“What’s the matter,” he asked. “I’m not a legend?”

7

WATCHING
Cracked Ice
with the two men who made it was an education. The small elite group of us: Sharon, Dad (Mom had seen enough of Harry Lillis during my teenage years, but sent her regrets, along with a batch of cookies guaranteed to cause heartburn if used as anything but coasters), Vic, Anthony (when he wasn’t changing reels), Mitchell, and I, sat silently while the two old pros watched their crowning work, their pinnacle of achievement, the highlight of their careers . . . and trashed it mercilessly.

It took me a shorter while to get over my awe at being in the same room with Les Townes, mostly because he and Lillis were busy taking verbal shots at each other that were as funny as they were pointed. Not that I wasn’t amazed at listening to the team, but after a while, you started to feel like part of the club. I almost felt like taking a couple of shots at the movie myself, but it was one of my all-time favorites, and I couldn’t bring myself to criticize it.

In case you haven’t seen it (and I strongly suggest you do),
Cracked Ice
is a brilliant comedy based on the idea that a prehistoric man—shown in a brief opening sequence fleeing a rear-projection brontosaurus left over from
King Dinosaur
(1955)—falls into one of the many glaciers that were available at the time, only to be discovered, and thawed, in 1956 (otherwise known as “modern times”). He is examined and taken in by an eccentric doctor, and eventually learns to become a smooth, Brylcreemed playboy who does well with the ladies.

The genius evident in the handling of this rather pedestrian plotline (beaten to a bloody pulp, for example, by Pauly Shore in
Encino Man
) was that any other comedy team in history would have had the stronger comic presence—in this case, Harry Lillis—play the caveman. Lillis and Townes knew better. The caveman would spend much of the movie grunting, and that would rob Lillis of his verbal wit, perhaps his greatest comic weapon. And after “evolving,” the caveman (eventually named Bob) would be a charming, if oily, ladies’ man, something that would again keep Lillis from cutting loose.

They reversed the roles, and the result was classic. Or so I thought, until I heard Lillis and Townes rip it to pieces before my very ears.

“Look at that lighting,” Townes grumbled from his seat behind the screen (you can actually see very well back there, although the image is naturally backward). “Who directed this turkey, anyway?”

“I did,” Lillis reminded him.

“Oh, yeah.” Townes grinned.

Lillis pointed at the screen, as if we might be watching something else. “You see that? My tie’s inside the doctor coat in one shot, then outside, then back inside. And I knew it from the first dailies, but they wouldn’t let me go back and reshoot it. Cheap bastards. They said nobody’d ever notice.”

“I’ve seen this movie fifty times, Harry,” I told him quietly, “and I never noticed until you said something just now.”

He gave me a look that shut me up for twenty minutes.

They proceeded like that for some time, noticing every tiny continuity error, groaning at some of the jokes that I’d always thought were brilliant, despairing at how each of them looked on-screen. But when they got to the examination scene, they both stopped talking.

Perhaps the most well-remembered of any comedy scene the team ever performed, the scene halfway through
Cracked Ice
, in which Harry Lillis, playing Dr. Horatio X. Ledbetter, decides to perform a thorough examination of his prehistoric subject (Townes), is a seamless grafting of sophisticated verbal wit onto relentless slapstick that has never been equaled on film. Entire theses have been written in postgraduate film programs on the scene, and even those haven’t blunted its delirious momentum.

At one point, Dr. Ledbetter slips on a bar of soap (don’t ask how a bar of soap ends up on the floor; just trust me, and go rent the movie), and the caveman, having been told to follow his doctor’s lead, deliberately slips on the floor, too. The camera stays on the empty room—a static shot— for forty-two seconds, and the grunting and groaning (and Lillis’s offscreen remarks, which he has insisted were adlibbed) is all we have to go on for the longest time. When the two men finally stand up, the caveman is in the doctor’s coat, and the doctor is wearing a leopard skin. It defies explanation, but it is hilarious.

Tonight, neither Lillis nor Townes spoke during that scene—despite the raucous laughter coming from the audience—but they restarted the acid commentary immediately after. I didn’t dare open my mouth, and neither did anyone else in our small group. We listened, and we learned.

The question-and-answer period after the film was priceless: even relatively innocent questions like, “When you were shooting that scene, did you have a cold?” were met with less-than-innocent answers (“A cold
what
?”). Anthony, with his digital video setup on a tripod, recorded the event, and never looked happier. Even when he looked at me, the alleged destroyer of his dreams, he couldn’t stop smiling.

It went on for over an hour, far longer than Mitchell— who seemed terribly protective of Lillis—was comfortable with, but the two old pros showed no sign of flagging. When I finally ended the session, to groans from the audience followed by a long standing ovation, it was with the same feeling one has after any big (and enjoyable) moment in one’s life:
Wow, that was great
coupled with
Is that it?

After the audience left, we sat in the lobby of Comedy Tonight as Lillis and Townes continued to hold court. Townes, almost as tall as his partner (and better preserved, at least to the untrained eye), sat with his long legs stretched out in front of him. Sophie was still putting the snack bar back together, although there was precious little left; almost everything we’d had in stock had been sold. I’d have to call our candy distributor early tomorrow morning to get replacement snacks in time for the next evening’s showing.

Sharon, Vic, Anthony, Jonathan, and I sat on the steps to the balcony, while Harry Lillis, in his wheelchair, and Les Townes, in my desk chair (the most luxurious seat I owned that wasn’t bolted to the auditorium floor), bantered themselves silly for an hour and a half. The woman from the Booth Actors’ Home, whom Harry introduced as Marion Borello, “a dame from way back when,” sat next to Lillis and rarely took her eyes off him, giving Harry looks I think he saw but chose not to return. Mitchell, glancing impatiently at his watch, hovered nearby, leaning on the snack bar and getting dirty looks from Sophie, who had just polished it to a mirrorlike finish. Dad sat in a folding chair I’d dusted off and set near the two guests of honor.

“How did you come up with all that stuff when they’re on the floor?” I asked Lillis about the examination scene.

Townes jumped in ahead of him. “Would you believe the studio wanted us to cut that?” he asked. “They said it was a shot of the wall for forty seconds, and nobody would want to watch it. Harry had to fight with them for a week over it, and to the day he died, H. R. Mowbrey insisted we were crazy.”

Lillis grinned at his partner’s admiration for his work and his tenacity. “I threatened to walk off the lot and never come back,” he said. “I think Mowbrey wanted to take me up on it.” Lillis’s battles with the studio owner were the stuff of legend; while they were negotiating a contract extension in 1955, Lillis once actually sent a man in a gorilla costume to Mowbrey’s office with instructions to follow the poor man around all day and, well, ape every move Mowbrey made.

“Whenever we got too deep into it, we sent Vivian in to talk to him,” Townes said. There was a moment after hearing the name of Townes’s late wife, and their on-screen leading lady, that the two men both grew quiet, but Dad, sitting on a folding chair to one side, broke the silence.