Life Is Not a Stage (16 page)

Irving and I had been on the road together not long before he passed away. Ken Greengrass had told me, “You really need to have an act and go out.” Ken was also Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé’s manager at the time, and he had seen how playing clubs became a whole industry for them. He was surprised I hadn’t done it sooner. My agent Sandy Gallin, who would soon succeed Ken as my personal manager, completed the process and got me into the big Las Vegas types of engagements. As Dolly Parton, Mac Davis, and others would soon find out, Sandy was a brilliant manager who really hustled for his clients.

What was the big deal about going out with your own act? It’s about the closest thing you can do to going out on the stage completely naked. There is absolutely nowhere to hide. If you’re performing a role in the theater, the audience may like you even if they think the rest of the production leaves something to be desired. But headlining your own act, the buck stops with you. It is your opportunity to display all your talents, along with sharing who you are more intimately—your thoughts, your personality, your humor, and your more serious side. But I loved the challenge and the freedom to be totally in charge of my own material. And I was finally ready to take that big step to go out there by myself and see if I could hold an audience and excite them. The good thing, too, is that you find out immediately if you’ve succeeded or failed. One of the first times I tried out the act was at an exclusive country club in Westchester. Performing for a wealthy and sophisticated audience would be a fair challenge, I thought. It reminded me of John Lennon’s famous call-out to a royal benefit concert audience, “People in the cheaper seats, just clap your hands. The rest of you…just rattle your jewelry.” I was relieved. The reaction was tremendous, and I thought, “Wow, this is fun.”

One of the major reasons why I didn’t do it earlier was that I had a legitimate concern that it might endanger my marriage and my family. The club lifestyle was not one that you clocked into and out of like a day job. The environment of Broadway theater was more protected—you sign in, prepare, interact with the other cast members and crew, do the performance, then go home to your husband and kids. The experience with the audience doing clubs was more intense and raw. You had to be good and on top of your game. It also meant being away from home for weeks. The pressure was far more intense on so many fronts. But freed from so much of the obligation and responsibility that had repressed me, I was ready to take it on. Standing there on the club stage was a form of freedom that I had never had before in my life—just to go out there and be my unadulterated self!

The act officially debuted at the Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria on February 28, 1967, for a three-week engagement. As people munched on their turbot mousse with lobster and truffle sauce and prime beef with sautéed endive, I ran through a set mixing Broadway and popular tunes, including “My Favorite Things,” “I Know a Place,” “Gotta Travel On,” “Impossible Dream,” “Tonight,” “Who Can I Turn To,” and a
Sound of Music
medley, among several more. There was quite a buzz in the newspaper columns the following day reporting on Mayor John Lindsay’s very public “congratulatory” kiss at the reception following the performance (that’s a scene in the coming attractions, stay tuned). Otherwise, the evening was a great success and an auspicious beginning. Rave reviews and great crowds at the Empire Room got the buzz going along the club circuit, so the bookings grew. From there I went on to play an engagement at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., and continued on to similar venues.

One of the funniest and strangest compliments I ever received happened during this period. I was playing the Concord, the Borscht Belt resort in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. “You’re a no door act,” said Philly Greenwald, the manager of the club at the resort and brother of famed choreographer Michael Kidd. I had absolutely no clue what he meant by that. “There are very few of you,” he explained. “Lena Horne is one of them, and so are you.” He went on to tell me that the audience had a way to show their appreciation to the artist besides the Concord tradition of banging wooden knockers on the tables in lieu of clapping. (Maybe it was a one-handed way to applaud without having to put down your fork or spoon.) This was a discriminating audience when it came to supper club performance. A “no door act” meant that nobody got up in the middle of the performance to go to the bathroom. They had seen it all, he told me, so it wasn’t a big deal for them to suddenly get up if nature called. So I learned that if people went so far as to hold their bladder for you, it was biological proof that you had to have been good.

The Concord unfortunately was the casualty of the ultimate knocker—the wrecking ball. No longer appealing to the younger generations, the hotel went into decline and stood shuttered and abandoned by the late 1990s and was ultimately leveled to the ground in 2008.

As mentioned before, playing clubs was hardly a sheltered environment, and interaction with the audience could be interesting and sometimes intense. One major factor was the booze. I observed quickly into the process how males and females behave differently when they’ve had a little too much. For the most part, the men became better behaved up to a certain blood alcohol level, more appreciative and definitely more responsive freed of their usual inhibitions. The women, on the other hand, had the tendency to forget their manners and lose sight of the fact that a performer was up there entertaining them. They would turn to their companion and chat away, sometimes with more than enough volume to compete with the singer.

I don’t know about other performers, but when I’m on the stage, my senses are heightened. I hear everything and see everything. At a performance with David Brenner in a big tent near Atlantic City, I was singing “Send in the Clowns” when I heard the audience tittering. I immediately checked myself to make sure nothing was falling off of me. I then turned around and saw that there was a big dog just sitting there on the stage and looking at me. Of course, the audience loved it. I stopped everything and engaged the dog in a conversation. “Are you enjoying the show? If you like it, you can stay.” When I started again, the dog looked up at me, thought about it for a second, and gave me his answer by promptly walking down the aisle and out the nearest exit. The audience and I had a great laugh.

During this same engagement, there was a terrible rainstorm with thunder and lightning. Being in a tent is not the safest place to start off with, but water began flooding the orchestra pit with all the electrical wiring down there. A lightning bolt struck. I immediately threw the microphone down on the stage floor. Some guy from the audience yelled, “Don’t worry, you can’t get electrocuted. It’s okay.” To prove his point, he came up onstage and took the microphone in his hands, and for added emphasis he kissed it during a flurry of thunderclaps.

“Good,” I said. “You sing!”

Another time, some years later, I was doing a big production number of Bette Midler’s “Do You Want to Dance,” which we put together with another song, “Ten Cents a Dance.” I had male dancers in the act, and the guys and I played up the drama of the song in the choreography. The dancers leaned on me and weighed me down as I sang the words “ten cents a dance, that’s all they pay me.” Again, I heard the audience snickering. I looked to the side to discover a guy from the audience on the stage waving cash in his hands. He was obviously very drunk. “I don’t think you can pay me enough,” I said and made a few other jokes as they escorted him gently off the stage.

The worst example happened when I played the Desert Inn for a month, opening for Milton Berle. One night a member of the audience started heckling him. No one was killed, but this incident was a reason why that month felt more like a year. I liked Milton well enough, but you had to accept him the way he was on his terms. Well-deservedly, he was a legend in the business, but he had a very abundant ego to go along with it. For example, he came to my rehearsal and, unsolicited, gave me a lecture on how I should do my show. If I happened to get a standing ovation when I finished my part, it was uncanny how fast Milton came out there to thank me and start his show.

Milton was no stranger to hecklers, so that evening he did all the putdowns he could think of. But this guy would not shut up and got even more aggressive. The sold-out audience was not happy, Milton realized. So he jumped off the stage and went over to the man. He picked him up with one hand on the guy’s shirt collar and the other by the seat of his pants and threw him out of the room. He then went back onstage and tried to pick up where he left off, but it’s hard to be funny again and get a stunned audience back to normal. What made the whole thing more bizarre and out of a Fellini movie was that Milton was wearing clown makeup at the time. No wonder some children are terrified of clowns.

There could also be other extenuating factors why you might not click with an audience every night. Someone told me once about a particularly disastrous taping of a sitcom. They had done the first taping earlier without a glitch, but the director in the booth was dumbfounded because the jokes were not getting any laughs in the evening taping. Then a production assistant solved the mystery. He told the director that they had bused in a large group from a retirement community for an extracurricular outing. The show and most of the jokes were all themed around death and dying. Timing is everything, and the audience was obviously not amused.

However, it was no fun as a comedian to go out there and not be your best before a Las Vegas audience. When a comedian is having a great night, I could be a little envious of them. When I appeared with Bill Cosby at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, I came off the stage dripping with sweat from singing and dancing. I watched for a few moments from the wings as he took his place onstage after me, sitting down comfortably in his chair, entertaining the audience like he was having a casual chat from his living room. “Something is wrong with this picture,” I remember thinking to myself and laughing.

“You don’t appreciate me—I’m sweating up here,” Shelley Berman once yelled at the audience when I opened for him. He was the first stand-up comedian to play Carnegie Hall, and he won a number of gold records for comedy, so he was and still is a true master of his craft. But no one is immune from an off night, especially comedians who stand there alone armed only with a microphone. Shelley continued moaning about the audience as he came off, and I hid in my dressing room so I wouldn’t have to say anything.

My mother happened to fly in and was a witness that night. Back in the 1960s, Las Vegas was fabulous, and I was mesmerized by it. It was a glamorous place, especially at the Sands, where everybody dressed up. You never saw people walking around in T-shirts, sandals, and shorts unless they were going to the pool. When I was at the Flamingo, I was alone, and it was a hard place to hang out by myself. So, long story short, I brought my mother out.

“Don’t ever work with him again,” she repeated. “He’s not that funny.” Neither was my mother. It had been a few years since she last made me cry, and I had decided that she would never do that to me again. Years ago, I would have been terrified of getting verbally whacked by standing up to her, but not anymore. “Oh, when you start paying some bills, then you can tell me who I can work with,” I said. In response, my mother retired to the casino for a late night and early morning of blackjack.

“Mom, it’s five o’clock in the morning!”

“Go to bed if you want to,” she yelled back at me. “Go to bed. Leave me alone.”

Speaking of gambling, many an entertainer was as big a player as the people they entertained. In this regard, Alan King was no slouch. One night, he went out and dropped $100,000 at the tables. The management wanted to hold him to it. “Hey, I have a bad elbow,” he said. “I’m on cortisone and it made me crazy.” They relented and let him off the hook. He was a real character. When I first started working with him at the Sands (when he called me his “Catholic yenta and Girl Scout mother”), he took me aside and told me that he was a little uncomfortable and embarrassed having to bring this up, but…The issue was the marquee outside the hotel. We had equal billing, and our names were required by the contract to be the same font size. The only problem was that his name had eight letters and mine had seventeen.

“I feel so bad to ask you this, but would you mind having a smaller name?” he asked me.

“Nobody sees my name,” I told him. “You can make it any size you want—I don’t care.”

We became great friends despite my continual rejection of his sexual advances. I used to say, “Oh, Alan, give me a break!”

One of the other unpleasant aspects of club life that performers had to deal with back then was that everybody smoked in the clubs. There were no laws against it or even a designated section set aside. The term “secondhand smoke” did not yet exist in the dictionary. Your hair reeked, along with your gowns that cost a fortune, not to mention what it was probably doing to your insides, especially the toll on a singer’s throat. It could get nasty. Lainie Kazan had been performing at the Plaza Hotel in New York City a week before I was to open. A man sitting right in front by the stage was smoking a big cigar. Lainie asked him very politely to put it out since the smoke was bothering her. He refused. So she went over to him, took the cigar, and put it in a glass of water. It must have been a very good cigar, because the man got up and hit her in the chest. It was a good-sized target, because Lainie was back then and still is quite zaftig. The incident made the newspapers.

Cut to a week later. I was standing there on the same stage and, lo and behold, there was a different man with a big cigar blowing smoke at me. I reminded the audience that just a week before Lainie Kazan had asked a gentleman to put out his cigar and had her ample cleavage accosted. In a premeditated gesture for comic effect, I looked down at my own much lesser-endowed bust and said, “I guess I don’t have to worry.” A big laugh followed. And the man put out his cigar.

Regardless of drunks or smokers or Alan King trying to hit on me, I wouldn’t have traded those times for anything. The same time as I was out there having a blast singing for my supper, there was a bigger story happening inside that was both exhilarating and petrifying. The club scene truly hastened the inevitable. Telling me back then to “be careful what you wish for” would not have stopped caution from blowing away in the wind.