Roy and Arthur was a vaudeville comedy team. Roy was my father; Arthur was my uncle Bunk. On November 22, 1921, after their last show that night in Philadelphia, Phil Roy got a call backstage, where he was told, “It’s a boy!”
My father drove that night from Philadelphia to Babylon, Long Island, to greet his new son, Jacob Cohen. Me. (My father’s real name was Phillip Cohen; his stage name was Phil Roy.)
I was born in an eighteen-room house owned by my mother’s sister Rose and her husband. After a couple of weeks, my mother took me back to her place in Jamaica, Queens, where we lived with my four-year-old sister, Marion, my mother’s mother, my mother’s other three sisters—Esther, Peggy, and Pearlie—her brother Joe, and a Swedish carpenter named Mack, who Esther later married. The whole family had come to America from Hungary when my mother was four.
My mother’s father—my grandfather—was almost never referred to in that house. Rumor has it he’s still in Hungary—and still drinking. My dad wasn’t around much, either. I found out much later that he was a ladies’ man. Dad had no time for his kids—he was always out trying to make new kids. I was born on my father’s birthday. It didn’t mean a fucking thing. His first wife was a southern girl. It was literally a shotgun wedding—and the marriage lasted until my father went back on the road with his vaudeville act.
I was an ugly kid. When I was born, after the doctor cut the cord, he hung himself.
My mother was my dad’s second wife. She was pregnant with my older sister, Marion, so Dad did the honorable thing.
I feel awkward referring to my father as “Dad.” When you hear that word, you picture a man who looks forward to spending time with his family, a man who takes his son camping or to a ball game every once in a while. My father and I did none of those things. He didn’t live with us. Show business kept him on the road practically all the time—or was it my mother?
My mother and father in one of the rare moments I saw them together.
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.
As you can see I was a serious kid. I had only one thing on my mind—to play Las Vegas.
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.
When my father wasn’t on the road, he’d stay in New York City. About every six months, I’d take the train from Kew Gardens into New York to see him. We’d walk around for an hour and talk—not that we ever had much to say to each other—then he’d walk me back to the subway and give me some change. I’d say, “Thank you,” and then take the subway back home.
I figured out that during my entire childhood, my father saw me for two hours a year.
In my life I’ve been through plenty. When I was three years old, my parents got a dog. I was jealous of the dog, so they got rid of me.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my childhood was rather odd. I was raised by my mother, who ran a very cold household. I never got a kiss, a hug, or a compliment. My mother wouldn’t even tuck me in, and forget about kissing me good night. On my birthdays, I never got a present, a card, nothing.
I guess that’s why I went into show business—to get some love. I wanted people to tell me I was good, tell me I’m okay. Let me hear the laughs, the applause. I’ll take love any way I can get it.
When I was three years old, I witnessed my first act of violence. I walked into the living room and saw my mother lying on the couch, being beaten by her four sisters. My mother was kicking and screaming.
“Get Joe!” She yelled, “Get Joe!”
I did what my mother told me. I ran up two flights of stairs and started pulling on her brother Joe to wake him up. I kept repeating, “Uncle Joe, downstairs! Downstairs!” He came down and broke it up.
What a childhood I had. Once on my birthday my ol’ man gave me a bat. The first day I played with it, it flew away.
From the time I was four years old, I had to make my own entertainment. There was a parking lot next to our three-story building that was always vacant after dark. Every night I would hear voices below my window, and I knew what that meant—there was going to be a fight. This is where the local tough guys would come to settle their beefs.
From my windowsill, I had the best seat in the house. Many nights, about twenty guys would be down there, rooting for whichever fella they wanted to win. The fight itself was usually over in a few minutes—the winner would walk away happy with his pals, while the loser was left on the ground, usually bleeding, usually with a couple of his consoling buddies.
Even as a little kid I always identified with the loser. Most kids fall asleep listening to a fairy tale. I fell asleep listening to a guy yelling, “Enough! I’ve had enough!”
I told my doctor I broke my arm in two places. He told me to keep out of those places.
My mother was coldhearted and selfish, and her sisters weren’t much better. I remember being lied to by my aunt Pearlie when I was four. She was taking my sister to the movies and I wanted to go, too, but she wouldn’t take me, so I pleaded and pleaded until she finally said, “Okay. Go wash your face and hands real good, and I’ll take you with us.”
I was so happy that I ran into the house and up two flights of stairs to the bathroom to wash my face and hands. But when I came back out, Pearlie and Marion were gone. I could see them down the block, running away from me. I stood there crying and yelling, “Pearlie, I washed my hands and face real good…”
When I was a kid, I never went to Disneyland. My ol’ man told me Mickey Mouse died in a cancer experiment.
I was four years old when I got my first laugh. One night when I finished my dinner I said, “I’m still hungry.”
My mother said, “You’ve had sufficient.”
I told her, “I didn’t even have any fish.”
Most of the time, my grandmother kept an eye on me, if you’d call it that. She would be in the kitchen doing her chores while I’d be in the backyard banging nails into pieces of wood all day. Once in a while she’d glance out the window to see if I was still banging.
One day I got curious about what was on the other side of our fence, so I put my hammer down and walked out of the backyard. I walked a half block to Jamaica Avenue, the main drag in the area, and suddenly I found myself in the midst of a hustling, bustling neighborhood. I thought, Boy, this is fun. To hell with hammering nails.
After that, I used to walk there every day. My grandmother never noticed that I was gone.
On one of my walks—I was five by this time—a man asked me to come up to his office. After I’d climbed a couple flights of stairs, he offered me a nickel if I’d sit on his lap.
Wow, I thought, a nickel!
So I sat on this man’s lap. He held me and then kissed me on the lips for about five minutes. Then he said, “You can go now, but don’t tell anybody about this. Come by again tomorrow, and I’ll give you another nickel.”
I never told anyone, and I kept going back to that man every day, and I got a nickel each time. How long did this go on? I don’t remember. It could have been a few days, a few weeks. Or maybe it was just a summer thing. Let’s face it—at five years old, I was a male hooker.
Thanks for lookin’ after me, Ma.
When I was a kid I got no respect. When my parents got divorced there was a custody fight over me…and no one showed up.
I was ten when the Great Depression hit. Money was very tight then, so my father arranged for us to live with his mother in the East Bronx, in a really poor and rough neighborhood. She had a small one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a six-story walk-up. My mother and sister slept in the living room, and I slept on a cot in the foyer. My father stayed at his place in New York.
School was tough.
All the kids wanted to fight and the teachers hit you, too.
My teacher, Mr. O’Connor, was a strange man. He had a beautiful voice—an Irish tenor—and when he sang “The Rose of Tralee,” you loved him. It was hard to believe that this was the same man who’d tell students “you’re getting one” or “you’re getting two.”
If you misbehaved he would call you to the front of the class. “Put your hand out,” he would say, “palm up.” Then he’d tell you how many times he was going to smack you with his thick ruler, depending upon what you had done and his mood.
I made sure I was a good boy that year, but I slipped just before Christmas. The whole class built a beautiful cardboard display about the yuletide season—one day, I gently touched the display, but I guess I wasn’t gentle enough because my finger went through the cardboard and poked a hole in those snow-covered “mountains.”
As I pulled my finger back, I could see Mr. O’Connor looking at me.
Then I heard those famous words: “All right, front of the class. Put your hand out, palm up.”
I was hoping I’d just get one.
Then he said, “You’re getting two.”
He gave me the first one, and it hurt like hell. Then before I could recover, he hit me again.
As I was standing there in pain, my hand burning, I said to him, “How about a song?”
Then I got two more.
Living in the Bronx, the big thrill was at night when we’d roast “mickeys.” We would start a fire in the gutter against a curb, put in potatoes, and in an hour, they were delicious. We always put in extra potatoes. We knew we’d have guests for dinner. (Black tie optional.)
We lived in the Bronx for a year, then moved to a rooming house in Far Rockaway, Long Island, near the ocean, on July 19. My mother waited until that date so that she could get the place cheap—$39 for the rest of the summer. The three of us—my mother, my sister, and me—lived in one room, ten long blocks from the beach. But it was a beach.
My first day there I saw a kid I knew from the Bronx. He was selling ice cream on the beach. That became my job for the next four summers. It was hard work for a young kid—carrying around a heavy carton of ice cream loaded with dry ice so that the ice cream wouldn’t melt. It was also against the law but no one cared—a minor offense—and I could make at least a dollar a day. For that kind of money, I became a criminal.
That first summer I did pretty good. I saved $100, and my mother put it in the bank for me. When I looked at my bankbook a few months later, I was shocked. All my money was gone. When I asked my mother about this, she just said that she’d needed it. And that was that. I said to myself, Hey, what’s the big deal? It’s your mother. But then I thought, She should have at least sat me down and told me what was going on before she took it. That would have been easier for me, but that was how my mother did things.
My old man never liked me. He gave me my allowance in traveler’s checks.
After that summer, my mother wanted to live near her sister Pearlie. (You remember Pearlie. She’s one of the sisters who beat up my mother.) So we moved to Kew Gardens, in Queens, which was a much nicer area. But that was a problem—it was too nice. We were much too poor for the neighborhood, and I never fit in there.
We had a one-bedroom flat. To help pay the rent, my mother took in two boarders, Max—a gangster from Detroit—and his girlfriend Helene. Max and Helene slept in the living room; I slept in the bedroom with my mother and sister.
I couldn’t figure Max out. At first, I thought he was a nature lover, because he’d sit for hours just looking out the window. Then I realized he was on the lookout for trouble.
One night Max was drunk. My mother and I stood there listening to him argue with Helene. Max was saying, “I’ll go back to Detroit and be a gunman.” I stood there thinking, Boy, he’s a real gangster.
My mother had only one thought: I’m losing a tenant.
One time I asked Max, “Is that a real gun?”
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “You gonna shoot someone?”
He said, “Only if they ask too many questions.”
I live in a tough neighborhood. They got a children’s zoo. Last week, four kids escaped.
When Max and Helene left, we had to move again, to an even cheaper place in Kew Gardens, next to the Long Island Railroad station, but we were still the poor trash on a ritzy block. Not being able to keep up with the other kids financially made me feel inferior. The kids I went to school with would see me delivering groceries to the back door of their homes, so they looked down on me. I couldn’t play football in school because I didn’t have money for the equipment. Tennis was out. That cost money, too, so I played a game called “stoop.” You throw a ball against the stoop and try to make it land where your opponent isn’t. No investment required—except for the ball—the stoop is always there, always free.
A homeless guy came up to me on the street, said he hadn’t eaten in four days. I told him, “Man, I wish I had your willpower.”
Growing up, I got no guidance from my mother. The only advice I can remember getting from her was, “Never eat a frankfurter from the man on the corner with the orange umbrella. Those hot dogs are made of snakes.”
I believed her. I was a kid. What did I know?
My father’s place in New York was a half-hour subway ride from Kew Gardens. Once when I was about eleven, I went into town to see him. We were sitting at the counter in a drugstore—I was drinking a Coca-Cola; he had nothing. When I was done, he went outside while I paid the check. While I was looking for the waitress, I saw that I could walk out without paying, so I did. When I got outside, I was pretty proud of myself, and said to my father, “Hey, I beat the check.”
My mother would have congratulated me, but my father wasn’t going to. Disgusted, he said, “Who taught you that, your mother?”
He made me go back and pay for my soda.
I tell ya, I grew up in a tough neighborhood.
The other night a guy pulled a knife on me.
I could see it wasn’t a real professional job.
There was butter on it.
A couple of months later, my mother and her sister Esther took me on a trip to Atlantic City. (You remember Esther. She’s another one of the sisters who beat up my mother.) But this wasn’t going to be a nice day at the beach with the family—it was an ambush. They had surmised that my father would be there on the beach with his girlfriend Lily. And they were right.
We got to the beach, and sure enough, there was my father with the big love of his life. My mother and my aunt went over to them and started yelling, “Look at him! He’s a tramp!”
As you might expect, a crowd gathered to watch this free freak show. “This is his wife!” my aunt screeched, pointing at my mother. And then she pointed at me. “He left this ten-year-old boy to be with that whore!”
With that, the crowd looked at me like it was my fault. It was awful. I wanted to crawl under the boardwalk. I was standing there sweating, sand in my shoes. My aunt said to me, “Jackie, when you grow up, punch him in the nose.”
What a day that was. But I tried to look at the bright side—for a few minutes I got to see my father. I knew I wouldn’t be seeing him again for six months.
I was an ugly kid. I worked in a pet store. People kept asking how big I get.
I was always hustling to make some money because my mother never gave me any. I started delivering groceries when I was ten. The grocer gave me a choice—ten cents an hour or three cents for every order I delivered. I worked fast, so I took the three-cents-an-order deal. But I soon realized that I’d made the wrong decision. Every order he gave me was at least ten blocks from the store. Two hours later, I told the guy, “No more three cents an order. From now on, I’ll take the ten-cents-an-hour deal.” He said okay.
Then he gave me six deliveries—all going to the same apartment house.
When I finished for the day and was ready to go home, the boss turned out to be a good guy. He gave me an extra buck and a Swiss-cheese sandwich for the walk home. The sandwich he made tasted real good. He put something on it that I’d never had before—lettuce.
My entire childhood, my mother never made me breakfast. She would sleep every day until about eleven. She never got up to see me off to school, so before getting on the bus in the morning, I’d go to a place called Nedick’s, a big cafeteria chain at the time. I had the same breakfast every day—orangeade, doughnut, and coffee—for ten cents. For me, this was a home-cooked meal.
Before I went to school in the morning, I would take care of a newsstand. I would make change for people who bought papers or cigarettes. Sometimes, my fingers were so frozen that I’d ask the people to make their own change. For this, I got a dollar a week and a nickel piece of candy.
As a kid I felt inferior to everyone. I was too shy and insecure to talk to girls. At around fifteen, there was a girl I liked, but the thought of speaking to her was petrifying. I would see her on the bus, and she really turned me on. I always made sure my books were on my lap.
I couldn’t talk about sex with my mother, and my father had his own life in New York, which didn’t include me. (As I grew older, I realized that he was a smart guy.) When vaudeville died in the late thirties, my father became what they called a customer’s man in the stock market. He was basically a stockbroker—he invested money for a very elite clientele. He did extremely well for many years.
My mother would never listen to my problems and had no interest in how I was doing. I remember giving her my report card to sign one time. My marks were pretty good, and I was looking forward to some praise, but she didn’t give a damn. She just signed the report card without a word and gave it back to me.
I said, “Don’t you want to look at it?”
She said, “You know what you have to do.”
What a childhood I had. My mother never breast-fed me. She told me she liked me as a friend.
When you’re a kid, you have no way to compare mothers. I knew only mine, and to me she was the best. My entire life she never gave me a gift. But I remember I gave her one.
When I was fourteen I tried to start a newspaper and I failed, but I did have an egg route. Although I didn’t make much money, I put aside enough to buy my mother something for Mother’s Day. She liked to sit in the kitchen every night and have a few beers. So I bought her a six-pack, and I made my own card:
Dear Ma,
Happy Mother’s Day.
Let’s hope I keep selling egg after egg,
So you can keep drinking keg after keg.
Okay. I’ll go back to prose.
What a childhood I had. My parents sent me to a child psychiatrist. The kid didn’t help me at all.
My aunt Pearlie and her husband had a drugstore–soda fountain in Astoria, Long Island. After they’d worked that for a while, they leased the bar and grill next door. When my mother would visit Pearlie, they’d hang out in the bar.
I was around fourteen or fifteen at the time, and I sometimes worked behind the soda fountain at Pearlie’s drugstore. On my break one night, I walked down the sidewalk and looked through the window of the bar and grill. There I saw my mother sitting in a booth, having a drink with some old guy. What I saw next was even harder to believe. When my mother’s drinking companion wasn’t looking, she’d throw her drink under the table. A few moments later she’d ask for another one.
That was my apple-cheeked mom—hustling drunks for her sister.
I tell ya, my family were always big drinkers. When I was a kid, I was missing. They put my picture on a bottle of Scotch.
Both my father and his brother were in show business. They did a pantomime act in vaudeville, one that involved breaking a lot of plates, as I recall. When Eddie Cantor, the big star of yesteryear, was seventeen, he was broke, hungry, and trying to get into show business. My uncle Bunk took a liking to the kid, and took Cantor on the road with him.
One night, a singer on the show had one too many and couldn’t go on, so my uncle Bunk said, “Put Eddie on. He can do a couple of songs.”
So Eddie went on, did his best number—“Susie”—and the house went crazy. They wouldn’t let him off the stage. From that night on he was “Eddie Cantor,” and nothing could stop him.
Cantor never forgot what my uncle had done for him, and Uncle Bunk was on Cantor’s payroll for the rest of his life.
When I was fourteen, my uncle Bunk arranged for me to be in the audience for the taping of The Eddie Cantor Show, a half-hour variety show they shot in New York City. Every week I got the best seat in the house—front row, center.
But one night my uncle Bunk said to me, “Jackie, we got a problem. You can’t sit in the front row anymore. After the taping last night, Cantor said to me, ‘Who is the kid who sits in the front row every week and never laughs?’ I told him you are Phil’s kid. To make it short, Jackie, you can’t sit in the front row anymore. You have to sit in the back.”
The next week, when I showed up for the taping of Cantor’s show, uncle Bunk put me in the last row of the theater. When the show started, no matter what Cantor said, I just kept laughing and laughing.
My uncle came over and said to me, “Why are you laughing so much?”
I told him, “I wanna get my seat back in the front row.”
My ol’ man took me to a freak show. They said, “Get the kid outta here. He’s distracting from the show.”
When I was about fifteen I got a job as a barker for a theater, the Academy of Music, on Fourteenth Street in New York. I was the fellow standing outside yelling, “Just in time! Feature’s going on in ten minutes! Plenty of good seats! Win a twelve-piece set of dishes!”
What made it really tough was that the boss had his office on the fifth floor, and if he didn’t hear me, he’d call down to the assistant manager, who would tell me to bark louder. I was yelling all night so that the boss could hear me five flights up—and he had his windows closed because of the cold.
When I was sixteen, I was taking a walk down Broadway in New York City and I saw a sign—10 CENTS A DANCE. I didn’t know what exactly went on in those places, but I did know that they were for adults, but I thought, I’m big for my age. I’ll give it a shot, see what it is.
The woman in charge met me at the door. She was extremely nice and walked me over to the girls. Right away, I saw one girl I really liked, so the two of us sat at a table and started talking. She seemed to really like me, too. She even held my hand. I thought, Hey, I’m doing all right! I was in love. We sat there talking for about ten minutes like a couple of lovebirds.
The next thing I knew, the nice manager came over to our table and said, “We have to get paid now. Your bill so far is six dollars.”
I said, “Six dollars? For what? I didn’t dance.”
I turned to the girl I’d fallen in love with and said, “What’s going on? I didn’t dance, and I don’t have any money.”
Now the nice woman in charge and the girl I was in love with started yelling at me. The girl of my dreams screeched, “You fuckin’ idiot, you cost me money! I could have been dancing with someone else!”
Then the manager yelled, “Punchy! Get this creep outta here.”
I tell ya, the first time you see Punchy, you hope it’s a bad dream. But as he hustled me out of there, I tried to be funny. I said, “Maybe I’ll open my own place—eight cents a dance. When you come to my place, you’ll see big Hollywood stars.”
Punchy said, “Kid, you keep talking, you’ll see plenty of stars.”
With my wife, I got no sex life. She cut me down to once a month. Hey, I’m lucky—two guys I know she cut out completely.
At eighteen, I got my driver’s license, and I bought an old Ford with a rumble seat. They don’t make them like that anymore, thank God.
That car gave me nothing but trouble, but one thing I’ll say, it was very easy for me to find it. It was always on a lift. I was always watching it, going up and down, up and down. I had the only car that had more miles on it vertically than horizontally.
When my wife drives, there’s always trouble. The other day she took the car. She came home. She told me, “There’s water in the carburetor.” I asked her, “Where’s the car?” She said, “In a lake.”
Sometimes my car became a taxi. I noticed that the Long Island Railroad station had very few cabs, so when the trains would pull in and there were no cabs, I’d offer to drive people home. I’d tell them, “Pay me whatever you think is fair.” Most of them knew exactly what a cab would cost, and that’s what they’d pay me.
I got a couple of other jobs, too. Monday and Saturday I drove a laundry truck. Monday was pickup day, Saturday was delivery. Thursday and Friday, I drove a fish truck for the Little Fish Market in Kew Gardens.
One afternoon I was delivering some fish orders to Jamaica Estates, a rich neighborhood in Queens. I was stopped at a red light when a classy, good-looking chick in a sharp car pulled up alongside me. She smiled at me and waved, then signaled for me to follow her.
I thought, Oh, man, did I get lucky! I should have taken a shower!
I followed her until she pulled into the driveway of a big, expensive house. I parked my truck behind her car, and snuck a peek in the rearview mirror to check my hair. Then I stepped out of the truck and walked toward her.
“Hi, honey,” I said. “Where do we go from here?”
She said, “Nowhere. I just thought I’d make it easy for you to find my house. You have my fish in your truck.”
I was gonna say, “Honey, you should see what I’ve got in my pants.”
All my wife and I do is fight about sex. The other night, we really had it out. Well, I’ll put it this way—I had it out.
This is me sixty years ago. As you can see, I haven’t changed at all.
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.