Chapter Four
Very Naked from the Waist Up
My wife and I, our relationship
is on and off. Every time I get
on, she tells me to get off.
When you’re starting out in show business, you go through many frustrating experiences. Today I can think back and laugh, but at the time, it was serious business.
I was working a club on Long Island once. The show consisted of me and three gay guys who had a dance act. The lead dancer was named Paris, and he had talent. In fact, he was the whole act—the other two just hung on for the ride.
After the second night’s show, the boss put his arm around me and said, “Jack, I like you very much, you son of a gun. I want you to come back next weekend. You’ll work Friday and Saturday again.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You just made a comic happy.”
He said, “Come with me. I wanna talk to the dance act.”
We walked over to the dancers. The boss still had his arm over my shoulder, still telling me how great I was. When we got to the dancers, he said to Paris, “I’m bringing Jack back next Friday and Saturday.” He smiled at me and said, “I love you, you son of a gun.” Then he told Paris, “I’d like you to work with Jack, but I can’t use the other two guys in your act. I want you to work alone.”
Paris stood up and said, “We’re an act. We don’t break up.”
The boss said, “You don’t break up, huh?” He then took his hand off my shoulder and said, “Jack, you’re out.”
I had a date with an inflatable girl. Now I got an inflatable guy looking for me.
When I was twenty-one, I worked at a nightclub in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The show consisted of me as the comic emcee and a stripper named Virginia Kinn. After the first show there was a knock on my dressing-room door. In walks Virginia, very upset and very naked from the waist up. She said the boss had told her to cover her nipples during her act because he was worried about the vice squad.
She told me this was a huge problem for her because she had four high-rolling friends coming for the second show. “They’re driving an hour and a half to get here,” she said, “and if they don’t get to see my nipples, they’ll be very disappointed.”
It was hard for me to believe what I was hearing. And due to her attire, it was hard for me to really hear what she was saying, so I just stood there mumbling things like, “I’m sorry…Oh, really?…Uh…You were saying…?”
The whole time she was talking, I never thought of coming on to her. I figured, what would she want with me? She had guys with big money driving a hundred miles just to see her nipples.
As it turned out, everything was okay. Her friends started drinking, and never missed her nipples. Virginia was relieved, but I wasn’t.
She was a wild girl. I took her to a bar. She gave the mechanical bull her phone number.
In those days, I never knew when or where sex would pop up. One night, I was on the subway going home after a show. It was late, about three in the morning, but when I got off at my stop, I noticed that a girl was following me. I wasn’t afraid of some little girl, so I went up to her, and we started talking. After a few minutes of conversation, it was clear that she wanted us to get together, so we went to an isolated place behind a monument in the park nearby and did it. When we were done, we went our separate ways.
On the way home, I suddenly became worried, because I didn’t use a rubber, so I went to a hospital across the street. I asked to see a doctor, and a woman in a white coat came out. I told her I’d rather see a male doctor, but she assured me that she was a real doctor and that I had no reason to be concerned because she was a woman.
Well, I thought I had plenty of reason to be concerned, but I had no choice, so I told her about my “one-monument stand” earlier that night and said that I was worried about catching something. She had me take my pants off, and she looked at my penis, then took a hold of it to examine it more closely. At that point I started to get excited, which she pretended not to notice.
After this extremely intimate examination, she told me I could put my pants back on. “Nothing to worry about,” she said. “You’re okay.”
I said, “So are you. What time do you start work tomorrow?”
I said to a girl I’d been seeing, “Come home with me, honey, and I’ll show you where it’s at.” She said, “You’d better, because the last time I couldn’t find it.”
People talk about safe sex. To me, safe sex is when all the car doors are locked and her husband is dead.
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.
During those days, I kept a small blue bulb in my glove compartment. In case sex did pop up, I had the right lighting. One night, it popped up in Baltimore. I was working at the Club Charles there when I got lucky with one of the waitresses. We decided to go to her place when we were both through with work.
When we walked into her apartment, I sat down on a chair in her bedroom. She said, “Excuse me,” and went into the bathroom.
I sat there waiting.
Ten minutes went by.
I thought she was taking kind of long.
I’m sitting there.
Now it’s fifteen minutes.
I thought, What’s going on?
It became twenty minutes. Finally I got up and knocked on the bathroom door. I said, “Are you all right?”
She said, “Oh, you can come in.”
I opened the door, and she’s washing her stockings.
I thought to myself, How urgent is her passion for me?
I felt like I was one of her chores for the night. I’ll do my nails, do my hair, wash my stockings, bang him, and go to sleep.
I was twenty-two, working at a nightclub in Bridgeport, Connecticut. That was a long ride from New York, but I wasn’t complaining—in addition to my meager salary, I got a free room above the club. To my delight, also living in a room above the club was an easy-to-look-at waitress.
It is now five days later. I have been turned down by this waitress at least ten times, and the job will be over in two days. That was bad enough, but what really hurt was that she had made it with almost every other guy at the club—both bartenders, the boss, the boss’s son, even the dishwasher.
I was determined to get this girl. I felt like I was a big-game hunter; I was the predator and she was the prey. Sitting in my room that night, prompted by the heat of youth, I devised a plan: I’ll knock on her door, and if she lets me in, I’ll charm her, and when the timing is right, I’ll make my move.
I walked down the hall and knocked on her door. This is it, I told myself. Showtime.
She said, “Who is it?”
“It’s Jack,” I said, “the emcee. I want to talk to you.”
“Nah, I’m sleeping.”
“I have to talk to you,” I said. “Open the door. It’s important.” Important to me, not her.
She opened up, and as I walked in, I told her, “I’ll sit in that chair, and you can stay in bed.” I figured I had a head start if one of us was already in bed.
She sat on the edge of her bed and lit a cigarette as I started talking. I figured I had at least five minutes to warm her up while she smoked, so I was flattering her as much as I could. I never knew I was such a great liar, and after a while I made my move.
She said, “What if I scream?”
I said, “If you scream, that won’t help you. Everyone will just think I’m a great lover.”
I am holding a ferocious lion that I captured in Africa. His name is Rodney Jr., and right now he resides at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.
She wasn’t impressed. She said, “I’m looking for a man who will love only me, someone sensitive, romantic, handsome, and considerate.”
I said, “If I had all those qualities, I wouldn’t be with you.”
I tell ya one thing—I know how to satisfy my wife in bed. I leave.
In the forties and fifties, before television became big and killed nightclubs, New York was a wild place to be a performer. In the five boroughs of New York and in New Jersey, there were about three hundred nightclubs—and they all had shows. On Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, there were eight nightclubs on that one block alone.
These nightclubs used all kinds of acts, from knife throwers to fire-eaters to a girl named Rosita, who worked with a snake. Every night when the show was over, the boss would say, “Rosita, we’re closing. Tell the snake to wrap it up.”
I worked at a nightclub in New York called the House of Scheib’s. Every Tuesday night, they had a mambo contest. One of the girls there was an excellent dancer, and very sexy, so I made a point of getting to know her pretty well. We’d have a drink or two after the show, and we got along great. After a couple of weeks, I said, “Let’s get together.” She said, “Sure,” and then I really got to know her.
Before long, we were seeing each other every Tuesday after the show. Then I started seeing her on other nights, too. We were both having a real good time together, but one night she said, “I’ll be getting married soon.”
I said, “Good luck. Who are you marrying?”
“You wouldn’t know him,” she said. “He’s a cop from Long Island.”
I knew only one cop from Long Island. I’ll call him Pete Hartmann. We were kids together—we would go to the beach, lie on a couple of comfortable rocks, and repeat all the funny lines from our favorite movies, especially the Marx Brothers. We’d laugh for hours. I don’t know why, but I asked the girl, “What’s his name?”
She said, “Pete Hartmann.”
I was in shock, and I felt awful for Pete. I asked myself, Should I tell him? I knew the guy years ago. Maybe he’s deeply in love with this girl. He could very easily say, “She’s a good girl. What did you do, twist her mind around?”
I was also thinking, He’s a cop. He’s got a gun. Who knows how he’ll react? But I did what I had to do.
The next day, I called him and said, “Pete, I have to talk with you.”
We met for a drink, and I told him all about “his” girl. He sat there quietly. When I was finished, he didn’t say a word for about five minutes. Then he got up, shook my hand, and said, “Thanks.” That was it. I didn’t hear from him again for years and years.
Many years later, Pete and I reconnected. He told me that he’d married a different girl—not the dancer—and was doing okay, kids and everything. He told me his wife was lovely, and said, “Do you want to see her picture?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not going through that again.”
I tell ya, my wife likes to talk during sex. Last night, she called me from a motel.
I spent the next few years working and improving my act and trying to get a better reputation as a comic. I wasn’t always successful at that last part. When I was twenty-five, an agent named Billy Goldes booked me into a place in Montreal called the Esquire Club.
I go up there, do the first night’s show, and I die. Nothing. And then I realized that no one spoke English. They all spoke French.
The next night, same thing. I died both shows.
After three days of this, I called Billy Goldes. “What did you book me up here for?” I said. “No one speaks English!”
“Yeah, I know,” Billy said. “I don’t like the guy who runs that club. He did me wrong on something, so I booked you up there to get even with him. I knew you were gonna die.”
My agent was booking me to get even with people. That gives you some idea of how my career was going.
I tell ya, comedy is in my blood. I wish it was in my act.
But I stayed at it, taking any job I could get. Eventually, I was on the road all over the country. I remember one gig in Shreveport, Louisiana. I arrived the night before and had a drink at the club with the boss. I had heard that this guy owned half the town, and he couldn’t have been nicer to me. He told me I made him laugh, and it was an honor to have me work his nightclub. Then he said, “If there’s anything I can do for you, just tell me. And I do mean anything.”
I said, “Anything?”
He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Anything.”
Then he told his teenage son to go up to his office, open the top drawer of his desk, and fetch the address book in his drawer. When the kid came back down, the boss flipped through his book and then seemed upset. He told me that he had a special girl he wanted me to “meet,” but that she was out of town that night. He said, “I’ll have a girl for you tonight who’s really nice. But Ella Mae—that’s the one I want you to meet—will be here tomorrow night.”
I thanked him, and that night a very lovely young lady paid me a visit. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give her a 9.5.
The next night was my opening night. I was under a lot of pressure now—this guy had been really nice to me, so I wanted the show to be great. Fortunately, it was, so after the show I got to meet Ella Mae.
She was dressed in farm-girl attire, and she was hot. This girl was so hot that if she smiles at you as she turns you down, you think you did all right.
I said to Ella Mae after observing her physical attributes, “You’re just oozing sex. I guess when a guy’s with you he comes quick.”
Then she said, “A lot of them tell me, ‘Don’t move!’”
I like southern girls. They talk so slow that by the time they say no, I made it already.