THE FRANK SINATRA STORY
I met Tina Sinatra at a Sue Mengers soiree. She paid me the great compliment of saying I reminded her of her father. I asked Sue later if this was just pleasantry on Tina’s part, and Sue said, “No, she meant it.”
I always adored Frank’s acting. He never made anything up. See him as the Parish Priest in The Miracle of the Bells and then as the Major in The Manchurian Candidate.
If that were not enough, he, as the Chairman of the Board, that is, the Motengator, is the point of the Don Rickles story.
Don rose to fame through Insult Comedy. He got his break as a lounge comic in Vegas.
He saw Frank entering the joint and approached him humbly. “Mr. Sinatra,” he said, “I’m no one, but could I ask a favor. I’m playing here, and my wife is with me. It’s her birthday. If, on your way out, you could stop at our table and simply say, ‘Hi there, Don.’ It would make her day.” Sinatra said nothing and walked on.
When he left the casino, he stopped by Don’s table.
“Hi, Don,” he said.
“Fuck you, Frank,” Rickles said.
Frank dissolved, screaming with laughter, and Don was made.
I worked with Don on The Unit (Season 2, Episode 13); and I asked him, “Tateleh: the Frank Sinatra story…?” “My hand to God,” he said.
Don’s gag had a precedent in the ancient tradition of the Court Jester. While the Monarch received adulation, his Jester sat behind him, whispering.
It is recorded that he whispered, “Remember, you are just a man,” but I suspect his riff was closer to the bone. Why? As anyone could whisper the one phrase—or its like—how would one choose a Jester, which, we must assume, was a coveted job, in any case better than currying sheep or whatever the proles did.
The Jester must have been chosen for his ability to drive home the healthy lesson in acceptable form, which is to say through comedy. Its simple repetition quickly would have become wallpaper. No, the Jester must have been a comic, getting his job exactly as Don Rickles did.
The Great, when told “Remember you are just a man,” congratulate themselves on their preternatural ability to accept criticism; but a jester who could stick it to them, who actually brought them up short, and made ’em like it, was worth something. E.g.:
“Five of your concubines say you’re a rotten lay.”
“If you fuck up this Triumphant Parade like you fucked up Sicily, I’m looking for another job.”
“Wave, dickhead, that’s what you’re paid for.”
Now, some of the Caesars may understandably have resented the actual reminders as impertinence, and then had their jesters killed. (See what Ed Sullivan did to Jackie Mason.)I And the jesters, on the line, were betting the ranch on their ability to know the Room. Thus the birth of stand-up comedy.
I wrote a one-act play, some time back, Keep Your Pantheon, about a troupe of the worst actors in ancient Rome. Ed O’Neill played its star, Strabo. An example:
“Hello to the Tenth African Legion, they’re the boys, their spears come in three sizes, small, medium, and ‘Thank you for a lovely evening.’ And Hello to Marcus Quintus, who, you know, has just made the switch from Boys to Women… The fellow who used to think the clitoris was a building in Greece. We heard, on his wedding night, he said, ‘I know it’s around here somewhere…’ ”
We may recognize something as amusing, which bears the same relationship to comedy that Twinkies bear to food. But a laugh, like a lascivious glance, cannot be recalled. If the Monarch laughed, the Jester had not only saved his life but earned his keep. If the Monarch turned red, it may have been “sauve qui peut.”
Today, who are the souls who, when they go out, are like Don Rickles, playing each time for all the marbles? There seem to be a few; and you, like me, will have your favorites. But the climate, and the curse, of the times is sententiousness, our culture now screaming “unclean” at anything that might, in some notional person’s estimation, hurt some other person’s feelings. The Jester, behind the King, is now constantly aware that One Wrong Word will mean the end of his career.
After some brief thought, I’ve decided to include some actually provocative words and pictures in this book. It’s a bit like extensive dentistry—at my age, it’s ridiculous to have long-term preventative work done. I have no idea what a “legacy” is, but I do know that its pursuit can lead to no work worthy of even momentary notice.
Jerry Lewis and Red Skelton both performed disability as comedy—Jerry miming Muscular Dystrophy, and Red, some sort of Moronism. They were hugely successful, but are unwatchable today.
Lenny Bruce brought the whole thing up short and called the Government down on him, for saying the unsayable.
In my home, Chicago, he got tossed out of town for saying, of the slain and dismembered victim of our Leopold and Loeb, “Bobby Franks was a snotty kid.” The cops were called to his show and testified that, additionally, he used the epithet “mother” as “half-a-word.”
And the great Sarah Silverman got tossed out of Canada for saying at the Montreal Comedy Festival: “I am now going to recite in one-half minute a list of the Vice Presidents of the United States. Backward. But I need two things: I need absolute silence, and I need to stick my thumb in my vagina.”
Latterly, John Oliver said of the late Queen: “We have to start with the UK, which is clearly still reeling from the shocking death of a ninety-six-year-old woman by natural causes…”
This is the opposite of hordes stacking teddy bears outside of Buckingham Palace, the bear somehow commemorating the late Princess Diana.
An allied joke, and I would most happily credit the author, if I knew his identity.II
Grace Kelly, our beloved Queen of the Shiksas, married Prince Rainier of Monaco.
Years later she died in a car crash. An equerry was assigned to break the news. “Your Highness, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that your wife is dead. The good news is that the Mercedes will be fixed by Thursday.”
The Jester’s job was to offend. Like Don, Sarah Silverman, and Lenny.
The purpose of comedy is to expose our folly.
Television’s Situation Comedies of yore have become the sole comedies of today.
Why are they not amusing? Because a joke must be about disorder, and a situation comedy is about a situation, which is to say continuation; the mixture as before; “everything is fine, however, uh, oh… the painters put the wallpaper on upside down, and the trees have their roots at the top, and your boss is coming for dinner.” So what?
Frank Sinatra had all the money, fame, and companionship anyone could desire. What could one give him that he would value? A laugh. And, better, a laugh about himself.
New-speak slogans suggesting we “embrace our humanity” are inducements to self-congratulation. But we scream with laughter at the recognition that our beloved “humanity” is a joke. Our laugh is the recognition that no one is here but us chickens.
A favorite Barbara story:
After a day of shooting we went to the sound mix.
The studio door was opened by an ancient guard. He walked us down the hall past large framed photos of silent film stars. We passed Lillian Gish, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and he pointed to the image of a very handsome man dressed as a gaucho.
“You know who that is?” he said.
“Ramon Novarro,” I said.
“You know how he died?”
“Yes,” I said, “his boyfriend beat him to death with a dildo.”
He nodded. “His boyfriend beat him to death with a dildo,” he said. He looked around, beckoned me closer and leaned in. “He had a boyfriend,” he whispered. “Because he was a homo.”
- I. Sullivan destroyed his career by insisting Jackie made an obscene gesture on Ed’s TV show.
- II. My friend Jonathan Katz created the Freudian Slip joke: “This morning at breakfast with my father I meant to say, ‘Pass the toast,’ and it came out, ‘Youson-ofabitch, you ruined my childhood.’ ” I, and you, have heard the joke in many forms, it’s his joke, but how would one know who didn’t know—his reward being its inclusion in our Culture. I wrote the polar bear joke for him.
Young polar bear comes home from school, he says, “Mom, am I actually a polar bear?” “Yes.” “I mean, are you and Dad polar bears?” “Yes.” “Then, I’m a full polar bear?” “Yes, why do you ask?” “Because I’m fucking freezing.”