Actor, comedian, author
(1942– )
My parents were ultracautious. “Yoyishtanem.” It’s a Hungarian expression, and it’s usually not good. What are you doing? Watch out for that lamp cord! Wear white when you go out at night so the cars can see you! Don’t cut that bagel! You’ll slice your neck! I’ve not read of too many beheadings while cutting a bagel.
When someone rang our doorbell at 6F—Who is it? Even the sound of it. Who is it? “Da da da.” It was automatic that no one came into the apartment. And if you didn’t recognize the voice, you looked through the peephole in the door. I remember even later, while on my own, when I already had a track record in show business, I’d get a phone call from my parents in Florida.
“What are you doing tonight?”
“I’m staying home.”
“Good!” How about some bubble wrap around me?
I never leave my thirty-year-old son, and I see him twice a week, without saying, “Drive carefully! Watch out. There’s rain.” My son boulders and does some rock climbing. The bouldering is not a Klein tradition in any way, shape, or form. He only goes maybe seven or eight feet up on a rock with special shoes. You don’t have far to fall. But it’s not as safe as Ping-Pong, for which I insist he wear a helmet.
Early on, the ability to make others laugh enhanced my image. I showed off in the first grade by making Joy Wyman, my classmate, laugh at my silliness. Things like imitating the teacher when she left the room. I always made the class laugh. I was always the class clown.
We are three generations, my father, myself, and my son, three consecutive generations whose parents had to go to the principal because the boy was fooling around. My father told me, “Don’t be a clown. It doesn’t pay!”
Our block, on Decatur Avenue, had three vacant lots that were used for playing. Our enemies were broken glass and dog shit. There were no curb your dog rules. People never even thought of doing it. These were active lots anyway. We played softball on this one lot facing up—home plate was downhill. And in the warmer weather, these women would sit outside in their folding chairs where it was cooler and they’d sit behind home plate. What are you doing with this ball? They had absolutely no concern for the fact that this was where we played.
We played softball on the lots, but we played stickball in the street. There were two kinds. The one where we played across the street on the Woodlawn Cemetery wall, where we aimed for the box on the wall with a broomstick with no real fielding. If you hit my building, it was a home run. If you hit above the fourth floor it was a triple. The other kind of stickball was fungo. You yourself throw the ball up. No one’s pitching to you. We played association football only in the colder weather, and if there was traffic you’d yell, “Car! Car!” and you never said that without its being true.
There was a sensible aspect to life there. It was a walking life. It was a public transportation life. There was a sensibleness to walking to grade school, walking to junior high school. Walking to high school. There were routines. Sunday mornings were special. My father would go to the bakery, and we would get six small rolls, which are known as kaiser rolls, but these were a more sensible size, and I would have a roll with cream cheese on one side and butter on the other. There was Freddie the barber who cut my hair from the time I cried when I was too small and had to sit on a little seat until I went away to college. In his shop there was this beautiful calendar of Babe Ruth in heaven. There was also a picture of a very handsome Jesus looking over the barbershop on the calendar at the other end.
Despite those good memories, I really didn’t like where I lived. I wanted something else. I wanted a backyard when I lived on Decatur Avenue. There were veterans coming back from the war and getting good loans. Moving to Westchester. Moving to Levittown. Going to the suburbs. My father used to take the subway downtown to work, but he took the New York Central back. The trains said, “Northward, to Chatham” and “Southward, Grand Central Station.” I wanted to go northward to Chatham. There was a kind of claustrophobic feeling I had where we lived. I wanted what I saw on television.
When we were very young, someone in the building on the second floor had a TV set before we did, and we’d come home from school, go to our neighbor’s, and watch Six Gun Playhouse. Or Republic and RKO Westerns with a young John Wayne, which often featured children galloping on a pony, usually white, across expansive plains. It appealed to me so much that eventually I learned to ride quite well in camp. That was one of the ecstasies in my life, galloping. Now, of course, I’d be afraid to gallop. So anyway, west and north were my favorite directions. The West Side. I didn’t like the East Side. And going west. I didn’t get to California until I was twenty-five, but then the smell in October of jasmine, when it was getting nasty back east, and every traffic light there turning green. I wanted more space.
I went to camp as a kid, and even though those were my father’s worst years because he was a terrible businessman, he still provided. Even in the worst year he’d take a place in Monticello or in Peekskill, which isn’t even twenty minutes away from where I live now. I loved the trees and the smell of the grass and I loved camp. All those experiences made me think that I wanted less concrete.
I have a couple of acres in Briarcliff, fifty minutes away from where we’re sitting in Manhattan. The view of the Hudson is unbelievable. There’s no building across the way. It’s north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. It’s one of the great places. It’s the views. It’s the Hudson River School of painting. I never get tired of it. So when I come to the city it’s more of a novelty for me.
There were things in the Bronx everyone seems to think of nostalgically and positively, but part of that is because we were young and we had fun. Sunday nights I do not have fond memories of. It took me many, many years to get out of the slight gloom, because Ed Sullivan was on and the next day was school and as much as I’m thankful for the most wonderful free education it was dull, except for a few courses in high school and a few in college.
At my age, I realize another important thing about that life. It had to do with women. When you live compactly, you know everyone else’s business, and it’s amazing how they pretended they didn’t, but the women were incredibly strong for each other. Much more so than the men. Men in the building—there’d be some talk, and this and that, but the women, they bonded, they knew each other’s business. Even women who didn’t see each other socially would confide in each other. I remember the word “divorcée,” the women talking about this other hardworking woman with two kids, a divorcée—the very sound of it scared me—and that with my parents arguing every day. I didn’t know if there’d be a divorcée in our family. I didn’t know anybody who was divorced.
I have a collection of books, mostly from the Bronx Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York, with pictures of when the Bronx was farmland. I love those pictures. Farmland! These beautiful photos are of something that will of course never exist again.