Charm Read online

  And so has been that of many of the greatest modern comedians. The Marx Brothers’ movies, taken together, were a concerted attack on what passes for good taste. They were put on to this when at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the producer Irving Thalberg, impressed by their comic energy, felt that they wanted a target for their anarchic humor. “Throwing a snowball at a man isn’t funny,” he instructed them, “but throwing a snowball and knocking off his silk top hat is funny.” Thalberg’s notion was that the Marx Brothers would be a lot funnier if they played their comedy against rigid social institutions; and so they did, making charmingly vulgar movies against the background of opera, higher education, psychiatry and the medical profession generally, first-class ocean travel, thoroughbred racing, and high society. The best part of the Marx Brothers’ career was devoted to knocking off silk top hats.

  The release from good taste is the message behind the better Marx Brothers’ movies. “The reason people enjoy to see us doing any damn fool thing that comes into our head is quite simple,” said Chico Marx. “It’s because that’s how a normal person would like to act, once in a while.” Havoc was the Marx Brothers’ specialty, their underlying collective message that respectable life was a sham, a scam, a swindle. And yet their movies are now regarded as classic, the Marx Brothers themselves as loveable.

  Even profanity, properly deployed, can be charming. I have long admired W. C. Fields’ work in this line, where it comes out not in his movies but in the anecdotes that have come down about him. Apparently a young man was going about Hollywood claiming to be Fields’ illegitimate son, a claim Fields utterly rejected. One day the young man showed up at Fields’ home, there to be greeted by the butler. When the butler asked Fields how he should deal with this young man, Fields replied, in his famous slow drawl, “Tell him something equivocal, like go fuck yourself.” The charm, if not the genius, is of course in the formulation: the word equivocal paired with perhaps the least equivocal command in the English language.

  Zero Mostel, on the other hand, can be terribly amusing but not at all charming. Mostel was the man who first snapped his fingers to accompany his singing of “If I Were a Rich Man,” and then added deedle deedle deedle dee to the chorus of the song. Many anecdotes have been told about his wild spontaneity. One has a friend tell him that he has a touch of butter on his sleeve, which causes Mostel to grab the butter dish and proceed to butter his arm all the way up the shoulder. Amusing, as I say, but far from charming.

  The difference between being amusing and being charming is that charm is more universal in its appeal. I, for example, have found the comedian Don Rickles intermittently amusing. (“Frank Sinatra saved my life. One night in a parking lot in Vegas. He said, ‘That’s enough, boys.’”) Mae West is perhaps the first well-known vulgar female charmer. (“Is that a comb in your pocket,” she is supposed to have told a man playing opposite her, “or are you just glad to see me?”) On occasion I have found Joan Rivers amusing (“I don’t see why everyone is so down on Prince Charles and Camilla. I was honored that they invited me to their wedding. I couldn’t go, but I did send a gift: a George Foreman Grill.”), but never charming. Sarah Silverman’s faux naïve Jewish princess bits attacking political correctness is giggle-making (After describing all the inopportune times for her to have had a child, she says, “I guess the best time to have a child is when you are a black teenager.”), but again well short of charming. Amusing makes one smile, chortle, laugh; charming sometimes does all this, too, but is also, somehow, endearing.

  Jackie Gleason was amusing and charming both. He was charming in many roles, as the sadly bumptious bus driver Ralph Kramden; as Reginald von Gleason III, the ridiculously inept playboy; the talkative Joe the Bartender; the Poor Soul; and just about any other character he cared to play. He was perhaps at his most charming in The Hustler, where he played the pool shark Minnesota Fats, to which he brought a suavity and delicacy that only an overweight man in perfect command of his body could achieve. Jackie Gleason was also charming as himself, the overweight, heavy-drinking, extravagant show business figure. No one would wish to be Jackie Gleason, no one could be Jackie Gleason, but to be in his company might, at least for brief spells, be charming.

  Louie Prima makes the cut as a vulgar charmer. How easily he is imagined slurping up a huge dish of pasta in a wife-beater undershirt at a kitchen table on Staten Island, even though he was born in New Orleans and may never have seen a kitchen table after the age of thirty. When his wife, the stone-faced Keeley Smith, sang “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good,” there behind her Louie was, with the refrain, “I Got It Good, and That Ain’t Bad,” his eyes rolled back, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. He came across as lower-class Italian, heavy accent on the I, the white musician’s Louis Armstrong, but with deliberate coarseness added. Refinement was no part of his being. Not everyone found this charming. I’m not sure that women found Prima as amusing as did men. Louie Prima’s charm was a specialized taste, like that for heavily garlicked Italian dishes.

  The comedian Larry David is another specialist in trashing good taste. His specialty is to go right up to the line of bad taste—and then cross it. Most of the plots on The Larry David Show are propelled by his lapses in good taste. On one of his shows he claimed a cough owing to oral sex; he will use the one word—the c-word—not permitted even in the most permissive social circles; he has made the earnest argument that men do better to urinate sitting down; he has claimed a dog bit him on his penis; he brought a black comedian on his show doing ghetto humor that causes every progressive to shudder. Funny, some of it, chiefly because no one would have thought a comedian would have gone quite so far, even in the open purlieus of cable television. Larry David has built his career on such stuff. He is a funny man but not one anyone would ever think to call charming.

  Working the same rich field of undermining good taste yet coming away charming was Sid Caesar, who in the 1950s was the premier comedian on American television. A large man, slightly gross in mien, with a face of great plasticity, a stutterer (though not when doing his comedy), said to have had a drinking problem, Caesar was able to provoke Mel Brooks’ dangerous laughter, and to do so with regularity. This was perhaps partly owing to Brooks being one of his battery of splendid comedy writers: Also among them were Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen, Selma Diamond, Mel Tolkin, Carl Reiner, and Howie Morris—an all-star team, a murderer’s row, of comic writers. But it was in greater part owing to Sid Caesar himself, who understood how vulgar charm worked, that his show was the immense success it was.

  Sid Caesar did not do jokes but sketch comedy. Sketch comedy took on the little oddities of people, or the strange situations in which they find themselves, and wrung laughter from them. The couple at the opera finding themselves seated too close to the percussion section. An unsophisticated couple not knowing how much to tip a headwaiter to get a decent table. The effect on yet another married couple of a beautiful single woman moving into the apartment next door. Sketch comedy drew from the quotidian. “We had the ability to extract humor out of everyday life,” Caesar wrote in his autobiography.

  Sid Caesar was a Jewish schtarker, or strong man, and was able to give these playlets a physical turn. (His two brothers, Abe and Dave, were, respectively, six feet four inches and six feet, two inches; he was himself six one.) In a sketch called “My Life Story,” a parody of a once hugely popular television show called This Is Your Life, Caesar, playing the man whose life it is, is confronted by Howie Morris playing his Uncle Goopy, who, upon embracing Caesar after a long absence, refused to disengage, causing Caesar to carry him, pending from his neck, through the better part of the sketch. In another sketch, Caesar is bitten by a termite who has just returned from a NASA mission in outer space, which gives him a termite-like appetite for wood, and he proceeds to eat his way through furniture and just about everything else wooden on the set. In another parody, this time of an Orson Welles movie called The Stranger, Caesar, Imogene Coca,
Howie Morris, and Carl Reiner play clock tower figures who have run amok, beating one another up with hammers, anvils, and throwing water in one another’s faces. What Caesar’s television shows—first The Show of Shows, then Caesar’s Hour—brought to television was a combination of wild invention and artful slapstick, of which Sid Caesar was a master.

  Something earthy, old shoe, the reverse of elegant inhered in all that Sid Caesar did on television. His comedy shattered the notion that one could expect to live an easy and well-ordered life. This, in good part, is what gave him his charm. So many of the sketches he and his writers devised were attacks on pretense. This was his plan. In his autobiography, he tells that he began Caesar’s Hour with a domestic sketch. “The truth never changes,” he writes. “You still have to eat. You still fight with your wife. So starting each show with a domestic sketch was like shaking the audience’s hands, making them feel at home.”

  As for his own part in all this, Caesar notes: “I set myself up as the clown, the fall guy, and the butt of the jokes. I was the self-assured guy who beneath it all was very insecure and kept screwing up. I was everybody’s brother, cousin, and uncle. In every downtrodden situation and every fight with my wife, even the smallest triumph got laughs and sympathy from the audience . . . We also didn’t preach. It was more important to get the laugh than to send the message.”

  Week after week, for roughly six years, beginning in 1950, Sid Caesar performed live on television, supplying humor that was topical yet somehow also timeless, wild yet never offensive, sometimes verging on the crude yet neither gross nor coarse. The humor also had an appeal across generations. The Show of Shows and later Caesar’s Hour was television that three generations of the same family could watch together and all enjoy. To this day, sixty years later, people remember many of the extraordinary sketches on those shows.

  The achievement was impressive, but it took its toll on Sid Caesar, a self-described obsessive compulsive who couldn’t sleep nights wondering how he could have improved shows already done and worrying about those forthcoming. He took pills, overate, boozed heavily. One night in 1977, playing in Regina, Saskatchewan, in Canada, in Neil Simon’s The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, he blanked out on his lines and realized that his drinking was destroying his mental capacities. He began psychotherapy, took a cold-turkey alcohol cure, dieted, and came out of it stripped of his neuroses, his alcoholism kicked, slender, and optimistic, but, as his account of this recovery in his autobiography fails to reveal, no longer amusing and rather boring in a self-congratulatory way. His career poses the artistic dilemma, not to be sure faced by all artists, of whether it is better to live with one’s talent including all its wretched side effects or to live without these side effects and be stripped of one’s talent. For some people, Sid Caesar among them, having it both ways evidently wasn’t an option.

  Dean Martin, another vulgar charmer, seems to have had no split whatsoever between his stage and personal life. Billy Wilder called Martin “the funniest man in Hollywood.” What was the joke? For those who missed it, it was that Dean Martin simply didn’t care—nothing, nada, zilch, he didn’t give a rat’s rump about anything. Which was the source of his charm, odd as that may at first sound.

  Martin was born Dino Crocetti to immigrant parents in 1917 in Steubenville, Ohio. The town of Steubenville was what was then known as “wide-open.” Prostitution, gambling, every sort of illicit pleasure was on the menu. Jimmy the Greek, the Vegas odds setter, came from Steubenville. The town resembled nothing so much as a minor league mafia franchise. Dino grew up with a sense of a more than merely imperfect but a deeply, permanently corrupted world.

  Bored by school, which he left in the tenth grade, he was a genial screw off, with an early and as yet undeveloped talent for singing. He ran errands for the local gamblers, and at sixteen himself became a dealer in one of Steubenville’s backroom casinos. He was tall, striking-looking, though shy of being smashingly handsome by having too large a nose. A local hustler pushed him into boxing, but he quickly decided there were easier ways to earn a living.

  Singing was the less punishing career, and he began to sing in clubs in Steubenville and in nearby towns. One of the many agents he would acquire along the way had him change him name to Dino Martini; another, completing his de-Italianization, suggested he change it again, this time to Dean Martin. Bing Crosby was the great singer of the day, and the young Dean Martin, as did many other beginning crooners, modeled his voice and style on Crosby’s.

  A nonchalance, a coolness, a certain distant quality was part of Dean Martin’s personality. (Joe DiMaggio also had this quality, minus the comedy and the singing talent.) This didn’t come across so much cold as unavailable for intimacy. Rather than seek out other people, people tended to seek him out. As a singer, women were attracted by his good looks—fairly early in his career he had rhinoplasty, settling the nose problem—but men found that the songs he sang spoke to them. A winning combination of the manly and stylish and amusing came through in all he did.

  When he sang about the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore, something about him supplied a subtext that read, “Can you believe people pay me to sing such crap?” When he sang about going to Houston, you’d have to be a serious ninny not to realize that a man like him wouldn’t spend twenty minutes in a town like Houston unless the fee paid him to do so was immense. “Goin’ to Houston—whaddya, fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” his rendition of the song all but said. Late in his career, after his serious drinking had set in, one night in Las Vegas, before a large audience, he said, “I hate guys who sing songs serious.”

  Martin was on the slow rise as a nightclub singer, but he hit his stride when he joined with Jerry Lewis (born Joseph Levitch), a goofball comedian four years younger than he, then doing a record-miming act. One of the mysteries of show business is why certain comedy-couple acts work: Laurel and Hardy, Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello, Olsen and Johnson. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were another such comedy-couple act. Nick Tosches, Dean Martin’s penetrating biographer, claims that their act was “a celebration of ignorance, absurdity, and stupidity,” and so it seems when viewed today, when it no longer seems in the least funny.

  Jerry Lewis admired what most men admired in Martin: his self-assurance and ability to view the world as essentially a joke, and a slightly off-colored one at that. Worry was for other people. Nick Tosches writes: “His uncaring air of romance reflected the flash and breezy sweet seductions of a world in which everything came down to broads, booze, and money, with plenty of linguine on the side.”

  The team of Martin and Lewis was booked into all the flashy nightclubs of the day—the Copacabana in New York, the Chez Paree in Chicago, Ciro’s in Los Angeles—and at top prices. Their movies grossed tremendous sums; they had their own radio show; they were an international attraction. They did the first big charity telethon, for Muscular Dystrophy. (The comedian Lenny Bruce remarked that Jerry Lewis damn well ought to do something for muscular dystrophy, for with his various grimaces and spastic movements he may have caused a lot of it.) Between the middle 1940s and the middle 1950s, no act in show business was bigger than Martin and Lewis.

  Through it all Dean Martin remained unfazed. Meeting the Queen of England did nothing for him. Later he would declare he thought John F. Kennedy a jerk and his brother Bobby a scumbag. Although invited, he didn’t bother to go to the Kennedy inaugural. Nor did he have an especially good opinion of Frank Sinatra, who cultivated his friendship much more than Martin did Sinatra’s. Martin thought Sinatra, with his hopeless love affairs and dopey marriages, always sucking up to Mafia guys and then the Kennedys and later the Reagans, rather pathetic. Dean Martin called everyone “pallie,” the way Louis Armstrong called people “pops,” but the fact was that he neither had nor wanted any close friends.

  Not even his own success impressed Martin all that much. He was ready to throw it all away when he had had enough of Jerry Le
wis, whom there is no strong evidence to suggest that he had ever much liked. When Lewis began to upstage him in their movies, he showed his irritation. Lewis’ neediness and insecurity disgusted him. In desperation, Lewis claimed that it was their love for each other that made their act the extraordinary success it was. “You can talk about love all you want,” Tosches reports Martin replying. “To me you’re nothing but a dollar sign.”

  Jerry Lewis was a dollar sign Dean Martin was ready to walk away from, which he did, never to return, in 1956. The result was that Dean Martin, working alone, became even bigger. He became a star of stage, movies, and television, and his records did extremely well. In the 1960s he had an income of $15 million a year, not to mention vast real estate holdings. He was the enemy of phony showbiz sincerity, the malarkey of politicians, the falsity of romantic love. Nick Tosches describes the immense rating success of The Dean Martin Show by noting that “his uncaring manner and good-natured boorishness endeared him to the millions who were sick of sincerity, relevance, and pseudo-sophistication.”

  “Everybody loves somebody sometimes,” Dean Martin sang, in a way that implied they do at least till somebody better comes along. “Everybody loves somebody,” he ended his television show, “and remember I love all of you,” neglecting to add, though it was implied, that if you believe that there is some real estate in the Everglades he’d like to show you.