It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (6 page)

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

D
uring 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.

I
n 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
.

B
ut 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.

Chapter Five

I Needed $3,000 to Get Out of Jail

The other night, I had a date with a manicurist. We went to a nightclub. We started to hold hands. And while she was holding my hand, she took my other hand and put it in my drink
.

A
t twenty-eight, I decided to quit show business, get married, lead a so-called normal life. To give you an idea of how well I was doing at the time I quit, I was the only one who knew I quit.

I married a singer named Joyce Indig, who also gave up the business in hopes of having a normal life. We quickly found out that married life was at least as tough as show business.

I later learned that it wasn’t show business that was crazy—it was me.

We got no wedding present from my mother, which was no surprise, because she had always hated and put down any girl I liked. I think that was mainly because she
wanted to make sure I’d always support her. When I told my mother I was going to marry Joyce, she looked at me as though I had betrayed her, and then made me promise that I would always support her.

After Joyce and I were married, I tried to start a nice little family ritual. I decided that we’d take my mother out to dinner every Sunday. That lasted for two Sundays. All through dinner, my mother looked at Joyce with such hatred that from then on, it was just Mom and me having dinner on Sunday nights.

I tell ya, it’s tough to save a buck. Right now I’m supporting two fighters. My wife and her
mother.

B
eing married, trying to start a family, I now needed a steady income, so I went into the home improvement business. I sold aluminum siding and paint on a commission basis at a place called Pioneer Construction in Newark.

I was doing well, but then the weather turned cold and made it difficult to get jobs in the Northeast, so a couple of us decided to go down to New Orleans to work. I took two guys with me as canvassers and covered everybody’s expenses.

We did pretty well down there. We worked around New
Orleans for two months, then decided to head back to New York. Driving back, we passed through Birmingham and I said to my guys, “Hey, let’s stop here for a few days, give it a shot.”

After we got a hotel, I approached a siding company that looked like it was reputable. I asked the owner, a guy I’ll call Steve McGill, if I could be a sales rep for him. He said, “Okay, fine.”

My two canvassers and I went to work the next day. We worked hard, and everything was going great—we were signing up a lot of customers for McGill. After a while, though, I noticed that none of those jobs were actually getting done, so I said to McGill, “What’s happening? I got about fifteen jobs out there, but you’re not doing them.” This was a problem for me because I didn’t get paid my commission until the job was finished.

“I’ll get to them when I get to them,” McGill said. “I’m pretty busy right now.”

Yeah, and I was busy, too—paying for three hotel rooms, my car, my expenses…

“All right,” I said, “as long as you get to them. I mean, they’re three weeks old. You start ’em and don’t finish ’em, it really aggravates people.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” he said. “About how much you got coming from me?”

I said, “About four thousand dollars.”

“Look,” he said, “if you want to end this thing right now, I’ll give you a check for seven hundred and fifty, and we’ll call it even.”

I was stunned. “In other words,” I said, “you want to burn me out.”

“That’s my offer,” he said coolly. “If you want the seven-fifty, okay. If not, I don’t know when I’ll get to those jobs.”

I was really disgusted. I saw no way out.

That was on a Saturday afternoon. That night, I went to a nightclub. I wanted to have a few drinks, see a floor show or a comedian, maybe forget for a few hours that I was getting screwed by McGill. So I fall into this place, say hello to the owner, and after a few drinks, I feel a little better. In fact, I feel like getting up and telling some jokes to break the mood.