Pete Hamill - Piecework

“Dyin’ is a pain in the ass,” he says.

Sinatra could be around for another twenty years, or he could be gone tomorrow, but the jagged symmetries of his legend would remain. For too many years the scared kid lashed out at enemies, real or imagined; he courted his inferiors, intoxicated by their power; he helped people and hurt people; he was willful, self-absorbed, and frivolous. But the talent survived everything, and so did the fear, and when I see him around, I always imagine him as a boy on that Hobo-ken street in his Fauntleroy suit and remember him wandering the streets of New York a half century later, trying to figure out what all of it meant.

NEW YORK,

April 28, 1980

Here he comes, “the Great One,” in a maroon stretch limousine, its planes and curves glistening in the summer sun. The limousine moves in a stately way down a curving path and stops in front of a huge pile of stone, brick, and mortar that is the centerpiece of the Riverdale estate known as Wave Hill. The Great One steps out of the limousine, blinks in the bright sunshine, glances at the cables, massed trailers, busy extras, grips, and electricians who are part of every movie location. Then he steps into the huge Beaver 36 mobile home that is parked on the shoulder of the driveway.

“Come on in,” Jackie Gleason calls behind him. “Have a seat, I’ll be with you in a minute.”

He’s 69, and looks in good shape, given what he has done to the body over the years: the gorging and the pig-outs, the monumental drinking bouts, a broken arm in the forties, a broken leg in the fifties, the crash diets, careening horseplay, billions of cigarettes. He’s six feet tall, and large, but he doesn’t look fat. He goes to the back of the trailer with a valet, closes the door, and emerges in a black shirt and slacks. The face is now a draftsman’s delight: pouches, slashes, the large upper lip sliced by a thin mustache, eyes that alternately sparkle and grieve, a face made for expression. He lights a cigarette, sits back on a couch.

A production assistant leans in through the open door. “Can I get you anything, Mr. Gleason?”

“Yeah,” he says, “a couple of broads.”

Everybody laughs except Gleason. He blinks in a deadpan way and takes a drag on a cigarette.

Suddenly, it’s Gleason time again. The so-called lost episodes of The Honeymooners are appearing three nights a week on Showtime; they will go on for a year before joining the classic 39 pieces from 1955-56 already in syndication. Gleason is serving as creative consultant and co-producer of a Broadway musical based on The Honeymooners. Membership in R.A.L.P.H. (Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of The Honeymooners) is soaring as more and more young people discover the great comedies made 30 years ago by Gleason, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows, and Joyce Randolph within a 2o-by-3o-foot set in the Adelphi Theatre on West 54th Street. When four “lost” episodes of The Honeymooners were shown at the Museum of Broadcasting last year, the place was jammed with old fans and new.

“Who couldn’t be happy about it?” Gleason says. “To think that something you did 30 years ago can still give people laughs: I mean, that’s somethin’!”

But the Gleason surge is more than a nostalgia act; he’s working harder than he has in years. To begin with, there is the TV movie that brought him to Riverdale on this bright summer day. Producer Robert Halmi managed to bring Gleason together with Art Carney for the first time since 1978 in the only non-Honeymooners work they’ve done since the early fifties. The movie, to be on CBS September 23, is called Izzy and Moe; it’s about two failed vaudevillians (Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith) who became Prohibition agents in the 1920s and provided grand tabloid entertainment for the duration of the Volstead Act. Gleason worked hard with writer Robert Boris to remove any possible echoes of The Honeymooners from the script.

“We didn’t want to do Ralph and Norton again,” Gleason says. “And this is nothing like them. These are two different guys altogether.”

For Izzy and Moe, Gleason is supervising the music, most of it in a Dixieland style (he’s composed three tunes). After that, he will head out to Hollywood to work with Tom Hanks in a feature film called Nothing in Common.

“Yeah, I’m working,” Gleason says, and then waves the cigarette. “But what the hell, I always worked.”

But there is more to this latest Gleason moment than career notes; there’s a growing awareness that Gleason has been for many years one of this country’s great comic geniuses, on a level, perhaps, with Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, and Chaplin. This doesn’t apply to his acting in the Smokey and the Bandit movies (although even that work has its own solidity and sense of surprise), or to the straight acting he did in such films as The Hustler (for which he received an Academy Award nomination in 1962), Requiem for a Heavyweight, or the much acclaimed TV version of The Time of Your Life. Gleason deserves the half-mocking title the Great One for his accomplishments on his own television shows — that is, for the work he created or controlled.

“Jackie Gleason is an artist of the first rank,” John O’Hara wrote years ago, with uncharacteristic generosity. “An artist puts his own personal stamp on all of his mature work, making his handling of his material uniquely his own. Millions of people who don’t give a damn about art have been quick to recognize a creation. Ralph Kramden is a character that we might be getting from Mr. Dickens if he were writing for TV.”

That gets close to the heart of Gleason’s enduring accomplishment. He was a creator of a vast Dickensian cast of characters: Reginald Van Gleason III, the Poor Soul, Joe the Bartender, Charlie “the Loudmouth” Bratton, Rudy the Repairman, Crazy Guggenheim, Stanley R. Sogg (the late-show pitchman who sold, among other things, a book called How to Slide Downhill on Your Little Brother).

And then, of course, there were Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie. I first saw them while I was a teenager in Brooklyn in the fifties, sitting in Catherine Rogan’s living room. I laughed at them then and laugh at them now. “This was nudge comedy,” Gleason says. “When you see Ralph or Ed, or any of the others, you nudge the guy next to you and say, ’J eez> that’s just like Uncle Charlie,’ or some guy down the block.”

True, but there was more to the show than that. When Gleason first exploded on TV all those years ago, he wasn’t just a gifted comedian. He was ours. He wasn’t just New York; he was Brooklyn. When he swaggered onstage to open the show, flanked by gorgeous women, we swaggered with him; when we read about his all-night sessions at Toots Shor’s or Eddie Condon’s, his gigantic meals, his partying with show girls and prizefighters and Max Kaminsky’s band, we ate and drank and parried with him; when we picked up the News and Mirror in 1954 and read about his $n-million deal with CBS, it was as if we’d signed the deal, too.

So, in Brooklyn in the fifties, we watched The Honeymooners in a broader context; it was the continuing story of Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie, but it was also part of the Gleason legend. We didn’t imagine in those days that The Honeymooners would be with us the rest of our lives. And yet here they are, six nights a week, as constant as the stars (each of the 39 episodes has been played more than 200 times in the New York area). Some of us left Brooklyn, others stayed; we made our lives; but Ralph and Norton remain the same, and we know them better now than we did then.