Pete Hamill - Piecework

There were a few more now-forgotten movies, but Gleason kept busy working at Slapsie Maxie’s, then a wild club in Hollywood fronted by former light-heavyweight champion Maxie Rosenbloom. And he continued learning, studying the craft of making movies, discovering his strengths and limitations in front of an audience. Most of all, he learned to trust his own instincts.

“I never did a lot of analyzing,” he says now. “It was funny or it wasn’t. Once you start analyzing it, the mechanics and all that, you’re through. It’s instinctive. That’s why a comedian can be a serious actor, maybe a great actor, but I never heard of an actor becoming a great comedian.”

Gleason was turned down for army service (badly healed broken arm, ioo pounds overweight), shuttled back and forth between the coasts. He was separated from his wife, and in New York lived at the Astor or the Edison and did his drinking in Toots Shor’s. There were a lot of women. “They were all wonderful,” he says. “At one time, I was working at Billy Rose’s and there were 22 girls in the chorus and all you had to do was say, ‘Would you care to have dinner?’

“Gleason also started working in theater; there was a flop called Keep Off the Grass, with Jimmy Durante and Jane Froman; another turkey called The Duchess Misbehaves, in which Gleason played, of all things, the painter Goya. He worked awhile in Hellzapoppin, did a memorable Foreign Legion bit in Along Fifth Avenue, and then in 1945 was in a smash hit, Follow the Girls. I have a friend who was at this show on V-E Day, 1945, and s^ e savs> “It was the most insane evening in the theater I’ve ever spent.”

In 1949, television called for the first time, and he took the role that eventually would go to William Bendix in The Life of Riley. It was the wrong part at the wrong time, and after one season the sponsors canceled. Gleason went back to the clubs. “Who the hell knew what television was?” he says. “Nobody.”

He was working in Slapsie Maxie’s in June 1950 when the call came from DuMont. This was the fourth television network, and the only one to go out of business. A man named Milton Douglas was producing a weekly variety show called Cavalcade of Stars, with rotating hosts, and he offered Gleason two weeks as host for $750 a week. Gleason, who doesn’t fly, refused to cross the country for two weeks at $750; he insisted on four weeks. Douglas sighed, and agreed. Gleason took the Super Chief back to New York. He was 34 years old, a bouncer, braggart, pool hustler, failed husband, loudmouth, boozer, squanderer of money and time, a failed movie actor, a middle-level nightclub act, a mediocre radio performer. He was all these things, and when he walked into the studios at DuMont, he was ready. The four weeks became twenty years. From DuMont, he went to CBS, and in one form or another, he was a regular performer on television until 1970.

“Four weeks after I started the DuMont show,” Gleason remembers, “I took a broad to Coney Island. We stop at Nathan’s for some dogs, and then we’re walking around. And I notice three, four people staring at me. Then ten, a dozen. Then, out on the boardwalk, there’s maybe 50 of them, and I knew then, the first time, what television was, how powerful it was.” He shakes his head, remembering the moment clearly half a lifetime later. “I also knew that I was never gonna be able to walk around Coney Island with a broad again, maybe the rest of my life.”

Gleason is sitting in the trailer in Riverdale talking and smoking. Art Carney comes in, dressed in the style of the 1920s. Gleason is asked about the young comedians. “Eddie Murphy is a very good comedian,” he says, “but his concert act is frightful. I can’t understand why he thinks he needs all the four-letter words. I don’t think you need it; it gives you easy laughs, a replacement for dropping your pants.” He lights another cigarette. “Murphy has a thing where I do it to Norton!”

Carney says, “I thought we kept that pretty quiet.”

“It was only three times,” Gleason says.

“Seven.”

Deadpan, they go into a riff about great actors they’ve worked with.

“Olivier was the best I ever saw,” Gleason says. “Working with him was a great experience.”

Carney says, “Don’t forget Hobart Bosworth.”

“Or Rex Reed,” says Gleason.

“And Monte Blue, one of the all-time greats.”

Carney says he first saw Gleason at the Roxy in the forties, “doing the pinball thing.” Gleason explains, “The guy comes onstage with a pinball machine, and he moves left, right, the hip, the arms, his back to the audience.” Gleason laughs, remembering the character. Both men say they’d prefer working with a live audience to making movies. “We always performed before a live audience on TV,” Gleason says. “And I think that’s one of the reasons for the show’s success. The audience directs you. There was no stopping, no retakes, no cards. We never stopped.” Why not do theater? Gleason shakes his head. “Nah. Somebody once asked me when I got tired of doing Take Me Along. I said, ‘About twenty minutes after eleven on opening night.’ But also it’s hard with three critics in town, three newspapers. You don’t have a shot. I remember seeing the show about Harrigan and Hart, and saying, ‘This is a hell of a good show.’ They bombed it right out of Broadway.”

Carney says, “They wanted us to do that years ago, remember?” “Yeah,” Gleason says. “That’s the only bullet we ever missed.”

Carney leaves for makeup. Gleason, who once had two floors at the Park Sheraton, an apartment on Fifth Avenue, the famous $650,000 round house in Peekskill (with its eight-foot round bed), now lives on the Inverrary golf course near Fort Lauderdale. He’s married to Marilyn Taylor, the younger sister of June Taylor, whose dancers were featured on the Gleason variety shows. In the fifties, they were together for a long time, until she became convinced that Gleason, the lapsed Catholic, would never divorce Genevieve, and she left him. When he finally did get a divorce in 1971, he married Beverly McKittrick; that lasted three years, and when he was free, he went looking for Marilyn and married her. She is a soft-spoken, sweet, funny woman; in New York with him during the shooting of Izzy and Moe, she is protective of Gleason, making certain he doesn’t stay out all night, that he eats properly, gets his sleep. She doesn’t have much to worry about; the New York nights of Gleason’s youth are far behind him. Except in memory.

“Memory is the only money you ever really have,” says the man who once told America that “the worst thing you can do with money is save it.”

The real trouble is that most of his friends are dead. Shor is gone, and Eddie Condon, and a lot of people from the television shows. He shakes his head, and then his face slowly brightens.

“I went to Condon’s once on Christmas Eve,” he says, “and we’re all drinking, and I suddenly realize the band is gone. I say to Condon, ‘Where in the hell is the band? So he takes me downstairs, through one door, into a boiler room, down through another subterranean passage — I mean subterranean! And then another door, and a tunnel, and then he opens the last door …and it’s Santa’s workshop! Here’s the whole goddamned band, stoned out of their brains, working on these little … trains.”

That led Gleason to another night at Condon’s. “Someone in the band took the strings off Condon’s banjo. Just cut them off. And there was Condon up on the stand, loaded to the gills, playing away, no strings.”

Gleason did more than drink with musicians; later, he was to sell millions of albums of his lush arrangements of standard love songs.