Photo by Justin Stephens
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Shelley Berman Laughs Last
By Margaret Guroff, November & December 2005
Forty years after his fall from grace, the legendary comedian’s phone is ringing again
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Shelley Berman drives the same way he does standup: confidently but with a
maniacal edge that makes you feel at once safe and terrified. Careering uphill
toward his L.A. home in his bulky silver Toyota 4Runner, the 79-year-old
comedian is talking about Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld and the
co-reviver—with Berman himself—of Berman's TV career. David
plays Berman's son on Curb Your Enthusiasm, an unscripted HBO sitcom
that just began its fifth season.
"Working with Larry is always a kick," says Berman in his crisp,
deep professor's voice as mountain scrub zips past his window just a bit
too fast. "While you're improvising, you may come up with something
which will break him up. As soon as that smile comes out, you know that, hey,
we're having fun."
The show revolves around David, a notorious perfectionist and a proud
neurotic. These qualities made Berman a natural to play his father, because
neurosis made Berman a huge star once, and neurosis all but took that away.
After one public misstep 40 years ago—a private tantrum aired on national
TV—Berman became a pariah. Now, after he spent years in a wilderness of
Love, American Style and regional theater, Berman's star is on the
rise again with a role in the cult hit Curb, headline comedy gigs in Las Vegas,
and cameos in films such as Meet the Fockers and The
Aristocrats.
This time, he says, he's enjoying the ride.
Though not exactly a household name, Berman is a comedy colossus. In 1959
his first LP, Inside Shelley Berman, shattered the norms of standup,
replacing rat-a-tat punch lines with anxious monologues about disturbing
aspects of daily life. "It's not the buttermilk that bothers me,"
he whined. "It's the way the glass looks when you're through
drinking it that makes me sick." That record—the first live comedy
album to go gold and the first to win a Grammy—brought Berman's brand
of humor out of smoky jazz clubs and into the nation's rumpus rooms,
turning him into "a sort of Everymanic-depressive," as Time
magazine called him.
Berman became the dean of the new school of persecuted comics that included
political monologuist Mort Sahl and so-called sick comic Lenny Bruce. The
monologues—many of them pained, one-sided phone calls—were
Berman's personality, amplified. "My whole act is confession," he
told Time in 1959. "Every word I say, I'm admitting
something."
Audiences devoured it. Before long, Berman, who grew up poor in Chicago, was
living with wife Sarah, his drama-school sweetheart, on the swanky Upper East
Side of Manhattan, employing two secretaries and a valet and buying suits in
$1,000 lots.
Rod Serling wrote a Twilight Zone episode for him. He was a frequent
panelist on What's My Line? He starred in the musical A Family
Affair on Broadway. "I was on top of the world," Berman says.
"We were living high."
And then NBC came calling.
Sinking deep into a blue velveteen couch in his dusky living room,
surrounded by his collection of handmade knives—including one that folds
into the shape of a tulip blossom and one inlaid with mastodon
tusk—Berman begins the story of his downfall. "NBC wanted to do a
documentary," he recalls. His eyes form sad crescents beneath a thicket of
brow. Cameras followed Berman around for months, he says: at home, on the set,
to the Army-Navy game, and finally, on New Year's Eve 1963, to the Diplomat
Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, where he was to play the Café
Cristál.
Berman had already earned a reputation as an exacting, even difficult,
performer. Early in the one-week engagement, he was onstage when a phone rang
backstage. He made a joke of it, but afterward he reminded his road manager
that backstage phones should be off the hook.
A few nights later, the backstage phone rang again at a disastrous time: the
last few tear-jerking moments of a sketch about his own father. Berman finessed
the distraction, but when he got backstage, he freaked. "Take those phones
off the hook when I'm working," he shouted, throwing his freshly lit
cigarette down. "I'll pull the damn phones out of the wall!" He
dashed the phone's receiver to the floor with a clunk. Then he put on his
suit coat and leaned face-first into a corner, arm overhead and head down.
When Comedian Backstage aired in March 1963, this outburst was its
centerpiece. Berman and his managers had seen the film ahead of time, and no
one objected to it. "I said to somebody, 'Can this hurt me?'
" he recalls. "They said, 'How can it hurt you? And believe me,
they won't forget who you are.' "
The last part, at least, was true. Within days after the show aired, Berman
had become the era's Janet Jackson—overexposed and drowning in
torrents of hysterical criticism. "It was the first time that reality
programming poked its head out of the rock," recalls Mary Tyler Moore, an
admirer who later had Berman as a guest on her 1970s sitcom.
"It was an enormous brouhaha over something that I think, in
today's world, would have not even been newsworthy," says actor Martin
Landau, a friend from the days when he and Berman were both struggling young
performers in New York City. "In fact, it would probably be considered
quite human today—the fact that he cared so much."
But this was 1963. Celebrities were not supposed to be human. Suddenly job
offers were fewer and the pay was lower. "Soon we were not doing too
well," Berman says. In order to avoid being seen as a monster, he had to
back off of his obsession with the technical details of his act. If he ever did
complain, he recalls, "everything became amplified. When I asked for a
light, it was a demand. When I demanded a light, it was a f---ing fit."
Berman says his performances sometimes suffered as a result of technical
difficulties, fueling his descent. Before long, he was working mainly in
regional theater—when he worked at all.
Life, of course, went on. In 1964 the Bermans moved to Beverly Hills, into a
villa once owned by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. They adopted two
infants—Joshua in 1965 and Rachel in 1967. A doting father, Berman felt
an almost mystical bond with his son. "I would sit with Josh sometimes
when he was very, very little," Berman recalls. "All of a sudden
we'd connect, and no words were said. We'd sit there staring at each
other until the tears came running down our faces. He was somebody who kept
saying 'I love you,' but he was somebody who never needed to say
it."
The fallen comedian scraped for TV guest spots, wrote books and plays, and
directed a film, Keep Off! Keep Off! starring Mickey Dolenz of the
Monkees. But the superstardom that had once seemed likely never
materialized.
"He is a guy of great talent, both comedic and dramatic," says
actor Tom Bosley, who belonged to a winter stock company with Berman in the
1940s. "He deserved better than he got."
Then in 1975 the family got news that dwarfed Berman's professional
struggles: Josh was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Within 18 months, at age 12,
he was gone. "I had him studying for his bar mitzvah until he couldn't
stand it anymore, because I wanted him to live to the very last minute,"
Berman recalls. According to Gerald Nachman's book
Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (Pantheon,
2003), Berman gave an interview a month after Josh's death. "I've
been taught a profound lesson," he said then. "The future is a
breaker of promises."
Today Rachel lives in North Carolina and has two sons. One is named after
her brother.
"Young Joshua is over 13, and he's into manhood right now, young
manhood," says the proud grandpa. The boy was not bar mitzvahed—nor
is it likely, Berman says with a laugh: "He's a dyed-in-the-wool
Baptist. Haven't I told you that it is the dream of every Jewish father
that his daughter will someday marry a Southern Baptist?"
If Berman sowed the seeds of his own professional destruction, he also sowed
the seeds of his own resurrection. Bookers and producers don't live
forever, after all, and the ones who had shut down Berman's career
eventually stopped making all the decisions in Hollywood. In their place came a
new generation—a generation that had worn out Berman's records on
their family room turntables. He began getting more TV work—a recurring
role on L.A. Law, two episodes of Friends.
And then in 2002 he landed a role as the very nearsighted, very bald father,
Nat, on Curb Your Enthusiasm. (Berman has worn a hairpiece since his
20s—even, he says, to take out the garbage.) Much of the early Shelley
Berman is present in the character—the exaggerated oddness of everyday
life, the nerves on edge, the sentimental undertone. But there's modern-day
Berman there too. One of Nat David's most appealing traits—and one of
the offscreen Shelley Berman's—is a perfectly delighted, silent laugh
that is too pure and happy to have fit into his 1950s act: it's an almost
shocked, wide-open grin, like a dolphin's.
"He has not lost a step," says comedian Richard Lewis, who plays a
version of himself on the show. "You close your eyes and he's doing
improvs with Nichols and May in the '50s. It's astonishing."
Having idolized Berman since his childhood, Lewis says he is awed to call him a
friend. "He's the sweetest, most brilliant guy in my field that I have
ever known," Lewis says. "I just adore him. And that's an
understatement."
Berman has clearly mellowed since his early days. The people who work with
him now call him a sweetheart, a doll. "I think like good wine he has aged
well," says Landau. "He's still a hell of a performer, but if you
don't learn along the way, your life hasn't really added up
properly."
And yet some traits endure. "He's unbelievably neurotic," says
Jeff Garlin, who coproduces the show and plays David's agent. "He
needs to be told all the time how good he is, and it's easy to do because
he's terrific."
It's June 2004. Berman takes the stage at the annual Los Angeles Improv
Festival. He perches on a barstool, his one trademark prop, and asks the
audience for words to riff on. Dialing an imaginary rotary
phone—"Incidentally, this pantomime should give you an idea of just
how old I really am," he jokes—Berman concocts a conversation with a
woman who has advertised a lost balloon that Berman has found. The monologue is
absurdly funny at the outset, but it grows sweeter when Berman asks to speak to
the woman's son, whose balloon it is.
"These things leak, you know," he tells the imaginary boy. "I
don't want you to come here and be disappointed." Even if something
lost can be restored, he instructs, it may not be the same.
Then, it seems, Berman's mind turns to what has been lost that cannot be
restored. "Are you crying?" he asks the boy tenderly.
Lately the once-difficult comic has taken to writing poetry. One of his
recent poems is called "Curb." Scattered with jokes about life on the
set—"We are the breath mint addicted,/worshipful druids of
chlorophyll"—it also lauds the craft of improv comedy and its basis,
trust. With trust, Berman writes, the actors' back-and-forth works to
create something beyond the show itself. "This is where the doings
emerge,/where the Taking/is the Giving," he writes.
Where we in our invention
Are mindful always of
The end and persistence of intention—
the Laughter, the Laughter.
The end is nothing
if not the end in Laughter.
Margaret Guroff is a features editor for AARP The Magazine.
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