offstage in surrender. Luckily we managed to regroup in the next scene and finished the evening with a semblance of professionalism, very happy that Groucho didn’t give us any more help.
He came back after the show and all of us sat with him for a couple of hours in the empty club, mostly listening to his stories in joyous rapt attention. In spite of the botched Khrushchev-Kennedy debate we seemed to have pleased Groucho, and completely out of keeping for us we actually delighted in the fact that he’d turned the show into a shambles. It was an evening none of us will ever forget, and I’m proud to say that after that night Groucho became a friend. He’d often come to see me when I was in a show in L.A., and invite me to his house for dinner, or out to a nearby restaurant. His presence was an endless source of delight to anyone who approached him. He joked with waiters, busboys, maître d’s, everyone in the restaurant who came over to say hello. And more than almost anyone I’ve met in this business, he was inquisitive about everyone and everything. He never stopped asking questions. Once I tried to tell him of the joy he’d given me over the years and how greatly I admired him. He waved me off. “I was nothing without my brothers,” he said. “Without them I wouldn’t have amounted to anything.”
The club in Greenwich Village stayed successful for a long time. The group, most of whom had been native Chicagoans, slowly adjusted to living in New York, and, predictably, offers for work on Broadway and in film and TV started coming in. We had considered ourselves iconoclasts and rebels, and we were a pretty tight, if dysfunctional, family. But as offers came in, things began to change. The new possibilities that were offered to some of us represented too many unspoken hopes and dreams, dreams of financial security, of greater personal recognition, of less pressured work, and the group started changing. People started leaving, new blood came in, and Second City started its long climb into becoming an institution and a success machine.
Forty years later there was a celebration and reunion in Chicago, and those of us, the early members who were still alive, climbed haltingly onstage to receive standing ovations from the crowd. We were treated like pioneers. Pathfinders. We looked at each other with our mouths open in disbelief. We had started out in Second City, all of us, because there was nowhere else to go. We were mavericks, misfits, almost unemployable. Most of the original members of the group had come out of the University of Chicago, where the dean had said publicly, “Get a general education. Don’t specialize. You’re all smart people; you’ll end up on your feet.” They took him at his word and as a result the University of Chicago produced a generation of brilliant people who wandered and floundered without
finding specific work to do, all of them prospective Second City cast members. I fit right in. If anyone had told us that we were founding a dynasty, that three-quarters of the comic talent in the country for the next five decades would come from our ranks, we would have laughed in their faces. Now people join the cast in order to “make it.” We did it to survive.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After being with Second City in New York for a year, I was offered a part in a Broadway play. It was called Enter Laughing , from a book written by Carl Reiner. It was my first Broadway play, I had the lead, and I was never offstage. We opened in the middle of a newspaper strike, but in spite of the blackout and a complete lack of newsprint publicity, we got enough raves via television and word of mouth to turn the show into a smash hit.
The night before the reviews came out, my name was in small letters at the bottom of the ads. The next day I was over the title. As glamorous as that sounds, and as much of a dream as I thought it would be, it backfired. For the first time in my career there was no avoiding the fact
He came back after the show and all of us sat with him for a couple of hours in the empty club, mostly listening to his stories in joyous rapt attention. In spite of the botched Khrushchev-Kennedy debate we seemed to have pleased Groucho, and completely out of keeping for us we actually delighted in the fact that he’d turned the show into a shambles. It was an evening none of us will ever forget, and I’m proud to say that after that night Groucho became a friend. He’d often come to see me when I was in a show in L.A., and invite me to his house for dinner, or out to a nearby restaurant. His presence was an endless source of delight to anyone who approached him. He joked with waiters, busboys, maître d’s, everyone in the restaurant who came over to say hello. And more than almost anyone I’ve met in this business, he was inquisitive about everyone and everything. He never stopped asking questions. Once I tried to tell him of the joy he’d given me over the years and how greatly I admired him. He waved me off. “I was nothing without my brothers,” he said. “Without them I wouldn’t have amounted to anything.”
The club in Greenwich Village stayed successful for a long time. The group, most of whom had been native Chicagoans, slowly adjusted to living in New York, and, predictably, offers for work on Broadway and in film and TV started coming in. We had considered ourselves iconoclasts and rebels, and we were a pretty tight, if dysfunctional, family. But as offers came in, things began to change. The new possibilities that were offered to some of us represented too many unspoken hopes and dreams, dreams of financial security, of greater personal recognition, of less pressured work, and the group started changing. People started leaving, new blood came in, and Second City started its long climb into becoming an institution and a success machine.
Forty years later there was a celebration and reunion in Chicago, and those of us, the early members who were still alive, climbed haltingly onstage to receive standing ovations from the crowd. We were treated like pioneers. Pathfinders. We looked at each other with our mouths open in disbelief. We had started out in Second City, all of us, because there was nowhere else to go. We were mavericks, misfits, almost unemployable. Most of the original members of the group had come out of the University of Chicago, where the dean had said publicly, “Get a general education. Don’t specialize. You’re all smart people; you’ll end up on your feet.” They took him at his word and as a result the University of Chicago produced a generation of brilliant people who wandered and floundered without
finding specific work to do, all of them prospective Second City cast members. I fit right in. If anyone had told us that we were founding a dynasty, that three-quarters of the comic talent in the country for the next five decades would come from our ranks, we would have laughed in their faces. Now people join the cast in order to “make it.” We did it to survive.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After being with Second City in New York for a year, I was offered a part in a Broadway play. It was called Enter Laughing , from a book written by Carl Reiner. It was my first Broadway play, I had the lead, and I was never offstage. We opened in the middle of a newspaper strike, but in spite of the blackout and a complete lack of newsprint publicity, we got enough raves via television and word of mouth to turn the show into a smash hit.
The night before the reviews came out, my name was in small letters at the bottom of the ads. The next day I was over the title. As glamorous as that sounds, and as much of a dream as I thought it would be, it backfired. For the first time in my career there was no avoiding the fact
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