Earlier this year, on a winter evening in Atlantic City, Don Rickles left his suite in the Sands Hotel and, with his publicist, his road manager, and a hotel bodyguard, took the elevator down to the Copa Room. On a scouting mission earlier in the day, he had been pleased to discover that the Copa still has an old-school night-club setup, with tables and leopard-print upholstered booths and waitress service. “Most of the rooms these days, they’ve got theatre-style seating,” he explained. “This is one of the last places where I can ask the maître d’ to try to get a funny-looking guy up front—a big laugher, or someone who looks kind of odd.”
In the dressing room, he changed into a shirt, a super-sized bow tie, and a robe that had been laid out for him by his valet, Kenny. He drank some coffee prepared by his road manager, Anthony Oppedisano—a dandyish man with a strawberry-blond quiff, known to his familiars as Tony O. And then, since it was still only seven-thirty and he wasn’t due onstage until ten, Rickles sat down in front of a large flat-screen TV and began to grimace, in a slack-jawed, masculine fashion, at a football game.
Rickles is a great believer in a languorous run-up to a performance. For the more than half century that he has been in show business, he has punched in early for work. “You know how a fighter always comes into the dressing room way before a fight?” he says. “That’s me—I’m like a fighter.” This year, he turned seventy-eight, and he will perform between seventy and ninety dates across the United States; at every one of them, barring disaster, he will arrive a good hour before whoever’s doing the opening act.
At nine o’clock, Rickles, still in his robe, went out to the wings to watch a balladeer called Gene Ferrari perform. Ferrari, a sad-eyed Sicilian with hair the color of eggplant and a powerful, slightly distraught tenor voice, has been opening for Rickles for the past two years. He specializes in high-intensity love songs depicting the darker side of the romantic experience. It is safe to say that his interpretations of “Sometimes When We Touch” and “I Who Have Nothing” no longer hold many surprises for Rickles. But Rickles always comes out to watch him anyway—partly as a gesture of respect for a fellow-performer and partly as a chance to size up the audience. “I like to get the smell of them—see how they’re reacting,” he says.
After Ferrari had wound up his set with a thundering, ballpark-style rendition of “America the Beautiful,” there was a three-minute break. Back in his dressing room, Rickles took off his robe and shouted “Pants!”—a signal to his valet to hustle forward with his tuxedo trousers. Then he walked out into the long, dingy-green hallway, past the clattering hotel kitchens, and up to one of the side doors of the Copa auditorium.
A trumpet blew the opening notes of the old Spanish song “Macarena” and, assuming his trademark expression of bulge-eyed irascibility, Rickles strode out, looking like a snapping turtle surfacing in a pond. The stage lights were flashing red. The audience was clapping in time with the music. His great hairless Brueghelian head gleamed in the spotlight. He struck various martial attitudes and flourished an invisible cape. The conceit of this entrance—unchanged since the early seventies—is that Rickles is a matador come to do battle in the bullring. “Rickles!” an elderly man in an open-neck shirt and crucifix shouted hoarsely above the general roar. “Rickles, we love you!”
Rickles moved toward the stage, pausing here and there to shake a man’s hand or to fall upon an attractive woman in a mock-lascivious embrace. Once at his microphone, he ululated to the music in nonsense Spanish for a few moments, before breaking off to berate his band leader, Joe Mele, for some imaginary mistake. In short order, he turned his attention to the audience and began to rain derision on them in the prewar New York accent of a Dead End Kid.
“Hello, sir,” he said, looking down at a man in the front row. “Is that your wife?” He paused. “Oh, well. Keep your chin up.” “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed, stopping short in front of a fat man (the maître d’ had evidently done as requested). “How much d’you weigh? Two hundred and seventy-four pounds? Yeah . . . on the left side of your ass, you do!” He smiled sweetly at an old lady—“Hello, dear”—and leaned down to shake her hand. “Oof, what did you have for dinner tonight? Fish?”
There has always been a strong tradition within Jewish comedy of what one might call underdog humor—the voice of the nebbishy little guy using his wits to fend off or beguile or distract a hostile world. Rickles, it must be understood, has no truck with this tradition. He is neither underdog nor nebbish. He is a tough Jew—a confronter, an imposer, a hawk. The aggression that is generally understood to be the subtext of all standup acts is rendered entirely explicit in his performance: aggression is, in a sense, the subject of his performance. He isn’t trying to charm a hostile world. He is coming at it with a baseball bat.
“Don’t call me sir,” he bellowed at a young man in the audience. “King Jew will do fine.” “You”—he pointed at a woman—“you’re Italian, right? I knew it. None of your clothes match. Nah, but really, we like the Italians. We do. We gotta kiss their asses, so’s the Jews can have ice.”
The racial and sexual stereotypes in which Rickles trades have, for the most part, a distinctly period flavor. Poles are dumb Polacks. Gay men are mincing fairies. Women are broads with “good lamps.” Many of his caricatures—his goose-stepping Krauts and bucktoothed Japs—are so antique as to be positively quaint. (Really, when was the last time you saw an Italian delivering ice?) But he is still capable of creating a scandalized frisson with the audacity of his incorrectness. When a young Indian man in the Copa Room identified himself as a database analyst, Rickles gave a mournful little roll of his eyes and remarked, more in sorrow than in anger, “You people come out of the jungle and take all our good jobs.”
The stated intention of this genial racism is a liberal one. Rickles is an equal-opportunity offender, the idea goes—a kind of workingman’s Lenny Bruce—deploying stereotype to demonstrate that we are all different and all equal. For many years, he ended his act with a prayer that he would one day see “all bigots vanish from the earth.” In the sixties, when Rickles first started appearing on television, his angry style was a startling aberration in a medium dominated by gosh-darn-it good cheer. But equally startling was the progressive message underlying his faux misanthropy. The black comedian Bernie Mac, a longtime fan of Rickles, who has had him as a guest star on his television show, recalls what a radical spectacle Rickles presented to him as a boy, when he first saw him on a Dean Martin celebrity roast: “He was not afraid to cross the line. He attacked! He had no respect for any person, and he was doing his thing to everybody—black, white, Jewish, Asian. I fell in love with him. I saw the joke, you know? My family saw the joke. My old grandfather, who came from the South—even he got Rickles. He was like, ‘This mofo is crazy.’ ”
Of course, not everybody has seen the joke, or cared to acknowledge the humanity beneath Rickles’s dyspepsia. In a long career of making cracks about “needing the blacks so we can have cotton in the drugstore,” he has inevitably earned some enemies. The rapper LL Cool J, in his memoir “I Make My Own Rules,” describes being at a birthday gala for Quincy Jones, attended by Sidney Poitier, Oprah Winfrey, and others, at which Rickles made a fulsome toast, congratulating Jones on the beauty of his wife and on the enormity of his professional success, but concluding that, in spite of everything, he was “still a black man.” “Mr. Jones laughed it off and Mr. Poitier just shook his head and said, ‘Tack-y. Very tack-y!’ That was putting it mildly.”
As Rickles has grown older, he has become quicker to tip his audience off to his good intentions. His act has a lot of misty-water-colored reminiscing and lachrymose toast-making these days. (“I wish for you, my friends, that for years to come you have what I have—people who care.”) He first began singing songs like the vaudeville-flavored “I’m a Nice Guy” and the hair-raisingly mawkish “(I’ll Trade You) Laughter for Love” in the late sixties, when he moved up from being a lounge comic to working the big rooms in Las Vegas and felt he needed “something classy” to seal his new status. But after many years of functioning as sentimental relief—little rest stops of warmheartedness in a more general barrage of animosity—the songs have now leaked their twinkliness into the rest of the act, colonizing it with a rosy glow:
After the show in the Copa Room, Rickles’s dressing room quickly filled up with a group of retired Atlantic City cops, who knew Rickles from the old days when he had a regular gig at the Resorts. The air in the room was heavy with the smell of clashing colognes. (“Jeez, it’s the Gardens of Allah in here,” someone murmured upon entering.) When Rickles appeared, wearing a cashmere sweater and slacks—and bringing his own heavy dose of Paco Rabanne to the fragrant mix—he greeted the cops warmly. “These guys used to take care of me,” he said as he hugged them. Tony O. fixed him a vodka. (Tony O. was Frank Sinatra’s road manager for many years, and, particularly when preparing beverages, he comports himself with the terse dignity befitting that distinguished employment history.) Shortly thereafter, Rickles’s wife, Barbara, a handsome, carefully coiffed woman in a raspberry-pink sweater set, arrived. In his act, Rickles frequently depicts his wife as the supreme Jewish American Princess—a woman who “likes to lie in bed, signalling ships with her jewelry.” Although the real-life Mrs. Rickles does indeed sport an impressive smattering of diamonds, she is an altogether more dignified character than the jokes would suggest. She met Rickles some forty years ago, when she was working as his agent’s secretary, and in company she tends to listen to her husband’s patter with the slightly weary half smile common to the spouses of professional clowns. “She’s heard all my jokes now,” Rickles admits. “But I can still make her laugh. Late at night when we’re in bed, telling stories, I can get her hysterical.”
In the dressing room, various people who had been hanging around outside, waiting for an audience, began to trickle in. A young man who was appearing as Buddy Holly in the “Legends” show over at Bally’s Claridge Tower clasped Rickles’s hand reverently. “We in the business are so grateful to you for your showmanship,” he said. A couple from Connecticut posed for pictures and spoke about their granddaughter. At some point, the subject of Gene Ferrari came up. Ferrari had mentioned in his act that night that he used to have very long hair and that Rickles had persuaded him to cut it off. Was that true? “Sure,” Rickles growled. “Are you kidding? I mean, c’mon . . . he looked ridiculous. Like some kind of fag pirate.” The policemen guffawed appreciatively.
Rickles is not one of those entertainers who resent the expectation that he be funny offstage. On the contrary, he seems eager to get laughs wherever he can. (And if the laughter is insufficiently robust he is not beyond inquiring yearningly, “That was funny, right?”) “Don likes to train his instrument,” the comedian Bob Newhart says. Newhart and Rickles and their wives have been going on vacation together for several decades, and Newhart says that by now he has seen his friend do shtick in most of the European countries. “You’ll be in Venice or someplace,” he says, “and Don’ll instruct you, ‘Don’t talk to anyone, or they’ll never leave us alone.’ Then the next thing you know you’re in Harry’s Bar and he’s turning around, chatting up the American tourists in the next booth.”
Rickles claims to have inherited his exuberance from his mother. The noisy, indomitable Etta Rickles, whom he sometimes refers to as “the Jewish Patton,” once greeted a group of bosses at a casino with the words “Good evening, gentlemen. Now take out your guns and put ’em on the table.” Growing up in Jackson Heights, Queens, Rickles was a self-conscious child, he says—especially shy around “important people”—and he found his mother’s garrulity embarrassing. “Any place we’d go, she’d be, ‘HOW ARE YOU, SOPHIE, AWFULLY NICE TO SEE YOU.’ She’d talk loud on the subway. I always thought people were looking at us. But then, as I grew older, I realized that that was a part of me—that I was that way, too.”
After serving in the Navy during the Second World War—an experience he refers to only in the glibbest comic terms (“I was in the jungle with a bunch of Japs, running around calling, ‘Whe-e-re are you, Jew?’ ”)—Rickles decided he wanted to be an actor. He enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in Manhattan. But after graduating, in 1948—in the same class as Jason Robards—he had no luck finding work. For a few years, he did impressions and jokes at synagogue functions and bingo parlors. He sold makeup and pots and pans out of his car. He did a stint as a tummler in the Catskills. He even tried, briefly, to become an insurance salesman, like his father, Max. (“I was always great at the pitch,” he recalls, “but I could never do the closing.”)
Shortly after his father died, in 1953, Rickles moved out to Los Angeles to take a job as a comedian with Will Osbourne’s band. His mother moved with him. “We were always very close,” he says. “Joined at the hip, really.” For the first couple of years in California, Rickles and his mother shared a one-room apartment with a curtain across it. Although they later moved to grander accommodations, they continued to live together until Rickles got married to Barbara, at the age of thirty-eight. Etta moved out then—to the apartment next door.
It was in Los Angeles that Rickles’s act—or, rather, his anti-act—began to come together. “To this day, I can’t tell jokes,” he says. “I can do situations that become jokes, but I can’t do jokes per se. So I was doing impressions badly and I was doing jokes badly, and after a while I began to look at people and say, ‘Don’t you find that funny? It was damn funny! Tell me, why are you wearing that tie? It’s all wrong, you know that, don’t you?’ And that became a bit. People started to laugh.”
Rickles is not a great aficionado of comedy history, and he has little interest in theorizing about what makes a joke work. Bob Newhart says that he and Rickles have never had a technical conversation about their trade. (“I might say, ‘D’you think that guy’s funny?’ and he might say, ‘Sure, he’s funny,’ or ‘No, I don’t get him, either.’ But that’s as far as it goes.”) If pressed to name comics he admires, Rickles will concede that Shecky Greene was pretty good, but he declines to name any favorites among the younger generation of standups. “There’s nobody who I think, Oo! I gotta see,” he says. He cites no particular influences on his own style, but he does not seem much interested in claiming himself as an original, either. “I don’t say I was the first,” he once told a reporter, “because, who knows, maybe there was a guy out in Minnesota doing it before me.”
To refer to Rickles, as people often have, as “the father of insult comedy” is perhaps a little far-fetched. If insult comedy has a father at all, it is more likely to have been one of the old vaudevillians or a medieval court jester. Even in modern times, there were performers before Rickles who used insult as their central device—most notably, a rumpled, slightly depressive comic of the forties and fifties called Fat Jack Leonard. (It was Leonard who once told Ed Sullivan, “Don’t worry, Ed—someday you’ll find yourself . . . and you’ll be terribly disappointed.”) But Rickles is certainly to be credited with taking insult comedy to an unprecedented level of ferocity. Some of the abuse he coined in the Los Angeles night clubs of the fifties was essentially meaningless—an abstraction of insult—as with the snarling admonition “Don’t be a hockey puck.” Some of it had a crazy, almost poetic specificity. “I don’t know what this is all about, you annoying woman,” he would shout at an unsuspecting female in his audience. “Get a job at a fruit stand. Say, didn’t I see you during the war hanging around the embarkation point in a torn sweater?” All of it was faster and nastier and more confrontational than anything people had seen on a stage before. Strip away the personal charm and the strong strain of surrealist whimsy in his humor, and the line of descent from Rickles to the ultra-aggressive shock comedy of Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison is clear.
One night in 1957, when Rickles was performing at a small club in Hollywood called the Slate Brothers, Frank Sinatra and his retinue came in. As they were ushered to a table, the story has it, an awkward hush fell over the room. Would Rickles mock Sinatra? “Make yourself at home, Frank,” Rickles called out. “Hit somebody.” There was a terrifying pause, and then Sinatra began to laugh. “I saw you in that movie ‘From Here to Eternity,’ ” Rickles went on. “I gotta tell you, the cannon’s acting was great.” Sinatra kept laughing. He laughed until he fell off his chair, whereupon Rickles scowled at him and said, “Get off the floor, Frank—it looks fruity.”
So Rickles’s legend as a dauntless pricker of pomposity was born. “Nobody ever dared with Frank,” Rickles says, “because he had such mood swings and you never knew how he was going to react. But I could tell the minute I saw him that he was going to be in my corner.” Sinatra turned out to be a loyal fan and booster. Soon it became a perverse honor, in entertainment circles, to be singled out for Rickles’s abuse.
Over the years, he has played the licensed fool to all manner of touchy grandees, from Barbra Streisand to Elvis Presley, from King Hussein of Jordan to Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. (Jimmy Carter, he says, was the only President who declined to see him when he visited the White House: “He went to another room. Left his sweater on the chair.”) Rickles is the man who appeared on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” for the first time in 1965 and greeted the king of late night with the words “Hello, dummy.” He is the man who, at a British Royal Gala attended by Princess Margaret in 1980, derided the Queen of England. “I was up there saying how boring the Queen was, how she got on my nerves,” he remembers. “I’m making jokes about her jewelry and stuff. The Americans are laughing their asses off, but the British guys are kind of staring. Show’s over—I go sit down. Newhart’s there, and he says to me out the corner of his mouth, ‘Don’t worry, I got the bags packed. We can go straight to the airport.’ Then this butler comes over. ‘Mr. Rickles?’ he says. ‘Her Royal Highness would like to see you—now.’ Well, Newhart’s looking at me like I’m going to be beheaded. I go over to the Princess’s table and I say, ‘Good evening, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh, no,’ she says, ‘you can call me Ma’am.’ ‘O.K.,’ I say. ‘I did enjoy your performance,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t follow everything you were saying, but it was jolly good. You’re awfully quick, aren’t you? Awfully quick. Tell me . . . are you a Jew?’ ”
The standard explanation for how Rickles has escaped being beheaded all these years is that he is never really hateful—just a man with a childlike compulsion to say what is on his mind. “It’s like when you’re having a cocktail party at your house,” Bob Newhart says, “and your kid comes over to say, ‘That fat lady in the red dress wants another Martini.’ Rickles is that kid. He never had that kind of honesty beaten out of him.” Kenneth Tynan put it another way. “Rickles,” he once wrote, “is the unchained Id.”
The trouble with such accounts is that they underestimate the wiliness and control that Rickles brings to bear on his effusions. A truly unchained id would not, one suspects, be a very entertaining thing. There is a lot that Rickles does not—and will not—say onstage. He won’t do blue jokes—except of the very mildest variety. And he never uses a curse word stronger than “damn.” He also tailors his ad-hominem insults to what he thinks individual audience members can bear. Sitting in his overheated beige suite the morning after the Copa show (another flat-screen TV turned on, a buffet on the coffee table), he recalled how he had mocked one particularly unattractive man in the audience the night before. “He was thrilled when I made fun of him,” he said. “I could see he loved me when I walked offstage. But, I mean, I could have done much worse. He was weird-looking. Really Frankenstein. I could have made him a schmuck—but the point is I would never do that.”
Rickles’s gift, it would seem, lies not in ignoring the promptings of his super-ego but in his ability to give a highly stylized impression of doing so. When Rickles talks about the casino owners he used to work for (“People like to say they were the Mob, but I don’t like that word. All I know is they were businessmen who ran the casinos and they ran them very well. . . . They were good to me”) or about Lucille Ball, on whose show he appeared several times (“She was a sweet lady but tough if you got out of line—she was the kind of lady I minded my ‘p’s and ‘q’s with”), or about Elvis, who once interrupted Rickles’s Vegas act to recite a poem (“I didn’t need it, but what was I gonna do? His career was winding down, but he was still a big headliner”), it is a cautious, conservative spirit one hears, not an anarchic one. His reckless-seeming mockery of the high and mighty has always been rooted in an exquisite, courtierlike sensitivity to hierarchical distinctions.
“Don is a comic, remember,” Joan Rivers says. “And in his generation comics were always the low men on the totem pole.”
“I have always respected authority,” Rickles says.
Rickles still lives in Los Angeles, and in late February he taped an interview with his old friend Larry King at the CNN studios there. Afterward, he stopped off for a pre-dinner drink at the St. Regis Hotel bar. “I love Larry,” he said, as his publicist went off to order him a vodka. “He interviews the big shots—the President of this one and the Prime Minister of that one—but underneath it all he’s just an old Jewish guy who wants a corned-beef sandwich.” Rickles was in a buoyant mood. Just that week, he had signed a deal to co-star with William Macy and Ned Beatty in a television remake of the Jackie Gleason movie “The Wool Cap.” “It’s a very good cast,” he said. “I mean, Bill Macy! Did you see him in ‘Seabiscuit’?”
Rickles’s career as an actor probably constitutes the one significant disappointment of his professional life. Television tended to reduce him to a mere bully figure, and his various attempts to create his own comedy series—“Kibbe Hates Fitch” (1964), “The Don Rickles Show” (1972), “C.P.O. Sharkey” (1976)—were all more or less failures. Even in his appearances on variety specials, he often suffered from not being allowed to ad lib. “I was with Bob Hope on a million shows, and he was always scared,” Rickles once said. “We’d be in rehearsal, I’d do something off the script, and everybody would fall on the floor. He’d look at me real serious and say, ‘Is that the way you’re going to do it?’ And I’d go, ‘Well, Bob, they’re laughing, aren’t they?’ And he’d go, ‘No, just read the card and do it the way I wrote it.’ It got to the point where I’d say, ‘Good evening, Bob,’ and he’d make a face. I’d have to go and sit in his office and practice: ‘Good evening, Bob. Is that O.K.?’ ‘Try it again.’ ‘Hi, Bob.’ ‘That’s a little better.’ He treated me like a moron.”
Rickles did not have much luck in movies either. After a promising start in 1958, with a part in “Run Silent, Run Deep,” starring Clark Gable, there was nothing but a string of roles in low-budget teen movies until “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970). A video that he released in 1975 called “Buy This Tape, You Hockey Puck” gives a poignant glimpse of his frustrated thespian aspirations. In among excerpts from his Vegas act, various comic skits, and a big musical number with Michelle Lee, there is a jarringly sober ten-minute scene from “Inherit the Wind,” with Rickles playing the impassioned William Jennings Bryan character and Jack Klugman playing the Clarence Darrow character. “I was never handled correctly, in my opinion,” Rickles says. “My acting career should have gone further than what it did.”
He has not given up on acting yet. In the mid-nineties, he enjoyed a flurry of attention when he was hired to supply the voice for Mr. Potato Head in “Toy Story” and to play a casino manager in Martin Scorsese’s “Casino.” And he remains very much available for offers. “I’m already worrying about learning my lines for ‘The Wool Cap,’ ” he said at the St. Regis. “It’s a big part. I mean, if I was doing it with Lou Schwartz, I wouldn’t get that excited, but when Bill Macy wants me . . .”
Rickles’s enthusiasm for show business has proved remarkably hardy. Penn Gillette—the tall half of Penn and Teller—recalls seeing Rickles’s act for the first time in 1976, at the Latin Casino, outside Philadelphia. “When he finished his last joke and went off stage, I could see him standing there in the wings,” he said. “He had his head down and his fists clenched, sweat pouring off him, and he was kind of shouting and growling to himself. I mean, he’d played this place maybe two hundred times before and it was a weekday, you know, and he’d been in the business for twenty-five years. There was no reason for this to be a huge powerful moment, but somehow it was. He was still totally committed.”
Thirty years on, Rickles has yet to show any sign of jadedness. He has the usual physical complaints of a septuagenarian. He suffers from diabetes; he has a bad hip and dodgy knees; he is prone to gout. The venues he plays are not the glamorous places they once were. “The ladies used to wear jewelry and furs to a show, and the men wore suits,” he says. “Today, they come in their underwear.” Even the big casino customers are smaller than they used to be. When Rickles attended a “meet and greet” with the high rollers at the Sands in January, he and Tony O., in their jackets and ties and cufflinks and cologne, were by far the nattiest dressers in the room. The gamblers wore sweatpants and anoraks and gnawed on complimentary crab “lollipops.” “This is the highlight of my career, being here at this buck-and-a-half luau,” Rickles told the crowd.
And yet he’s not ready to retire. He has well-appointed homes in Century City and Malibu. He has two children and two grandchildren. But a lifetime of performing has left him with a limited appetite for domesticity. “I live for the nights,” he says.
A decade ago, the requests for him to perform were beginning to wind down, but recently, with the boom in Native American-owned casinos, things have picked up again. In the St. Regis bar, he outlined his schedule. He’d just done some dates with Tony Danza in Florida. Next, he would do a mini-tour with Joan Rivers. There would also be a quick trip to Toronto for a men’s-club convention. “It’ll be just a one-night thing,” he said. “They pay a lot of money for it, but they’re the toughest things to do—the private functions. These same people, they’ll come to see me in Vegas and they’ll be afraid. But with all their friends, on their own ground, they’re shouting at the waiter in the middle of the act to get them some pretzels. It makes it more difficult. I know in my mind the Toronto trip is going to be a pain in the ass. Because you get there and they all take you to one side and it’s like, ‘Make fun of Charlie, he’s a pain in the ass.’ Or ‘Make fun of Lou, he never makes love to his wife.’ I like to go out cold turkey, not knowing anybody, and do it on my own. Instead, I got to follow instructions—‘Jack, you are a moron and your brother is a jerk.’ And they’re WHAA! They fall on the floor. Believe me, the joke is not that funny. But for them it is. They go crazy. Under the table. It’s annoying. I’m thinking to myself, When is this going to be over? It bores me, you know?” He shrugged and rattled the ice in his vodka. “Then again,” he said, “I’m glad they’re laughing.” ♦
