Married to Laughter (eBook)

A Love Story Featuring Anne Meara

Jerry Stiller (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2000 | 1. Auflage
336 Seiten
Simon & Schuster (Verlag)
978-0-7432-1146-8 (ISBN)

Infos

The current generation knows him as the serenity-seeking Frank Costanza from Seinfeld. An older generation knows him as one-half of the comedy team Stiller and Meara. But, as his memoir, Married to Laughter, reveals, Jerry Stiller has had a lifelong love affair with entertainment.

Growing up during the Depression in Brooklyn and on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Jerry Stiller discovered the power of comedy when, as a child, he saw Eddie Cantor transform an audience. Jerry's father often took him to vaudeville performances, where Jerry decided that he, too, wanted to make people laugh. He studied drama at Syracuse University, where a charismatic professor inspired Jerry to believe that he could achieve his dream and become a successful actor. After Syracuse, Jerry returned to New York to begin a life in the theater.

Jerry soon met Anne Meara. Even before he fell in love with her, he knew she was a remarkable person. At first they encouraged each other in their separate performances, but eventually they began doing a comedy act in the coffeehouses of New York's Greenwich Village. They created a brilliantly successful act with two characters who were exaggerated versions of themselves. Before long, they were regulars on The Ed Sullivan Show, the most popular television program of the day. Stiller and Meara was a smash hit.

But Jerry's first love has always been the theater, and he writes with fondness and charm about his nearly fifty years in show business -- from summer stock to the early days of Joe Papp's pioneering Shakespeare in the Park, from his Broadway performance in Hurlyburly to his roles in such films as The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Ritz, Seize the Day, and Hairspray. He describes the genesis of the hugely successful Blue Nun radio commercials that he and Anne recorded, the first of many award-winning advertisements they would make together.

Jerry takes us inside his life offstage, describing with great candor his personal and professional neuroses, including some unusual experiences in therapy. He recounts hilarious stories about the Stiller family and tells wonderful tales about such friends and colleagues as Walter Matthau, Colleen Dewhurst, Mike Nichols, F. Murray Abraham, and Henny Youngman.

But most of all, he describes life with Anne, showing us his admiration for her as a performer and describing how she gave him the insight into acting that he'd long sought.

Married to Laughter is a great love story about two people who found their place in show business without ever losing sight of each other.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

Anne

In 1953, I was in New York City looking for work. I was making rounds with Bea Mortensen, a tall, lovely, redheaded actress. I thought we'd be terrific doing an act together. That wasn't all I wanted to do with Bea. She sensed that my hanging out with her was not solely in hope of theatrical employment, but I never made an overt pass and did everything to disguise my biological feelings.

We'd walk down Broadway holding hands, she in two-inch heels and me in my Keds, sending out a message: 'See, we're just two crazy show-business people.' Bea's making rounds with me must have hinged on some bizarre expectation of hers that we'd actually strike it rich one day.

On this spring afternoon we arrived at a casting cattle call in an agent's office. The place was full of chattering hopefuls seeking employment in a summer-stock company. As we waited our turn, Bea recognized a friend of hers, a tall girl, though not quite Bea's height, with auburn hair and an angelic face. They got talking just as the receptionist announced that the agent would start seeing people. I was sandwiched between them. The conversation proceeded as if I weren't there.

'By the way, this is Jerry,' Bea said.

'Hi,' I said, extending my hand in a kind of manly way. The angel-faced girl shook it. She looked sort of puritanical and smelled nice. She was wearing Mary Chess perfume, I later learned.

'Anne Meara,' the secretary called.

'That's me,' the girl said. 'I already know I'm too tall to play the ingenue and too young to be a character woman.'

She's very self-demeaning, I thought.

'Okay, wish me luck,' she said, disappearing into the inner office.

Bea looked at me soulfully and said, 'That's a nice girl.' I knew instantly that this was the kiss-off. 'You'll like her,' Bea said. 'She's a very sweet girl.' I felt like a baseball card being traded.

Before I could fully comprehend that Bea's and my relationship had ended, the agent's door flew open and Anne Meara, in tears, burst back into the room.

'What happened?' everyone asked.

'He chased me. He chased me all around the desk,' she said. Her face was flushed. 'I think I'm going back to Rockville Centre. My father told me New York was a tough place.'

'Who's next?' the secretary said. 'Who's Jerry Stiller?'

'I'm next,' I said.

I'd seen this agent on many occasions, and he'd always paid me the courtesy of saying hello. His walls were full of pictures of stars he claimed he handled. He wore a houndstooth sports jacket and always seemed to be on vacation.