Live From New York Part 9

There used to be a j.a.panese restaurant downstairs in the Woodward Hotel on Fifty-fourth Street that was open 'til like four in the morning; so we used to go there all the time. I remember a Friday night I was there with Gilda. It must've been about one-thirty in the morning. There was a newsstand in the hotel lobby. When I went to the men's room, I saw the latest edition of the Daily News; it said that Mr. Ed had died. I went back into the restaurant and I said to Gilda, "Mr. Ed just died." She said, "Wouldn't it be great if tomorrow night on 'Update'" - and I completed what I knew she was going to say - "we interview the grieving widow, Mrs. Ed."

So I'm mulling this over and I can't stop thinking about it; somehow we have to do this. I go to a phone and call Lorne at home and tell him, "Listen, Mr. Ed just died, can I interview Mrs. Ed?" He said, "You get a horse, you can do whatever the f.u.c.k you want." So it's two o'clock in the morning; how do I find a white horse? I wouldn't know how to find a white horse at noon. So I call a prop guy at home, and tell him Mr. Ed just died and I want a white horse for this "Update" thing.

Now in those days I used to come in at seven on Sat.u.r.day morning to get a start on "Update." There was a restaurant downstairs; I'd get all the newspapers and sit there and write jokes. So I start writing this Mrs. Ed interview. Bill Murray was going to interview her and Gilda was going to do the voice. Now Audrey in the production department finds me at the restaurant and she says, "Who's getting the white horse?" I said, "I called a prop guy, he'll take care of it." She threw her hands in the air. She says, "You don't ask them about white horses." I said, "Who do I ask?" She says, "I'll take care of it."

I swear to G.o.d, an hour and a half later there's a white horse in the studio. I went up to Audrey and said, "Where did you get the horse?" She wouldn't tell me. But she was the person who could make anything happen.

TOM DAVIS:.

We were going to do a Franken and Davis sketch - I think it was in the fourth year - and we're dressed as sumo wrestlers. And I suddenly stop and just announce that we're gay.

AL FRANKEN:.

Tom says he can't stand it anymore, we're gay lovers, and I go, "My wife and kid are here." "They don't know?" "No, they don't know!" And the kid is in the audience going, "I hate you, Daddy! I hate you, hate you, hate you, Daddy!" Then I go back behind the curtain, you hear a gunshot go off, and my legs sort of flop out from under the curtain. Then our music plays and I come out and we go, "Good night, everybody!" And that was it; that was a "Franken and Davis Show." And for a while we would say, "Brought to you by the International Communist Party - working for you, in Africa!"

TOM DAVIS:.

And where the censor got involved is, we're dressed in these sumo outfits, basically naked. Our genitals are covered in the front, but our a.s.ses are hanging out. Just being naked. And the Standards and Practices people hadn't seen the costumes. So Al and I put on the sumo outfits and went down to the fourth floor, and we're just walking around NBC naked, and we walked into the office of the head censor, Herminio Traviesas, and he just started laughing, and he said, "All right, I give up!"

DAN AYKROYD:.

Naturally the censors didn't like the refrigerator repairman sketch, where I kneeled down and the audience could see the crack of my a.s.s. And the censor said, "Don't put that pencil in there." I was checking this fridge and I had to put the pencil somewhere. "Don't put the pencil there!" And of course I said I wouldn't, but then on the air, I did. And you know - ma.s.sive laugh.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

Gilda was doing Emily Litella, who would get some topic rolling because she was so hard of hearing, and so she would try to defend violins on television and Chevy would correct her and tell her, "No, it's not violins, it's violence." "Oh, that's very different. Never mind." So that worked and it was cute for about a year, and now Jane Curtin is on "Update" and we wanted to give more life to Gilda's character - we already had done endangered feces and presidential erections and so on, and now the laugh at "never mind" was obligatory and we wanted to get rid of it. So I wrote this Jane thing where she says to Gilda, "You know, every week you come on and you get it wrong, and you're disgusting, you're an insult to the integrity of journalism and to human beings worldwide. Am I making myself clear? I don't want to see you anymore." And I had Gilda say back to her, crystal clear, she took a beat and she went, "b.i.t.c.h."

Now this is 1977, okay? We do it in the dress rehearsal and the place goes nuts because "b.i.t.c.h" on television was groundbreaking. But Jane Crowley, who was this five-hundred-pound censor and an ex-nun or would-be nun or something, she comes around and says, "You can't do that." "Can't do what?" "You can't say 'b.i.t.c.h' on television." And I said, "Jane, listen to me. What Gilda is calling Jane Curtin, when she's saying 'b.i.t.c.h,' she is effectively using the adverb form of the word. In effect she is saying, 'You are acting b.i.t.c.hy toward me,' which I have heard on television before. She's not saying, 'Jane, you are a b.i.t.c.h,' which is a noun, which I agree should never be in television nor even in streets. She's using the adverb form." And would you believe it, she bought this crock of s.h.i.t. She goes, "All right, all right, the adverb then," and went on.

BUCK HENRY:.

I remember there was a really odd argument between me and Lorne and the Standards and Practices woman in a bit where I played a censor. There's a moment when, in trying to describe something, I poke my forefinger through a hole made by my other forefinger and thumb, if you see what I mean. And the argument was, how many times I could do that and whether, having once poked the finger into the hole, could I move it around, or must I withdraw it immediately? It got pretty silly. It's easy to be dirty, but hard to be incisive.

TOM DAVIS:.

When we did the "Franken and Davis Show" sketches, our theme was usually that we were breaking up. Once we had Al's real parents in town, coming to the show, so we dressed up in SS uniforms and we dressed his parents in these death-camp stripes. It was going to be something. In the sketch, Al's father would say, "You know, Al, your mother and I are very uncomfortable with this piece. We think it's tasteless." And Al would say, "Oh come on, Dad, you wanted to be on TV. This is funny." Elliott Gould was the host and Elliott was going to go along with it. But Standards and Practices was really sweating. And Lorne and Bernie Brillstein were like, "Oh G.o.d!" And then Lorne finally decided, "No, no, you can't do it." And Joe and Phoebe, Al's parents, were really dejected. They were excited about being in the piece and being on TV.

So there we are up in Lorne's office in our SS uniforms, black skulls on the hat and everything, and Joe and Phoebe, this old feeble Jewish couple, are dressed in the prison outfits. And we got cut. And Al's parents walked out of the room. And Lorne said, "Don't ever do that to me again. I don't want to ever cut your parents like that."

NEIL LEVY:.

There was a time in the third season when the writers all thought they were being cheated out of their paychecks and there was an insurrection. Everybody got paranoid at one point that they weren't getting paid enough. They discovered there was a certain amount of money in the writers budget, but when they divided what all the writers were making, where was all this extra money? It was going into sets and other things, and it wasn't their business what was happening to it. But there was an insurrection, really. Somebody kicked a hole in a wall and then Lorne came in and said, "What's going on here?" And he was confronted by this mob. And he didn't say a word - he just turned and walked away and went back into his office and closed the door. And then there was dead silence, and then en ma.s.se, all the writers stood in front of Lorne's door begging his forgiveness, banging on the door and pleading, and he wouldn't talk to them - 'til later.

One charge that plagued Sat.u.r.day Night Live was that the show was a boys club, which meant women had to struggle first for admission and then for recognition. Women writers were easily among the most prominent and creative of the first group yet still remained in the minority - a state that would worsen rather than improve in years to come. Among cast members, men who stood out or became stars have outnumbered women, partly because better roles are written for men on the show - by male writers. During the 197677 season, the writing staff consisted of thirteen men and three women - Rosie Shuster, Anne Beatts, and Marilyn Suzanne Miller.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER:.

There was a sort of sisterhood that extended - you know, there weren't that many people, so we were like each other's best friend, because we didn't even know anybody outside the building. By "we" I mean all six girls, the writers plus the performers.

GARRETT MORRIS:.

Either it's that they were all n.i.g.g.e.rs with me or I was a woman with them - because I got the same raw deal.

LILY TOMLIN:.

There was a lot of misogynist stuff that I considered to be demeaning to women - or to any group - on Sat.u.r.day Night Live. It was not my style, you know. You can do anything about anything if there's some artistry involved, but I never was very big on imitating celebrities and putting them down either. It was too limited to me. It was too easy in some sense. And it was just not my style. I was much more interested in pervasive culture types. I was mostly trying to feed back the culture, really, and do stuff that I was pretty infatuated with. I was more interested in the humanity that held us together. Not to say that it shouldn't be satirical and edgy or whatever. It should be.

Their satire is seldom that hard-hitting. It's more - oh G.o.d, I don't know. I don't have too many views about a.n.a.lyzing comedy and what everybody does and what everybody didn't do or how they did it. It rises to the top or it doesn't, I suppose.

JANE CURTIN:.

John absolutely didn't like being in sketches with women. He told me women were not funny. Actually, Chevy said it to me as well. And I found it stunning.

Lorne didn't help, because that isn't what Lorne did. Oh, it was ridiculous. It was just insane. There's no way you can respond to that, so you just have to learn to live with it, plod on, and hope that Marilyn will get a piece on that week.

LARAINE NEWMAN:.

I think Lorne was really a champion of the women writers and gave them an even break. His background was working with women. He started writing for Phyllis Diller, he produced most of the Lily Tomlin specials. He hires women and he's supportive of women. He is not one of those people that thinks women are not funny.

But the boys got away with a lot. They were bad and we were good. We were punctual and they were late. We were clean and they were dirty. We were prepared and they weren't - it was that stuff. I don't think we really got into personalities, because we didn't really have that many. Jane certainly didn't have relationships with the guys on any level. She had a life and was married. I was very fond of everybody. It was a family. I always think of that scene in The Right Stuff when they've gone to that event that Lyndon Johnson planned for them, and they're backstage before they're introduced at this big party on their behalf, and they're all just sitting around realizing what they've all done, and they're just kind of looking at each other like, you know, "Here we are." And that is how we all felt. It's like we'd been through this incredible lifeboat of a situation and we're all tied together because of it.

DAN AYKROYD:.

I think if you look back on the first four years, it was pretty evenly balanced. The women were pretty strong. Jane, Laraine, and Gilda were strong and played strong characters. So I would question whether it was a boys club, just because what would it have been without those women there? It would have been very empty.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER.

I'm not sure how to say this, but everybody sort of thought I was good, and when I wrote something, people wanted to do it. It was a little niche I created for myself.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

Was Lorne prejudiced against female writers? I think we sometimes had to try harder. I remember being instructed by Lorne to write at least nine separate drafts of this stupid sketch called "Backstage Banter" that I just wanted to throw in the garbage can. I wanted to chuck it and say to him, "You're not the boss of me." There were times we were dismissed, or there were times that I would quietly pitch something in the room in a little voice, 'cause I would not, you know, jump on Lorne's desk and tap dance it out. I was quiet. Someone else would pick up the idea in the room and then sock it home. Stuff like that happened all the time. But I don't have any bitterness. I just think we did have to pave the way. We were on new ground. And it was challenging, let's say. Lorne had a real way of juggling a lot of hot egos. I'm sure he saw backbiting and infighting that we didn't see; he was probably privy to more of that than any other person. I know he was, because he used to confide certain stuff to me.

AL FRANKEN:.

My daughter was the first Sat.u.r.day Night Live baby, the first new child born to anybody who worked on the show.

TOM DAVIS:.

Gilda and G. E. Smith, the musician, were living together in the Dakota, and Gilda wanted to give Al's wife, Franny, and the new baby a shower. G. E. and I are in the back room of the apartment where all his guitars are, because the shower's for women - all the secretaries, all the wives, Jane is there, Laraine is there. Everyone is waiting for the baby to arrive and there's a knock at the door and G. E. and I peek in from the other room.

AL FRANKEN:.

My wife came with her sister first and I was to bring the baby. My other sister-in-law came with me. So I got a doll the exact size of the baby and swaddled it - I told Franny I was going to do this - and there's like thirty women, and I walk in and they're all going like, "Ohhh... ahhhh," and I walk in and I hit the baby's head on this piece of furniture and I go up in the air and I come down with everything, everything, going onto this doll, so that there is no way I didn't kill the baby. And the screams, the screams!

TOM DAVIS:.

The scream that came out of these women, it just made everyone's hair stand on end. They just witnessed this man kill his newborn baby. To this day, I've never heard a more terrifying sound than all those women witnessing this baby being killed by its father.

AL FRANKEN:.

And then my sister-in-law Carla walks in with the real baby.

TOM DAVIS:.

I'm telling you, Al did s.h.i.t like that. I love him for it.

STEVE MARTIN:.

And then there was Gilda, who was the sweetest, kindest, funniest person. She was so happy on-camera, she had such a happy face on-camera, you really did grow to love her. You understand what it means when people say they "love" a performer, because they're bringing such happiness into their world.

BILL MURRAY:.

Gilda was really an extraordinary and spectacular person. And she was tough. She was really, really tough. Gilda would just give herself up to a moment, she really gave herself up, she sacrificed herself. She knew how to serve a scene or another person in the scene just so devotedly. She really had the most of that of anyone. As a result, because she made other people look good, she herself looked fantastic.

And she had a charm about her and people could write things for her and sketches would be written and somehow she always took it back to that level of her childhood play. They wrote a lot of sketches to that - you know, of her Judy Miller dancing and bouncing on her bed and stuff - but her own sense of childhood play was really her touchstone.

She was a fantastic laugher. I never enjoyed making anyone laugh more than her. Never. I could make her laugh. I remember one day, I made her laugh so hard - you know there are girls who say, "Oh my G.o.d, I wet my pants," all the time - and I made her laugh so hard, she thought she was going to die. And I just couldn't stop. I used to be really funny, and in those days I used to have almost like a vengeful thing; I could just go for a long period of time and try to be funny. I don't do it like I used to. And I miss that. I'm still funny, but back then I would take something and not let go of it, just take something and not let go of it.

PENNY MARSHALL:.

Cindy Williams wasn't even sure she wanted to go into television, having done movies. So I was like reading with the world for who would play Shirley on Laverne and Shirley. And I called Gilda, because I needed someone strong. I said, "What's your contract? Can you get out?" But she had a loyalty to Lorne, which I understood. Gilda was funny. Gilda was great.

ROBERT KLEIN:.

Once Gilda made me laugh so hard, it was one of the hardest and longest laughing jags I ever had in my life. Do you remember years ago there was a yogurt commercial where they show these old Russians in a village and they live to be a hundred and six because they eat yogurt? Well, she played the old woman with the babushka, and yogurt was going all down her face. She was as good as it gets.

KATE JACKSON:.

I was so shy and nervous when I hosted, because these were the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. They were better than anybody else on television and everybody knew it. Lorne and the writers were there, and I was wondering if when I opened my mouth to start talking were they going to laugh? Would they roll their eyeb.a.l.l.s, look at me, and go, "Oh Lord, have mercy"?

After the cold opening I rushed to change clothes and was doing my wardrobe change and waiting for the lights to come up, and Gilda just very quietly said to me, "You're really good at this." And that just sent me flying. She just absolutely released me and allowed me to have the kind of confidence that lets you do the best you can do. That was the most generous thing. It was just wonderful of her to do that.

MARILYN SUZANNE MILLER.

We were aware of Gilda's eating problems, but we didn't know it was called bulimia. We thought it was this incredibly brilliant idea that Gilda thought up, and I underscore that and I suggest you put it in your book. Yeah, we thought it was a great idea. There were a few girls in my sorority house that went into the bathroom and threw up right after dinner. Which we also thought - by "we," I mean the entire female population thought - was the most wonderful idea and many of us tried to do. It didn't have any name like bulimia, and n.o.body had said it was a disease. We just thought it was a great idea. And then when it went on for a while we thought it was a great weird idea.

LARAINE NEWMAN:.

I was concerned about Gilda's bulimia because I'd had a very close friend who was bulimic all through her teenage years. I knew the things that could happen, so I was really worried about Gilda in that context. She was very open about it - not covert, which I always thought was typical of people with that illness. They're usually very hidden. But she was so funny about it, because she would really announce it to us.

Jane and I and Gilda shared a dressing room until the third year. The boys always had their own dressing room; we had to share one. And Gilda used to make this joke about how when we were tired we would have to split a couch three ways. We would all be on the couch together. Then at one point, Gilda would get up and say, "Well, I've got to go into the bathroom." And there were times when she and I would hang out at her house and I would be snorting heroin and she would be eating a gallon of ice cream. And I remember her staggering to the bathroom to make herself throw up, and saying, "I'm so full, I can't hear." And I laughed so hard. There we were, practicing our illnesses together. She was still funny throughout all of it.

ELLIOTT GOULD:.

Gilda became a very close friend of mine. She was the greatest. Just the most lovely and sensitive human being you could imagine. Gilda told me that when she couldn't sleep, she would order food at about two or three in the morning, and she was so bulimic she would order enough for six or seven people, even though it was just her alone. And then when the delivery guy came and rang the bell, she would say, "The food's here! The food's here!"

TOM SCHILLER:.

"La Dolce Gilda" was an attempt to capture the sadness of Gilda when she was at parties and all these sycophants would come around her, done in the style of Federico Fellini, my favorite director. We shot it in black and white after the show, at a place where we had our parties sometimes. For the end of the film, where she says, "Go away, leave me alone," we stayed up all night in order to get the real feeling of dawn coming up. Then I realized you could shoot that at dusk and it looks the same. So I was learning filmmaking at the same time.

I eventually got to show the film to Fellini himself. I went to Cinecitta Studios in Rome and said I was a friend of Henry Miller's and Paul Mazursky's, which was true, and they let me in to watch Fellini direct one of his pictures there. I met him and said, "Look, I made this homage to you, I'd love to show you." He said, "We must arrange a screening." So they showed him the movie, and he said it was "very sweet" and "it had the feeling of some of my work." Oh, I was in heaven when I saw him there. And he was so welcoming and supportive and everything. He was a neat guy.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

I really enjoyed doing the "Perfume for One-Night Stands" commercial parody. That one I really had a great fondness for, because it brought together a lot of what was going on at the time in terms of casual s.e.x and waking up next to somebody whose name you didn't remember and hobbling out in the morning in last night's dress. It was a great character for Gilda. I mean, I can't imagine Jane Curtin doing that one.

LARAINE NEWMAN:.

I had a situation involving Gilda when Christopher Lee was host. I was the one who wanted him to host. I'm a big horror movie fan and I just knew his work from that. And he turned out to be an excellent host, even though he dropped a bomb on us the first day. He walked in and said he refused to do Dracula on the show.

I know there is a story about me threatening to quit over that show, but I would like to set the record straight on that. They had written the sketch "Dr. Death" for a couple of shows before that, and I knew it was Gilda's sketch but I'm thinking, "f.u.c.k!" This is the conversation I had with Lorne: "Why does she get to do that sketch? She gets so much airtime. This is a character that I could do. Why can't I do that sketch?" So it got turned into this big thing that I had threatened to quit unless I got that sketch, which I never did. Lorne said, "If you really feel that way, you should quit," and I said, "I'm not going to do that. I'm just saying that this is really difficult for me. This is very hurtful and unfair." So I don't know who told who what, but that is really what happened.

The day of read-through, when we went in there, Danny was furious with me, because he had heard I'd threatened to quit. I only found out years later that Gilda had partially written that sketch. Now if I had known that, I would never have asked to do it, because my sense of fair play would never have allowed me to want to do something that someone else wrote. She wrote it with Alan Zweibel, but no one told me at the time. I just thought it was something that Alan wrote that I could have easily done - and what hardship would it have been on Gilda, when she had so much to do in the show? Especially with Christopher Lee, who was the host that I wanted?

And as it happened, I was cast as the little girl. And the sketch turned out okay.

NEIL LEVY:.

I had to go fish stars out of bars all the time, especially the first and second seasons. Oh G.o.d - Broderick Crawford was completely drunk all the time. He actually disappeared. He'd always try to get to the elevator. I'd say, "Where are you going?" He'd say, "I gotta go find my script, I left my script downstairs." I'd say, "I'll go with you." "No, you don't need to come with me." But Lorne had given me very explicit instructions: "You have to stay with him all the time." And Crawford tried to trick me, and then he'd get angry when I caught him at it. He did get away from me once, and I found him in a bar.

Kris Kristofferson was completely wasted during dress rehearsal. He couldn't say his lines, sloshing around, slurring the words. Lorne said, "Just get the biggest pot of coffee you can." I remember Louise La.s.ser on her hands and knees crawling into my office looking for pot. Why she was on her hands and knees, I don't know. And then the day of the show, she decided she wasn't going to do the show unless a certain sketch was cut. And we were all preparing to do the show without her. In fact I remember Aykroyd getting excited about it: "We can do it, Lorne. We can get out there and we'll improv it. We'll do a h.e.l.luva show." And they were ready. And Lorne told her agent that he would make sure everyone knew if she walked out.

DON NOVELLO:.

The Frank Zappa show was like one of the worst ever. And I looked at that recently and I really liked seeing how awkward he was in that. Zappa's a genius, but he doesn't trust people, he does everything by himself. A lot of performers after dress are shaken; it doesn't go well and all of sudden, "Oh G.o.d, in two hours I'm going on live." With Zappa what happened was we had a terrible dress and what was he going to do? What he did, not telling anybody, was he turned into Dean Martin. The approach he took was, he read the cards like he was reading the cards - he made a point of it. He was obviously reading the cards. That was his approach to the humor. No one else in the sketches knew it. It was real bad, because I always liked Zappa, I think everybody did, but it was just a terrible show. Lorne was really upset.

HOWARD Sh.o.r.e:.

Hugh Hefner wanted to sing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" when he hosted, and we rehea.r.s.ed it endlessly all week and did the dress, which was great. Then we did the show, and during the show he stopped listening, which a lot of amateur singers do. He saw the audience and just stopped listening to the band and went off into his own world. And I looked at Shaffer, who was playing piano, and it was just like, oh my G.o.d, he was bars ahead of us and we're on the air and we're trying to catch up.

RICK LUDWIN, NBC Vice President for Late Night: Belushi was thrilled to hear that Milton Berle was coming on, because Belushi admired Milton Berle, and it was one of those things where they were all hanging around Milton's dressing room for the first day or two of the week, you know - Milton, tell us about this, tell us about that. And then Milton a.s.sumed he was not hosting Sat.u.r.day Night Live, Milton a.s.sumed they were doing Texaco Star Theater, and as Milton sometimes did, he took over the production and tried to make it his own, as opposed to being the host. And Lorne disliked the show to such an extent that it's never been seen on Comedy Central, it's never been seen anywhere, since. Lorne was so upset with the way Milton had just steamrolled his way over everyone that he never wanted that show to see the light of day again.

ROSIE SHUSTER:.

Anne Beatts and I had written this sketch for Gilda and Milton Berle when he hosted. He was to play an old man in an old folks home, and she was going to feed him dinner. And during dress rehearsal Uncle Miltie did these painfully broad spit takes, enough to make Danny Thomas cringe. So I was sent to Uncle Miltie's dressing room between dress and air to deliver this one simple note, which was, do not go overboard on the spit takes. But he was totally focused on his opening monologue, which was looming in an hour, and he was trying out jokes on me. He was pacing around in his boxer shorts, very proud to parade in his shorts in front of me. Thank G.o.d they weren't briefs, because it was already too much information.

He left me no verbal airs.p.a.ce. I could not get a word in. He was like a totally crazed tennis ball machine spitting shtick at me, a comedy filibuster on my little one note. He just drowned me out. And finally wardrobe fetched him, and I found myself running after him screaming, "Don't be broad!" Of course he went even broader, if that was possible. It was sort of like watching a comedy train accident in slow motion on a loop.

ALAN ZWEIBEL:.

Milton Berle took a liking to me and gravitated to me, I think because in the early seventies, I had written all these jokes for Catskill comics. And I wrote jokes for a lot of the Friars Club roasts, where Uncle Miltie was usually the roastmaster. You played to people's stereotypes with those jokes - Jack Benny was the cheap one, and so on - and with Berle, all I had known was he wore a dress on TV and supposedly stole everybody's jokes. And also I learned early on that he was the guy with the big d.i.c.k, one of the biggest in show business. So I started writing big d.i.c.k jokes about him for these Friars roasts.

Now fast-forward a few years and I'm in Milton Berle's dressing room at Sat.u.r.day Night Live. He's sitting on a couch behind a coffee table and he's wearing a very short kind of bathrobe, the kind that comes down to about midthigh. And somehow I just say to him, "You know, it's so weird that I'm here talking to you, because for years I was writing jokes about your d.i.c.k." I said, "I wrote all these jokes about your c.o.c.k and now I'm talking to you - I feel like there's some violation or something here."

He says to me: "You mean you never saw it?" I said, "Uh, no, I don't believe I did." Then he said, "Well, would you like to?" And before I had a chance to say, "Not really" or "Can I think about it?" or whatever, he parts his bathrobe and he just takes out this - this anaconda. He lays it on the table and I'm looking into this thing, right? I'm looking into the head of Milton Berle's d.i.c.k. It was enormous. It was like a pepperoni. And he goes, "What do you think of the boy?" And I'm looking right at it and I go, "Oh, it's really, really nice."

At which point Gilda opens the door to the dressing room. It's like an I Love Lucy sketch, but this honestly happened! She opens the door to his dressing room just in time to see me looking into his d.i.c.k saying, "Yeah, it's really, really nice."