Black Lies Matter
All over the country, on city streets, on walls and on professional basketball courts, we are told that black lives matter.
Sometimes, when I consider the state of black people in America, it seems a hopeless situation, one it would take generations to turn around. But it’s not true.
If there were a way to get young blacks to get a high school diploma, learn a blue collar trade, such as plumbing, carpentry or auto mechanics, and then get married before siring babies, the turnaround could begin as soon as tomorrow.
But so long as they’re content to remain at the bottom rung of society, way below blacks who emigrate here from Africa and the Caribbean, so long as they’re happy to live off their bitterness and blame white people for their lowly status, they will remain the mindless pawns of the Democrats, satisfied to stay rooted to the latter-day plantation where, instead of cotton, the cash crop is crack cocaine.
All over the country, on city streets, on walls and on professional basketball courts, we are told that black lives matter. Well, of course they do. To some degree, all lives matter. However, when you consider the number of black babies born to unwed mothers, the number of abortions and the number of blacks murdered by other blacks, I can’t help asking why their lives should mean more to me than they obviously mean to them.
If I seem to take a philosophical, even cavalier, approach to dying and you wonder if I’m being sincere, I am.
I would very much like to avoid the dying part, which I know can be messy and painful, but death itself doesn’t scare me.
The thing is, by nature, I’m a very curious person. Not in the way that the mechanically or scientifically-minded person is; I’m not really interested in how things work or how electricity gets from someplace to my toaster. I’m delighted when things work the way they’re supposed to, overjoyed when my car starts up in the morning, but I’m just as happy not knowing the how and why behind these little miracles.
But when it comes to death, you could say I’m dying to find out what it’s like if, as rumored, this is only a way station and not our final destination.
Best of all, if this is in fact, in the words of the Peggy Lee tune, all there is, then there won’t be a curiosity to satisfy. If there’s nothing to know, I simply won’t know it.
It is getting easier and easier to grow nostalgic about the past as the present continues to get creepier, with the dregs of society not only looting and vandalizing to their hearts’ content but getting elected to high office.
In a time when tens of millions of people of all races feel entitled to be terminally offended by tens of millions of other people, it’s hard to believe that in my lifetime there was an era when we could not only laugh with each other, we could laugh at each other without getting a punch in the nose or making some cupcake cry.
The ethnic characters on those old radio shows weren’t held up to ridicule. Just the opposite. People would listen to programs featuring Jews (“The Goldbergs,” Mr. Kitzel on “The Jack Benny Show”), blacks (“Amos ‘n’ Andy,” Rochester on “The Jack Benny Show”), Italians (“Life with Luigi”) and assorted others, such as “Charlie Chan,” “The Shadow of Fu Manchu” and The Mad Russian on “The Eddie Cantor Show,” and be reminded – sometimes fondly, sometimes otherwise — of their own relatives.
Somehow, we all survived.
Speaking of the past, in the wake of the Dodgers winning their first World Series in 32 years, it occurred to me that even 62 years after the team moved to Los Angeles, there are a lot of people who still despise the team for leaving Brooklyn. For them, it was an act of betrayal, the athletic equivalent of Benedict Arnold selling out his country.
They felt team owner Walter O'Malley was the living embodiment of everything that was wrong with the world, a man who would move his beloved Bums to balmy Southern California where packed stands were guaranteed and rain-outs would be unheard of.
The irony, of course, is that those who were the most vehement are now doing their seething in Florida, Arizona and Southern California, Brooklyn just a cold and distant memory.
A couple of weeks ago, I invited people to suggest the names of celebrities they were interested in and I would write something about them if I had ever encountered them in some meaningful way.
There were only a few responses. There were a few people I had never met, including William Bendix and Richard Deacon.
But I did meet Suzanne Pleshette, Buddy Hackett, Phyllis Diller, Groucho Marx and Bob Newhart.
I was introduced to Ms. Pleshette by a troublemaker who knew that in a review of one of her terrible Warner Brothers melodramas, “Wall of Noise,” I opined that she had stayed married to Try Donahue just long enough to steal his acting secrets.
She was polite, but very cool, which is probably better than I would have managed if our positions had been reversed. But, then, why would I have married Troy Donahue, which was probably a question she asked herself when the union lasted all of eight months.
It was only later, as Emily Hartley on “The Bob Newhart Show” and as Leona Hemsley in “The Queen of Mean,” that I discovered what she could do when she had decent material to work with. But we never met again so I couldn’t tell her she was much better than her ex-husband.
I met Mr. Hackett when I was invited to join a group of men and women for a Sunday of tennis and backgammon.
It wasn’t the greatest Sunday of my life. First, I came across my first backgammon cheat. Before him, I had heard of backgammon hustlers, but I hadn’t been able to figure out how they worked. I found out, but, fortunately, it only cost me a dollar. I guess he couldn’t resist, even for a dollar. I suppose it was a case of use it or lose it, and he didn’t want to get rusty.
But I didn’t dislike the hustler as much as I did Hackett. I met him across the court in a set of mixed doubles. I didn’t know Hackett or either of the women we were partnered with. What I discovered was that my partner was a very weak player, but a nice enough person. Hackett was a weak player who thought he was a very good player, but not a very nice person.
My partner could barely get her serve over the net, but Hackett kept unnerving her by calling foot faults. In her case, it was not cheating. She was simply stepping on the baseline hoping to push her serve over the net. I tried to reason with Hackett, pointing out that we weren’t playing for money and that if he kept calling foot faults, we might just as well forfeit the game. But he insisted he was merely abiding by the rules and expected us to do the same. He lived to regret it, and he was lucky to live that long, because whereas I had assumed I was just supposed to keep points going by hitting easy shots to him and his partner, I decided to teach him what abiding by the rules could entail. He played net, which made it very easy for me to smash forehands right at him.
As a result, I never found him funny after that, even if I didn’t take offense at his portrayal of a Chinese waiter, complete with a rubber band around his forehead to make his eyes squint while he made Johnny Carson laugh with his pidgin Chinese routine.
I spent a couple of hours interviewing Phyllis Diller in her living room. She was very nice and didn’t try to make me laugh, although she had many times in the past when she was on TV, making jokes about her husband and her lack of housekeeping skills.
When I complimented her on a vase of flowers, she said they were made of silk. I had never heard of such a thing. She insisted I take one home for my wife. I did and she was very appreciative, but to Ms. Diller. Somehow, she seemed to have lost sight of the essential role I had played in the scenario.
I liked Groucho Marx and we spent quite a lot of time together, but eventually I got tired of the puns and wisecracks. It gets tiresome when you’re expected to laugh on cue every five minutes. It becomes particularly tiresome when puns are involved because you get the feeling you’re not really having a conversation but are only there to serve up straight lines. But, in retrospect, the best thing to come out of the relationship was that I got to meet several terrific people like Harry Ruby, Nunnally Johnson, Harpo’s widow, Morrie Ryskind and George Burns, through Groucho.
The remarkable thing about Bob Newhart is that he was exactly the same droll, diffident fellow in real life that he appeared to be on TV.
Although he became a major star, at heart I think he was always the accountant he had been when he decided to enter show business.
I always felt that if you sat down beside him on a plane headed from L.A. to New York, and didn’t recognize him, you would spend five hours chatting about your kids, crab grass and baseball, and when you landed in LaGuardia, you would tell your wife that you had met this nice guy who was a dentist or sold computers or something.
I know some people were shocked that Newhart’s best friend was Don Rickles. But after I met Rickles, I wasn’t surprised. It turns out that Rickles was as nice as Newhart, just funny in a different way. The day I showed up at his condo to interview him, I was so nervous going up in the elevator, I seriously considered turning around and going home. The problem was that I, who pride myself on my punctuality, had gotten stuck behind a cement mixer on a winding road going through the canyon and arrived about 25 minutes late. When Rickles opened the door, I began to sputter out my apology trying to forestall the torrent of insults I expected.
He waved my apology aside, letting me know that as an L.A. resident, he had been stuck behind cement mixers more than once. He actually had me believing him.
If stand-up comedy hadn’t worked out so well for him, Mr. Rickles could have carved out a career in the diplomatic service.
