Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [3]
Dad working with Margaret O’Brien. Was I jealous? Was I ever.
Margaret and me. I knew all of her lines, just in case . . .
My Lebanese grandparents were visiting from Toledo that summer. My grandmother was a saint—but I didn’t like my grandfather. He was kind of mean, and I was scared of him. I can still feel the sting on my legs where he swatted me with a pussy willow branch because I was playing with a dog in his tomato garden.
Our dinner table was always a raucous affair, with everyone speaking over everyone else, telling stories and laughing. It was obvious that Grandpa didn’t like this kind of commotion at the table. He preferred kids to be seen and not heard.
One night, I was pushing my food around the plate, as always, so it would look like I had eaten most of my meal. I was a terrible eater.
“Finish your vegetables,” my father admonished.
I didn’t.
“I see your children don’t listen to you,” my grandfather muttered under his breath.
Embarrassed in front of his father, Dad pushed his chair back with a loud scraping noise and stood up, looking as if he was going to spank me. I jumped up, shocked and frightened, and ran from the table.
“You’re being disobedient, young lady!” Dad yelled as he chased me around the room.
I ran right into the corner. He was coming at me. I was terrified.
Suddenly, I stopped, spun around, waved my hands in the air and yelled in my best Hungarian accent, “Cut! Print it! Very good! We try it again!”
My father literally fell over laughing. My grandfather was disgusted with all of us. And I had learned a good lesson: Laughter is the best way to get out of a corner.
Chapter 3
The Boys
What fun they all had together. Milton, Sid, Jan, George, Phil, Red, Joey, Harry. They just loved to laugh—and to make each other laugh. Our dinner table was like a writers’ roundtable, with each of my father’s pals taking his turn trying to top the others. They were always attentive, and never heckled one another as each one “took the floor.” Some jokes were told, but many of the biggest laughs came when they made fun of themselves.
It was a known fact that no one was funnier “in a room” than Jan Murray—and my dad was a sucker for him. One night, Jan told a story about trying to get Frank Sinatra’s autograph for his son’s admission counselor at Northwestern University. He felt like an idiot asking one of the guys for an autograph, but the counselor wanted it, and Jan wanted his kid to get into the college.
The way the story went, all the boys were at a casino in Miami. Jan walked up to Frank with a little piece of paper and asked him to sign it. But Frank brushed the paper aside and said that if it meant getting Jan’s son into Northwestern, he’d send the man one of his albums. Jan said, no, that wasn’t necessary. The guy just wanted an autograph.
“Nah, it’s no trouble,” Frank said. “I’ll send him an album and a signed photograph.”
But Jan was fixated on just getting that autograph. He followed Sinatra around the whole weekend, toting this little scrap of paper—sidling up to Frank at the gambling table, slipping it under his stall in the men’s room, pushing it on him while he was schmoozing some blonde in the lounge. The whole weekend—Jan flapping his paper, Frank pushing it away.
I remember watching Jan tell this story one night at our house, wringing the absurdity out of each beat, building the frustration and idiocy of the situation to such a height that he had my father so convulsed with laughter that Dad was lying on the floor in total surrender, howling.
You’d think that Jan would let up, having gotten him to the floor—but, no, now he really had him. Jan stood over my father’s prone body, legs straddling him, as he dug even deeper into Dad’s funny bone. My father was laughing so hard he screamed, “Stop! Stop!” afraid he would actually die of laughing.
In the real world, the guy laughing that hard is having the most fun. In this