Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [75]
•
A guy’s sitting at a bar, and a farmer next to him says, “I’ve got a talking horse and I want to sell him for a thousand dollars.”
“Yeah, sure,” the guy says. “You have a talking horse.”
“You don’t believe me?” the farmer says. “Come around to my barn and I’ll show you.”
So the two men go to the barn and the farmer says to the horse, “Go on tell him.”
The horse says, “I won the Belmont, I won the Preakness and I won the Derby.”
“My God, that’s amazing,” the guy says. “That horse can really talk. Why would you want to sell him?”
“Because,” the farmer says, “he’s a bloody liar.”
Chapter 38
Rose Marie
When I went on the Donahue show in 1977, and the host walked into the green room with his shock of white hair and his deep blue eyes—well, let’s say he made an impression. But what he casually said to me as he slid on his suit jacket impressed me even more.
“I’d like to talk about your mother. Is that all right?”
My mother?
No one ever wanted to talk about my mother. Not Johnny Carson or Merv Griffin. Not Mike Douglas or Dinah Shore or Tom Snyder. No one ever asked about Mom. They always had a million questions about my father.
Phil’s show didn’t air in Los Angeles or New York at the time, so I had never seen it. I didn’t even want to go on because it would be a full hour with me as the only guest. A whole hour? I thought. At 9:00 A.M.? Who’s that interesting for an hour at that time of the morning?
But I was in Chicago promoting the movie of Thieves, and my publicist, Kathie Berlin, insisted.
“You don’t know him because he’s not on the coasts,” she said, “but this guy is the hottest thing in the country. You have to go on.”
So I went on. And something happened. It was weird. It was alchemy. A couple drops of white hair and a dash of blue eyes. A tablespoon of Marymount girl, a splash of a smile. And it was done. He asked flirty personal questions. I giggled. It was like a first date. In high school. At the end of the show he held my hand.
“Well, you are just a fabulous guest,” he said. I, of course, never one to demur from expressing myself fully, said, “You are wonderful and kind and you like women and whoever is the woman in your life is very lucky.”
The women sitting in his audience watching us for that full hour knew that whoever that woman in his life might be, she’d better lock him up. That wouldn’t be necessary. He was divorced, raising four boys and unattached.
And he wanted to talk about my mother.
MY MOTHER was an act unto herself. She was Italian—well, more than that. Sicilian. They’re Italians, of course, just tougher and more suspicious. And don’t ever cross them—they never forget.
My parents were friends with the Sinatras, especially Mom and Frank’s wife Nancy, who had a lot in common. Rose Marie Cassanitti from Detroit and Nancy Barbato from Hoboken both married skinny, ethnic boys from the neighborhood who wanted careers in show business. Neither of these women had the slightest notion that their husbands would ever become as successful as they did. From where they began, they could never even have imagined it.
But Mom and Nancy adored these men and supported their dreams with all of their hearts. Through the tough times—and as each bore three children—they skimped and saved to make it all work. The Sinatras were Catholics, as we were, and my father was Frankie Jr.’s godfather.
Dad and Frank had a mutual respect for each other’s work. They both played the top nightclub circuit, and frequently followed each other into an engagement, so they saw each other’s shows often over the years. And they had great fun whenever they shared the stage for special celebrations—like the annual anniversary of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, which was always a wild, star-studded affair.
Our two families had houses next door to each other in Palm Springs. So when John Kennedy ran for president in 1960—and Frank was going to host him and his entourage at his house in the Springs—he asked my