Part 2
Toots Shor's. West 51st. Broadway's living room. Ballplayers, columnists, and heavyweights drinking shoulder to shoulder.
Not a comedy club. A saloon. And not a comedian. A heckler. The man's first job in show business was yelling at whoever was already onstage. He never really changed positions.
Carson keeps rolling. Rickles “didn't get married until late in life because he felt that marriage would jeopardize his career working gay bars.”
He swipes at Rickles' manager, Joe Scandore — “one of the most perceptive managers in our business” — then adds, “Mr. Scandore, you might remember, was also a lookout at Pearl Harbor.”
And then the sitcom. “Just a year and a half ago, ABC scored the programming coup of the year.”
Coup of the year. About a show that's already dead.
That's the tone. That's the room.
Now the man.
Donald Jay Rickles. Born May 8, 1926, in Jackson Heights, Queens. Died April 6, 2017. Ninety years old.
Nickname: Mr. Warmth.
That's it. No hagiography. He'd hate the hagiography.
Here's the origin beat. And it comes from Alan King, from the podium, later in the night.
Brooklyn nightclub. Early 1950s. Rickles is working a small room.
Then the door opens. Frank Sinatra walks in.
The biggest star in America. Sitting at a table. In Rickles' room.
Rickles looks at him and says: “I remember the good old days, Frank, when you had a voice.”
Dead silence.
Then Sinatra laughs.
Backstage afterward, Sinatra grabs him, hugs him — and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's right hand, throws the punch.
Insult. Laugh. Sock.
That's the act. That's the career. That's Don Rickles compressed into three moves. He found the one thing that makes a room go silent and go loud in the same breath, and then he did it for sixty years.
Run the filmography as a montage. Quick cuts only.
Run Silent, Run Deep. Robert Wise directs. Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster in a submarine. Rickles is in there, in a uniform, small part, holding water.
The Rat Race. Robert Mulligan. Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds. Rickles is in that too.
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Roger Corman. Ray Milland. Rickles in a cheap suit and an expensive mustache.
Beach Party. AIP. Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello. Rickles as Big Drag, the club owner — and back around through the whole beach cycle.
[[AD]]
- Enter Laughing. Carl Reiner directs. Alan Arkin stars.
Cut. Cut. Cut. Cut.
A working character actor. Steady. Employed. Never the leading man. Hollywood used him like hot sauce — incredible on top of something, never the meal.
Too much face. Too much voice. Too much nerve.
Then the failure. And the failure is what the whole night is built on.
The Don Rickles Show. ABC. 1968. A sitcom built around a guy whose entire gift is being uncontrollable in a room, dropped into a format that requires him to hit marks and wait for the laugh track.
It didn't survive.
Two years later, the corpse is still paying rent.
Huntley's cement train is that show's film prints. Carson's timeslot joke is that show's tombstone.
Channel 13, Carson says, was running a documentary called “The Phillips Screwdriver: A Tool for Our Time.” Brutal competition. Can't beat it.
Channel 13 was public television in New York.
In 1970 there are three networks. Three. And the fourth option is a documentary about a screwdriver.
That's the era. That's the joke. Public TV as punchline.
Now land the era detail that matters.
This roast happens in the final months of Huntley-Brinkley.
The most formal voice in the room is three months away from losing his own format. His desk. His handshake. His sign-off.
Nobody says it. Not Carson. Not the dais. Not Huntley.
Everybody in the room knows.
That's what a Friars roast is for. Half the room is on the way up. Half is on the way down. The rest are parked in the middle and terrified. You get up, you take your shots, you laugh at the guy who's next, and you eat your chicken.
And that's why the line lands the way it lands.
Because the sign-off was already in the room before Huntley touched the microphone. The man introducing him planted it. He told the crowd that “good night, Chet, good night, David” has become household words — “particularly in the household they set up together in Georgetown.”
There it is. The intimacy of the sign-off, flipped into material, before the newsman even walked on.
The bomb was armed. He just lit it.
Hold that sign-off.
We're coming back to it. Twice.
Once in the middle, spliced against the room, the format, and the corpse of a sitcom ABC put down early.
And once at the end, when the whole night turns over and the joke stops being a joke.
It'll land differently the second time. Trust the cut.
One thing before we go. Later tonight, Alan King — Rickles' friend of thirty years, the man who was in the room for the Sinatra story — takes that podium and turns the entire evening inside out.
We're not spoiling it. Not here.
Just know it's coming. And know that when it does, it recuts everything you just heard.
Now hold the frame.
Silver hair. Glasses. Wire copy. The most trusted man on television.
“Good night, Walter.”
