Rodney Running Scared

By JAY COCKS

How a comic made a comeback from nowhere

When he was a child and lost his parents at the beach, he asked a policeman, "Do you think we'll ever find them?" "I don't know," came the reply. "There's so many places they could hide."

No breaks, no how, no way. His father worked in a bank and got caught stealing pens. Research reveals that Rodney Dangerfield is the sap in his own family tree. The line has never been broken. Elevator operators eye him and always say the same thing: "Basement?" On a night out in a Chinese restaurant, he opens his fortune cookie and gets the check from the next table. The trauma reaches into the intimate parts of his life. He has become such a maladroit lover that he caught a peeping Tom booing him. His wife "cut me down to once a month. I'm lucky. Two guys I know she cut out completely."

The weeks of his life are run-on reminders of his inferiority. No luck. No chance. And of course--as a connoisseur of the hairsbreadth art of stand-up comedy will tell you--no respect. These components of Rodney Dangerfield's fractured comic mask form one of the unlikeliest success stories around. Dangerfield was a has-been even before he was anyone at all. "I dropped out of show business once," he often confesses in his act. "But nobody noticed."

He went into business selling paint, and scribbled jokes between appointments. By the time most businessmen are playing chicken with their first heart attack, Rodney was planning his comeback from nowhere. At 45, he made his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. He was 47 when he went on Carson for the first of 63 appearances. Now, at 58, Dangerfield has a rambunctious new comedy album out and his first starring role in a Hollywood movie.

In Caddyshack, Rodney shows up as a real estate developer who dresses in color combinations out of a Sherwin-Williams sample book and outrages the gentry at the local country club with such reflections as, "You look at that kid, you know why tigers eat their young." Rodney must compete for attention in the film with alumni of Saturday Night Live and one mechanical gopher. He draws more laughs than the TV kids and chews up at least as much of the screen as the rodent.

Dangerfield, who keeps his traveling to a minimum and works as much as possible out of his own club on Manhattan's East Side, has put together one of the best comedy acts in the trade by dealing shamelessly in things other comics struggle to hide--like fear, anger and humiliation. In performance, Dangerfield is the enemy of poise. A minute after he hits the lights, his brow throws off sweat like a lawn sprinkler. His eyes bulge. His hands claw at his throat. He may be trying to loosen his tie, but it looks as if he is trying to strangle himself. The whole performance is a screwball incarnation of the comedian's deepest nightmare: flop sweat, the purgatorial feeling of bombing out, when every joke falls like a barbell and the only laughs come when you introduce the band. Other guys fight their way past flop sweat, or cool it out. For Rodney Dangerfield, cool is a dial on a Fedders. He sets fear on parade, and all its consequences are his best punch lines.

Jack Benny once told Dangerfield that his signature line--"I don't get no respect"--cuts right to everyone's soul. Indeed, Dangerfield's best comedy is based on a futile lashing out against misery, often sexual and always social. "Comedy is essentially mood, not a series of one-liners," Dangerfield says. "Every joke is a complete story." The way he tells one, the audience can often see a whole life in a setup, and a fate in a punch line. "During sex my wife wants to talk to me," he confesses, then adds: "The other night she called me from a hotel."

Even Dangerfield's silliest gags have the sting of truth. How accurate they may be about his own life is another matter. He talks about "comedic license," but whether he is doing a shotgun discourse on marriage or about growing up Jewish and poor in a section of New York City that is well-off and Waspy, he seems to be drawing from deep roots. Rodney was Jacob Cohen when the neighborhood kids had names "like Marianne and Biff." When they were on the tennis courts, he was delivering groceries. He started writing gags when he was 15. At 19 he was playing the Catskills for $12 a week.

Jobs outside the Catskills were even harder to come by. He got a spot as a singing waiter at a Brooklyn joint called the Polish Falcon, where the emcee was a woman named Sally Marr. Rodney hung around with her I son, who was in the Navy then. He called himself Lenny Bruce.

If the Catskills were the training ground for that time, a Broadway drugstore called Hanson's was the laboratory. Rodney, Lenny and a lot of other young guys hung out in the back booths, nursing coffee, nailing each other with wild ideas, gags, nutty notions for routines. A few made it out of the drugstore. Some, like Joe Ancis, were brilliant in the booth and on the street; Bruce once admitted that he owed maybe a third of his act to Joe. But Ancis trembled before the prospect of flop sweat. He never went onstage. Others, like Rodney, fought the flops, but never got out quite far enough. When he married Singer Joyce Indig, he was close to 30 and still far from the big time. He worried that long weeks working joints on the road would hurt the marriage. So he packed it in and started selling paint.

During that period, he watched Lenny become a storm center, a genius and a martyr. He saw Joe Ancis go into the construction business. Rodney had two children, Brian and Melanie, but his marriage was rocky and finally fell apart. Rodney raised the kids.

He also put together a new act and got a taste for a new life. Says Dangerfield: "I asked the club owner not to put my name in the paper, to make up another name. When he came up with Rodney Dangerfield I thought he was crazy, but I was depressed enough to go along with it. I figured, if you're gonna change your name you might as well change it." By 1967, he crashed the Sullivan Show, and by 1969 he had enough mileage behind him to settle down and open a club, from which he has been sallying forth ever since, pretty much at his own pleasure.

Rodney says a lot of offers come in now: movies, "dozens" of TV pilots. His attitude toward them is "I don't want to spend my time poring over scripts and memorizing. When you do standup, you are the guy on. Live entertainment is the only real medium." It is a medium filled with ghosts. You can hear Lenny Bruce beneath the skin of some of Rodney's cracks, though Dangerfield disclaims any specific influence. Both of them share the same manic irreverence, the same compulsive wise-mouthing and fearless telling of truth.

They also shared the same pal, Joe Ancis, who has been boarding with Rodney and his children ever since Joe separated from his wife a couple of years back. Although Rodney occasionally pays $50 for a gag, he cooks up most of his own material, saying what he feels, working the jokes out in front of small audiences until they flow just right. "I play with a joke a long time," Dangerfield admits. "I came up with this one sitting in the sauna at the health club yesterday: 'When I got married all the property was put in two names. And her mother's. ' " My hands reach for her the throat. The eyes bulb out of his face like two Christmas ornaments dropped into a holiday pudding.

"Do you think that's funny?" he asks. qed By Jay Cocks. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.