1000 revealing words

Dangerfield was a Nudist

By Jaz Kaner

Rodney never liked clothes.  At least that was how it seemed to me.  The first time I met him was at Dangerfield’s in NY.  Four of us talking, sitting in a small circle in the lobby as he smoked a joint.  By this time I was pretty accustomed to show biz eccentrics, so it wasn’t really the fact that Rodney was smoking pot in public that struck me (I mean, if ever there was a poster-child for glaucoma), but that he was wearing his bathrobe.  Wearing a bathrobe in a NY club full of suits and ties.  Something about that appealed to the surfer in me.

During the eight months that followed, while I performed as his opening act, I noticed that he never wasted any time getting out of that suit and into his bathrobe after the show, many times as we were casually talking.  Yes, I’d seen Rodney naked, and lived to tell about it.   Or as Sam Kinison once put it, “Rodney has the biggest balls in show biz”.  (This isn’t your normal eulogy.) 

Whenever we toured the NY area, I was put up in Rodney’s old apartment behind the club.  It was a pitch-black ground floor two bedroom with foil and blankets over the windows.  Apparently somebody liked to sleep-in.   The décor was late fifties bachelor pad.  (Oh, if that bed could talk).  One morning the phone rang.  It was one of those big black Detective Hammer phones with the painfully loud firehouse bell.  The voice at the other end asked for Jack Roy.  In my stupor I deflected the sales call and hung up.  When I asked Rodney about it he explained, “I was born Jacob Cohen, then changed that to Jack Cohen, but that was still too Jewish, so I became Jack Roy.  Then the Dangerfield thing, …  well, you know…”.  Yeah, I knew, but reveled in a private collectors moment – that ‘Jack Roy’ was still an anonymous listed phone number in New York City.

Rodney was generous, if not with his money (his opening acts can testify to that), then with his stage.   He had a reputation for scouting and supporting new talent.  His cable TV “Young Comedian Specials” were a testament to that.  Many other big headlining acts, legend had it, would hand you a plane ticket if you did “too well” warming up their audience – there was no outshining the main act.  Not so with Rodney.  He was the rare headliner who actually wanted his opening act to kill.  He wanted that crowd not warmed up, but burning.  And that’s how such acts as Bob Nelson, Dennis Blair, Finis Henderson, Mark McCollum, and Harry Basil got their break.  

I learned a lot in those short months.  I learned that, rather than trust my off-stage introduction to a nervous sound guy, it was far better to crack an ice-cold audience by doing my own over-the-top off-stage introduction – like stuff about how I invented comedy and such.  Then I could revel in the audience’s growing laughter as I stepped from behind the curtain, sheepishly admitting that that was,  ….me.

One night as I came off stage I remarked to Rodney that I was getting tired of my act.  After a wink and a ‘join the crowd’, he told me I needed to keep writing new stuff.  “Even if it’s just for your amusement.  Keep writing,” he said.  I kept writing.  And by golly, it’s been just for my amusement.

This sounds cold, but the first thing I thought when I heard (October ’04) that Rodney had passed away was, “…well it’s about time”.   Rodney was pretty old when I worked with him, and that was 1987.  We thought then that he was living too fast.  The night we performed in Houston, Sam Kinison showed up.  He and Rodney made quite a pair, and they liked to party together.  They disappeared for three sleepless days of toot and god knows what.  That would’ve been cause for arrhythmia even in a young body.

Rodney was somewhere between a sage and an old crank.  I remember the Poughkeepsie stagehands cracking up during a sloppy sound-check because Rodney was barking at the crew.  It was perversely amusing to them, “Wow; that’s Rodney Dangerfield when he’s pissed!”   Dangerfield was a bit of a perfectionist.

And in one rare moment, after being unable, again, to convince him to take “our” show back to my hometown of Honolulu, he related to me why; That you could be in the most beautiful place on earth, but that it’d be “meaningless if there was no one special to share it with”.   This from the man who’d lost his wife to cancer years before.

Weeks before our big show at Resorts Casino in Atlantic City, he’d warned me about the audience there: “They don’t laugh there, so don’t let it bug you, ya know.  It’s a real tough crowd, tough crowd.”  I thanked him for the warning, but I wish now that I’d warned him about my grandmother. 

Mimi was 75 at the time, and stood about 5 feet by 4 feet.  She came down from Phili and somehow got a seat in the front row with her drinking buddy Carol.  About halfway into Rodney’s act, being well invested in her Chianti, she started heckling.  Seems she didn’t approve of his language, and wanted to see more of, …me.  It wasn’t anything Rodney couldn’t handle, ‘cept he’d never had an old lady yelling, “My grandson is gonna kick your ass.” 

After the show Rodney was, again, very naked and very kind:  “So uh, Jaz, I hear that was your grandmother out there….  She’s quite the firecracker.” 

Yep.  That she was, Rodney.  And if you two cross paths up there, you’d better have some running clothes on.  

– Pau –

About he author:  Jaz Kaner performed with Dangerfield for eight months in 1987. He has since recovered from seeing him naked.