TV Radio Mirror (Jan - Jun 1963)

JACKIE MASON (Continued from page 56) would-be comics from his old neighborhood. They couldn't tell him how to be a hit. but they did tell him how to get work. They knew the places in New York's Catskill Mountains where a fellow could get a job as a "Social Director" at a resort hotel — the places where the management was naive enough or desperate enough to hire a guy with no experience. Lots of big names in show business had started just that way. Jack Maza changed his name to Jackie Mason and went out and got himself a job. Naturally, he knew nothing whatever about being a Social Director, organizing games, introducing strangers to each other, making people feel at home. In desperation, he turned toward his comic gift to entertain the guests. Feverishly, he began to work up his first real comedy routine. He "borrowed" jokes from the comedians he had seen on TV — and also lifted funny sayings from newspapers, magazines, even Yiddish journals. The big night came and he stepped out on stage with his act. He was a sensation! The crowd adored him. He was in. The manager was so impressed that he had Jackie moved to a whole suite of rooms, invited him to make use of room service, anything he wanted. The world was his. The next night he went on again. Out came the same jokes, the same punchlines. The audience gasped with disappointment. But Jackie had no new material. He hadn't yet learned to write his own, and while he could improvise a bit, it wasn't enough for a whole show. He was a bomb! The management took away the suite, the room service, everything. "One day," Jackie recalls mournfully, "only the boss was important enough to talk to me. The next day even the waiters were giving me orders!" At one Catskill hotel after another, he went through the same cycle — a firstnight sensation, a second-night flop. He was getting nowhere at all. He had had his chance and muffed it. And then, miraculously, another chance came. Someone found him a job in a night club in Syracuse, New York. It was a special challenge, too, for now for the first time he'd be playing to a non-Jewish audience. He worked hard to improve and broaden his material. He had to make good. In Syracuse he walked into the night club and looked around. It wasn't a night club. It was a striptease joint. Most of the audience stood at the bar, a country mile from the stage, to avoid the minimum charge for sitting at a table. They hadn't come to hear Jackie Mason be funny. They had come to see the girls take off their clothes. Jackie went on as scheduled — between one stripper and the next. He trotted out his painstakingly prepared routine. The jokes were funny, the timing good. But there were no laughs. "Hey, get off the stage, we wanna see the girls!" "What's the matter, funny man, don't you know any dirty jokes?" Then they started calling him names. He lasted exactly one night, and then he went home to the East Side again, broke, jobless, a flop. His family decided he was utterly hopeless, but still he didn't give up. He took jobs for $40 a week selling behind department store counters — shoes at Gimbels, pajamas at Saks, men's wear at Macy's. But after his day's work, Jackie was planning new routines, discarding borrowed jokes to work out his own brand of humor. "So I said to the psychiatrist, 'What is it?' He said, 'It's twenty-five dollars a visit.' I said, 'For twenty-five dollars I don't visit. I move in!' '' The next summer he wangled jobs in New Hampshire resorts and found he could stretch his material out to two nights or even three. He added more good lines — and more. "It's hard to believe, but I was a very homely baby. Yes, I was. I was so homely, my mother used to diaper my face!" In 1959 he was back in the Catskills — this time finishing his engagements as riotously as he began them. The big, big breaks A year later, Steve Allen caught his act in a first-rate California night club and featured him on his television show twice in three weeks. "Do you know what the budget from this country was last year? One hundred and eighty-seven billion dollars! Do you know what I gave them in taxes? Twelve dollars. Without my twelve dollars, they couldn't get along? I told them, 'First spend the one hundred and eighty-seven billion — then, if you're twelve dollars short, I'll help you out.' " And from then on, it was roses all the way. It was "The Perry Como Show," "The Garry Moore Show," "The Ed Sullivan Show." It was the Copa in New York, the Sands in Las Vegas. And one memorable day, he stood silent and stunned as he heard one of his brothers tell a stranger, "I'm Jackie Mason's brother, Rabbi Maza." Jackie Mason's brother — before even saying "Rabbi"! Jackie Mason knew he was no longer a bum. Today, at thirty-two, Jackie Mason leads what many would regard as an odd life for a top-rated comedian. He lives in an elegant apartment on the upper East Side, but he never gives parties there. Nor does he attend the other show-business type parties to which he is often invited. With the exception of one young, still unknown comic, he numbers no professionals among his close friends. Sometimes he dates show-business girls, but none who qualify as celebrities. Most of the girls he takes to night clubs and dinners, he meets through old friends from the old neighborhood. He has no steady girl, no roommate, few real buddies. He is never lonely. He astounds the curious by say U 55 The five minute Pap test may save your life. Twenty-five years ago, uterine cancer was the major cause of cancer death in women. Today, uterine cancer is one of the most curable of all types of cancer. 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