"First night club date I ever had was at the Club Miami in Newark." " And the reason" " The reason-- SAFER:" "Heh." "Club Miami in Newark?" "Yeah." "Strangely enough." "And the reason I got the job, I went into this agent's office, a friend of mine brought me in." "And the two owners were sitting there, and, uh, they didn't ask me if I had a good act" "I guess they figured I must have some kind of an act." "But whether I could fight well." "[SAFER CHUCKLES]" "And, uh, our instructions were if we heard a glass crash out at the bar, the band would go into, uh, "Happy Days Are Here Again,"" "we would go to some location in the joint where we had the leg of a chair, and go out to the bar to see that the disturbance was quieted right away." "You probably heard about Galento." " Two Ton Tony Galento?" " Yeah." "It was about-- We were doing a 3:00 show." "Three o'clock in the morning." "And I had had a couple of quarts, and I was telling some jokes, and he kept yelling out things, all kinds of things." " Was he a heavyweight champ then?" " No." "He was a bouncer at the Mirror Club or something." "But I didn't know him." "But he was fighting." "He was going to fight for the championship that had been lined up already, but I didn't know." "And, uh, he kept going and I said:" ""Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be back in a moment."" "I said, "You, come on."" "We go outside, I was taking my coat off." "The next thing I remember," "I was downstairs in the cellar next to the furnace and guys were giving me this thing." "And I said to the owner, I said, "Who the hell was that?"" "Because I usually do it pretty good." "He says, "That's Tony Galento." "He's gonna fight for the world champion."" "I said, "Why didn't you tell me?"" "He said, "No, you're a wise guy." "You can lick everybody."" "And that was a very bad time." "I was very careful after that." "And, uh, then I went to work at the 18 Club." "The 18 Club was the club in New York." "You weren't allowed to do an act." "It was all adlib." "And every star in Hollywood was there every night." "And Winchell and Lyons and all the big columnists." "And, uh, I was doubling between there and the Queens Terrace." "So I did the first show one night at the 18 Club, went to do the second show, first show at the Queens Terrace, came back, and Freddie Lamb said, "You've just been signed for pictures."" "Warner had been in the audience for the first show." "And I thought he was kidding me." "But, uh, he wasn't." "I never saw Warner in my life." "And later on I did." "And I played in these pictures." "There was no chance to do any jokes." "So then I came back to New York." "Oh, I went to work at Slapsy Maxie's." "And that was a good place for me because we did scenes." "And I like to do scenes." "SAFER:" "But that..." "That shot on the DuMont Network was really and truly the beginning of The Honeymooners." "Yeah, but strange thing about the first show I did." "And also the first time I appeared as the paid master of ceremonies in the Halsey Theater, some seltzer had gotten on the stage." "And suddenly, it hit my mind to walk through the seltzer slide and fall down, and that's why they hired me steadily." "Now, the same thing happened on DuMont." "I was doing a sketch where I was walking into a check room and the door got stuck." "The sketch was terrible, but once the door got stuck" " It legitimately got stuck?" " Yeah." "And I had to climb out and call for a hammer and all of that stuff." "It turned out to be a big thing." "So it was luck." "You were speaking about luck before." "It was luck with the seltzer at the Folly, and the Halsey, and it was luck with this door getting stuck at DuMont." "The characters were funny, the people liked them." "Once you get an audience to like the characters in something you're doing, you're two thirds of the way home." "And people could identify with, uh, The Honeymooners." "How much of the success was due to Norton?" "I say 90 percent." "I'll give him 90 percent." "He's just great." "He was wonderful." "And I never had to worry about-- I never had to worry about Audrey." "She was sensational." "They were-- And they're really fine actors." "You've seen Art, Art won an Academy Award." "Audrey Meadows did a, uh..." "Did a show on public television called The Last Summer or something and she was just wonderful." " Did you have scripts for those shows?" " Oh, yes." "We did one when we didn't have a script." "I walked in about 6:30 at night, and they gave me the script and I said, "This is terrible."" "And the guy said, "We're going on in an hour and a half."" "I said, "Well, it's all right." I said, "Well--" Pert Kelton was Alice." "I said, "Pert and Art and I will go in my apartment and we'll write a little sketch."" "So we went over to the apartment and I sat Pert down at the typewriters." "She was gonna type." "So she typed Honeymooners and we sat and I said:" ""Maybe we ought to have a little drink to roll this thing."" "And we had a couple of more drinks, still didn't get anything." "And then I said, "Look, we know The Honeymooners." "I'll go on stage and start an argument with Pert." "When it's going good, you walk in, Carney, and say anything you want." "I'll chase you out of the house and I'll say, 'You're the greatest' and that's it."" "And we did it." "And I thought that that was it." "We were sure to be thrown off the air." "And the guy from, uh, Nescafe come up in the dressing room." "He says, "That's the best Honeymooners you've done up to now."" "So I just looked at everyone." "At Art and at Pert." " It was one of those things." " But your show was notorious for being absolutely chaotic." "Well, it, uh" "I don't know if it was chaotic, because the results weren't chaotic." " No, no" " So there must have been a method." "Everything that led up to actually going on the air was a mad house, I'm told." "Well, I couldn't rehearse." "I hated to rehearse." "It was my thought that if you rehearsed, you got stale." "And I knew that I'd have to run through it at least once for the rest of the cast." "And when they knew that there weren't gonna be any extenuating rehearsals, they knew their lines." "They knew there was no fooling around." "And they learned their lines and they also learned to take one rehearsal and have it be adequate." "And the result turned out to be the proper one." "Audrey Meadows, who thinks you are the greatest in every way, says she was pretty much reduced to tears though." " Preparing for that show every time." " At first." "At first." "But then she could have fought Louis Prima." "I mean, uh, Primo Camera and done the show." "She became that kind of a performer and she was proud of that." "Was it fun?" "Or were you scared or was it work or did you hate it or what?" "I was never scared." "It was work up until the lights went on and the show began." "Then it was fun." "And after the show, if we were fortunate to come out even, it was even happier." "SAFER:" "Almost all the characters in that show, not just" "Not within The Honeymooners, but I mean, all the characters you've played," "The Poor Soul and Reggie Van Gleason, everybody you played was a victim." "Except Reggie." " Well" " He made a victim of everyone." "He was like all wealthy, uh..." " Jerks." " Jerks." "He, you know, treated his mother poorly and he insulted his father every chance he could get." "But he, himself, was a pathetic figure." "Well, if you look at him and say, if he thinks that's fun, he was pathetic." "But he liked to drink." "And he was like all alcoholics." "He combed his hair straight." "He had no time to fluff it up." "[SAFER CHUCKLING]" "He wore tails because he thought that that was the uniform that he had most fun in." "And he liked girls and he spent money and he makes U-turns in the Holland Tunnel and he does all the crazy things." "And, uh..." "Strangely enough, the audience could recognize and go along with a guy like that." "They would like to be like that sometime or maybe for a week." "A guy who just ran over everybody." "Had all the money he wanted to spend." "Did what he wanted." "The only thing that Reggie felt bad about were hangovers." "That was his big problem." "[SAFER CHUCKLES]" "Did you ever know a Reggie Van Gleason?" "I knew a guy almost like Reggie." "As a matter of fact, I had a fight with him." "Uh, he insulted somebody I was with." "And I said, "Come on."" "So we were at the Copa, and he got outside and he said, "Well, let's go up to the park."" "I said, "All right." So we went up to the park." "And we started a fight and he just made the remark I'll never forget." "He said, "Not so fast."" "[SAFER CHUCKLES]" "And that was Reggie." "SAFER:" "But other than that, the characters you did play, the characters you created, were kind of victims, all of them." "Well, The Poor Soul was certainly a victim." "He's the guy that always turned the other cheek and that the end of the sketch, he was either embarrassed, humiliated or lost his girlfriend or something, or arrested, or something happened to him." "But Fenwick Babbitt was like The Poor Soul." "He took it for a while and then, he was the worm that turned." "He would get even with everyone." "So they weren't all victims." "He was very much a Chaplinesque kind of character" " Fenwick?" " No, The Poor Soul." "I don't think so." "Uh..." "He didn't have the aggressiveness that Chaplin displayed in his pictures." "Uh, Chaplin would think nothing of throwing a baby in the oven or hitting a guy over the head with a cane." "Oh, that would be the furthest from The Poor Soul's activities." "How would Chaplin have done and on television, supposing he..." " We were discussing that one-- - big in your age?" "We were discussing that one night with a couple other comics." "And we didn't think that he could come up with the material every week." "Uh, the fact that he'd make a picture every two years." "Or as Okey told me one time, Okey was in The Great Dictator with him." "Okey would drive up to the studio and Chaplin would be standing on the steps, and he'd wave Okey on." "He didn't feel like working that day." "Or he didn't have the next scene that he wanted to have." "And in television, you can't do-- You gotta go on whether you're dead." "You have to go on." "And I don't think that Chaplin would have enjoyed working under those conditions."