Gilbert Gottfried’s Rubber Balls and Liquor (St. Martin’s Press, 2011) is the most unassuming memoir by an abrasive, polarizing international celebrity (hello, Japan!) that you’re ever likely to read.
In contrast to his squinting, braying stage persona, in his book Gottfried underplays everything—his fame, his talent, his maturity. I highly recommend you purchase the thing. It makes fame and glamour seem mundane and confounding, a frank perspective which will appeal to a great many clear-headed working actors.
He also savages the very act of writing a memoir. When he uses a clichéd phrase, he instinctively stops himself, backs up and challenges the word choice:
It was music to my ears, a comment like that. No, he didn’t sing it. As far as I know, the man has no musical talent. Music to my ears is just another one of those meaningless expressions. He said something nice, and I was glad to hear it, that’s all. Maybe if Marvin Hamlisch was on the show that day there would have been some musical accompaniment.
The other main delight of the book for me is its theater-savvy namedropping, especially Gottfried’s deft use of stage icons as masturbatory material. Here are some juicy excepts:
Confession: watching Natalie Portman on Broadway was the only time I’ve ever jerked off to a production of The Diary of Anne Frank. I have, however, jerked off on several occasions to Hal Holbrook’s stirring performance as Mark Twain, for those of you keeping score.
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The first famous person I ever met was Chita Rivera. She was probably fifty at the time. I had a vague idea who she was, and as far as I knew I’d never jerked off to her, so it wasn’t the most exciting encounter. She came up to me after one of my shows, when I was just starting out. She said, “Hi, I’m Chita Rivera.”
In response, I wanted to say, “Hi, I’m Gilbert. I jerked off to you in West Side Story.” But I was too shy. Plus, I wasn’t so sure this was the case, and I wanted to be accurate. Instead, I said, “Nice to meet you, Chita Rivera.” She told me I looked like one of her nephews or cousins. I told her she looked like Rita Moreno. And that was that.
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The closest I came to landing an actual show business job was working the concession stands in Broadway theaters, selling T-shirts and drinks and overpriced candy. I got the job through another comic, who also needed to support his stand-up habit. The way it worked was that one guy owned the concessions in a bunch of different theaters, and we struggling comics or out-of-work actors would move from theater to theater, wherever we were needed. There were a lot of great shows playing on Broadway at the time, so I got another fine education. It was like taking an extension course, after watching all that television. There was American Buffalo, with Robert Duvall and John Savage. There was Equus, with Richard Burton. For a while, Richard Burton had to take a temporary leave, which I believe was what he did of his senses every time he married Elizabeth Taylor, and he was replaced by Anthony Perkins. The best part about working the concessions at Equus was the show’s famous nude scene. After I sat through the show a time or two, I had it all timed out. I’d go downstairs and relax in the lobby and listen for a certain speech, which was my signal to hurry back to my post in time to watch this girl take her clothes off onstage. This was another career highlight—for me, not the girl. My only regret was that I couldn’t jerk off to it. There were too many people around, and the couple times I tried I came all over the overpriced candy, which I was told was bad for business.