Lucky Bruce—A Literary Memoir
By Bruce Jay Friedman (Biblioasis, 2011)
I’m more excited by Bruce Jay Friedman writing a memoir than I am by him writing another play or novel. The guy’s in his 80s now, and he no longer radiates bleakness and self-defeat. Perversely, he’s into acknowledging accomplishments, honoring friends (Terry Southern, Mario Puzo) and memorializing fallen institutions. Friedman was a regular at Elaine’s restaurant from the time when it was a haven for struggling writers right through the time that it was an internationally known celebrity hotspot; his own rise as a writer mirrored the rise of his favorite hang-out and watering hole.
The book is full of backhanded compliments, but at least he grants himself them. He feels bad about his first marriage, a long loveless chapter of his life, but notes that his sons have said he was a good dad nevertheless.
Friedman has a way of downplaying his talents. Two of his most famous works he describes as stuff he just tossed off—he wrote the short story which became the film The Heartbreak Kid in a half hour as an exercise, he says, and dashed off the script for Stir Crazy because he’d forgotten he’d been contracted to write it until the film was about to be shot.
Yet he’s proud when others acknowledge his literary gifts. He glories in Neil Simon, when asked why he didn’t do more literary adaptations, responding “I only adapt Friedman.” (Simon did the screenplays for The Heartbreak Kid and The Lonely Guy, both based on Friedman stories.)
I like Friedman’s style, and always have. When I was a teenager and reading anything that seemed counterculture, the Anthology of Black Humor which Friedman compiled was a godsend. I discovered his fiction when I was a camp counselor in Maine; a paperback collection of his short stories couldn’t stand it on the camp library shelf with all that Sidney Sheldon anymore and leapt out at me.
I probably like his plays the most, and am pleased Friedman identifies as a playwright as readily as he does as a novelist. Scuba Duba and Steambath are both layered, deep actor-magnets that reward a variety of interpretations, but they’re also clear and focused and direct and threatrical and nice to average audiences. Likewise, his backstage stories in Lucky Bruce aren’t forced or starstruck. They’re earnest and eager. He enjoys the playmaking process, all of it.
The title of this book could be seen as a twist on the name “Lenny Bruce,” and indeed Friedman expresses a great admiration of that singular stand-up philosopher. He recounts getting paid a large sum of money to “think about” writing the screenplay for a film about Lenny Bruce, admitting that he had no intention of actually writing such a thing, out of respect and awe.
Some of this material has been uttered elsewhere—in the essay “My Life Among the Stars” from Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos: Best Non-Fiction, for example. But it’s fully rethought and reconstituted here. Individual chapters go off in their own directions, and central characters disappear for long stretches, but there’s nonetheless a flow, and a glow. Friedman’s in a good mood about his long, adventurous life with a pen. He’s feeling lucky, and sharing his good fortune for once rather than his neurotic trepidations.