Writer-performer-director Carl Reiner continues to mine his past for laughs
WHEN HE WROTE HIS first semi-autobiographical novel, "En-ter Laughing," in 1958, Carl Reiner was already an estimable figure on the American show-biz scene. As a key writer and performer on Sid Caesar's variety program "Your Show of Shows," he'd helped - with collaborators like Neil Simon and Mel Brooks - create a new brand of satirical TV comedy whose impact can still be felt in shows like "Saturday Night Live."
In subsequent years, the 73-year-old Reiner continued to be a seminal influence on American comedy. As a writer-producer he created "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (1961-65), a classic sitcom inspired by his own experiences, in which he also played the role of the vain, acerbic TV host Alan Brady; as a director he helped resurrect George Burns's movie career with "Oh God" (1977), launched Steve Martin onto the big screen in "The Jerk" (1979) and three subsequent films; as a performer he teamed up with Mel Brooks to record the hit comedy album "The 2,000-Year-Old Man," and graced numerous films and TV shows with his trademark bald pate and sardonic wit.
Now, after 27 years, Reiner has penned a sequel to the saga of aspiring Bronx-Jewish actor David Kokolovitz begun with "Enter Laughing." Titled "Continue Laughing" (Birch Lane/Carol Publishing; 257 pp.; $ 19.95), it follows Kokolovitz's adventures during the mid-1940s as an itinerant Shakespearean actor in the deep South and an army entertainer in the South Pacific.
Why would Reiner return to a story that first appeared in 1958?
"I think the book was timely," he says, interviewed in the book-lined den of his Beverly Hills home. "Mostly because it coincided with the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, which was traumatic for me, and even more so for my brother, who fought in 11 battles in Europe and helped liberate Auschwitz. I wrote my wife 17 letters (during the war), which figure in the new book. In writing the novel, I realized it was the war that made me a writer."
Carl Reiner grew up in the East Bronx, the son of a Romanian-Jewish watchmaker. Irving Reiner was an inventor of considerable talent but - unlike his son - lousy timing. Reiner recounts proudly that his father invented a 5-cent flashlight battery that, he insists, would have made the family fortune had World War II not broken out. Because it did, though, the patent was left to expire, and after the war, the defeated Germans began manufacturing the batteries without a by-your-leave from him.
Reiner says his father was completely irreligious, and he recalls having felt left out among friends who came from more observant families. "When they went to heder," he recalls, "I had to hang around with one other friend who didn't go." During the High Holy Days, Carl would steal off to services at the Hughes Avenue Synagogue with his pals. "They'd sit in the back and make jokes, and I would sit quietly and be respectful," he recounts. "But I'd feel very guilty. People would ask me, Where's your father?' and I would tell them, Oh, he's at the Fordham Talmud Torah.'"
Though Reiner eventually came to share his father's estrangement from their religion, he never became embittered, and eventually even recognized the humor of his predicament. In one well-remembered episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show," Reiner created a situation in which the long-married comedy writer Buddy Sorel (Morey Amsterdam) appeared to be disappearing a bit too frequently for what his co-workers imagined to be an illicit tryst. In fact, they would discover, Buddy had been taking bar mitzvah lessons, having missed his own as a child.
Last year comedian Paul Reiser asked Reiner to make a guest appearance on his hit sitcom "Mad about You." Reiner tried to beg off, but Reiser brushed aside his objections by making him an offer not even a 10-time Emmy winner could refuse. "We don't want you," he told him, "we want Alan Brady!" Reiner found himself instantly charmed at the prospect of reviving his 35-year-old role. So, it turned out, did the people who decide on TV's Emmy Awards - giving him an 11th for his appearance.
AT 16, AFTER GRADUATING HIGH school early, Reiner became a machinist's helper in the millinery trade. But he studied drama too, eventually landing a part as second tenor in a jazz version of "The Merry Widow." That experience became the basis of "Enter Laughing," which Reiner adapted during the 60s both for Broadway and the screen.
"Continue Laughing" picks up the story in 1942, when David Kokolovitz quits his steady job at the Foreman Sewing Machine Works in New York and joins a troupe of Shakespearean players who mangle the Bard as they tour the provinces. During one performance of "Hamlet," a flustered David forgets his lines and improvises thus: "The antidisdamatory Thanes of Rosenkrantz and Glammis who have here, now yet to dispel the lippsnard or to delve drammmidly unto who is thou that hath annointed my soul and burderred it with the pale sweet, prunish of Dane!"
When he's drafted, David joins an army entertainment unit performing for troops in the South Pacific, another episode based on Reiner's experiences as part of just such a company during the war.
Yet though he says that the new book is indeed chock-full of real-life incidents, some of it is clearly filtered through his imagination. For example, while touring the American South under the stage name Don Coleman, Kokolovitz takes up with the engaging Mary Deare Pruitt, the young daughter of an Alabama senator. The novel ends with them hopping into bed and swearing eternal love to each other. But Reiner has been happily married for over a half century to Estelle, a Jewish woman, and is the proud father of three children, among them the former "All in the Family" star and now top Hollywood director Rob Reiner. "I did go with one gentile girl who was as sweet and lovely as can be," says Reiner. "But I'm much happier having married a Jewish girl, because you have to explain yourself a lot less."