David Rothenberg Arrives at the Punch Line
Certain New Yorkers manage to create a spinning orbit of other New Yorkers around them, and that is why we call those groupings circles—as in, the Gershwin circle, or the Algonquin circle. Very few New Yorkers get two distinct orbits. David Rothenberg, who, at ninety-two, recently made his début as a standup comic, at 54 Below, is one of those few.
One circle that revolves around Rothenberg is made up of show-business veterans, of the kind that he interviews on his Saturday-morning radio program, on WBAI; the other is a circle of formerly incarcerated people who view him as a secular saint. Rothenberg is both a theatrical P.R. man—he worked for Liz and Dick when everyone knew who Liz and Dick were—and the defiantly unpious founder of the Fortune Society, an institution devoted to humanizing life after prison. The latter was the result of an epiphany, in 1967, when Rothenberg produced a play about prison life. Starting as a desk in his office in Times Square, Fortune has grown, with a community residence based in a rehabbed school building known as the Castle, up at 140th and Riverside.
Before the recent matinée, 54 Below was filled with some stars (Christine Ebersole kicked off the show), and with many members of the Fortune circle. (Stanley Richards, the new head of the Department of Correction and himself a former inmate, is a Fortune alum.)
“What made me want to do it?” Rothenberg asked backstage. “It was my Walter Mitty moment! Does anyone still know who Walter Mitty is?” (His conversation is sprinkled, as a hyper-alert ninety-two-year-old’s must be, with the question of whether an apropos reference he has just made is apropos to anybody else still breathing.) “I’ve always loved people who made other people laugh,” he went on. “My aunt Hilda was the person who made me believe in myself, and the first time she took me out at night was to see the movie ‘Kismet,’ with Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich. Afterward, she said to somebody, ‘We just saw a movie about Baghdad. Ronald Colman was the dad, and Dietrich was the bag.’ I loved that!
“Using humor to communicate with people who are angry and hurt and broken is part of the mission of Fortune,” he continued. “I’ve always said that, at Fortune, the first thing is to gain trust, since the people who come home to us have been so misused, abused, wounded, hurt. If they see you as someone who can start them laughing, their truth and pain come out. The first time it happened was with a kid named Abe, who was seventeen. We played Ping-Pong. I was still in show business, so I was dense with one-liners. He threatened to smile a couple of times, and then he laughed. And he started getting better.”
Rothenberg had been considering opening his set with a joke that, he knew, was likely to lose the audience. He’d planned to say, “This is Mr. Norman Maine,” a twist on the last line of the 1954 film “A Star Is Born,” where Judy Garland announces that, although she is Vicki Lester, the movie star, her true allegiance is to her husband, Norman, who has just drowned himself. Rothenberg’s bit would be him declaring that Mr. Norman Maine had faked his own death to get away from Garland.
Rothenberg nixed that and started his act more directly: “I’m the oldest standup comedian in America—the operative word here is ‘standing up.’ ” He did some material on the women in his life: “There was a woman I knew very well. Let’s call her Mother.” He then told a racy story about meeting Charles Laughton, who groped Rothenberg’s innocent and much younger thigh at the Algonquin, and added an anecdote about being thrown out of an upstate prison while trying to visit two inmates. He was told to “go back to New York and get some Jew liberal lawyer to help you.” He said, “I did. His name was William Kunstler.”
Afterward, everyone in the room agreed that the best story had been about a phone conversation with Peggy Lee. “She called, you see, at midnight!” Rothenberg had said. “Big stars assume that everyone is awake whenever they are. So, she asked me to assemble some sheet music for her, for her next gig in New York, and I said, ‘Yes, of course, Miss Lee.’ She wanted some tunes by Frank Loesser, and I said that I had never heard her sing ‘Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year,’ a lesser-known Loesser. So, she began it, right there on the phone, and kept on till she had finished it!
“The next morning, my mother called me and said, ‘I was trying to get through to you on the phone all night! The line was busy. What were you doing?’ I said to her, ‘Mom, I was in bed with Peggy Lee, and she wouldn’t stop singing.’ ” ♦