Read Online Exit Laughing by Victoria Zackheim - Free Book Online Page A

people already there. We gathered in the kitchen, while the nurse was upstairs preparing Cleavon to hold court in his bedroom. I remember mentioning to Jill that these other friends were much more intimately connected to him than we were, but she reminded me that we had known him almost the entire span of our acting careers, starting when he and Jill did a Broadway play together in 1974. It was the rollicking comedy
All over Town
by Murray Schisgal. Cleavon was the star, and he was great at keeping the laughter rolling.
    Jill tells the story of a performance when one of the actors went up on his lines, and Cleavon tried to help by giving him the cue again. When that had no effect, Cleavon actually tried saying the actor’s line for him. But that didn’t help either—the poor guy was lost; his eyeballs looked like little bull’s-eyes andthe flop-sweat was rolling. So, Cleavon casually strolled off stage, found the prompter’s script, brought it back out onto the stage, and handed it to him.
    “There you go, son. Just read it—nice and slow.” And he gave him that look that he was famous for—kind of judgmental and wary at the same time, as if to say, “Whoa, this boy’s so slow he’s
dangerous
.”
    The audience, of course, was having a grand time.
    Eight years later, I had my first acting experience with Cleavon in
Two Fish in the Sky
, produced by the venerable Phoenix Theatre. It was a disaster of historic proportion—historic in that the Phoenix, a New York cultural institution since 1953, was plunged ignominiously into the ashes by our production, never to rise again. Cleavon played a London-based Jamaican flim-flam artist with an accent that, despite all his hard work, was completely unintelligible. Added to that was my character, a rabbi who spoke in a pronounced London-Jewish dialect.
    The scene between the two of us was like listening to the United Nations on the day the simultaneous translators went on the fritz. We could see the people in the audience shrugging and looking at each other, as if to say “What’s going on? Do you understand any of this?” Cleavon, as I recall, remained blithely above the fray, never letting the audience’s confusion affect in any way his ebullient good time.
    He was irrepressible. From his New York debut in the political satire
Macbird
to his Tony Award–winning performance in the musical
Purlie
to his unforgettable portrayal ofSheriff Bart in Mel Brooks’s
Blazing Saddles
, you could always count on Cleavon Little to light up the moment.
    The nurse came down to the kitchen and announced that he was ready to receive visitors. We filed silently up the stairs. Most of the other friends had been around all week; we were the newbies. Jill and I pulled up chairs, while a few of his closer friends sat on the edge of the bed. Cleavon looked like Gandhi: his hair was gone and his body emaciated. He was hooked up to a morphine drip, but the effort it took to move his body made it obvious he was still in a lot of pain. He was at the end of his struggle.
    “Well,” he said in a small crackly voice, “look at you two little cuties.” We were, as I recall, the only white people in the room. “You come to say goodbye?”
    We nodded, and Jill went over and kissed him on the cheek.
    “If I knew there was a kiss in it, I would have done this years ago.”
    We all laughed. He started to say something else, but he didn’t have much breath. He looked at the man sitting closest to him on the bed and reached his hand out to him. I recognized him as an actor we’d seen years before in New York, but I can’t for the life of me remember his name. I wish I could, because his face and his presence will be with me forever.
    “Tell them about the show they missed last night,” Cleavon said to him.
    All the friends chuckled quietly, and Jill and I waited, not knowing what kind of show he was talking about.
    “Well,” said the friend, and he smiled and shook his head. “Last night,