FRIDAY
E-mail a friendJerry Stiller, Anne Meara
original airdate April 4, 2007
Award-winning actor-comedian Jerry Stiller and his wife, 5-time Emmy nominee, playwright and screenwriter Anne Meara, combined forces to become a legendary comedy team. They met while both were struggling actors and rose to fame writing and performing original comic sketches on ‘60s variety shows. Each has also earned individual success. Stiller's credits include back-to-back sitcom hits in Seinfeld and The King of Queens, while Meara's credits include The King of Queens and Law & Order SVU.
Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara
Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome comedy legends Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara to this program. They became household names way back in the fifties and sixties with more than 35 appearances on the "Ed Sullivan Show" alone. From there, they've gone on, of course, to numerous roles in film, theater, and television. Two weeks ago here in L.A. Stiller and Meara finally received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame - a long overdue honor. This year also marks the end of the long-running series "King of Queens." Here now, a scene from "King of Queens."
[Clip]
Tavis: (Laughter) Nice to have you both here.
Jerry Stiller: And you actually...
Anne Meara: He was good in that. I was pushy, though.
Stiller: No, no, you were wonderful. You turned...
Meara: No, he was...
Stiller: Yes.
Meara: It's good to meet you.
Tavis: Nice to meet both of you.
Meara: Yes, 'cause I'm up late, I watch you, your work. You're on, I think, midnight. Out here, I think it's 11:00.
Tavis: High five, God, really.
Meara: Thank you. (unintelligible)
Tavis: There you go, I like that. I was at a restaurant...
Meara: What does this mean? This is the new thing? All the White kids steal all the Black kids' stuff.
Tavis: They do, exactly. Actually, it goes like this. Put your hand out, it goes like this. Like, no - ball your fist up. They call it a pound, so I hit you on top, you hit me, and then we come together like that. Try that again. Bam. Bam. Bam. There you go.
Meara: And what does that make me?
Tavis: Makes you hip.
Meara: But can I be on the "Def Poetry Jam?"
Tavis: (Laughs) That's a Russell Simmons question. I can't answer that one. (Laughter) But you're on PBS, and we're glad to have you.
Meara: That show's good. I know, I know, I know, I know.
Tavis: I was at a restaurant one night, and I wanted to come over and meet the two of you so badly, and I almost broke my rules of etiquette and interrupted you in your meal. What would have happened if I walked over in the middle of your meal?
Meara: We would have given you the check (laughter).
Tavis: So I'm glad I didn't come...
Meara: I wish you had, I wish you had come over.
Tavis: No, no, it's nice to meet you in person.
Meara: I wish you had.
Tavis: Fifty-three years of being together.
Meara: Oh, it's unbelievable.
Tavis: I was just re-reading the story of how the two of you actually met and hooked up. It is a funny story about the audition, and I'll let you tell it.
Meara: Jerry is sentimental, and I don't wanna hear this damn story again. I get (makes noise).
Stiller: Well, it actually happened, how we got together, and I'm glad you asked the question and we got past the high fives. (Laughter) But although...
Meara: And the knuckle fives, or whatever those are.
Stiller: But the high five started with this, when two Indian tribes met, and the first one did this, and the other one - that meant peace. We have no bows and arrows, you see? And then it went on...
Meara: Yeah, answer the question he's asking you.
Stiller: Well, who cares about how we met? (Laughter) We did meet in an agent's office. It was - they called it a cattle call. Actors were called in to audition for an agent. They were gonna send us out in summer theater, etcetera, etcetera. I was going with a girl at the time who was trying to dump me, get rid of me. She saw Anne...
Meara: She was a ho.
Stiller: She was a...(laughter)
Meara: Piece of trash.
Stiller: Oh, God. Anyway, I was kind of standing there in limbo...
Meara: In my opinion. I thought she - very iffy. She was on the borderline.
Stiller: But anyway, this young lady comes out of this agent's office screaming and crying and I said, "What happened?" She said, "He chased me all around the room." And I went in next and I said, "Why'd you chase that girl around the room?" I knew the guy. And he said, "Because I like her, and now it's your turn." So he chased me out of the room, and when I got outside, there was Anne still crying, and this lady who I was...
Meara: Oh, my God.
Stiller: ...said, "Go have some coffee with this girl." And I went down and had coffee in this place, and I thought she was gonna have a soda, she was gonna have soup, she was gonna have a meal...
Meara: Don't list the whole menu, cut to the chase, come on.
Stiller: She wanted - "I'm just having a cup of -" I says, "Can I take your check?" She said, "Forget the check, just stick the silverware in your pocket, and let's get the hell out of here." And that's how I met her.
Meara: I had a roommate in the Village, Joyce, and we had no silverware. So, we took some.
Tavis: You had Jerry steal silverware for you?
Meara: We stole, we broke the law, but hey, that's life. You make a few mistakes, but then you go on television, apologize, and people forgive you. (Laughter)
Tavis: Fifty-three years. How does it last that long?
Meara: Therapy, therapy. We have a very good therapist. A lot of therapy. (Laughter) A lot of pacienza (sic), as my Italian friends say. And I don't know the answer to that, your question how. I think you start to find the person you always say you wanted in therapy. I always wanted a man to listen, to talk. 'Cause in the beginning, you know how it is - a lot of testosterone. I can see, it's coming off of you in waves. (Laughter)
That when guys are - in the beginning, all they wanna go is boom, boom, boom. No talking. Now that things are physically a little different, (laughs) he wants to talk all the time. (Laughter) I got the (unintelligible).
Stiller: Well, here I am.
Meara: I am sorry; I didn't mean to turn this into sex sin city.
Stiller: No, but what Anne is saying is appropriate. She's saying - I don't know about the boom, boom, boom part of it...
Meara: No, we still...
Stiller: But I found someone who...
Meara: There's ways to do that later.
Stiller: We were theater people. We have two kids walking around New York looking for work, trying to get a job as actors, and who else would look at you? 'Cause you had really only what you thought was your talent, and you ran into this lady and I thought when we did finally get married six months later, I said, "Why don't we have an act? Work on an act?" And eight years later, we did come up with what we called, laughingly, an act in which my wife did all the talking and I just stood there and watched.
Meara: Jerry, you make it sound like the third act of a movie, or like you're giving a speech at a commencement or something. It was really sordid. It was more sordid than Jerry's saying. (Laughter) But this is PBS, and we don't wanna...
Tavis: After 53 years of being together and doing what you do so well...
Meara: What was that? (Laughs)
Tavis: Emphasis, emphasis, emphasis.
Meara: All right, I thought it was a love story (unintelligible).
Tavis: (Laughs) I figure if anybody knows what funny is, the two of you do. What is funny?
Meara: Oh, I haven't met the person in the world that could tell you the answer to that. I can only say what is funny to me. What is funny to me is something that makes me laugh. It's not necessarily gonna make you laugh, although I think maybe something that made me laugh would make you laugh. But it's...
Tavis: But there's gotta be some connection, though...
Stiller: Well, there's no connection.
Tavis: ...because you're making other people laugh.
Stiller: You're asking a good question, because we had no rules. We never had rules. We had an idea when we came out on stage what we were gonna talk about, theoretically, and Anne would say, "What was that? You got a spot on your thing over here." And before I know it...
Meara: I would say that?
Stiller: ...you were into a - well, you were wonderful at it. You created a whole thing with my dry cleaner, and we talked about our friend Bernie down the street. So that became the act.
Meara: It was a desperate ploy, talk about little...
Stiller: You're looking quizzical, and you're wondering what this is all about, but we have no rules as comedians. But we had to make a living, and that was basically what it was about.
Meara: Well, there were rules. There were rules. If you were doing "Ed Sullivan," before your time, Travis - Tavis. I keep wanting to say Travis. Tavis.
Tavis: That's funny you said Travis, because Sullivan couldn't get your last name right, could he.
Meara: No. Mara...
Tavis: Mara.
Meara: ...is how they'd pronounce it if we were in Dublin. (Laughs) If we were in Dublin, I don't think so. But we would never correct him, because he looked like the damn pope. He was, like, he would smile, he would laugh, Ed Sullivan. It was like getting the imprimatur from Bishop Mulgahey. (sp?)
Tavis: But he called you Mara all the way through all 36 appearances.
Meara: Mara, yeah. Never corrected him.
Stiller: Yeah, he loved us.
Meara: He did, yeah.
Stiller: He loved us with a kind of a - he was kind of like a father...
Meara: Jerry loved him, but he scared the hell out of me. (Laughter) Oh, he looked like my eighth grade teacher, Sister Teracita (sp?). And there was a tough cookie. I got so disappointed when I graduated high school, I found out she ran off and got married to someone. And I worried about the man. I just worried, I cared.
Stiller: Yeah, but you were terrible - you did some wild things when you were going to parochial school.
Meara: No, I did nothing until...
Stiller: Didn't you paint the toenails...
Meara: No, I'm not going into stories about that.
Stiller: All right, then.
Meara: That was just - hi.
Stiller: Hello.
Tavis: Does that mean that's true?
Meara: I painted toenails of a statue once, with, like, Revlon red. They were stone, they were grey, and they needed color.
Tavis: Were you punished for that?
Meara: They never knew it was me.
Tavis: Oh, yeah.
Meara: So I lied. (Laughter) So besides being a thief, I'm a liar.
Tavis: I was gonna say, you're lying, you're stealing, and you...
Meara: I am.
Tavis: ...and you've been blessed nonetheless anyway.
Meara: I've been blessed despite. Despite. I'm very lucky. I have Jerry, I have Amy, I have Ben, I have Ella and Quinn, I have wonderful friends, and I have Christine, my daughter-in-law, and I have - I guess I'm lucky. This is gonna be read at my funeral, or something?
Tavis: No, no, I'm just...
Meara: I don't know why I'm going on with this (unintelligible).
Tavis: It's a wonderful thing, though, for you to have a relationship that's worked this well for this long, and to still be in a business where the two of you get to work. That isn't the easiest thing to...
Stiller: And to be on the "Tavis Smiley Show."
Meara: It's horribly hard. It's horribly hard, and I hate to sound - I don't care how I sound anymore, 'cause I'm old enough not to care about that, but it's very difficult to - and I say this mainly to women - you guys are okay, but you can - look at you, I know you're out there playing the field or whatever, handsome - it's hard to have a family, children, to be a mother, to be a funny lady, to be whatever. So we fought for, like...
Stiller: But you did it, and we went through it, and we...
Meara: I know, and you're being very sweet, Jerry, but it was a tough time for (unintelligible).
Stiller: No, no.
Tavis: How'd you manage all that?
Meara: I told you, we went into therapy.
Tavis: Well, therapy's not there when you're trying to raise the kids, and trying to write the jokes, and do the stand-up.
Meara: I don't know.
Stiller: Anne was a very talented woman who wanted to be...
Meara: No, what happens is you have an extra cocktail or something, and go to sleep.
Tavis: That's the secret?
Meara: After you do everything perfect.
Tavis: Right.
Meara: No, this is not the secret, this is the terrible parts of trying to do everything right. Halloween, I wanted to have the loot bags and the toys and the thing and everything perfect then. After that was done, then I'd go into my bedroom, (laughs) have a drink, and go to sleep.
Stiller: What a way to - but that's not all the way true. Tell...
Meara: He worshipped me. He worships me.
Stiller: Well, it was more than that.
Tavis: There's nothing wrong with that.
Meara: No, (unintelligible).
Stiller: No, no, I was just...
Meara: You do that, too. The madonna and the devil, you have a woman on a pedestal, or she's a ho, one or the other.
Tavis: You're complaining about being worshipped by a man. Every woman watching this right now wants some guy to worship her.
Stiller: Oh, God, I'd worship any woman right now.
Meara: Every woman wants to be worshipped? (Laughter)
Tavis: There's a bit you guys used to do about the neighborhood you grew up on.
Meara: Hershey Horowitz and Mary Elizabeth Doyle.
Tavis: Exactly. And nobody knows...
Meara: That's right.
Stiller: It was a time when they had just introduced the idea of computers, and bringing people together through a computer. And then these two met; the only thing they had in common is they came from the same block, East 48th Street. She's on the other side of the Catholic cemetery; he's on the other side.
Meara: And a computer matched them up.
Stiller: And I was Hershey Horowitz, and she was Mary Elizabeth.
Meara: And they meet. Do the first lines. How does it go? They meet, and she says, "So, how do you do?"
Stiller: How do you do? I'm Hershey Horowitz.
Meara: I'm Mary Elizabeth Doyle.
Stiller: Doyle?
Meara: Horowitz?
Stiller: Horowitz.
Meara: And that was the first laugh. (Laughter) Horowitz?
Stiller: Ed loved that very much. He went for that, and he...
Meara: Let's get off of Ed Sullivan. I don't wanna give him any more airtime. Please.
Stiller: (Laughter) I loved this man.
Meara: I'm sorry, I hated that. I didn't hate him, he just scared me. If I felt better about him, I could have the cojones to hate him, but I didn't.
Stiller: The one thing that he did that - once he put that sketch on, where the Irish boy and the Jewish girl came on, people all over the country started saying, "We're just like you." Whether they were Chicanos and they were people - Italian in northern California. They all came up and said, "We're just like you." But he said something wonderful after the sketch.
He says, "Someday in Rome, they're gonna change all that." People didn't know what he was talking about. I went the next day to the - I was taking a swim down at the club, the YMHA...
Meara: The YMHA, 92nd Street Y.
Stiller: The Young Men's Hebrew Association. And the man in the locker room said to me, he says, "I loved you yesterday on 'Sullivan.'" I says, "You mean the sketch?" He says, "No, what Sullivan said about going to talk to the pope." And that really was one of the most important things that Ed Sullivan ever did. He had this great feeling of bringing people together.
Meara: You see what a good man he is? He gets so sentimental.
Tavis: He is a good guy.
Stiller: No, no, I'm not sentimental.
Meara: And he believes all that stuff, (laughter) and I don't. I am a secret...
Tavis: You gotta have balance, though, right?
Meara: Who did I see? Nikki Giovanni? (unintelligible) I am secretly an anarchist, I think, but I don't have the - you can't say balls, but cojones. You can bleep me, I guess.
Tavis: You just said on TV that you're an anarchist. It's out there now.
Meara: An anarchist? No, I thought - I meant balls. (Laughter) Obviously, that's okay.
Tavis: All right, before I let the two of you go, put you on the spot here. Put you on the spot. And ladies first. You've been doing this, again, for so long and so well. Give me one piece of great advice. I don't care where you got it from, who told you, I don't care what it's about. Just give me one piece of really good advice that you've picked up along the way.
Meara: The only advice I can give you is that when you are my age and people ask you the same question, you withhold and do not give someone else advice. I think that is very patronizing, to give another human being advice. The only thing I can tell you is here's something that happened to me, and worked for me. But it's not necessarily gonna work for you. I just - I'm against giving advice.
Tavis: Is that what you tell...
Meara: That's my advice.
Tavis: Okay, I'll take that. That's good advice, though. All right, Jerry Stiller, what you got for me?
Stiller: Pick the right woman. (Laughter) The other part, don't be a faker. My father taught me that. Whenever he saw comics or people on stage who weren't gifted or whatever it was, he said, "Don't be a faker." And I have been in therapy ever since, trying to live up to that. (Laughter)
Tavis: I love these two; how could you not (laughs)? Jerry Stiller...
Meara: If you see Courtney B. Vance, tell him Anne, who played the nurse - Cynthia Nixon was Juliette, and Courtney was the guy who said, "Not so deep as a well, but (unintelligible)."
Tavis: He watches every night, so he just saw you shout him out.
Meara: He does? Okay, well, give him my love.
Tavis: He appreciates that. Nice to meet you both.
Stiller: Thank you, thank you.
Meara: Thank you. Thank you.
Tavis: Honor to have you here. Wow, what an opportunity. I'm gonna watch this tape two or three times, I'm certain. That's our show for tonight. Catch me on the weekends - they had so much stuff going, you know there's stuff you miss, and you gotta rewind it and get it again. I'll watch it...
Meara: But it's so good you had us on before we died.
Stiller: Can you get an isolated shot of me during all of her stuff?
Meara: Isolated shot.
Tavis: How about an iso on Jerry right quick while I close the show. Just stay on Jerry Stiller while I close the show. Catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from L.A., thanks for watching - look at that handsome face right there - (laughter) and keep the faith.
Meara: Adios, adios.
Back to April 4, 2007