THE FUNNIEST PEOPLE WHO LIVE LIFE, VOLUME 2: 250 ANECDOTES
By David Bruce
Dedicated with Love to Shantelle and Jeremy
Copyright 2009 by Bruce D. Bruce
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The Funniest People Who Live Life, Volume 2: 250 Anecdotes
Chapter 1: From Actors to Education
Actors
• In the play Clair de Lune is a hot romantic scene between a duchess and a hideous cripple. Because the duchess seemed to be by far the most interesting role for a woman in the play, dramatic critic Alexander Woollcott wondered why Ethel Barrymore did not choose that role for herself. However, the reason why is evident when one considers that the hideous cripple was played by John Barrymore, her brother. In fact, one actress remarked, “Ethel could hardly have played the duchess. It would have been adding incest to injury.”
• Ellen Terry was famous in large part because of her acting in plays by William Shakespeare, and she was willing to criticize the actions of his characters. In her copy of King Lear she annotated the scene in which Cordelia declines to express her love for her father when he is dividing his kingdom. Her comment was succinct: “FOOL.”
• Edwin Forrest had a magnificent voice. One day, before he made his entrance on stage, he cursed his dresser in the wings. The audience heard him speaking and applauded, thinking that the play had begun with his first words being spoken off stage.
• Megs Jenkins was once rehearsing the play A Day by the Sea with Ralph Richardson. She asked him for advice about how to say a line, and he advised her, “Don’t let’s talk about it. Let’s just do it.”
• Bret Morrison was one of several actors who played the Shadow on old-time radio. He sometimes gave this autograph: “May I be the only Shadow in your life.”
Alcohol
• William Frawley played Fred Mertz on TV’s I Love Lucy. He gave a certain panhandler a dollar for coffee each time they met, and one day he asked what the panhandler really did with the money. The panhandler replied that he didn’t buy coffee with the money, but instead bought whiskey. Hearing that, Mr. Frawley said, “At least you’re honest. Come have a drink with me.” They went into a bar, where Mr. Frawley ordered, “Two double scotch-and-sodas.” The panhandler spoke up, “Make mine the same.”
• During World War II, Alexandra Danilova set sail for South America. During the voyage, she was shocked to see that a group of naval officers were drinking—of all things—milk! Immediately, she went to the officers and told them, “You can lose the war drinking milk. You must drink vodka.” She then ordered a bottle of vodka for the officers, who responded by ordering a bottle of champagne for her.
• During poker games on rainy nights, Heywood Broun used to serve bad port, then say, “Any port in a storm.” Once, Alexander Woollcott forgot to bring a special liquor called kümmel to a poker game, so Mr. Broun said that he would go to Mr. Woollcott’s house to pick it up, because he would “walk a mile for a kümmel.”
Animals
• People get dogs for various reasons, including to replace a deceased pet. One older man came to the Friends of County Animal Shelters (FOCAS) to look for a puppy that was born after March 20. He asked Peggy, a volunteer there, “Do you believe in reincarnation?” Peggy replied that she was willing to believe in a lot of things if it would persuade the man to adopt a pet. The older man explained that his dog had died on March 20. Of course, he had grieved over the death of his pet, but an angel had appeared to him in a dream and told him that he would have to look for his dog but that his dog would return to him. “So,” said the man, “here I am to start looking.” He looked at several dogs, and one dog that he looked at looked at him. He said, “There she is!” Peggy pointed out that the dog was three or four years old and definitely not a puppy, but the man was satisfied. When the cage door opened, the dog ran to the man, who said, “I’ll take this one; this one is mine.” Outside, after the adoption forms had been filled out, the man and the dog walked to his car. The dog waited by the passenger’s side until the man opened it, and then she jumped in the car. The man and the dog then drove away together.
• Sometimes pets choose families, instead of the family choosing the pet. When ballerina Alice Patelson was a little girl, a cat that had been hanging around her family’s yard for a few days scratched at the door. Her father opened the door and the cat walked in and began looking through the house—first downstairs, then upstairs. Then the cat went outside. A few minutes later, the scratching began again, the door was opened, and the cat appeared with a kitten in her mouth, which she deposited in an upstairs bedroom. The cat went outside a couple of more times and brought in a total of three kittens. That is how Mittens chose to belong to the Patelson family.
• Green Bay quarterback Brett Favre grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi, and he could fish for bass from his porch because of the bayou. The bayou can be dangerous because of the alligators, one of which ate Brett’s dog. Even as an adult, Brett lived by the bayou. One summer, two of his Green Bay teammates—tight end Mark Chmura and center Frank Winters—visited him. They went out on the bayou in a boat, and Brett wanted everyone to jump in for a swim. Mr. Chmura remembers, “All of a sudden, a dead animal floats by with no head. And Frank says, ‘What the h*ll is that?’ And Brett says, ‘Oh, that’s a beaver—just got his head bit off by an alligator—you guys ready to go swimming?’”
• Dogs have sensitive noses, and often those noses are put to work. For example, Chewy (a dog that has a shaggy coat and therefore was named after the Star Wars character Chewbacca) hunts truffles, a fungus that grows under the ground. Chewy’s talented nose finds 50 pounds of truffles a year. Once, Chewy and his owner guested on David Letterman’s TV show. Before filming began, Mr. Letterman put a truffle in one of his pockets. Chewy quickly sniffed it out. Why train a dog to hunt truffles? Truffles are used in gourmet food, and their price is usually more than $1,000 a pound.
• Russian bass Feodor Chaliapine once attended a tea party at which several young ladies were present. While sitting at the table, he felt a pressure on his foot and he wondered which of the young ladies was flirting with him. Upon rising from the dinner table, however, he noticed that one of his shoes shone with blacking while the other shoe was wet and had no blacking. Just then, a Saint Bernard dog came from under the dinner table, licking its chops, which were covered with blacking.
• Ballerina Alicia Markova was fond of cats, and she often made friends with the cats in whatever theaters she performed in. Unfortunately, at His Majesty’s Theater in London, this almost led to a faux pas on stage, when Peter, the theater cat, decided to look for Alicia. Just before he trotted onto the stage where Alicia was performed, he was intercepted. After that incident, she was discouraged from making friends with theater cats.
• When Jacqueline Bouvier, who was later better known as Jackie Kennedy Onassis, was five years old, she showed a dog—a Great Dane named King Phar, in a dog show. A newspaper article stated, “Miss Jacqueline Bouvier showed her dog, which was about the same size as she.”
• Not everyone likes dogs. Susan Conant’s father loved dogs, but her mother hated dogs. Her mother once placed this classified advertisement in a newspaper: “My husband’s fifty-dollar puppies for twenty-five dollars. If a man answers, hang up.”
• Being an aviator in the early days of flying had its disadvantages. Aviators wore goggles, and the sun tanned the skin around the goggles. Amelia Earhart wrote that after a long air trip, she used to resemble a “horned toad.”
Birth
• The famous dancer Rudolph Nureyev was preceded in birth by three sisters. When his sister Lida was born, his mother, knowing that her husband wanted a son, wrote him a letter and told him that a boy was born. This meant that when Rudi was born and she telegraphed her husband that he finally had a son, she felt that he wouldn’t believe it.
• Ballerina Maria Tallchief gave birth to Elise, who gave birth to Alexandra. When Alexandra was born, Ms. Tallchief referred to her as “the newest Sugar Plum Fairy.”
Books
• When fantasy author Tamora Pierce was in the 7th grade, her teacher, Mary Jacobsen, introduced her to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. One Friday afternoon, Tamora complained that she didn’t have anything to read, and so Ms. Jacobsen gave her The Fellowship of the Ring to take home. On Saturday morning, Tamora sat down to read the book, and at 2 a.m. she finished reading it, then she started crying because she thought that was the end. Fortunately, on Monday her teacher gave her the other two volumes of The Lord of the Rings to read.
• Children’s book author Lois Lowry, a two-time winner of the Newbery Medal, learned to read early. When she was three years old, children in her nursery class did such things as pretend to be elephants, swinging their arms in front of them as if they were elephant trunks. This embarrassed young Lois, who much preferred to sit in a corner and read a book while the other children played those games.
• When Randy, Judy Blume’s daughter, was a toddler, she used to mix together soap, shampoo, and baby powder while taking a bath and then pat her face with the goo, which she called “freckle juice.” Judy knew a good title when she heard it, and in 1971 she published Freckle Juice.
Cars
• Michael Bennett helped create A Chorus Line and treated himself to a Rolls Royce after it became a success. However, he soon switched to driving a regular car again. He complained, “Every pot hole in the city destroyed my Rolls. It was always in the shop being repaired.”
• Comedian Flip Wilson’s most famous character is probably sassy Geraldine, whose boyfriend is named Killer. On his Rolls-Royce, Flip put a vanity license plate that read, “KILLER.”
Children
• As a child, Bo Jackson was a bully. He used to make other children give him their lunch money, and then he would lend it to them until the next day when he would collect it along with “interest.” He says that he became so wealthy doing this that he could afford to pay other kids to beat up anyone he didn’t like. His mother warned him over and over again that he would mess up his life acting like a bully, and a couple of incidents made him decide to straighten up. Once, he started a fight with an older boy and was beaten up, so he decided to get even. He took his brother’s .22 rifle and aimed at the boy who had beaten him up. Fortunately, he remembered his mother’s warnings, so he unloaded the rifle and went home without shooting the boy. On another occasion, he started throwing rocks at the pigs on a farm owned by a minister and killed several of them. He was caught, and he got a job so he could pay for the pigs he had killed. Finally, he decided to direct his energies to playing sports rather than bullying and making trouble. Eventually, he played both professional baseball and professional football. By the way, Mr. Jackson’s real name is Vincent Edward Jackson, but people called him “Boar Hog” because he was so tough as a child. That name eventually became shortened to “Bo.”
• Children have no inhibitions, and they tell it like it is. Actress Gladys Cooper once played the ever-youthful Peter Pan on stage, and when Wendy asked Peter how old he was, a youthful voice from the audience called out, “About forty-five, I’d say.” And Tom O’Connor once ran into a youthful truth-teller while appearing in Dick Whittington. He was being chased by the Wicked Owl, and as the script demanded, he kept asking the audience, “Where’s the Owl?” The audience was supposed to be excited and yell, “It’s behind you.” Unfortunately, he said one too many times, “Where’s the Owl?” A youthful voice called out, “Don’t tell him—the man’s obviously an idiot.”
• Django is a dog that dog trainer Liz Teal rescued from an ASPCA adoption van, and then taught to work with developmentally disabled and/or mentally challenged children. Ms. Teal has learned to trust Django. While they were visiting some developmentally challenged children, Ms. Teal announced that she would allow every child to brush Django, When she thought that every child had brushed Django, she said, “Django, let’s go!” But Django didn’t go to her. Instead, he went to one remaining child who hadn’t yet had a chance to brush him. Now, Ms. Teal asks Django if they are done instead of saying, “Let’s go.”
• In chapter 1 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom gets out of being whipped by his Aunt Polly by exclaiming, “My! Look behind you, aunt!” She does look behind her, and Tom escapes over the backyard fence. When Mark Twain’s daughter Suzy wrote a biography of her famous father when she was 13, she wrote about herself and her sister Clara, “Clara and I are sure papa played the trick on Grandma about the whipping, that is related in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” In his Autobiography, Mr. Twain wrote, “Suzy and Clara were quite right about that.”
• Many world-famous dancers started dancing early. When Fred Astaire was four-and-a-half years old, Adele (his sister) was enrolled in a New York dancing class. Rather than arrange for a babysitter for young Fred, his mother enrolled him in dance classes, too. When choreographer Martha Graham was two years old, her parents took her to church. As the organist began to play, she got up from the pew and started dancing down the church aisle. This horrified her parents.
• Actors have different reasons for agreeing to play a certain role. For example, Amy Sedaris will take a role such as playing Snow White on Sesame Street or appearing in Yo Gabba Gabba or Shrek the Third simply because it will make her the cool aunt. After all, she and David, her brother, are competitive about being the cool aunt or the cool uncle. David is stiff competition for her. He is a writer, and the kids have given him the nickname “Uncle Money.”
• Jane Withers was a child movie star who started a doll collection that eventually numbered over 14,000. In her big break, the movie Bright Eyes, she played a little girl who was mean to Shirley Temple. In one scene, she was required to tear Shirley’s doll to pieces. This upset her, so she made the prop man promise to collect the pieces of the doll so that she could sew them together later. The doll ended up in her collection.
• Kids are kids, even when they are the kids of celebrities. Actor Eric McCormack and his wife, nee Janet Holden, have a son named Finnegan. When he was six years old and in kindergarten, he went to the set of his dad’s TNT sitcom, Trust Me, where he was able to watch him film a scene. His dad warned him that in the scene he would kiss a woman, and Finnegan said, “That’s gross.”
• When playwright Lillian Hellman was a young girl in New Orleans, she sometimes played hooky from school and spent time up in a favorite fig tree reading. The hideout was comfortable—a sling held her schoolbag, a fishing pole was stowed away, a rope helped her haul up her lunch, and a nail held her dress and shoes so she wouldn’t get them dirty as she read in the tree.
• Maria Callas’ mother, Evangelia, knew that her daughter’s voice was special when young Maria was playing the piano and singing “La Paloma” on a warm day with the windows open. Evangelia looked outside and noticed a group of people attentively listening to young Maria. After that, Evangelia resolved to get the best professional training for Maria’s voice.
• How much of a football town is Green Bay, Wisconsin? When Brett Favre became a quarterback for Green Bay, all the games were always sold out, and the waiting list for tickets was 35 years long. Parents used to put their infants’ names on the waiting list in hopes that the infants could see a game live and in person before they were middle-aged.
• At age 12, Suzanne Farrell danced on the Music Hall stage in Cincinnati. The experience convinced her to make ballet her life, and to commemorate her decision, she peeled a large splinter from the wooden Music Hall stage. In her autobiography, Holding On to the Air, she writes that she still has that splinter.
• As a child, Marian Anderson sometimes sang at church events. Once, her mother sent her to the store to buy a loaf of bread, and she found a flyer lying in the street, advertising that she would soon sing at an event. Marian was so excited by the flyer that she bought potatoes instead of bread at the store.
• Groucho Marx once asked Melinda, his little daughter, what she did at nursery school. She replied, “Oh, Daddy, all we do is paint and go to the toilet.” Groucho called this “the most accurate description of a nursery school that’s ever been uttered.”
• As a schoolchild, Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schultz used to draw the character Popeye on his notebooks. Other schoolchildren saw his artwork, and they asked him to draw Popeye on their notebooks, too.
• Some famous people and characters have been adopted—Superman; Batman’s ward, Robin; Moses from the Old Testament.
Christmas
• On Christmas Eve of 1989, the Detroit Lions played the Atlanta Falcons. In this game, played on the final day of the regular season, Detroit’s Barry Sanders, playing his first season as a pro, needed 169 yards to became the National Football League’s leading rusher. With one minute left in the game, and Detroit leading 31-24, Mr. Sanders needed only 11 more yards to become the leading rusher of the year. However, when coach Wayne Fontes asked Mr. Sanders if he wanted to go back into the game and break the record, he replied, “Coach, let’s just win it and go home.” Throughout his career, Mr. Sanders has always been more concerned about winning games than breaking records
• In 2008, Los Angeles Times columnist Chris Erskine bought an $89 Christmas tree, which he and his family brought home, and then discovered that the tree was poorly mounted and did not stand up straight. They tried to fix it, but after decorating the tree, it began to lean again. No one wanted to de-decorate the tree, re-cut its bottom, and re-mount the tree, and so it continued to lean. A family friend called it the Leaning Tower of Christmas.
Clothing
• During times of war, such things as clothing can be rationed. During World War II, British opera/lieder singer Kathleen Ferrier began to become famous. The dress in which she sang at her first notable success was made out of material intended for curtains.
• Julia Marlowe believed in thoroughly preparing for her roles in plays by Shakespeare. Before appearing in King Henry IV, Part I, as Prince Hal, she wore the character’s armor at home until she felt comfortable in it.
Coaches
• As coach of the Minnesota Vikings, Bud Grant lay down rules about what his players could eat and where they could smoke. Once, he even spent 30 minutes drilling his players in how to stand at attention while the National Anthem was being played. Some of his players regarded such rules as being “Mickey Mouse” rules, so they would whistle “Mickey Mouse” when Mr. Grant’s back was turned. (But once the team started winning—the once-losing Vikings won the league title only three years after he started coaching them—Mr. Grant earned the respect of his players.)
• One season, Pepper Rodgers had a rough time as coach of the football team at UCAL. The team was losing, and the media and the fans were turning against him. In fact, even his own wife and his own family were unhappy at the way the team was playing. The only friend he seemed to have was his dog. Mr. Rodgers told his wife, “A man needs more than one friend, especially at a time of crisis.” His wife got him another friend—she bought him a second dog.
• Players did what coach Vince Lombardi ordered them to do. When Green Bay Packers linebacker Tom Bettis reported overweight to training camp, Mr. Lombardi was not pleased. He was also not pleased with Mr. Bettis’ reason for being overweight: “I’m built that way.” Mr. Lombardi told him, “H*ll with your build. Get that weight off, or you’ll go home on the first plane out of here.” That week, Mr. Bettis lost 12 pounds.
• Herman Hickman, football coach of several losing teams at Yale, once grew angry at a referee who was stepping off a 10-yard penalty against Yale in a game against Princeton. Mr. Herman was so angry that he complained to the ref, “You don’t even know the rules—that penalty should be 15 yards.” The referee replied, “I know what the penalty is, but the way this team is being coached I’m giving it a break.”
• Bud Grant, coach of the Minnesota Vikings, always seemed to have a laid-back approach to football, and he kept strict control of his emotions. Once, he was ten minutes late for a bus taking his team to the game. Professional football is big business, so his excuse was interesting: He had lost track of the time while fixing his son’s bicycle.
• Herman Hickman used to coach football at Yale. In one game, as a referee was counting off a 5-yard penalty against Yale, Mr. Hickman told the referee that he stank. The referee calmly added an additional 15 yards to the penalty, then asked Mr. Hickman, “How do I smell from here?”
• Long ago, Iowa beat Purdue in football by the odd score of 4-0. Afterward, Iowa coach Eddie Anderson joked, “We had them licked with that first safety, but we wanted to run up the score.”
Couples
• After getting divorced, children’s book author Lois Lowry dated a few men, including some who wanted to borrow money from her and some who turned out to be still married. But then a man who worked in an insurance office asked her out. On their date, he said to her, “You have good ideas, Cornelius. When I am king I will give you a green hat.” At first, Lois thought she was in the presence of a weirdo, but then the man explained that he was quoting Babar the Elephant, the hero of a popular series of children’s books. Lois thought that was interesting, she paid attention to him, and soon they were living their lives together.
• When Alexandra Danilova and George Balanchine were living together, Ms. Danilova loved to go shopping for hats. While shopping, she would try to find a hat that Mr. Balanchine would like, but he always said, “That’s awful—go and change it.” Finally, she thought, “To h*ll with him”—and she chose a hat she liked. When she returned home, Mr. Balanchine said, “How nice. It suits you.”
• For a while, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates dated Ann Winblad. Both were often in different cities due to business, so they went on “virtual movie dates.” Both would attend the same movie in different cities—at approximately the same time, and both would talk to each other about the movie on their cell phones on their way to and from the movie.
• Back when writer/actress Carrie Fisher was going with musician Paul Simon, they had a big fight one morning. Ms. Fisher had to travel, so Mr. Simon drove her to the airport. Ms. Fisher said to him, “You’ll feel bad if I crash.” Mr. Simon shrugged, and then he said, “Maybe not.”
Crime
• Sir Rudolf Bing, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, lived in New York City, and he experienced some of the same things that other New Yorkers experience. For example, he was held up in Central Park and robbed of his money and a watch. The watch was inexpensive—worth approximately $25—but he valued it because it was a British Army watch and a reminder of the time when he was a wartime fire warden. The newspapers reported the robbery, and the next day Zinka Milanov told him, “The general manager of the Metropolitan Opera does not carry a watch worth only $25.”
• Very early in his career, Russian bass Feodor Chaliapine traveled with a group of singers through Cossack country. Seeing heaps of watermelons piled along the road on a very hot day, they took advantage of the situation and helped themselves to the thirst-quenching melons. That night, however, they were awakened by gunfire. They then discovered that the men firing the weapons were Cossacks who had come to demand the payment of 20 kopeks per head for the theft of the watermelons. Mr. Chaliapine and the others paid, then continued their journey.
• Tom Waits’ ravaged voice reveals a life devoted to cigarettes and booze as well as singing and songwriting. Asked whether he does anything to protect his voice, he replied, “Protect it from what—vandals?”
Dance
• By the time of choreographer George Balanchine’s last bows on stage, he had grown frail and easily lost his balance. When he took a bow with the other members of the New York City Ballet, he whispered to ballerina Merrill Ashley as he took her hand, “I need to hold your hand. Don’t let go.” And when he later took a solo bow, he was discreetly holding onto the curtain to help him maintain his balance.