Comedians: Alone on the Telephone

In Shelley Berman’s closet, a dozen $325 suits hang in a row, the right sleeve of each bent at the elbow, recalling a cocked arm holding a telephone. Short of a medieval armorer, no tailor could keep a jacket from taking on the prime characteristic of its owner, the comedian who has risen to fame by talking to imaginary people on imaginary telephones.

Ordering new clothes in $1,000 lots, Berman fights the problem with money. His nightclub dates, his cross-country tours of one-night stands, and his three long-playing, long-talking records, which have sold over $1,000,000 worth of copies, round out an income of $500,000 a year. Currently playing (at close to $10,000 a week) the enormous Empire Room at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria, where a joke can get lost as easily as a cough in a wind tunnel, he is financially the most successful of the New Comedians.

Everymanic-Depressive. Herman’s material is a hill of minutiae. He climbs it slowly each evening, then skis down the other side in long set pieces, some of which have become so familiar that he jokes about how the lips of his audience move with him as he goes along. He finds comedy in everyday trials—a frustrating conversation with a child who keeps hanging up the phone, a speck of dirt in a glass of milk, TV commercials, a dentist ominously taking X rays. Perhaps best known is his airline routine (“Coffee, tea or milk?” chirps the stewardess, although the wing is on fire); because of the recent disasters, the sketch has been retired, but many airlines still use the record during stewardess training. Berman builds his long routines forward and backward from initial jokes, as in his newest piece, which grew around a forlorn conventioner who is afraid that if he loses his name badge, no one will talk to him.

Beneath Berman’s gentle, familial humor and his brilliantly controlled voice, there is the constant hint of tension. Like a sort of Everymanic-depressive, Berman offstage—and sometimes even Berman onstage—rapidly moves from patience to anger, from caution to bravado, from hilarity to gloom. Every line of his rough-weathered face (“Isn’t it awful,” he says, “to be 34 and look 90?”) is on the defensive. He blinks, cracks his knuckles and pulls his hair as he chases worries across his mind: Will the talking records choke off his popularity in clubs? Should he order his next suit with two jacket buttons or one? Onstage he tries his best to ignore the occasional hecklers, but they get under his skin like West Indian chiggers. “I know I’m doing things I shouldn’t,” he says gloomily, “and not doing things I should; but I don’t know what they are.”

Autobiographical Confessions. Even in his past, there is a lot to fret about. He describes his early self as “show-off,” “smart aleck,” “clod” and “wisecracking punk,” worriedly says, “I’m sure my friends thought I was a pansy. I sculpted in wood and wrote short stories.”

Many of his monologues are autobiographical “confessions.” During Prohibition, on Chicago’s West Side, he recalls tearfully, his Russian-born grandmother made bathtub gin to support the family, and one of Sheldon Berman’s first memories is of being held by his mother (now dead) in a tight clutch of terror while police raided their home. His father Nathan was a tavern owner, and he appears, in one of Berman’s best routines, as a militantly bourgeois delicatessen keeper who rough-talkingly tenders a chunk of his life savings so that his son can go to acting school; the sketch ends with the father’s soft-spoken request to the newborn star not to change his name. Berman actually went to Chicago’s Goodman Theater acting school—and did not change his name. Nathan Berman now drives a truck in Chicago (as does Shelley’s brother Ronald in Los Angeles), although Shelley sends him enough money “to live like any other rich comedian’s father.”

Insecurity Forever. At acting school and later in stock, Berman appeared in everything from Shakespeare to Chekhov to Charley’s Aunt. Classmate Geraldine Page remembers Shelley’s “potent personality, which sometimes bent the plays out of focus.” As the clerk in Saint Joan, “he was so startlingly effective you thought it became almost a play about him.”

In 1947 he married Sarah Herman, another acting-school classmate. Failing to get work in the theater, they lived on unemployment insurance and on his odd jobs—social director at a Florida hotel, Arthur Murray dance instructor, Los Angeles cabbie (three rear-end collisions in four weeks). What started the Berman spiral upward was a job with Chicago’s talented, improvising Compass Players (TIME, March 21), where, alongside his friends Mike Nichols and Elaine May, he developed his own style of comedy and began to grow into a great performer. He loathes being compared to other comedians, particularly the “sick” ones. Says he of the sickest of them all: “I don’t dislike him, but people needed Lenny Bruce for the same reason they needed Hitler.”

Childless, Berman and his wife now move in the center of a large professional family that includes three types of manager, a lawyer, an advance man, two secretaries, two flacks and a valet (to try to keep those sleeves straight). Although awed by his income, what he really wants is to be an actor, and he vows he will yet conquer Broadway. “My insecurity goes on and on and on,” he says. “If 5,000 people were laughing and one didn’t like me, it would bother me. And I can’t relax. If I knock off, I think the world is rolling on and I’m not in it. I feel guilty.”