Leaving Las Vegas

His wife, Marie, is still emptying boxes from their move to Palm Springs over the summer--they sold their big home in Hancock Park. Shecky Greene, who didn’t lift a hand when he was riding high as a nightclub comic, is helping her with the heavy ones until the heat gets to him and he throws up.

“You’ve become so nice,” Marie says.

Wearing shorts and a “Shecky superhero” T-shirt, Greene slouches into a chair in the den of the expansive condo. His brown hair, graying, flops over his forehead. Glasses dangle on his nose.

“It’s something I wanted many, many years--to get out of show business,” he says. “I didn’t have the guts because of the money. I don’t even want to know how many millions I made. I was supporting a lot of people. One wife got that, the other wife got this, and this wife will get the furniture here.”

He smiles and breaks into an impromptu song with a familiar melody, pure Shecky:

The money that I had

I gave it away, I feel sad.

I’d never do that again;

I’d save all the money from the Riviera

and also from the MGM.

I’d walk down the avenue,

there goes a wealthy Jew....

Greene spends his days playing golf, hitting a racing parlor in nearby Indio to place a few bets on the horses, reading and watching television. “I’m like all the rest of them here,” he says, “waiting to die.”

But as he talks about his wild years, as he stands up and moves around--restlessly, rocking occasionally on his heels--you can sense the feral energy that used to drive him. Short and stocky, he’s in good shape at 78. His voice gets a little louder. The impressions and one-liners flow. He’s got an audience, so Shecky Greene is “on,” riffing on anything and everything, even the drinking and brawling, the depression and panic attacks, and the moment he knew he’d never work in Las Vegas again.

Tony Zoppi spent a lifetime in show business and was for 22 years the entertainment director of the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas. Who’s the funniest man he ever met? “Shecky Greene,” he answers immediately. “He’s a great improviser. He’ll walk out on a stage and do an hour off the top of his head. He’s got such a great mind. A waitress dropped a glass--he did 15 minutes. When Bob Hope came to town, he always wanted to go see Shecky. He literally saved the Riviera. He packed that lounge every night. It was a late crowd, the tried-and-true gamblers.”

Ralph Young of the erstwhile singing duo Sandler & Young is one of Greene’s best and oldest friends. “Off the cuff,” Young says, “he was funnier than anybody with written material. To this day, I’m in awe of him.” They now live within a few blocks of each other in the Canyon Country Club area of Palm Springs and frequently lunch in the clubhouse, where the mah-jongg-playing grandmothers coo and kvell over Greene as he sweet-talks them and belts impromptu jingles.

His first gig in Las Vegas was in 1953. Fred Sheldon Greenfield (he finally made the name change to Shecky Greene legal last year) had grown up on the north side of Chicago, served in the Navy during World War II and enrolled at a junior college to become a gym teacher, but he also had been picking up spare money by playing resorts and small clubs around the upper Midwest. He quit school after he got a call to fill in for two weeks at the Prevue Lounge in New Orleans and stayed six years, until it burned down. From there he went on to showrooms in Miami, Chicago and Reno/Lake Tahoe before an agent persuaded him to move to Las Vegas and open for Dorothy Shay, “the Park Avenue Hillbillie,” at the Last Frontier. His act was held over for 18 weeks, a first for the Strip.

On April 23, 1956, he was booked at the New Frontier on a bill topped by the Freddy Martin orchestra. He drove up and saw a 75-foot cutout of Elvis Presley in front of the hotel. “I didn’t even know who Elvis Presley was,” he says. “The kid should never have been in there. He came out in a baseball jacket. Four or five musicians behind him had baseball jackets on. It looked like a picnic. After the first show they switched the billing, and I headlined.”

For the next three decades Shecky Greene was the king of comedy on the Strip, the prototypal lure for high rollers, a real meshugener (Yiddish for “crazy one”) both on and off the stage. He was physical. He was smart. He was quick. He was talented, as a singer and mimic and impressionist in any dialect. And it all came off the top of his head.

When astronauts walked on the lunar surface, Greene riffed about “caca on the moon,” impudently wondering if they’d left behind traces of their visit--and then, speaking “Russian,” played a Soviet cosmonaut traipsing gingerly through the same landscape. Called “a whole repertory company,” he might run through impersonations of Dean Martin and Al Jolson, the lisping dialogue of Truman Capote and the halting joke-telling of George Burns. He bounced ballet-like in a mock pas de deux through his version of “Swamp Lake.” And a touching tenor rendition of “My Funny Valentine” veered into extra lyrics about the gangland massacre on that date in Cicero, Ill., and a plaintive “Thank God, each day ain’t Valentine’s Day.”

“Shecky was a breakout performer,” says John L. Smith, a longtime Las Vegas newspaper columnist. “Don Rickles is great, but only makes a pretense of being dirty and tough. Shecky was flat-out funny and gave the Strip an edge it wasn’t used to.”

By the ‘60s, his name was known far beyond Nevada. A thoroughbred horse named Shecky Greene was the frontrunner for nearly seven furlongs in the 1973 Kentucky Derby until the legendary Secretariat ran off with the race. (Young says Greene jokes that he’s played the ponies since his father took him to the track when he was 10 years old, picked up a horse dropping and said, “This is the reason you’re not going to college.”) Arlington Park in Illinois still runs a Shecky Greene Handicap.

When the MGM Grand Hotel opened in 1975, starring Dean Martin, the second headline act was Shecky Greene, whose salary at one point climbed to $150,000 a week ($125,000 went to “my bookmaker,” Greene cracks). He was in rarefied company. The only other stand-up comics pulling down six figures at the time were Rickles, Buddy Hackett, Bill Cosby and Johnny Carson.

Greene played Carnegie Hall and appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” (which he hated--”they’d rush you on and off”). He played Pvt. Braddock for a year on “Combat!” and guested on “The Joey Bishop Show,” “The Love Boat” and “The A-Team.” He was a guest host on “The Tonight Show” and “The Merv Griffin Show” and brags that he gave Arnold Schwarzenegger and Luciano Pavarotti their first national television exposure. He was recruited for Broadway shows but turned them down. “They wanted me to play Tevye at Caesars Palace,” he says. “I did a big portion of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ in my act, but people didn’t realize I was making up everything. They’d go see it on Broadway and come back and tell me, ‘That wasn’t in the show. They must have left it out.’ ” He did a couple of movies, but Greene was a freewheeler, uncomfortable when limited to a script. He was at his best in a Las Vegas lounge, where he wasn’t limited to anything.

“He was brilliant, and he was also nutsy at that time,” says pianist Bill Marx (the son of Harpo), who first worked with Greene at Harveys Wagon Wheel in South Lake Tahoe in 1963.

Was he enjoying himself? “Was Napoleon happy?” Greene answers. “Yeah, it was madness.”

Greene’s unbridled act carried over offstage into booze blackouts and brawling. “I started drinking and gambling really badly,” he admits.

His capers have become legends, some true, some apocryphal. Like the one about his driving his car into the fountain at Caesars Palace. When the cops arrived, the windshield wipers were going. Greene rolled down the window and said, “No spray wax.”

“I had a bad habit when I got drunk, and I think it must have been a death wish: to get in my car and just drive,” Greene says. “One night I drove 90 miles an hour down the Strip--which you couldn’t do now, crowded as the Strip is--and I hit this breakaway lamp at the entrance to Caesars. It went shearing across Las Vegas Boulevard, and I went right over the curb and into the water. The cops came, and I went. I told Buddy Hackett about it. He gave me the line about the spray wax, and I put it in my act.”

Greene says that Jay Leno once told him that his all-time favorite joke is one Greene recounted about Frank Sinatra saving his life. Five guys were beating up Greene, and then he heard Sinatra say, “OK. He’s had enough.”

“This joke really happened,” Greene says. “It was in the lobby of the Fontainebleau hotel [in Miami]. A guy named Fischetti”--of the Chicago mob family--”I split his nose open. Then a couple of security guards went after me. Frank wasn’t really there. We had a love-hate relationship.” So who called the assailants off? “Jilly Rizzo”--Sinatra’s longtime friend--”came running in. I think it was planned that way. He didn’t come too early.”

Suddenly serious, Greene muses, “That’s a helluva thing, after a 60-year career, being known for two things, the Sinatra joke and driving into the fountain.”

A pivotal point was the night in the late ‘70s when he went to see Eddie Fisher perform at the Frontier. When Fisher forgot the lyrics, Shecky screamed the words from the audience. “I ordered a drink,” he says, “and the minute I did I knew it was death. I had a bottle of Courvoisier in front of me. I don’t remember anything after that. I know I got up on the stage. It was one of the worst nights of my life. I remember waking up and looking out my window and I see them taking down the letters off the Riviera marquee. First came ‘S,’ and then ‘H’ and ‘E’--my name was removed and all my clothes were outside the hotel. Harvey Silberg, who ran the Riviera and always saved my [butt], called and said, ‘Look what you’re doing to me.’ I said, ‘Harvey, I’m a sick man. I need help.’ And I did. Las Vegas was really the making of me and the breaking of me.”

Greene’s personal and professional troubles accumulated. He lost his voice after throat surgery and couldn’t perform for a year. He had to scramble for dates in other venues around the country, such as the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island, Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco, Kutsher’s Hotel in the Catskills. Then the Tropicana, which had once given him five points in the hotel because he was such a great draw, beckoned him back for a sentimental return engagement the night before New Year’s Eve 1999.

At rehearsal that afternoon, Greene asked, “Where’s the orchestra?” The hotel’s entertainment director shrugged and said: “Oh, there is no orchestra.” Across the street, Greene pointed out, Barbra Streisand had 31 pieces, and Bette Midler had 35. Even in the Tropicana lounge, he used to have a four-piece band. “C’mon,” he said to Bill Marx, his piano player. “We’re getting out of here.” They went to a music store and bought a tape of a John Philip Sousa march.

When they made their entrance for the 9 p.m. show, Marx’s jacket was slung over one shoulder, hiding his arm--which was holding a blaring tape recorder. “This,” Greene announced, “is my orchestra. And here’s my one-arm piano player.”

“And then he went out there,” Marx says, “and wowed them.”

Later Greene marched into the Tropicana coffee shop, where the walls were decorated with embossed portrait plates of every prominent entertainer who had played the hotel, and took his plate off the wall. “I don’t want anybody to know I ever worked this joint,” he said.

Greene’s contract called for him to continue his act after the holidays. He flew off to Canada to shoot a TV movie with Rita Rudner, caught a cold that delayed his return and received a letter from the Tropicana canceling his appearance.

“That was the end,” Greene says. “I said I never would work Las Vegas again.”

Greene’s private life was as hectic as his act. He went through two bad marriages--they still provoke bitterness, always accompanied by a zinger--before Marie Musso came into his life. Tall, blond and friendly, she wasn’t awed by his celebrity. She wasn’t in the business, but her father was. Vito Musso, a prominent Las Vegas musician, had played saxophone with Benny Goodman and had roomed with Frank Sinatra on tour with the Tommy Dorsey band. Marie grew up seeing the crooner around.

“Shecky knew my parents,” she says, “and my mother kept telling me there’s a guy I should meet. That was way back in the ‘70s, and we did get together, but Shecky was drinking then, and I didn’t know how to handle that. We both got married to other people. After he left his second wife, he kept calling my parents to find out where I was. We’ve been together 24 years.”

The drinking stopped--Greene insists he hasn’t tasted a drop in three decades--but it was supplanted by a new problem. “I had never seen a panic attack before,” Marie says. “Pretty brutal. He reacted like a heart attack. He was so frightened, he was afraid to drive a car or go anywhere.”

Greene went to psychiatrists around the country. “The guy at Mayo,” he scoffs, “told me he’d teach me to drive a car again.” He tried a cornucopia of antidepressants, including lithium, and had to be weaned off one prescription sedative to which he’d become addicted.

“He had seven or eight years that were really bad,” says Marie, “before I found a doctor in Los Angeles who put him on a drug that helped--Zoloft.”

Greene found a new venue for his stream-of-consciousness monologues in Beverly Hills, where he made a daily lunchtime routine of meeting cronies such as double-talking Norm Crosby at the Caffe Roma and working the room, table by table. That satisfied his urge to entertain, but didn’t allay the pressure of performing onstage. “Ballplayers who think about their salaries when they go out on the field,” Greene says, “they never catch the ball. That’s what used to happen to me onstage. ‘Am I delivering? Am I bringing in people?’ It would drive you crazy.”

He became acutely aware of his transition from eager “tummler” who dominated audiences to self-doubting performer when he did a tour of Florida resorts four years ago. “One night onstage,” he recalls, “I found myself saying, ‘What am I doing here?’ I always had this strange feeling that somebody was going to find me out. ‘How did this [guy] get in this business?’ The only time I enjoyed it was when I was pleasing that audience. As soon as I left the stage, I’d go into a terrible depression.

“It’s something that ran in my family. My family was so depressed that on Friday night, Shabbos dinner, everybody ate with their heads down. My uncle had a breakdown, my mother had a breakdown. ‘What are you gonna do next year?’ ‘We’ll have a breakdown.’ And they didn’t have the pills they have today, which saved my life.

“My mother’s sister had a complete breakdown. When people would come over to her house, she’d go in the closet. We used to knock on the closet door”--his voice rises a couple of decibels--” ’Aunt Irene, hi. We love you!’ The people she loved, she knocked back. A lot of people didn’t get knocks. My grandmother used to say, ‘Good she’s in there. She can hand you your coat.’

“My mother, I just saw her fall apart. . . . Finally I put her in a nursing facility I bought into right around the corner from my house in Las Vegas. Every time I went there, it tore my heart out. Her head was down. I brought Buddy Hackett one day. He said”--he imitates Hackett’s side-mouthed lisp--” ’Hiya, Bess.’ She woke up and looked around and said, ‘Buddy!’ She never did that for me.”

Ten years ago, Greene came out of the mental illness closet and admitted publicly that he suffered from manic depression, diagnosed as bipolar disorder, controlled by the medication that he still takes. He started performing again, on the borscht circuit in the Catskills, on television in “Northern Exposure,” “Roseanne” and “Mad About You.”

“But I didn’t like it anymore,” he says. “I’d rather go to a racetrack. Buddy [Hackett] would say to me, ‘You know, Sheldon, you don’t give a . . . . ‘ And I really didn’t.”

Occasionally, he’s lured by aficionados of his humor to entertain at private parties--in Houston, where an oilman was celebrating his divorce; in Anaheim, to toast the sale of a business to Japanese investors; and at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, where a grandson ponied up $25,000 to bring in his grandfather’s favorite comedian for an 80th birthday fete. But Greene considers himself out of circulation: “I don’t do shows anymore.”

Is he a happy man now, essentially retired?

“Yes,” Marie answers. “He’s much calmer now. I think he would like to perform, because he’s bored doing nothing--his mind is so quick. But he starts to get nervous when he thinks about going back to work. When he’s got money on the line, there’s pressure.”

Could he still perform?

“Oh, yeah,” Greene says. “I do it all the time.”