At 72, She’s Now a Driving Force in Stand-Up Comedy

Betty Perry is the Valley’s answer to Milton Berle.

She’s never heard a joke she didn’t want to steal.

Perry, who lives in Encino, is, according to her business card, an actress-comedian-writer-producer-tank driver, although her tank driving days are now over.

Whereas many people work their way through college, Perry, who’s 72, says she’s working her way through old age doing comedy.

When asked why she has chosen comedy, she says because she doesn’t know how to type.

She is also, however, a natural healer, a spiritualist and the subject of much interest by the psychological community. “I may not have been a centerfold in a girlie magazine, but I have had a picture of my naked hand produced in the magazine Beyond Reality,” she says.

“Everyone is fascinated by the pictures taken of me using Kirlian photography,” Perry explains. Kirlian photography purports to show energy fields emanating from the body.

Even those who wouldn’t know a Kirlian photograph from a potato chip can see the energy field emanating from Perry. No special photography needed. This is a woman who keeps a manager, commercial agent, acting agent and print agent busy, keeping her busy and in work.

She says she has also written a book and has done about 100 other odd jobs.

Modesty probably prevented her from mentioning that she sky-dives when things get dull.

Little is known about Perry’s early years on a farm in western Illinois because that’s the way she likes it. When asked about it, she sputters in exasperation: “It’s too boring. I don’t want to go into that.”

Perry says her life really started when she was in her 60s and she first did stand-up comedy in a hotel just outside Denver. Asked how she got her start in comedy, she says she put together some material and got up on the nearest stage.

Asked why she would want to tackle a job as hard as stand-up, she answers, “because I’m funny.”

Of course.

What could we have been thinking of?

Another topic that bores her is her marriage to a military man and their different postings around the world with three children. Except when it comes to one of her favorite stories about driving a tank:

“I was working at a military installation in Tacoma issuing parts for combat equipment, when one of the men asked if I’d like to go for a tank ride,” she remembers. She agreed, then agreed again when he asked her if she’d like to take it herself for a little test drive.

“He got in a lot of hot water for that,” she says, adding that when called on the carpet by his superiors, he said she was the only person he ever took for a test drive who didn’t need driving instructions. “It was just like driving the Caterpillar I used to wheel around the farm,” she says.

Perry says she has given up her short career in tank driving to concentrate on comedy. “And a lot of my comedy’s none too clean,” she adds with a satisfied laugh.

When asked why she left Denver for Los Angeles, she says because this is where all the action is.

Show business is now her life.

It is suggested to her that 60-something may not have been the optimum age to get her break in Hollywood. She says, well, it is true she hasn’t done a lot of acting yet, but the commercials have come through.

Her first commercial was for a bank, and at the audition she was asked to improvise a couple of lines. The scene was that she was supposed to be in bed on her birthday when her husband brings her breakfast. She was told to take it from there.

She said the first thing that came into her head was, “Oh, I’m so happy you remembered to crack the eggs this year before you scrambled them.” Not a world-beater, but the patter was snappy enough to get her that job, and others followed.

She has appeared in commercials for Nestle’s tollhouse cookies, Mr. Coffee, the Dreyfus Fund and Little Caesar’s. The pizza ad ran in early 1993 and was set in a psychiatrist’s office during the wedding of two dogs.

She says she also won $3,459 as a contestant on America’s Funniest People, before that TV show was booted off the airwaves, and that she’s won other awards and contests in clubs all over Southern California.

Asked for the key to success in this field, she says, “I remember every joke I ever heard.”

“What I don’t do is sit around listening to my hair grow,” Perry says. “As I told a man at Universal who was interested in making a video with me, not all old people just drool on themselves, have memory loss and pass gas.”

She is currently up for a couple of commercials and is now planning her next stand-up appearance at the Calabasas Community Cabaret, Dec. 16 and 17 at 8 p.m. at Calabasas High School.

She says she will be doing about five minutes of clean stuff. Then adds, “For me that’s a stretch.”

Making Room for Baby, Even When Face Down

When Judy Leyton of Van Nuys was pregnant with twins eight years ago, the idea of sleeping on her stomach was only a dream that she’s since figured out how to make a reality.

What she’s come up with is a 4-foot-long foam pillow with a depression in the middle that she says lets pregnant moms sleep on their tummies through the ninth month.

When the baby is delivered and mom no longer needs the pillow, voila , and it becomes a neat and cozy little baby’s bed.

“After I had the twins, I became a massage therapist and had a lot of pregnant women as patients. They have found massage a good way to lessen upper and lower back pains, but it was awkward working on them because they had to lie on their side,” Leyton says.

Leyton gave the matter a lot of thought and consulted with her husband, David. The pair came up with a drawing of the pillow, had a prototype made and got a firm to produce it.

This fall, they started a mail-order business for the pillows, which sell for $159 and $199, depending on whether they are ordered in cotton or vinyl.

Leyton says the response to Prego Pillow has been good with the medical professions and with individual mothers-to-be. She says that, in addition to being pleased that she and her husband have created a business together, it makes her feel good when she sends each order out.

“I just wish it had been around when I was carrying Casey and Cory,” Leyton says. “I was huge.”

Overheard:

“Now that they’ve discovered the gene that causes fatness in human beings and obesity may go the way of whooping cough and measles, I’m going to put my customers into anything that makes chocolate anything.”

Young stock broker to another at El Torito in Woodland Hills.