Infinite jest

For a large and enviable portion of his adult life, Rodney Dangerfield has worn a bathrobe and nothing else. By his wife’s estimation, Dangerfield has more than 20 of them, including certain favorites, and when comedian friends talk about Dangerfield their anecdotes invariably include the detail that Rodney was backstage or in his trailer or strolling through a hotel lobby or out on the street practically naked, except for the robe.

Every now and then, however, Dangerfield gets dressed, and even less occasionally he gets dressed and leaves his high-rise Westside condominium. This was the case Tuesday, when the comedian attended the “premiere” of “The 4th Tenor,” his new movie, and celebrated his 81st birthday with a party at Westwood’s Napa Valley Grille. There were a few hundred people on hand, some of whom Dangerfield knew. His wife, Joan, had arranged the whole thing, and Rodney, in a gesture of solidarity, wore pants.

“The 4th Tenor” is the sixth in a series of what might be called the Rodney Dangerfield Movies. They are all post-”Caddyshack,” post-no-respect, and they all star Dangerfield as either a schnook with a heart of gold or the crazy rich guy who can party like a rock star -- including “Easy Money” in 1983 (schnook), “Back to School” in 1986 (crazy rich guy), and “Ladybugs” in 1992 (schnook).

Except the movies have kept coming where others might have stopped, and so has the joke-writing. For Dangerfield, the yen to tell the world that he’s around, and still getting no respect, hasn’t much abated, even if doctors, and Hollywood, are telling him otherwise.

It was sometime after “Meet Wally Sparks,” in 1997, or maybe “My 5 Wives,” which came out briefly in 2000, that Dangerfield began having to finance the Rodney Dangerfield Movies himself.

In “The 4th Tenor,” which opens today in one theater in Los Angeles and one in New York, Dangerfield plays Lupo, the love-struck proprietor of an Italian restaurant with singing waiters, who falls in love with his star soprano (played by Annabelle Gurwitch, formerly of the TBS film series “Dinner and a Movie”). “The 4th Tenor” has no domestic theatrical distribution, though Warner Bros. bought the rights to domestic home video, pay-per-view, and video on demand. The film was co-written and directed by Harry Basil, a comic who has been opening for Dangerfield on the road for years, and it was produced by Dangerfield and Joseph Merhi. Merhi is a 48-year-old Lebanese-born producer who knows his way around selling titles straight to video or overseas, having produced more than 90 movies, including “Fist of Honor,” “Night of the Wilding” and “Cellblock Sisters: Banished Behind Bars.”

“Actually, as early as this morning, Romania, of all places, they called and we’re closing a deal,” Merhi said on the phone last week, talking about how “The 4th Tenor” was pre-selling and would make back the roughly $4-million budget. He added that the White House had inquired about screening the movie on Air Force One, though several calls to the White House could not confirm this.

Like others, Merhi fell in love with the octogenarian comedian’s gotta-keep-working chutzpah, his “graciousness.” They had never met before Merhi received a call from his tennis partner, Dick Van Patten.

“Dick Van Patten, the actor, called me one day and said he was speaking to Rodney, and Rodney has a dream of making this movie.... Rodney delivered the script personally to my house.”

Van Patten, the accidental broker of “The 4th Tenor,” attended the movie’s Westwood premiere and birthday party. He seemed as stunned as anybody that he’d played a role in getting the film made. He and Dangerfield weren’t social friends, Van Patten said; in fact, they didn’t really speak, but one day Rodney called him, saying that he knew Van Patten was well-liked around town, and very connected, and could he find him a producer? Van Patten thought about it for a few minutes and came up with Joe Merhi.

“Rodney bought me a Chrysler convertible,” Van Patten said.

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Do-it-yourself Rodney

“I guess I finance them by myself, mostly,” Dangerfield said earlier this month, sitting on a sofa in his ornately appointed living room. He was referring to “The 4th Tenor” and “Back by Midnight,” another movie in the can, produced with Merhi, in which Dangerfield plays a prison warden. “That’s why I’m broke,” Dangerfield joked. “People think I’m dumb. Bums tell me they’ll pay me back.” He paused. “It’s a funny line, I think, you know?”

He was wearing a robe festooned with playing cards. The robe was open wide at the chest, displaying the scar from double bypass heart surgery in 2000. Dangerfield said that if he didn’t work he would be bored out of his mind, and to that end he tried to remember all of his plugs: the movie, the Web site (www.rodney.com), a new line of wine, called Rodney’s Red, and slot machines in Las Vegas that tell one of his jokes when you pull the handle. He is also putting together a memoir, tentatively titled “It Ain’t Easy Being Me: Rodney Reveals His Bouts With Depression, His Love for Swiss Cheese, Lions and His Lifelong Romance With Marijuana.”

“I’m trying to think of any other ventures,” he said. “Well, I do commercials, you know? In fact, I got a commercial running this week -- Glad Bags, you know?” Though he continues to put out products, Dangerfield shares a kinship with Johnny Carson, whom Dangerfield regularly slayed during appearances on “The Tonight Show” (“Hey, I tell you, when I was a kid I went through plenty. My uncle’s dying wish -- he wanted me on his lap. He was in the electric chair!”)

Today Dangerfield and Carson, for all their differences, are similarly reclusive. “What is anybody gonna tell Carson that he doesn’t know?” Dangerfield said. “You know what I mean? He don’t need anybody. He’s self-contained. If he left his house, where’s he gonna go?” According to his wife, Dangerfield’s heart troubles persist. He can no longer drink, because alcohol interferes with his various medications. Ever the warhorse, Dangerfield will appear on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” tonight, his birthday. This was where he was a year ago, on his 80th, when Dangerfield suffered a mild heart attack backstage. Admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, he smoked some pot in his room and ran afoul of the staff. Dangerfield’s world, already fairly closed, continues to shrink by degrees. Joe Ancis, an old New York friend whom Dangerfield took in for 18 years, and a man Dangerfield calls “the funniest guy I know,” died recently. Two grown kids from Dangerfield’s first marriage are on the East Coast.

In L.A. Rodney and Joan Dangerfield, ensconced in their 21st floor condo, don’t go out much. They stay up all night, going to bed around 4 or 5 in the morning, Joan said. It’s an old habit from Dangerfield’s late nights of performing. (Indeed, he briefly nodded off while his ‘80s comic rap song, “Rappin’ Rodney” played in the background). In the wee hours, Joan Dangerfield said, she and Rodney do miscellaneous things. They look at the computer. She’ll go on www.google.com and search her husband’s name. “I’ll check to see how many times Rodney’s name was mentioned in the news today,” she said -- as in who was described as the “Rodney Dangerfield of .... “

They met over a decade ago, Joan Dangerfield said, when Rodney was at the Pritikin Center on Santa Monica beach, and she was running a flower shop at the Santa Monica Place Mall. Dangerfield kept coming into the shop, and “gradually, I started looking forward to his visits,” she said. She is from Ogden, Utah, and 30 years younger than her husband. They dated for 10 years, during which Dangerfield was living at the Beverly Hilton, and then got married in 1993, on a whim, in Las Vegas. After the wedding, the couple had dinner and Rodney played craps, and that same night they came home.

She mothers him, she admits, in addition to managing his affairs. “A typical day?” Rodney Dangerfield said. “Well, I read poetry a lot.” He chuckled, because he doesn’t.

Dangerfield says he’s tried psychiatrists. “It’s difficult for me. I can’t buy their antics, or whatever it is. I’ve had a lot of discussions with psychiatrists. It never really did anything.” What would make him feel better? “A couple of drinks,” he said ruefully, “a couple of joints.”

In addition to the robes, marijuana comes up often in the anecdotes comedians tell about him. His appetites are part of his legend. But beyond this good-natured admiration is a reverence. For comedians, the arc of Dangerfield’s career symbolizes the business and all its heartache, possibilities and glory. He was born Jacob Cohen in Babylon, N.Y. He began writing jokes at 15. He performed stand-up for a decade under the name Jack Roy. He quit comedy at 28 and sold aluminum siding and worked the construction business for another decade-plus, a married man with a wife and kids in New Jersey, before coming back to stand-up in his 40s, re-christened Rodney Dangerfield, big-eyed and sweaty-browed, in jacket and tie. He got no respect, no respect at all.

“I tell you, since I was a kid, women always gave me a hard time. My mother never breast-fed me. She told me she liked me as a friend.

“My old man didn’t help, either. One time I was kidnapped. They sent back a piece of my finger. He said he wanted more proof.”

In the Washington Post, Dangerfield once recalled what Jack Benny told him: “Rodney, I’m cheap and I’m 39, that’s my image, but your ‘no respect,’ that’s into the soul of everybody, everybody can identify with that.”

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Fashionably late

“The 4th Tenor” had a 7 p.m. red-carpet call, and by 7:20 Dangerfield had yet to show up. The celebrities in attendance -- actor Gary Busey, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and six blonds -- had already walked the red carpet, which was about 15 cameras shy of a media gantlet.

“Is he late or is he having open-heart surgery?” comedian Bob Saget said, standing with a few stragglers outside. Dangerfield had put Saget in one of his young comedian cable specials back in the day. The list of comedians Dangerfield has helped and/or influenced is long and luminous. But it most famously includes Jim Carrey and the late Sam Kinison.

Finally, a limo pulled up, and out stepped Joan and Rodney Dangerfield. Trailing him was the veteran film and television producer David Permut, who was shooting footage for what he hopes will be a movie. Permut met Dangerfield in a Las Vegas steam room and has been collecting video string on the comedian for some 10 years.

Joan Dangerfield had planned the premiere/birthday party. The sidewalk string music. The girls in Italian peasant outfits, stomping grapes outside the theater. The flashing ice cubes in the glasses of Rodney’s Red served at the Napa Valley Grille. When the screening ended, Dangerfield sat in a seat in the last row of the theater, shaking hands and receiving accolades. Most everyone said the film was “cute,” which pleased him, but this might have been the most difficult part of the night, all that physical contact with his fellow human beings.

He seemed more comfortable later, at the Napa Valley Grille, as he dug into a plate of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, the party loud and happening around him. “Oh, look how cute he is!” exclaimed former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Molly Shannon. She had been in “My 5 Wives” (Rodney as a real estate king/polygamist) and went to give Dangerfield a big hello. Seated at the comedian’s table were Joan, Brad Garrett, of the CBS sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” Garrett’s wife, and a woman who Joan Dangerfield later said had finagled a place at the table, even though nobody knew who she was.

Garrett, by contrast, was Dangerfield’s invited guest. A former stand-up, Garrett said Dangerfield gave him the courage to go onstage and tell jokes about being “a 6-foot-9-inch geek” and “a Jew who couldn’t play ball.” He didn’t know Dangerfield personally, but he had come to pay his respects.

So, in a way, had everybody, even the hangers-on -- the friends of friends of someone connected to “The 4th Tenor” -- who were now eating crab and drinking booze, too young to care who Dangerfield was but nevertheless enjoying themselves on his dime.