So we hop in and Buddy drives

Around the time that Bonny Lee Bakley, Robert Blake’s wife, was found shot to death outside Vitello’s restaurant in Studio City, I got one of Buddy Hackett’s phone calls.

“Everything in her apartment was all packed, right?” he said. “When you pack what’s the last thing you do?”

I wasn’t sure. Lock the doors? Was this a setup for one of Hackett’s jokes? When he called, he often had a joke, but they tended to begin with a duck or a horse walking into a bar.

“You take out the garbage,” Hackett said. “Nobody would go out of the house and leave some trash in there. Chances are, wherever she went to put the garbage, there was the chance to find the clue. Or somebody whacked her right there.”

Hackett at this point was 76, five years removed from the night in Atlantic City when he told the audience, basically for the last time: “Thanks for tonight.” The official biographies say he was struck down by stage fright or performance anxiety -- an odd coda to a 50-some-year career that began in the Catskills when Hackett was just a teenager.

But comedians like Hackett, who died Monday, don’t stop needing an audience. When the paying customers aren’t there, it falls to their spouses, their kids, their friends, whomever, to listen.

Sometimes the whomever is a reporter. Two years ago I telephoned Hackett to interview him ahead of a screening of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” at the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro.

After the story ran he would call. Not often, but for a time regularly. We talked about the stray cat problem around my apartment building (Hackett and his wife, Sherry, were involved in animal rescues, having formed a charity called Singita). When Robert Blake was in the news I learned from Hackett that it wasn’t so unusual for a show business person to go out to dinner armed. So what if Blake had gone back into the restaurant to retrieve his gun? Hackett was speaking, it was clear, from experience.

And then one day I found myself driving to his house in Beverly Hills -- the one I had loved passing as a kid because it had a big elephant statue on its sloping front lawn.

We were going to visit the comedian Pat McCormick at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills. McCormick was one of those comedian’s comedians, a brilliant teller of filthy insult jokes. A big Irishman with ruddy cheeks, mustache and red hair, he wrote for “The Tonight Show” for many years. One night, legend has it, McCormick streaked the audience at the end of Johnny Carson’s monologue, running naked from the band side, stage left all the way to stage right.

Now McCormick, who had suffered a stroke, is in the show-biz convalescent home out in Woodland Hills, and Hackett would visit him occasionally.

He drove. He put on these black leather gloves he said were for his arthritis. He talked about that night in Atlantic City, the end of the road. “I got a big standing ovation, as usual, and my eyes filled with tears,” Hackett said. He still had dates to do in Chicago and Florida, but he never really performed again. Shortly after the Atlantic City date, he said, he was honored in New York by the Friars Club. Then he and his wife took a trip to Africa.

I asked Hackett who his friends were these days. “I have lunch a couple of times a week with Louis Nye,” he said. He mentioned Jan Murray, George Segal, the jazzman Jack Sheldon and a young comedian named Jeffrey Ross. Ross was a throwback in a young man’s body -- shticky, Friars Club-influenced.

I told Hackett I’d heard Ross on “The Howard Stern Show” that morning.

“Talk about me?” Hackett asked.

At the motion picture home, Hackett parked and popped the trunk. He and Louis Nye, he explained, usually had a little belt. Hackett poured two shots of whiskey into Styrofoam cups. It was one of those 90-degree days in the Valley. We drank.

Seeing McCormick now was inevitably sad: The great joke teller was still a bear of a man, his eyes were bright but he hardly spoke. He followed Hackett into the activities room, where a small crowd gathered. Jack Sheldon was also visiting; he played his trumpet for the residents. Suddenly it was a Vegas nightclub show: Jack Sheldon and the comedy of Buddy Hackett.

Hackett initially resisted when Sheldon gave him the floor.

“I’m not gonna tell you any naughty stories,” he told the room.

“Oh, tell one, Buddy, what the hell,” Sheldon said.

So he did. He told several, in fact. There was the horse that walked into a bar, the bartender asking, “Why the long face?” Another involved a doctor informing a patient he had a penis growing out of his forehead. And then there was the one about the reporter asking Neil Armstrong to explain his famous comment, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” upon landing on the moon.

“What does that mean?” the reporter asks.

“Actually,” Hackett-as-Armstrong replies, “my original thought was, ‘Go for it, Mrs. Berkowitz.’ ” From there, the joke switches locations to Newark, N.J., and the punch line finds its way to oral sex.

Laughter in an old-age home does not sound old.

Ringside in Vegas

Afterward, back in the car, Hackett said to me: “I’m gonna teach you how to enjoy the life you have now more. Some people are not lucky enough to have a place like that to go to. Some people live under bridges, culverts and stuff.... This place takes care of their own, you know?”

“You gave them $10,000, huh?” I said, repeating something he’d told me about a donation to the hospital.

“Well, we don’t put that in the paper, right?” Hackett said.

“Why not?”

“We don’t talk about money with me,” he said, getting agitated.

We stopped at a Greek restaurant on Ventura Boulevard. It was 2, 3 in the afternoon. The place was empty. At the bar, I tried to order a Diet Coke, but Hackett berated me into having a large beer.

He held court with the owner, an old acquaintance but on this day a new listener. Hackett said the director Steven Soderbergh had called; Soderbergh was remaking “Ocean’s Eleven” and wanted to fly Hackett to Las Vegas and sit ringside for a fight scene.

“Here’s what I will do,” Hackett said he told Soderbergh. He wanted to be seated next to a mother, a father and a child. In the scene, he wanted the child to ask him, “Hey, mister, why don’t they hit below the belt?” This would set up Hackett’s punch line, again unprintable here.

The restaurant owner said he understood Hackett no longer played Vegas. For decades, Hackett WAS Vegas. During the making of the Disney film “The Love Bug” in the 1960s, he did a late-late show at the Sahara Sundays at 3 a.m., flying back to L.A. at 7:30 a.m. to work on the movie.

“It ain’t the same, anyway,” Hackett said of Vegas. “Hey, if I was broke, I’d go. I’m broke I do anything. I would love to write a book, and then I’m thinking, what would I have to leave out?”

The restaurant owner said he wished Hackett came by more often. He offered to retrieve him, drive him back to the restaurant. “I haven’t seen your elephant for a long time,” the owner said. “I’ll come pick you up.”

“I got a better idea, just come to the house and hang out,” Hackett said.

Then he told another joke. It was a long joke, the longest one he’d told all day. It began with a guy asking for help with a recurring dream. To reprint the joke here is to botch it, for there is no way, truly, to hear Hackett -- or any master comic -- in print. I can tell you that the joke involves a truck driver, the rain, fear of death, a beautiful naked girl, a telephone, God, another beautiful naked girl, a country club and the words: “In dreams all things are possible,” repeated several times.

I can tell you that the punch line goes: “Your wife answered, said you were driving a truck to Cleveland.” I can report that Hackett got a big laugh. It was the laugh of three people, echoing through an empty Greek restaurant at 3 in the afternoon.