Dan Brooks

2/6/98

"Young Jacob Schreck’s Inheritance: A Brutal Piece for Bad People"

[Dan, center stage, old as hell.]

Sixty years in show business, Jacob – that’s how long I worked. Sixty years is a long time. You know where you were sixty years ago, Jacob? You were dead! You were worse than dead; you weren’t even born yet. When I was eating knish at the Friars Club with Zero Mostel you were a zygote. A little zygote. If you tried out for the zygote football team they would have made you the towel boy. During the games you would have had to hang out with the retarded kid’s zygote over by the ovaries. You had six cells, and four of them were for the nose. Mein gott, look at that thing. That shiksah mother of yours didn’t quite drive the Catskill Showensteins out of you, did she? I’m just kidding you, Jacob. You’ve got your father’s sense of humor.

For sixty years I worked with Hollywood people. No matter what anyone tells you, Jacob, remember one thing: Hollywood people are the greatest people in the world. Oh, the stories I could tell.

I remember this one time, me and Sammy Davis Jr. and a couple of other guys – I don’t know, Rudy Valentino or something – we were all at Clark Gable’s house shooting pool. The pool table was down in the basement. Clark had a beautiful basement, and he spent a lot of time down there on account of his wife would lock herself in the upstairs bedroom all day and eat valium and stare at this one checkered sweater she had that Clark got her for Christmas. Anyway, he had the whole thing decked out with the pool table and dart boards and a little bedroom and everything. He’d bring kids from the neighborhood down there all the time. He was a great humanitarian. The words "age of consent" meant nothing to Clark.

Anyway, one day we’re all down there shooting pool, like I said, and Clark’s son Scottie comes downstairs. Now Scottie was the joy of Clark’s life, but he was also his greatest source of personal pain. The kid just wasn’t right. You’d throw him a golf ball and it’d just bounce right off his head. Sometimes it’d hit him in the eye. He was autistic or something – I don’t know exactly, nobody ever really asked him. But there were only two things Clark Gable loved in life: a good joke and his son Scottie. So when we’re all sitting down there and Scottie bends over to pet the dog, Clark takes his pool cue and just hits Scottie as hard as he can right in the testicles. I thought the whole cue was going to snap in two. It was the funniest thing I had ever seen. And we’re all laughing so hard we’re trying not to pee on ourselves, and Scottie’s trying not to throw up, and then Clark…Clark walks over to the liquor cabinet, grabs a fifth of gin, drains the whole thing and throws up all over Scottie and everyone else. Perfect comic timing. I mean, say what you will about Jerry Lewis, Clark Gable was the king.

You know who else was funny, Jacob? Fatty Arbuckle. You probably talk about him at school. When Fatty got older, he had one of those tracheotomies – you know, where they cut a hole in your throat so you can breathe better? He had this because he’d been smoking since age six. Anyway, Fatty would be sitting there in his wheelchair at parties, just smoking a cigarette through this hole in his throat. And he also had one of those respirators – you know, with the oxygen tank? And Fatty would do this trick where he’d take the cigarette and wedge it into the hole in his throat so no air could get through, and then he’d close his mouth real tight and crank the valve on his oxygen tank, and the lit cigarrette would go shooting out of his throat all the way across the room. Funniest thing I’d ever seen. And most of the time there’d be this jet of oxygen coming out of his throat that would catch fire, so it’d just be this cigarrette followed by a stream of fire coming right out of Fatty’s neck. In those days make-up was still petroleum based, too, so it would always get a laugh. One time he burnt Bette Davis’s entire face clean off. She just kept shaking her head trying to put out the flames and when she stopped there was nothing there. It was like an Etch-a-Sketch.

I remember another time, Ginger Rogers was receiving the Legion of Honor medal from the Prime Minister of France. It was a big ceremony with a dinner before it and everything, and the whole French parliament was there along with a bunch of Ginger’s friends from Hollywood, and Ginger spent the whole time in the coatroom sucking off Lou Costello, who was fifteen years old at the time. Ginger Rogers was an incredibly warm human being, loved animals and the elderly, and also she was obsessed with oral sex. Anyway, she gets done with Lou just as the Prime Minister is announcing her, and she has to come out and give her acceptance speech but her mouth is full of Lou Costello’s semen. So what she does is, she goes to kiss the French Prime Minister and when she does she spits it into his mouth. He doesn’t know what it is or what’s going on, but she tells him it’s an American thing. And the Prime Minister doesn’t wanna be rude, so he turns to the chairman of parliament and kisses him and spits it in his mouth, and the Chairman does the same thing to the guy next to him, and so forth. So the entire French Parliament is passing around a warm mouthful of Lou Costello’s semen, and I’ll never forget what Ginger says to me. She says, "Mr. Schreck, can I trouble you for a glass of ice water?" The woman was pure class.

Now before you go to dinner, Jacob, I want to give you something. It’s your inheritance, and it’s also a magic trick. [Reach into pocket, as if grabbing quarter. Actually grab nothing, but reach out with hand as if about to pull quarter from invisible grandson’s ear.] What’s this behind your ear, Jacob? It’s nothing. And here’s a quarter. [Toss quarter into first row with left hand.] If you can learn that trick, it’ll be all you ever need.