Pubdate: Wed, 19 May 2004
Source: Rolling Stone (US)
Copyright: 2004 Straight Arrow Publishers Company, L.P.
Contact:  http://www.rollingstone.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/373
Author: Erik Hedegaard

GONE TO POT

Rodney Dangerfield Finally Gets a Little Respect

You may be wondering what Rodney Dangerfield, at the age of eighty-two, 
after nearly a lifetime in the business of making other people laugh, is up 
to these days. Mainly, he's bathrobed and hanging out in his airy, 
ultradeluxe twenty-first-floor apartment in Los Angeles, smoking pot. He 
watches a lot of TV, too -- Jerry Springer, Bill O'Reilly, Greta Van 
Susteren, boxing, football. He goes to bed around 4 a.m. and typically 
rises noonish. He might start the day with a bowl of Total cereal or he 
might just eat an egg, because, he says, "If I want an egg, I can have an 
egg." A joint might follow breakfast, depending on the vagaries of blood 
pressure, residual pain from surgeries and overall general mood. Today, 
when I drop in on him for a brief visit to celebrate the publication of his 
autobiography (It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty 
of Sex and Drugs), it's actually kind of hard to get a fix on the mood he's 
in. His wife of ten years, Joan Child, 50, blond, buxom, long-legged and 
totally hot, hovers nearby, a lively, sparkling presence. But Rodney 
himself sits at a marble table and basically just sits there, lost in 
thought. His bathrobe, blue in color and materially thin, is spread open to 
the waist, revealing a substantial and surprisingly hairless stomach.

"So, this is Rodney central, where it all happens," I say, jauntily.

Rodney shifts in his chair and says, "I don't know what happens here. Just 
a lot of boring stuff."

His voice sounds tired, like maybe he's aged some since his wiseacre 
Caddyshack and Back to School days.

"That's a nice scar you have on your tummy," I say.

"A lot of big operations," Rodney says.

Right around then, Joan takes me on a quick tour of the environs, which 
includes the kitchen (spotless, foodless), the bathroom (abnormally high 
countertops, Rodney's preference), a closet with no doors ("Rodney doesn't 
like doors on closets; I don't know why"), a gargantuan steam room ("Rodney 
likes to stretch in there") and a wide hallway featuring lots of pictures 
of Rodney with celebrities (Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Elvis).

"Yes, this is the memorabilia room," Joan says. "See that picture? That's a 
picture of Rodney and his lions. He has a love of lions. That one next to 
him is named after him. Rodney Jr. He was rejected by his mother and lives 
at the MGM habitat. Notice how brave Rodney is? That's no small cat!"

Back at the table, Rodney lifts his big head and says, "You want to smoke a 
little shit? I don't know how good this is. I just got it. Decent shit 
costs you a minimum of $500 an ounce. As a kid I bought pot for $25 an 
ounce. An ounce! Oh, everything's insane. Oh, everything's wild!"

He hands me a joint, fires it up, then fires one up for himself. He says 
he's been getting high since he was twenty-one. He says he once got stoned 
at the White House, during the Reagan years. He says that about two years 
ago, during a heart-attack scare, after being wheeled into the 
intensive-care unit at an L.A. hospital, he lit up a joint in the bathroom 
and caught holy hell for it. He says that the only days he isn't smoking 
pot are the days when he's in surgery or similarly indisposed; most 
recently, he went under the knife to have the superficial temporal artery 
near his left ear inserted into the middle cerebral artery of his Rodney 
brain, in a high-risk, high-cost, no-laughs procedure known as an 
extracranial-intracranial brain bypass. "The surgeon who did that one calls 
Rodney his Picasso," says Joan. Joan also says that she's a good Mormon and 
never gets high with her pothead husband. Rodney says that he's a legal 
pothead these days, having received doctor's orders to smoke the stuff, 
mostly to control his high blood pressure.

Between puffs, Rodney asks Joan to put on the CD titled Romeo Rodney. It'll 
hit stores one of these days and features Rodney belting out love songs, 
singing only as Rodney can, in that distinctive, wackadoodle voice of his. 
First we listen to a quite lovely rendition of "Strangers in the Night," 
remarkably melodious, with Rodney and Joan gazing at each other across the 
table. Next is a much brassier number called "I Spent My Birthday in Las 
Vegas," and Rodney in the flesh sings along with it, his clouded, baggy 
eyes suddenly lighting up like a pinball machine about to tilt.

"The playground of the world, that's Las Vegas," he sings swimmingly. "Yeah 
- -- I had the best time in Las Vegas, even though my wife and her mother 
were there!"

That's a pretty good punch line, and it gets a pretty good laugh from Joan. 
Meanwhile, I'm tapping my foot and sucking away on the reefer.

"Do you feel it?" Rodney says.

"Not yet," I say. "Do you?"

"Yeah," he says.

I say to Joan, "What do you love about Rodney?"

Joan says, "Absolutely everything."

Rodney says to me, "So it's doing nothing for you? I feel ridiculous now. I 
give you some pot, and it don't work for you. I feel ridiculous. Jesus Christ."

Joan smiles and nods. "It'll hit him all of a sudden," she says 
optimistically. "Remember that guy who did some work here? He hadn't smoked 
dope in a million years. Then he could hardly drive home."

"What's it do for you?" I ask Rodney.

"It relaxes me," he says. "It allows me to cope with life."

That's about all he says about that, but I already know a few things. His 
dad treated him like shit. His mom treated him like shit, too; not once 
during his entire childhood, for instance, did she ever make him breakfast. 
How messed up is that? He got along by being funny, started performing at 
the age of eighteen, traveled the comedy circuit for the next ten years, 
hardly made a name for himself, hardly made any money and quit the comedy 
racket to become the world's only honest aluminum-siding salesman, 
probably. Twelve years later, after a miserable marriage that led to a 
miserable divorce, he returned to comedy, this time using his life for 
material:

One time, when I was a kid, my family played hide-and-seek. They found my 
mother in Pittsburgh. In my life, I've been through plenty. When I was 
three years old, my parents got a dog. I was jealous of the dog, so they 
got rid of me. My ol' man took me to a freak show. They said, "Get the kid 
out of here. He's distracting from the show."

It was heartbreaking stuff, but with Rodney's delivery -- eyes bulging, 
cheeks puffed out -- it was a real laugh riot. It led to sixteen 
appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and a record-setting seventy 
appearances on Johnny Carson. Over the years, he's caroused on The Dean 
Martin Show, Saturday Night Live, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, etc. He also 
started a comedy club called Dangerfield's, in New York, and gave big 
breaks to comics such as Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey and Jerry Seinfeld. He 
won a Grammy for his comedy album No Respect. That white shirt and red tie 
he always wears onstage - right now they're in the permanent collection at 
the Smithsonian Institution in the nation's capital. He's made millions.

"Can life really be that hellish?" I say.

"It's tough, man, tough," he says.

"What's tough now?"

"What's tough now?" he asks, almost incredulous. "You feel different when 
you're getting old. You know you're going to die. You just don't know how. 
So, what I'm doing now is hanging around, waiting -- waiting to see when 
and how I'm going to die."

Joan snorts. "We're trying to delay that," she says. "We're going to an 
anti-aging doctor in Beverly Hills, very la-di-da-di-da. I think it's 
working. Our goal is for him to live to be 120. I mean, doesn't he look 
good for eighty-two? Rodney, you really do not look your age. It's the 
skin. It's the hair."

I take a closer look at Rodney. Joan is correct. It's the skin, soft, 
beetle-brown, wrinkle free; it's the hair, silvery. His eyes are milky and 
somewhat unfocused, but maybe that's just the weed.

I'm taking Rodney in like this, when all of a sudden his robe slides open 
and I'm confronted with the sight of his willy and the poor boys. They're 
huddled between his legs, looking quite pleased to be out of the dark. I 
know I should turn my head but I can't. "I'm not a sexy guy," Rodney used 
to tell the crowds. "I went to a hooker. I dropped my pants. She dropped 
her price." Ha, ha. Very funny.

"I think he's high," Joan says. "Do you think he's high, Rodney?"

"Why not?" Rodney says, covering himself.

"Do you have favorite jokes?" I ask him.

"Nah," he says.

"One's as good as another?"

He shrugs. "If it gets a big laugh, it's a favorite joke."

"OK, but when you think of a great joke -- doesn't that bring you great 
pleasure?"

Again with the shrug. "It all becomes a business," he goes on. "You don't 
appreciate the art form. Well, you do. You never stop doing that. But 
whatever. I'm just trying to find my way in life."

"And are you happy with life?"

"Am I happy with life? Sheesh. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I'm elated. Life. 
You kidding me?"

I ask Joan how different the actual Rodney is from the stage Rodney.

"He's classier," she says. "More gentlemanly, sensitive and intelligent."

"My character is the type of guy that gets the short end of the stick," 
Rodney says. "People think that's me. Cabdrivers always turn to me and say, 
'I went to the track, Rodney, and hit ten losers. Ten losers! Oh, you've 
been through that, Rodney. You know what I mean.' Anyway, when people look 
at me, they don't look at me like I'm a classy guy. I don't get that."

Joan breathes deeply. "Oh, Rodney," she says.

Rodney wiggles his legs and out comes his willy again.

"Joan," Rodney says. "Do me a favor, would you?"

"What."

"I think there's some blood here on my foot. Take a Kleenex, put a little 
water on it."

"Oh, yes, yes," says Joan, rushing into the kitchen.

Then it's just me and Rodney sitting at his table. First, he closes his 
robe, then he takes the remainder of his joint and lights it up. There's so 
much silence around us you could hear a clock tick. If we were out on the 
street, riding in a cab, people would see Rodney and shout some of his more 
famous lines from Caddyshack. "Wanna make fourteen dollars the hard way?" 
they'd shout. "While we're young!" they'd shout. But we're not outside. 
We're inside, blown away on $500-an-ounce pot. Sixty-one years Rodney has 
been smoking the stuff. Twenty-two-thousand two-hundred and sixty-five 
days. Life. You kidding me?
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake