America’s saddest clown: the outrageous life of Rodney Dangerfield (2024)

Martin Chilton

America’s saddest clown: the outrageous life of Rodney Dangerfield (1)

Rodney Dangerfield was hailed by Jay Leno as “simply the greatest stand-up comedian there ever was”. Yet despite all the acclaim, and a successful Hollywood career, the lugubrious jokester, who was born 100 years ago today, conformed to the cliché of the sad clown. “I’ve been depressed my entire life,” he admitted in 2004, just months before his death at the age of 82. “That’s the way it is. I had a f__ing horrible childhood. My father saw me for only two hours a year. My mother stole money from me.”

Born Jacob Cohen, on 22 November 1921 in New York, Dangerfield was not exaggerating the misery of his upbringing. His father, a juggler-comedian who performed as Philip Roy, left the family home soon after his son’s birth. His mother Dorothy lived up to her nickname “Dotty”. She was described by Jim Carrey, a man who opened for Dangerfield for two years, as “the mother from hell”, a dysfunctional woman who gave her son a “brutal life”.

Dangerfield recalled being permanently sad as a boy, starved of affection and compliments by a woman “who never made me breakfast her entire life”. Although Dangerfield later made her a staple of his act – “My mother couldn’t stand me: she breast-fed me through a straw,” he joked – he believed her “cold-hearted” neglect had done him great harm, recalling with bitterness the time he saved up 100 dollars from selling ice cream on the beach only to have her pilfer it.

At five, he was left to wander around Queens borough completely unsupervised. In his memoir It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs, he confessed that during his roaming, when he was a “very inhibited child”, he was preyed on by a paedophile, who gave him a nickel to sit on his lap and then assaulted him. Dangerfield ended the pitiful anecdote with a caustic sign-off: “Thanks for lookin’ after me, Ma.”

He grew up to be an adroit wisecracker, keeping a store of one-liners in a duffel bag. At 17, he made his stage debut, earning $2 for a performance at a theatre in Newark, New Jersey. Within a year, having given up a job driving a fish truck, he legally changed his name to Jack Roy and took a comedy gig at a resort in the Catskills. “I went into showbusiness to get some love,” he admitted. “I wanted the applause and for people to tell me I was good.”

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The experience was tough, though, and he admitted his act, a mixture of jokes, W.C. Fields impressions and Al Jolson songs, was “very immature”. His career failed to get off the ground and he spent his twenties scuffling for money, supplementing his income by working as a house painter. In 1949, around the time the 28-year-old married 23-year-old singer Joyce Indig, he decided to give up showbusiness for what he called a normal life. “To give you an idea of how well I was doing at the time I quit,” he told Terry Gross in 2003, “I was the only one who knew I quit.”

To support his wife and new son Brian, the comedian accepted a job as an aluminum wall-cladding salesman. Throughout his thirties he lived what he described as a mundane existence in suburban Englewood, New Jersey. “My wife and I were happy for 20 years. Then we met,” he joked. He struggled on for more than a decade like this. By 1961, with his marriage crumbling and his business prospects in tatters, he took the remarkably brave decision to return to comedy. “I’m 40, broke. I owe $20,000 to an aluminum-siding company. I need money now,” he said.

The comedian later referred to his “difficult domestic situation” at the time. After divorcing in the early 1960s, he soon reconciled with Joyce and re-married. They conceived a daughter, Melanie, a year later. “My marriage was a real mixed-up affair,” he admitted. “I divorced the same girl twice: got married, divorced, married, divorced, one of those numbers. I was very much down at the time.”

To counter his depression, he threw his energy into reviving his comedy career. “Everyone thought I was absolutely insane,” he said. “But showbusiness was like a fix, and I had to have it to escape reality.” He was nervous about how people would react to the return of Jack Roy, so when he appeared at New York’s Inwood Lounge, he asked the owner, George McFadden, to list him under a different name. McFadden picked Rodney Dangerfield; the name of a comedy cowboy character used by Jack Benny in his 1940’s radio show. “When he came up with Rodney Dangerfield, I thought he was crazy. But I thought, ‘what the heck, I’m depressed enough to go along with it.’”

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He was shrewd enough to realise that, like his comedy hero W.C. Fields, he needed a “unique identity” to make himself successful as Rodney Dangerfield. He decided to build his act around self-deprecating jokes and a loser persona. He also developed a trademark look on stage: white shirt, a rumbled black suit, and one hand perpetually loosening his red necktie. The image became so ingrained that his clothes are on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. After earning his big break in March 1967, with a triumphant appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, he carved out a reputation as a sublime chat show guest, appearing on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show a record 70 times.

Dangerfield worked hard at honing his act and by 1972 he found a lasting catchphrase after watching the Francis Ford Coppola movie The Godfather. “All I heard in the movie was the word ‘respect’. People in the mafia saying, ‘You’ve got to give me respect,’ or ‘respect him.’ I thought to myself: It sounds like a funny image – a guy who gets no respect. Maybe I’ll write a joke.” He believed people would identify with the idea that “life has treated ‘em wrong and they got no respect” and devised punchlines around the phrase, using a stream-of-consciousness delivery style.

His quick-fire jokes (he delivered hundreds of punchlines every show) appealed to the public and although his humour was often risqué and sexist, his act was full of laugh-out-loud bangers such as:

“I know I’m ugly. My proctologist stuck his finger in my mouth.”

“I could tell that my mother hated me. My bath toy was a toaster.”

“I was in a bar, and they told me to get out. They wanted to start Happy Hour.”

“Last time I made love with my wife, it was ridiculous. Nothing was happening. I said, ‘what’s the matter, you can’t think of anyone either?’”

“I was poor. I used to go to orgies to eat the grapes.”

Dangerfield was self-aware enough to know he was tapping into a well of self-loathing, and his fidgety delivery style masked genuine on-stage anxiety. He coped by using marijuana. The comedian first tried weed at the age of 21, when he smoked a joint with fellow comedian Bobby Bryon, and later joked: “I was a hippie long before hippies were born.” Weed gave him a sense of peace and well-being and he was still smoking it more than 60 years later, when he told Time magazine that “pot still relaxes me”, urging for it to be made legal.

His dope-smoking antics became the stuff of legend. The original title for his autobiography was My Love Affair with Marijuana and he reportedly lit up a joint while visiting President Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1983. When he was 80, Dangerfield stunned hospital staff at Saint John’s Health Centre in the Bronx after being caught firing up a joint while he was in the Intensive Care Unit.

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The comedian’s second wife, Joan Child, said smoking dope was the way he dealt with nerves and that the drug offered relief from the constant pain of arthritis, the congenital fusion of his spine, an inoperable dislocated shoulder and rotator-cuff tear. In his memoir, written when he knew his heart problems were a risk to his survival, Dangerfield said: “It’s hard for me to accept the fact that my life will soon be over. No more Super Bowls. No more Chinese food. No more sex. And the big one, no more smoking pot.” After his death, Child gave a talk at the Patients Out of Time conference on cannabis therapeutics in Santa Barbara, in which she revealed she had enclosed a marijuana medical use letter in Dangerfield’s casket, “in case the feds were waiting for him at the Pearly Gates.” Jim Carrey was bequeathed the comedian’s pot pipe, joking that this “was pretty much the grail”.

Although Dangerfield maintained publicly that he stayed off hard drugs – “I tried sniffing coke, but I couldn’t get the bottle up my nose,” he quipped – there are accounts of his drug use. Peter Berkrot, who played caddie Angie D’Annunzio in the 1980 movie Caddyshack, said that the comedian told him on set: “I love weed. You know what I love more than weed? Coke.” Dangerfield quickly earned a reputation for being a wild socialiser. “There are not many people alive who could party with Rodney,” said co-star Bill Murray. “He would have left you all for dead. He really went hard.”

In Chris Nashawaty’s book Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella, executive producer Jon Peters recalled the moment they met Dangerfield. “He comes in wearing this aqua-blue leisure suit and takes out a plastic bag and does two lines of coke. He undoes his shirt and says, ‘where’s the pussy?’ It was a hell of a first impression,” said Peters. “Dangerfield ended up getting $35,000 for his role. And though he would always credit Caddyshack for launching his movie career, he would often do so while complaining that he actually lost $150,000 on the film, having given up a month of headlining in Vegas to shoot it.”

A decade later, Dangerfield was involved in a bitter legal dispute with one of those Vegas venues, after walking out of an engagement at Caesar’s Palace, claiming he’d suffered an eye injury because of a faulty steam bath. He sued for $5million in damages. Caesar’s counter-sued for breach of contract. The hotel hired a doctor who testified that Dangerfield went out partying when he was supposedly incapacitated, and claimed the comedian had “severe problems with cocaine, marijuana and alcohol abuse”. The jury found in favour of Dangerfield, however, awarding him $500,000 for pain and suffering and $225,000 for the missed performances. In 1995, Dangerfield also won $45,002 when the tabloid newspaper Star alleged that the comedian had hired prostitutes and used cocaine during his Vegas tenure.

In Caddyshack, Dangerfield played the obnoxious Al Czervik, a loud nouveau-riche “ignoramus” who tries to buy a country club. It was one of his more successful roles in an experimental career in which he was often cast against type. He was a wealthy businessman in Back to School, a surprise hit in 1986 that grossed $100million, and a tabloid television reporter in 1987’s Meet Wally Sparks.

Perhaps his most challenging role was as the loathsome father Ed Wilson in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), a character who sexually assaults his own daughter (played by Juliette Lewis). “Rodney had those huge eyes and his face told a thousand stories,” said Stone, who allowed Dangerfield to write his own lines for the film, telling him just to play “the father from Hell”. Dangerfield insisted on using body doubles in the scene in which his daughter is molested.

In his private life, Dangerfield was proud of having played a key role in raising his two children during his wife’s struggles with cancer. When his daughter Melanie was a teenager, she would often wear a white T-shirt with “I DON’T GET NO RESPECT” emblazoned on it, the catchphrase that was the title of his 1981 Grammy-winning comedy album, a record that spawned the hit song Rappin’ Rodney.

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One of the main reasons he invested $250,000 in his own Dangerfield’s comedy club in New York was because it meant he would not have to travel as regularly, allowing him to look after his children, a role he took on fully after his wife’s cancer diagnosis (they finally divorced again in 1970 and she died five years later). The club, incidentally, remained a long-running success. When he signed a deal with HBO in the 1980s to showcase young comedians at the club, he gave vital breaks to promising young comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld and Roseanne Barr.

One of the comedians who performed at Dangerfield’s has spoken publicly about one of the more bizarre, creepy sides to Dangerfield: his fondness for exposing himself. Comedian Lenny Clarke said Dangerfield would often be naked in front of other comedians in his dressing room.

This trait continued in his eighties. In a 2004 profile, The Baltimore Sun reported that “Rodney Dangerfield is always naked. In bed. In front of the TV. Eating a sandwich. Thinking up a joke. Digging through a drawer.” David Hirshey, an editor at HarperCollins, spent three days at Dangerfield’s Los Angeles home working on the comedian’s autobiography. He recalled having to constantly avert his eyes. “Can’t look down with Rodney,” Hirshey said. “It’s always… there.”

In 2004, journalist Jeff Pearlman interviewed Dangerfield for Newsday. He went to see the comedian at a penthouse in Manhattan and, when the door opened, he was greeted by a memorably “unpleasant” sight. “Rodney was wearing a robe that was wide open, his, eh, junk hanging out with the casualness of a plastic bag. I, of course, asked Dangerfield about this and he shrugged. ‘When you reach a certain age,’ Dangerfield said, ‘you throw a lot of things out the window. What do I care what people think? I’m just trying to be me.’”

Shortly before his death, Dangerfield revealed that Fox Television had bought the rights to his autobiography. When asked who he would like to see portray him, he replied: “Brad Pitt couldn’t do it. He’s not built like me. I like Steve Buscemi. He’d need a lot of makeup, but when he’s onscreen you’re always looking at him. I also like Paul Giamatti.” Perhaps the nude scenes would have given them the willies.

Dangerfield’s final 11 years were spent with Child, a Mormon who was 30 years his junior. They wed in a Las Vegas chapel on Boxing Day 1993. Despite the matrimony jokes that continued to pepper his stand-up – “My wife wants Olympic sex. Once every four years” – she said that their relationship was a happy one, recalling that, “we got weekly mani-pedis and he’d sing love songs to me at the salon. He was romantic, and left me notes like, ‘I’ll never let you down – unless you’re on a ladder.’ He was ethical, compassionate, always reassuring and kind. An exceptionally good person.” For his part, Dangerfield was charmed that when he first wooed her, she responded to his question, “what kind of drugs do you like?” by innocently answering, “antibiotics, I guess.”

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She was supportive of his struggles with mental health issues, especially after he was diagnosed as clinically depressed in the 1990s. “It was bad,” Dangerfield admitted in his autobiography. “For two years, I couldn’t function”. One thing that helped was the inspired idea to set up a website. In 1995, Dangerfield became a cyberspace pioneer, one of the first celebrities to have his own online page. His site included a Joke of the Day, his blog thoughts on films and the chance to order from Jungle Roses, the flower business run by Child. Asked by Time in 2004 about how he went online, he replied: “I thought to myself, what’s the newest thing out today? And computers are it. So, I asked my wife to check into it, and I got my own website. I figured it’s the future thing.”

Dangerfield said he knew that the internet would “transform communication”, especially as it allowed him to interact with his fans and answer their questions. He said he received thousands of e-mails from fellow sufferers of depression. He wanted to compile a book about the subject but could not find a publishing house who were interested.

As well as dealing with depression, chain-smoker Dangerfield was also forced to cope with mounting health problems in his seventies. By the late 1990s, he was taking 137 pills a day – he had a colour-coded chart on his kitchen wall to help him keep track of medication timings – and endured numerous surgical procedures, including a double heart bypass. Nevertheless, he retained his gallows humour. “I don’t get no respect. On the way to the hospital, the ambulance driver stopped to have lunch,” he joked after undergoing arterial brain surgery in April 2003.

On October 5 2004, after suffering complications following heart valve replacement surgery, he suffered a stroke that ended his life. One of the last things he said to the surgeon who was due to replace his aortic valve with a porcine valve was: “Shouldn’t I at least meet the pig first, to see if we get along?”

It is a true shame that a man who gave such pleasure to comedy fans remained so downbeat about his own life. “I have never been happy. My whole life has been a downer,” he said, at 75. Dangerfield did not believe he would go to heaven, saying he was a “logical” atheist who simply accepted that: “We’re apes – do apes go anyplace?”

He had the final sardonic word on the headstone that adorns his remains at Westwood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. “There goes the neighbourhood,” it says.

America’s saddest clown: the outrageous life of Rodney Dangerfield (2024)

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