Piecework

“Even the music goes back to Chauncey Street,” he says. “I always was sensitive to sounds. At night, lying there in the apartment, I’d hear these sounds: footsteps upstairs, or out on the street; the mice in the walls; the ticking of a clock. I was fascinated by sounds. And years later, I’m working with Tommy Dorsey, and I say, ’I’d like to make some records!’ He says, ‘Why?’ And I say, ’I hear things!’

“Gleason can’t read music; his own tunes are hummed or picked out a note at a time on a piano and written down by an arranger. He loves conducting. When he assembled more than 50 French musicians to record the score for a 1962 film called Gigot, he had to explain through an interpreter what he wanted. “I say to the interpreter, Tell them I want the first note to sound like someone pissing off a cliff into a Chinese teacup.’ “ A beat. “He tells them.” Another beat. “At first, a few of them smile. Then they start looking at each other, and then they start to nod. And I tell you, it was beautiful.”

Even the romantic music had something to do with Brooklyn.

“I saw Clark Gable in a picture,” Gleason remembers. “He’s on a couch with a broad. Nothing’s happening. Then the music starts, and Gable is the most romantic-looking son of a bitch you ever saw. And I say to myself, ‘If Gable needs strings, what about some poor schmuck from Brooklyn?’

“More than anyone else, the friend Gleason seems to miss is Toots Shor. “One night in Shor’s, the 52d Street joint, Toots was bragging about what a great athlete he was. One thing led to another, and I said, ‘You can’t play pool, you can’t fight — if you did, I’d knock you on your ass!’ But I said, ‘Maybe you can run!’ ‘Of course, I can r"",’ says Toots. So we organize a race. But I say to him, ‘Toots, if I go outside and the two of us start running, we’re gonna draw a crowd, and it’ll be terrible, we’ll never get it finished. So when we go out, you run towards Sixth Avenue and I’ll run towards Fifth, and we’ll go around the block — 51st Street — and whoever gets to the bar first wins a grand.’ Agreed! So we go out, and Toots starts huffing and puffing towards Sixth Avenue, and I stroll towards Fifth. In front of ’21,’ I jump in a cab and drive around the block. And when Toots finally gets there, I’m already at the bar with a drink. He says, ‘Aw, you son of a bitch.’ And he hands me the grand. We’re sitting there another twenty minutes, when suddenly Toots turns to me, the eyes popping out of his head, his veins all straining in his neck, and he yells: ‘Wait a minute!’ He roars, ’You never passed met’ ” Gleason is laughing now. “That was the greatest double take I ever saw.”

All of that was long ago. Gleason moved to Florida in the early sixties, and when I ask him why he doesn’t come to New York more often, he just shakes his head and says, “Everybody’s dead.”

In Florida, he plays a lot of golf and reads. For years, he read the literature of parapsychology, the occult, and books about the world’s religions. But now he also reads history. “I don’t read fiction,” he says. “You know, our lives in this business are devoted to fiction.”

Did he have any advice for young people who want to get into show business? “Work at everything — weddings, benefits, bar mitzvahs. Play for no money, if you have to. And find out everything. When I was working, I’d listen to the band, talk to the lighting guys, the stage manager, the carpenters, every branch of it. You have to like show business. That’s the main thing. And you have to know everything.”

Were there parts he’d wanted to play and didn’t, chances that he never got to take? “No,” Gleason says. “Almost everything I wanted to do, I’ve been able to do. And most of it turned out pretty good.” A pause. “Everybody’s been damned nice to me. I’ve been very lucky.”

And how would he like to be remembered?

“Ah, hell,” the Great One says, staring at the smoke from the cigarette. “I’d just like to be remembered.”

NEW YORK,

September 23, 1985

FRANZ

New York was full of swaggering energy in the spring of 1958, when I was living over a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue and Twelfth Street, still trying to be a painter. It was a town where everyone was working, nobody cared about politics, and all things seemed possible. Even for the likes of me.