Warmth, the Merchant of Venom -- has been on best-seller lists for five weeks. That's all the digits on one hand, dummy. Try to keep up.
While making the TV rounds to promote "Rickles' Book," the 81-year-old comedian -- who has made a career of insulting people -- has received reverential treatment from Jon Stewart, David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel (who returned from an appendectomy to devote virtually his entire show to Rickles). Hard to believe? In person, Rickles is a lovely, low-key guy, who would prefer to talk about baseball rather than his career.
He has been married for 42 years, has two grown children, and grandchildren who were ecstatic when their "Pop-Pop" voiced Mr. Potato Head in the "Toy Story" movies. The book -- co-written with David Ritz, who collaborated on Aretha Franklin's and Ray Charles' memoirs -- is unmistakably in Rickles' voice.
And Rickles is proud of his literary effort -- there are 80,000 copies in print -- and the episodic way in which it's written. The New York City native opens his heart about his parents, poor grades in school, difficulty "getting the girls," best friend Bob Newhart, courtship with wife Barbara and the slow start to his career, among other things. "I didn't think about making it.
I just thought about surviving," he tells the Associated Press. "I said, 'Gee, I got to keep going because I want to survive and I think I might be good.' So I never thought of disaster.
Because, to be very honest, I thought, 'What could I fall back on?' " Eventually, he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where Jason Robards, Grace Kelly, Anne Bancroft and Tom Poston also studied at the time. He envisioned a serious acting career, but after innumerable auditions he got used to hearing, "Thank you, next .
.. Then he attempted stand-up comedy, doing impressions and jokes, and soon found himself making comments about his audience.
"It was all attitude. All attitude," he says. "I took my best shots.
Whatever I thought was funny in my head, I said." After his "biggest hero of all," his dad, died at 55, Rickles moved near his mother, Etta, to Miami Beach. There, she befriended Frank Sinatra's mother, Dolly, and asked her to get Sinatra to check out her son's act at a club called Murray Franklin's.
"I saw him come in," Rickles recalls in the book. At first, I didn't believe it, but Etta had really pulled it off. If anyone could get Frank to do anything, it was Dolly.
When I said, 'Make yourself comfortable, Frank, hit somebody,' I saw his entourage wait to see how he'd react. Warmth, the Merchant of Venom -- has been on best-seller lists for five weeks.
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