She said, “No! You said the Beverly Hills Hotel and that’s where I want to go.” So I went to the general manager of the hotel and said, “I am bringing you Buster Keaton’s widow. Or, if you want to just go to a little local joint in the Valley. It’s right near where Buster used to live and it’s sort of symbolic. She lived in the Valley, so I called her from Hollywood and said, “Listen, maybe we could go to the Beverly Hills Hotel. After I became a comedian, I did this A&E documentary on Buster, and I met her at the wrap party. And, luckily, because these lost films were found, he became an icon. She took him to all these festivals-he had no idea that he was so revered. She helped him live a great last 20-something years of his life. But with Eleanor, Buster was okay with it. She was a gorgeous, young actress-dancer and he was an alcoholic. Eleanor must have been in her early twenties when Buster married her. I was still in college at the time and I’d never seen anybody like him before. So at the festival, I basically saw all of Keaton’s work. They had found all of these lost Buster Keaton films in the shed of James Mason’s house in Beverly Hills, and this wonderful guy had gotten them all remastered. I was in London in ’69 for about 14 days, and I stumbled onto a Buster Keaton festival. It’s almost tragic for me that he never really did much stand-up because he was way over everybody’s head-he was too hip for the world. He can riff for hours, and make social and political points using characters. RL: Well, I have to say Richard Pryor was arguably the greatest stand-up ever, and Lenny Bruce was maybe the most important, but Jonathan Winters is so explosively spontaneous. KS: What is it about Jonathan Winters that makes him the best? He is also the most spectacularly funny human being I’ve ever known. He’s had two nervous breakdowns and still talks about his family, how his parents didn’t respect him. To have a woman in her nineties who is a renaissance woman-she’s a painter, a pianist, not to mention one of the most iconic stand-ups of all time-understand me. She wrote me a letter and then we became great friends. In the last decade, unbeknownst to me, I found out that Phyllis Diller was a huge fan of mine. So I didn’t get the kind of nurturing you’d expect from a mother. RL: My father died before I was a comedian and my mother and I didn’t get along-she didn’t understand my work, although I think she was sometimes proud behind my back. KS: How is it that you have the inclination for these elders? You talk about all these older people in the book, like her and Sally Marr and Phyllis Diller and. One of the things that I found interesting was how you became close friends with Buster Keaton’s widow, Eleanor, who was almost 29 years older than you. KATE SIMON: I’ve been reading your book, The Other Great Depression, and it’s just been. But he still has plenty to be neurotic about: There’s the recent paperback reissue of The Other Great Depression there’s his ongoing Misery Loves Company Stand-Up Tour there’s the return of the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, on which he plays himself (minus a kidney) and then there’s life in general. Of course, today, at 61, Lewis is three-years married and more than a decade sober. The book details everything from the lack of love that Lewis felt as a child to his difficult rise through the ranks of stand-up comedy, his crippling obsessive compulsions, the harrowing extent of his commitment-phobia, and his descent into alcoholism and addiction-and it does so in the funniest way imaginable. Richard Lewis’s 2000 memoir, The Other Great Depression, is a veritable chronicle of one man’s lifelong quest to contend with seemingly endless pain and suffering. I’m credited with popularizing that phrase. The car from hell, the bar mitzvah from hell.
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