The original interview with Bob Newhart was published in CS (Chicago Social)/Modern Luxury Media’s October issue. Click here to read the article and here is the link to my contributor bio.
You’re coming to the Chicago Theatre on October 22nd. That was all the information I could find, haha. So tell me what kind of tricks and jokes you’re going to be doing that evening. [laughs] I’m sure some local Chicago stuff, and then I’ll probably do one or two of the classic album routines because that’s why a lot of people show up for that and then the rest is some kind of observational what-a-strange-place-this-is we all inhabit and how you gotta laugh to get through it.
How often do you get back to Chicago? Do you still have family there? Yeah, my three sisters are there. . . well, two of them are there, and one is a little further outside the city. I usually get back probably once or twice a year on my way to other dates I try and make a stop in Chicago. The last time I was there, we got all the nieces and nephews together in one place so I could meet ‘em, so I wasn’t just Uncle Bob on the television. [laughs]
What Chicago places do you love—restaurants, things to do, etc.? I hate to pick out one over the other, but I really enjoy the city. The people are wonderful. They’re warm and especially welcoming. I think people should land in New York, spend a couple days, and then come to Chicago and see what people are really like. [laughs]
I think GQ in fact just recently named Chicago one of the most honest towns in America. Oh, is that right? I didn’t know that. It has great restaurants. You know, Michigan Avenue. When I come back, it’s like, ‘you’ve come a long way baby’ because I walk by familiar things. . . like The Chicago Theatre, as a kid I used to go to The Chicago Theatre, and then I’d go see Martin and Lewis, all those great acts, and now to be walking on those boards, the same boards those people walked on, I remember when Martin and Lewis were there and in between shows they would go out on the balcony and throw autograph pictures down to the people.
That is incredible. Do you ever want to retrace your steps and almost recreate the opening of “The Bob Newhart Show” which was filmed in downtown Chicago? Well, you know, if you’re a native Chicagoan, you know how dumb he is. [laughs] Because he gets on the Ravenswood El, he goes past his stop on Sheridan Road, he gets off in Evanston, where the El is on the ground, and then he walks back 55 blocks to his apartment. Now, would you want to have that man as a psychologist? A man who misses his stop everyday?
[laughs] No, but if I could get lost with you I’d like to do it because then you’d entertain me the whole way! [laughs] So then it would be fun! We did a show. . .I was working with a baseball player, a pitcher I think it was, for the Cubs and as a client, supposedly, he turned his whole career around and thanked me for helping him, on the psychology end, and the catcher was in the doldrums as far as the hitting was concerned. He came to me and they sent me the script, and it’s a nice game, and I said, ‘well the Cubs don’t play night games.’ And so they said, ‘ok, well we’ll make it Cincinnati and it will be a night game in Cincinnati and the Cubs are visiting,” and I said ‘yeah, but then the Cincinnati fans wouldn’t be booing this catcher, they’d be cheering for this catcher because he’s so bad.’ [laughs] I had to explain. . . Chicago’s kind of a unique place you know.
Are you a Cubs fan or a Sox fan? Oh, Cubs fan.
Do you follow the Cubs still now? Yeah, I love em, but it takes a strong heart to follow ‘em.
Ok, what about any favorite restaurants that stand out that you have to have when you get back to Chicago? We stayed a lot at the Ritz Carlton and we always enjoy the restaurant there at the Ritz, and then we stayed at the Four Seasons and enjoyed the restaurant there.
You have good taste. I’m going to stay with you guys next time! [laughs] And then we walk a couple blocks, and one of the ones we always have to get to is the Cape Cod Room at the Drake. The waiters are characters and the food is just great. If there’s one place that we always go to when we get to the Chicago, it’s the Cape Cod Room.
You said in your book that Chicagoans are really the toughest people out there—between the brutally cold winters and hot and humid summers, you have to be tough to live in that city. So when are you moving back? [laughs] Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I was in Chicago. . . born in Oak Park, but raised in Chicago. I spent 22 years in Chicago in the deadly winters. You just had a terrible summer. . a terrible storm, the worst storm they said they’ve ever had. So I got through that a couple times, although nothing that bad, but pretty close. And I had the horrible winters and then at 22 I was drafted and sent to the West Coast and said to myself, ‘how long has this been going on?’ and ‘why have they kept this away from me that you don’t have to freeze to death in the winter and die of heat stroke in the summer?’ [laughs]
Ok, we have The Bob Newhart Show, Newhart, Bob. . .did you ever worry you were going to run out of names for shows? Maybe incorporate a middle name or initial at some point? Well, I did actually. I did Bob, which lasted a year and then I did George and Leo. My legal name is George Robert.
When did you start going by Bob? Well, if someone calls me George, that usually means I was in service with them or accounting with them. My Dad was George David, so they just called me Bob to avoid any confusion.
Right. Alright, George. [laughs]
In the 1960s, you worked as a certified public accountant at a Chicago firm and hated every minute of it. Well, that’s actually incorrect. To be a certified public accountant, you have to take a test, which I would never have passed. [laughs] So I was an accountant and that was it. [laughs]
Well, I was gonna say, my grandmother was a C.P.A. but she was never funny. When did they drop that requirement? [laughs] Well, we have lots of funny accountants now with Enron and Bernie Madoff, there’s a lot of funny accounting going on now.
Did you ever think about doing a show in which you played an accountant and found the humor in that? No, we never. . . that never came up.
Really? Well, I’m sure you could make up some funny accountant stories in there. [laughs]
Did you always feel like you would make it—that you would succeed in this business? No, no I didn’t. As a matter of fact, when I was an accountant—and I knew I wasn’t cut out to be an accountant—I decided that I was going to take a year of my life and try and make it in comedy, and if I didn’t, I would know that, and I wouldn’t have spent the rest of my life saying I wish I would have done that, or I wish I would have done this. So one year became two years and then two years became three and three years became four and then lo and behold I made a record album and it took off, and before I knew it, I was doing Ed Sullivan shows. Instead of watching Ed Sullivan shows, I was appearing on them. It’s just something I had to find out. . . if I was funny. I had to find out if I could make a living in comedy.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? Let me think. Well, let me put it in the form of a saying. It was by Nathaniel West, the author. And he said, and I’m paraphrasing, in effect, ‘The world—the universe—is against us, so the only intelligent response is to laugh.’ [laughs]
I love that! [laughs] I do too! [laughs] Oh, that is great! I’m putting that on my computer screen saver. There you go! Look up the original, [because] I’m not sure I said it exactly right, but that’s the idea.
Let’s talk about Don Rickles. Oh, do we have to? [laughs] This was going so well. Jessica, this was going so well and then you had to go ruin it. [laughs] God you’re killing me. Well, he is one of your best friends . . . that’s right. . . and what I thought was so awesome at the Academy event last summer, they showed vacation video of you and Don and your wives traveling the world together. I want to know when you’re traveling, do people go crazy when they see you guys out and about? Well, when we travel in Europe. . of course other Americans recognize us, but one of the nice things about traveling in Europe and Asia, they don’t know who we are. We’re just two other ugly Americans traveling. [laughs] We’re rather loud, which plays into the ugly American. [laughs] We just have a great time. Over the years, gee, I think we’ve been almost everywhere. We were talking about it the other night . . . the places we haven’t been to. I think our favorite is Venice. We love to go to Venice.
What’s the funniest travel story you have with Don? Oh, there’s so many. We traveled to Israel together. We went to Greece, we went to Israel. God, there’s so many stories. We flew to Paris, I think we spent a couple days in London [first] and then we flew to Paris, and then the driver who picked us up at airport, he said, ‘would you like to see Normandie?’ And of course Don was in World War II and I was in the Korean War, and we all told him yeah, we’d love to see Normandie. Is it much of a drive? And he said, ‘no, no, an hour’ or something like that. It turned out to be 2 hours or something like that, but we’re driving and there was a sign that said Cherbourg, and Don said to the driver, ‘are there a lot of trees there?’ and the Driver said, ‘no, no, not really,’ and Don says, ‘no, I’m sure there are a lot of trees there.’ And the driver said, ‘there’s one or two trees, but no, no,’ and then Barbara his wife said, ‘Oh my god, he thinks it’s Sherwood Forest.’ We had to explain that was in a whole different country. It was some other forest.
What I love from the Academy was when Rickles was telling a story and couldn’t come up with a name, and he jokes, ‘feel free to chime in there buddy!’. . . he’s not afraid to make fun of you. Oh no. [laughs] Do you give it right back to him, or are you more of the straight man to his funny man? The first time I met Don, my wife Ginnie, and Barbara Rickles, Barbara Sklar, they knew each other before I married Ginnie and Barbara married Don. So Don was in the lounge at the Sahara in Las Vegas and I was at the Dessert Inn, and Ginnie noticed Don was there, and Ginnie said, ‘Oh, I’m going to call Barbara, we have to get together. I haven’t seen her in a long time.’ She was a secretary for an agent and that’s how Ginnie knew her. So we made arrangements after my second show and before his third show, at like 4 o’clock in the morning, we went to the cafeteria at the Sahara and sat and talked, and that’s the first time I had met Don, and Ginnie had met Don, and the first time I had met Barbara. So we’re talking and talking, and now we’re going to go in to see Don’s 4am show, and Ginnie says, ‘he’s just the nicest man. He loves his family so much and he wants to be home and doesn’t want to be on the road as much as he is, and he’s just such a sweet man,’ and I said, ‘well, honey, his act is a little different than that, than the guy you just met.’ So we go in and sit down, they put us in the front row and Don comes out and the first thing he says is, ‘the stammering idiot from Chicago is in the audience with his hooker wife from Bayonne, New Jersey.” [laughs] So Ginnie’s jaw dropped and I said, ‘I tried to tell ya!’ That was our first meeting.
What comedians or actors do you find funny today? Well, today, well, the other day I ran into Garry Shandling, and I like his work very much. Jerry Seinfeld of course. Steven Wright. Norm McDonald. There’s a young comic who’s beginning to get some attention. He’s on Letterman a lot and his name is Jake Johannsen and I think he’s very funny. There’s nothing I enjoy more than watching a good comedian work. I love to laugh and I love to watch somebody who’s good.
What I love about you is that you’re so funny without having to resort to any gimmicks, and I feel like today so many comedians resort to either sexual humor all the time or profanity, and they do it to get a laugh, but it’s not funny. You proved that you could tell a story or say a joke and make it about everyday life and it was hysterical. That’s the world I grew up in. That’s the way the world was then. And yet I think, well, I was up last night watching Tom Arnold on Piers Morgan, and he was asked the same question about the young comics around and he said the man I think that’s the Seminole comedian for the past fifty years, who unfortunately has died, and that would be Richard Pryor. I think he was beyond. . it was uber-comedy that he was doing. There were just such poignant moments, and he’d draw, despite the language, he’d draw these wonderful pictures of life in the inner city, and I just thought he was incredible.
When I told people I was getting the honor of interviewing you, they always say, ‘ask him about the Newhart finale that was a dream!’ Your wife came up with that idea. Where does that episode rank for you? Yeah, that was her idea. It certainly. . . well, if there’s one comment I get, it’s about the final episode, and they’ll say whose idea was it, and I’ll say, my wife’s. I was having a problem with CBS, well this was like in ’76, and they were kind of moving us around and putting other shows in at 9 o’clock and so I said to my wife, I think. . . wait, I’m sorry, we were talking about Newhart. We were going to a party, and I said to Ginny, I think this is going to be the last year, and without a beat she says, ‘if this is the last year, you should do a dream sequence where you wake up in bed with Susie explaining this weird dream you had.’ There were so many inexplicable things in Newhart. . you know, that the maid was an heiress, and you had Larry, Daryl and Daryl, and I always said that Larry and Daryl, even though they wound up in Vermont, they were straight out of deliverance. I thought there had been a whole lot of intermarriage that had taken place and resulted in Larry Daryl and Daryl. [laughs]
You guest-hosted the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 87 times. That’s what I’ve been told, yeah. [laughs] You’ve worked with what seems like every showbiz legend. Is there someone you have yet to work with that you’d love to, given the opportunity? Well, the one person I would have loved to have work with is Peter Sellers. I was a huge fan. I just saw R.J. Wagner, R.J. as we call him, and he’s coming out with a new book because his first book did very well. And I said, you gotta do a chapter on Peter Sellers, cause he. . . my favorite movie is probably Dr. Strangelove in which he played like 4 or 5 different characters. My kids say to me, ‘Dad, next time you watch Dr. Strangelove, would you let us know because we’d like to bring some of our friends over to watch you watch Dr. Strangelove. I just find it hysterical! I’ve probably seen it 25 times and I laugh each time.
Last question. . . with so much talent coming from Chicago and the Midwest tonight, what’s your advice to aspiring comedians and actors? Well, I get mail a lot from young comics starting out and my advice is work as much as you can because there’s no where else to learn it. You have to learn it on the stage. There’s no book that has ever been written. . there’s no other way of finding it out. Any opportunity you get to act or do stand-up, just take advantage of it because you’ll learn from it.
Mr. Newhart was so wonderful and invited me and my parents backstage after his show at The Chicago Theatre, where I got to meet his lovely wife, Ginnie, and Bob’s sister, Ginny (yes, you read that right). 
