20 Questions Richard Lewis

Fifteen years ago, after providing a manufacturer of multicolored condoms with the product name Rainbeaus, Richard Lewis left the world of advertising to begin a career as a stand-up comedian in New York City. Now, after countless club dates, movies, TV specials, series, upwards of 30 guest appearances on "Late Night with David Letterman" and considerably more visits to psychotherapists, Lewis has found his place in the comedy hierarchy as the hilarious, if neurotic, Prince of Pain and Bad Posture. Inevitably clad in black, galvanized by anxiety, his long hair flowing behind him like exposed nerve ends, Lewis paces, twists, winces, scowls and races his way through a series of wildly funny, fast and furious raps, focused on the people and the events that have turned him into a therapist's darling. He was getting ready to shoot "Anything but Love," a new television show for ABC, when writer Dick Lochte met with him in his press agent's Hollywood office. "The energy level rose dramatically when Richard walked into the room," Lochte recalls. "He's always on the move. He wanted to prowl as we talked but was worried that the tape recorder wouldn't pick up his side of the conversation. So he stayed seated. Until then, I wouldn't have thought it possible for a man to pace while sitting down."

1.

[Q] Playboy: What are you most looking forward to in Anything but Love, your new TV show with Jamie Lee Curtis?

[A] Lewis: I'll be doing a love scene with Jamie in--how many days?--in thirteen days, as we talk. I'm gonna wear more things to tuck my lower belly in. I'm gonna wear more contraptions--I'm wearing the Jules Verne pajamas! Who'd want to be in bed with her and look like--you know, I look like Ward Bond right now. I can't change my body in thirteen days, so I'm gonna have to wear the contraption pajamas. And we're supposed to be under the covers, so I told her, "If you feel anything metallic, don't yell." But she's great. She'll go along with it. The wardrobe guy, if he hears that I'm wearing this outfit, he'll go crazy.

2.

[Q] Playboy: Have you any tips on dressing for success in bed other than wearing contraption pajamas?

[A] Lewis: Well, dressing up like an insurance man is out. I tried it; no good. I tried to dress up like a fireman and save the damsel in distress; no good. The only thing that worked once--I did a Mister Rogers impression, and then I segued quickly into Nixon on Meet the Press, and I'll tell you, I have never been better in bed. I don't do impressions, so it didn't really sound like Mister Rogers. It sounded more like Fredric March and a little bit like Polly Bergen. But in my mind, it was Mister Rogers and Richard Nixon. Polly Bergen, she's such a lovely woman. She also has one of the funniest names I've ever heard. Polly Bergen. I don't know--is she a parrot? Is she a model? What is she?

3.

[Q] Playboy: Have you really spent so much time in therapy?

[A] Lewis: Oh, God, yeah. I've been in and out of therapy for most of my adult life. I'm not proud of this. I wear stripes, you know. Jung, Rollo May, Adler, Freud. I've done many disciplines and I'm in it again. I just can't seem to get enough--of figuring out where I went wrong. I've made tremendous headway. The only problem is, I have a tendency--or I had a tendency--to repeat my mistakes, almost like I had to. I was on this very destructive track, even though I was spending thousands and thousands of dollars to figure out why I was being such a schmuck. Now I try to really force myself to get on another path. I hate to use the word path. It sounds like I'm on the road to enlightenment. Actually, I'm on the road to darkness.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't there the risk that if you get on the right path, you will no longer have an act?

[A] Lewis: I have such a backlog of misery that I could be a swami and still be on stage looking like I do. I mean, the act is me. It's a little more exaggerated. It has to be. Because, first of all, I have a microphone. I had a fight last night with a girlfriend. I didn't take a mike to bed, though I should have. I would have had the upper hand.

[A] No, I have the same feelings on and off stage. I mean, I usually don't have to structure my pain off stage in the form of jokes--"I'm going to top this misery with this." I'm pretty much the same person on and off. Which scares you, doesn't it?

5.

[Q] Playboy: Has your style changed much since you began as a comedian?

[A] Lewis: No, it was--I was--no, I wasn't nearly as frenetic and involved with my feelings. I never did observational comedy, because I don't really enjoy that kind of stuff, the "did-you-ever-notice" kind of comedy. But I was less into my therapy and more into my family. It was too early for me to be into relationships. It was too young to know the horrors that were ahead of me. And I was too young to know the hundreds of thousands of dollars I would piss away in psychotherapy. So I wasn't obsessed with it. Now I'm totally obsessed with it. Now I send friends and girlfriends to therapy. It's not enough that I'm pissing it away for myself. I piss it away for friends now. It's pretty tragic.

6.

[Q] Playboy: Most of your routines have to do with pain and angst and your neuroses. What kind of groupies does that attract?

[A] Lewis: I get a lot of people who think they have to take care of me. I get a lot of registered nurses and people who are in the medical or pharmaceutical fields. Women send me pictures, snapshots of themselves in a sickbed. "This is me when I had the flu in Rome." It's crazy. I don't understand it.

7.

[Q] Playboy: Aside from the sickbed, are there specific parts of the country from which most of your fans come?

[A] Lewis: From north Jersey and hell, I think. Anyone from hell--boom! "Honey, Richard Lewis is playing this week." "Well, get out of the fire and let's go!" North Jersey because, after all, how many people are from north Jersey? My fans, they're all over the place. I have as many fans as I do now primarily because of David Letterman and Late Night.

8.

[Q] Playboy: How (continued on page 179) Richard Lewis (continued from page 135) did you meet Letterman?

[A] Lewis: Letterman and I go back--he doesn't go back as far to the misery as I go back; I came out of the comedy tar pits. But we met in Los Angeles and became friends. And we respected each other's work. He knew my style and he knew that it was better for me to sit for ten minutes than to cram material into five. In fact, the only time I've ever done stand-up since then on television was--and I had no choice, really--on his anniversary show at Radio City Music Hall. There was no way I wasn't going to do it, even though it was precisely the reason I haven't done standup. It's so frenetic. A hundred thousand jokes in three and a half minutes. I looked like a chicken, a Jewish chicken without its head. My mother said that I actually paced out of her television set and wound up taking a bath in her apartment. I said, "Mother, I had to pace." It was like performing on a battleship, with six thousand people screaming. I had to get their attention. If I'd stood there like Jack Benny, I would have been assassinated. I kept moving. I don't think I could have taken a chair onto that stage. It would have been sitting-duck comedy. A whole new school.

9.

[Q] Playboy: Do you remember what your first romance was like?

[A] Lewis: My first romance? My first romance had more to do with, I think, intercourse than anything else. There was a woman in New York one friend had gone out with and I know that he'd had intercourse because he had an affidavit. And I had a banner over my head, intercourse or bust. 1964. please! Finally, I met this woman. She was far more advanced than I am now, even. My parents went to Puerto Rico for the weekend and I tried to lose my virginity. I tried it in every room of the house. And I finally did it in the--it's sad--I did it in my parents' bed. That moment of losing my virginity in my parents' bed was what catapulted me weeks later into psychoanalysis. So it was, like, a good and bad thing, you know? I got laid, which was exciting. But I did it in my parents' bed, which--little did I know--would set me back a lot of money.

10.

[Q] Playboy: Have you had any successful relationships?

[A] Lewis: I guess not, if you judge them by my not being in them anymore. Then I've been a miserable failure. I've been with some really wonderful women in my life. And I've been with some pretty horrific women I've run after. First, I ran after people who didn't want me, because I felt that they represented all the rejection I got growing up. So I figured I'd get them to love me. That didn't work. That never works. Then I went the other way. I went with people who idolized me. But I slowly lost respect for them. And they slowly resented being with me. So now I'm looking for people who idolize me for the right reasons.

11.

[Q] Playboy: What's the longest time that you've been in a relationship?

[A] Lewis: I dive headfirst into relationships, with all my Freudian cannons blasting. I've been with women for three years, four years, five years. The sad part of it is that I should have been with them for one week, two weeks, three weeks. That's what I didn't learn. I didn't learn how to get out of a bad relationship. I felt that I deserved a bad relationship. But now what happens? Now I don't know if people are gonna want to be with me because they dislike me. I don't know. It's hard to find someone. I may have to marry myself in drag. And then have Brian De Palma shoot it as a small film.

12.

[Q] Playboy: Do you usually break up with women or do they break up with you?

[A] Lewis: It's been around fifty-fifty. And I don't foresee that statistic changing much. For a while, I had a good record with women I loved, whom I lived with or who lived with me. Then I had one woman who's like an asterisk on the record. She ruined my average. It's not fair for me. I had three years, four years, five years. And then this woman came out and she lived with me for a week and a half and blew the whole average. She was caught cheating on a blimp flying over Venice Beach. People saw her have intercourse with this guy who was my best friend and every record went into the toilet. I gave her money; she slept around on me with a best friend. She did it in public, she advertised it. She wrote a one-act play about it. Every record that I had for being able to commit was blown because of this one woman who destroyed me. But that happens, you know?

13.

[Q] Playboy: Whom do you see as the perfect woman for you?

[A] Lewis: It's tragic, but I think the perfect woman will have to live in another home. That's the only thing I can see right now. My ideal woman through the years has been someone who would allow me to be myself. Now I feel that I need someone to allow me to be someone else. If anyone gets to know me, just me, purely, for three or four days in a row, it's over. I think the perfect woman is not around for me, because I'm so imperfect that it would take a total masochist to be with me. And I'm sure she's out there and I'm sure I'll find her.

[A] I'm not a sadist, but I would be almost like a sado-hypochondriac. Basically, she would sit in the car wearing lingerie and watch me shop for pharmaceuticals in a drugstore. That would be our sex. Sado-hypochondriac sex. Actually watching me shop for needless over-the-counter drugs. "Honey, I got the stuff for the asthma." "You don't have asthma." "I know. Isn't that great! Aren't you hot now?"

14.

[Q] Playboy: What is it that you find most confusing about women?

[A] Lewis: Their gender. Their gender confuses me more than any other gender. I'm scared of men and I'm confused by women. So where does that leave me? Cardboard cutouts, I can go with. Sexually, women have the more magnificent possibilities of the two genders. By comparison, men are slobs, sexually. I mean, I'm still very naïve. In college, they had to take me from the gym by ambulance when they foolishly showed the natural-birth film. If I ever have a child, I'm going to have maybe a rabbi or a social worker deliver it. I don't want to see something coming out. Then I'd really never have sex again. I don't want to be there. Just call me when he comes, darling.

[A] Actually, I think that one of my strengths sexually is having women laugh at the experience afterward. As long as it's gonna not work out in bed, at least let me put on a show, huh? And then I tell them at the end, "So, here we're in bed for only forty minutes. If it doesn't work out, I'll entertain. I'll play some cassettes, some old shows I did, some old Letterman reruns. It'll be a ball! I'll make popcorn." One of my goals this year is to make love naked. And I hope to be naked in bed soon. I usually wear three-piece woolen suits to bed.

15.

[Q] Playboy: Was being on Dr. Ruth Westheimer's show any help?

[A] Lewis: It was a good experience until I realized that she had a need to say the word penis more than a hundred and eleven thousand times in a six-minute interview. Regardless of what I said, she segued to penis. I said, "I went to Ohio State University." She went, "That's very nice, penis." "I'm involved in a relationship now." She says, "Good, penis." So it got to a point where I was sitting there just thinking about my penis, you know? And I just didn't want to talk about my penis that much on national television.

[A] But you know something? She helped me. What she did was--I didn't see this, but I had the tape--after I went off stage, she apparently analyzed me. And my penis. In front of the studio audience. She's very bright. She said some pretty astute things. My therapist at the time was a little threatened by that. I mean, how dare this woman think she knows me so fast? But she had some good insights. They were basically about my penis, though. She has penis insights.

16.

[Q] Playboy: What's a typical day for you when you're not on the road?

[A] Lewis: I try to get a good fifty to sixty minutes of weeping in, you know? A typical day? There is no typical day. People like milkmen have a typical day. I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna deliver cottage cheese, go home, make love, see a movie. I think I've tried not to be typical so much that my life is chaotic. I'll go to a movie at nine in the morning. I'll have dinner at four. It's not a good way to live. A lot of it has to do with the work I'm doing. If I'm writing a movie, then my life centers on that. If I'm getting ready for a big concert, it centers on that. Of course, it wreaks havoc on a relationship. Just try to tell someone you're supposedly in love with who needs your rare blood type that you have a meeting with the Osmonds.

[A] Few people know it, but I was the seventh Osmond. I was living in Utah. I built a little synagogue. I was the congregation, I was the rabbi. I did everything there. There aren't that many Jews living in that state. But I--quietly, you know--I would sing in the back. And if you look closely at some of the old Osmond tapes, you'll see a guy there with peyes and a cantor's hat. That's me. Chaim Osmond.

17.

[Q] Playboy: We thought you were carrying on the tradition of the man in black started by Lash La Rue, Hopalong Cassidy and Johnny Cash. Now it seems you were a rabbi in Utah. What's the real story behind all the dark duds?

[A] Lewis: In college, I saw a film called The Magician. It's a Bergman film and I started crying black tears when I saw it. I went home and got so freaked out by the movie that I threw out all my Hawaiian shirts. And I started wearing black from then on. And, I don't know, I think it was a way to hide behind a lot of craziness that I felt was going on. I felt that it was a pure kind of thing to wear, that I could just express myself without having to make a statement. Some people may argue, well, why not white? Isn't that purer? And I say, hey, I'm ambivalent. I'm in psychotherapy. White may have been the way to go. But it's too much like an ice-cream man. Too much like--you know, like maybe I needed a sitar. I just felt that black was the purest color to hide behind. It's like wearing a wall. Sometimes, though, if I have a good day, a good brunch, I put on a black shirt with little flecks of white.

18.

[Q] Playboy: What got you to move to the West Coast?

[A] Lewis: I had toured with, opened as a young comic for, Sonny and Cher. Which to this day still seems like science fiction to me. I did it, and I learned a lot about what I wanted to do with the rest of my career, and I also was hired to come to L.A. to be on their TV show. But I came out and then I realized what I had to do on the show. It wasn't Sonny and Cher's fault. It was just that I felt humiliated doing what I had to do. I wasn't cut out to dress up like Spartacus. So I quit.

[A] One of the main reasons I knew I had to leave was that my mother watched the show, and she usually watches anything I'm on with a microscope she got from the Mayo Clinic. She watches every nuance, everything as if it were the Zapruder film. She plays it back frame by frame so she can judge me with some credibility. And she said, "I watched the whole show. Where were you? Where were you?" I said, "I'm quitting." If Mom couldn't find me on the screen, I'm out. So I quit.

19.

[Q] Playboy: All of your fears and worries seem to be about sex. What about death? Is that a fear, too?

[A] Lewis: Death? No. I've been through hell already, you know? So I can't go there. I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of not living long enough to be in a really healthy relationship. That's a fear. And I suspect now that it's a fear that I'm gonna take with me to my deathbed!

[A] I'll do Letterman after I die, though. If he wants me to come back. But it will cost him a pretty penny.

20.

[Q] Playboy: What are your hopes for the future?

[A] Lewis: If I find a nonactress, I'll move away from Los Angeles. Actresses are the greatest to be with for two hours of the day. It's the other twenty-two that make life miserable. And I'm an actor, too. So the thing is, I'm going to have to find a nonprofessional who is blind to the incredible narcissism that actors have. And I think I almost have to find a sweet, loving nonprofessional whom I save from, say, an ice-skating accident. Pull her out of the hole in the ice and she owes me. The only one who's going to marry me is someone who owes me. So I hang around places where there could be major accidents and hope to save a very attractive, sweet, bright nonprofessional from death. And we'll go to the Owe-Me clinic and we'll get married.

psychotherapy's favorite comic relives the day he tossed his hawaiian shirts and reveals just what it cost to make it in his parents' bed