PLUME: You were an integral part of my childhood, watching The Muppet Movie…

DeLUISE: Oh, no kidding? There I was in The Muppet Movie, and I said, “What about a gold tooth?” and they said, “Okay.” So I went to my dentist and he compiled a tooth that snapped over my little eyetooth – which I still have in my little case here. Jeez, it’s amazing… what a privilege it was to work with Jim Henson. He was in a barrel, and the barrel was pulled down underwater – because it had a hook on the bottom of it – and he was underwater, and his arm came up through a… ’cause I was in a boat in real water… through an artificial log, and then he would proceed to stay there all day with his right arm up in this little green frog, and talk to you. And I said, “I don’t think people understand this.” He’s in a barrel way down underneath the water, and you see this frog, and… it must have been so claustrophobic to be underwater in a barrel with a little television set, so he could see where the hell I was so he could… you know what I mean? You never even knew that that was… you never pictured that, did you?

PLUME: Oh, when I was watching the movie? Not in the least.

DeLUISE: No, you just look at the character.

PLUME: That was Kermit on a log, talking to you.

DeLUISE: Right, it was Kermit talking to me, and I was his agent or something, and he wanted to get a job, and I started the movie. It was very exciting.

PLUME: It’s got to be wonderful to get to that level in the movies…

DeLUISE: I remember I got a call, and Doris Day said, “We’d like you to be in our movie called The Glass Bottom Boat,” and I said, “Oh, how wonderful.” She said, “We’ll send you a script and maybe you can do it if you like.” I said, “Thank you Miss Day. You’re wonderful.” I hung up and I screamed! I screamed. I said, “OH MY GOD DORIS DAY!” It was so exciting. And I bought a car and drove it across the country. That’s how I came to California. I don’t know why I drove to California. And then when I got here, I went to the Valley by mistake and they said, go over here – so I drove and drove and drove, and then they told me to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel. My god! I moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel and I said, “What are the rooms?”, and it was $35.00 a night. And I said, “Oh my god, this is… I can’t afford to stay here!”

PLUME: “I had a wonderful apartment with windows that rattled for less than that!”

DeLUISE: (laughing) Yes, but now… now it’s $500 a night. So I quickly moved to a place called the Sunset Marquis, and my rent was, I don’t know, $200 a month. Now the Sunset Marquis is like this faaaaamous, famous building. But it was very new then.

PLUME: When you came out, did your wife come along with you?

DeLUISE: No, I wasn’t married. I wasn’t married. It was Doris Day who told me, you know – I said, “I met this girl in summer stock.” Jerry Herman was my piano player. And I did a nightclub act with Dick Cole, and it was called Dick and Dom. And we paid $35 to have an arrangement of our song, you know, “Climb upon my knee, Danny Boy. Hello to you both from the city. Hello to you both from the farm. My name is Dick… and my name is Dom.” So you know, we got this piano player to sit down, and I said, “Here’s our music…” ad he said, “I don’t read music.” I said, “You don’t read music? You’re charging us $40 to do three shows…” and he said, “Well, just do your act.” So I did the whole act with all the comedy and everything and my magic act was in there. And then he said, “Now let’s do it again.” And he played full, wonderful, amazing…ahh! How great. You know, “Here’s your $40.” And we were a big hit. A nightclub act is a very hard thing to compose. And his name is Jerry Herman and he wrote, (sings) “Hello Dolly, well hello, Dolly”… “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”… he was our piano player, and he still doesn’t read music! Isn’t that lovely?

PLUME: It shows that you don’t need technical skill to be a star.

DeLUISE: That’s right. Amazing. So we just, you know, spoke with him, and we still sit and talk and he says, “Remember how you made me laugh?” He’s like a darling… he’s like a boy, you know, in his little man body. So I was working with Doris Day in this picture. And we’re on a raft on a boat with Arthur Godfrey and Paul Lynde who’s an amazing experience. And my wife and I… I met my wife when I was in a place called Provincetown, Massachusetts, and we did something called Summer and Smirk – and Tennessee Williams wrote something called Summer and Smoke. So Smirk was the name of our show. and it was written by Marty Charnin. He wrote Annie. You know, (singing) “Tomorrow, tomorrow… I love ya, tomorrow”… that was the man. We were getting $75 a week. And later we worked again, my wife and I, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in another show written by Jerry Herman, and the show, (sings) “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”… we did a lot of the tunes that he later took and put in his shows. And that was called The Jerry Herman Review. So I was knowing and loving Carol, and then I asked her to marry me. I was with Doris Day again – I’m just telling you how I got there – and I said to her, “You know I’m really in love and I want to get married, and I don’t know what to do,” and she said, “Marry her. If you love her, marry her. Don’t be silly.” So I called Carol up and I said, “Doris Day said I should marry you.” So when she met Doris…

PLUME: What woman could say no to that?

DeLUISE: Ha ha! And when she met Doris she said, “Thank you. You’re the one that got me married.” We’re still friendly with Doris. She’s terrific. And she has 16 dogs. Some of them that are very small. Some of them have three legs. And she’s, uh… a special lady. You know when you get a note from Doris Day, you save it. You don’t throw it away. On the first day of The Glass Bottom Boat, I arrived and I looked at my chair – it was an old director’s chair with my name spelled in ballpoint pen… and it was spelled incorrectly – “D-E-L-O-U-I-S-E.” I had a sad face, and Doris was sitting next to me and she said, “What’s the matter?” I said, “I always dreamed of having a chair with my name on it, and it’s spelled wrong.” So the next day, I got a brand new chair, and I cried a little as I looked at it. My name was spelled correctly. I looked at Doris, and she said, “That, you can take home.”

PLUME: Do you still have that chair?

DeLUISE: I do! I also ended up working with Frank Sinatra on The Dean Martin Show. Jimmy Stewart, Jack Benny. Mel Brooks came to me and said, “I want you to audition for The Twelve Chairs, and I’m gonna be in it and Frank Langella’s gonna be in it – never done a movie in his life – and a man named Ron Moody,” who had just won the Academy Award for playing Fagin in uh… (sings) “You gotta pick a pocket or two…”

PLUME: In Oliver!…

DeLUISE: In Oliver! And Mel said, “Because I did The Producers, and Peter Sellers loved it, and took ads out – ‘This is the greatest movie’ – Peter may play the part of Father Theodore, the illegitimate priest. Or you will play it if he doesn’t play it. And no matter what, we’ll be friends.” The audition was five hours. I spoke to Mr. Brooks for five hours and we’ve been friends ever since.

PLUME: What was the conversation like?

DeLUISE: Well we just talked about my father. My being at home. Being Italian. Being raised. We just talked about life. Just life. But he did say… “We’ll be friends for 25 years.” He said, “We’ll be friends for the rest of our lives.” He just called it right then.

PLUME: And you’re both native New Yorkers, right?

DeLUISE: We’re both native New Yorkers, but he’s older than me. He’s about 10 years older than me. And I’m 69, so he’s is 79. And having a wonderful time with The Producers. So, Peter Sellers didn’t do the movie, and I was very young and my son Michael was just born, and Michael’s now 33, and Mel said, “Let’s go to Yugoslavia to make a movie. Are you ready?” And I said, “Sure, sure, sure. That’s great. How long will we be there?” He said, “I don’t know but…” and I said, “And what’s my salary?” And he said, “$15,000.” And I said, “A week?” And he said, “No, no, no. For the whole movie.” For The Glass Bottom Boat I got more money than that. They gave me room and board and they treated me well in the big studio. But Mel was doing a low budget movie, and so I got $15,000 to do The Twelve Chairs.

PLUME: It’s a wonderful performance.

DeLUISE: Oh, thanks. It was really… it was very, very, very interesting to work with him. And he was a new director. So it wasn’t… things didn’t go smoothly. When we got there they had new film, and they put two lights up – and I had already done some movies, right… “There’s not enough light! This movie doesn’t have any lights!” There were two lights in the scene and then they’d shoot it, but they had this very sensitive film, and it looked wonderful. So Frank and I bonded because we were there, and Mel was, you know, nuts and wonderful, and we spent six months making that movie. And then Anne Bancroft came over, and then my wife came over for a visit, and it was thrilling. My wife had to leave our son for two weeks. My wife came for two weeks. And it was probably the best two weeks of my life. It was great.

PLUME: How would you compare working with Mel during that film, with how he was in later films? As a director, how did he mature?

DeLUISE: Well he was not… he’s not a smooth man. He’s very, very, um… raw, and what you see is his insides. You know what I mean? He laughs. Now, he’s a big director – but then, he was a first time or second time director. So he was a novice. Try anything. He would try anything. But he still says, – like when I did History of the World, Part One, he said, “I’m happy. Do whatever you want.” Nobody says that, you know? So then I would just ad lib and carry on and do anything that I wanted. You know, make a mistake. It could be brilliant or it could be throwaway-able. So he was smoother. He’s much smoother, much more confident. He did a lot of movies. But some of his movies didn’t work. Some of his movies came out and they were not big successes.

PLUME: The 90’s didn’t treat him very well.

DeLUISE: His version of Dracula. Something about… Dead and Loving It.

PLUME: Not one of my favorites of his.

DeLUISE: Right. So, you know, when he did Frankenstein, it was classic and was amazingly wonderful. And Blazing Saddles… I mean, some of his movies were spectacular.

PLUME: One of the few scenes that I really liked in Robin Hood: Men In Tights was your scene.

DeLUISE: Oh, when I did… you know he said, “I want you to imitate Brando…” ’cause I can do it in real life. And I said, “You know I’ve done that in Cannonball one and Cannonball two,” and he said, “Well, no one saw those movies.”

PLUME: I saw Cannonball Run! I grew up on Cannonball Run…

DeLUISE: And then when the man said… there was a line about the fact that his tongue was cut out. One of my cohorts, his tongue was gone, and I ad libbed, I said, “Go like this… (cluck cluck sound). Ha ha! He can’t do it!”

PLUME: Well, The Twelve Chairs still remains a classic…

DeLUISE: Yeah, that was nice, that was nice. I mean, you know, when you have six months to make a movie, that means that each moment… There was one time when I had to handle those chairs. One of them was made of mahogany, and that was the actual chair. And then another chair was balsawood, which was still very heavy. And they said, “Take this chair and run up the hill with it.” And I said, “I’m taking this chair.” And he said, “No no, take the other one. It looks better.” I said, “I can’t lift it!” And he said, “Get the f***ing chair and go up the hill!” And I said, “Up yours!” People were screaming. I had bruises, little cuts all over my body. Now I couldn’t… “I could pick up the chair, and you take a picture, I’ll put the chair down,” but I was running up hills with the chair. So then we would sit and laugh at night. We’d all go home, take a shower, and go out to dinner and we would scream with laughter about the day. And even though I said, ‘F*** you, I’m not doing that!” and he’d say, “Pick it up!”

When we were there it was Frank Langella, my wife Carol, and Anne Bancroft came. It was a vacation, because we were all together and we would go to restaurants and eat and laugh and, oh my god, I was in heaven. And mind you, I had two children being taken care of by my sister in New York. But now I couldn’t do any of that. I couldn’t… in Yugoslavia when there was a rip in the rug, they would take little nails and seal the rip. It was a very poor country. So for two cents American, I would take a trolley. Mel said, “Let’s take a cab,” and I said, “No, I’ll meet you at the studio.” I just took a trolley car, and it went like this and went like that, it went like this and went like that, and it got me, you know, a half hour later right in front of the place we were gonna see rushes. But he said, “You’re gonna get killed.” Mel said, “You’re gonna get killed.” I said, “I’m not killed, I’m here.” And he said, “Well, you shouldn’t be on these public trams…” he was very worried about me. But for two cents I got there. American. One time I said to the man downstairs, “Can I have my jacket cleaned?” Man says, “Three weeks.” I said, “Three weeks? Why?” He says, “We have to send to England.” I said, “Oh, never mind. I’ll just wear it.” They had no facilities. Everything was brown and dark green. They have leather jackets, and you put them on, and they were all irregular. Yugoslavia was… Mel used to make fun, he said it was very hard to get around because the whole country was lit with a 15 watt bulb. He said it was very hard to do anything on the weekend because Tito had the car. It was a very primitive country. But we did have an experience of a lifetime, because… you know, you just would be inventing stuff with Mel. You went to work every day. Mel said, “We’re not using you today..” – you would come. Come, sit, work… no matter who was in the scene, you were there. Have you ever been to Yugoslavia? It got bombed and torn apart.

PLUME: An aunt of mine is Yugoslavian.

DeLUISE: No kidding? Yeah, that’s funny because I meet people from there and I’d say hello in Yugoslavian. And then the word which means to cook in water. But if you just say it one way, it also means two testicles.

PLUME: So it’s all context.

DeLUISE: Yeah, in Spanish you can say eggs and eggs and it’s the same word.

PLUME: You gotta wonder how those two words came to mean the same thing.

DeLUISE: Well they’re both the same shape, you know. Isn’t it? Roughly? I haven’t seen my testicles in a long time, but I’m assuming that they’re…

PLUME: It depends on how long you boil each.

DeLUISE: Exactly. And you see Mel taking gigantic chances, writing a musical of The Producers. When I did a movie with Mae West called Sextette, one of the guys from The Who, who died of an overdose, said to me, “I want to do a musical of The Producers.” And I said, “Mel, he’s asking me to ask you.” And he said, “I don’t want anybody to do it. I’ll do it some year, sometime.” That was years and years and years ago. And then finally he sat down and wrote – a little late, but obviously it was the right time for him – The Producers. And he, you know, it won every accolade you can. And I just spoke to him and he said that they’re going to have companies in every country in the world, and then eventually they’ll do the movie, but he says he won’t do the movie until he has milked the world of the need to see this play.

PLUME: How pragmatic.

DeLUISE: You know, he is a man who is still trying to prove that he’s entertaining, funny and skilled. I swear to you there’s a little seed in him that has not rooted. And the seed says, “I want to be noticed, I want you to think I’m funny, I want your approval”… and you know, he is… that’s one of the best things about him. We all have that, but his is prevalent. He just still wants you to know that he’s okay and funny. It’s amazing. I mean, it’s wonderful.

PLUME: You would think 30+ years of cinema history and people respecting him and his films as classics would be enough.

DeLUISE: Yeah, you would think that. But I mean, when you talk to Norman Lear, who’s also my friend, he looks like he has accepted the fact that he’s, you know, an artistic genius, and he’s much calmer, you know? Mel will dance and try to do his imitation of Fred Astaire, and he’ll kick the cupboard once, twice, three times – you’ll say, “You’re gonna hurt the cupboard…” and then 56 times later he’s kicking the cupboard, and you’re hysterical. But that’s just… he can say, “I can make you laugh.” You’d say, “You’re gonna hurt the cupboard!” and he goes da-da dum bee bop BANG BANG badda beep bop BANG BANG… and Carl Reiner and Estelle, and Normal Lear and his wife, and Carol and I, and Larry Gelbart – all those people were present. And we all were in fear for the cupboard until finally you were laughing until we held our sides, and I said, “Do you realize when he did it, it was like… it was harmful to the house? And after a while you didn’t give a s*** about the cupboard and you were just laughing?” So that unsatisfied moment in the bowels of his being is what makes him hysterical. And he has the courage to make fun of homosexuals, Hitler, producers… everybody, you know? He says “Producers are the scum of the earth.” And he says, “I know, ’cause I’m a producer.”

PLUME: Well I know that even the films that don’t work that well comedically, like Dracula: Dead and Loving It, you have to admire the energy and the gusto with which they’re made.

DeLUISE: I agree with you. He also has the nerve to do a dance number in a wedding cake. There was a guy looking in a window – I think this is in Silent Movie – and there was a wedding cake, and then he had a wedding cake as big as a house, and he and Bernadette Peters danced and were dancing and they jumped from the top of the wedding cake, and they danced a little bit and then they danced in whipped cream. So that they disappeared in whipped cream. You know, there’s very few men who have a mind like that.

PLUME: He’s the type of comedic director who will slap the audience until they laugh…

DeLUISE: That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. You got it. And he is still as cute as a bug. ’cause you walk in, and he’ll say, “I’m having a great third act!”

PLUME: I’ve always wanted to interview him. I’ve tried for three years and never got past his handlers.

DeLUISE: Really?

PLUME: Yeah. It’s one of the biggest regrets I’ve had. It’s a body of work to definitely admire.

DeLUISE: He’s unique. Sweet. He’ll be so sweet to you. Once you get in the room with him, he’s a doll. And he’s married to one of the most talented, exciting women in the world, Anne Bancroft. How the f*** they got together I’ll never know. You know what I mean? They’re not likely to be together, but they are.

PLUME: And to stay together.

DeLUISE: Yeah. They’re wonderful together. She laughs at him. Listen, I make him laugh by getting a bottle of ginger ale and walking over to a plant by a pool and pretending that I’m urinating and I’ll pour the entire bottle of ginger ale slowly on the ground, and it’ll foam up and he’ll just, he’ll laugh at that. I mean I also make him laugh when I talk about my home life, about my dad. We went to a movie one time, called Lassie. My father’s very primitive and he was a farmer, and he had all his teeth, but he didn’t understand about movies, and he said, “There’s no such-a thing as-a big-a skunga like-a this.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “In the movie there was a tree skunga. One skunga was a-right, but then one skunga was a-too big, and the last one was a-big-a, and skunga don’t come-a like this. Skunga don’t come like-a this. I know skunga.” I said, “Pa, that was a close-up. That was a long shot, a medium, and a close-up.” He said, “The skunga no come like-a this.” It’s hysterical, those stories. And my father went to Lassie and said, “No can be.” What he’s talking about was the position of the camera. And it took me a long time to figure out because I didn’t know what three skunks, you know? My father was amazing, because when he was 75 years old, he was at the top of a tree trimming it. I said, “You can’t do it! You’re 75 years old!” He was, you know, an amazing man. Amazing. The last words he said was, “I want to get up.” I said, “Pa, you’re dying. You can’t get up.” He was something else. He was a tough, rough guy. Because he used to yell at us, you know. “I no see no ting-a like this in my life!” And that was on Christmas Eve! My father was just yelling. So I said, “When you were bad, what did your father do?” And my grandfather was very little, and my grandmother, who I look like, was a big, big, woman. And he said, “When I was-a bad, my father would take-a the wood and hit me with the wood.” “What? He would take wood and hit you with a piece of wood?” He said, “Yes, he hit me with the wood…” I said, “Oh, I see. Now I know why you beat the s*** out of me.”

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