As a kid I saw Buddy Hackett on The Tonight Show telling a story about how the Mafia murdered two men because they burglarized his house. The mafia took offense apparently because Hackett worked in a Mafia owned casino. Hackett defended it because they were professional criminals and should know better to rob people who worked for "such nice people". One was murdered with a heroin overdose.
But I can't find anything about this on-line. I wasn't very good at identifying celebrities as a child, but I knew who Buddy Hackett was.
While looking for information on it, I found this odd item on the internet about Hackett.
Bipolar behavior and drunken debauchery colored many a Shecky Greene story. Fellow comedians, some just as fucked up, were dragged into the chaotic world. "Buddy Hackett," Greene recalls, "went looking for me one night. Buddy Hackett found me in a bar and Buddy Hackett came in with just a nightshirt. A portfolio under his arm. Buddy Hackett had a gun in the portfolio." It wasn't unnatural for Hackett, a foul-mouthed, pudgy faced comic, to be packing heat. Jack Carter remembers that Hackett was "a very angry man. He carried a gun. He was violent. He shot up a car in Vegas that parked in his spot. The Mafia wanted to kill him and I don't know who protected him."
On the night in question Shecky was drunk and bleary-eyed when Hackett started needling him. "You wanna know why I wanna talk to you?" asked Hackett. "You fired Fred Thompson." Thompson was an elderly African-American gardener that had been employed by both men. "Every time he'd garden the lawn he would cut in to the wire fence and it would curl up," explains Shecky. "So I finally said to him 'I've replaced twelve wire fences. Fred, I can't have you anymore.' So I fired him. Buddy Hackett came in and he said, 'Let me tell you something. That man needs new teeth.' I said, 'Well, fuckin' go buy him some new teeth!' He said, 'No, you should buy him some new teeth because you fired him.' I said to Buddy, 'You got any money?' He had some money in the portfolio. We went across the street to The Landmark and started gambling. And drinking."
Two heavy boozers raped their livers that evening. Shecky Greene ran a lucky streak at the crap table, but was too bagged to notice. Each time Greene won a toss, Buddy cashed the chips and stuffed the dough in his portfolio, eventually accumulating enough money to pay for Thompson's new teeth. It should have ended there, but with these two volatile figures, one characterized as viciously angry and the other as merely insane, their acrimony drifted into the Las Vegas streets. "So now we're walking across the street," says Greene. "As I'm walking, he stands in the middle of the street and he refers to me as Mr. Magoo's dumb nephew ... Buddy Hackett says, 'You know something? You're a Waldo!' I said, 'What?' He's in the middle of the fuckin' street! I said, 'I'm a what?" He said, 'Not only that. I'm gonna tell you something. You're a double Waldo!' So now I walk back and I said, 'I'm a fuckin' double Waldo!?' He's got the gun. I punch him in the fucking stomach! As I'm walking away he comes and jumps on my back. I flip him over my back. I put my foot on his throat. I said, 'If you get up, Buddy - I'm going to kill you.' I reach down, I take the gun and his car keys and I throw them into the desert. "Now don't get up."
Shecky and Buddy, despite their assorted fist fights and incessant animosity, shared a long history and a complicated friendship. Phil Berger wrote about the evenings on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles when Shecky was a regular at Billy Gray's Band Box. "The favorite there, Buddy Hackett, would come in and sabotage Shecky's routines with misplaced laughs." Greene's mother was in the audience for one of those shows. She was convinced that "the little fat guy" was Greene's biggest fan because he was always at the back of the room cackling loudly. "No, mom," explained Shecky after the show. "He's ruining me by intentionally laughing in the wrong place!" Today Greene laments, "I miss Buddy Hackett. But he did some terrible fucking things ... there's a word in Jewish culture called dybbuk. He was like the devil. You never knew what was going to happen with Buddy."
Hackett with his gun collection
Thanks for posting that! I would have never been completely sure!
ReplyDeleteI remember it vividly too, right down to the punchline, although, I remember it as two guys, and “about 10 minutes“.
ReplyDeleteThe reason I remember is because I was working as a live-in houseman for a Colombo family guy in Long Island, who had pictures of Buddy Hackett and Peggy Cass on the wall of his sunroom, recently taken in that very sunroom. So when I heard Buddy’s story, I knew I had better not fuck up.