MONTECITO, Calif. -- The one thing Jonathan Winters wants you to know right away, even before you've moved beyond the tiled entrance foyer of his house: He's not crazy.
Moments after the handshake, he launches into a many-voiced shtick alternately describing, making fun of and setting the record straight on his long-discussed mental state. It used to be called manic-depression, what he has. Now it's bipolar disorder. It keeps being upgraded to sound more respectable, he jokes. Sure, he had two breakdowns, but that was 40 years ago. Nothing since. It's not just the lithium, either; it's finding out what's important in life -- raising your kids, enjoying your home life, reconciling with the ghosts of your parents.Whoa.
We'd planned on asking about Maude Frickert and the stable of characters that made Winters a four-decade eminence in American comedy. We wanted to ask about Robin Williams and other contemporary comics who took their cue from Winters. Sure, we were going to get around to the "nutty" issue, but we thought we'd sit down first.
It's understandable why Winters would be on the defensive. Yes, he's the acknowledged father of improvisational stand-up, siring such offspring as Tracey Ullman, Lily Tomlin, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams.
He helped invent the highly personal comic routine that expressed the comedian's inner life in a sly and subtle way. Before Lenny Bruce and Sam Kinison mined their painful pasts and expressed it in the first-person monologue, Winters invented characters who voiced his. And in honor of his contribution, Winters on Oct. 20 received the Kennedy Center's second Mark Twain Prize for achievement as an American humorist. (The event was taped to run as a one-hour special Jan. 12 on cable's Comedy Central.)
But Winters, 73, also became a poster boy for the romantic fine line between genius and insanity. In a business with fast and loose labels, Winters got stuck with the "crazy" epitaph years ago. "Oh, yeah. Jon Winters. Genius. But he's, you know . . . "
He's what? What??
Winters wants to know why he's been saddled with that for 40 years, and it's a fair question. Actors today have breakdowns and go on Larry King the next night, it seems.
"This is something I've never quite shaken. There are bigger stars than me with all kinds of coke problems, sauce problems, guys that are married four, five times," he says. "Then they put them in picture after picture. Why should I have to go through my life auditioning and proving I'm sane?"
That's how Winters comes at you: all at once. Williams has claimed Winters as his mentor. ("I told Robin, 'Don't call me your mentor. People back in Ohio don't know what that means. Call me your idol,' " Winters deadpans.) So think of talking to Winters as something like talking to Williams, only at 45 rpm instead of 78 rpm. Winters is slower now, his voice a low grumble, spiced with a Tabasco splash of sarcasm and outrage. He is no longer the Gatling gun mounted in Johnny Carson's chair, but he's still got some ammo.
He and his wife of 51 years, Eileen, live just down the coast from Santa Barbara. His children, Jonathan IV and Lucinda, live nearby, with five children between them. Walk out of Winters' living room and you're on a patio, overhung by trellises and flowering shrubs. Straight out toward the horizon is a green ridge and beyond that, a fine view of the ocean. On cool, clear Southern California nights, the stars are thick. Things are quiet here.
Things have been quiet in Winters' career for the past decade.
Twenty, 30 years ago, he appeared in movies, toured for club dates, did TV commercials. He seemed a weekly fixture on Carson. He was big. Now his career has slowed, if not his mind. He reads constantly, devouring news and history, particularly anything to do with Winston Churchill. He'll still do an occasional 35 minutes of stand-up, or voice a cartoon, or take a small part in a movie, but his last regular work was the 1991-92 TV sitcom "Davis Rules," which netted him his only Emmy. A 1988 book of short stories, "Winters' Tales," hit the bestseller lists. A 1992 comedy album, "The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters," won a Grammy.
But he's not often on David Letterman or Jay Leno, and probably not because anybody thinks he's crazy. It's because, first, he hasn't had a recent TV show or movie to publicize, but also he doesn't "get" Letterman and Leno, and, likely, vice versa. Or he may be simply too slow for them now. Or it may be the difference between two eras and two kinds of funny. The difference between history and the present.
A tour of his house displays many icons of the past. He is surrounded by his era.
Over here is a four-foot-long model of the USS California in a glass case. Signed, framed documents from all of the presidents hang impressively. His "special room" is a virtual armory of Civil War rifles and pistols on two walls; on another, glass-cased autographed baseballs. To Jonathan, from: Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Joe DiMaggio.
And here is a photo of Winters on "The Tonight Show." Carson is laughing so hard he seems near tears. He has signed it: "Jonathan: You are definitely not funny!"
"Johnny and I, we were on the same frequency," Winters says. "Not so with these guys."
"These guys" are Letterman and Leno, the late-night hosts most responsible, along with Conan O'Brien, for keeping celebrities in the public eye nowadays. When Carson went, so did Winters. "I found Leno extremely difficult to work with," Winters says.
Carson gladly served as the straight man for Winters' character-driven improvisations; Leno's scripted, punch-line-driven style is less compatible. It's easy to paint Letterman as just a grouch.
In a way, Winters and Letterman might seem a perfect match. Despite the family-safe comedy he performs publicly ("I just don't get these guys with their filthy language," Winters says of today's profane comics), there is a dark edge to his private patois. It's not a hateful shtick. He's your grumpy but charming grandpa from the Midwest, who fully takes in the world but is nevertheless perplexed and somewhat soured by it.
Frickert is probably Winters' most famous character. The swinging grandma was a gray-bunned libertine whose promiscuous antics made '60s audiences howl. There also was the quack shrink, Dr. Bellenhoffer, and others, from Chester Honeyhugger to King Kwasi to Larry Lech.
By the mid-'50s, Winters had left radio deejay and TV jobs in Ohio for New York, where he had modest success doing celebrity impersonations. His big break came when an old show-biz guy told him: Stop doing celebrities like every other young comic. Invent characters you know, people you grew up with. Do them.
Soon he was a hot rising young comic, a fixture on TV in its early days and a wacky contemporary of Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Milton Berle and Imogene Coca. Winters became a regular on "The Garry Moore Show," "Here's the Show" and "The Steve Allen Show." He got his own gig, "The Jonathan Winters Show," on NBC in 1956. He toured comedy clubs. He had a wife and two young children. And in 1958, he quit drinking. "At 32, my hands were shaking like this from the sauce," he says, vibrating them. He was drinking a half-gallon of liquor a day.
So he quit. But the anxiety didn't. He exacerbated the situation by downing 12 to 14 cups of coffee and Coke a day. In 1959, he had his first breakdown, in San Francisco. He took two weeks off. Should have taken longer, he says, because, two years later, he had a second one. This one cost him eight months in a clinic. He's taken lithium since then. It's been a long, long time since he had a manic episode, but he remembers what they feel like.
"I felt that I could read into things that weren't there," he says. "It was a form of hallucinating. I would see people staring at me and think, 'Do they know what I'm going through? Are they trying to read my mind?' "
By the mid-'60s, Winters was back in the spotlight. He played a truck driver in the 1963 film "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World," perhaps Hollywood's last madcap caper. He took a turn as twins in 1965's "The Loved One," the adaptation of Waugh's black novella, called by some critics one of the best comedies of the '60s. There was a part as a deputy in "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!," the 1966 Cold War spoof. He had a second "Jonathan Winters Show," this time on CBS, from 1967 to 1969.
Throughout the '70s, his appearances were pretty much limited to TV specials and the long-running Hefty garbage bag ads, in which he played a wacky "garbologist."
His big reemergence came in 1981, when he appeared on ABC's "Mork & Mindy" as Mork's son, Mearth. Williams, who played Mork, had been a longtime admirer of Winters and had requested him. In 1992, Williams told Playboy why Winters inspired him:
"It was like seeing a guy behind a mask, and you could see that his characters were a great way for him to talk about painful stuff. I found out later that they are people he knows -- his mother, his aunt. He's an artist who also paints with words, he paints these people that he sees."
Winters hasn't the desire to do a weekly TV series anymore, he says. Besides, a pacemaker, implanted in 1988, reminds him to take it easy. (Williams collapsed in February of that year. When he came to, he was being given mouth-to-mouth by a male paramedic. The first thing out of Winters' mouth was: "You're a very attractive man.")
But Winters would like to do one more film. A strong supporting role in a comedy or drama; doesn't matter, as long as it's good. But it may not come, not now. Winters --like so many other improvisationists, such as Tomlin and Martin Short -- doesn't fit Hollywood's molds.
But there's something else, too.
"They give Don Ameche an Oscar and a standing ovation but they don't give him a job," says Timothy Gray, managing editor of Variety, the show business trade paper. "How many other 73-year-olds are working? For better or worse, there's not a lot of action for these people."
So Winters browses the collectibles market in Hollywood on weekends. And assembles his autobiography. And paints. And endures "blue-hair parties" with his wife -- his best friends are back in Ohio.
And he still has a little fun.
Like last May, when his wife put together a local fashion show for charity. The willowy models prowled the runway in their pret-a-porter. All went as expected. Until the last model appeared at the end of the runway. It was a devilishly grinning Winters, dressed as swinging granny Maude Frickert, in the trademark dress, little round glasses and gray wig with the pulled-back bun.
And he brought down the house.