The Tears of a Clown

Rodney Dangerfield Uses Laughs to Chase a Lifetime of Depression

NEW YORK -- There are some sights no human being should ever be subjected to; sights so unbearably ghastly that even John Ashcroft would label them cruel and unusual punishment. It's bad enough that many must witness death, famine, plague. But this . . . this is too much. Head for the hills. Pack your stuff. Board up the windows. To arms! To arms!

Rodney Dangerfield is naked.

Here's the bizarre thing: Rodney Dangerfield is always naked. In bed. In front of the TV. Eating a sandwich. Thinking up a joke. Digging through a drawer in search of a bag of marijuana and his lighter. Unless he's planning on hitting the town, Dangerfield's wardrobe is -- simply -- a robe, wide open. "Comfort," he says. "I'm all about comfort."

Last year, when David Hirshey, an editor at HarperCollins, spent three days at Dangerfield's Los Angeles pad working on the comedian's autobiography, he concentrated on keeping his eyes straight ahead. "Can't look down with Rodney," says Hirshey. "It's always . . . there." Tonight, it's . . . there. Dangerfield is sitting on a chair in a penthouse suite of Manhattan's Omni Berkshire Place, his home away from home while promoting his autobiography, "It's Not Easy Bein' Me."

His gut is large and his skin is wrinkly, and the fact that the law prohibits fleshy, 82-year-old men from exposing themselves to strangers seems lost on him.

"When you reach a certain age," Dangerfield says, "you throw a lot of things out the window. What do I care what people think? I'm just trying to be me. To be myself." It is an illuminating statement, because the Rodney Dangerfield the public knows is not real. Onstage or in front of a camera, Dangerfield sparkles. He is, even at this advanced age, a bolt of electricity; a continuous stream of caustic one-liners that whoosh past your head at 500 mph.

WHOOSH! With my wife, I got no sex life. She cut me down to once a month. Hey, I'm lucky -- two guys I know she cut completely out.

WHOOSH! What a childhood I had. My parents sent me to a child psychiatrist. The kid didn't help me at all.

WHOOSH! I was an ugly kid. When I was born, after the doctor cut the cord, he hung himself.

As the laughter grows louder and louder, the familiar Dangerfield emerges, tugging on his tie, nodding his head, running his hand through his gray hair. Beads of sweat -- good, comfortable sweat, the motor oil of the stand-up -- form across his brow. He is on a roll. It's what he lives for. "I tell ya, I get no respect . . ."

Poof!

The real Rodney Dangerfield is not there on the stage. He is here, in the Omni: nude, raspy-voiced, soldiering on. Running up and down Dangerfield's chest is a long zipper scar, the result of open-heart surgery that saved his life four years ago. Dangerfield also has recovered from two aneurysm operations and brain surgery. Yet those, he will tell you, are not his biggest problems. Not even close.

Despite regular sessions with a psychiatrist and mountains of medication (he takes 137 pills daily, listed on a color-coded chart hanging in the kitchen and ranging from antidepressants to Valium to Aleve to Prevacid), Dangerfield is a somber man. He has been for decades, beginning with his youth in Babylon, Far Rockaway and Kew Gardens, N.Y., and even extending through his "Caddyshack"/"Easy Money"'/"Back to School" cinematic heyday of the 1980s.

Dangerfield was formally diagnosed as clinically depressed several years ago, but he traces it back to his boyhood. Born Jacob Cohen, he was abandoned by his father (a vaudeville comedian) and raised, along with his sister, Marion, by a cold mother whose cruel remarks made him feel worthless.