"Alan knew everybody," Billy Crystal once recalled of the great comedian Alan King. "He was the greatest name-dropper in the history of show business. The joke was he could drop more names than Schindler. I could drop some names pretty good too, but I could never top him. He always had a story that would top me.
"One night we're shooting right in front of the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard and the crew is bonding and were telling stories of our relationships with drugs in the '60s. Eveyone had a drug story of some kind. Tame -- but we had them.
"And I thought, 'Alright, now I've got him. There's no way he can compete with the story I'm about to tell -- which was a story of when I got my cat stoned on a marijuana brownie and watched him walk backwards... Other guys were takling about, 'I saw Fantasia nine times' -- and they would tell what drug they saw it on. And Alan just sat quietly. He didn't say a word. And I'm about to tell the story about the cat going, 'Woooooow!' -- and Alan goes, 'I smoked pot once. It was with Bishop [Fulton] Sheen, Lana Turner, Mrs Lou Gehrig, and two of the Mills brothers'... and nobody could tell their stories."

Bookmark/Search

Add/Forward