Anne and I were lucky to have great friends. We formed a somewhat exclusive daffy club called “Yenemvelt” which is a Yiddish term meaning “other world.” Yenemvelt was the brainchild of the incredibly talented and prolific writer and producer Norman Lear. Back then he had access to a vacation house near Palm Springs. The Yenemvelt group that would gather there for a long weekend were me and Anne, Norman and his wife, Carl and Estelle Reiner, Dom DeLuise and his wife, Carol, Larry and Pat Gelbart, and sometimes Ron and Sheila Clark. We’d stay in our pajamas all day and from sunrise to sunset we’d never stop laughing.
The Yenemvelt club （left to right）： Carol and Dom DeLuise, Norman Lear, Pat Gelbart, Estelle and Carl Reiner, Lyn Lear, Larry Gelbart, Anne Bancroft, and me.
On one of those weekends, I thought I had a great idea. Half of the group was going to have to actually get out of their pajamas to go out shopping, the other half were lucky enough to stay at the house in their bedclothes. Anne and I were in the group that got to stay at home. So I proposed an outrageous practical joke. I said, “Let’s make believe that while they were out shopping someone came to the house and murdered us all. We can lay on the floor and cover ourselves in ketchup, but from a distance it’ll look like blood.”
Everyone was immediately on board. We all lay on the floor and Dom DeLuise assumed the task of ketchup dispenser and doused us all with a liberal coating of ketchup—faces, arms, chests, everything! The works! For about ten minutes we all just lay there awaiting the shoppers return and suppressing our laughter. I shouted, “When you hear the key in the door don’t make a sound!”
When the door finally opened they came in talking to each other and then for moment—utter silence. We knew we had them. They were in shock!…until somebody smelled the ketchup, and then the jig was up. You never in your life heard such an explosion of laughter.
At this writing Yenemvelt founder Norman Lear is almost one hundred years old, as sharp as ever, and he is still a dear and cherished friend.
Let me tell you some of the other stories from our travels. Sometime in the early sixties, Anne and I made friends with Harry Lorayne and his wife, Reneé. We had met them at Marty and Genii Charnin’s home, where once a week we’d all have dinner and play word games. Marty was a songwriter and TV producer. He produced two wonderful Anne Bancroft television specials; that’s how we initially met. We all lived in the Village, so it was easygoing. Harry and Reneé became good friends of ours and we would often share summer vacations together.
Harry was a memory expert and wrote a big bestselling book called The Memory Book. He went on The Johnny Carson Show and memorized the whole audience. Johnny would tell them to stand—almost five hundred people—and believe it or not, Harry could remember all of their names. It was truly amazing! In addition to that Harry was a bit of a genius when it came to close-up magic tricks. He would wow us because no matter how we shuffled and cut the deck of cards, we always wound up with the ace of spades. They were really a fun couple, and Anne and I so enjoyed our two or three weeks traveling with them every summer.
One summer sometime in the mid-seventies Carl Reiner and his wife, Estelle, bought a little house in a fake seventeenth century village called “Castellaras” that was actually built in the sixties somewhere in the south of France near the city of Mougins—Harry pronounced it “Muggins.”
We traveled there on the Concorde. The supersonic airliner got us from New York to London in three and a half hours. To say it was fast would be a bit of an understatement, especially in comparison to the eleven days I spent in stormy seas when I was a soldier heading for Europe; it was pretty darn fast and much more enjoyable.
In those days when we were in London we usually stayed at a beautiful hotel on Mount Street called the Connaught. We enjoyed having a late dinner after seeing a show in the West End. We dined at famous eateries like the Ivy, which is right across the street from St. Martin’s Theatre, where Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap has been playing for a record-breaking sixty-five years.
After about a week in London we headed to Nice, in the south of France. We stayed in Cannes at the Majestic Hotel, which was a lovely hotel with big balconies overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. I stocked our little hotel fridge with delicious, locally made yogurt and succulent fresh peaches. Every morning on our balcony we’d have peaches and yogurt with a croissant and café au lait. Then we’d hit the beach and swim in the warm waters of the Mediterranean.