Shecky Greene, a high-energy stand-up comedian who for years was one of the biggest stars in Las Vegas, died Sunday at his home in Las Vegas. He is 97.
His daughter Alison Greene confirmed his death.
Mr. Greene was a frequent guest of Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson and other television hosts, and had acting roles in films and television. But he never reached as wide an audience as many of his fellow comedians, perhaps because his humor was best experienced in full flower on the nightclub stage rather than in small doses on the small screen.
In Las Vegas, though, he’s an institution. A versatile entertainer of the old school — he told stories, he pretended, he ad-libbed, he did impressions, he sang — he’d do almost anything to get a laugh, with physical comedy so broad it sometimes left him black. and blue.
He is not one to stick to a set routine. “I’m not an ABCD comic. ‘Hello, ladies and gentlemen’ and then the next line,” he told comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff in 2011. Audiences who went to Shecky Greene didn’t know what to expect.
“One of the greatest I’ve ever seen in a nightclub,” his fellow comedian Pat Cooper told Mr. Nesteroff. “I saw him go up to the curtain and do 20 minutes on high the curtain! He destroyed an audience.”
Some say he’s funniest when he’s angry, which is often. “He’s got to be where he hates the owner, he hates the hotel,” the comedian Jack Carter once said, “so he can get something going.”
He is at least as unpredictable off stage as he is on it. He became famous not only for his acting but also for his drunkenness, gambling and erratic, often self-destructive behavior.
“I must have been fired probably 150 times in Las Vegas,” Mr. Greene told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996. “I’ve only been fired 130 times.”
Perhaps Shecky Greene’s most famous story involves the time he drove his car into the fountain in front of Caesars Palace. In a 2005 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he confirmed the story, but admitted to slightly embellishing the way he told it in his demeanor: He didn’t actually greet the police who rushed to the scene with the words “No spray wax. , please.” That line, he said, was suggested to him after the fact by his friend and fellow comedian Buddy Hackett.
Another of his most famous jokes is, he insists, based on a true story. Frank Sinatra, the joke went, once saved his life. Five men are beating Mr. Greene, but they were stopped when Sinatra said, “OK, boys, that’s it.”
As amusing as the stories of Mr. Greene’s behavior were, the truth was that he had serious mental health problems, including bipolar disorder and panic attacks, which seemed to worsen when he became dependent on his prescription medication. He also had other ailments, including cancer, and in the mid-1980s he stopped performing.
Mr. Greene, who has a family history of mental illness, went public with his condition in the 1990s and, with the help of a new therapist and new medication, gradually resumed his career. He even incorporated his pain into his shtick.
“I’m bipolar,” he told a television interviewer in Las Vegas in 2010. “I’m more than bipolar. I’m South Polar, North Polar. I’m every polar type there is. I’ve even lived in a polar bear for about a year.”
As of 2005, although he happily describes himself as retired, he can be persuaded to perform at private parties. In 2009 he made his first Las Vegas appearance in many years, at the Suncoast Casino, and he continues to perform occasionally in Las Vegas.
As early as 1996, Mr. Greene, he said, for one reason only. “I’m not here for a career anymore,” he told The Sun. “I had my career. I was in it to enjoy myself.”
Although never known as the best of comedians, Mr. Greene made headlines in the comedy world in 2014 when he appeared at an event at the Friars Club in Manhattan and announced that he was resigning from the club after fellow comedian Gilbert Gottfried produced material that Mr. Greene, who was scheduled to to speak, was found offensive.
“He was getting dirtier,” Mr. Greene told a radio interviewer, without giving details, “so I got up and said, ‘That’s it.’”
Fred Sheldon Greenfield was born on April 8, 1926, in Chicago. (In 2004 he legally changed his name to Shecky Greene, his professional first name having long since come to connote a kind of brash, aggressive, old-school comedian even to people who had never seen him perform.) The his parents were Carl and Bessie (Harris) Greenfield. His father was a shoe salesman and his mother sold socks in a department store before quitting to focus on raising their three children.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, he enrolled at Wright Junior College (now Wilbur Wright College) in Chicago with plans to become a gym teacher. But he was sidetracked by his interest in performing.
He took a summer job at a resort near Milwaukee, where, he once recalled, “They paid me $20 a week and gave me a fancy title, ‘social director.’” Became a performer, he said, because the resort could afford it. . t afford to hire big-name acts. “I’m not Red Skelton,” he recalls, “but I got a few laughs.”
He returned to college in September but also continued to form a comedy act and occasionally performed in nightclubs. It will be a few more years before his commitment to show business becomes full time.
He left college to accept a two-week engagement in New Orleans; that booking spanned three years, and only ended when the nightclub caught fire. Unsure of his next move, he returned to Chicago and went back to college, but left for good when comedian Martha Raye offered him a job as her opening act in Miami.
“This time,” he said in an interview for his website, sheckygreene.com, “I made a decision: I’m going to stay in show business. I’m only 25 years old and earn $500 a week. Besides, I have a quiet partner to support – I discovered how to bet horses.”
He first ventured to Nevada, then in its early days as an entertainment mecca, when the Golden Hotel in Reno hired him for four weeks in 1953. His opening-night performance so impressed the hotel owners that he was hired he of them for 18 weeks and offered. him a new contract, for a guaranteed $20,000 a year (equivalent to more than $200,000 today). He was about to headline in Las Vegas, where for a week in 1956 Elvis Presley was his opening act.
By 1975, he was earning $150,000 a week (more than $800,000 in today’s money), one of the few comedians in that salary range at the time. He likes to say he gambled away most of it, but it doesn’t matter because he has more money than God — whose weekly salary, he knows, is only $35,000.
He also developed a reputation for his sometimes violent behavior off stage. A decade later, his mental health problems halted his career.
He eventually overcame those problems, for which he gives great credit to the support of his wife, Marie (Musso) Greene, whom he married in 1985.
His first two marriages, to Jeri Drurey and Nalani Kele, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Alison, he is survived by another daughter, Dorian Hoffman — Mr. Greene and his first wife adopted them both at birth — and his wife. He moved to Las Vegas a few years ago; previously, he lived in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, Calif.
Although destined to be remembered primarily as a performer in Las Vegas, Mr. Greene had a substantial television résumé, as both a comedian and an actor.
He had a recurring role in the World War II series “Combat!” in 1962 and 1963 and appeared on “The Love Boat,” “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mad About You,” as well as variety and talk shows. (He was an occasional guest host of the “Tonight Show” in the 1970s.) He also appeared in several films, including Mel Brooks’ “Splash” (1984) and “History of the World, Part I” (1981).
Interviewed by The Washington Times in 2017, Mr. Greene reflected on his career philosophically:
“Why did I do this and that? At 90 I don’t know yet. Sometimes, I sleep well. I wake up almost every night screaming, ‘Why did I do that?’
“Life is weird, but if you have a mixed life like I’ve had, it’s fine.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
