With as many credits and accomplishments as Carl Reiner has, one might think his 87-year-old brain would be ready for an extended sabbatical on some beach in Florida.
No way. Not for the guy who interviewed 2,000-year-old Mel Brooks. Or helped launch Steve Martin in “The Jerk.” Or stockpiled 12 Emmys.
Nope. It’s hard to keep a man down. Especially one very funny man.
“There’s always something in my head,” Reiner said. “And I always say, ‘It’s got to get out or it’s going to give me a headache.’ ”
It’s 11:30 a.m. on a Tuesday. Reiner’s at home in Beverly Hills, chowing on waffles. And finding time to promote his latest book, “Just Desserts,” a 136-page “novellelah” endorsed on the back page by — no surprise — Steve Martin and the late Larry Gelbart, the latter a co-writer with Reiner on Sid Caesar’s “The Show of Shows” 50 years ago and the writer behind the TV series “M*A*S*H.”
Gelbart’s death Sept. 11 was — and is — tough to take for Reiner, who saw his wife of 65 years, Estelle, die last October, leaving “a big hole,” Reiner said.
Now his lifelong buddy goes.
“I saw him three weeks before he passed,” Reiner said. “We went to lunch. I picked him up and in the car I asked how he was and he says, ‘You don’t want to know.’ I didn’t find out until later he had cancer. That was that. It was one of the saddest and most crazy moments.”
Despite the losses — one of life’s punishments for living so long — Reiner continues to produce, continues to work, continues to garner honors that include induction into the Television Academy Hall of Fame, the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for Humor and, coming up, his “2,000 Year Old Man” riff with Brooks being added to the Library of Congress.
The Emmys he’s won, Reiner said, are what thrills him the most because all his talents were honored.
“I’m proud of the fact they were in different categories — supporting actor, producer, writer — I loved that fact,” he said.
Reiner has won a dozen Emmys, including several for writing and producing “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and a Grammy for “The 2,000 Year Old Man.”
Reiner still gets a kick out of any contemporary “Dick Van Dyke” reference.
“Residual things happen all the time,” he said. “I was reading [President Barack Obama’s] ‘Audacity of Hope’ and got great pleasure when Obama says ‘My wife is watching Dick Van Dyke reruns.’ ”
Then there are the inspirational moments when strangers come up to Reiner and say, “I’m a writer because of you.”
“Some say they were 13, 14 watching Dick Van Dyke, how we kept talking about these guys writing with a sense of humor. So many kids became writers, seeing that you can get paid for being funny,” Reiner said.
And then there’s his relationship with Martin, whom he directed in several films — going back to “The Jerk” in 1979, followed by “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” in 1982, “The Man with Two Brains” in 1983 and “All of Me” in 1984.
“I appreciate him so much,” Reiner said of Martin. “He tickles me. He’s one of these sly guys that never says funny things with big crowds around him. But his autobiography was one of the best I’ve ever read.”
Reiner saw the impact when he was having his neck worked on by a physical therapist.
“He started reciting lines from ‘The Man With Two Brains,’ ” Reiner said.
One of Reiner’s most notable acting jobs was in “The Russian Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming,” a 1966 film done mostly in Mendocino that also starred Alan Arkin, Jonathan Winters and Theodore Bikel.
“I hadn’t done acting in a long time and wanted to do this. It was an absolutely fun thing,” Reiner said.
He remembers a day when shooting was postponed because of rain: “So we were stuck in this little motel. I remember everyone came to my room and I said, ‘Fellows, what’s the last time you played a serious game of ‘Ring Around the Rosy?’ So we did it deadly serious, fell on the floor and then we all laughed.”
More recently, Reiner played Sid Bloom in “Ocean’s 11,” “Ocean’s 12” and “Ocean’s 13.” And if there’s an “Ocean’s 14,” “I hope they ask me back,” said Reiner, who can handle the script better than handling the title “comic legend” or “icon.”
“I don’t take that seriously,” he said. “I’ve had a couple of successes along the way. If you don’t foul the air and stay above the fray and don’t make too many terrible waves, you’re an ‘icon.’ More importantly, know who you are.”
Reiner was born in the Bronx, N.Y., the son of Jewish immigrants, and in 2008 he and his actor-director son, Rob, were honored by the Israel Film Festival in Los Angeles.
“I once wrote that there are 15 things I know about God, and one is that he is allergic to shellfish,” Reiner said. “There are far too many commandments and you really only need one: Do not hurt anybody.
“But I remember that my parents were always very proud of Jewish accomplishments,” he added. “Christ, Karl Marx, Freud, Einstein. We’ve turned the world around.”
Often describing himself as a “Jewish atheist,” Reiner believes that “man invented God. God didn’t invent man. Man needed God. The Bible was written by man and they didn’t know anything back then compared to hack writers of today. They didn’t know where lightning comes from.”
If God existed, said Reiner, “he would have spoken up during the Holocaust when 18 million people were saying, ‘Please God, stop this.’ He must have been busy making flowers.”
Reiner said his parents “were believers, but weren’t religious. My father didn’t go to temple.
I did go with my friends and hung out with them. I got bar mitzvahed by learning a few prayers by rote. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
He did, apparently, know who he was marrying. Estelle, who uttered the famous line “I’ll have what she’s having” in “When Harry Met Sally,” died at age 94, giving the couple 65 years of mostly marital bliss.
“I miss everything about her,” Reiner said. “I miss her carping about things I’m not doing right. She was a perfectionist. She was an amazing woman.”
Estelle knew the secret from the start, he added.
“She said ‘Marry someone who can stand you.’ That broke me up,” Reiner said. “And it’s true.”
“Just Desserts: A Novellelah” by Carl Reiner (136 pages, Phoenix Books, $14.95)