A New Film Showcases Rose Marie and Her Show-Biz Survival Stories
rose marie the dick van dyke show the hollywood squares show business
Richard Brody Katherine Rundell Condé Nast
Richard Brody reviews “Wait for Your Laugh,” a documentary film about the entertainer Rose Marie, directed by Jason Wise.
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The New Yorker
The documentary portrait is a tough genre, because it’s generally undertaken in a spirit of forthright enthusiasm for its subject, which gets in the way of asking the tough questions. That’s one of the problems with Griffin Dunne’s new documentary about his aunt, “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.” Another is Dunne’s failure to let Didion talk at length; too many other interview subjects hold the screen for too long, and readings from Didion’s work take the place of her current reflections. The director Jason Wise’s new portrait-film of the ninety-four-year-old entertainer Rose Marie, “Wait for Your Laugh,” skirts the second problem—it has the merit of being nearly wall-to-wall Rose Marie—and that’s how it skirts the first one as well, revealing a complex life and a picture of her times that should suffice to dispel nostalgia for them.

Rose Marie’s voice is, as it ever was, fast, crackling, husky, precisely expressive, etched to the word; it’s the voice of a natural performer whose passions are matched by a survivor’s smarts and courage. Born in 1923, Rose Marie (that’s her first name—she never used her last, Mazetta, professionally) today is most vividly remembered as part of the core cast of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” But by the time that show went on the air, in 1961, she had already had multiple lives in performance, and “Wait for Your Laugh” details them all, starting with her years as a child singer. By the time she was five, in 1929, “Baby Rose Marie,” as she was billed, was a national star of the new medium of radio. She loved to perform, and perform she did, on radio, onstage throughout the country, and in movies, making thousands upon thousands of dollars and seeing none of it. Her father, Frank Mazetta, a.k.a. Frank Curley, controlled the funds and made off with them.

Rose Marie calls her father “a mean man,” and she says, “I disliked my father intensely.” He never married her mother because, Rose Marie says, he had a second family elsewhere. And he was a small-time gangster (“one of the do-this-and-do-that guys”). When she and her father went to Chicago in the early nineteen-thirties, they were summoned by Al Capone to his mansion in the nearby town of Cicero, where the gangsters fawned over her and fêted her. (The film features ludicrous, though fortunately brief, reënactments of this scene and several other notable moments in Rose Marie’s life.) Capone gave her a diamond ring, insisted that she call him Uncle Al, and, Rose Marie adds, “Turned to my father, he says, ‘We’ll take care of her from here on in.’ ”

And they did. When Rose Marie was performing at the Copacabana, in New York, sometime in the nineteen-forties, she was summoned to the table of Joseph Fischetti, Capone’s cousin, who asked if she had another gig coming up. She said no. “He says, ‘You’re gonna play Tahoe.’ Oh, O.K. And that’s the way it went. I was going from one place to another, all because of the boys. They were absolutely wonderful to me.” The biggest “boy” of all was Bugsy Siegel. In late 1946, when he opened the Flamingo hotel, in Las Vegas, with borrowed Mob money, Rose Marie and Jimmy Durante were its headliners. In “Wait for Your Laugh,” she tells some extraordinary stories about Siegel, including an incident in which he coaxed her to play baccarat in his casino in order to attract customers. “I’m not a shill,” she said indignantly. “I don’t do this.” “Do it for me,” he responded. She played with ten thousand dollars of his money, won twenty-five thousand, stuffed it in her bra, went onstage, and, after the show, wanting no part of that money, gave it to Siegel personally. He told her, “You’re all right,” and, in the film, she repeats the line with a sense of wonder, imitating the distinctive inflection with which he said it, and, to top off the reminiscence, adds, “Five days later, he was killed.”

The codes of silence on which Mob bosses depended were not so different from the ones that allowed the depredations of Hollywood—then and now—to go unchallenged. Rose Marie may have been treated as the “cat’s meow” among the mobsters of Las Vegas, but she never had much of a career in movies, and she explains why. After co-starring in the Broadway comedy “Top Banana,” she was cast to co-star in a movie version, which was filmed in 1953 (in 3-D). During the shoot, she says, a producer of the film approached her with “a dirty offer.” She deflected it by pretending to take it as a joke. He persisted:

“I’m serious. This could be your picture.” And in front of everybody, I go, “You couldn’t get it up if a flag went by.” Which didn’t sit too well with him. All my numbers were cut in the picture—there isn’t one number of me in the picture.

The story, of course, is all too familiar: a man in power propositioned her, making sex with him a quid pro quo for stardom. She turned him down and he got his revenge, which was professional: he harmed her career. Rose Marie’s daughter, Georgiana Rodrigues, adds, “I think my mother’s experience of doing the film of ‘Top Banana’ pushed her away from wanting to do movies.” Instead, Rose Marie turned to television, and it was another seven years before she found stardom there, on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

That sitcom, created by Carl Reiner (who’s ninety-five), is centered on a TV comedy writer played by Van Dyke and based largely on Reiner’s own life. Many of its scenes take place in a writers’ room, and Rose Marie plays Sally Rogers, one of the writers and the only woman in that room. Wise gathers good stories about the making of that enduring show, and adorns them with a precious set of home movies, taken on the set—in color, not black and white—and showing the cast’s playful and exuberant looseness. Yet what Rose Marie says about her work there is even more revealing. Rose Marie recommended her lifelong friend, the acerbically profuse comedian Morey Amsterdam, for the role of another writer, and their inventiveness was central to the show. “No, it wasn’t ad-libbed, it was scripted, but we would come up with things in the middle of it that they would shove in the script,” she says. The loose-limbed, easygoing Van Dyke says that he learned comedy from Rose Marie on that show. Yet Rose Marie experienced the frustration of being overshadowed on the show by Mary Tyler Moore because, contrary to her expectations, the show was centered not on the writers’ room but on the domestic life of the head writer.

Reiner explains that this is how he meant the show to be from the start: he was writing about himself, his own career and his own life, and, as he tells Wise, “The audiences cares more about Mary and Dick, as I do—I care more about my family than about my workers.” But there was another side to the imbalance: sex, or, rather, sexualization. Moore was being featured nationwide on the covers of prominent magazines; Rose Marie wasn’t. Here’s how Rose Marie’s friend Ruthie Shapiro describes the role: “She didn’t play the pretty girl, the sexy girl; like a non-sex person. It had nothing to do with sex.” When Rose Marie’s frustration was apparent, Reiner took her aside and talked to her about it: “I used real strong language: I said, ‘You both have beautiful legs. They wanna look at her legs.’ ” It’s not clear which viewers Reiner was speaking for, but it seems likely that it was the male ones whom he was identifying as the home audience over all. Rose Marie’s role, and her career, were overshadowed by the stereotype of the domesticated ingénue that shadows many actresses’ work even today.