The Other Life of 130 West 56th Street
In 1973, at seventeen, I fell for two legends I was much too young to have met. They arrived at a movie theater in Woodbury, New Jersey, in the unglamorous form of a compilation film called Ten From Your Show of Shows. Ten sketches, plucked from a live 90-minute weekly comedy program that had gone off the air before I was born, starring the brilliant Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. I was smitten. I went back to watch these legends on celluloid so many times that week that the ticket taker probably assumed I worked there.
At eighteen I moved to New York City to study acting with a living legend: Stella Adler, who had taught Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro, Elaine Stritch, Warren Beatty and many other bold face names.
These legends turn out to have shared the same address during different decades. 130 West 56th Street in Manhattan — better known, if you knew where to look, as the Stage Door of New York’s City Center Theater.
Three days a week for four years, I walked through that stage door, rode an elevator run by a uniformed attendant who knew everyone in the building, and got off on the third floor. The Stella Adler Studio consisted of two offices, one unremarkable classroom, and a large rehearsal studio with a stage — its floorboards already scuffed into a permanent record of every actor who’d crossed them before me.
There was never enough room for scene work and quiet study on that one floor, so students colonized the hallways of other floors instead. My spot was the sixth floor: cross-legged on the floor, back against a closet door, a few feet from the sixth floor’s then-tenant, the administrative offices of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. I sat there for four years without once wondering what was in that closet.
Back to Caesar, Coca, and Your Show of Shows. I learned from newspaper coverage of the compilation film’s release that some of the writers were among my personal heroes: Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner. Reiner later mined those years for the writers’ room on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and his own character, Alan Brady, borrowed a fair amount of his temperament from Sid Caesar himself. I picked up more of the mythology from the 1992 film My Favorite Year and from Neil Simon’s 1993 Broadway play Laughter on the 23rd Floor, his own reminiscence of life in Caesar’s writers’ room.
Fast-forward to the year 2000. The front page of The New York Times carried the headline: “Mother Lode of TV Comedy Is Found in a Forgotten Closet.” A new tenant was moving into the sixth floor of 130 West 56th Street, the space was being renovated, and there it was — that same locked closet, the one I’d used as a backrest for four years, finally getting opened. The article noted the difficulty of the job with a certain dry understatement: there was no key, the lock was frozen solid, and it took an hour just to pull the hinges.
Link to November 14, 2000 article
When the door finally gave, someone flipped a switch, and a forty-year-old bare bulb — apparently as stubborn as the lock — flickered on to illuminate the equivalent of 47 boxloads of long-lost scripts and memorabilia from Your Show of Shows.
As it turns out, that sixth floor had belonged, back in the 1950s, to Max Liebman, the producer of Your Show of Shows and a legend in his own right. That closet was his closet. And the office space later occupied by Alvin Ailey — the one I’d been sitting outside of, cross-legged, for four years — had been the writers’ room. The writers’ room. I had been using comedy’s holy of holies as a place to run lines.
I recently tracked down a 1992 New York Times essay by Lucille Kallen, the only woman on the original writing staff. She remembered a sixth floor room roughly fourteen by twenty feet, one small window that was always shut, usually occupied by six men chain-smoking cigars — and Lucille, resolutely smoke-free.
Link to November 29, 1992 essay by Lucille Kallen
A few weeks ago I was back in New York and crossed to the far side of West 56th Street just to look up at the building. Three large windows mark the third floor, where Stella taught us. Above them, off to the right, one small, almost apologetic window on the sixth floor.
I know exactly what happened behind the third-floor windows from 1974 to 1978 — I was there for it. What happened behind that sixth-floor window in the 1950s I can only picture: Carl Reiner wrestling a half-formed idea into shape, Mel Brooks trying to out-joke yesterday’s joke, Woody Allen nursing some fresh anxiety into material, Lucille Kallen jumping onto a couch because it was the only way to get six men to stop talking, Sid Caesar shouldering through the door with a new twist on a sketch nobody asked for but everyone needed.
There’s a line in that 2000 Times article I can’t shake. At the end of a hallway, it says, was “a stairway leading down to Studio 6,” where Your Show of Shows once rehearsed. This is where memory starts to whisper things it can’t quite prove. The room where Stella taught us was never really a classroom — it was a full rehearsal studio, with a stage that by the mid-1970s already looked chewed on by decades of performers. Was it Studio 6? It was the only rehearsal studio in that part of the building. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.
Stella never once glanced upward and told us that television comedy had been invented a few floors above our heads. She had no idea, or didn’t think to mention it, or simply had bigger things on her mind than a rumor about comedy real estate. Today, a plaque by the front entrance says it for her.
A building I’ve known for 52 years just became new again — impossibly, wonderfully new — because it turns out I spent four years sitting with my back against comedy history and never once thought to knock.
Treat yourself to these YouTube videos from “Your Show of Shows.” Remember, this was live television:
Link to “From Here to Obscurity” - A send-up of “From Here to Eternity”
Link to “This is Your Story” - my personal favorite Sid Caesar sketch, a send-up of “This is Your Life.”
Other places to find me…
History has a funny habit of hiding in plain sight. So do great houses. If Connecticut is your next adventure, I’d be delighted to show you around. And if you’re simply in the mood for more unexpected stories, overlooked places, and delightful detours, here are a few more stops along the way:
• ConnecticutWeekendHomes.com
• ConnecticutBaedeker.com
• BuyYourSecondHomeFirst.net
• The Further Adventures of David Mayhew
Still hopscotching. Just in different directions.