JACKIE GLEASON CARRIED A SECRET HIS WHOLE LIFE — AND TOOK IT TO THE GRAVE

Three days before he d.i.ed, Jackie Gleason opened his eyes in a quiet bedroom in Florida, looked at his wife, and spoke a name out loud that he had not said in 68 years. It was the name of his brother. His wife held his hand and did not let go. Outside the Florida sun was burning across the golf course he had loved, and all across America on small television sets in living rooms and kitchens and corner bars, the same man was on the screen at that very moment shouting at his wife in a Brooklyn apartment, raising his fist and

then softening, putting his hands on her face and saying the line that a billion people would eventually hear. Baby, you’re the greatest. Nobody watching that night knew the man on the screen was dying. Nobody knew about the brother. Nobody knew what it had cost him every single laugh he had ever pulled out of a crowd.

And tonight, my friend, I want to tell you that story. The whole story. The one behind the laughter. Because the Great One, as they called him, carried something heavy his entire life. And if you stay with me, you’re going to understand exactly what it was and why, in the end, a man who could have anything in the world chose to build himself a round house with no corners, fill a library with books about the dead, and carve three words above his own tomb that say everything you need to know about him.

So, pour yourself a cup of coffee. Get comfortable because we’re going back to Brooklyn in the winter of 1921 to a small apartment on a cold street where a little boy is sitting on a radiator in the dark waiting for his father to come home. His name was John Herbert Gleason. He was born on the 26th of February, 1916 in a working-class corner of Brooklyn called Bushwick in a neighborhood of immigrants and tenements and small grocery stores where the lights stayed on late and the rent was always due.

His father, Herbert Walton Gleason, was a clerk at the Mutual Life Insurance Company in Manhattan. His mother, May Kelly Gleason, was an Irish-born woman with a soft voice and tired eyes who kept house and worried about money and lit candles at the church on the corner. And there was a brother, an older brother named Clements.

14 years old, bright, gentle, the family favorite, the kind of boy mothers point to when they say, “This one is going to make it.” Little Jackie, who was 3 years old at the time, worshipped him. And then, one morning in the year 1919, Clements got sick. The doctors called it meningitis. There were no antibiotics then.

There was nothing anyone could do except sit by the bed and wait. And within a matter of days, the boy was gone. Jackie was 3. He didn’t really understand what had happened. He only understood that the apartment changed. The candles stayed lit. His mother sat in the kitchen for long hours not moving. His father started staying out later.

And the older brother, the one who used to lift him up onto the kitchen counter and make him laugh, was never coming back. Now, here’s something you need to understand right at the start. For the next 68 years of his life, Jackie Gleason almost never spoke his brother’s name out loud. Not in interviews, not to his daughters, not to the men he worked with for 40 years.

The biographers who eventually wrote about him, William A. Henry and James Bacon and others, all noticed the same strange silence. The brother existed only as a small sealed room in the back of the great man’s mind. A door that stayed closed. And it would stay closed almost until the very last day of his life.

But the brother was only the first loss. There would be another. Sometime in the winter of 1925, when Jackie was 9 years old, his father Herbert came home from work, sat down at the kitchen table, and made a decision that would shape every single thing his son would ever do. Herbert Gleason got up from that table, went into the bedroom, gathered a few things, and walked out the door.

He left his wife. He left his son. He left his coat hanging on a hook in the hallway, took it down, put it on, and never came back. Now, the exact day of this disappearance is something the biographers argue about. Some say December. Some say earlier in the year. Jackie himself, when he talked about it in later life, was always vague on the date.

What he was not vague about was the moment he understood his father was gone. He came home from somewhere, the way a 9-year-old comes home, expecting nothing in particular. And he looked at the hook in the hallway. The hook where his father’s coat always hung. The hook was empty. He stood there, he later said, for a very long time, just looking at that empty hook.

He was 9 years old. And in that instant, by his own account, he understood. He understood that his father was not at work. He was not at a friend’s house. He was not coming back tonight. He was not coming back tomorrow. He was not coming back at all. That empty hook. Remember it. Because for the rest of his life, in one way or another, Jackie Gleason would be looking at that empty hook.

Every time he stepped on a stage, every time he raised a glass, every time he opened a closet in one of his enormous houses and saw rows and rows and rows of his own coats, neatly arranged, sometimes more than a hundred of them, he was answering that empty hook. He was filling it. He was making sure that in his life, no hook would ever be empty again.

But that was decades away. For now, he was nine years old. His mother, May, was suddenly alone with no husband, no savings, and a son to raise. She got a job working as a token clerk in the subway, in a small booth underground, selling tokens to commuters for long hours every day. The money was thin.

The apartment got smaller. Sometimes there was heat, sometimes there wasn’t. And the little boy, John Herbert Gleason, who was now just called Jackie, started doing something interesting. He started making people laugh. He did it first in the street with the other kids. He could imitate the neighbors. He could imitate the priest.

He could imitate his teachers, the shopkeepers, the cop on the corner. He had a face that could do anything, a voice that could change pitch in a heartbeat, and a sense of timing that other children just didn’t have. The kids would gather around him after school and ask him to do people. And Jackie would do them.

And the kids would howl. And here’s the thing. Here’s the thing you need to understand, because this is the seed of everything that came after. When Jackie made the other kids laugh, the empty hook got quieter. The hole in the apartment got smaller. The mother in the subway booth got a little easier to live with.

The brother in the sealed room got a little less heavy. The laugh was a medicine. The laugh was a hiding place. The laugh was a way of being loved without having to ask for love. And once a child discovers that, my friend, he never stops doing it. Ever. By the time he was a teenager, Jackie Gleason was a known quantity in his Brooklyn neighborhood. He was big.

He was loud. He was funny. He hung around the local pool halls. He picked up money any way he could. He worked as a carnival barker. He worked as a stunt man in a small daredevil show. He worked as a master of ceremonies at little dances in church basements for a few dollars and whatever sandwiches were left at the end of the night.

He dropped out of school. He was, in the words of one biographer, a kid in motion. Always moving, always working, always looking for the next room with the next crowd that needed cheering up. And then, in 1935, when he was 19 years old, two things happened that changed everything. The first thing was his mother, Mae Kelly Gleason, the woman in the subway booth, the woman who had raised him alone after his father walked out, got sick.

Very sick. And in the spring of that year, she d.i.ed. Jackie was at her bedside. By his own account, given to friends decades later, he held her hand and watched her breathing get slower and slower until it stopped. He was 19. He was alone. He had no father. He had no brother. He now had no mother. He had, in the world, exactly nothing.

He had a few dollars in his pocket and a half-empty apartment and a name that nobody outside of Bushwick had ever heard. He went out that night, the story goes, and he got on a streetcar, and he rode it to the end of the line, and he sat there in the dark for a while. And then he rode it back. And by the time he got home, he had made a decision.

He was going to be somebody, whatever it took, whatever it cost. He was going to fill every empty hook in every empty hallway from here to the end of his life. He was going to be loud enough that nobody would ever be able to walk out on him again because he would already be in every room. And then the second thing happened.

He met a girl. Her name was Genevieve Halford. People called her Jen. She was a dancer, a few years older than Jackie, sweet-faced, Catholic, with a quiet sense of humor, and the kind of patience that Jackie even then knew he was going to need. They met at a dance hall in Brooklyn. He was working the room as a young MC, telling jokes between numbers.

She was on the bill as part of a dance act. And here is what he told friends many years later about the first night he ever spoke to her. He said he was up on the little stage telling some joke, and he heard a laugh come out of the crowd. A real laugh. Not the polite laugh you get when you’re working a small room.

Not the laugh of somebody being kind. A real, full, surprised laugh. The kind that comes out of a person before they have time to decide whether to let it out. And Jackie said he stopped right in the middle of his joke, and he looked out into the room, and he found the face the laugh had come from. And it was Genevieve. Standing in the wings holding a hand to her mouth, almost embarrassed at how loud she had laughed.

He said later that he knew right then. He didn’t know how he knew, he just knew. This was the first woman in his life who had laughed at him without trying to, without being polite, without being paid, without being his mother. A real laugh from a stranger given freely. And the boy who had spent his whole short life trying to convert sorrow into other people’s laughter had just been handed, by a girl he didn’t know, the only thing he had ever really wanted.

He walked off that stage that night and he found her and he introduced himself. And within a few months, he was telling everybody who would listen that he was going to marry her. He was 19, she was 21. He had no money, he had no job that lasted longer than a week or two. He had no family left at all. And he asked Genevieve Halford to marry him.

She said yes. They were married on the 20th of September, 1936, in a small Catholic ceremony in New York. There were not many people there. There was not much money for a wedding. There was no honeymoon to speak of. There was a young couple in a small apartment with a young husband who was going to be somebody and a young wife who believed him.

And for a little while, it was good. It was very good. He worked the small clubs, she kept the apartment. They went to mass on Sundays, most Sundays anyway. They talked about having children. And in 1939, they had their first daughter, Geraldine. Two years later, in 1941, the second daughter, Linda. But here is what was already happening, even in those first good years.

Even in the small apartment with the two baby girls, Jackie Gleason, the boy from the empty hook, was beginning to discover that the world had something else to offer him. Something the world had not yet offered him. The world was beginning to offer him a stage that was bigger than a church basement.

And the world was beginning, very slowly, to offer him a drink. The clubs in New York in those years were full of two things. They were full of aud.i.ences hungry for a laugh after the depression and on the edge of a war. And they were full of bottles. Whiskey behind every bar. A drink waiting for every comic when he came off stage. A drink bought by every patron who wanted to slap the funny man on the back and tell him he was a riot.

And Jackie Gleason, the big-faced young Irishman from Brooklyn with the empty hook in his memory and the brand new wedding ring on his finger, was learning very quickly that he could drink a great deal of it. And he was learning something else, too. He was learning that out there, somewhere past the small clubs and the wedding ring and the two little girls at home, there was a thing called fame.

Real fame. The kind that put your face on a magazine. The kind that filled the empty hook forever. He could feel it coming. He could feel it the way a sailor feels weather coming in off the ocean. And on the nights when he came home late, very late, smelling of whiskey to the small apartment where Genevieve was sitting up with a sick baby, he would sit at the kitchen table and he would look at his wife and he would say, “Jen, Jen, you wait.

You wait. I’m going to be the biggest thing in this country one day. You just wait.” And Genevieve, the girl who had laughed once in the wings of a Brooklyn dance hall, the girl who had given a homeless boy the only real laugh of his life, would look at him and she would not say anything. Because she could see it, too.

She could see what was coming. And she could see, even then, what it was going to cost. The 1940s for Jackie Gleason were long, slow, stubborn climb. He worked clubs. He worked radio. He took a contract with Warner Brothers in 1940 and went out to Hollywood for the first time, full of confidence, sure that this was it. This was the moment.

This was the door swinging open. And Hollywood, in that first round, looked at him and shrugged. He got small parts. He played a heavy here, a sidekick there. He came back to New York with his tail down and a few bad reviews in his pocket and the sense, the very uncomfortable sense, that maybe the world was not going to give him the thing he wanted just because he wanted it badly.

So, he went back to the clubs. And he went back to the bottle. And he went home, when he went home at all, to Genevieve and the two little girls in an apartment that was getting smaller and smaller in his mind, even though it was the same size it had always been. The marriage started to crack. Not all at once.

Marriages almost never crack all at once. They crack the way ice cracks on a pond. A little line one winter, a longer line the next. And then one day you step on it and it goes. Genevieve was a serious Catholic. She didn’t believe in divorce. She believed in patience, in prayer, in waiting out the storm. And Jackie, who loved her, who really did love her in his enormous, complicated way, was nevertheless out almost every night in clubs that did not have wives in them, with women who were not his wife, and bottles that were always full.

By the late 1940s, they were essentially living apart, though they would not be legally divorced for many, many years to come. Genevieve raised the two girls mostly alone in an apartment in New York. Jackie sent money when he had it. He visited when he could. He loved his daughters, by every account from everyone who knew the family, ferociously.

But he was not there. The empty hook in his own hallway, the one his father had left behind in 1925, was now reappearing in his daughter’s hallway, and he knew it. And he could not stop it. And that, my friend, is one of the great quiet traged.i.es of his life. And it is something we are going to come back to before we are done tonight.

But first, the world finally cracked open for him. And it cracked open in 1949. That was the year a brand new thing called the DuMont Television Network put him on a show called The Life of Riley. Television was still a baby. There were only a few hundred thousand sets in American homes. The picture was small.

The picture was gray. But people were watching. And on the small gray screen in living rooms all over America, this big-faced Irishman from Brooklyn started showing up every week. And people started leaning forward. He only stayed on The Life of Riley for one season, but it was enough. The producers at the CBS Network were watching.

And in 1950, they offered him his own variety hour. They called it Cavalcade of Stars at first. Then it grew and grew and grew. And by 1952, it had become The Jackie Gleason Show. And on that show, my friend, the world finally met the man. Because Jackie Gleason did not come on to television as a comic. He came on to television as a city.

He came on to television as a whole population of human beings, all of them living inside one body. There was Reginald Van Gleason III, the rich drunk in the top hat. There was Joe the bartender, leaning on the bar, telling stories to an invisible customer named Mr. Dunahee. There was the poor soul, the silent, sweet, hopeless little man who only wanted to be loved and could never quite figure out how.

There was Charlie Bratton, the loudmouth. There was Rudy the repairman. There was a parade of human beings week after week, all of them coming out of the same enormous body, and all of them, every single one of them, was somebody Jackie Gleason had known growing up in Brooklyn. Every single one of them was a face from the old neighborhood.

Every single one of them was, in some way, a way of bringing his dead mother and his vanished father and his lost brother and the empty hook in the hallway back into the room, dressed up in a costume and making the aud.i.ence love them. And then, in the middle of all of that, he created Ralph Kramden. Ralph Kramden, the bus driver from Brooklyn.

Ralph Kramden, the loud, dreaming, scheming, raging, tender, broken-hearted bus driver who lived in a tiny apartment with his wife Alice and shouted at the world every single week because the world had not given him the things he believed he deserved. Ralph Kramden, who threatened to send his wife to the moon, and then, at the end of every single episode, in that quiet moment after the storm, put his hands on her face and told her she was the greatest.

Ralph Kramden was, of course, Jackie Gleason. Everybody who knew him knew it. Ralph was the boy from the empty hook, all grown up, dressed in a bus driver’s uniform, raging at a world that had taken his father and his brother and his mother and given him in return only the small apartment of his early marriage.

And Alice was Genevieve, the patient woman, the woman who waited, the woman who, in the end, was the only thing in the room that mattered. In 1955, CBS spun Ralph and Alice off into their own half-hour show. They called it The Honeymooners. They filmed 39 episodes that season, the so-called classic 39, in front of a live aud.i.ence at the Adelphi Theater in New York.

Art Carney played Ed Norton, the goofy sewer worker upstairs. Audrey Meadows played Alice. Joyce Randolph played Trixie. And those 39 episodes, filmed in 1 year in black and white in a tiny set with one painted window and a battered icebox, would turn out to be one of the most important pieces of television anybody has ever made in this country.

To this day, somewhere in America, at almost every hour of the day or night, The Honeymooners is playing on a television set. Think about that for a moment. Almost 70 years later, a little black and white show with one set and four people and a painted window is still on the air, still being watched, still making people laugh somewhere every single hour of every single day.

That is what Jackie Gleason built in 1 year in a small theater in New York with the empty hook from 19 25 still burning in the back of his mind. And the country went crazy for him. By the middle of the 1950s, Jackie Gleason was one of the biggest stars on American television. He was making, according to the trade papers of the time, an enormous amount of money.

He had a suite at the Park Sheraton Hotel. He had a car and a driver. He had a personal orchestra. He had, by some accounts, more than 100 suits hanging in his closet. He had every single thing the boy on the radiator in Bushwick had ever dreamed of having. And he was lonely. He was profoundly, structurally, permanently lonely.

In the way that only a man who has built his whole life around being loved by strangers can be lonely. His friends in those years were Toots Shor, the saloon keeper, and Frank Sinatra, and Joe E. Lewis, and a long list of men who lived the way Jackie lived. Late nights, big tables, long bills, whiskey, steak, cigarettes. He smoked, by his own admission later in life, between three and five packs of cigarettes a day.

He could drink, his friends said, more than any man any of them had ever met, and still walk out of the room at 4:00 in the morning and be on set at 9:00. He was a phenomenon, physically. He weighed, in his heaviest years, well over 280 lb. He could move on stage, despite that weight, with the lightness of a dancer. He was, in every sense, larger than life. Larger than one life.

Larger, you might say, than the small life he had been born into in Brooklyn. And in 1952, in the middle of all of this, he met a woman named Marilyn Taylor. Marilyn was a dancer. Her sister, June Taylor, ran the dance troupe on Jackie’s variety show, the famous June Taylor Dancers with their overhead kaleidoscope routines that were copied by every other variety show in town.

Marilyn was on the show, too. She was bright, warm, very pretty. And she had the same kind of patient steadiness that Genevieve had once had. Jackie fell for her almost immediately. By every account from people who were around them at the time, including interviews Marilyn gave many years later.

They were deeply in love almost from the start. But there was a problem. The problem was Genevieve. The problem was the Catholic Church. The problem was the two daughters, Geraldine and Linda, who were now teenagers and who adored their father even though their father was almost never home. Jackie was a public Catholic. Genevieve was a private Catholic.

Neither of them could imagine in the early 1950s walking into a divorce court. So Jackie and Marilyn did what people in that situation did in the 1950s. They waited. They were together. They were apart. They tried to be discreet. They were not, in fact, very discreet at all. The gossip columns of New York knew.

Walter Winchell knew. The whole world of New York cafe society knew. But there was no divorce. There would not be a divorce for almost two more decades. Genevieve would not give him one. And Jackie, in some part of his heart, did not really want to push her to. So he lived two lives. Three, if you counted the lives he lived on television.

And he kept moving. He kept working. He kept drinking. And he kept, in the deepest part of himself, looking for the thing he had never quite been able to name. The thing on the other side of the empty hook. And around this time, in the middle of all this fame and all this noise and all this loneliness, Jackie Gleason started doing something that, when his biographers found out about it later, surprised almost everybody.

He started reading. Not novels, not light reading. He started quietly, in his suite at the hotel, in the back of his dressing room, on long train rides, reading books about the paranormal, books about life after d.e.a.t.h , books about ghosts, books about reincarnation, books about psychic phenomena, books about, frankly, every strange and unexplained thing that human beings have ever written down.

He had begun, somewhere in the late 1940s, to build a library. And by the 1950s, that library was enormous. By the end of his life, it would contain, according to people who saw it, somewhere on the order of 1,700 to 1,900 books, all on these subjects. Life after d.e.a.t.h , the soul, UFOs, ghosts, spiritualism, psychic research.

He read them all. He underlined them. He wrote in the margins. He talked about them late at night when he trusted the person he was talking to with a seriousness that surprised his friends, because his friends mostly knew the loud man, the funny man, the bartender man, the Ralph Kramden man. They did not know the man who, in the small hours of the morning, in a quiet hotel suite, was sitting with a book open on his lap, trying very hard to find out where his brother Clement had gone in 1919, and where his mother had gone in 1935,

and where his father, who never came home, had gone, if he had gone anywhere at all. He didn’t put it that way, of course. He would never have put it that way. He would say he was just curious. He would say he found it interesting. He would shrug it off and pour another drink. But his friends, the ones who really knew him, the ones who eventually talked to biographers like William A.

Henry and James Bacon, all said the same thing. They said the library was the real Jackie Gleason. They said the library was where he lived when nobody was looking. They said the library was the answer to the empty hook. Because if the books were right, if any of the books were right, then the people who walked out of your life were not necessarily gone.

Then the brother in the sealed room was not gone. Then the mother in the subway booth was not gone. Then the father who took his coat down off the hook in the hallway and walked out the door in 1925 was not, in some final sense, gone. He had only stepped, perhaps, into another room. And one day, perhaps, the door of that room might open.

That was a very large hope to hang on a very large pile of strange old books. But Jackie Gleason hung it there. And he never took it down. Now, I want to be careful here because some of what I am about to tell you next is in the area of stories that people told about Jackie Gleason, rather than things that anybody can prove.

There is a famous story, and you may have heard it, that in 1973, Jackie Gleason was taken by his friend, the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, to an Air Force base in Florida late at night and shown something there that he was not supposed to see. Something that, the story goes, had to do with crashed flying saucers and the bod.i.es of beings that were not human.

The story comes mainly from Jackie’s second wife, Beverly McKittrick, who told it years after the fact. Other people in Jackie’s life found it credible. Other people did not. The Air Force has never confirmed it. Nixon, who was indeed friendly with Gleason, and who did indeed play golf with him in Florida, never spoke about it publicly.

So, I’m not going to tell you tonight that this happened. I’m going to tell you that this is a story that was told. And I am going to tell you that it was told about a man who had by that point in his life spent more than 30 years quietly assembling the largest private library on the paranormal in America. Whatever you make of the story, the library was real.

The hunger behind the library was real. And the empty hook behind the hunger was real. And in 1959, in the middle of all of this, that hunger started to take a strange and very physical shape. Because Jackie Gleason, the boy from the small Brooklyn apartment, bought himself a piece of land in Peekskill, New York, about 50 miles up the Hudson River from the city.

And on that land, he decided to build himself a house. And it was not going to be a normal house. It was not going to have right angles. It was not going to have square rooms. It was going to be a round house, completely round, built on a circle, with a circular living room and circular bedrooms, and curving hallways that went on and on forever and never came to a corner.

He hired an architect, John McNamara, to design it. Round. All of it. Round. And when his friends, when reporters, when anybody asked Jackie Gleason why he had built himself a round house, he would smile that big Irish smile, and he would say a sentence that, once you understand the man, breaks your heart a little.

He said, “Because in a round house, the devil has nowhere to hide in the corners.” And he laughed. He always laughed when he said it, like it was a joke, like he didn’t mean it, like it was just a piece of Irish whimsy from a man who had too much money and not enough sense. But he meant it. My friend, he meant every single word of it.

The round house in Peekskill was finished in 1959. And from the outside, it looked like something out of a science fiction movie. A great circular building sitting on a hill with a smaller round building next to it and a covered walkway connecting them. The locals called it the spaceship. Children on bicycles would ride up the road just to look at it.

Newspapers came out and took photographs. Architectural magazines did features on it. And Jackie Gleason, the boy from Bushwick, the man who had grown up sleeping on a radiator in a tenement, stood on the front step of his round house in his bathrobe and grinned for the cameras and said it was the only kind of house a man should ever live in.

The big circular building was his living quarters. The smaller round building was his library. His paranormal library. By this point, he had moved most of his collection of strange books, his books about life after d.e.a.t.h , his books about ghosts and UFOs and psychic phenomena, out of his hotel suite in the city and into this little round building on the hill in Peekskill.

People who visited him there in those years, and a few of them eventually talked to journalists about it, all remembered the same thing. They remembered Jackie taking them by the elbow, sometimes after dinner, sometimes very late at night, with a drink in his hand and walking them across the covered walkway from the big house to the little house.

And then, unlocking the door of the little round building and turning on the lights. And just letting them stand there in the middle of all of those thousands of books and feel what it felt like. And what it felt like, by every account, was a chapel. A strange, quiet, slightly spooky chapel. There were no televisions in there.

There were no radios. There were no signs of the loud, raging, drinking, joking man who lived in the big house next door. There was just silence and books. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Following the curve of the round room all the way around with no corners anywhere, the way Jackie liked it. And in the middle of all this, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jackie Gleason was at the peak of his fame.

His show was a hit. The Honeymooners had become a permanent piece of American life. He had started a recording career of all things in 1952, putting out a series of mood music albums under his name, like Music for Lovers Only and Music to Make You Misty. Now, here is something amazing about those records.

They sold millions of copies. Millions. Jackie Gleason, the loud-mouthed Brooklyn comic, had quietly become one of the best-selling instrumental recording artists in America. The records were soft, slow, romantic, late-night music, music for empty apartments. Music for people who are sitting alone with a drink at midnight, thinking about somebody who wasn’t there.

He didn’t read music. He couldn’t write down a single note. But he would hum the melod.i.es to his arrangers. He would sing them. He would describe the mood he wanted in those big, sweeping Irish phrases of his. He would say, “I want it to sound like the loneliness of a Sunday afternoon.” And the arrangers would write it down.

And the orchestras would play it. And Jackie’s name would be on the album. And the album would sell and sell and sell and sell all through the 1950s and into the 1960s. And here is what I want you to notice, my friend. The man who had built a round house with no corners so the devil couldn’t hide, the man who had built a chapel library full of books about life after d.e.a.t.h , that same man in those same years was making millions of records of slow, sad, lonely music.

Music that he himself called music for the wee small hours of the morning. Music for the long nights when the empty hook was loudest. He was speaking in every part of his life in code. The loud Ralph Kramden on television was the code. The slow, lonely music on the record player was the code. The roundhouse was the code.

The library was the code. And the code, every single piece of it, was about the same thing. The brother who was gone. The mother who was gone. The father who took down his coat from the hook in the hallway and walked out of the apartment in 1925 and never, ever came back. In 1961, Hollywood, which had once shrugged at him, came back with its hat in its hand.

They offered him a part in a movie called The Hustler. He played a character named Minnesota Fats, a great fat pool player who sits at a green table in a smoky room and beats a young Paul Newman in a long, slow, brutal game of nine ball. Jackie Gleason, by every account, was magnificent in that film. He hardly spoke. He just played pool.

He played pool the way a priest says mass, slowly, deliberately, with every gesture meaning something. He was nominated for an Academy Award. He didn’t win. But the world saw, perhaps for the first time, that this man was not just a comic. This man was an actor. This man had something behind his eyes that not very many performers in America had.

And the truth was, the something behind his eyes was 68 years of loss, carefully hidden behind a Brooklyn smile. He made other movies, Gigot in 1962, where he played a mute Frenchman, a small, lonely, sweet creature who loved a little girl who was not his own daughter. Sold.i.er in the Rain in 1963 with Steve McQueen.

Papa’s Delicate Condition in the same year, where he played a charming drunk. He was good. Sometimes he was great. But the movies never quite knew what to do with him. They could not fit him on the screen. He was, as one critic said at the time, too big for the frame. He was always, in some way, leaking out the edges of the picture.

And in 1964, he moved. He sold the roundhouse in Peekskill. He packed up the thousands of books. He packed up the records and the suits and the bathrobes and the cigarettes and the bottles. And he moved his whole life down to Miami Beach, Florida. Now, why Miami Beach? There are a lot of reasons people will tell you.

The weather, the taxes, the proximity to the racetrack at Hialeah, the proximity to the golf courses. Jackie loved golf. He loved it the way some men love women, deeply, irrationally, hopelessly. He played, by his own admission, almost every single day of his life that the weather allowed. But there is another reason, and his friends knew it, and his biographers eventually wrote about it.

The reason was that in Miami Beach, he could be left alone. In Miami Beach, there were no Brooklyn streets to remind him. In Miami Beach, there were no winters. In Miami Beach, the sun came up every morning, hot and clean and yellow. And there were no empty hooks. He convinced CBS to move his entire television show down there with him.

Imagine that for a moment. One man convinced an entire network to relocate his weekly variety show with its orchestra and its dancers and its writers and its cameras from New York City, the capital of television, to Miami Beach, a vacation town. And CBS did it. Because he was Jackie Gleason. And Jackie Gleason got what Jackie Gleason wanted.

The show ran from Miami Beach from 1964 until it finally went off the air in 1970. He performed at the Miami Beach Auditorium, which was eventually renamed the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts. He opened every show by walking out onto the stage in a beautiful suit with a flower in his lapel and saying his catchphrase to the aud.i.ence, the catchphrase that had become his trademark over the years.

He would smile and he would gesture out at the crowd and he would say, “And away we go.” You remember that line. You remember the way he said it. You remember the lean to the side, the lift of the leg, the wave of the hand. Remember that line, my friend, because we are going to come back to it at the very end of this story in a way that is going to surprise you.

Because that line, “And away we go”, is not just a catchphrase. It is, in the end, the most honest thing Jackie Gleason ever said about anything, about himself, about all of us. But that is for later. In Miami Beach in the 1960s, Jackie Gleason was a kind of king. He had a house on a golf course at the Inverrary Country Club.

He had friends who came to visit who were among the most famous men in the world. Frank Sinatra came down. Dean Martin came down. Toots Shor came down. And according to many later accounts, Richard Nixon came down, too, both before and during his presidency. Nixon and Gleason had become friends in the late 1960s. They played golf together. They drank together.

Although Nixon was a much, much lighter drinker than Jackie was. They sat on porches in the Florida evening and talked. And it was in the context of this friendship, according to a story that began to circulate many years later, that the famous incident I mentioned earlier supposedly took place. The story, as it has been told over the years, mostly by Jackie’s second wife, Beverly McKittrick, after the fact, goes like this.

Sometime around 1973, after a long evening together, President Nixon supposedly drove Jackie Gleason late at night to Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami, and walked him into a hangar where he supposedly saw the recovered bod.i.es of beings that were not human, kept in special preservation chambers. And according to the story, Jackie came home shaken to the bone, sat down in his kitchen, poured a drink, and could barely speak for several days.

Now, I have to say this very clearly, my friend. I’m telling you this story because it has been told about Jackie Gleason for decades, and you may have heard it somewhere. And you deserve to know where it comes from. But I’m not telling you that it happened. There is no official confirmation of any such visit.

The Air Force has never confirmed it. Nixon never spoke about it publicly. The story rests almost entirely on accounts given by Jackie’s second wife years later, and on the recollections of people who say Jackie mentioned something to them in private, with a drink in his hand. It is, in the strict sense of the word, a rumor. A famous rumor.

A persistent rumor. but a rumor. What is not a rumor, and what is documented, and what really matters for our story, is that Jackie Gleason was a man who, by that point in his life, had spent three or four decades quietly assembling the largest private library on the paranormal in America, and who believed in the deepest part of himself that the world had more rooms in it than most people were ever shown.

So, whether or not Nixon ever drove him to a hangar in the middle of the night, the truth is that Jackie was already, in his own head, walking through those kinds of hangars every single night of his life. In the little round building next to the roundhouse, in the rented hotel suite with the books stacked on the floor, in the long, quiet hours after the show came off the air, when he was alone, and the music was slow, and the bottle was open, and the empty hook in the hallway of his childhood was, after all this time,

still empty. And in 1970, his life cracked open in a different way, because in 1970, after almost 35 years of separation, after almost 35 years of waiting, of patience, of a Catholic refusal that had held them apart and tied them together all at the same time, Genevieve Halford Gleason finally agreed to a divorce.

The marriage that had begun on a small September day in 1936, in a Brooklyn ceremony with no money and no honeymoon, was at long last officially over. The divorce was painful. There was a financial settlement that was, by the standards of the time, very large. Genevieve had earned it. Genevieve had earned all of it and more.

She had raised the two daughters. She had held her dignity through decades of public humiliation, through gossip columns and photographs of her husband with other women in nightclubs and on cruises. She had stayed Catholic. She had stayed quiet. And in the end, she had let him go. Jackie married Beverly McKittrick, a secretary, very quickly after the divorce in 1970.

That marriage did not last. They were divorced by 1975. And then on the 17th of December, 1975, after waiting more than 20 years for him to be free, Jackie Gleason married Marilyn Taylor. Marilyn, the dancer. Marilyn, the sister of June Taylor who had run the dancers on his show. Marilyn, who had been the love of his life since 1952.

Marilyn, who had waited and waited and waited because she knew, the way Genevieve had known on a long ago night in a Brooklyn dance hall, what the man was and what the man was going to cost and what the man was worth in the end. By every account from the people who knew them, that marriage to Marilyn was the happiest period of Jackie Gleason’s adult life.

He calmed down. Not all the way. A man like Jackie Gleason never calms down all the way. But he calmed down. He drank less. He smoked perhaps slightly less, although still far too much. He stayed home more. He played his golf in the afternoons. He watched television with his wife in the evenings. He laughed at Johnny Carson.

He went to bed at a reasonable hour, sometimes. He was at long last in the only marriage of his life that he was fully present in. But there was a shadow over it. And the shadow was Genevieve. Because Genevieve Halford Gleason, the first wife, the patient one, the one who had laughed in the wings of the dance hall in 1935, lived on for less than a year after she finally gave him his divorce.

She d.i.ed in 1976. And Jackie Gleason did not go to her funeral. He told friends later that he could not face it. He told friends that he didn’t think he had the right to be there. He told friends in some private moments that he was afraid that if he stood at her graveside in front of his two grown daughters, he would not be able to keep himself standing up.

So, he stayed home. And his two daughters, Geraldine and Linda, by every account from people close to the family, took a long time to forgive him for that. It was, by his own private admission to a few close people in the last years of his life, one of the great regrets of his existence. Not going. Not standing there.

Not saying in front of God and his daughters and the empty space in the front pew where a husband should have been that he was sorry. That she had been the first laugh of his life. That she had given him the only thing he had ever really wanted. And that he had not been able to give her in return the small, simple thing she had asked of him, which was to come home at night.

He had built a round house with no corners. He had built a library full of books about the world beyond this one. He had filled a hundred closets with a hundred coats so that no hook would ever be empty. But the one hook he could not fill, the one room he could not enter, the one woman whose graveside he could not stand at, was the one that mattered the most.

And the years after that, my friend, were the long, slow, quiet years. The years of the round man on the golf course at Inverrary in his big sun hat with a cigarette between his fingers walking down the fairway in the Florida heat. The years of Marilyn at home. The years of the daughters slowly, carefully coming back into his life one Sunday phone call at a time.

The years of the library growing book by book in a quiet room in the Florida house with the curtains drawn against the sun. The years, in other words, of waiting. Although Jackie himself, the loud man, the funny man, the man who hated to be alone, would never in a thousand years have admitted that he was waiting for anything.

The late 1970s and the early 1980s were a strange and quiet chapter for Jackie Gleason. His weekly variety show had gone off the air in 1970. The Honeymooners reruns played on and on every single night in syndication in city after city. But the man himself was no longer on television every week. The world that had once tuned in by the tens of millions to watch him stomp around a Brooklyn apartment set was now mostly watching other people.

The big variety hours were dying. The country was changing. Comedy was changing. The loud, brassy, vaudeville trained, orchestra backed style that Jackie Gleason had built his whole career on was, by the late 1970s, beginning to look like something from another century. And Jackie knew it. He was not a stupid man, my friend.

He was, in fact, one of the most intelligent performers of his generation despite the eighth-grade education and the cultivated front of Brooklyn ignorance he liked to wear in interviews. He read everything. He thought about everything. He knew that the wave he had ridden for 30 years was breaking on the beach, and he reacted to it the way a lot of great old performers react to it.

He semi-retired. He played golf. He gave the occasional interview. He let the phone ring. He waited to see what would come next. And in 1977, what came next was a small movie called Smokey and the Bandit. Now, when his agent first brought him the script for Smokey and the Bandit, Jackie Gleason almost did not take the part.

The film was a low-budget car chase comedy. The star was Burt Reynolds, who was about 20 years younger than Jackie and at the absolute height of his good-looking, mustachioed, easy-going, charming fame. The director was a stuntman named Hal Needham, who had never directed a feature before. The story was nonsense.

A bootlegger and his friend try to drive a truckload of beer across state lines, while a Texas sheriff named Buford T. Justice chases them in a police car that slowly falls apart on screen. It was, on paper, an absolutely silly movie. But there was something in the part of Sheriff Buford T.

Justice that Jackie Gleason saw immediately. The sheriff was loud. The sheriff was furious. The sheriff was constantly being humiliated by the world. The sheriff was, in some way, a country cousin of Ralph Kramden, a man who was always shouting at a world that would not give him what he believed he deserved. And Jackie Gleason said yes.

He said yes, and then he did something that very few stars of his stature would ever do. He told Hal Needham, the rookie director, that he would improvise the part. He told Needham that he would say whatever came into his head. He told Needham not to write him any more dialogue. Just point the camera at him, give him a situation, and let him go.

And Hal Needham, who was not a fool, said yes. The result was one of the most beloved comic performances of the 1970s. Jackie Gleason in a wide cowboy hat and a tan uniform that strained against his enormous belly, sweat pouring down his face, drove through the American South screaming insults at his son, screaming insults at the road, screaming insults at the trucker he was chasing in an unbroken river of improvisation that by every account had the crew in tears on the set.

The movie came out in May of 1977. It was an absolute juggernaut at the box office. It was for that year second only to Star Wars in domestic grosses. Think about that for a moment. The biggest movie of 1977 was Star Wars. And the second biggest was a little car chase comedy starring Burt Reynolds and a 61-year-old Jackie Gleason from Brooklyn.

There were two sequels, Smokey and the Bandit 2 in 1980, Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 in 1983. They were not as good as the first one. They were never going to be. But Jackie was in them and he was paid handsomely for them. And a whole new generation of children who had never sat in front of a black and white television set in the 1950s and watched Ralph Kramden threaten to send his wife to the moon, met Jackie Gleason for the very first time in color, in a cowboy hat, shouting at a windshield in a Pontiac police car.

He took other parts in those years. He played a tough old patriarch in a film called The Toy with Richard Pryor in 1982. It was not a great film, but Jackie was good in it. He took a few television specials. He came back to Honeymooners of all things in 1976 and 1978 when ABC paid him very large sums of money to do two new one-hour reunion specials with Art Carney and Audrey Meadows and a fresh version of Trixie.

He even, in 1973 and 1974, recorded a handful of additional Honeymooners sketches that ABC turned into a new short series. The old set was rebuilt. The old icebox was wheeled out. The painted window was put up. And Ralph and Norton, 20 years older now with a little more gray in their hair, sat at the kitchen table once again and shouted at each other and made up at the end of the half hour.

It was nostalgia, of course, pure nostalgia. America was looking back. It was looking back at Brooklyn. It was looking back at the small black and white apartment with the icebox and the painted window. It was looking back at a time, real or imagined, when a man could yell at his wife on a Saturday night and still put his hands on her face at the end of the show and tell her she was the greatest.

Whether that time had ever really existed, my friend, is a complicated question. But the country wanted it back. And Jackie Gleason, in his Florida house, was happy to give it to them for a price. And then, in 1986, he made one more film that I want to tell you about because this one matters. This one was different.

The film was called Nothing in Common. It came out in the summer of 1986. It was directed by Garry Marshall. The young star was Tom Hanks, who was just then becoming a serious leading man in Hollywood, just a few years after Splash and Bachelor Party. And in this film, Tom Hanks played the son and Jackie Gleason played the father.

The father was a difficult, stubborn, lonely old man named Max Basner, a traveling salesman who had been a bad husband and a worse father, and who, over the course of the film, gets sick, gets very sick, and slowly, painfully, has to be cared for by the son he had never really been there for. There were scenes in that movie, my friend, that I do not believe Jackie Gleason was acting in.

There were scenes between Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason in a hospital room where the old man, sitting up in bed in a thin gown, looked across at the son and tried to find the words to apologize for an entire life. And anyone who knew anything about Jackie Gleason’s real life, anyone who knew about Genevieve and the two daughters, Geraldine and Linda, and the years he had not been home, and the funeral he had not gone to in 1976, knew exactly what those scenes meant.

Tom Hanks said in interviews after the film came out, and again in later years, that working with Jackie Gleason was one of the great experiences of his career. He said that Jackie, by that point, was a very gentle man on set, a patient man, a serious man, a man who had stopped showing off. He said that there were moments in the hospital scenes where Jackie would simply sit very still and look at him, and that the air in the room would change.

He said that he knew, watching Jackie Gleason in those scenes, that he was watching a man who was telling the truth, with the cameras rolling, about his own life, even though the script was somebody else’s. What Tom Hanks did not know at the time, what almost nobody on that set knew at the time, was that Jackie Gleason was already a sick man when he made Nothing in Common.

He had been diagnosed by the mid-1980s with colon cancer. The cancer had been treated. It had appeared to be in remission for a while, but by the time he was shooting his scenes in the hospital bed for Garry Marshall’s film, the cancer had quietly returned, and it had begun to spread. He had also, by this point, developed serious problems with his liver, the predictable result of more than 40 years of heavy, almost daily, drinking.

And his lungs were the lungs of a man who had been smoking three to five packs of cigarettes a day for most of his adult life. His friends, by every account, looked at him in those last years and saw a man who was, in the most literal sense, slowly being consumed by the appetites that had kept the empty hook quiet for 60 years.

The film came out in 1986. It was a hit. The reviews for Jackie Gleason, in particular, were extraordinary. There was serious talk of another Oscar nomination, which did not, in the end, come through, but the conversation about him as an actor, as a real, deep, serious actor, was as warm in 1986 as it had been in 1961, when he played Minnesota Fats in The Hustler.

And many of the people in Hollywood who had grown up watching him on television in the ’50s and ’60s, the directors and the writers and the actors who were now running the studios, made a point of reaching out to him, of writing him letters, of letting him know what he had meant to them. And Jackie, in the last winter of his life, sat in his house in Florida and read those letters very slowly, one at a time, with a cup of coffee at his elbow and a cigarette in his hand.

And Marilyn moving quietly through the house behind him. The Florida house. We have not really talked about it yet, my friend, but I want to take a moment now and walk you through it, because the house tells you almost everything about how this man chose to live the last chapter of his life. It was not, this time, a roundhouse.

The roundhouse had been in Peekskill. He had sold that years before. This house, in the Inverrary community in Lauderhill, Florida, near the golf course he loved, was a more conventional shape on the outside. But on the inside, it was a kind of museum. It was a museum of Jackie Gleason’s entire life, organized exactly the way Jackie Gleason wanted to remember himself.

There was a billiard room with a beautiful pool table. He played pool every day. He had played pool, by his own account, since he was a kid in Brooklyn, sneaking into the pool halls to make a few dollars. He had played pool on screen, of course, as Minnesota Fats, and the role had given him a strange second identity that followed him for the rest of his life.

Strangers in airports would walk up to him for the rest of his life and say, “Hey Fats, how about a game?” And Jackie would always smile and say, “Sure, kid. Set them up.” He never said no. There was a music room with the record player and the recordings of his orchestras. The slow, lonely instrumental music he had spent two decades producing.

He listened to it, by every account, almost every day. He would sit in his big chair in that room, alone, in the late afternoon, with a drink in his hand, and he would play those old records, the records he had made for the wee small hours of the morning. And his face, friends said, would go very quiet. There was a screening room with a projector and a small aud.i.ence of comfortable chairs where he could watch movies.

He watched old movies. He watched new movies. He watched, sometimes, his own old movies. He almost never watched The Honeymooners. Friends asked him about this, and he would shrug. “I lived it once,” he would say. “I don’t need to live it again.” And there was the library. The paranormal library, the thousands of books about life after d.e.a.t.h , about ghosts, about spiritualism, about UFOs, about reincarnation, about everything that lay just beyond the edge of what most people were willing to believe in.

The library had moved with him from Peekskill to Florida, and over the years it had only grown. By the time he was in his late 60s, by the estimates of people who saw it, it contained somewhere between 1,700 and 1,900 volumes, although exact counts vary in different sources. The library was in his Florida house in a separate room with its own door.

He spent more and more time in that room as he got older. He would sit in there with a book open on his lap, sometimes for hours, with the door closed, and Marilyn would leave him alone, the way wives of men like Jackie Gleason learned to leave them alone, with patience and respect, and a kind of quiet love that does not need to be in the same room.

Now, here is something I want to tell you about, and I want to be careful about how I tell it. Because in those last years of his life, the people who were closest to Jackie Gleason, a small handful of friends, his wife Marilyn, his daughter Linda, started to notice something. They started to notice that he was talking more and more often about his brother, about Clemens, the brother who had d.i.ed of meningitis in 1919 when Jackie was 3 years old.

The brother whose name he had almost never said out loud in 65 years. He started to say his name. He said it quietly at first. He said it in passing. He would mention in a story about his childhood that he had had an older brother. He would mention in a conversation about his mother that there had been another boy in the house before me who didn’t make it.

And then, as the months went on, as the cancer that had come back began to move through him, as he started to lose weight, as the great bulk of his body began for the first time in his adult life to actually shrink, he started to say the name itself. Clemence. Friends would be sitting with him in the music room listening to one of his old albums, and he would say out of nowhere, “You know, my brother Clemence used to sing.

” Friends would be sitting with him at the breakfast table, and he would say, looking out the window, “Clemence would have been 78 this year.” Friends would walk into the library and find him sitting with a book open on his lap and his eyes closed, and they would ask if he was all right, and he would open his eyes, and he would say very quietly, “I was just thinking about Clemence.

” And by every account from the people who were closest to him at the end, this was new. This had never happened before. For 68 years, the door at the back of the great man’s mind, the door to the small sealed room where the older brother lived, had been kept tightly shut. And now, in the last winter of his life, that door was beginning, very slowly, to open.

The spring of 1987 came to Florida the way spring always comes to Florida, quietly, without much fanfare. The temperature went up a few degrees, the mornings got brighter a little earlier. The flowers on the bushes outside the house in Inverrary opened up one by one in their slow Florida way. And inside the house, in the bedroom on the ground floor, Jackie Gleason was dying.

He had known it for months. By the late winter of 1986, the doctors had told him, in the plain, careful language doctors use when they have run out of options that there was nothing more they could do. The colon cancer had spread. It was in his liver. It was, by some accounts, beginning to move into other organs.

He was in his early 70s. His body, after a lifetime of cigarettes and whiskey and steak and the kind of eating and drinking that would have killed a smaller man a quarter of a century earlier, had finally simply run out. He chose, by every account, to d.i.e at home. He could have gone into a hospital. He had the money. He had the connections.

He had the kind of fame that would have gotten him the best private room in the best hospital in Miami with the best specialists in the country flying in to consult on his case. He said no. He said that he wanted to be in his own house. He said that he wanted to be in his own bed. He said that he wanted, by every account from Maryland and from the few friends who were there at the end, to be near his books.

The library, in those last weeks, became a kind of small kingdom. He could not walk to it anymore by the end. His body, which had once weighed close to 300 lb, was down, by some accounts, to less than half of that. The great frame of the great man was, in those last weeks, almost gone. But Maryland would bring him books from the library, one at a time, into the bedroom.

She would set them on the nightstand. She would open them to the place he had marked. She would help him sit up, if he could sit up. And she would let him read for as long as he could before his eyes got tired or his hands got too weak to hold the book or sleep came up behind him like a slow tide and took him out for an hour or two.

His daughters were there in the last weeks, Geraldine and Linda, the two girls he had not been home for in the 1940s and 1950s. The two girls whose mother’s funeral he had not attended in 1976. The two grown women by this point with their own lives, their own families, their own complicated histories with their father.

They came down to Florida. They sat with him. They held his hand. They forgave him in the small everyday ways that people forgive each other in the last weeks of a life. They did not make speeches. They did not have to. They just sat in the room. And he knew, by every account, what it meant that they were there.

Marilyn, who had waited more than 20 years to be his wife, who had finally married him in 1975, was there every single day, every single hour. She moved through the house quietly. She brought him water. She brought him books. She brought him, sometimes, a little soft food that he could no longer really eat. She held his hand at night.

She slept, when she slept at all, in a chair by the bed. And by every account from the people who came in and out of the house in those weeks, she was extraordinary. She was, in the last quiet chapter of his life, the wife he had always needed and had not been able to fully receive until the very end. He took, by his own request, the sacraments of the Catholic Church in the last weeks of his life.

He had been raised Catholic. He had drifted, the way many men drift, in and out of the actual practice of the faith over the course of his life. He had married, of course, in the Catholic Church the first time. He had been kept in that first marriage in part by the rules of that same church.

He had spent 40 years reading books about the paranormal in part because the answers his church gave him about d.e.a.t.h had not quite been enough to fill the empty hook in the hallway. But at the end, my friend, at the very end, when the books had been read, and the records had been listened to, and the round houses had been built and sold, and the great career had been lived, he asked for the priest.

And the priest came. And Jackie Gleason, the boy from Bushwick, made his confession and received the last rites of his church, the way his mother Mae would have wanted him to. The way Genevieve would have wanted him to. The way, perhaps, he had wanted to all along. And on the morning of June the 24th, 1987, Jackie Gleason d.i.ed in his bed in his house in Lauderhill, Florida at the age of 71.

Marilyn was with him. He was at home. The cancer, which had taken so much of him in the previous months, had finally taken the rest. The news went out across the country that day. The wire services moved the story. The evening news led with it. Television stations all over America dug into their archives and pulled out clips.

There was Ralph Kramden threatening to send Alice to the moon. There was Reginald Van Gleason III in his top hat drunkenly slurring his way through a sketch. There was the poor soul silently breaking your heart. There was the Honeymooners theme music, the soft slow notes of You’re My Greatest Love rolling over the closing credits of yet another tribute.

There was Buford T. Justice screaming at a windshield in a Pontiac. There was the small black and white image of a young man in a cheap suit standing in front of a microphone at a club in Brooklyn in 1940, almost half a century earlier, just starting out, just beginning. And there was the catchphrase, the one we said we would come back to.

And away we go. Think about that line for a moment, my friend, now that you know the whole story. Think about it now that you know about the empty hook in the hallway in 1925. Think about it now that you know about Clemence in the sealed room. Think about it now that you know about May in the subway booth with her swollen feet and her 8-lb legs.

Think about it now that you know about Genevieve at the dance hall and the two daughters in the apartment he was almost never in and the funeral he could not bring himself to attend. Think about it now that you know about the roundhouse with no corners and the library of 1700 books on the world beyond this world.

And away we go. That, my friend, is not a comic’s catchphrase. That is a man, every single week for almost 20 years, walking out onto a stage and telling his aud.i.ence the single most honest thing he has ever figured out about being a human being. We are going. All of us. We are going somewhere. The father walked out the door in 1925 and went somewhere.

The brother went into a sealed room in 1919 and went somewhere. The mother went home from the subway booth in 1935 and went somewhere. The first wife went into a cemetery in 1976 and went somewhere. And the great big man on the stage in the beautiful suit with the flower in his lapel is going to go, too. He is going.

We are all going. And the only thing left to do in the meantime, between now and the going, is to lean a little to the side and lift a leg and wave a hand and smile at the people who happen to be in the room with you. And say it out loud the way he said it. And away we go. He was buried in Miami at Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery in a marble mausoleum that he had designed for himself sometime before.

And on the front of that mausoleum in carved letters, my friend in the hot Florida sun, where anybody who wants to can walk up and read them, are five words. Five words that he had chosen himself. Five words that when you stand in front of them and read them with everything you now know about this man, hit you in the chest like a small, quiet bell.

The five words are these. And away we go. That is what is written on his tomb. That is the line he chose to leave behind him carved into the stone as the last word, as the last laugh, as the last small joke, as the last small truth. The catchphrase from the variety show, the opening line of all those Saturday nights in front of all those television sets and all those small American living rooms.

The bartender’s wave, the comic’s flourish, the Brooklyn boy’s salute. And underneath all of that, the quiet faith, the long stubborn hope that the going is not the end of the going. That there is somewhere, in fact, to go. That the empty hook in the hallway in 1925 is not, after all, the last word on the matter.

Marilyn lived on for many more years. She kept the house. She kept the library. She talked eventually to some of the biographers and journalists who came to write about her late husband. She told them, by every account, the same kinds of things that he had been more complicated than people knew, that he had been more tender than people knew, that he had been, in his last quiet years, more afraid and more hopeful at the same time than the public Jackie Gleason had ever let anybody see.

His daughters lived on with their own families, their own children, their own grandchildren. They are, by the time of this telling, themselves grown old. The line goes on. The Brooklyn boy on the radiator, sleeping under his coat in 1925, has great-grandchildren now. The world keeps moving. The wave keeps rolling.

The hand keeps waving. And the honeymooners, somewhere in America, on a television set, somewhere in a city or a small town, in a kitchen or a hospital ward, or a hotel room, or a college dorm, in black and white, on a Friday night or a Tuesday afternoon or a Sunday morning, plays on. The kitchen with the icebox, the painted window, the kitchen table, the big man with the bus driver’s uniform and the cap, the skinny man from upstairs with the suspenders and the silly walk, the wife with the patient eyes, the shouting, the threats,

the big bald fist held up to the camera, and then, at the very end of every single episode, after the storm, the man putting his hands very gently on his wife’s face and saying, with everything he has, with the entire weight of his life behind the words, “Baby, you’re the greatest.” And that, my friend, is the story of Jackie Gleason, the boy from the empty hook.

The man with 1,700 books on the world beyond this one. The husband of Genevieve who could not be at her grave. The husband of Marilyn who finally came home. The father of two daughters who came back to him at the end. The brother who said, “After 68 years.” The name of the brother who had gone first. The performer who walked out onto a stage every Saturday night and waved his hand and told the truth about all of us.

Every single one of us. Even though almost nobody in the aud.i.ence heard the truth inside the joke. And away we go. We are all going, my friend. He knew it. He knew it the whole time. He was telling us every single week. And now, after this long, quiet night of telling, you know it, too. Sleep well, my friend. Wherever you are listening from.

In whatever city. In whatever small room. In whatever quiet hour of whatever quiet night. Sleep well. The great man is at rest. The empty hook, perhaps, is empty no longer. And the wave goes on from his hand to ours. From this generation to the next. From one quiet bedroom to another. All the way down the long hallway of the years.

And away we go.