He is a favored pal of many luminaries. Says the forever star-struck Reilly, "It's fun to get a message on the phone service that Lucille Ball or Burt Reynolds called, and play it very blasé by asking, 'Anyone else?' " The ultimate, of course, was being invited to the White House—"your basic good freebie"—to meet Queen Elizabeth. "What do you say to the Queen: 'How's the traffic in the diamond lane?' or 'Have you been to Ralph's new supermarket in Ventura?' "
Reilly's fey and flyweight persona overshadows serious accomplishments. "I don't think I'm aggressive, but I must be if I have my hand in 20 pies," he notes. At the age of 48 he has performed more than 3,000 times on Broadway in plays like Hello, Dolly! and Skyscraper, and has his own L.A. drama school, the Faculty. He has also coached Liza Minnelli, Peter Boyle and Lily Tomlin ("She was terrible, but she worked hard"). In 1976 he directed Julie Harris in her acclaimed one-woman drama on Broadway, The Belle of Amherst, and recently he staged his third opera, La Traviata, in San Diego. He is now in the throes of producing SRO, a TV sitcom loosely based on the life of diva Eileen Farrell, starring Roberta Peters (both friends, as is Beverly Sills).
"I'm quite strange, but not really," he sums up, and doesn't mind being the butt of his own jokes. "I live at the dentist's," Reilly explains. "I'm on my third set of teeth that they put in with nails and screws." When he goes for an appointment the parking lot attendant asks, "Are you sure you've got just one mouth?" Reilly also kids about his $2,000 toupee. "It took the hair of three Sicilian women to make it—one for brown, one for gray and one for curl. Everyone should have hair. When you get dressed up, you must do that last whip of hair spray or life's not worth living."
Like many comedians, Reilly professes a deep personal sadness, which he tries to make light of. "I'm very romantic, but it all went by," he sighs. "Very sad, but it was the correct thing for me. I would like desperately to be part of two, but I guess I don't or I would be. You know what I'm saying? I truly have no sexual life, and that's by choice."
A Freudian would have a field day. "My childhood could not have been worse," claims Reilly, who was born in the Bronx and grew up with his sign-painter father, mother, uncle, aunt and grandparents in a two-room apartment in Hartford, Conn. "Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams couldn't begin to do the story," says Reilly. "My mother would pull out drawers for people to sleep in. I ate fish sticks for 19 years."
At 12, encouraged by the Italian family next door, he began to study opera. "On a one-note part I could dazzle, but my top register stank." At 22 he moved to Manhattan to spend a decade in a cold-water flat as an impoverished actor. "There were times when I had to go through the garbage and take bottles back." He scored as understudy for Dick Van Dyke and Paul Lynde in Bye Bye Birdie and won a Tony for best supporting actor as Frump in How to Succeed in Business. That and other Broadway successes led him West to TV where he co-starred in the series The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. He also sidelines as a highly paid radio and TV huckster. One commercial, which put Reilly in a banana suit, still causes kids to shout after him, "There goes the Bic Banana!"
He is cheerfully profligate with money. "If I make $30,000 a month, I'll spend $29,999," he says. "I tell friends, 'Oh, you need money to go to college?' I'm a little crazy, but the backwash is heaven." Reilly hopes to learn to relax—"Is there a course like Deck Chair One or Patio Two?" He also plans to exercise, brush his teeth, lose weight (now up to 185) and stop drinking Manhattans. Never on a star trip—"I don't even own an 8"x10" glossy"—Reilly does his own cooking and cleaning ("If someone is working in the house I feel guilty"). The three-bedroom house he bought eight years ago ("organized chaos and elegant bohemian") cost a modest $67,000 and sits in the panhandle of Beverly Hills. "It's not where Doris Day lives, or Gladys Knight either," he says, "but it's still Beverly Hills, darling." He would like to give up performing for teaching ("It never goes off the air"), producing and directing. "I reach actors in ways no other person can," he claims.
His professional attainments lead Reilly to suspect he's more solid than many think. As a boy, he recalls, he liked to play with puppets. "My mother used to say, 'My God, my son is odd.' My father would say, 'You're odd, go throw a ball around.' Now, after 40 years, I'm in the gas crisis and I'm still odd." Then Reilly smiles. "But that's okay, because underneath I know that I'm even. I'm really quite fine."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
