For 40 years my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.
Gracie was my partner in our act, my best friend, my wife and my lover, and the mother of our two children. We were a team, both on and off the stage. Our relationship was simple: I fed her the straight lines and she fed me. She made me famous as the only man in America who could get a laugh by complaining, “My wife understands me.”
We had a good marriage. We knew it was a good marriage because we never read anything bad about it in the papers. They only wrote about us once in the big gossip magazine, “Confidential.” They wrote a story that said we’d had a big fight and I’d moved into the west wing of our house. I knew that couldn’t be true—our house didn’t have a west wing.