HOLLYWOOD LOVE: JERRY STILLER AND ANNE MEARA

 Jerry Stiller on meeting Anne Meara: "She seemed to sense I had no money, so she just ordered coffee. Then she took all the silverware. I picked up her check for ten cents and thought, 'This is a girl I'd like to hang out with.'

Meara met Stiller in 1953, and they married in 1955, after a two-year relationship. Until he suggested it, she had never thought of doing comedy. "Jerry started us being a comedy team," she said. "He always thought I would be a great comedy partner." They joined the Chicago improvisational company The Compass Players (which later became The Second City), and after leaving, formed the comedy team of Stiller and Meara. In 1961, they were performing in nightclubs in New York, and by the following year were considered a "national phenomenon," said the New York Times.

Their often improvised comedy routines brought many of their relationship foibles to live audiences. Their skits focused on domestic themes, as did Nichols and May, another comedy team during that period from the Chicago Compass Players project. "They were Nichols and May without the acid and with warmth," notes author Lawrence Epstein. They also added a new twist to their comedy act, he adds, by sometimes playing up the fact that Stiller was Jewish and Meara was Catholic. After Nichols and May broke up as a team in 1961, Stiller and Meara were the number-one couple comedy team by the late 1960s. And as Mike Nichols and Elaine May were not married, Stiller and Meara became the most famous married couple comedy team since Burns and Allen.

Though Meara was born, baptized, and raised a Roman Catholic, she converted to Judaism six years after marrying Stiller. She took her conversion seriously and studied the Jewish faith in such depth that her Jewish-born husband quipped, "Being married to Anne has made me more Jewish." Anee Meara died in 2015, and Jerry Stiller died in 2020...