Tuesday, July 1, 2003 | 11:26 a.m.
Prior to a New Year's Eve performance in the 1960s, a top executive of the Sahara Hotel walked into Buddy Hackett's dressing room and warned him to keep his act clean.
The executive told Hackett that the resort's then-owner, Del Webb, and his wife, would be in the audience and it would be advisable for Hackett to tone down his trademark raunchy act.
"Buddy told him 'I promise you, I will not use one four-letter word,' " said longtime Las Vegas entertainer Pete Barbuti, a close friend who was there that night.
"True to his word, Buddy didn't tell a dirty joke. He just walked out onstage naked. (Actually, he wore a strategically placed silver dollar, as Hackett would later tell it.) You never told Buddy which path to follow."
Hackett, a rubbery-faced standup comic and actor who was one of Las Vegas' top headliners during the 1950s and 1960s, died at his Southern California beach house late Sunday or early Monday. He was 78.
The cause of death was not immediately known, but his son, longtime Las Vegas comedian Sandy Hackett, said his father suffered from diabetes.
"If I was going to a corporate job somewhere, I'd call him up, and he'd rattle off 10 jokes," Sandy Hackett, 47, recalled. "He never called just to say, 'Hello.' He'd call and say: 'A guy walks into a bar ...' "
Barbuti said Buddy Hackett was a "complex guy -- one day he would be the nicest person in the world and the next day the most difficult. But, God, what a talent.
"Buddy is one of the last great ones who helped build this town. He worked every hotel."
Prior to and after his star turns in Las Vegas, Hackett's more than 50 years in show business also included appearances in movies and in shows on Broadway and television.
Although Hackett was pudgy, Barbuti said he nevertheless was a good athlete, excelling at golf and skiing -- he long had a home at Brianhead, Utah, one of the world's top ski resorts -- and was a fair amateur boxer. Most of all, Barbuti said, Hackett was a hard worker.
"The object is to keep working -- if you are not working you are not in the business," Buddy Hackett told the Sun in an April 1992 story.
"A guy sitting at home alone is not a comedian. A guy standing up and talking in front of four people might be a comedian or he might just be a guy talking to four people."
Hackett said it was not the money but the love of show business that keeps an entertainer going.
"If you don't enjoy doing this for $5 a night, you won't enjoy it for $25,000 a night," Hackett said in the 1992 interview. "This is a business where you've got to like it. You've got to understand rejection. You've got to understand the people's right not to like you."
Of his raunchy sense of humor, Hackett said all types of comedy were good medicine. A person with a headache, he said, laughs and doesn't feel so bad.
"So, whether what I do walks the line of acceptability, please don't condemn me until you hear me," Hackett said. "Because if you condemn me, you're condemning yourself to have that headache forever."
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