COMEDY : It’s Not Easy Being Greene : Did you hear the one about the comic whose life became a nightmare of gambling, alcohol, panic attacks and prescription drugs? Shecky Greene can tell it.

Because he spent most of his professional life playing clubs, and because the name Shecky fits right in with all those generic Jackies and Joeys who started out in the Borscht Belt before they went on to careers in movies and television, Shecky Greene tends to get lumped in with the band of postwar vacation resort tummlers that history and a new generation have shunted aside. His Vegas association tends to date him too, now that the city is metamorphosing into a theme park. But to comedy aficionados, Shecky Greene is unquestionably one of the greats, the comedian’s comedian.

What nearly no one knows, however, is that his chunky frame has housed a lifelong rage and sorrow so consuming that, emotionally speaking, he could be a character out of Aeschylus. Or that a six-year period beginning in the ‘80s saw not a celebrated turn into the gentle autumn of a career but a man so seized by terror that he would take to his bed, crying and shaking uncontrollably.

“You feel you’re in a pit, a hellhole,” he says, describing an emotional free fall, accelerated by prescription drugs, that began in high school and has only recently come to an end. “There’s nowhere to go. You can’t get out. You feel alone.”

“It was a big effort just to get him to walk,” says his wife, Marie. “Socially, we couldn’t go out. He couldn’t drive. If a restaurant was too dark, he’d leave. If a restaurant was too light, he’d leave too. I had to warn our friends to expect anything. You never knew when a panic attack was going to hit.”

While Greene anguished in self-imposed exile, everyone who knows him filled his absence with wild and crazy Shecky Greene memories--almost as many as Greene has himself. There was the time, during his heavy drinking period, when he plowed his car into the fountain in front of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and while security guards surrounded him under towering plumes of water, he rolled down his window and said, “Hold the spray wax, please.”

There was the night when Johnny Carson, in his drinking period, chased Greene around and out of his best friend Buddy Hackett’s house during a party. Greene crashed through a lot of furniture, then plunged into Hackett’s swimming pool fully clothed, whereupon he clambered out and squished his way home. The next day Greene, remembering nothing but feeling remorseful--he knew from experience that he was a mean, obstreperous drunk--called Hackett to apologize.

“I hope you don’t hate me,” Greene said.

“Hate is an emotion,” Hackett replied. “For you, I feel nothing. But you’re off the nut. Carson was so loaded he walked into a wall and wrecked my stereo.”

Friends and associates remember Greene’s days as a compulsive gambler who shrugged off the loss of pot loads of money. He could afford it, he reasoned. After all, he made more than God (he was quite specific on this: He earned more than $100,000 a week during the mid-’70s, while God, in Greene’s estimation, made only $35,000).

Grateful audiences remember him as an all-purpose entertainer of the old school who told jokes and stories, sang, owned an endless fund of the kind of observations that made the dreariness and confusion of life not only bearable but funny and would do anything short of killing himself onstage for their delectation. Once, during a Florida gig early in his career, he did a body flip that landed him flush on his knee, which blew up to the size of a cantaloupe.

“Why do you do this to yourself?” an examining physician asked him the next day.

“It got a laugh,” Greene replied.

“Is a single laugh worth your knee?” the doctor asked, incredulously. Greene, in recounting the story now, doesn’t give his response. He’s had knee surgery and a hip replacement to relieve a career full of self-inflicted damage. Decades later, a decisive answer is still too close to call.

There are clinical words to describe what Greene has been privately suffering through, depression being chief among them. But there’s another term that describes what has made a miserable condition even worse, especially because it was avoidable: iatrogenic addiction.

“That is a condition that is physician-induced,” says psychiatrist Ronald Gershman, who has been treating Greene since November, 1989 (the comic has given the doctor permission to talk about his case). “The drugs Shecky was on are among the most addictive in medicine.”

Gershman is, as far as Greene is concerned, a radical departure from a long list of attending physicians whose eccentricities and ruinous prescriptions could be the gleeful subjects of a Moliere farce.

For example, there was the Freudian disciple who told Greene to feel free to call him at his Viennese clinic whenever he felt an anxiety attack coming on. Greene did and made his way through the labyrinth of international dialing signals and a phalanx of uncooperative medical assistants only to hear the doctor call him a string of obscenities and yell, “You crazy s.o.b. Don’t call me anymore!”

There was the psychiatrist who never suspected the anvil of dread that hung in Greene’s viscera, taking pleasure in the emotional camouflage of Greene’s patter and shtick. When Greene asked him why he didn’t help his sleeplessness, the doctor said, “But I thought this was your real personality.”

As Greene regales his visitor with stories like these, one is reminded of the notion that the comedian is a person who sees things funny. But that of course doesn’t mean things happen funny. Especially in Greene’s case. Through the years he had been diagnosed a manic-depressive, a condition often pharmaceutically treated by Valium, Xanax and Ativan--drugs that fall into the category of benzodiazepines.

The symptoms of benzodiazepine withdrawal include, Gershman says, “pains, burning sensations, teeth grinding, emotional outbursts, the feeling that the earth is spongy under your feet, a perpetual kind of mild terror and a mantra about wanting to die. These drugs can render you incapable of functioning. One of my patients who was on Ativan wrapped Scotch tape around her head because she felt that pieces of it were falling off. One patient saw her arms fall off. It’s hard to get the word out on these drugs because of the drug companies.”

That this kind of addiction has been hard to diagnose until recently doesn’t seem to offer Greene much of a vindicating solace. At 68, he still has a powerful-looking body--a low center of gravity lends his thick torso the obduracy of a hydrant. The sheer forcefulness of his personality, even in casual conversation, is indicative of a lifelong capacity to dominate large roomfuls of people.

His voice is strong, peremptory. He has a born comedian’s restlessness of mind and is full of jokes, asides and uncannily dead-on dialects. But there are small stillnesses where his lips are pursed and his mind is off elsewhere. Then his face looks shadowed with a lot of bad memory.

“I grew up in the North Side of Chicago,” he said recently in his Hancock Park home. “I was a real good athlete, which disguised the depression I began feeling as a kid. I loved sports. I wanted to be a phys ed teacher. But at the same time I was never happy. I felt like I never knew where I was going. I thought because there was mental illness in my mother’s family, and that my father’s mother had a nervous breakdown, that it might affect me. But there were no pills in those days. You didn’t talk about these things.

“Why I went into comedy I’ll never know. My father was a shoe salesman whose real vocation was the horses. I had two older brothers. One sold restaurant supplies, the other had a tile store. I could sing pretty well, and I liked to tell dialect jokes. I even took drama class, but I never had aspirations to that. I never wanted show business. I guess what I wanted was approval.”

Greene, whose pre-show-biz name is Fred Sheldon Greenfield, served aboard an aircraft carrier during World War II. After his tour ended, he took one stab at seeing a doctor. “He said, ‘Don’t go to school. Don’t get married. You need help.’ But I never followed through.”

Greene went to a junior college for a while, but comedy was such a natural outlet that he joined some friends to play resort revues at Peewaukee Lake, Wis.

Some of the sources he drew on then were Danny Thomas, Lou Holtz, the Three Stooges and Harry Ritz of the Ritz Brothers. He had already broadened his knowledge of dialects as a kid listening to the radio with his brothers while his mother worked late nights; they picked up signals from Uncle Ezra and the Barn Dance, and Lulabelle and Skyland Scottie.

Not surprisingly, he floundered early on in search of his own style. He worked with partners at first, Sammy Shore, then Joe Sterling, then Jean Karen, and for several years chased a desultory career through New York, Chicago and East and West Dubuque. He decided to strike out on his own and went down to New Orleans. The Big Easy loosened him up; he found his timing and sharpened the angles of his variety act at a joint called the Preview Lounge, where Al Hirt worked as his orchestra leader.

By this time Greene had taken it on himself to support his entire family; he went through considerable panic when the Lounge burned down, but Martha Raye called on him to join her, and he began his move west.

He went to Reno in the early ‘50s to play the Golden Hotel. “I was working for the boys out of Chicago without realizing it,” he says, which may be yet another explanation why, for all his affability, he’s a guarded figure: too much garrulousness around or about the euphemistically termed “boys” is not generally conducive to good health. They looked out for him. This was around the time Reno and especially Las Vegas were beginning to build up. Greene proved such a sure audience draw that he landed an unheard of three-year contract at $1,250 a week.

Soon he was playing the Last Frontier in Las Vegas. He married, unwisely (“I didn’t know her second name then, and still don’t”), and the ghastly split between soaring success and private misery became more abysmal than ever.

“I wanted to quit show business. I wanted to leave the girl. I started to drink and gamble, which I’d never done before,” he says. “It was unbelievable. They held me over for 18 weeks, the first time ever in the history of Vegas. But it didn’t mean (expletive) to me.”

He signed with NBC in 1953 and began to divide his time between Hollywood and Las Vegas, where he would return to play the New Frontier (Elvis Presley was his opening act) and the Riviera. The name Shecky Greene became as solid as the mint.

“I moved into the Riviera lounge and never felt so free and uninhibited in my life,” Greene says. “At the same time I was mean, belligerent, angry. There was this writer from Esquire magazine who came out to do a story on me. ‘I’ve never fallen for an entertainer before,’ he said. ‘This is going to be the best story I’ve ever done.’ Then he saw me drunk. He called up the next day and said, ‘I’ve torn up the article. I can’t let people know the truth about you.’ ”

The pattern kept up for 20 years. More money, more fame, more misery--and a second bad marriage. (“She was a little Hawaiian revue act. It was a complex situation--but a disaster.”) Even the jokes about Greene’s drinking were growing commonplace. “There goes Shecky’s burglar alarm,” his neighbors would say. “He must be just getting home.”

Inevitably, he began to break down. He lost his voice, and doctors removed his parathyroids in error. In 1976, he was diagnosed with sarcoma of the ribs, and three were removed (“I thought they were making the Andrew Sisters out of me”). He had recently stopped drinking and started on prescription drugs, Nardil at first, then Xanax.

Divorced once again, he called up an old friend of 30 years, Marie Musso, a tall, elegantly attractive woman who had been drawn to Greene years back but frightened and repelled by his drinking. “I said, ‘I really need you, Marie,’ ” Greene recalls. “He was searching for me,” she says.

They were married in 1985, by which time Greene’s panic attacks were literally paralyzing him. Several times he thought he was having a heart seizure. In the meantime, his Xanax dosages were increased. By 1987, “he was not working,” Marie Greene says. “We moved to Brentwood. He took to his bed, where he’d cry and shake. To get him to walk at all was a big effort. We went through six or seven therapists. There were times when I wanted to kill him. But mental illness is hard to detect. It’s not like a broken leg. But we never lost our sense of humor. As a wife going through all this, I said, ‘I’m not going to give up.’ ”

Then they heard of Gershman, a pioneer in drug rehabilitation therapy who had opened a methadone clinic in Watts in 1977 and was director of alcohol and substance abuse at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from 1984 through 1990.

Gershman, a youthful-looking 46 and dressed in jeans and casual shirt, carefully placed Greene’s case history folder on the living room coffee table in his Brentwood home. He spoke from memory, occasionally running his fingers along the edge of the folder, talking first about Greene’s treatment and psychological background and then about how the entertainment profession makes vulnerable people even more so.

“Shecky came to me in October of 1989 and I admitted him to the clinic in November,” Gershman said. “His chief complaint was Xanax dependence. He was severely depressed. He had panic disorder, depressive disorder and agoraphobia. He was completely dysfunctional. He’d been through a whole lot of medications.

“It’s not that they don’t work, but you can’t just throw pills at people. Depressions happen. Regardless of what underlies them, there’s always treatment. But medication doesn’t say anything about who you are or why you’re depressed. It’s just something that deals with brain chemistry, a tool to help you get off the floor.

“Shecky was typical of the actor-entertainer who grows up in a family where he had a distant, cruel father and a manipulative mother. His sense has been to take care of the world to gain its love. He’s been brilliantly successful, but he never gets what he wants: his mother to say, ‘You’re a good boy, Shecky.’ Even as his life grew more and more out of control, he took care of his mother, father and brothers. When the appreciation didn’t come, it only made him work harder and feel more enraged. He looked for acceptance in applause.”

Gershman has worked with entertainers for a good portion of his career and recognizes in the industry itself and in the people attracted to it a continuous potential for individual disaster:

“I’ve had Academy Award-winning actors sit in front of me terrified that they’d never work again. A lot of them go into show business for approval; if the whole world doesn’t love them, they feel like failures. When you become famous and wealthy, you have this complex network to deal with--managers, agents, studio executives. Most actors don’t have the tools to manage anything so complex. They don’t have particularly good skills for conducting normal lives. Much of the time, they feel theirs out of control.

“Freedom is when one’s existence isn’t dependent on other people’s opinions. If you have to filter your identity through an image, you’re leaving a large part of yourself in the dark,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the O. J. Simpson mansion, only a few blocks away.

Gershman treated Greene initially by prescribing Klonipin (“a slow-acting benzo that doesn’t create a high”) in gradually reduced doses; he then put Greene on Zoloft. He also began what he calls “the therapeutic alliance,” which at first consisted of having Greene make golf his first priority--at least over working.

“I think psychiatry got lost when it tried to fit patients into a theoretical framework,” Gershman said. “I don’t believe in creating a mystique, in infantilizing the patient by hiding your technique. The therapeutic alliance takes a lot of time and consists of listening and being credible. If you tell them what you’re doing, they get better faster.”

Greene has recently, and cautiously, begun a return to performing after 6 1/2 years. Starting slowly, he’s played Kutcher’s in the Catskills, the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Chicago.

“I found out if you can be honest with an audience, they’ll accept anything,” he says. “So many people are touched by these situations, or else they understand that emotional illness is as serious as cancer or alcoholism. It can’t be hidden. It has to be treated.” On Monday, he’ll play himself on TV’s “Northern Exposure,” and on Nov. 11 and 12 he plays live at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.

Gershman has great affection for Greene, and some concern as well: “Shecky’s one of the most just, kind and compassionate people I’ve ever met. I think his comedy genius is based on being sort of the common man. People understand he’s struggling to survive, like everyone else. Audiences trust him to tell them the truth; he can take them anywhere. Now he’s going back into the lion’s den. Will the same old forces push the same old buttons?”

No one can tell, including Greene himself, whether his return and its churning up of deep currents will set an old self-destructive cycle back in motion again. But odds are that the moment he takes the stage he’ll be met by a wave of residual gratitude and warmth for an entertainer who’s given a lot of pleasure for a lot of years.