The Horrible Death of Buddy Hackett & His Wife

The old vaudevillian lived alone in a shuttered theater, which was strange enough, but the little girl who ran away from the orphanage made it weirder.

She found him in the dark, sitting in the third row, facing an empty stage.

“Are you the ghost?” she whispered.

He turned. His face didn’t work right, one side pulled down like melting wax, and his voice came out a friendly slur.

“Lady, I’m not dead yet.”

She sat down next to him anyway.

Buddy Hackett spent decades making millions of people laugh, the kind of laugh that starts in the belly and doesn’t stop until it hurts.

But in his final years, something extremely heartbreaking was happening behind the curtain.

His body was failing him in ways he could have never predicted, slow and quiet, the kind of collapse that doesn’t make headlines because there is nothing funny about it.

And after devastating warnings from his doctors, warnings he chose to ignore because he had always trusted his own gut more than anyone else’s, the clock began counting down.

The woman who had loved him for nearly five decades stood by and watched, helpless, heartbroken, and completely unprepared for the tragedy that was unfolding.

She had married him when he was nobody, when he slept on basement floors in the Catskills and told jokes for free meals.

She had raised three children with him, built a home, survived the chaos of Hollywood, and outlasted every celebrity marriage of their generation.

And when the end finally came, it happened in a way nobody could have ever imagined.

Not with a punchline. Not with a curtain call.

But with silence.

And then, years later, with an $18 million question that nobody knew how to answer.

The making of a comedy icon started in Brooklyn, on August 31st, 1924, with a different name entirely.

Leonard Hacker came into the world with nothing but a loud mouth and a father who upholstered furniture while dreaming up inventions that never quite worked.

His mother sewed clothes for other people’s families, bent over a machine for twelve hours a day, and still came home to cook dinner for her own.

They were Jewish immigrants, the kind who didn’t expect their children to be famous.

They just expected them to survive.

Young Leonard learned that lesson young.

When he was a boy, his face stopped working properly.

Bell’s palsy, the doctors said. A nerve condition that paralyzes one side of the face.

For most children, this would have been a source of shame, a reason to hide.

For Leonard, it became the foundation of his entire identity.

The paralysis left him with an asymmetrical mouth that slanted to one side, a natural slur in his speech that made him sound like he was perpetually amused by his own words.

He could not have fixed it if he wanted to.

And eventually, he stopped wanting to.

He just learned to use what he had been given, the way every kid from Brooklyn learns to use whatever scraps life hands them.

There was another physical trait that shaped his childhood.

Leonard was severely overweight.

In a neighborhood where toughness mattered, where boys measured each other by their fists, his body made him a target.

The bullies came for him regularly, three or four at a time, circling him in the schoolyard like wolves.

But Leonard discovered early that he could disarm them with words.

He could make them laugh.

He could say something so unexpected, so perfectly timed, that the anger drained out of a confrontation before it turned violent.

“You gonna hit me?” he’d say, blinking his crooked face. “You wanna be the guy who punched the funny kid? Your mother’s gonna see that in the paper.”

The bullies hesitated.

Then they laughed.

And Leonard walked away without a scratch.

Comedy became his shield.

Then, it became his weapon.

And eventually, it became his profession.

He grew up in a Brooklyn that produced extraordinary talent in clusters.

His next-door neighbor was a boy named Sandy Koufax, who would grow up to become one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history.

The two neighborhood kids went in different directions, one toward the World Series, the other toward the stage.

But both learned the same lesson about pressure and performance.

When you are in front of a crowd, there is no room for fear.

If you show fear, they eat you alive.

Sandy learned that on the mound in the World Series.

Leonard learned it in a basement club in the Bronx, where the audience was drunk and the microphone barely worked.

Unfortunately, the Second World War interrupted everything.

Buddy spent three years in the United States Army, serving in an anti-aircraft battery in the Pacific.

He was not performing comedy during those years.

He was loading shells and watching the sky for Japanese planes, standing in the mud while the rain came down sideways.

But the discipline of military service gave him something he would need later.

The ability to work through exhaustion.

To show up every night no matter how he felt.

To treat comedy not as inspiration, but as labor.

When the war ended, he came home ready to work.

He started where all aspiring comedians started in those years, the Borscht Belt.

The Catskill Mountains resort circuit was a brutal proving ground.

The audiences were tired, the pay was terrible, and the conditions were cramped.

Hackett slept on basement floors.

He performed in rooms where the only compensation was a free meal, a plate of cold brisket and a stale roll.

He changed his name somewhere along the way, trading Leonard Hacker for something that sounded friendlier.

Buddy Hackett.

Like a guy you would want to have a drink with.

Like a guy who knew something you didn’t and was willing to share it for the price of a beer.

The breakthrough came in December 1954.

Buddy made his Broadway debut in a farce called Lunatics and Lovers, written by Sidney Kingsley.

The play ran for 336 performances, which meant Buddy performed the same material night after night for nearly a full year.

Three hundred and thirty-six times he walked onto that stage.

Three hundred and thirty-six times he made that audience laugh.

Critics took notice of his physical timing.

He did not just tell jokes.

He inhabited them, using his body, his asymmetrical face, and his slurred voice as instruments.

Broadway audiences had never seen anyone quite like him.

Hollywood came calling soon after.

Buddy landed roles in films that have aged into classics.

He played Marcellus Washburn in The Music Man in 1962, holding his own against Robert Preston.

He played Benjie Benjamin in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in 1963, a chaotic ensemble comedy that remains a landmark of its genre.

These roles made him famous.

But they did not make him rich in the way people assumed.

Buddy worked constantly because he had to.

The checks cleared, but the lifestyle was expensive, and Hollywood had a way of making sure nobody got too comfortable.

He also found a second career as a commercial pitchman.

In 1968, he succeeded Bert Lahr as the face of Lay’s potato chips.

The slogan was simple and unforgettable.

Nobody can eat just one.

Buddy delivered it with such conviction that the line entered the cultural vocabulary.

He filmed those commercials for three years, and for three years, American households saw his face every time they opened a bag of chips.

The checks from Lay’s were steady.

But they weren’t enough to stop worrying.

A later generation would know him best as a voice.

Disney cast Buddy as Scuttle the seagull in The Little Mermaid in 1989.

He was sixty-five years old, far past his commercial peak, but his voice had lost none of its character.

Children who had never seen his previous films recognized Scuttle immediately.

That giddy, slightly confused, utterly sincere voice.

Buddy had found a way to reach audiences across four decades without ever changing his style.

He was always himself, whether on Broadway, in Hollywood, or inside a cartoon seagull.

But behind the laughter, something else was happening.

Buddy Hackett was terrified.

Not of the audiences.

Not of the critics.

Of being forgotten.

He had seen too many comedians fade away, their names erased, their jokes stolen and repurposed by younger men who didn’t even know who had told them first.

He told his wife Sherry once, late at night, when the house was quiet.

“You know what scares me?”

Sherry looked up from her book. “What?”

“They’re gonna forget me. Ten years after I’m gone, nobody’s gonna know who I was.”

Sherry closed her book.

“Then make sure they don’t.”

Buddy laughed, that slurred, sideways laugh.

“Yeah. I’ll get right on that.”

But he didn’t get right on it.

He kept working instead.

By the late 1990s, he was still working, appearing regularly on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn in a segment called Tuesdays with Buddy.

He seemed ageless, tireless, and indestructible.

But the same body that had carried him through six decades of comedy was hiding a danger that no audience could see.

And the woman who loved him, the wife who stayed with him through all of it, would watch it all happen in a way that no one could have predicted.

Before Sherry Cohen, Buddy Hackett’s romantic life was barely worth mentioning.

He dated here and there, mostly women he met in the comedy clubs of New York, dancers and waitresses and the occasional starlet who thought funny men made good boyfriends.

But nothing ever took root.

The problem was not a lack of interest.

The problem was Buddy himself.

He carried deep insecurities about his appearance, the kind that never fully heals, no matter how many people laugh at your jokes.

He had spent his childhood being mocked for his weight and his face.

Success did not erase those memories.

It just gave him something to hide behind.

So he buried himself in his career and told himself that romance could wait.

Then he met Sherry.

She was a young Brooklyn-born dance instructor performing under the name Sherry DuBois.

He was working a summer gig in the Catskills, the same Borscht Belt circuit where he had slept on basement floors years earlier.

The setting was humble, a small resort with peeling paint and a stage that wobbled if you stomped too hard.

But the connection was immediate.

Buddy saw something in her that had nothing to do with the bright lights of show business.

They were both from Brooklyn.

They both understood the value of hard work.

And neither one was easily impressed.

The courtship was not smooth.

Buddy asked Sherry for a ride in his car, a casual invitation that she declined without hesitation.

She told him plainly that she did not know him well enough to get into a vehicle with him.

“You could be anyone,” she said.

“I’m Buddy Hackett.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

He laughed at that, really laughed, because she was telling the truth and he respected it.

When he tried a different approach and asked to see her in the city, she deflected again.

She explained that her schedule was nearly impossible.

She worked as a daytime telephone operator on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State Building, and at night she taught mambo dancing.

There was barely time to sleep, let alone date a struggling comedian.

But Buddy was persistent.

He finally secured a Sunday driving date during a heavy rainstorm.

There was nothing romantic about the weather, just gray skies and water running down the windshield and the wipers squeaking back and forth.

But the rain did not matter.

He just needed her to say yes once.

She did.

And that was the beginning of a partnership that would last forty-eight years.

The wedding took place on June 12th, 1955, in a private ceremony.

Buddy was thirty years old.

Sherry was younger, twenty-four, but she carried herself with a maturity that seemed far beyond her age.

She knew what she was signing up for.

A man who traveled constantly, who performed in front of rough crowds, who came home exhausted and sometimes demoralized.

Yet she did not flinch.

“I knew he was going to be a handful,” she said years later. “But I also knew he was worth it.”

Together they raised three children.

Their son, Sandy Hackett, followed his father into stand-up comedy and frequently opened for Buddy’s shows.

Two daughters, Lisa Jean and Ivy Julie, completed the family.

The Hackett household was not the chaotic circus that fans might have imagined.

By all accounts, it was surprisingly quiet.

Buddy left his stage persona at the door.

The loud, blue, raucous comedian who made audiences howl with laughter became something else entirely at home.

He was a protective father, a devoted husband, and a man who valued privacy above almost everything else.

“He didn’t want the kids to see that side of him,” Sherry remembered. “He said, ‘That guy on stage isn’t real. That guy is a job. When I come home, I want to be your husband, not a comedian.’”

Buddy spoke about Sherry often in interviews and on talk shows.

He was not a man given to sentimentality, but when he talked about his wife, his voice softened.

He credited her with keeping him sane.

He said that she was the only person who looked past his face to see the deeply serious man underneath.

Sherry had married him when he was still grinding through the Borscht Belt, years before Hollywood came calling.

She had seen him at his lowest and chosen him anyway.

Sherry, for her part, painted a picture of a man few fans ever glimpsed.

She described Buddy as incredibly quiet at home, highly sensitive to the moods of those around him, and fiercely protective of his family.

He shielded them from Hollywood gossip.

He kept his work life separate from his home life to a degree that was unusual for someone in his profession.

The man who told jokes about bodily functions and inappropriate situations did not want his children exposed to that world any more than necessary.

He drew a line between the stage and the living room, and he never crossed it.

The couple spent forty-eight years together in marriage, a remarkable achievement for any relationship, especially in the entertainment industry.

Buddy and Sherry Hackett outlasted nearly every celebrity marriage of their era.

They did it without scandals, without separations, and without the tabloid coverage that destroyed so many other unions.

They simply stayed together because they wanted to.

Because they had built something that worked.

But no amount of love could stop what was coming.

In the late 1980s, something shifted in Buddy’s body.

The same physique that had been his armor for so many years began to betray him.

The changes were subtle at first, easy to dismiss as normal aging.

He got winded walking up stairs.

He woke up with headaches that didn’t go away.

His feet started swelling, the shoes tight in the morning and impossible by dinner.

Sherry noticed before anyone else.

She was the one who finally convinced him to see a doctor.

“You’re not fine,” she told him. “Stop saying you’re fine.”

“I’m fine.”

“Buddy.”

“Okay. I’ll go.”

And what that doctor found would change everything about their remaining years together.

For decades, Buddy Hackett had relied on his body to make a living.

He threw it around stages.

He contorted his face into absurd shapes.

He used his physical presence as the engine of his comedy.

But in the early 1990s, the body that had served him so well for so long sent a message that he could not ignore.

The diagnosis was advanced, severe coronary heart disease.

His arteries were critically blocked, three of them, the big ones, the ones that mattered.

The cardiologists did not mince words.

They sat Buddy down in a small examination room, the walls beige and unremarkable, the air smelling of antiseptic.

They showed him the angiogram, the little black lines where blood should flow but didn’t.

“Mr. Hackett,” the lead cardiologist said, “you need heart bypass surgery, and you need it soon. Without intervention, your heart will continue to weaken until it can no longer do its job.”

Buddy stared at the images.

“How soon?”

“Within six months. Ideally sooner.”

The doctors laid out the risks of the surgery, the recovery time, the possibility of complications.

They also laid out the certainty of decline without it.

Buddy listened to all of it, his crooked face unreadable.

And then he made a shocking decision.

“I’m not doing it.”

Sherry, sitting beside him, put her hand on his arm.

“Buddy.”

“I said no.”

The cardiologists tried to persuade him.

Medication would only slow the progression, they said. It would not stop it.

The bypass surgery was routine, safe, thousands performed every year.

Buddy heard them.

He understood them.

But he did not change his mind.

He was not afraid of the operating table in the way that some people are.

His refusal came from a deeper place, one rooted in the same stubborn independence that had carried him from Brooklyn to Broadway.

He did not want to be operated on.

He did not want to have to spend weeks recovering in a hospital bed, tubes in his arms, nurses checking his vitals every four hours.

He wanted to manage the condition on his own terms, with medication and willpower and the same grit that had gotten him through the Borscht Belt.

The cardiologists warned him again.

“Mr. Hackett, medication will only slow the progression. It will not stop it.”

Buddy nodded.

“Then I’ll take my chances.”

For a few years, he managed.

He took the pills, a handful every morning, a handful every night.

He tried to watch what he ate, cutting back on the red meat, ordering fish in restaurants instead of steak.

He continued working because work was what he had always done when life got difficult.

But the body does not negotiate.

In 1996, the illusion of control shattered on a stage in front of a live audience.

Buddy was in the middle of a performance at a casino in Las Vegas, the room full of tourists who had paid good money to see a legend.

He was telling the one about the duck that walks into a bar, the old one, the reliable one, the one that had never failed him.

And then something went wrong.

He felt an acute wave of dizziness so intense that the room seemed to spin, the lights blurring, the faces in the audience melting together.

His breath would not come.

His chest tightened, a crushing weight like someone had dropped a sandbag on his sternum.

For a man who had spent decades commanding stages, who had never forgotten a line or lost an audience, the feeling of losing control mid-performance was more terrifying than the physical symptoms themselves.

He stopped the show.

He looked out at the crowd, his crooked face pale under the lights.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t.”

He walked off stage.

He did not return.

That night marked the end of his live touring career.

Buddy Hackett, who had made millions of people laugh from coast to coast, never performed another full show.

The man who fought his way to Hollywood had been stopped not by a rival or a changing industry, but by his own failing heart.

Buddy had his own theory about what caused that collapse.

He told friends and family that he believed the vertigo and shortness of breath were not primarily heart-related.

He had undergone major gum surgery just days before that performance, a brutal procedure that left his mouth swollen and sore.

He insisted that complications from the dental work had triggered the episode.

“It was my gums,” he said. “Not my heart.”

But the cardiologists disagreed.

They pointed to the blocked arteries, the three critical vessels that had been narrowing for years.

They pointed to his refusal to undergo bypass surgery.

The real culprits were not in his mouth.

They were in his chest.

However, Buddy had always trusted his own instincts more than doctors’ opinions, and he held on to his dental theory until the end.

There was another condition lurking beneath the surface, one that Buddy did not talk about publicly.

He had been diagnosed with severe progressive Type 2 diabetes years earlier, the same year he turned down the bypass surgery.

The disease had been advancing for years, quietly damaging his circulatory system while he focused on his heart.

Diabetes and heart disease are a devastating combination.

Each one makes the other worse.

The diabetes compromised his blood flow, which put additional strain on his already weakened heart.

The heart disease raised his blood pressure, which damaged his kidneys, which made the diabetes harder to control.

His body was fighting a war on two fronts, and he was outnumbered.

The physical changes became impossible to hide.

His weight fluctuated wildly, swinging up and down as his medications and his appetite played tug-of-war with his metabolism.

His breathing grew worse.

Simple tasks that had once required no thought at all became ordeals.

Walking across a room left him winded.

Climbing stairs was out of the question.

The man who had used his body as a comedic instrument, who had thrown himself across stages with reckless physical abandon, now struggled to move through his own house.

He retreated from the public eye.

The invitations stopped coming after a while, the phone ringing less and less, the mail piling up unopened.

But even when the invitations came, Buddy declined them.

He developed intense anxieties about his declining physical capabilities.

He did not want people to see him the way he had become.

He wanted to be remembered as the man on stage, the one who made them double over with laughter, not the man in the wheelchair, not the man who couldn’t catch his breath.

So he stayed home.

He saw a few people, the ones who had known him longest, the ones who wouldn’t flinch at the sight of him.

He talked to Sherry.

He talked to his children.

And he talked to the animals.

There was one loss that hurt more than most people understood.

Buddy had been an avid firearm collector for decades.

He loved the craftsmanship, the history, the way a well-made pistol felt in his hand.

He loved the ritual of cleaning and maintaining his collection, sitting at his workbench for hours, oiling the metal, checking the actions.

But as his frailty increased and his health became erratic, he made a difficult decision.

Buddy sold off his entire private weapon collection.

Close friends noted that the sale took a heavy emotional toll.

It was not about the guns themselves, not really.

It was about what they represented.

Independence.

Competence.

The ability to take care of himself.

Letting them go felt like admitting that the strong man he had once been was never coming back.

Sherry watched him pack them up, one by one, wrapping each weapon in cloth and placing it in a foam-lined case.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“Yes I do.”

“Why?”

He looked at her, his crooked face tired.

“Because I can’t take care of them anymore. And if I can’t take care of them, I shouldn’t have them.”

By the late 1990s, Buddy Hackett was a shadow of the performer who had packed theaters and made generations laugh.

The glory days were a distant memory, black-and-white photographs in a drawer, faded clippings in a scrapbook.

What remained was a quiet, painful decline that Sherry watched unfold day by day.

She had stood by him for more than four decades.

She was not going to leave now.

But even she could not prepare for what happened next.

The final days of Buddy Hackett’s life would bring a tragedy that no one saw coming.

And the circumstances of his death would raise questions that have never been fully answered.

In their final years together, Buddy Hackett and Sherry walked away from the entertainment industry entirely.

They retreated to their beachside home in Malibu, a quiet house on Pacific Coast Highway where the only sounds were the waves and the wind and the distant cry of seagulls.

Instead of chasing fame, the Hacketts channeled their remaining energy into something that had nothing to do with show business.

They founded the Singita Animal Sanctuary in California’s San Fernando Valley, a rescue operation dedicated to taking in unwanted dogs and cats.

The sanctuary became their shared mission.

Buddy, who had spent his life making people laugh, now spent his days comforting animals that had known only neglect.

He fed them, cleaned their enclosures, sat with them in quiet companionship.

He talked to them the way he used to talk to audiences, soft and slurred and full of affection.

“You’re a good boy,” he’d tell a trembling rescue dog. “Someone didn’t treat you right, but that’s over now. You’re with me.”

The work was hard and thankless, no cameras, no applause, no checks from Hollywood.

But he loved every minute of it.

After quitting commercial stages in 1996, Buddy made only one exception to his retirement from live performance.

He agreed to perform stand-up at the annual fundraisers for Singita.

These were not glamorous shows.

There were no cameras, no critics, no industry insiders in expensive suits.

Just Buddy on a small stage in front of people who had donated money to save animals, a hundred and fifty people in a rented hall, folding chairs and a cash bar.

He gave those performances everything he had left.

Not for the applause.

Not for the reviews.

For the cause.

When the fundraisers ended, he went back to Malibu and did not perform again.

The end came quickly.

Roughly one week before his death, Buddy suffered a severe and debilitating stroke.

It happened in the morning, Sherry making coffee in the kitchen, Buddy still in bed.

She heard a sound, a kind of groan, and then silence.

She ran.

He was on the floor, his left side limp, his mouth slack, his eyes open but not seeing.

“Buddy. Buddy, can you hear me?”

He tried to speak. The words came out garbled.

She called 911, her hands shaking, the operator asking questions she could barely answer.

The paramedics arrived in eleven minutes.

By the time they got him to the hospital, the stroke had already done its damage.

The stroke broke whatever physical strength he had managed to preserve.

It robbed him of his mobility, his energy, and finally his will to keep fighting.

He could not walk.

He could barely lift his right arm.

Eating required help.

Using the bathroom required help.

Everything required help.

Sherry stayed by his side, just as she had done for forty-eight years.

She slept in a chair next to his hospital bed.

She held his hand when he cried.

She told him it was going to be okay, even though they both knew it wasn’t.

On the last weekend of June 2003, Buddy Hackett was back at his beach house in Malibu.

The hospital had released him because there was nothing more they could do, just palliative care, just comfort.

The details of his final hours are sparse, partly because the family requested privacy, and partly because there was no public drama to report.

He died sometime late Sunday night on June 29th, or early Monday morning on June 30th.

Family members found him at the house, in his bed, the Pacific Ocean visible through the window.

There was no ambulance race to the hospital.

No last-minute heroics.

No punchline.

He was simply gone.

The formal medical evaluation ruled the cause of death as severe complications stemming directly from diabetes and chronic heart disease.

The same conditions that had been diagnosed years earlier, in that small examination room with the beige walls and the antiseptic smell.

The same conditions he had refused to treat with surgery.

The cardiologists had warned him that medication would only slow the progression, not stop it.

They had been correct.

In accordance with his explicit final wishes, Buddy Hackett’s body was cremated.

He did not want a public burial.

He did not want a grave that fans could visit, no Hollywood Forever Cemetery plot with his name carved in marble.

He wanted to be reduced to ashes and kept by his family, away from the cameras and the crowds.

That is exactly what happened.

His remains stayed in the care of the people who had loved him most.

The man who had made America laugh for half a century died quietly in a beach house, surrounded by no one but his family.

But the story did not end with the cremation.

For Sherry, the real devastation began after the ashes were collected, after the death certificates were filed, after the well-wishers went home.

She had spent nearly five decades building a life around Buddy.

She had managed his career, raised his children, nursed him through his final illnesses.

Now she had to figure out who she was without him.

The aftermath of his death brought challenges that no one had prepared her for.

And the way she navigated those challenges would define the rest of her life.

The night Buddy passed, Sherry was overwhelmed in a way that words cannot fully capture.

Close Hollywood friends, including comedians Jay Mohr and Jeff Ross, rushed to the Malibu beach house to sit with her through the darkness.

They did not tell jokes.

They did not try to cheer her up.

They simply stayed present, making sure she did not collapse under the weight of the shock.

“I don’t know what to do,” she kept saying. “I don’t know what to do.”

Jay Mohr put his hand on her shoulder.

“You don’t have to do anything tonight. Just breathe.”

Those first hours were a blur of phone calls, paperwork, and the strange administrative duties that death imposes on the living.

The funeral home.

The cremation authorization.

The Social Security notification.

But when the friends finally left and the house went quiet, Sherry was alone with the absence of a man who had been by her side for forty-eight years.

She described the loss as an immediate vacuum.

Losing Buddy, she said, felt like losing half of her own physical body.

The comparison was not poetic exaggeration.

It was the literal truth of how she experienced the grief.

For months after his death, she withdrew from public life entirely.

She did not attend parties.

She did not give interviews.

She did not return phone calls.

She did not want to be seen by the people who had watched her and Buddy together for so many years.

The couple had been a unit for nearly five decades.

Being half of that unit was unbearable.

Eventually, she found a way to keep moving.

She threw her energy into the Singita Animal Sanctuary, the rescue operation she and Buddy had founded together.

The animals needed her.

The shelter needed management.

But running the nonprofit without Buddy’s celebrity fundraising power proved far more difficult than she had anticipated.

Buddy had been the draw, the name that opened wallets and attracted donors.

Without him, the donations slowed from a stream to a trickle.

The work became more physically and emotionally draining.

Sherry kept the sanctuary going as long as she could, six more years, feeding animals, cleaning cages, writing grant proposals that went unanswered.

But the burden was heavier than anyone outside the situation understood.

In 2009, she finally closed Singita.

She did it quietly, without announcement, without fanfare.

She simply stopped.

Internet rumors have circulated for years claiming that Sherry was left with nothing, that Buddy died broke, that she spent her final years in poverty, eating cat food in a rundown apartment.

Those rumors are false.

Buddy Hackett left a substantial estate, but the wealth was not sitting in a bank account waiting to be spent.

It was tied up in illiquid real estate, properties that held significant value but could not be easily converted into cash without selling them.

Sherry was not poor.

She was asset-rich and liquid-poor, a common situation for widows whose husbands invested in property rather than stocks or savings accounts.

Her primary source of security was the family home, a landmark property that Buddy had owned since 1952.

The house sat on a prime one-acre corner lot in Beverly Hills, directly across from the Los Angeles Country Club.

It measured 7,800 square feet, a substantial home by any standard, with six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a swimming pool, and a tennis court that hadn’t been resurfaced since the Carter administration.

But its real value was in the land.

In the decades since Buddy bought it, the neighborhood had become one of the most desirable in Los Angeles, a place where new mansions sold for thirty or forty million dollars.

The property was worth millions.

But selling it meant letting go of the place where she had raised her children.

Where she had celebrated holidays.

Where she had watched Buddy decline, day by day, year by year.

Where he had died.

She was not ready to do that for a very long time.

Decades after Buddy’s passing, Sherry finally made the decision.

In October 2020, she listed the Beverly Hills home for $18 million.

The listing described it as a remodel opportunity or a potential lot for a new mansion.

The house itself was old and needed work, the kitchen stuck in 1972, the bathrooms with their pink tiles and brass fixtures.

But the land was priceless.

Sherry was not selling out of desperation.

She was selling because the time had come to let go.

The children were grown.

The memories were secure.

She did not need to hold on to the walls anymore.

The years of widowhood brought other stresses beyond the management of property and animals.

Her son, Sandy, became locked in a bitter, multi-year legal battle in Las Vegas over the rights to his Rat Pack musical tribute show.

The lawsuit dragged on for four years, consuming time, money, and emotional energy.

Family dynamics that had been stable under Buddy’s watchful presence began to strain.

Sandy accused business partners of fraud.

The business partners countersued.

Depositions were taken. Lawyers were hired. Legal fees mounted.

Sherry found herself caught in the middle, trying to support her son while also maintaining her own peace.

The legal war was not her doing, but she felt its effects deeply.

“I just want everyone to get along,” she told a friend. “Is that too much to ask?”

Despite all of these challenges, Sherry Cohen lived for many years following Buddy’s passing.

She preserved Buddy’s memory with dignity, speaking about him honestly in the rare interviews she granted, pushing back against the myths that grew up around his death and her life afterward.

She did not remarry.

She did not take a lover.

She lived in the Beverly Hills house, alone with the ghosts, until she finally decided to sell.

In 2022, a buyer emerged.

The $18 million asking price was negotiated down, as it always is, but Sherry walked away with enough to live comfortably for the rest of her days.

She moved into a smaller place, a condo in Santa Monica, two bedrooms and a view of the ocean.

She told friends it was liberating.

“I don’t have to worry about the pool anymore,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about the roof. I just have to worry about me.”

On the rare occasions when she spoke publicly about Buddy, her voice still softened.

Forty-eight years of marriage, and then seventeen years of widowhood.

The numbers added up to a lifetime.

“He was impossible,” she said once, smiling. “Absolutely impossible. But he was my impossible.”

She outlived him by nearly two decades.

She saw her children grow older.

She saw her grandchildren born.

She saw the world change in ways Buddy never could have imagined, smartphones and social media and a pandemic that shut down the very nightclubs where he had made his name.

Through it all, she carried him with her.

Not his ashes, which remained in a place she never disclosed.

But his voice.

His laugh.

His crooked face, looking at her across a dinner table, saying something so stupid and so funny that she couldn’t help but laugh.

“You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” he used to tell her.

“I already miss you,” she’d say back. “And you’re sitting right there.”

He’d laugh at that, that slurred, sideways laugh.

“Good answer.”

“I learned from the best.”

And he’d raise his glass.

“To us.”

“To us.”

The old vaudevillian lived alone in a shuttered theater, which was strange enough, but the little girl who ran away from the orphanage made it weirder.

She found him in the dark, sitting in the third row, facing an empty stage.

“Are you the ghost?” she whispered.

He turned. His face didn’t work right, one side pulled down like melting wax, and his voice came out a friendly slur.

“Lady, I’m not dead yet.”

She sat down next to him anyway.

And for a little while, they just sat there together in the dark, the old man and the little girl, two broken things that had found each other.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of wrapped candy, a butterscotch, the kind his mother used to give him when he was small.

He held it out to her.

“Take it,” he said. “It’s the only thing I’ve got left that’s any good.”

She took it.

She unwrapped it.

She put it in her mouth.

And Buddy Hackett, the funniest man in America, watched her taste it and smiled.

Not the stage smile.

The real one.

The one that belonged only to him.