Brief Encounters Page 14

  It may have been his last joke.

  Despite everything, despite his reported crankiness and even cruelties in his unhappy times with his children and wives, I hope some kind of peace is being enjoyed by the man who merits our eternal gratitude for having lived in our time; who imagined the Stamp Act of 1765 as two fellows who came onstage, stamped their feet, and finished with a song; or who could say to an operator, as I heard him do, “Extension 4-8-2, eh? 4-8-2. Sounds like a cannibal story.”

  Such a man deserves flights of angels to sing him to his rest. Let’s hope, for his sake, they sang something from The Mikado.

  APRIL 20, 2012

  Pyramid Power, Over Me

  Dick Clark’s death reminded me of how much a part he was of some of the most fun I ever had in my life. I mean being on The $25,000 Pyramid.

  Password was fun, too, and being a panelist on the old What’s My Line? was a superthrill. But the laughs gotten from my friendly sparring with Dick Clark were great, and the games themselves were a day at the gym for your brain. Five shows in a row taped with only economics-dictated short breaks between them left you all but cortex-dead and, when the show was in Los Angeles, barely qualified to drive yourself home.

  I liked Dick Clark and we had a pleasant, kidding on-air relationship that played well, and it was fun winning money for the civilian contestants. Although I had never been a fan of American Bandstand, I had admired his defiance on that show of the “too many black ones” crowd who threatened his sponsors. He and I had an odd thing in common: people on the street frequently said to him, “Hey, aren’t you Dick—um—Cavett?” And I got the reverse. (Once it was, “Don’t try denyin’ you’re Dick Clark.” I didn’t.) And whenever we saw each other, we’d compare how many times this had happened to each of us since the last time we’d met.

  The show was still in New York the first time I did it. My ABC show had ended, and eerily, the Pyramid set was in my old studio in place of mine.

  In those days Pyramid was on only once a week, in the evening, and they taped two at once. I’d never seen the show and somewhat foolishly accepted the offer. Not the move of a wise person, but it turned out okay.

  Recklessly, I learned the game on the job, so to speak. Dumb as this was, it was also good in a way. I had nothing to lose, didn’t even care whether I won or lost, and this relaxed me to such a degree that in the two tapings, I—and my partners, of course—beat the pyramid all four times, costing the company a bundle.

  Somehow I was invited back, and having learned how chancy and nerve-racking the whole thing actually was, I tensed some and, caring now, I with my perfect record began to lose sometimes, like everybody else. What can we learn from this?

  Here is a sample of the self-inflicted but pleasant torture of pyramiding.

  The host’s and my on-camera “feuding” was lighthearted, and Clark’s perfect combination of a quick mind, genial on-camera nature, and masterful ability to hit just the right note in banter made him perfect for his job.

  A sample of our allegedly humorous joshing:

  He’d say, “Our next contestant comes all the way from Florida and—yes, what is it, Dick?”

  Me: “If she hadn’t come ‘all the way,’ she wouldn’t be here, would she?”

  He would deftly and expertly express mild exasperation and move briskly on.

  A very few experiences on the show were less than fun.

  Memory just coughed this up. A woman I was teamed with got eliminated in the first round when I, seeing the easy clue “aspirin” and with just seconds left, apparently went nuts and said “acetylsalicylic acid.” Unforgivable. Was I showing off? Why not just say, in succession, “pill” and then “headache.” Anyone breathing would have replied “aspirin.” As she was led from the set, she turned for what was usually the inevitable moment of, Oh, well, it was nice meeting you, Mr. Cavett.

  Her version: “Thanks a lot! I needed the money.”

  I still ache from this. I owe her a check. I wish I could find her.

  A job on that show that I would not have wanted at (almost) any price was the one held by the poor fellow who, watching from the control booth, had to make—under inhuman pressure—the instant on-air decisions about what answers and clues to accept or reject. (Was “calm” acceptable for “relaxed”? “Grasp” for “grab”? Etc.) All the while knowing that his snap decisions might please or infuriate his employer, and delight or break the heart of the civilian contestant. A job, I should think, that would make air traffic controlling look simple.

  Yet he was a cordial fellow, pleasant of appearance and quite thin, probably from difficulty with keeping solid food down. I hope that in retirement he has found some degree of well-deserved tranquillity, perhaps in a rest home in a pleasant setting by the sea. And without ever, ever again having to decide in a flash if “amble” and “stroll” are the same thing.

  One of Dick’s and my running humor gambits was my joking questioning of some of those decisions. It was harmless, quick, and fun, and caused no trouble. And nobody got hurt. Until one day.

  First, a kind of secret was revealed in confidence to me by a staff member I’d become friendly with. I assume the statute of limitations is not a factor here, but I shall not identify him further.

  Early on, after doing the show a few times, I noticed that the last subject as you climbed—the top square of the pyramid—was harder to convey than the rest. Considerably harder. It was more abstract, or something. Where the bottom rows might have been easy stuff like CHRISTMAS THINGS or BURT REYNOLDS MOVIES, a top square, just as things were going swimmingly, could suddenly bring your brain to a halt. It was like going from, say, U.S. PRESIDENTS to THINGS THAT CHANGE. Or THINGS THAT HAVE ENDS. What would you say to those, instantly and unambiguously, with time running out? (Once I got THINGS THAT PENETRATE. I’d give a lot to know if I said the obvious one.) The staff member confided to me, in a lowered voice, “Around the office, we call the clue in the top box ‘the money-saving clue.’”

  It’s a triumphant memory, though one not without pain. A contestant and I—and I’d love to find her—were doing fine. We’d won the first round at the desk and thus were promoted to the big pyramid, where the big money lay.

  We got through the two lower rows of subjects without much trouble, as I recall, and had plenty of time for the “M-n-y S-v-ng Clue.”

  It turned around and the mind reeled.

  THINGS YOU BIND.

  “The nation’s wounds” didn’t occur until years later. Nothing occurred at all.

  I’d recently held a fishing pole and noticed the lacquered “binding” on the handle, so I said “fishing pole handles.” And was immediately sorry.

  “Things you hold,” ventured the contestant.

  “Uhh, books,” I tried.

  “Things you read. Things with paper. Rectangular things.”

  Not surprisingly, my next clue, “magazines,” didn’t convey the bound sets in my mind.

  I tried another: “A sprained ankle.”

  “Things that hurt, painful things.”

  Time would be up in three seconds at most. I don’t actually remember thinking—in any sense of the word “thinking”—this, but my mouth, along with some unconscious recess of the brain, blurted out, “Chinese women’s feet.”

  “Things you bind?” (Pandemonium.)

  Moments like that were glorious. The cheering, the jumping up and down. The jubilant, celebratory, spontaneous joy. The intimate, automatic close-body embrace with the contestant, of either sex, bordered on the erotic. One of life’s great moments; or at least so it seemed. Maybe that night, trying to get to sleep, you didn’t torture yourself by wishing that, in a blown game that day, you hadn’t said “handcuffs” instead of “cuff links.”

  But, in its own category, there occurred the Fateful Day.

  A female contestant and I were climbing smoothly toward the pinnacle and the big bread. And then it happened.

  The deadly top box turned around, revea
ling: THINGS THAT HAVE PITS.

  Me: Coal mines.

  Contestant: Things that are dark. Deep things.

  Me: Cherries … uh, plums, plums and peaches.

  Contestant: Fruits. Things that are round. Things that are sweet. Things with juice.

  Me (feebly): Peaches, cherries.

  Contestant: Juicy things. Things on trees.

  I thought of, and rejected, “the human arm,” and suspected that “tooth-breaking fruits” might have too many words. Though probably, sadly, not.

  Although I doubt that the phrase “think outside the box” had been born, it’s what I tried, in a panic. The gleaming “$25,000” sign glared at me: the amount that the woman was clearly not going to win in the remaining few seconds. Then, from where I know not, It Hit.

  Me: Poe’s pendulum.

  Contestant: Things that have pits! (Crowd explodes.)

  Joy all around. Then tragedy. Dick Clark, looking pained and reluctant, announced that his earphones had just conveyed the news from the booth that the upright judge had rejected my clue. Hissing and booing filled the theater.

  I blew. “What earthly reason could anyone with half a brain—and it would take half a brain—come up with for rejecting that clue?”

  (Audience cheers.)

  Clark (listening to earphones and a little sheepish): “They say that Poe’s pendulum doesn’t have a pit.”

  Me: “What? Every schoolkid knows it’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’ It’s not ‘The Pit and the Cabbage Leaf’ or ‘The Pit and the Subway Token.’ It’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’ Did you ever see Poe’s pendulum without its pit? What kind of reasoning? You get an intelligent audience here. Why don’t we let them decide this one? Is ‘Poe’s pendulum’ fair?”

  (Massive roaring and approval out front.)

  I like to think I was angry on the contestant’s behalf and not about the rejection of my clue.

  I don’t remember at what point they had to stop the tape. Since the shows were timed precisely to the second to avoid editing costs, which I had now incurred for them, plus overtime pay for crew, etc., for the one-after-the-other, five-shows-a-day schedule—you went half brain-dead somewhere in the fourth one—they weren’t happy. I was marginally less than persona grata.

  Alas, they stuck with their wrongheaded decision. And saved money. It still gets to me as I type this. I wonder if I thought of paying the woman myself?

  I’d love to see that show. I missed it on air, and I can’t imagine how much of it, with challenging editing, they managed to air to make it presentable. But there’s more.

  About a year passed, and I was back on Pyramid again. In the parking lot, one of the show’s staff, looking cautiously both left and right, said, “We were wrong about ‘Poe’s pendulum.’”

  I wondered, did they contact the contestant? His chuckle answered that question. If she’s reading this now, she has, at least, the dubious reward of knowing she won.

  In spirit.

  I still wish the show would come back.

  MAY 11, 2012

  You Gave Away Your Babies?

  “Didn’t you just hate giving your jokes away and seeing someone else get the laughs?”

  It’s a common question to comedy writers. I still get it. And the answer is no. At least I didn’t, and my colleagues didn’t, and I could never figure out why people assumed gag writers for famous comedians felt like Cinderellas.

  Or that they lurked enviously in the dark shadows of the wings—as their boss got laughs—filled with envy and dreams of usurping the crown.

  Statistically, I’d say comedy writers are perhaps the sanest category of show people. And why not? They make big money, and although it’s not an easy trade—particularly when you’re at your galley oar five days a week—it’s easier on the nerves and the psyche than living with the brain-squeezing pressure and cares of being the Star.

  You don’t have to pay a press agent, or if you choose, not even an agent. (My great friend, the late sitcom writer David Lloyd, saw no virtue in paying someone for years—10 percent of your earnings—for having made perhaps one phone call. David composed his own contract. Its short opening paragraph: Mr. Lloyd will not, at any time, be either asked or required to be associated in any manner, shape, or form with “Laverne and Shirley.”

  Other advantages of writer versus star: you can dress sloppy, work mostly at home, not obsess over your aging face, hair, and body, not get sued or bugged by camera wielders and tabloids and cranks who claim you stole their ideas, and not have your sex life and divorce displayed publicly in a variety of decorator colors. And you never have to risk flopping onto your butt, or face—or on bad nights, both—in front of an audience. That list of advantages could go on and on. And, surprising as it may seem, I never knew a staff comedy writer who yearned to be the Star.

  As one writer put it, “Jack, Johnny, Jerry, Milton, they’re nervous wrecks from morn till dusk, wondering how long they’ll last. The only fun they have in life is the minutes they’re actually out there doing the show. [Painfully true of Johnny, I’m afraid.] I go home without a care and enjoy my house, my family, my lawn, and my dog. And my lack of even a single ulcer.”

  He might have added that he’s not plagued, while at the top, with disbelief at how high he’s climbed and nagging fears about just how long that precarious status and all that fairy gold will last.

  People have assumed I was the exception. “Every time Jack or Johnny or Groucho or Jerry Lewis got a laugh with your line you died a little, right?”

  The truth is I felt elated, fulfilled, successful, and thrilled that a huge star had just said what I wrote. I never dreamed of being the host of a show. My highest ambition in that regard was to maybe, someday, somehow, be a guest on a talk show. Even just once. (Talking about what? I hadn’t worked that out.)

  Years later, blessed and saddled with my own show and the pressures, pleasures, and pains thereof, I admit I would now and then recall a good line I’d written for others and wistfully admit that it would have been fun to get that particular booming laugh myself.

  Example: The buxom beauty Jayne Mansfield was at the peak of her movie fame, and my boss Jack Paar was beside himself with the thrill of her appearance. On the day, he lined up the writing staff in his office and said her introduction had to be “extra special.” The five of us went back to our Remingtons and tapped out flowery compositions attesting to Miss Mansfield’s looks, talents, and knockout physique and presented our offerings to the boss.

  Jack wadded them up.

  In my mind’s ear I can still hear our combined product hitting the dread wastebasket at Jack’s feet. And the assertion that we weren’t trying and hadn’t given him but scraps of material he could use in weeks. That was Jack.

  Irked, I suggested in the hall that we all go get our carbons of the good stuff of ours he’d used in those “weeks,” but wiser, older heads prevailed.

  We took another shot at our assignment of producing an introduction worthy of Miss Mansfield and her outstanding (sorry) attributes. And failed again.

  Two of the older veteran writers, insulted, were on the verge of just going home. As the nonveteran kid on the staff, I was afraid that Jack’s snit bore just the hint of a mass firing.

  So, not feeling the same job security Jack’s longtime writers enjoyed, I tried once more. Fired up by the mission of perhaps saving our collective arses, I typed briefly and quickly, ran down and dropped it on Jack’s desk and hurried away. He liked it. It’s only a little immodest to haul out the cliché, but it did all but stop the show.

  Paar: “Ladies and gentlemen, what can I say about my next guest, except—Here they are, Jayne Mansfield.”

  The line enjoyed a measure of fame, and once or twice it was accorded the honor of having its authorship claimed by others.

  There were other such instances. If I had been the sort who suffered over giving his babies away, it might have been over a product of my brain that was in a category I don’t know
the proper name for—“overweight spoonerized jeux de mots,” perhaps.

  For instance:

  The Tonight Show in the sixties. The front page of that day’s New York Times bore a large photo of crowds at the Met viewing Rembrandt’s famous painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. (“Bust” seems to be the theme here.) It had sold for some fantastic seven-figure sum, and people were well aware of it from the massive publicity. Jack was off that night, and Hugh Downs was subbing. Hugh, an educated, literate man with a fondness for humor and wordplay, seemed the right person to either delight with—or fob off on—the odd, misshapen creature my strange brain had given birth to. I felt Jack probably would not have chosen it. Hugh did.

  As Hugh presented it:

  I often wonder who thinks up those sometimes amusing captions under news pictures in the paper. Just for fun, pretend your job is to come up with a caption for a certain photo that’s going to appear in tomorrow’s paper.

  It shows the world-famous billionaire Onassis out in Hollywood, standing in front of a house he’s thinking about buying; a house that once belonged to a famous silent screen star named Keaton. I wonder if the right caption might be:

  “Aristotle Contemplating the Home of Buster.”

  Whenever I’ve seen Hugh in years since, he’ll recall it and laugh. This oddball gag went ’round the world. I’m told there were attempts to translate it into other languages, which is hilarious.

  Imagine the heads scratched in France, Germany, or Japan, trying to figure out in Cherbourg what’s funny about “la maison de Buster”; in Bremerhaven, “das Haus Busters”; or, in Yokohama, “Basutaru-san no homu.”

  Learn English, folks!

  JUNE 8, 2012

  Vamping with Nora

  So frequently the wrong people die.

  While traveling in a remote part of western Nebraska—away from the news media except for little local papers—I saw a friend’s e-mail suddenly change from its harmless subject to the appended line, “Sad about Nora Ephron.”

  One of those moments when the mind does its inadequate best to fend off the truth. “What’s sad about Nora? Surely not—”