Brief Encounters Page 15

  We sat, facing each other, dismay bordering on panic. The setting: The Dick Cavett Show, somewhere in the early seventies. Nora and I are talking. My producer, sheet-white, had just delivered the news during a commercial that my next guest, a famously eccentric genius actor with a legendary thirst, had, in a gesture of professional shabbiness, gotten “tired” of waiting backstage and had left. (His initials are Nicol Williamson.)

  Nora and I, having used up all our good stuff and at the point where I was supposed to say “My next guest…,” now faced what felt like a Sahara-wide half hour of remaining airtime to fill. We set forth on our trek.

  It may sound improbable that two such, ahem, engrossing people couldn’t fill the time as if tumbling from a log. At this distance, it seems crazy to me, too. But it’s a peculiarity of such a show that it somehow doesn’t work that way. We had, in the elegant phrase, shot our wad. I wish I could make that convincingly clear. It’s a little like asking a singer or dancer, wiping their brow after having successfully done the expected performance they were geared for, to do two or three more right now just like it. The mind has moved on. It’s weird and shows again how just “sitting and talking” on TV is not remotely like doing the same thing in real life.

  After what seemed like an hour of gasping for air, lurches and restarts and awful pauses, we had killed only ten minutes. Only twenty to go.

  Each time I looked at the studio clock it seemed to show the same time it had before. Had the hands been welded in place? In a state of stunned disbelief we somehow dragged ourselves, and what felt like at least two tacklers—and any remaining viewers—to the goal line. As the closing theme song mercifully sneaked in and the eon-length show faded from the screen, we, at least figuratively and maybe in fact, fell into each other’s arms like two survivors pulled from a mine.

  And agreed to meet the next day to plot the slow death by poison of Nicol Williamson.

  Years later, Nora pointed out that at all our subsequent encounters, before cordial greetings, each gave a little involuntary shudder upon seeing the other. Like friends who’d survived a long-ago car crash together.

  All that aside, I did one good thing for Nora and her arsenal of talents. I gave her a play to write.

  It had to do with the notorious incident on my PBS show when I had lightheartedly asked Mary McCarthy, who’d talked about underpraised writers, to name some overrated writers.

  That’s when she delivered her famous remark about Lillian Hellman that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” It flowered into a notorious lawsuit about which much has been written. Including a Broadway play Nora managed to construct from the wreckage.

  In the world of letters it was generally held that by suing, Hellman had disgraced herself and betrayed her own principles about free speech and criticism. Nora saw Hellman’s actions as “a kind of dance of death.” An effort to, in fact, shorten McCarthy’s life; which, in my opinion, the anguish and costs of Hellman’s monumental lawsuit undoubtedly did. (It amused Nora that the late Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and my hard-drinking friend Jean Stafford always referred to Lillian as “Old Scaly Bird.”)

  But that same Nora found the appallingly spiteful Hellman to be a vastly entertaining friend who made her laugh. She called her, in a chat we did for the now defunct magazine Show People, “too much fun to hate.”

  In that same staged restaurant “conversation,” Nora told me she was startled to read in her morning paper just what in fact had happened the night before on the Cavett program.

  “One of the rare nights when you missed my show, Nora?” I asked.

  “One of the rare nights when I missed your show,” came the reply, with a wry line reading that Eve Arden might have envied.

  Intrigued and inspired, Nora turned all this unwieldy and psychologically complex matter into an entertaining play, Imaginary Friends. The long-standing hatred between these two competitive women who became famous at the same time (1929) had all the seeds of drama. Nora stated at our magazine interview lunch what could hardly be called a trivial factor: “They had a lot to fight about. One was beautiful and one was not.”

  I told Nora, in a merry jest, that I had tried out for the part of “Dick Cavett” in her play but had been turned down.

  “We wanted someone younger.” (Laughter all around.)

  I loved making Nora laugh out loud. We talked about Hellman’s Julia, a tale apparently bogus from tip to toe. In it, Lillian claimed to have risked her life during a dangerous period in Germany by smuggling a vast number of German marks—hidden in her hat—to Julia.

  I said that owing to the value of the mark at that particular time in Deutschland, to have smuggled, chapeau-wise, the amount Lillian claimed, her hat would have had to be the size of a Volkswagen. Nora’s laugh was my reward.

  For Nora at her deadliest best, I recall a review she wrote in The New York Times in 1972 of three books about and by gossip columnists. One of the books was the columnist Sheilah Graham’s memoir about her sex life. Its title—and could you have guessed?—was A State of Heat. Nora wrote, “I’m afraid I may have made ‘A State of Heat’ sound like one of those ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ things. I don’t mean to. It’s as close to being unpublishable as anything can be these days. Sheilah Graham has been in on a pass for years as a result of her affair with Fitzgerald: it’s about time it ran out.”

  I don’t know how to close this. If there is that so-called better place, then Nora’s surely in it.

  Her going left ours a lesser one.

  JUNE 29, 2012

  Comedy Pain and Comedy Pleasure

  I guess this could be called Part 2 of an earlier column, which was inspired by readers asking me to talk about comics and comedy writing. So here’s more.

  Let me take you back to Ed Sullivan days and start with that which was part of the life of a New York–based scuffling comedy writer of the time: the phenomenon of the B-level comedian.

  Not the beginner or the guy who entertains at picnics and church socials, but a professional comedian who is sort of in the big time without being of it. He works reasonably steadily in nightclubs and the borscht circuit, has had a few TV “shots,” and has a modest house in Queens or Brooklyn. He is, as the saying goes, on his way. Eternally.

  I can’t forget my first job working briefly for a prototype B-level comedian, now gone, at least from the scene.

  In his career, he had achieved that maddening level of what you could call semi-recognition. On the street, he would get, “Hey, ain’t you, uh—? Don’t tell me … uh— The guy from Ed Sullivan, uh—” (The comic reveals his name.) “Yeah, that’s right! I reconized yuh.” (A certain stratum of New York street society drops the g in “recognize.” So does the increasingly rare English-speaking cabbie.)

  I’ve been there. You have to be on TV a surprisingly long time before you’re stopped on the street. Then, when you are, you get a lot of “Hey, you’re great! What’s your name again?” (It happens not only at the beginning of careers, but…)

  The comic that, as Jerry Lewis likes to say, “I have reference to” illustrates a sad aspect of that life. A dream comes true. He’s lucky enough to get career-making Ed Sullivan appearances, to do well enough on them, and yet still toss at night with a sour stomach, plagued with the lifelong inability to figure out why he never “moves up.” Up there. With Benny, Hope, Marx, Burns, Berle, et al.

  I once asked my shrewdly perceptive former manager, the legendary Jack Rollins—who handled the careers of comics big and small—what separates the frustrated medium-timers, even those who are by no means bad, from the big-timers.

  Jack thought a bit and said, “When they ask me why they can’t reach the top, I really don’t know what to tell them. Or even myself. The only way I can think to put it is what I’d call a certain lack of largeness in them.”

  My guy had a particular style and vocabulary and way of phrasing things. I’d seen him and I could imitate him at the typewriter; the sin
e qua non of being able to write for a comedian.

  The late Mort Lachman, long Bob Hope’s head writer, explained to me, as a relative kid in the business, how that’s the trick. He said you can write for a famous comedian only if you can turn him on in your head: “You have to hear their voice and their inflections as you type, and hear the difference between how Benny would say it and how Hope would say it.” (For younger readers, substitute Stewart and Colbert.) He advised that “if they sound all alike to you, be a plumber. You’ll make more money.”

  I could do what Mort described with Comic X, referred to above. Upon my first laying my jokes in front of him, he uttered, in my presence, a classic line. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

  I handed him some pages of good (trust me) material, and as he finished reading and I assumed a modest expression, awaiting my compliment, he removed his glasses, held my gaze for a disconcerting moment, and uttered a statement that deserves immortality.

  Instead of praise, I got, “This isn’t comedy material. This sounds like stuff I’d say.”

  With a little help from me, the remark made its way like wildfire through the world of comedy writers.

  And now an item seemingly from the supernatural.

  When TV and Sullivan came along, it was both a great and a tough time for purveyors of stand-up humor. Typically, comics who’d done their reliable act for years in vaudeville and hundreds of clubs got one shot on Sullivan, rejoiced, and then got invited back. Yikes! What to do? Naturally, they had used (blown) the best stuff from their acts the first time. Stuff they’d made a living on for years in vaudeville and clubs.

  I had a one-time job with one of these desperate souls.

  I can still hear his anguished phone voice pestering me at all hours. “Ya gotta help me, Dick. I’m layin’ off here”—read “out of work”—“and I’ve got a Sullivan shot.”

  I wrote him some new stuff. I needed his modest stipend. So, with a headache, and with both my heart and Aspergum in my mouth, I went with him to the live Sullivan broadcast. One of the theater’s twin gods smiled on, let’s say “Georgie,” and he did well.

  A particular one of my lines worked beautifully. He was a “zany.” Part of his shtick, was, while talking, to suddenly duck and swat at imaginary insects attacking him. It was funny, but it needed a big new laugh. I wrote, Grab the bug out of the air, smash it in your hand, hold it up, and say to it, “Aha! Thought the mustache would fool me, didn’t you?” It brought down the Sullivan theater.

  I went backstage to congratulate him and for my pat on the back. I should have learned by now. I got: “Dick, when you write for me you gotta give me more than just one great line!”

  Another line for the books. Soon, our paths diverged.

  The opposite could happen. The personally lovable, hilarious “insult” comedian Jack E. Leonard hosted The Tonight Show a few times in the interim guest-host summer between Jack and Johnny. “Fat Jack” always used his favorite insult line, “Why don’t you put your glasses on backwards and walk into yourself?”

  I thought he might like a variation and gave him “Why don’t you walk into a parking meter and violate yourself?” He used it, and it, as they say, killed. He thanked me for it each and every time I ran into dear Jack for the rest of his life.

  And, I just remembered, he never forgot another line of mine. Hugh Downs, Jack Paar’s Ed McMahon, sat nightly next to the host. Hugh had been dubbed “an intellectual.” I gave Jack E. the line, “It’s hard to concentrate with Hugh Downs sitting here humming a crossword puzzle.” I have to admit being surprised that this got such a blockbuster laugh. (But not surprised that I would mention it here.)

  All of this returns to the question: What is it about the comics who see no difference between their limited talents and those of the giants? I’m always amused by the witless complaint I can recall hearing even as a kid and as recently as a week ago: “Why don’t these old-timers move over and let somebody else have a chance?”

  As if there were only a certain number of places at the “top”—like limited seating on a bus—until somebody gets off. As if until some top star retires or expires, no aspirant can move into the newly vacated spot.

  Now for what I once heard called in an ad agency meeting “an added plus.” An incident I find to be almost spooky, with a touch of synchronicity, perhaps. See what you think. It’s a comedy collector’s item. A curious accident leads to a great joke and a huge laugh.

  It took place as I sat alongside Jack Benny on my mid-seventies ABC late-night show. An odd thing happened at the very end of our conversation.

  This is hard to make clear. As Jack and I chatted, something put the idea of Jack Benny and life insurance into my head.

  I’ve decided I must have had, just below the level of consciousness, a memory of some Jack Benny joke on that subject. But only the idea that there may have been such a joke, way back somewhere. I also remember thinking, as we continued to chat, that it was an ideal subject for a Jack Benny joke.

  The fun here was that when I said “life insurance,” it stirred something in the Benny head—but not yet the joke. I saw him noodle and fill verbally for a moment as if sensing that something was there. And then, click. Jack’s memory retrieval released the joke and Jack, delighted, fired out the line with a smashing delivery:

  J.B.: Then I go to Chicago, because I have business. You know, I’m with the American Republic Life Insurance Company. And there’s a very dear friend of mine who owns it, Watson Powell. And I meet with him and we talk some more business …

  D.C.: Are you a business associate or are you covered by them?

  J.B.: No, I’m not covered by them at all, I just work for them.

  D.C.: But you have life insurance.

  J.B.: Have I got life insurance? My God, I could go into a routine about that.

  D.C.: Well, you don’t need to—

  J.B.: I’ll tell you the kind of life insurance I got: When I go, they go!

  (Pandemonium.)

  It’s so strange. Just before the joke burst into life, neither of us had it in his head. At least not the conscious head.

  The best part for me was Jack’s visible delight in having excavated from memory a great joke from his past. And the very best part was that as the segment faded out, he shook my hand to thank me for the “setup” that gave him, and us, a gigantic laugh.

  I just loved it.

  Sitting there with that great comic artist, I might well have thought, “Toto, we aren’t in ‘This sounds like stuff I’d say’ land anymore.”

  AUGUST 3, 2012

  The Fine Mess Maker at Home

  “Fat and skinny guys comin’!”

  That’s how a Nebraska playmate of mine would burble the news that if Saturday would ever come, we’d be once again rolling with laughter at Stan and Ollie. Twice. We’d learned how not to get caught, sitting through for the second showing.

  If someone had told me then that I would one day meet a member of that beloved team, my mind would have had no way of processing the thought.

  I’d be as likely to meet Donald Duck.

  Just out of school and working as a copyboy at Time, I returned a folder to the “L” section of a file shelf and noticed the next folder said, “Laurel, Stan.” It was 1960. Who knew he was alive?

  Fade down and back up.

  I was a writer now with Jack Paar and the show was in Los Angeles for two weeks. A note to Mr. Laurel had gotten an immediate response, self-typed, beginning with an almost courtly, “Dear Dick Cavett, Thank you for your letter, containing such kind sentiments, so graciously expressed.” Also within was a postcard-sized photo of Laurel & Hardy (beside his smiling face he had penned, “Hi, Dick!”)—and an invitation to visit him in Santa Monica. (Where, unbelievably, he was in the phone book!)

  It came to pass. For maybe the first time in my life I was ready, dressed, and combed an hour before it was time to go.

  I drove slowly to Santa Monica and the Oceana Apartment
s, facing the sea. There on the side of the building was the same logo as on Laurel’s apartment stationery. This somehow confirmed that, far from dreaming, I actually was about to meet the man who helped the fat man struggle and wrestle and heave that piano up that long flight of steps in The Music Box.

  Inside. The desk.

  “Mr. Laurel, please.”

  A dreary, bored clerk, without looking up: “204, up those stairs.”

  He didn’t seem part of the magic.

  I took a breath, rang, the door opened, and my not having met Stan Laurel abruptly ended.

  “Well, lad, it certainly is nice to meet you.”

  There he stood. No derby. No silly grin. No shrill, squeaky crying of “I didn’t mean it, Ollie…” Just a nice-looking gent in a white shirt and tie and a warm, welcoming manner. The face was fuller, but the eyes—and the ears—were instantly familiar.

  But there was one thing to certify who it was. The slight speech impediment. The familiar Laurel fricative on the s sound. (Webster: fricative: frictional passage of the expired breath through a narrowing at some point in the vocal tract.) Every impersonator of Laurel, including me, does it. I spared him my version.

  On people who “do” him: “I suppose it’s flattering. I like when Chuck McCann and Dick Van Dyke do me.” But, he said, there was a guy who asked to come over “and the whole time he was here he talked in my voice. It was so goddamn embarrassing I didn’t know where to look.”

  The apartment was at best three rooms, modern furniture, with a commanding view of the sea. His honorary Oscar was on the TV, a rather small framed photo of L&H on the wall. No other showbiz mementos. We sat, with tea.

  “I just today got a lovely letter. You might like to read it.”

  He was justly proud. It was two pages, beautifully handwritten, praising his work in films with detailed appreciations of his comic techniques, ending with, “I have always attempted to emulate you in so many ways in my work.”