and Gayle from the New Christy Minstrels. Jackie eventually married John Davidson. It was a "young" show and the guests included
Richie Pryor and Flip Wilson, singers like Nancy Sinatra, Noel Harrison (Rex's son), the Everlys, Chad & Jeremy.
John Davidson himself was bland as hell but easy to please; the
son of a Baptist minister. Nothing seemed to upset him. One reason
could've been, as he told me years later, that he'd fucked every girl
on the show. I was always impressed with that. At the time I would
never have thought it possible.
I did my spot and I wrote the chatter. The chatter was easy, because it was always, "Thank you, Gayle, thank you, John." I had
those two lines and I worked from there. With the exception of the
white pants, yellow shirts, striped blazers and boaters—that Andy
Williams touch of Iowa in the summer of 1890—the show was very
pleasant. It seemed as though this shit would lead somewhere.
Still, the Jimmy Dean and John Davidson shows, my first extended network exposure, were also the first taste I got of all the
blocking and sitting around empty TV studios for long hours while
whatever went on went on around you. Which you didn't understand a word of nor wanted to. Occasionally a voice up in the lights
would tell somebody on the stage, "Do that again." "This time come
in from the right." "Now stand over there . . ." All this boredom—
the other driving force of television.
That didn't mean the fear was gone. However pleasant the people
were, fear kicked back in with the endless fucking run-throughs.
These were nerve-racking because you had to succeed for everyone
present, the cast, the guests, the execs, the staff. Then you had to
succeed again at dress rehearsal for the same people (who'd now
heard your material at least once) plus the technicians and cameramen. And you still had air ahead. You'd dissipated your edge and
energy and you hadn't even done yet what you'd come to do. Fear
and boredom. Boredom and fear.
There were some private compensations. Kraft Summer Music
Hall was where A1 Pouch, the Hippy-Dippy Mailman, made his
debut until he became A1 Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman.
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What was great about having A1 on this harmless, pleasant, whitebread show was that to my way of thinking—after all, I was Al—A1
was a pothead. Like me, he was permanently stoned. That's where
his misperceptions came from. Sure, he was a bit ignorant too. But
he was fueled by cannabis.
I don't know where the John Davidson staff and the great
middle-American viewing audience thought Al's weirdness came
from, whether he sipped a little wine or whether they just thought
Al was dumb as a brick, an early version of Forrest Gump.
But I knew Al's jokes were written from a pot mentality. By someone who smoked pot all day, every day. That felt wonderfully subversive. I ' v e never been a full-blown radical. I wasn't cut out to man
the barricades. But any time the subversive part of me is satisfied,
it delights me. Thank God I'm nurturing this little animal over
here.
'EYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY, baby, was' happenin'?
Que paso? Al Sleet your Hippy-Dippy Weatherman here with
all the hippy-dippy weather, man! First of all the pollen count
from Long Island Jewish Hospital, onetwothreefourfive haha-
haha. Present temperature is sixty-eight degrees at the airport,
which is stupid 'cos I don't know anyone who lives at the airport.
Downtown it's much hotter. Downtown's ON FIRE, man.
Now, I imagine some of you were a little surprised at the weather
over the weekend. Especially if you watched my show on Friday.
I'd like to personally apologize to the former residents of Rogers,
Illinois. Caught them cats nappin', man! . . .
Now we take a look at the radar. Hey, the radar's pickin' up Mitch
Miller! Sing along with Mitch, man! (sings) Baby . . . Gimme
your answer do, I'm half crazy, all.. . Where was I, man . . . ?
Oh yeah, the radar's picking up a line of thundershowers extend-
ing from a point nine miles north-northeast of Secaucus, New
Jersey, to a line six miles on either side of a line somewhere south-
southwest of Fond du Lac. However the radar is also picking up
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a squadron of incoming Russian ICBMs so I wouldn't sweat the
thundershowers!
Tonight's forecast: DARK! Continued mostly dark tonight turn-
ing to widely scattered LIGHT in the morning, man!
That's it from Al Sleet. Don't forget, folks: inside every silver lin-
ing there's a DARK CLOUD!
As I did more and more television— The Hollywood Palace, The
Tonight Show, Perry Como, Jimmie Rodgers, Roger Miller, more
Douglases, other variety crap I've mercifully forgotten—I began to
realize that there was a price you paid for the chance to do your
stuff. You had to make believe you really cared about and belonged to the larger community of show business. That you were
really interested in their small talk and shared whatever their values
were.
The two-track life was there all the time. I clung to the respectability and mainstreamness, yet I had no respect for the things stars
did and talked about and seemed to glorify and find glory in. I'd
watch other people do the show after I had: the same junk talk, the
same empty chatter, all this stupid fawning and caring that wasn't
really there.
But then along came the main chance. What all this dumb shit
was leading to, my ultimate goal, the Holy Grail. Stage Three: my
first shot at real acting!
I decided to start modestly with a small role in That Girl. No need
to overreach. Take it nice and easy. I was cast as Mario's agent. I
knew I could do well at this. I was a natural onstage. Acting was just
the next step in other kinds of performance I had mastered. Doing a
character voice was an extension of what I did in my act. You memorize your lines and speak them, moving when needed. In the end it
was all television. Piece of cake.
There were a few other considerations, like real direction. (Variety TV directors direct cameras and not much else.) On the set,
Mario's producers, Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, successful TV writ1 2 4
INSIDE EVERY SILVER LINING THERE'S A DARK CLOUD
ers who were moving fast up the food chain and knew what they
wanted, gave me some direction:
"Okay, remember now, you'd like to handle this account. You've
had trouble with this type of person in the past, so you're a little
leery, but at the same time you have to pay the bills and your wife
has just left you. The phone upstairs is ringing but you're not going
to answer that because you know the maid is going to get it. And
there's a fire in the basement. By the way, you're originally Romanian, so you have an Eastern European attitude to everything . . ."
You absorb that and walk through it and now there's blocking:
"Okay. Try to come down and cut a little to the left, then come all
the way down, cheat a bit toward the light, but stay out of her light
and this time get closer to the window. Okay? Let's do it again."
And . .
. action!
I try to remember the words, while putting something behind
the words that smacks of authenticity—motivation, character, something, and also while following the direction and blocking, wondering if I should use one of my own characters, although then I'll
be putting alien words into my guy's mouth and bang goes all his
naturalness, because they're someone else's words which I have to
somehow interpret. . .
In short: Acting.
And I was NOT ABLE to do that! I was absolutely at sea, completely lost. Whatever competence I might have had going in had
vanished. I floundered. I fluffed lines. I tried to do everything I'd
been told at the same time. I was failing! And failing feeds on itself.
There's a constant diminution of confidence. On top of failing, your
brain is whirring: "They hired me! They are thinking about that
RIGHT NOW! About the three more days they have to go through!
They must be very dissatisfied! I SUCK! I will CONTINUE TO
SUCK! And it WILL BE ON NETWORK TELEVISION!"
I'd lobbied my manager hard for auditions and they came in
thick and fast.
There was a screen test for a series called Manly and the Mob.
Anthony Caruso, who'd played a million mobsters, whose face you
would know in a minute, was the Mob. Great casting. I was Manly,
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the inept private detective—an American Clouseau. Easy enough
comic character to play. Not that complex a task. This was my series
to have or not have. This was my pilot. My ticket to stardom.
I couldn't do that either! Or any of the others. They were all absolute, total failures, every one a humiliation. That Girl hadn't just
been first-time-out nerves. I was devastatingly inept! There were no
Oscars in sight. No Hollywood helpless with laughter at my feet.
Danny Kaye the Second? Jack Lemmon the Second? Forget it. It
was all beyond my reach.
I felt like I'd lost both legs in a car crash. My dream, this thing
I'd wanted since I was a little kid sitting transfixed in a funky, dark
movie house on the edge of Harlem, this future I believed was my
birthright, had dissolved into thin air like the morning mist.
Meanwhile Stage rlwo, which was to have been phased out, having
served its purpose, the booster rocket designed to fall back to earth
as I shot to movie stardom, continued to barrel upward, getting bigger and stronger all the time. To the outside world I was a comic on
the fast track, hitting all the professional heights. But inside I was
full of fear and confusion. I was beginning to feel the discontent that
became intolerable later on.
Objectively 1967 was full of success. In February my first album,
Take-Offs and Put-Ons, came out and went gold. It was nominated
for a Grammy and lost by a squeaker to Bill Cosby, a very worthy
opponent. I was playing the biggest nightclubs in the country. I was
starting to play Vegas. That summer, I did another replacement series called A w a y We Go, fourteen episodes, this time in the Jackie
Gleason Show slot. (Hence the title, "Away we go!" being one of
Gleason's catchphrases. "To the moon, Alice!" didn't seem to work
so well.) But this summer I was a star of the show. Along with Buddy
Rich and Buddy Greco.
My schizophrenia was beginning to show. I would come to the
studio every day with a single strand of Indian beads and a different button. One day the button said, "The Marine Corps Builds
Oswalds," and Buddy Greco took great exception to that. (He later
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became a very different person, completely relaxed with the human
race, but he used to be a very difficult, very conservative guy.)
The kind of stuff I did on Away We Go was singing a trio with my
two Buddies of "It Was a Very Good Year." It was creaky sketches
with creaky premises, it was trivial numbers in bunny suits. It began
boring in on me how untrue I was being to myself. These dreary
variety shows with uninteresting people who were just walking
through their lives. Doing bland, middle-American showbiz-asusual material. The more that feeling piled up, the more my acting
failures weighed on my mind, the more I was becoming aware that
something was seriously wrong. That I was in the wrong place with
the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
Then there was The Ed Sullivan Show. The horrible, horrible Sul-
livan Show, torture chamber of comedians. I'd resisted doing it for
a long time, but the offers kept improving and they agreed not to
hack up my material, like they did with every other comic, however
big. So in '67 I finally went on Sullivan. On what I thought were my
terms.
The Ed Sullivan Show's worst weapon of torture was that it was
live. There were no second takes on Sullivan. If you fucked up, all
America saw it. If Mr. Pastry dropped his plates or Jackie Mason
gave Ed the finger there were no do-overs, no cutaways, no edits. No
apologies were accepted.
There was additional pressure: the studio audience knew the
show was live too. They knew there was a chance they might be on
television, sitting in front of the picture of Joe Louis or Jimmy Cagney or some other celebrity Ed wrote about in his stupid column.
Half the audience had special invitations. It was a perk. If you were a
Lincoln Mercury dealer on Long Island you got ten tickets and you
brought people you wanted to impress. Everybody had their best
things on. The audience was on display as much as you were.
When an audience is potentially on display, they're very inhibited. They're reluctant to let go. So laughter, which is a natural,
spontaneous thing, must be avoided. They think: "I'll wait and
make sure that if I laugh, it's something everyone's laughing at. That
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I'm right in with the crowd. Because if I start roaring, 'Hahahaohhhahaaahaaaa-God-oh-fuck-that's-funny,' and no one else does,
I'll embarrass the shit out of myself." Not good for comedy.
The final turn of the screw: Sullivan himself. During your set,
Ed would stand onstage over to stage right. Out of camera range
but onstage. So the entire audience never watched the comic. They
were watching Sullivan to see if he would laugh. And he never did.
Add all this up and you have the graveyard of laughter. Playing
comedy to the Sullivan audience was agony. You'd get more laughs
in a mausoleum.
I've always been an ordered and left-brained person about performance, worried to the point of obsession that every detail has
been taken care of, is precisely in place. But I don't get nervous. On
Sullivan I was always incredibly nervous. At first I thought it was
the unpredictability, the lack of control, but I soon figured out it
was because the show cultivated, it seemed almost deliberately, that
driving force of network television—fear.
I'd stay at the Americana Hotel (now the Sheraton) on Seventh
at 52nd. I'd take that walk—the Last Mile—across to Broadway and
up to the stage door on 53rd Street. There was a deli right at the
stage door; I'd get my two cans of Rheingold, because I knew I could
&
nbsp; handle two cans. It wouldn't show and it might help a little. But the
nervousness never went away.
These days Letterman is taped in the same place, the Ed Sullivan
Theater. Once in a while when I'm in New York I purposely walk
the Last Mile across those same streets and up to that stage door on
53rd. Forty years later I still reexperience all the fear and vomiting
nervousness.
It got even worse. Sullivan was on Sunday nights at eight. Because the dress rehearsal began around one to two p.m., you had to
be there fairly early in the morning, right around the time normal
people were in church. That was the choice: church or Sullivan. So
you had ten to twelve hours to sit around getting absolutely fucking
terrified before you went on live in front of 50 million belching, farting, comatose Americans who'd just eaten a big Sunday dinner. The
boredom part of fear and boredom.
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There was one tiny ray of sunlight. Ed found out that I was an
Irish Catholic from New York. It didn't help with any of the physical
horrors of the show, but it did mean I got preferential treatment when
it came to having my material butchered, or simply being cut from
the show after dress, both of which could happen even to the biggest
names in comedy. The Sullivan people told my manager—whether
it was true or not who knows—that I was Ed's favorite comic.
On one show he called me over after my set to where he stood,
stage right. This was supposed to be a big honor. We had some inane
exchange and then he said out of the blue, "You're a Catholic!" and
then gestured to the audience with that weird insect thing he did
with his arms: "Give him a big hand! He's a Catholic!"
Ed was partial to this form of intro. He once introduced my friend
the Hispanic singer José Feliciano (another of the Au Go Go gang)
as follows: "Want you to give the next act, José Feliciano, a big hand!
He's blind—and he's Puerto Rican!"
But the real milestone of my Sullivan career was the show where
I followed the skating chimpanzees. There's something I can say for
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