The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Sexual subject matter caused problems. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department raided a Pico Boulevard warehouse in January 1961, arresting three employees for “distribution of obscene records” and seizing four thousand LPs by Belle Barth, B. S. Pully, Pearl Williams and Rusty Warren. They are so innocuous by today’s standards that the clampdown seems insane. “The albums were innuendo,” says Woody Woodbury. “They were called risqué, but today you could play them in their entirety during high mass.”

  Belle Barth had her comedy albums distributed by Roulette Records. The president of Roulette was Morris Levy, one of the top mobsters in the recording industry. He was notorious for securing publishing rights to songs written by others. When he released a series of Christmas music, he credited himself as the cowriter of “Silent Night.” He seldom paid out royalties and had no qualms about threatening those who complained. Barth’s Roulette releases were on Levy’s After Hours subsidiary. Sales were enormous, but she never saw a cent. “Terrible things happened to her,” says Rusty Warren. “They screwed Belle over terribly.”

  Roulette also screwed over comedy writer Bill Dana. Kapp Records released LPs based on Dana’s comic character Jose Jimenez, which he’d been doing on The Steve Allen Show. When they proved profitable, Roulette decided to get in on the action, releasing a Bill Dana record without his knowledge or approval. The unauthorized release made a hefty profit and Dana filed a lawsuit seeking $200,000. “They did that record without my permission. It was a bone of contention and it got a little heavy. These voices called me saying it would be good for me to cooperate with them. It was like a scene from The Sopranos. They just compiled air checks of [my act from] The Steve Allen Show and released it as a record.” Roulette promised to destroy the masters if Dana dropped his claim. There was no financial settlement, but with Levy’s reputation it was the safest solution.

  Fax Records also had ties to organized crime. Named for its Fairfax Avenue location, the Los Angeles label cranked out several risqué records by small-time comedian Bert Henry. Henry’s LPs had titles like Position Is Everything and At the Hungry Thigh. A San Francisco postmaster seized three hundred copies of the Fax Records catalog in May 1960 because “they gave information on where obscene material could be obtained.” While the albums were hardly profane, the owner of Fax Records, William H. Door, was a convicted pornographer with a “lewd picture syndicate” and suspected Mafia ties. In November 1963, at the height of his label’s success, he was found hog-tied in his home with a bullet hole in the back of his head.

  Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart owed their fame to the comedy record boom. Verve Records pressed Inside Shelley Berman in January 1959, and it was awarded certification as the first gold comedy record. Foxx actually beat Berman to the distinction, but his underground status kept the organization that governed gold record status from acknowledging him. Verve quickly pressed the follow-ups Outside Shelley Berman and The Edge of Shelley Berman; Don Rickles joked that the next LP would be called Up Shelley Berman.

  Warner Bros. released Newhart’s first record—The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart—in April 1960. Berman and Newhart were oddly similar—both from Chicago, performing while seated on stools, delivering monologues into imaginary telephones. Berman was convinced Newhart stole his shtick. “I was coming to work one night and a guy stopped his car when he passed me, ‘Hey, Shelley! There’s a guy stole your act!’ When I finally saw Newhart—I was devastated.”

  Newhart’s success was unforeseen. He was writing routines for Chicago radio, but had never been onstage when he got a recording contract. “A disc jockey friend of mine, Dan Sorkin, in Chicago, said that the Warner Brother record executives were coming through town. ‘Put what you have on tape and I’ll play it for them.’ So I put them on tape, brought it down there, they listened to it. And they said, ‘Okay . . . we’ll record your next nightclub.’ I said, ‘Well, we have kind of [a] problem there. I’ve never played a nightclub.’”

  Warner Bros. taped Newhart’s first-ever stand-up ­performances —three of them, done the same evening at the Tidelands nightclub in Houston. The first recording was rendered useless when Newhart’s voice quivered with fear. The second was a write-off as a drunk woman yelled throughout the show, “That’s a bunch of crap!” The third show clicked. The recording sold two hundred thousand copies upon release and after twelve weeks it was the number one record in America. Lenny Bruce predicted Newhart would “make more money than me, Sahl and Berman because Paar, Sullivan and [Garry] Moore need a goy comic so bad their teeth ache.” (Dan Sorkin, the man who helped Newhart get his recording contract, was fired over a comedy record dispute in 1963 when he played a Lenny Bruce LP on the air.)

  In 1959 playwright Moss Hart threw a party to celebrate the publication of his memoir, Act One, at Mamma Leone’s restaurant. The event featured Manhattan’s glitterati. Among the guests were comedy writers Mel Tolkin and Mel Brooks. The two entertained the crowd with a routine soon dubbed the “2000 Year Old Man.” Theater critic Kenneth Tynan had never heard of Mel Brooks before. “All I knew as I left Mamma Leone’s that night was that [the] pseudo-Freudian partner was the most original comic improviser I had ever seen.”

  At the prompting of Steve Allen, the 2000 Year Old Man routine was pressed to vinyl, with Carl Reiner in the straight man role. Released in November 1960, it gathered a cult following and marked the first time Brooks was considered a performer. As with Berman, Newhart and so many others, comedy records helped make Mel Brooks a star.

  The Billboard record charts for June 1961 had Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley sharing top honors with Berman, Newhart, Warren, Freberg, Dick Gregory and Jonathan Winters. Music writer Joe X. Price marveled at the comedy record recipe. “Take a hundred small round tables, a few hundred hard wooden chairs, set ’em up in any recording studio available, order lotsa booze, send out as many invites as you have chairs to the gigglingest people in town—and you’ve got what it takes to make a comedy album. Oh, yes, you also need a comedian.”

  By far the hottest comedy record of the early 1960s was The First Family, starring Vaughn Meader, a piano player who did an impression of President Kennedy. The First Family was a composite of comedy sketches about White House life. It sold two and a half million copies in four weeks and five million copies in less than a year. It was the fastest-selling album, of any genre, in recording history up to that time.

  Meader had been an unsuccessful barroom act playing country and western. “Before I was a comedian, I had a country band,” he said. “But the music never seemed to get across.” He added impressions of Fats Domino and Nat King Cole, which got a much better response. By the end of 1961 he was a regular at Phase II in the Village, and in September 1962 he was booked at the Blue Angel for his first substantial gig. He had been attempting stand-up for ten months, but had yet to develop much of an act. He had one basic strength, as Variety noted: “One of his assets is a resemblance to JFK; he even has the same kind of haircut.”

  Comedy writers Earle Doud and George Foster conceived The First Family with disc jockey Bob Booker. JFK was a national phenomenon and ripe for satire. The script had been written, and now they needed someone to play the lead role. Comic actor Chuck McCann joined Earle Doud on the scouting mission. They went to the Village to catch Meader’s act. “He was kind of a country hick from Maine, just another barrelhouse piano player, but his voice was very New England,” says McCann. “He barely imitated Kennedy, because he was that voice.”

  Meader was hired to play JFK, but most record labels turned the idea down. They felt it was out of bounds to ridicule the president. A high-level executive at MGM Records called the subject matter “too sensitive.” ABC-Paramount, Capitol and Mercury Records all turned it down for the same reason. It was left to the small-time Cadence label to take the chance. A recording date was set for October 22, 1962. “We made a little demo at Y&R Studios on 57th Street,” says McCann. “Right before we recorded, the p
resident made an announcement on television. It was the Cuban Missile Crisis speech . . . and then we went into the studio. The audience came to our studio, and they laughed out of nervousness; it became twice as funny to them. [Cadence Records president] Archie Bleyer was in the control room. He was livid after we finished. He said, ‘We can never release this! There’s too much laughter! They’re laughing over the lines! We’re going to have to do it again.’ So the next week they did it again and it bombed. I mean, into the shit house. So they released the original right away.”

  The First Family was mailed to WNEW morning team Klavan & Finch and WINS disc jockey Stan Z. Burns. “It was an acetate copy that Earle laid on them,” says McCann. “They played it and the people stormed the record stores to order it. They couldn’t print the covers fast enough. People would buy the disc in a paper jacket and were entitled to come back and get the cover later on.”

  The First Family went platinum. The Jenkins Music Store chain in Manhattan remained open three extra hours each day to accommodate the lines. Eight separate pressing plants were hired to meet the overwhelming demand. The First Family created a craze within the craze, and countless new JFK-related comedy records hit the market. Bullwinkle writer George Atkins devised Sing Along with JFK, in which JFK speeches were comically set to music. Ron Clark, a frequent Mel Brooks collaborator, wrote the comedy LP The President Strikes Back and an unknown Rich Little made a northern version called My Fellow Canadians. The Kennedys were surplanted in rip-off versions like The Last Family—a comic indictment of Castro’s ­revolutionaries—and The Other Family, a Khrushchev-themed comedy record featuring Joan Rivers, George Segal and Buck Henry.

  “No albums or singles that feature any takeoffs on the president of the United States or his family will be played now or any other time on WHK,” announced a Cleveland program director. He said record companies “are deprecating the nation’s leader at a critical time in our history.” Radio WIND in Chicago said, “The Sing Along with JFK album is definitely in poor taste. We stopped playing The First Family here at WIND a week after we received it. The same holds true with all of this follow-up imitation material. The record people are running the gimmick into the ground.”

  Jack Paar said he and Richard Nixon listened to The First Family after eating Thanksgiving dinner together. “With cigars we retired to a room which had a record player. I had brought with me a recording written by one of my former writers, Earle Doud. Most of us laughed, and here is what may surprise you: Mr. Nixon walked over and lifted the playback head off the recording and said, ‘That man is the President of our country. Neither he nor his family should be the butt of such jokes.’”

  Vaughn Meader’s new management wasted no time in capitalizing on the sensation. He was sent on a nationwide tour, but Meader was essentially still an amateur. He hadn’t paid his dues, didn’t have an act. One headline announced, “Meader Bombs.” He was booked into Carnegie Hall, but his opener, Stanley Myron Handelman, got twice as many laughs.

  Comedy about JFK was to the early 1960s what Monica Lewinsky jokes and Bill Clinton impressions were to the 1990s. It was everywhere. The president’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was none too happy about it. Hugh Hefner invited Joe Kennedy to his Chicago Playboy Club to see Jack Burns and George Carlin. One report said Kennedy “sat stonily as George Carlin did his impresh of the Chief Executive,” and muttered, “‘I don’t see anything funny in making fun of my son.’”

  When Mort Sahl started ridiculing President Kennedy in his act, the hungry i was threatened. “Joseph Kennedy called Enrico Banducci and club owners with Mob ties who were part of the elder Kennedy’s extended family,” wrote Gerald Nachman. “He reportedly asked Bobby Kennedy to have the IRS close down the hungry i. Banducci was stunned to come to work one day and find the club’s doors padlocked by the IRS for unpaid withholding taxes.” The Crescendo stopped booking Sahl after a similar threat. Gene Norman said to him, “I’ve been told that the White House would be offended if I hired you and I’d be audited.”

  The JFK comedy craze was, of course, brought to an abrupt end on November 22, 1963, when the president was assassinated. It affected the mood of the country and it derailed nightclub comedy. Comedienne Marilyn Michaels was booked at a Long Island nightclub the following night. “It was the first job that I ever got fired from. I played it the day after President Kennedy got shot. It should have been canceled, but it was the stupidity of ‘the show must go on.’ Everyone was very drunk.”

  The hungry i reopened, and John Barbour was the comic. “I did it the first week of November 1963. That engagement was so successful they booked me again for the last week of November 1963. Unfortunately, President Kennedy was murdered on the twenty-second, so when I went back it was empty. The following week I was booked in Fresno—and there were a thousand people there every night celebrating the assassination. I became aware there were people in this country that were glad John F. Kennedy was killed. There was a pathological hatred of Kennedy the way there is a pathological hatred of Obama.”

  Producer George Schlatter says the assassination indirectly led to the editing style he later implemented on his program Laugh-In. Schlatter was prepping a Jonathan Winters television special that week. “We had Pat McCormick writing, Dwight Hemion directing, Art Carney as the guest. We came out of the reading and found out Kennedy had been shot. Jonathan went to one bar, Dwight went to another, and Art went to another. The next time we saw each other was the day of the show. We hadn’t rehearsed anything and everybody was drunk. Nothing worked and I said, ‘We’re fucked, and I have to deliver this to the network.’ I sent for the prop department to put props on a table. I said, ‘Let Jonathan fuck around. Anything that looks funny, just shoot it.’ So we taped an hour of Carney and Winters fucking with props. We sat down in the tape room and edited it together. Dwight said, ‘But it’s not a television show, it’s just a bunch of cuts and nothing makes sense. [Programming executive] Mike Dann said, ‘So, what’s the show?’ I said, ‘That is the show.’ He said, ‘That’s not a television show.’ I said, ‘You mean, you don’t know what this is? In Europe this is what they call “comedy vérité.” It’s the latest thing in Europe. I’m amazed you haven’t heard of it.’ [Account executive] Irwin Siegel went, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, comedy vérité! Sure, I know about that.’ The thing won a TV Guide award, and that was the beginning of the Laugh-In style, with that free-form, fast editing.”

  George Schlatter may have saved face, but there was no saving Vaughn Meader after the assassination. His only career success had been imitating JFK. Now he was left in the lurch.

  “Lenny Bruce went onstage a week after the assassination,” says Bruce’s friend and ghostwriter Paul Krassner. “Everybody knew he had to say something. He couldn’t ignore it. Nobody knew what he would do. He stood there milking the tension. Finally he said, ‘Vaughn Meader is screwed.’”

  He sure was. Verve Records had been prepping a Vaughn Meader Christmas album. Not only was that project canceled, but most copies of The First Family were pulled from shelves. Meader had taped an appearance on the Joey Bishop sitcom, but it never aired. The television show Hootenanny tore up a contract with Meader, invoking the Act of God clause. The Grammy Awards had to cancel Meader’s appearance, which was going to be a cornerstone of the show. Cadence Records officially issued a recall of The First Family in December.

  Meader changed angles and attempted alternate characters, but with so little stand-up experience, nothing clicked for him. He drifted from show business into a life of drug use and self-doubt. “Nobody would hire him,” says Krassner. “He moved to San Francisco and became an overaged flower child. He called me in 1968 and asked me for a tab of acid.”

  Ten years passed when Life magazine decided to do a “Whatever Became Of” profile: “He began drinking. In two years the bank account was zero. He dabbled in Eastern religions and witchcraft, experimented with LSD, became a Yippie, retreated to a Bronx apa
rtment and finally to a tepee in the California redwoods. In Los Angeles he was so broke he scrounged food from back-alley garbage cans. He hit rock bottom one night in Chicago. He was mugged and, falling unconscious to the gutter, he had a horrible vision of his own death. He speaks of himself often in the third person now. ‘Vaughn Meader had become totally empty, physically and spiritually. That night he was no more.’”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Percolation in the

  Mid-1960s

  A new era of domestic upheaval followed the president’s death. The cynicism of Bruce and Sahl expanded with the comedy of Dick Gregory, Dr. Strangelove, Second City and an improvisational sketch collective featuring Godfrey Cambridge, Buck Henry and George Segal called The Premise.

  Ted Flicker founded The Premise after his Compass Players flunked in St. Louis. While other Compass members created Second City, Flicker went his own overtly political way. “I knew everybody at Second City. We just had a different philosophy.” Flicker said The Premise would “declare war against the huge stage machines . . . war against the playwrights who are themselves ‘establishments’ with phalanxes of agents, managers, advisers, gag writers and play doctors.”

  At various times The Premise roster included Thomas Aldredge, Sandy Baron, Peter Bonerz, Godfrey Cambridge, Joan Darling, James Frawley, Gene Hackman, Buck Henry and George Segal. Dustin Hoffman was the dishwasher in their Bleecker Street venue. He auditioned for the group, but was turned down because he swore—Flicker was already having trouble with authorities and didn’t want any more heat.

  Buck Henry says, “We were shut down by the cops several times. There was this longtime cabaret license feud. If you told jokes in public you had to have a license and all that stuff.” Flicker says it placed him in a moral dilemma. “I found a venue to lease, and it was the toughest dyke bar in the Village—they stationed eight cops there every Saturday night. I knew I better get a local Village lawyer. He gave me a mimeographed sheet of who got paid off and how much. I thought, ‘I’m opening a theater of political satire . . . and I need to pay people off?’ The first guy who came in was the health inspector. He said, ‘Let’s go take a look at the kitchen.’ I took thirty-five ­dollars—as instructed on the sheet—and kept it in my sweating palm. I said, ‘It’s so nice of you to come early to make sure the kitchen is all right . . .’ He looked at me and said, ‘Son, just hand me the thirty-five dollars.’ Well, I did—and then I went crazy wondering how I could have done that. The next guy in was a police sergeant. He said, ‘Let’s go take a look at the kitchen.’ That was the code.”