The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  The Premise was the first professional gig for many future stars. Flicker saw an amateur actor at Princeton named George Segal and hired him as a foil for Henry. “He and Buck turned out to be a perfect team,” says Flicker. “George was always Buck’s stooge.”

  Flicker put together a sister company called The Living Premise, consisting entirely of sketch comedy about race relations. The Living Premise starred African American actors Godfrey Cambridge, Al Freeman Jr. and Diana Sands. The New York Times called their satire “very disturbing.” Flicker had two white actors play straight for his three African American leads. “When Godfrey Cambridge came to The Premise he showed what he could really do and his career started to happen,” says Flicker. “We did a sketch about a Westchester couple in their big Westchester house with a white Jewish maid. We reversed all the clichés. It shook people up. The New York Times refused my first ad: ‘The Premise—in Spades.’ Then it was ‘The Premise—In Living Color.’ And they turned that down too. The Living Premise was the first integrated theater in New York.”

  The Premise had its swan song with The Troublemaker, a motion picture bankrolled by Janus Films. “Ted Flicker and I wrote it,” says Buck Henry. “It had some funny moments and an interesting kazoo score written by Cy Coleman. It had local political references because Flicker felt there was an audience interested in his New York cabaret card troubles, but of course no one was interested in that. It was fun to make, but we bankrupted Janus Films. We put them out of the filmmaking business—cost them too much money, so they became a distribution arm.”

  Lenny Bruce hung out at The Premise from time to time, and Flicker was flattered by his presence—until he discovered why he was there. “Lenny hung out at The Premise. He was there a lot. I didn’t know until later that our lobby was his drug drop.”

  Bruce influenced all the sketch collectives of the decade. “While I was in New York, I saw Lenny Bruce and he had a great effect on me,” said Second City’s Anthony Holland. Flicker says, “He influenced all of us.” David Steinberg had his Lenny Bruce epiphany in Chicago. “Bill Alton was the head of the University [of Chicago] Theatre at that time. Bill did everything he could to get me to be a stand-up comedian before he would take me the Second City route. He insisted I go to the Gate of Horn with him. I thought, ‘Who wants to go see a comic?’ because at the time I thought comics were nowhere. But sure enough the comic he wanted me to see was Lenny Bruce. I went back to see him every single week for five weeks.”

  Bruce was an influence on Second City in other ways as well. John Brent was a Second City cast member whom Carl Gottlieb describes as “a hipster ladies’ man, an early junkie-comic-poet-­entrepreneur from the days when such a thing could coexist.” Brent used heroin because he wanted to emulate Bruce. Likewise, legendary Second City member Del Close took his drug cues from Lenny. Premise member Peter Bonerz says, “He was really smart, had an immediate callback memory, could do Shakespeare, could do Gilbert & Sullivan, and was charismatic to the point he could talk you into trying heroin.”

  Second City was an underground sensation in the early 1960s. While not as overtly political as The Premise, it still had a socialist vibe. When it became wildly popular several producers wanted to package it for mainstream consumption. David Susskind and Max Liebman brought Second City to New York in 1961. It gave the Chicago outfit Broadway credibility, but compromised its underground credentials. Susskind promoted the cast—Howard Alk, Alan Arkin, Severn Darden, Andrew Duncan, Mina Kolb, Paul Sand and Eugene Troobnick—on his talk show Open End. “Immediately afterward we got a whole new kind of crowd,” said Arkin. “We were getting the uptown crowd, the mink coat crowd, and I hated them. Because they would laugh at any kind of reference, whether they understood it or not. It had nothing to do with the content; it had to do with the reference. And I came offstage one night and I said, ‘Damn these people to hell! I hate them. They’re snobs.’”

  Eugene Troobnick blamed Second City’s Broadway failure on the man who previously gave so much trouble to Mel Brooks and Buddy Hackett. “The reason we didn’t make it on Broadway was because our producer, Max Liebman, didn’t have the courage to allow us to do what we were unique in doing. He was terrified to allow us to improvise in front of critics.”

  While stand-up and live sketch comedy evolved, television comedy was stagnant. Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Second City seemed to have little effect on loosening the conservative restrictions of the small screen. Comedy programming like Bewitched, My Favorite Martian, The Lucy Show and The Munsters seemed to imply that the old Keith-Albee “blue rules” still applied.

  The one exception—and even then it was very mild—was on the late night talk shows. Late night was one of the few places on television where subversive comedians were occasionally welcomed. Jack Paar left The Tonight Show in 1962 after negotiating for a once-a-week prime-time show called The Jack Paar Program. NBC did not have a replacement ready when he left. Johnny Carson was offered The Tonight Show—and accepted—but was contractually obligated to Who Do You Trust?, his five-day-a-week afternoon game show on ABC. In the meantime The Tonight Show was handled by a who’s who of American popular culture. Art Linkletter, Joey Bishop, Bob Cummings, Merv Griffin, Jack Carter, Jan Murray, Peter Lind Hayes, Soupy Sales, Mort Sahl, Steve Lawrence, Jerry Lewis, Hugh Downs, Jimmy Dean, Arlene Francis, Jack E. Leonard, Groucho Marx, Hal March and Donald O’Connor—in that order—demonstrated their mostly inept talk show abilities for six months. It made one appreciate Jack Paar all the more.

  Mort Sahl’s attempt at hosting The Tonight Show was called “a dreary affair,” but to his credit he booked George Carlin for his first solo stand-up performance and welcomed fellow comedy subversives Del Close and Henry Morgan on the same episode.

  Dick Cavett was a writer on The Tonight Show during the six-month guest host spell. “It was great writing for Mort and Groucho. It was a joy if they thought anything you wrote was worth doing. And then there was Art Linkletter, where you just turned the whole job over to a Bennett Cerf joke book and went home. There was the week Donald O’Connor did it and no one could imagine why.”

  Of these interim hosts, only two truly succeeded. NBC hired each of them to do five nights, but Merv Griffin was such a natural he was held over for twenty. It made NBC wonder if it had made the right choice in Carson. Griffin was happy to instill network execs with doubt. “Merv was dying to get The Tonight Show,” says Cavett. “It nearly killed him when he didn’t.” Instead NBC signed Griffin to do what was essentially a Tonight Show knockoff during the afternoon. It made his career.

  Jerry Lewis was the other guest host who impressed viewers and executives alike. He shocked the industry with his numbers. He scored the highest ratings in the history of late night—surpassing all records set by Jerry Lester, Steve Allen and Jack Paar. All three networks were impressed and began wooing Lewis for his own talk show. In an expensive bidding war, ABC won the rights. The following year The Jerry Lewis Show debuted as the most expensive talk show in television history.

  The Jerry Lewis Show was a two-hour talk show slated for Saturday nights, debuting autumn 1963. Lewis signed a contract for $8 million a season, forty-two episodes a year, with a five-season option including multimillion-dollar increases. The contract gave Lewis total creative control, a detail that turned costly. “I’ll be in complete control,” Lewis said at the ABC press conference. “I’ll be doing something I’ve never done before. It’ll be what people want. I’m going to play it loose. I’ll be what I’m with. I suppose I’ll have guests.”

  The vagaries of his vision were a concern. Lewis offered very few specifics other than some strange contractual demands—like an assurance there be no deodorant advertising during the time slot. “He wouldn’t tell us what the show’s format was,” said ABC president Leonard Goldenson. “He kept giving us double-talk and double-talk and double-talk, insisting he would take the country by storm.”

  Lewis
orchestrated a massive renovation of the El Capitan at 1735 Vine Street in Hollywood. He had performed on its stage years earlier during broadcasts of The Colgate Comedy Hour. His first point of business was changing the venue’s name to the more modest-sounding Jerry Lewis Theater.

  The walls were lined with gold vinyl wallpaper and the stairs with eighteen hundred yards of thick red carpet. New theater furniture was custom-made. An outdoor patio was built, with a fireplace that had a speaker system installed within the brick, playing music as embers flared. A 10x12 screen was installed to help the balcony sight lines. “About two thousand yards of drapes have gone into the stage area,” wrote Variety. “Fifty new banks of dimmers have been added backstage. Up the circular staircase, to Lewis’ private dressing room, there is a luxurious suite with a gold motif. Initials JL are ingrained in the tile of the shower.”

  “The very wiring and plumbing had been replaced,” wrote Lewis biographer Shawn Levy. “The desk at which Jerry would sit when talking to guests was equipped with a control panel that allowed him to override the director and control shots while the show was in progress; at a cost of thirty thousand dollars, it was designed to be broken down and taken anywhere in the world on location.”

  “Oh my God, the money,” says ABC producer Bill Harbach. “Oh, Jesus, there was a plaque of his profile in bronze in the cement. His dressing room was all brass fittings and mirrors.” Phil Silvers told Lewis, “It’s a little nauseating. The designer of this joint must have been smoking hashish.”

  On Saturday, September 21, 1963, at 9:30 P.M., The Jerry Lewis Show debuted. Scheduled guests were Mort Sahl, singer Kaye Stevens, crooner Jack Jones and author Clifton Fadiman. Larger stars like Steve Allen, Jimmy Durante and Robert Stack made surprise appearances. As the curtains parted, Jerry’s hair glistened with Brylcreem. He mockingly berated his crew and sang “When You’re Smiling.” When the song finished, Lewis said, “I’d like to say welcome to all you nice . . .” Shrieking feedback deafened the crowd. After a moment he continued: “I realize two hours is an unusual amount of time but . . . Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘What can Liz [Elizabeth Taylor] and Dick [Richard Burton] do for two hours?’” Nobody laughed. Lewis tapped the boom mic and turned into a tragic Catskill act: “This is on, isn’t it, sweetheart?”

  Communication with the control room cut out. Headsets froze. The red light on each camera—indicating which camera the performer should look into—stopped working. The giant monitor installed in the balcony failed to turn on, and the upper section of the audience eventually walked out.

  The morning reviews were vicious. Variety wrote, “It’s truly amazing that so much could have gone awry. [The show] came off as disjointed, disorganized, tasteless. It was, in truth, an unimaginative, uninspired, unfunny show.” Time said, “ABC has . . . the apparent illusion that several million people want to watch 120 minutes of the scriptless life of a semi-educated, egocentric boor.”

  ABC panicked. It blamed shortcomings on the host’s “Jewishness” and asked him to “tone it down.” ABC executive Thomas Moore said, “Lewis was agreeable to all our suggestions for the show’s improvement. We have complete confidence that he’ll make the changes we suggested and that the audience level will rise with each succeeding week. He’s on his way.”

  Dick Cavett was lured from The Tonight Show to The Jerry Lewis Show. “He pissed away most nights,” says Cavett. “He was deeply depressed on at least two, maybe three, shows. You could watch Jerry go down, down, down, the showbiz equivalent of the Hindenburg.”

  On November 18, 1963, after a mere eight weeks, ABC announced cancellation of the show. In order to erase it from the airwaves, the network had to buy out Lewis’s contract. The Jerry Lewis Show finished with a total of thirteen episodes, but its star made off with an estimated $10 million (some claim the number was four times as much). Lewis purchased a full-page ad in the trades. The ad was surrounded by blankness and only a signature at the bottom, and Lewis had placed one word in small type at the center of the page: “Oops.”

  The Jerry Lewis Theater was sold back to ABC, which used it for Lewis’s immediate replacement, a thrown-together variety show called The Hollywood Palace. Remarkably, the replacement program succeeded where Lewis did not, lasting a full five seasons. But over those years it had been hard to erase the memory of The Jerry Lewis Show: The entire theater remained covered in brass engravings that read “J.L.”

  Jerry Lewis had a reputation, but a new stand-up comedian rivaled it. Jackie Mason rose quickly in the mid-1960s. He was considered enormously clever onstage. Offstage he was widely loathed.

  One of the brightest new acts of the period, Mason became a star comic with several appearances on the shows of Steve Allen, Garry Moore and Jack Paar. He made headlines after a set on The Ed Sullivan Show on October 18, 1964. Mason was in the middle of his act when he got a signal from the sidelines that he had a minute left. The stage cue distracted him and, in his opinion, distracted the audience. Mason was known for stabbing the air, punctuating his punch lines with an index finger. He gestured back at the stage manager and said, “Here’s a finger for you.” Sullivan was convinced he’d just seen Mason flip him the bird.

  Former Sullivan director John Moffitt says, “He was going on and on. We put one finger up, ‘One minute. Cut.’ Jackie put up his forefinger and people thought it was the middle finger. He went to Ed’s dressing room after and we heard Ed ranting for a half hour.” Sullivan told Mason he was banned from the show. Sullivan’s producer, Bob Precht, said Mason’s contract with the show was terminated “as a result of Mason’s on-camera obscene gestures and offensive conduct, insubordination and gross deviation from the material agreed upon.” Mason fought back. He sued the program for $3 million, charging defamation of character and stating that Precht “maliciously and wickedly contrived to blacken and defame.”

  Mason seemed to have the better argument, but few sided with him. Columnist Herb Kelly reported, “Everyone who’s discussed it with us had no sympathy for Mason. He can be an obnoxious fellow at times.” Though Mason claimed it did the opposite, it seemed the publicity from the incident actually boosted his status. “It made his career,” says George Schlatter. “Who knew who Jackie Mason was before that? Nobody. It established him.”

  Mason claimed he was blacklisted from show business as a result of the incident, but he was already burning his bridges. Fellow comedian Alan King said, “The Ed Sullivan Show really had nothing to do with his demise.” Mason simply rubbed people the wrong way. “He’s my least favorite person in the whole world,” says Friars Club patriarch Freddie Roman. Lou Alexander says, “Jackie Mason was brilliant, but do I like him personally? Not one bit! I never liked him for one minute! None of us liked him.” Shecky Greene says, “He’s brilliant—but I think he’s a piece of shit.” And television director Alan Rafkin said, “Jackie Mason was one of the most unlikeable people I’ve ever met and a royal pain to work with.”

  Jack Carter was around Mason a lot in the 1960s and says, “Everybody wanted to hit him.” In November 1966, someone wanted not only to hit him, but to kill him. Mason was in his bed at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas when three shots were fired through the balcony. Mason was unscathed, but the gunfire peppered the headboard. The assassination attempt went unsolved.

  Soon after, a woman phoned the entertainment director of the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, yelling, “Those bullets [that were] supposed to get Jackie in Las Vegas will kill you instead if you book him.”

  Two weeks later in Vegas, while Mason was sitting in the passenger seat of a friend’s car, a vehicle accelerated toward the automobile and smashed into him. He was rushed to the hospital and treated for cuts and bruises. The attacking car fled the scene, and no one was ever arrested.

  A year later another assault left him bloodied, battered and bruised. “Comedian Jackie Mason has a bandaged nose and blood-stained shirt at a Miami hospital . . .” reported a
Florida paper. “He was hit 8 to 10 times in the face by an unknown assailant. Mason said he was parked in front of his apartment with his date about 5 a.m. when a man opened his car door, slugged him and ran.”

  Mason is aware of his reputation: “As soon as I walk into the Friars Club, you never saw such hostility. Alan King with venom, full of vicious hate, Freddie Roman, full of hate. They don’t event try to hide it—it’s right in their faces. I’m not close to too many comedians.”

  In a business where charm is often essential, it’s amazing that Mason’s career has endured. Another comedian was not so lucky. While Mason blamed Ed Sullivan for his career problems, Shelley Berman did the same regarding a remarkable 1963 cinema vérité documentary called Comedian Backstage. It was a compelling look at a comic at the height of his stardom, but Berman says it cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in canceled bookings and destroyed his career. However, as with Mason, there is a scapegoat at play. If anything hampered the career of Berman it was, according to contemporaries, Berman’s own doing.