The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Robert Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Rat Packer Peter Lawford, received much of the Mob’s invective. “They scared the shit out of Peter,” wrote Rat Pack expert Shawn Levy. “He cowered in the corner of a Copacabana dressing room when a couple of thick-necked guys in fedoras walked in on him and wanted to know why Bobby Kennedy was being so hard on their friends.”

  Billionaire Howard Hughes took advantage of the situation. Hughes sold his Trans World Airlines for an enormous sum at the end of 1966, but the dough was subject to the undistributed profits tax. Hughes needed a massive investment to skirt taxes. Las Vegas was the answer. His move was a tax dodge, but he painted himself as an anti-Mob savior and promised to “chase out the hoods.”

  U.S. district attorney George Franklin and Nevada governor Paul Laxalt saw Hughes as a possible solution to Mob rule, so they were peeved when the Department of Justice investigated the acquisitions to see if they violated antitrust laws. Hughes was going to take over the Stardust Hotel when the feds revoked his application. Franklin said, “I wish the anti-racketeering division and the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice would get together so that they can make up their minds what they want to do with Vegas.”

  Hughes moved to Vegas and took over the Desert Inn. “Howard Hughes had the top floor of the Desert Inn,” says former Vegas booker George Schlatter. “They wanted that suite back. Howard Hughes got pissed off so he bought the hotel. Then he brought in businessman Robert Maheu from Utah. Maheu brought in the Mormon Mafia. Hughes brought in all the corporate guys and started running it like a business. It changed Las Vegas forever.”

  Hughes purchased the Desert Inn, the Frontier and the Sands in 1967. Corporate powerhouses followed his lead. The Fujiya Corporation bought the Flamingo, and other corporations swallowed Holly­wood next. In 1967 Transamerica Corporation took over United Artists, Gulf Western took over Paramount and Seagram became the primary stockholder of MGM. Showbiz was corporatized.

  The mobsters and their corporate successors had plenty in common. The corporate element could be every bit as ruthless as the Mob in its pursuit of profit. If criticized for unethical business practices, it had the same defense of “operating a legitimate business.” Corporate Vegas worked less crudely than the Mob, but its goals were the same. As the salient novelist Raymond Chandler had observed, there was a “spiritual kinship between the operations of big money business and the rackets. Same faces, same expressions, same manners. Same way of dressing and same exaggerated leisure of movement.”

  Hughes invested $300 million in Las Vegas over the next four years. Acquisitions included the Landmark Hotel, the Silver Slipper, the Castaways, an airport and a television station. He bought Harold’s Club in Reno and invested in electronic technology. “The Sands and other hotels that Hughes acquired were computerized,” said columnist Earl Wilson. “Gamblers’ junkets, which hauled well known players to Las Vegas free and gave them complimentary rooms, were discontinued or greatly reduced. A more careful watch was kept on the credit of the stars who gambled.”

  “Everything changed,” says comedienne Rusty Warren. “The counting was computerized. The waitresses no longer made the same kinds of tips. They bought the hotels and then leased out the gambling to people who knew what they were doing.” It wasn’t subtle. “Hughes changed the whole character of the town,” wrote columnist James Bacon. “Banks and insurance companies started investing in hotels. Back in the old days it was run by the Mafia and run quite efficiently. You could see the greatest entertainment in the world at low cost. Now that the town is run by businessmen, the prices are outrageous. Every department must show a profit. In the old days, the Mafia let the casino carry the whole operation.”

  As Vegas changed, so too did American supper club culture. Mob entities fell around the country and the new hippie movement rejected traditional tuxedo showbiz. Supper club floor shows were replaced with deejays playing records. New York’s top supper club faded away. “The Copacabana was ready to close and I get a call from Jules Podell,” says Shecky Greene. “Jules Podell pleaded with me. ‘Shecky, I need you.’ I never went back. It was finished.” Tom Dreesen saw the same thing at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago. “If you played Mister Kelly’s, you had made the big time—but now it was on its last legs. One night they didn’t have any salad in the kitchen. The chef had to chip in to go to the store and get some.”

  Comedians did not like the changes. “When I was working Vegas, the Mob ran Vegas,” says comedian Lou Alexander. “The Mob was great to us and they would give us everything: the shows, the rooms, the meals—whatever you want. They really knew how to treat performers. Vegas in the 1960s was real fun. Now it’s corporate.”

  The late 1960s showed an incredible divide between a generation of young, stoned kids and their horrified parents. The gap is demonstrated by some end-of-decade statistics. While psychedelic longhairs dominated musical trends in 1967, Lawrence Welk, the king of squares, sold $4.5 million worth of albums. Bob Hope was polarizing fans with his unwavering support of the Vietnam War, but five of the ten highest-rated television programs in 1969 were Bob Hope specials. The unrest played out among comedians on the late night talk shows.

  The late night talk show spread beyond NBC for the first time in 1964. ABC wanted to challenge Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and made three attempts—The Les Crane Show, The Joey Bishop Show and The Dick Cavett Show.

  Les Crane was hired as ABC’s first late night talk show host in November 1964. He had done a radio program for KGO San Francisco, sometimes interviewing comedians from the floor of the hungry i. Lured to WABC in New York, Crane welcomed controversial opinion, and became the first radio host to take calls from irate listeners. ABC, feeling his calculated outrage could lure viewers from Carson, put him under contract.

  The Les Crane Show purposely booked guests who were unwelcome elsewhere. It blazed a television first when Randy Wicker, an openly gay man, came on the program to talk about the gay lifestyle. “It was the first time that an LGBT spokesperson faced an audience,” said Wicker. “That was in 1965. [We] took call-in questions. I remember a technician followed me out to the car and, with tears streaming down his face, told me how much he appreciated what I had done.”

  ABC inserted the word “controversial” in its show publicity, but the labored approach rang false. “Les Crane was a real nice-looking guy, but I didn’t think his show worked,” says comedian-turned-talk-show-host John Barbour. “There was just something artificial about what Les did. Les was sort of manufacturing an image.”

  The Les Crane Show was canceled after a mere four months. ABC regretted Crane’s “failure to cut in on Johnny Carson’s Tonight audience.” He was fired, and the format changed: Network suits saw no sense in giving cultural dissenters a platform if it didn’t get ratings. “I’m quite shocked,” said Crane. “I’d been on the network for fourteen weeks, but I suppose ABC wasn’t satisfied with the speed of our growth. I’m also sorry and disappointed that ABC wasn’t more patient.”

  ABC renamed the program Nightlife and producer Nick Vanoff tested a rotation of new hosts—Pat Boone, Dave Garroway, Allan Sherman, Jack Carter and Shelley Berman. Nobody watched, so Les Crane returned. ABC added Nipsey Russell as his sidekick and gave Crane new gimmicks. “He had a microphone that was hidden in a rifle, and he would point it at people,” says Marty Ingels, a regular guest on the show. “He’d press a button on the rifle and then they spoke.” In the words of television critic Jack Gould, “Mr. Crane is something of a fascinating product of gimmickry.” Each episode of Nightlife had a different theme—censorship, drugs, draft dodging—but again, compared with the freewheeling fun of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Nightlife was a serious drag. Crane was canceled again, and is barely a footnote in history.

  Comedian Joey Bishop was the next competitor. He seemed like formidable competition, but when ABC gave the Rat Pack jester a late night talk show starting April 17, 1967, Carson was
unconcerned. Many affiliates didn’t even bother to air The Joey Bishop Show in its proper 11:30 time slot, running old horror movies in its place. Only after the Mummy and the Wolfman were done with their respective rampaging did Bishop appear.

  The Joey Bishop Show was ninety minutes of innocuous talk with occasional themed episodes (one episode served as an infomercial for the Rowan & Martin movie The Maltese Bippy). But by virtue of its existing in the late 1960s, it could not avoid cultural unrest. The Joey Bishop Show featured the type of controversies that The Les Crane Show tried to manufacture. “It was really touch and go, because there were a lot of political people around at that time,” says the program’s head writer, Slick Slavin. “We were the first ones to give Jesse Jackson a national forum. He told the A&P stores in Chicago they had twenty-four hours [until a boycott was implemented] and scared everyone to death.”

  There were other tense moments. Folk singers Delaney & Bonnie stormed off the show, claiming Bishop’s people were censoring their songs. Tom Smothers appeared on an episode ranting about his CBS censorship battles. Marlon Brando came on waving a gun. “In the midst of his interview with Joey, he suddenly pulls out a gun and holds it to the side of Joey’s head,” said Slavin. “Brando doesn’t say anything . . . The audience goes into a deep freeze and they stay there. He says, ‘You see, Joey, how easy it would be for me to kill you. And that’s because it’s too easy for anyone to get a gun. Tonight, I’m asking everyone to turn in their guns.’” The same appearance had Brando criticizing the Oakland police force for assassinating Black Panther Fred Hampton. The police slapped him with a lawsuit.

  The FCC’s Section 315 caused further havoc for The Joey Bishop Show during the election year of 1968. Media scholar Erik Barnouw explained the statute, also known as the equal time provision: “If a station licensee let a legally qualified [political] candidate ‘use’ the station, other candidates for the same office had to be given ‘equal opportunities’ to use the station. This was assumed to mean that if one candidate got free time, rival candidates were entitled to free time; if one paid for time, the same rates and conditions had to apply to the rivals. Such programs made licensees uncertain about their obligations.”

  Richard Nixon was running for president and was interviewed on The Joey Bishop Show for thirty minutes. Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey appeared the following week under the pro­vision. But then other candidates demanded the same, and Bishop’s program became a platform for Henning Blomen of the Socialist Labor Party, Fred Halstead of the Socialist Workers Party and the vice presidential candidates from those same organizations. By law The Joey Bishop Show had to comply, even as the host complained that Commies had overthrown his program.

  Comedian Dick Gregory also ran for president in 1968. Gregory had become one of the most famous political activists in America, and he had a lot of clout in the progressive community. “Dick Gregory called me,” says Paul Krassner. “He said, ‘I’m going to run for president. Do you think Bob Dylan would be a good running mate?’” Dylan wasn’t interested. Instead Gregory chose Mark Lane, a scholar on the JFK assassination. Gregory and Lane ran under the banner of the Peace and Freedom Party and made it onto a handful of state ballots. The only comedic gimmick Gregory employed was a mock dollar bill with his face in place of George Washington’s. The U.S. Treasury quickly confiscated the play money, claiming it was a violation of federal law.

  The Gregory-Lane ticket ran on an antiwar platform and received little news coverage in comparison to George Wallace of Alabama, who was also campaigning for the presidency. Gregory and Wallace were the antithesis of each other. Gregory spent the 1960s fighting for racial equality while Wallace fought to maintain segregation. The Peace and Freedom Party filed a $5 million lawsuit against ABC, CBS and NBC for denying Gregory airtime. Dick Gregory never appeared on The Joey Bishop Show. Governor Wallace did.

  Gregory felt there was a conspiracy to silence him. The lengths his detractors would go were made clear in declassified FBI memoranda. J. Edgar Hoover authored a series of memos suggesting they “develop counter-intelligence measures to neutralize him [Gregory]. This should not be in the nature of an expose, since he already gets far too much publicity. Instead, sophisticated completely untraceable means of neutralizing Gregory should be developed.” Gregory had made a comment in the press about the nefarious nature of organized crime. Hoover clipped the news item and wrote in his memo, “Consider the use of this statement in developing a counter-intelligence operation to alert La Cosa Nostra to Gregory’s attack.”

  In the end Dick Gregory received a meager forty-seven thousand votes (writer Hunter S. Thompson cast one of them). Gregory survived all neutralization plots and his campaign symbolically challenged the two-party system. “We keep voting for the lesser of two evils, but the evil keeps getting worse and worse.”

  The Joey Bishop Show was canceled after three fairly successful seasons. Coffeehouse comic Dick Cavett was hosting a low-rated morning talk show on ABC when he was tapped as Bishop’s replacement. “I learned about it while sitting in a London theater with the curtain about to rise,” says Cavett. “An American woman slapped me on the shoulder from the row behind and said, ‘Congratulations!’ I said, ‘For what?’ She said, ‘You’re replacing Joey Bishop.’ I thought the woman was drunk.”

  Cavett entered late night at the right time. The conflict in the country made for compelling late night drama, and today The Dick Cavett Show stands as a helluva time capsule. It had a loyal audience, but a brief run compared with Carson’s.

  Cavett was often portrayed as an intellectual, but Joan Rivers argued it was Carson who used smarts on the air. “I’m a very good friend of Dick Cavett. He’s wonderful and he’s brilliant, but Johnny Carson is brighter. Dick is very smart, but Dick talks to smart people. Dick has a much better program, but any one of us could talk to Orson Welles. Johnny talks to morons. That’s tough.”

  Activists like Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman and Dave Meggyesy had a network platform on Cavett’s show, to the consternation of the Nixon administration. Years later, when the Nixon Tapes were declassified, it was revealed that the president had asked White House aides Chuck Colson and H. R. Haldeman what could be done about The Dick Cavett Show.

  President Nixon: Is he just a left-winger? Is that the problem?

  Haldeman: I guess so.

  President Nixon: Is he Jewish?

  Haldeman: Don’t know. Doesn’t look it.

  President Nixon: What the hell is Cavett?

  Colson: Oh Christ, he’s, God, he’s . . .

  President Nixon: He’s terrible?

  Colson: He’s impossible. He loads every program.

  President Nixon: Nothing you can do about it, is there?

  Colson: We’ve complained bitterly about the Cavett shows.

  President Nixon: Well, is there any way we can screw him? That’s what I mean. There must be ways.

  Haldeman: We’ve been trying to.

  While the administration failed to get Cavett canceled, ABC did demote him. It went from a nightly program to one week per month, sharing the time slot with a rotation of late night specials. “ABC never figured out how to promote The Dick Cavett Show,” wrote TV Guide. “Nor did they promote it enough; and too few—about 141 out of 175—of its affiliates carried the show. Of these, some 25 stations delayed telecasting it until the wee hours of the morning.”

  Antiwar sketch troupe The Committee appeared on an episode of The Dick Cavett Show, sharing the panel with Janis Joplin. In the years to come, the fingerprints of The Committee were found on The Bob Newhart Show, Cheech & Chong, WKRP in Cincinnati and the Steve Martin film The Jerk. It was a merging of traditional sketch comedy and the hippie underground.

  Alan Myerson and Irene Riordan founded The Committee in San Francisco in 1963. They adopted the name as a salute to the reviled House Un-American Activities Committee. Featuring politically minded members of
Second City, The Committee was aligned with the 1960s protest movement. Counterculture youth flocked to The Committee’s San Francisco theater to see comedy that reinforced their point of view.

  “The Committee had a political nature that was different from Second City,” says troupe member Peter Bonerz. “Because it was in San Francisco, it reflected the changes in America culturally, musically, narcotically. Freedom of speech happened. All kinds of people were drawn to San Francisco. San Francisco had topless entertainment and jazz and it had The Committee. Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, Kent State, the Free Speech Movement of Berkeley, the antiwar protests—it was all inspired by what was happening in the Bay Area. There were all these Masonic ballrooms that had been collecting flies now opening every other week, and all of a sudden there’s Bob Dylan onstage with the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez and the Jefferson Airplane. The Committee reflected that.”

  The Committee was embraced by the San Francisco counter­culture. Poet Michael McClure was a big fan—although literary leader Kenneth Rexroth dismissed it as “charades in a Quaker work camp.” Either way, it had people talking. “The Vietnam War was very much a part of our show,” says Bonerz. “We wanted to reflect the divergence of opinions in the country. In our audience uniformed members of the military were sitting at nightclub tables next to hippies. Onstage we’d have a scene between a recently returned Vietnam vet and a hippie. It reflected what our audience was. And people would get up and scream and walk out. There would be fistfights, which was exactly what we wanted—bring it to the surface. We weren’t just entertainers. If you came to our show—you were made aware.”