by Norman Lear
“I’m flying back east tomorrow,” he said. “Can you get me a couple of sketches I can show to Jack Haley in New York?” Haley was a low-key song-and-dance man and a light comic, famous for playing the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. The Ford Motor Car Company had just hired him to host a new NBC musical comedy show, the Ford Star Revue, and David was helping to assemble the elements.
The woman whose bungalow we were renting lived with Ted Stanhope, a bit player in films who’d also done some TV, and he had a few scripts lying around. TV scripts were formatted differently in those early days, the page divided down the middle, with the actors’ words on the right side, and what the audience would be seeing on the left. In that format Eddie and I wrote two sketches, “School for Comics” and “Blind Date,” which David Susskind took with him to New York. Three days later he phoned us. Haley loved the sketches and wanted to do one of them on the first show. We would be paid seven hundred dollars per show for the team, and he wanted to know how quickly we could get to New York. Seven hundred dollars! Three hundred fifty dollars each! It seemed like as much money as there was in the world. A quick confab with Charlotte and Elaine and we called back to say we could be there the day after tomorrow.
The night before our early-morning flight we decided to dine together at the Simmonses’ apartment. On the way, Charlotte and I picked up a pint of Fleischmann’s gin, all we could afford, to toast ourselves with. Giddily, we did. Then there was the toast to Jack Haley: “May he be the Second Coming.” The First, of course, was Danny Thomas.
Having driven cross-country when Charlotte, Ellen, and I came to L.A. a year before, this trip with Eddie—American Airlines, Los Angeles to New York—was my first cross-country flight, a very big deal at the time, and the beginning of my professional life in entertainment. On top of that, NBC flew us first class. Eddie and I were flying high before we got off the ground.
At LaGuardia Airport there was a car waiting for us, and the uniformed driver at baggage claim was holding up a little sign. It was the first time we’d seen it in print: SIMMONS AND LEAR. My God, we felt important!
I hadn’t called my folks long distance from California to tell them the good news for the same reason we’d bought a pint of Fleischmann’s to celebrate with. In those days transcontinental phone calls were expensive, so the way I would communicate all’s well was to place a person-to-person call to Norman Lear. They would say I was out, I’d ask when Norman would be back (so that they would hear my voice), they’d say they weren’t sure, I’d thank the operator and say I’d call back, and the message was delivered. No charge for that in those years.
Now, while waiting for our luggage at LaGuardia Airport, I phoned Woodstock Street and my father answered. He was surprised at how close I sounded.
“Yeah, Dad,” I said, my child’s heart racing to share the news while the adult in me hoped it didn’t show. “I just landed at LaGuardia.”
“You’re in New York? What’re you doing in New York?”
“It’s a long story, Dad,” I answered in an uncontrollable rush. “Eddie and I wrote a routine for Danny Thomas and last week he did it at Ciro’s, you know, Ciro’s, and the audience, all big shots, laughed their heads off, and Ed and I have been hired to write a new show for Jack Haley, the Ford Star Revue, can you believe it, on NBC, and Dad, listen to this, they are paying us seven hundred dollars for the team. I will be making three hundred and fifty dollars a week!”
“When you make a thousand dollars a week,” H.K. replied, “that’s a lot of money.”
PART 2
Those Were the Days
At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assure your success.
—JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE
1
FROM LAGUARDIA AIRPORT we were taken to the Hotel Wellington in Midtown Manhattan, where a small one-bedroom suite with twin beds had been reserved for us. It was a Wednesday night, and we had four days to write a one-hour show—two big sketches, a monologue, and some incidental dialogue—to go into rehearsal Monday morning. The show had been on for a few weeks, and Eddie and I were replacing the original writers.
Our job that first week was eased by the fact that Mr. Haley wanted to do one of our audition sketches, “School for Comics.” That sketch was the first thing we wrote that was cast, captured by a TV camera, and available live to East Coast viewers. For the rest of the country, the shows were recorded on kinescope—placing a camera in front of a video monitor, filming the broadcast, then shipping it to other time zones for showing days later. Hal Kanter, one of the earliest and funniest comedy writers, famously said of the kinescope, “It was like viewing pea soup well enough to see the croutons.”
If the top of the fifties wasn’t quite the birth of television, it certainly qualified as the medium’s infancy. Most of the writers attracted to it came over from radio, so those of us who wrote exclusively for television were seen as a new breed. Eddie and I were looked upon as avant-garde members of the new medium and that lent us a special cachet. Yes, our personalities and abilities lived up to the buzz, but it was the dawning of a new era in entertainment that made us hot from the get-go.
We learned much of what we needed to know by paying close attention to the multicamera directors of the earliest TV variety shows, the Jack Haley show among them. Our director, Kingman Moore, was a god to all of us, and the director’s booth—with its multiple screens, mysterious panels of buttons, and the low hum of engineers and assistant directors who worked them—was holy space. One entered it in those early days as one might enter a shrine.
But back to “School for Comics.” It remains unforgettable for reasons beyond marking the start of my career in television. Jack Haley played the school’s teacher, real comics were cast as the students, and there we were, Simmons and Lear, our first days in the biz, working with a group of the best funnymen around early in their careers: Jackie Gleason, Jerry Lester, “Fat Jack” Leonard, Jack Carter, Joey Faye, and a few others. Haley was teaching his class a category of comedy known as insult humor. The students were lined up facing something like a statue with a blanket thrown over it. One by one the student-comics were to approach the statue, pull back the blanket to make the reveal, say something funny about it, and toss the blanket back over it. Of course, under the blanket—thought to be hilarious in 1950—was an unattractive woman.
In rehearsals Jackie Gleason, two years away from his giant success as star of the show named for him, never used a line we wrote for him and never said the same thing twice. This frustrated me, because I wanted him to do a line I felt we could depend on, and some of his ad-libs in rehearsal made no sense at all. It was Gleason who taught me, that very first week, that a truly funnyman can make anything he says seem funny. Unable to pin him down, I had no idea what he would say when it was his turn in the live broadcast to pull the blanket off the homely girl. When it happened, with that inimitable Gleason delivery, he said, “You’ve heard of nose drops? Well, hers did.” The audience howled.
“Live. Up at eight o’clock, off at nine,” is the way we described the physical broadcast. The experience of putting your week’s creation—comedy, song, and dance—before the pitiless eye of a camera to be shared with an unseen audience of millions is indescribable. It was a fraught, vulnerable high, akin in a way to flying a mission. After all the preparation, you were out on a limb and a prayer, and it would play out as planned, or not.
Our first show played out as planned. The audience loved it, Jack Haley was pleased, but no one I knew saw it. My folks didn’t have a TV—why they didn’t go next door to their friends who did, I’ll never know—and it would be a week before they ran a kinnie (kinescope) in L.A. But a certain stranger did see it and phoned before noon the next day. He introduced himself as Adolf Wenland, said he’d enjoyed the show last night, and asked if we’d been surprised by anything that morning. It was a strange question and I said we’d
been here only a week and it was still a surprise waking up in New York, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He cut to the chase and asked if we had yet left our suite that day. When I said we hadn’t, he said cheerily, “Well, then, open that front door, why don’t you?” We did, and there sat a case of Cutty Sark scotch. Indeed surprised, I reported it to Wenland and he said, “The Lamb Association of America wants you to know it is grateful for Mr. Haley’s mention of the word lamb in his monologue last night.”
Ten days earlier I was stretching to buy a pint of Fleischmann’s and now I was being given—given!—a case of Cutty Sark, twelve bottles, not pints but fifths, free. A bit of undisputed street wisdom leaped up at me: them what has, gets.
• • •
ED AND I had a small budget for another writer on the Haley show, and an itinerant TV scribe named Danny Simon was recommended to us. He arrived for a meeting with his kid brother Doc, whom he was mentoring. Our budget for one writer covered what the brothers, Danny and Doc Simon, asked for as a team. Doc eventually dropped his nickname, and Neil Simon became the most celebrated writer of hit comedies in the American theater, most of them equally successful as films. His first, Come Blow Your Horn, was produced by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, directed by Yorkin, the screenplay written by Lear, and starred Frank Sinatra. More about that coming up, but another point of connection was that years later, after both Neil and I had become well known, our mothers, both widowed, lived for a time in the same building in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Danny Simon came to have an early dinner with his mother one day. The women in the building enjoyed sitting together in the lobby in the late afternoon on an ad hoc basis, and on this day Mrs. Simon was one of them. Danny was making a good living in TV at the time, he always did, but Neil was a rock star, play after Broadway play of his going through the roof. Mrs. Simon saw Danny come in, and as she motioned to him, she said to the women nearest her, “Oh, girls, I want you to meet Danny, my son’s brother.”
• • •
THE SECOND AUDITION sketch we wrote for Jack Haley was called “Blind Date.” I hardly recognize the guy who could cowrite, be content with, and reap the reward for such a piece. “Blind Date” was about an extremely nearsighted guy whose buddy escorts him to the front door of a girl he has been fixed up with. When the camera cuts to the girl inside the apartment, we see that she, too, is nearsighted, and a girlfriend is preparing her for her blind date.
In those years, as a matter of vanity, men and women were less inclined to be seen wearing glasses, and the soft contact lens was not yet an option, so it seemed normal for their friends to suggest that the daters would make better first impressions without their glasses. And so the audience was treated to the spectacle of two near-blind people with their glasses removed, pretending to be well sighted while they stumbled, mistook things, and groped for other things, including each other.
Jack Haley did well with the sketch, but can you imagine what Jerry Lewis, with his genius for outrageous physical comedy, could have done with it? Well, that’s what Jerry Lewis himself wondered when he saw it on TV. Just a few weeks away from his own debut with Dean Martin on The Colgate Comedy Hour, Jerry phoned his agent at MCA and lowered the ramp for the next move on Simmons and Lear’s upward climb: “I just saw the Jack Haley show. Get me those writers!”
Since the Ford Star Revue and The Colgate Comedy Hour were both represented by Music Corporation of America, or, as it had been nicknamed, The Octopus (with its tentacles into every corner of show business), it was a simple matter to move Simmons and Lear from one show to the other (with a raise to $750 a week). In its giant roster of stars at that moment, none was hotter than the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. They’d already established a big reputation in supper clubs and, in 1949, took moviegoers by storm as featured performers in the film My Friend Irma. Their forthcoming hosting—in rotation with three other comics—of NBC’s competition to CBS’s Sunday night Ed Sullivan Show, Toast of the Town, was the most anticipated event of the 1950–51 TV season.
The head writer whom we would be working under was older than us, with a long history in radio, and was renowned for being funny not just as a writer but as a persona. Harry Crane more than lived up to his reputation. Ten minutes with him, and Simmons and Lear doubted who they were and why they were there. The man was hilarious. He could tell you your mother had an ear infection and make you laugh. He could add that she got the infection from sneezing near a plate of pitted olives and make you roar. The problem working with and under Harry was that after days of laughing together there was nothing laughable to write down. It required Harry’s delivery.
Two days before rehearsals were to begin we were told to expect a visit from NBC executives Pete Barnum, Sam Fuller, and Pat Weaver, the celebrated head of programming at NBC. They were looking for a heads-up on the material we’d been developing, which was hopefully on paper by now.
As we greeted the NBC giants, Eddie and I, without a word on paper, were struck dumb, but Harry Crane feasted on the moment. Pat Weaver and company, who held our careers in their hands, were eating out of Harry’s within minutes. He told them we were working on two sketches that were “so funny you could die, like dead, like drop dead, like when the boys read them they’ll die, too, and the audience, forget about it altogether, they will rock so hard with laughing, the whole building could shake, until the mezzanine falls into the orchestra, with the whole balcony on top of that, you can hear the sirens now, the ambulances, with the National Guard, the Red Cross with the blankets for the injured, and who knows, maybe doughnuts, all from the laughing, belly laughing, hysteria like you’ve never heard it. Tell them, Norman.”
I could not have uttered a syllable with a gun to my head. I didn’t have to. Harry Crane went on to describe a sketch with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis trying to rehearse in a tiny dressing room, with a fat woman in red sneakers holding on to a small boy with a kite, and wherever the hell it went from there, and the NBC execs were finessed and laughed their heads off. When they left it was to grab a drink at Toots Shor’s. With a wink and a “See you in the A.M.,” Harry went with them.
If Harry only wrote as funny as he delivered, he’d have been the most sought-after talent in the field. He was perfectly suited for Jerry Lewis—much more so, I came to realize, than Simmons and Lear were—but ironically he went on to something else after the first show and we stayed with M&L for three seasons.
The first Martin and Lewis episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour aired on September 17, 1950. We encouraged Harry Crane to write some version of the dressing room scene he had sold so brilliantly while we tackled another idea, “Movies Are Better Than Ever.” It was a send-up of the PR campaign by that name on behalf of the Theater Owners Alliance and the Motion Picture Association. Scared that they might be losing audience to the new medium, they were spending a fortune on ads in all media to downplay the advent of television. As it turned out, it was also my introduction to controversy.
In our sketch Dean was the manager of a movie theater and Marilyn Maxwell, a starlet of the time, played a ticket seller. So desperate were they to sell tickets that Dean was marking down admission prices and Maxwell was using all her feminine wiles to lure passersby into the empty theater. When Jerry, as Melvin, an innocent youth bouncing a basketball, wanders by, Marilyn applies every ounce of sex appeal to stop him and Dean hustles him with fast talk. But Melvin wants to go home instead because there’s something he wants to see on television. Every time Melvin says the word “television,” he’s clobbered over the head by Dean. Punchy from Dean’s attack and slathering over Maxwell, Melvin finally buys a ticket and goes inside, where the dark, the emptiness of the theater, and the loud echo of his voice frighten him and make him want even more to go home and “watch television,” at the mention of which he is of course clobbered once more.
A side note about the name Melvin. Somehow “Melvin,” with a rising w
hine in its middle, fell out of Jerry’s mouth funnier than any other name he tried. So Dean made a point of asking Jerry his name in every sketch, and his response, with the audience by now anticipating it, was always “Melvin.” It grew funnier each time. In another scene in which Jerry said his name, Dean went on to ask if he had a last name.
“Yes,” Jerry replied. “Melvin.” Dean’s incredulous “Melvin Melvin?” was hilarious, topped only by Melvin’s proud delivery of his full name, “Melvin M. Melvin.” Then, after the laugh: “I suppose you’re wondering what the M stands for.”
As that first broadcast ended, I was dissatisfied. Even with the Melvin business, I thought we’d written a scene that had some real bite; funny, yes, but satirically edgy. Jerry played it 100 percent slapstick. “But did you hear those laughs?” asked David Susskind. “That’s all they’ll be talking about around the watercooler tomorrow morning.”
Of course David was right. When television was young and not everyone owned a set, it was the office watercooler they all gathered around to discuss what some had seen and others had missed the night before. Fresh on the scene, their comic sensibilities pricelessly matched, Dean and Jerry could do no wrong, and sure enough, on the Monday morning following that first show, they were all the watercooler talk in offices everywhere. And a day later I learned that, despite my concern, Jerry’s clowning did not destroy the meaning of our sketch . On the contrary, the sketch had enormous impact. In his biography of Jerry Lewis, Shawn Levy wrote, “The nation’s movie theater owners and film producers were outraged by this savage parody of their fight against the onslaught of television.” The skit created so much of a hullabaloo among the studios and theater owners that Hal Wallis, the boys’ movie producer, urged them to take out full-page ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter apologizing for their assault on the industry. Martin and Lewis did further penance by offering to perform at the next convention of the Theater Owners Alliance.