For Laughing Out Loud

by Ed McMahon

  I guess I started drinking when I was working in the carnivals. I was young and I was one of the few people with the show going to college and for me that was a way of proving I belonged. There's a lot of alcohol around a carnival. A lot of people walked around with a half-pint of whiskey in their back pocket. I didn't get into that so much as having a few beers at the end of the day. For me, drinking has always been a reward, payment for a good day's work. You finish your work, you're entitled to a couple of drinks.

  I started taking my drinking seriously in the marines. At the end of the day the pilots would get together for happy hour, perhaps the longest hour in history, and talk flying. When I was in Korea not only were we working very hard under difficult conditions, people were trying to kill us. About the only place to go to relax was the officers' club that I'd built. One night, I remember, we'd been drinking and we were walking to the mess hall in a downpour, the whole camp was one big mud bowl, and this buddy of mine whose nickname was Herkimer kept slipping into foxholes. After he did that a couple of times I stood on the edge of the foxhole, looked down at him lying in the mud, I mean he looked as miserable as we all felt, and said, "Herkimer, I told you the last time you did that it wasn't funny. It wasn't funny then and it isn't funny now. So the next time you fall in a foxhole, no one's gonna laugh. But this time, Herkimer, we will laugh."

  When I got back to the States I started commuting to New York to try to get voice-over work in commercials. I'd get there early in the morning and try to schedule interviews and auditions, but most of the time was spent waiting, waiting for a return phone call, waiting for a meeting, waiting for an audition. I'd have an interview at 10 A.M. and my next appointment wouldn't be until 2 P.M. If waiting had been a profession, I would have been a star. Michael's Pub on East Forty-eighth Street became my office. Michael's Pub was the hangout for people in this line of wait . . . work. Everybody would gather there between appointments. It was at Michael's Pub that I met the best voice-over people in the business, people like Pat Hernon, who later became a weatherman, the great Bill Wendell, Bob Delaney, who broadcast the Boston Red Sox games, the great Fred Collins, known for his cigarette tag line, "and . . . they are mild," as well as the line "More people watch ABC than any other news organization." Believe me, when Fred Collins told you they were mild, you believed they were mild. And when Pat Hernon told you it was raining outside, you could look outside and tell how much he'd had to drink.

  During the hours we spent waiting at Michael's Pub many of us became close friends. Now, most of us would drink only coffee during the day, we wouldn't even have a beer before going to an audition for a beer commercial, but after that last audition or when the phone didn't ring again, well, we did a little drinking. A little drinking? Let me be a little more precise about this: this group was to drinking what Charles Eiffel was to erector sets.

  Both the best and the worst thing about drinking excessively is that you really can't remember exactly what you did when you were drinking. I can state unequivocally, however, that there is absolutely no truth to the story about Pat Hernon and me climbing the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Now, there may well have been a discussion about the possibility of climbing that tree, there might even have been some wagers placed on our ability to climb that tree, but we did not climb the tree. Oh sure, maybe we did attempt to climb that tree, but as my close friend Charlie Cullen will attest, the guards never let us close enough.

  On another occasion, I remember, Bobby Quinn, the director of The Tonight Show, Mort Rosen, who owned Sneaky Pete's, our hangout in Los Angeles, and I flew to Las Vegas to surprise Johnny when he did his nightclub act. We stayed the whole weekend, the whole, long weekend, and we drank to the New Year. I think by the time we finished, the New Year we were drinking to was 2146. Our flight back to New York was not direct, and apparently when we stopped in Los Angeles Mort Rosen got off the plane. Now, he didn't tell me he was getting off, so I still believe it was his fault that I thought he was sitting next to me the entire flight. I don't know who it was that I was speaking to during that trip, but he must have thought he was Mort Rosen because he never corrected me.

  The most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me while I was drinking took place years later, when I was the spokesperson for Budweiser. The wonderful people at Anheuser-Busch had a party at a club in St. Louis. This combined two of my favorite activities, business and drinking. As the evening was coming to an end, a terrific man named Jimmy Orthwein, the chairman of the board of D'Arcy McManus, the brewery's advertising agency, invited several people back to his house to continue the party. Hey, more party? That sounded like a good idea to me. He gave me directions to his home and I told my driver how to get there. We drove down this long, very private road, past several beautiful homes, until I told the driver where to turn. I was the first one to arrive, but fortunately the front door was open. So I went in and decided to get everything ready for the others.

  It was a beautiful home. I puttered around, I set up the glasses on the bar, I went into the kitchen and filled two ice buckets, I put some soft music on the stereo and turned on just enough lighting to create the proper atmosphere, I poured myself a drink, and just as I was about to light the fire, I turned around and saw a woman in her nightgown standing on the stairway with two children. "What are you doing in my house?" she asked.

  What was I doing in her house? That seemed like a good question. "Isn't this the Orthwein home?" I asked, feeling quite certain I knew the answer.

  "No," she said, "this is the Griesedieck home."

  I knew that name. The Griesedieck family owned Falstaff brewery, one of Anheuser-Busch's competitors. So not only did I walk into someone's home early in the morning, turn on the stereo, and pour myself a drink, probably scaring them to death, but I'd invaded the home of a big rival of the company for whom I was the spokesperson. Now, had I really been thinking clearly at that moment, I might have said, "I guess you've never seen my program, Bloopers and Practical Jokes?" or, "Remember that notice you got from American Family Publishers that said you may have already won ten million dollars?" Instead, I said, "I'm really sorry." I started cleaning up the house. "Let me just turn off the stereo and put these glasses away. I'll just be a minute, let me turn off the lights, and I'll go out the same door I came in."

  Now, for just one minute, put yourself in this woman's place. There she was, asleep, happy, when suddenly she was awakened by the sound of music coming from downstairs. The lights were on, someone was in the kitchen. She walked slowly downstairs, and there, in her living room, Ed McMahon was standing by himself having a drink. Now, I really don't know what was going on in her mind at that moment, my guess is that she didn't think Ed McMahon had broken into her house just to have a drink, but whatever it was, I've always hoped she thought she was dreaming rather than having a nightmare.

  "Ed isn't drinking anymore," Johnny announced one night, ". . . of course, he isn't drinking any less either." Or, "The first time Ed saw Niagara Falls he asked, 'Does that come with scotch?' " The truth is, I drank, sometimes I drank a lot, but I didn't drink as much or as often as people believed. If I had, I wouldn't have been able to function as well as I did. I considered myself a drinking man, but physically I'm a big man and my system could absorb a great deal of alcohol. I could drink a lot. Besides, I used little tricks when I was drinking. For example, I always had a sip of water between sips of drinks. A sip of wine, a sip of water. A sip of a martini, a sip of ice water. Maybe that diluted the alcohol; whatever it did, it enabled me to drink a little more than most teams.

  One night I think I remember I spent in the St. Louis home of the great Gussie Busch, who could party with the best of me. Gussie used to have a little test. At the end of a meal I went with him into the smoking room in which he served his famous Pick Me Up Charlies. This was a drink served in a glass with a narrow top; it looked like a cordial glass. A Pick Me Up Charlie consisted of Courvoisier, a cognac, topped by a slice of lemon and a single sugar cube.
You drank it by chewing the lemon slice and sugar cube until they became a sweet and sour pulp, and then drank the Courvoisier through this filter. It was a very potent drink. Most people had two or three, and all of a sudden it was Wednesday.

  Please don't tell anyone, but I set the all-time record. Seventeen. At least that's what I was told later. Much later. But please, keep that to yourself.

  I never objected to Johnny's jokes about my drinking or the creation of this image. Object to it? I encouraged it. And I used it. People believed that I was their kind of man, the kind of regular guy who lived next door or with whom they could sit down and have a friendly drink. My reputation as a drinking man helped put me on a first-name basis with America. Everybody knew me as Ed, Big Ed. This image was certainly part of the reason I was hired by Anheuser-Busch as the spokesperson for Budweiser. I even wrote a slim book, Ed McMahon's Barside Companion, which was filled with bar games, jokes, bets, and tricks, such as how to make a needle float on a glass of water, how to make up your own "Tom Swifties," like " 'I had trouble with my power saw,' he said offhandedly," and how to answer questions like "Can a man marry his widow's sister in the United States?" The answer to that question is no; in order to marry his widow's sister he would have to be dead.

  Because of my reputation, whenever I was in a restaurant or a club people would send drinks to my table. Naturally I didn't want to hurt their feelings. Once, though, that created a little problem. I spent the evening with my good friend Jimmy Breslin, who was making the rounds of New York taverns in search of his column for the next day. We wound up at the bar of a well-known midtown restaurant, sitting next to a ruddy-faced man wearing a hat. This man turned to me and said, "I know you. I'm gonna buy you a drink."

  When someone I don't know speaks to me, I try to relate to them as an individual, I try to kid with them, make them feel I'm paying attention to them, not just giving them some sort of celebrity response. "That's very kind of you, sir," I said to this man, but then I jokingly added, "However, I never drink with a man who wears a hat at a bar." Breslin was just staring at me. I could tell from the lack of expression on his face I'd done something wrong. The whole place quieted. What I did not know was that this man was the head of a mob family running Newark or Trenton.

  "You know what?" the man said, hitting me in the shoulder. "You're absolutely right." He removed his hat and we had several drinks together. Later Breslin told me, "That's the kind of guy who would have shot off your kneecap just for laughs." Well, I thought, there's an unusual sense of humor.

  I went through several different periods in my drinking days and nights. There was my martini period, a scotch and soda period, scotch and water and vodka and water, scotch without vodka and water, and red and white wines. I did love those martinis before dinner. The question I have been asked most often about my drinking was what I did for a hangover. Now this was the most amazing thing of all: I've never had a hangover in my life. Never. There were many days when I'd wake up on what I assumed to be the next morning and I wasn't very sharp. It took me a while to focus. But I never experienced the traditional hangover, complete with headache, nausea, and spinning room. I know how bad they can be, though. One man who knew how to drink was my friend John Wayne. Duke was one of the great men of this world and a good friend. When Budweiser was repeating a television show we'd done together, they asked us to do several radio spots to promote it. Duke volunteered to do these commercials on the Tonight Show set. They set up a little recording area for us. I expected him hours after we'd finished taping the show, but to my surprise, when I walked backstage after the show he was standing there, waiting for me. "McMahon," he yelled in his booming voice, "I quit drinking!"

  I was surprised. "Really, Duke?" I asked.

  "Absolutely," he said firmly, and then added, "well, except tequila."

  And later that night, after we'd finished taping the spots, we went to Chasen's and drank tequila. And then we drank a little more tequila. And then a . . .

  In my barside companion I quoted a college study that stated that it takes from twelve to thirty-six hours for the body to return to normal following a night of drinking, and suggested that the best thing to do is just sleep it off. Well, if that's true, my body will get back to normal just after my 181st birthday. For me, the key to preventing a hangover is to always have something to eat before going to bed. That way the alcohol works on the food. But the best hangover remedy I know about is the hair of the dog, a Bloody Mary with tomato juice. Apparently whiskey depletes the vitamin B in your body and a Bloody Mary replenishes it. A good cold Budweiser with a few drops of Worcestershire sauce will do pretty much the same thing, because there are a lot of B-complex vitamins in the yeast.

  Among the lessons I learned from drinking was that I had to watch out for parked cars. As I stepped out of a cab after an evening of celebration with Charlie Cullen, I slipped and fell heavily into a parked car, spraining my ankle. They had to put it in a cast. On the show the next day, when Johnny asked, "Well, what happened to you?" I had to tell him the truth. With a sigh I admitted, "You probably won't believe this, but I got hit by a parked car."

  Anheuser-Busch once commissioned an eighteen-month study by the Wharton School of management research to find out why people drink. The study identified four types of drinkers. Indulgents, an incredibly small percentage of people, use alcohol to escape reality. Social drinkers use alcohol to sublimate their inhibitions; a drink helps them feel more comfortable at a party. A third group of people use alcohol to control others; at parties they'll tell the bartender to pour doubles to get everybody loose. But the largest group were the reparatives, those people who work hard and like to relax at the end of the day with a drink. I was in that last group; I was a reparative. No matter how much I drank the night before, I was never late for an appointment, I never missed a day of work, and I never showed up unprepared to do my job. In the thirty years I did The Tonight Show I probably missed six shows, five of them because of illness and the sixth was the night I took off because Claudia was leaving for Europe on her college graduation trip and I wanted to see her off. Listen, some days it was tough, I'd come home very late, Alyce would be asleep, and I'd write on the bathroom mirror in toothpaste, "Please wake me at 8." And at eight o'clock the next morning I'd be up and getting ready for work.

  Only once did I ever appear on The Tonight Show slightly . . . considerably . . . less than sober. That afternoon, while I was having lunch with some friends, among them the great songwriter Paul Williams, I got word that two lawsuits in which I was involved had both been settled in my favor. Normally I wouldn't drink during lunch if I were doing the show that day. But this news was so good I had to celebrate. I wasn't really drunk, although I certainly had a nice buzz on. Maybe I shouldn't have done the show that night, but my strong sense of responsibility—and several martinis—outweighed my good judgment. I guess the problem started when Johnny introduced Joan Embry, the wonderful representative of the San Diego Zoo. "We've had this lady on the show very often in the past, I guess, seven or eight years," he began.

  I tried to help him out. "Nine years," I said firmly.

  "Nine years, yeah," he agreed. "Several plus several'd be about nine." He was just beginning to sense that something might be wrong.

  "You said seven or eight, then . . ."

  "I didn't say seven or eight," he insisted. "I said several . . ."

  There are few people more insistent than someone who has been drinking and is convinced he's correct. "Then you said, 'seven or eight,' and I said, 'It's nine.' The animals you had as babies are now . . . ," I had to pause to figure this out, "ten years old."

  "That'd be about right," he agreed. He still wasn't sure how to handle me. I suspect he felt if he left me alone no one would notice.

  The worst thing you can do when you have too much to drink is pretend that you're sober. And that is what I tried to do. "Remember those animals that . . . did something funny on your tie? Those little baby lions were on
e year old. Now they're treacherous and ferocious ten-year-old animals."

  Johnny patted me on the arm. "Okay." Then he tried to save me. "Joan Embry's here tonight . . ."

  That was not going to be possible. "She's now thirty-two," I interrupted.

  "That's right. Joan is an animal handler and a trainer and . . ." Johnny couldn't resist any longer. He started laughing as he looked at me and said, "You really think you're fooling everybody, don't you?"

  "No, no, no, no. I'm just doing my best to help."

  "I know that," Johnny continued, but not easily, ". . . and she does her three horse shows a day, did you know that? At the animal park?"

  What I didn't know was how to be quiet. "Boy, is that an exciting idea."

  Now Johnny was getting into it. "Would you like an army cot or something maybe? Time to catch up on a little nappypoo or something, maybe?"

  See, my feelings were hurt. I was trying to make a point, even if I had no idea what it was, and my friend Johnny Carson was making fun of me. "I love Joan. I'm the only one who went to see her," I said defensively. "Doc has never seen her, you've never seen her. I went to the wild animal farm . . ."

  "It's all right, it's all right . . ."

  "But you're upsetting me."