For Laughing Out Loud

by Ed McMahon

  At 5 A.M. Pam and I walked into the Las Vegas marriage license bureau. The woman typing our papers looked up and recognized me. "You!" she said. "Are you doing what I think you're doing?"

  Now, since we were in the marriage license bureau at five o'clock in the morning getting a license, there was not a lot of room for denial.

  Later that morning, as Pam drove us to Boulder City, I turned around and showed Katherine and Toni two small ring boxes, a blue one and a black one. "Okay," I said, "I'll tell you what's going on. Pam and I are getting married. Toni, you're going to be the maid of honor. Katherine, you're going to be the ring girl and the best man. The blue box is the prettiest, so that's for the lady, the black box is for the man. When the priest asks you for the rings to bless them, you'll hand them to him . . ."

  Because this took place during Lent we couldn't be married in the chapel, so we were legally married in the Ed McMahon Child Care Center at St. Jude's. What do you do the night of your marriage when your best man is your fiveyear-old daughter? It's automatic; you go to Excalibur, the medieval jousting spectacle, where you eat your wedding dinner with your fingers. Our team was the White Knights and they won, which we agreed was a fine symbol. Back at the beautiful Golden Nugget Hotel we had our wedding cake, although in this case it was our wedding key lime pie.

  On Monday I appeared on Live with Regis and Kathy Lee and announced that I'd gotten married over the weekend.

  Since then Pam and I have done even better than live happily every after; we've lived healthily ever after. I believe Pam saved my life. When we got serious she told me, "I love you and I want us to be together for a long time, but the only way that's going to happen is if you change your habits. You're going to have to learn how to eat healthy."

  All those years I hadn't been eating just for myself, I was eating for the starving kids all over the world my grandmother Katie had told me about. My weight had always been a big topic for Johnny's jokes, and over the years it had gotten bigger and bigger. To me it seemed as if I was either always on a diet or always about to go on a diet. I was always going to start the strictest diet known to man—next Monday morning. Through the years I'd tried probably fifty different diets, everything that came along, the Stillman diet, the grapefruit diet, the hard-boiled-egg diet, Dr. Atkins's diet, the Scarsdale diet. One I particularly loved was the martinis and whipped cream diet; now there was a diet that was right for me. It was based on the theory that if you kept your carbohydrate intake to less than sixty grams a day you would lose weight and could still eat steak, drink martinis— but you couldn't eat watermelon because it contained too many carbs. I tried fasting—that's when I learned that the slowest thing in the world is a fast. They all worked for a short time.

  I wasn't just eating too much; I was also eating too much of the wrong things. My favorite breakfast, for example, consisted of a bagel with the bread scooped out, filled with tomato, and covered with melted American cheese and spices. By not eating all of the bagel, I figured, I was cutting down on starch. Pam changed all that. She taught me about nutrition. She figured out how to cook everything I love, but with low-fat ingredients. You can't taste the difference, but your body knows.

  Now, I had cut down considerably on my drinking before I'd met Pam. But Pam insisted I drink. One glass of red wine a day, with my meal, which is very good for the heart. The truth is that sometimes I cheat a little: it's still one glass, but I fill it twice.

  I married Pam for better and for worse, but I don't remember anyone saying anything about exercise. My response when I was asked to do some exercise on The Tonight Show —"I have a man who does that for me"—was true. Except for that part about there being a man. Earlier in my life I had been a good athlete and in Marine Corps condition, but later in life my exercise had been limited primarily to climbing in and out of limousines. As I'd gotten more successful, in fact, my shape actually began to resemble a dollar sign—I had a round bulge in the front and a round bulge in the back. Pam put both of us on an exercise program. We have dueling treadmills—two treadmills that face each other. And if we don't get outside for a fast walk in the morning, we use those treadmills. Now I can go nowhere faster than ever before. I also started lifting weights. I'd always wondered why the weights were called dumbbells when I was the one picking them up over and over and putting them right back. But as I've learned, moderate weight training is an excellent way of keeping muscles trim and flexible.

  The result has been that I'm in the best condition of my adult life. The one place I resisted Pam's attempts was when it came to alternative medicine. The closest I'd ever gotten to alternative medicine was taking a multivitamin. But Pam asked me to go with her to see her doctor, Soram Singh Khalsa, M.D., who uses a combination of Western and Eastern medicines. I agreed to go with her, but I made it clear that I had no intention of getting involved myself. When I walked into the office, all the doctors were wearing turbans. I felt as if I were walking into a Tibetan monastery. The last person I had seen wearing a turban was Carnac.

  I told Dr. Khalsa, "I hold in my hand the final . . ." Well, actually I told him I was there to be a supportive husband, that Pam was his patient. And I told him that as he examined me and showed me a simple diagnostic technique called applied kinesiology. And I told him that as he prescribed a program of herbs and nutritional supplements. And I continue to tell him that twice a month during our regularly scheduled appointments. And I'm firm about it too!

  And that doesn't even include acupuncture. I try to be a positive person, and one thing about which I've always been positive is that I don't like needles. I could land an airplane on an aircraft carrier at night or fly over enemy lines while people were shooting at me, but the idea of getting a needle or having my blood taken frightened me. Needles hurt. So it was difficult for me to accept the concept that being stuck with needles took pain away. But when I started having back problems, Dr. Khalsa claimed that acupuncture might bring relief. Yeah, sure, I thought, I know how that works. The needles hurt so much they make you forget all about the pain in your back. But I agreed to try it. I really do dislike needles so this wasn't easy for me.

  The biggest problem with acupuncture, I discovered, is that it gives medicine a bad name. Who wants to get a treatment called "puncture"? It sounds painful. It sounds like "root canal." But it worked for me, my back pains were greatly diminished. And to my surprise, it was about as painful as a mosquito bite. So what acupuncture really needs is a new name, something like "spot therapy," or "pleasure points." I just call it relief.

  Before I met Pam the chances that I would completely change my lifestyle, that I'd limit my drinking to a glass or two of red wine, follow a diet of nutritious low-fat foods, take an array of vitamins and herbs, exercise every day, and let people wearing turbans stick needles in me were probably about the same as that of Aunt Blabby modeling in Sports Illustrated 's swimsuit edition. Maybe even a little worse. You know, with the right lighting, on a beach, Aunt Blabby wasn't so . . .

  But I had no choice, I had to do all these things. Once again I need all the energy I can muster because I'm about to go into battle one more time: my daughter Katherine is now a teenager. If Doc were doing the music for this book, this would be the page for really terrifying music. Thus far I've learned one thing about raising a child in this rapidly changing world: the fact that I've already raised four children is absolutely no preparation for raising Katherine. I realized that when she was just a baby. Instead of the traditional Dr. Dentons and sailor suits, the baby stores sold everything from baby flapper outfits to astronaut suits. Everything in her life had to have a theme, she couldn't just be a pretty baby girl. Her bedroom, for example, was done in Miss Piggy; everything from lamps to drawers featured the divine Miss P.

  Very few of the lessons I'd learned about child raising applied. Personal computers didn't exist when my older kids were growing up, so they never surfed the Internet; not only didn't they have their MTV, television consisted of only about six channel
s; there were no such things as Sega or Nintendo, serious sports for girls, body piercing, or even rap music; they had very little exposure to drugs; they didn't have to worry about AIDS; and they knew very little about sex.

  Things are so different now. Katherine was as sophisticated at eleven years old as my older daughters were when they were sixteen. When she was five years old we took her to Spago, one of the most popular restaurants in Los Angeles, and she ordered an artichoke. An artichoke? I didn't even know what an artichoke was until I was thirty-eight. She asked for asparagus. It is a known fact that not a single child in the 1950s or 1960s ever asked for asparagus.

  Children today have access to so much more information than children of any other era in history that the old methods of raising children no longer apply. They have a hundred TV channels and they're taught about drugs in school and they know about sex. Know about it? When Katherine was twelve we told her Aunt Martha was going to the hospital and that Maggie would be born that day, and Katherine replied, "Oh, you mean she's having a c-section?"

  Kids have so much more knowledge about the world. It's impossible to restrict their access to it; the best thing to do is try to channel it in a positive direction. "Channel" really is the right word. I refer to television as "the sorcerer." It can be magical, it can be an extraordinarily effective teaching tool, but if parents aren't careful it can take control of their children's minds. Katherine does not have a TV set in her bedroom, and we try to monitor the shows she watches; but like kids of any time, the shows she wants most to watch are the shows we don't want her watching. And even if she doesn't see them, her friends at school do, and the next day they're talking about them.

  Katherine does have her radio, her boom box, in her room. Long ago radio stopped being a medium limited to playing the top forty love songs. Now kids listen to Love Lines, where young people frankly discuss their sex problems, shock jocks who talk about anything, and instead of love, the songs are about suicide and self-mutilation. If I were trying to create my own radio show today in Katie's parlor, instead of introducing Enoch Light and his Light Brigade and reading cigarette ads from Time, in order to be realistic I'd be interviewing a topless dancer and reading condom ads from Spin.

  Even if we wanted to, it's impossible to shield kids from these things. There are so many external influences. Drugs just weren't a part of my older kids' childhood. But Katherine started learning about them in second grade. Pam and I made a deal with her: we agreed that if she doesn't smoke, drink, or use drugs by her sixteenth birthday we will take her on a trip anywhere in the world. She decided the one place she wants to go, of any place in the entire world, is New England. Maybe she heard me talking about Lowell, but much more likely she saw something about it on TV that impressed her.

  She learned about things like the dangers of smoking and AIDS in her Catholic elementary school. I hosted a benefit the school produced to raise money for pediatric AIDS. Kids know how AIDS is spread, they are much more sexually aware than any previous generation. I'm the one who has had to learn how to deal with a whole new set of problems. One day I drove home with Katherine and her friend, and as we got out of the car, she said, "Daddy, we forgot to stop at the department store. I have to get a training bra."

  I can't imagine Claudia or Linda even saying the word "bra" to their father. When I'm faced with a situation I don't know how to handle, I try to be the thoroughly modern parent. "Oh," I said, not knowing what to say. "Let's go inside and let Pam handle that. That's for the Pammy department."

  Faced with this barrage of information, kids grow up very fast. Katherine did get her training bra, and one Saturday afternoon several months later Pam and Martha were going shopping with her. Katherine wasn't ready and finally Pam gave her two minutes. Eleven-year-old Katherine came out to the car out of breath. "I couldn't find my bra," she explained, and added sadly, "and now I'm sagging." And after a pause she concluded, "Everyone'll know I'm not wearing a bra."

  When I was raising my kids in the 1960s I was the authority figure. I set the rules and the kids lived by those rules. The magic words, after "please" and "thank you," of course, were "because I said so." Why can't I do that? Because I said so. How can you do that to me? Because I said so.

  That would never work with Katherine. As I've had to learn, everything is negotiation. "What do you think about this plan?" "If you do this today, we'll do that tomorrow." And when you reach an agreement, you'd better follow through with your end of it.

  One thing hasn't changed, though. The best form of punishment is depriving a child of something he or she wants to do. When Katherine misbehaves she is confined to her room—and we take the boom box out. As she gets older, of course, I'll have to start looking for a collapsible ladder. I remember the afternoon we were going to UCLA for a full day of activities with celebrities to raise money for multiple sclerosis. Pam's son, Lex, was bringing thirty members of his college fraternity to work as coaches, timers, and ushers, and Katherine was in heaven. She adores Lex, and the chance to spend time with him and his friends was important to her. But she was less than charming several times and finally, as we were driving to the campus, she said something very rude to me. Pam turned the car around and we confined Katherine to her room, where she had to write a one-hundred-word essay on the topic "Why I must have a good attitude."

  When Pam and I came home that afternoon she had finished. After listing several reasons, she closed the essay by admitting "It's important to have a good attitude, otherwise your room will become your best friend."

  I am trying to correct the worst mistake I made with my older kids by spending much more time with Katherine than I did with them. I go to her school functions and outside activities and whenever possible she travels with Pam and me. When we went to Detroit to host a benefit for an animal shelter she came with us. On the plane I explained to her that there would be many dogs at this event and under no circumstances could we bring home another dog. Between our dogs and Lex's dog we almost qualified to be a kennel. So this time, no way, no more pets. Under no circumstances. Katherine understood.

  We named our new dog Lucky. I managed to hold out about five minutes. There are some things that just never change.

  Katherine is turning out to be a lovely Irish lass, exactly what I'd hoped for. She's independent, opinionated, and smart, and she knows every route directly into my heart. When she was six years old we were at a luncheon and she came over and said to me, "Daddy, let's go up and do the Daddy and Katherine Show."

  There's a request that is impossible to resist. See, ever since Katherine has been old enough to deliver a punch line I've been teaching her the great vaudeville jokes. What good is a straight man without someone to deliver the punch line? Although I guess it would be more accurate to say I was playing straight person to my daughter. So, in front of the audience, she told me, "Oh, Daddy, it was Lincoln's birthday and I didn't even send him a card."

  "Why send him a card?" I asked. "Lincoln is dead."

  "Dead?" she said with surprise. "I didn't even know he was sick!"

  People often ask if it's hard raising a young child at my age. I suppose the best answer to that question would be, at exactly what age is raising a child easy? What makes raising Katherine a joy is that she is part of a large and very modern extended family. Pam and Katherine have formed their own wonderful relationship. One Halloween, for example, Pam turned the house into a fair. We took out all the furniture and put in carnival games and booths and served ice cream and cotton candy to more than one hundred kids. Pam and I and our friends Kenneth and Josie Castleberry dressed as clowns and entertained. We had a hot dog man and someone to paint the kids' faces. In the backyard we had a haunted house. We had glass eyeballs and frozen ice hands floating in the punch bowl. At Christmas we tented the backyard and had fresh-baked cookies for the kids to decorate, and then we donated the cakes and cookies to the needy.

  Katherine also has her older brothers and sisters and their children—my grandchildren,
her nieces and nephews. And she has her stepbrother, Lex. When it became obvious to Pam that our relationship was going to be serious, she called Lex, who was in marine boot camp, and told him she was going out with Ed McMahon.

  Apparently Lex was very impressed. Not that I was a television personality, not that I was the spokesperson for the largest-selling beer in the country. "Ed McMahon," Lex said. "Mom, he's a colonel in the Marine Corps!" Now that impressed him. He always referred to me as "the Colonel": "Mom, tell the Colonel they had me doing this . . . ," or whatever. Often Pam didn't understand what he was talking about, so she'd ask him to explain it.

  "Mom," he'd tell her, "don't sweat it. Just tell the Colonel, he'll understand. It's a marine thing." It's a marine thing. So how could Lex and I not get along?

  The first day I met him I was working aboard my boat when I was suddenly blinded by the sun glaring off his shoes. I looked up and saw this handsome young man with a friend. "Good to see you, marine," I said.

  "Good to see you, Colonel," he responded. "Permission to come aboard, sir?" Marines talk to each other like that, like police officers talking to suspects on badly written TV shows. Lex and I had the Marine Corps in common, which meant we spoke the same language, so we got along very well right from our first meeting. Growing up, Lex had no father—he doesn't even get a Christmas card from his natural father—so I've happily taken on that role. Although he'd never been much of a student, getting by mostly on charm and football, when he left the Marine Corps he went on to graduate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is presently in law school.

  I often express my feelings through little poems. On our fifth anniversary, I wrote a poem for Pam. It reads, partially, "Oh, I've been lucky in my life, once or twice. But lucky in love, that's a roll of the dice. Well, luck turned to love, and a wonderful life, and brought me a lover, a friend, and a wife." Now, Coleridge it's not, and it only begins to explain the way I feel about Pam. There is one more way in which Pam has changed my life. She has gone back into the fashion business, creating a couture line creatively named "Pam McMahon." Her gorgeous dresses are carried by Neiman Marcus, Saks, many of the top boutiques. When we got together, we agreed that we would really be together. So when she is doing truck shows, meaning showing her new line, if I'm not working I go with her and our partner, Greg Mills. I carry the dresses and maybe sell a little. So Pam has turned me into something I've never been before: besides everything else, I am now a proud schmatta schlepper.