For Laughing Out Loud

by Ed McMahon

  Most people don't think of me as a movie star. Probably because I'm not. But I've made several movies, playing everything from a ruthless mob boss to the father of a teenage werewolf. Martin Sheen, Donna Mills, Beau Bridges, and I all made our film debuts in the same 1967 movie, The Incident. The story is about a group of people terrorized by two hoods on a New York City subway car. I played Mr. Don't Get Involved, who eventually provokes the incident by defending my daughter. Now, acting is one of the few professions in which the key to success is defined as "don't be yourself," and I think director Larry Peerce was concerned I'd play too much Ed McMahon. He didn't want an Ed McMahon character, which is why I got the part. So in order to evoke real emotion from me for my big scene, Sheen and Tony Musante staged a fake fight in rehearsal. I knew they were faking it, but I acted as if I believed it was real. No one knew I was acting, which is the goal of all actors. And so when I was successfully not myself in the scene, everyone believed it was because I believed the fight was real. Acting can be very complicated sometimes.

  In Slaughter's Big Rip-Off I played a mob boss out to kill Jimmy Brown. Naturally, I get killed at the end. It was great fun for me to play a nasty, mean, downright dirty character. At the end I got shot. Several of the reviews complimented my death scene.

  Fun with Dick and Jane, starring George Segal and Jane Fonda, was the best movie in which I appeared. It's the story of an upwardly mobile Los Angeles couple trying to cope after he loses his job. At first Jane suggests they economize by not using the swimming pool heater, but when their landscaper literally rolls up their front lawn and carts it away because he wasn't paid, they turn to a life of crime. I played the executive who got drunk and fired George Segal. I got very friendly with both Jane Fonda and George Segal. Jane was the kind of person nice enough to come to work at four in the morning for hair and makeup so we could get my work done early enough for me to get to The Tonight Show. I'll never forget the director, Ted Kotcheff, telling this million-dollar cast, "Okay guys, we've gotta get this one done because Ed has to leave." Imagine telling Jane Fonda to hurry up because I had to get to NBC.

  Not only did I get excellent reviews—the New York Times wrote, "The members of the supporting cast, headed by Ed McMahon as Dick's alternately smarmy and sozzled former employer, are excellent"—but Columbia Pictures campaigned for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for me. Although I wasn't nominated, I was invited to the Academy Award ceremony that year. Apparently I was quite proficient at playing "sozzled."

  Unlike many actors, I've never been worried about being typecast. Please, typecast me. In Love Affair, with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, for example, I played the role of a commercial spokesman named Ed. I like to claim I'm a method actor—in this case my method was just showing up. I was a natural in the role.

  Most people loved Steve Martin's Father of the Bride. The worst picture I've ever made could have been titled Father of the Werewolf . Instead it was called Full Moon High, with Alan Arkin and his son, Adam Arkin. This was sort of unusual casting; even though Alan is Adam's father and appeared in the movie, they felt I was more believable in the role. That's some compliment. Adam played a high school football hero I took on vacation to Transylvania and while there he got turned into a werewolf.

  I've acted in several movies made for television. I worked with Gary Coleman in a wonderful remake of the baseball fantasy The Kid from Left Field . In the miniseries The Star Maker, Rock Hudson played a famed movie director who turned his beautiful conquests into movie stars. I played his manager, and Jeffrey Tambor, who created the role of Garry Shandling's sidekick, Hank Kingsley, on The Larry Sanders Show, played his lawyer. A lot of people don't remember that I was in the semiclassic Great American Traffic Jam and a movie about the Los Angeles Olympics, The Golden Moment, with Stephanie Zimbalist. The last movie I made was Disney's Safety Patrol, with Leslie Nielsen. I was offered a role in the comedy feature PCU, meaning Politically Correct University, but against the wishes of my agent at the time, I turned it down.

  The producers offered me quite a bit of money, and my agency put great pressure on me to do it, but I just didn't see myself in that kind of movie. Actually I ended up leaving the agency because of this. There was a lot of contemporary, colorful language in the script and I was uncomfortable with that. I don't use that language in my home, so I just didn't feel comfortable using it on the screen. Besides, I was hosting Star Search at the time, and it didn't seem feasible to me that I could play a character using foul language, then turn right around and introduce a nine-year-old young man playing a piano concerto.

  Even though I've done an incredible variety of things, I've turned down many, many more opportunities. For example, I almost left The Tonight Show to become the host of Good Morning, America. I didn't want to leave, but NBC did not want to properly compensate me for the work I was delivering. So I secretly flew to New York and met with executives from ABC. The negotiations were very serious and they went on for a long time. But I didn't like the thought of getting up every morning at four, and I wasn't sure I was ready to move back to New York. Most of all, when it came down to making the decision, I didn't want to leave Johnny Carson. As far as I was concerned, we were joined at the desk. So I turned it down.

  The brilliant broadcaster Al Masini, who created Solid Gold and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, wanted me to host his new show, Entertainment Tonight. I liked the concept, I thought it might work, but my contract with NBC prohibited me from appearing on any show that might be broadcast just before, during, or after The Tonight Show. Because Entertainment Tonight was to be syndicated, meaning each station that bought it could run it whenever they wanted, Masini couldn't guarantee the time slot.

  Another show created by Al Masini that I initially turned down was Star Search. The amateur talent contest is one of the oldest formats in broadcasting. Major Bowes and Ted Mack had been very successful at showcasing amateur talent. Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts had been a big hit on television. Even my friend Dick Clark had briefly experimented with a show called World of Talent. The executive producer, Bob Banner, said that they specifically wanted me to host Star Search because I wouldn't be in competition with the talent presented on the show.

  I looked at their pilot. It wasn't bad at all; in fact, the spokesmodel on that very first show was a beautiful young woman named Sharon Stone. Talk about getting it right from the very beginning. But I turned down their offer. I just didn't want to do an amateur talent show.

  They persisted. We negotiated. I knew The Tonight Show couldn't go on forever—after the first fifty years or so I figured Johnny might start to slow down—and I'd started thinking about my future. So when Masini and Banner offered to make me their partner I agreed to host the show.

  Star Search was a one-hour syndicated show. Two performers competed for prize money in each of eight categories, including male and female vocalist, dancing, comedy, and female spokesmodel. The winners returned the following week and at the end of the season the big winners competed for the one-hundred-thousand-dollar first prize. In 1984 we managed to tape our first show at KTLA in Los Angeles in only eleven hours. Eleven hours! In that time I could have taped a week's worth of Tonight Shows, sold a hundred slicers, flown a mission over the Korean DMZ, broadcast a parade, and filmed several Budweiser commercials. I mean, eleven hours. That's almost half a telethon. In the time it took us to tape one show, Jerry Lewis could have raised twenty-five million dollars for muscular dystrophy. "Gentlemen," I explained to the producers, "I love this show, but I think we're going to have to find a way to speed this up."

  At first it was hard for us to prove to our audience that we were serious about finding real talent. The last successful TV talent show had been The Gong Show, which was really a comedy show featuring people doing strange tricks. But we really were searching for potential stars. In fact, when our first major discovery, Sam Harris, heard about the show, he thought, "It sounds like Bowling for Dollars, only with talent." Sam appeared
on our fourth show, and by the time he'd made his thirteenth appearance and won one hundred thousand dollars, he'd signed with Motown—his first album went gold—and had become known throughout the country. After Sam's success we were deluged with requests for auditions and tapes. In our first year our eight talent coordinators auditioned more than twenty thousand acts, taped six thousand of them, and eventually selected the 170 people who competed on the show. We had an open call in Hollywood and four thousand performers showed up, some of them waiting on line for more than a day. We had about seven thousand people show up for auditions at a mall in Minnesota. Of course, a few of those people claimed their talent was doing dog-barking imitations, but most of them were talented young people trying to break into show business.

  With such tremendous competition just to get on the show, we were able to produce a terrific weekly variety show. I mean, so many great young performers made their first national appearance on Star Search. We discovered Rosie O'Donnell, Sinbad, Martin Lawrence, Drew Carey, Linda Eder, LeAnn Rimes, Tiffany, Lara Flynn Boyle; Jenny Jones was a comedienne; Dennis Miller; the country group Sawyer Brown; Richard Jeni; Allison Porter of Curly Sue was on the show when she was five years old; the soap opera star Scott Thompson Baker, Kevin Meany, Carrot Top . . . I mean, I was in New York and one night I went to see a revival of Grease. In the first act Sam Harris just stopped the show cold, dead cold, standing ovations. In the second act our 1992 winner, Billy Porter, did the same thing. And Rosie O'Donnell—this was before she even started her talk show—brought down the house. The audience loved her. And how about this? At the end of the show Rosie interrupted her curtain call and asked Sam Harris and Billy Porter to join her. Then she told the audience, "We would not be standing on this stage tonight if it was not for that man right there, Ed McMahon. Ed McMahon, would you please stand up?" That was thrilling for me. That was worth my whole life in show business.

  Now, although I say "we" discovered these great performers, it wasn't really me. I had the easiest job of all. I just showed up and said, "The champion has owned the stage for a week and plans on keeping it . . . here's our next challenger . . . please welcome from Detroit, Michigan . . . and the winner is . . ." I didn't even rehearse. Sometimes I'd finish taping The Tonight Show and get to the Star Search set just in time for taping to begin. Normally our great stage manager, Kenny Stein, read my lines in the rehearsal. When it was possible, I'd watch the rehearsal on a monitor in my dressing room while putting on my tux, learn how to correctly pronounce the contestants' names and enough about them to conduct a good interview, and then go out and ad-lib my way through the show.

  I had absolutely no input in selecting talent for the show. Believe me, I preferred it that way. I did attend a lot of auditions in shopping malls and comedy clubs, but I didn't participate in the selections. It seemed as though everywhere I went people were ready to audition for me. If I was on the Star Search bus and we stopped for a traffic light people on the sidewalk would start dancing. I remember I had the same limousine driver in Detroit for several days. When he picked me up the last day to drive me to the airport, his cousin was with him, and as we unloaded my luggage from the car, his cousin started tap dancing for me. I hated to disappoint people, but there wasn't anything I could do to help them. The system was set up to make sure of that. The best I could do was hand out a card with the phone number of the production office.

  The talent coordinators had to deal with this every day. Once, the office had to be evacuated because of a bomb threat. The rumor was that the threat had been called in by a contestant who didn't get on the show. While the staff was standing outside the building waiting anxiously as the bomb squad searched the premises, one of the policemen in charge asked talent coordinator Gary Mann, "So, can I get my niece on the show?"

  In one city, a singer actually bought a busboy's outfit so he could get into one of our talent coordinators' hotel rooms and audition for him.

  As far as I know, only once did such an approach pay off. In Detroit one day my daughter Claudia had spent ten hours auditioning acts. The crew had seen hundred of acts and everyone was exhausted. But as they were packing up, a man who worked in the building asked Claudia, "Do you think you could audition me? I don't have any music with me, but could you please let me sing?"

  Claudia didn't have the heart to refuse. The man got up on the stage and began singing a cappella. Three bars into his song Claudia broke out in goose bumps. He was so good he just blew away everyone else. His name was Keith Washington, and he eventually appeared on the show and went on to become a popular R & B singer.

  Hundreds of videotapes arrived every week at the production office. Most of them were pretty rough. One singer felt the acoustics were better in his bathroom, so he submitted a tape of himself singing in the shower. I mean, as he was singing, he lathered up and shaved. When we turned him down, he pitched himself as a male spokesmodel. We got a lot of tapes from comedians and singers whose living room performances were interrupted by their mother shouting from the kitchen that dinner was ready or by the phone ringing or their friends making faces in the background. But we watched every one of those tapes and if the performer showed any promise at all we would arrange to have a more professional tape made.

  For a lot of performers these auditions represented their one chance at stardom. Basically they had thirty seconds to change their lives. Talk about pressure. At one audition at a mall in Kansas City, a seven-year-old girl explained seriously, "I've been waiting my whole life to be on Star Search."

  Listen, an appearance on Star Search changed a lot of lives. Rosie O'Donnell was performing in a Long Island comedy club when Claudia discovered her. Her routine was based on her experiences in Catholic school, which wasn't right for our show, but Claudia felt she had something special. So she offered her a second audition. But before that audition she worked with her, helping her select the right outfit, the most flattering hairstyle, and her best material. For Rosie, this really was a last chance. It was just a few months before her twenty-fourth birthday and she had decided to quit show business if she wasn't successful by that day. Her second audition was much better and she was picked for the show. Ironically, the first person she competed against was the owner of the Long Island comedy club where Claudia had found her. Rosie won five weeks. The late Brandon Tartikoff, head of programming at NBC, saw her on the show and gave her a part on a sitcom, which led to her movie career, which led to her great success on television. Which was exactly the way the show was supposed to work.

  Tracey Ross, who won our first spokesmodel competition, was absolutely penniless when she was discovered. She'd dropped out of college and would sneak back to the campus to eat. After appearing on our show she got a recurring role on a soap opera, and a network contract.

  A lot of the young comedians who worked the comedy club circuit had problems coming up with two and a half minutes of clean material for their audition. Like Martin Lawrence. Claudia found him in a club in Washington, D.C., and recognized his talent, but until he was able to do a clean act we couldn't use him. When Claudia finally called to tell him he had been selected to be on the show, his mother answered the phone and thought it was a friend of his playing a big joke. He was a three-time winner.

  Young performers knew the power of Star Search to launch a career. When Drew Carey heard we were doing auditions at a small comedy club in Milwaukee, for example, he drove several hundred miles and lived in his car until he had a chance to perform.

  We missed a few good ones too. Tim Allen auditioned for Claudia five different times and never got on the show. She felt he was much better as a comedic actor than as a stand-up comedian. Finally he asked her, "What's the problem, why aren't I getting on?"

  "Your material is too male-oriented," she told him. "Car jokes and home tool jokes just don't make me laugh." Years later, after his great success on Home Improvement, she saw him in a restaurant and sent him a note reading "Well, at least I was right about your ability as a comic
actor."

  The hardest part of my job was standing on that stage and telling one of the contestants that they'd lost. Oh boy, that was tough. For a lot of people losing represented the end of their dreams, they thought it was the end of their career. A lot of tears were shed backstage. After the show, I tried to spend a little time with the people who hadn't won. I reminded them that by just appearing on the show they'd gotten great national exposure. I told them I knew exactly how they felt, that when I was trying to get started in radio I'd lost an audition for an on-air job to Ray Goulding. "That's proof," I said, "that you don't have to come in first to have a nice career in show business."

  If telling adults they'd lost was difficult, imagine what it was like telling a five-year-old that they'd lost. I remember the first year we had kids competing for the one-hundred-thousand-dollar first prize. The two finalists were a twelve-year-old and the five-year-old Allison Porter. I had absolutely no prior knowledge of the judges' decision. "This is just awful," I told the producers. "How am I gonna do this? You've got to get me something to give to the five-year-old if she doesn't win. Get me a big stuffed animal or something."

  When I was handed the judge's decision I took a deep breath and said proudly, "And the winner is . . . Mary Johnson. Mary gets the one hundred thousand dollars!" And then I immediately turned to Allison Porter and said quickly, "But Allison, look what we have for you!" They brought out a huge stuffed panda, it was almost as big as she was, and she was thrilled. Believe me, not as thrilled as I was, but very happy.

  Several years later Allison was on The Tonight Show, and I saw her in the office before the show. "Everybody gets excited when they come into my room," she told me, "because I've got my giant panda bear sitting on the shelf. They all ask me where I got it and I tell them, 'Ed McMahon gave it to me when I was on Star Search. And you know what his name is? Big Ed!' "