For Laughing Out Loud

by Ed McMahon

  Of all the things I am, most of all I'm a salesman. I've always said with great pride, if I can hold it up or point to it, I can sell it. In my career I've done more than sixty thousand television and radio commercials for products ranging from pants stretchers to coin collection equipment, from carpet manufacturers to banks. I've done beer commercials with Sinatra and Wayne, a gasoline commercial with Barbara Walters; I did the very first spot for People magazine, and I've fed Alpo to more than four thousand different dogs. In fact, when NBC decided to honor the best commercials, I was selected to host several specials titled Television's Greatest Commercials.

  Advertising has always fascinated me. The first ad I ever paid attention to was a calendar my grandfather had nailed to the wall in the office of his plumbing company. Some calendars have pinups; this one was a nailup. It was from a tool company that made "the tools you swear by—but never at!" Isn't that a great line? I'm sure I used it in my parlor shows.

  I've always loved selling. From my first day hawking the Saturday Evening Post, it came easily to me. Although in the other areas of my life I was shy, I was never even slightly reticent when I had something worth selling. Working as a pitchman on the Atlantic City boardwalk and selling pots and pans door-to-door were as much a part of my formal education as the years I spent at Boston College and Catholic University. I gained experience and confidence, I learned the business of selling. I believe I can sell almost anything—but I don't. Before I agree to do a commercial I either use the product myself or investigate it thoroughly to make sure it is absolutely legitimate. I've turned down many, many offers. Not necessarily because there was anything wrong with those products, but just because I didn't feel comfortable selling them. Among the products I've turned down were a spray that supposedly covered a bald spot, a roach trap, rose bushes guaranteed to bloom in six weeks, even the Playboy Channel.

  In my early days of television in Philadelphia I not only produced my shows, I also did my own commercials. On those shows we didn't even pause or cut away to a commercial. There were no commercial breaks. I'd finish my interview or my song or whatever I was doing and just hold up the product and do the commercial. The transition wasn't always very smooth. I mean, seconds after I'd finished singing a beautiful love song, I'd have to pick up a rubber duck, a baby toy that would quack like a duck when squeezed—and sell it. I didn't mind at all, I was on television. I knew that without that duck and the pants stretcher and the pineapple juice and Mrs. Paul's frozen foods and everything else we sold, I would have been singing a very different song.

  Even newscasters had to interrupt their broadcast to read commercials. "North Korean troops are preparing for war . . . but if you're having trouble washing away dirt, maybe you should try new improved Babbo . . ."

  I think the first commercial I ever filmed was for McCafferty Ford, a local car dealership. It was a two-minute spot that took us ten hours to film. We were learning how to make commercials as we made them. The expert was the person who'd made one a week earlier. Fortunately, there were no union problems to worry about because there wasn't a union; we just did whatever we had to do. Wardrobe was whatever I was wearing, I did my own makeup, and when I needed children to model, I used Claudia and Michael.

  By the time I got back from Korea everything had changed. Television commercials had become a sophisticated and very profitable business. And although local commercials were still being filmed in Philadelphia, New York City had become the center of the television advertising industry. That's where all the national commercials—the commercials that paid the best—were cast and filmed. Much like the introduction of talking movies had ended the careers of silent movie actors with high voices, many well-known radio announcers couldn't make it on TV because their appearance didn't match their voice. That created a lot of opportunity for people like me.

  I was still doing very well in Philadelphia, I had my late-night show and I was getting a lot of the local commercials, but I wanted to be in New York. So I began commuting to New York every day to make the rounds of the advertising agencies and audition for commercials.

  The fare was four dollars round trip, eight dollars if you wanted a reserved seat in the parlor car. I paid the four dollars, but the porters got to know me, so they'd let me take my coffee and donuts and sit in the front car with all the wealthy guys from the garment district. If I sat in the back, people would recognize me and want to talk about my show the night before or what's it like to be on television and I'd get nothing done. The front car would be filled with cigar smoke, which I didn't care for because I didn't smoke, but I'd tolerate it because nobody would talk to me. On the way to New York I'd read my three newspapers and plan my day.

  My office was my briefcase. I carried a stack of index cards on which I'd made notes about every audition I'd had and everybody I'd met, and five dollars in dimes. When I got to New York I'd settle into a comfortable telephone booth—the booths in the Pennsylvania Hotel, across Seventh Avenue from Penn Station, were the most comfortable—and begin calling the advertising agencies to try to get auditions. I learned all the little tricks: I knew how to get an operator to place calls for me to make it sound as if I had a secretary, and I was on a first-name basis with all the secretaries at the ad agencies.

  But there were days when I couldn't get anything going. On the trains in those days the backs of the seats could be moved from one side of the seat to the other so passengers could face forward no matter which direction the train was traveling. I'll never forget the day I got off the train and made at least two dozen calls from the lower level of Penn Station and couldn't get a single appointment. No one wanted to see me, no one had any auditions, nothing was happening. So I got right back on the same train—although they'd changed the direction of the seats—and went back to Philadelphia. I never even made it to the upper level of Penn Station.

  Normally though, I'd get at least one appointment with an account exec or a casting director, or an audition, sometimes several. After spending the day in New York—this was when I started hanging out in Michael's Pub or wandering the floors at Abercrombie and Fitch—I'd catch the afternoon Congressional back to Philadelphia at four-thirty. The problem with that train was that it had a great club car. The trip to Philly, I learned, was about three martinis long, which made it rough for me to do my show that night. So instead of going into the bar car I'd find the person most unlikely to want to talk to me—a rabbi was a real find—and sit next to him. About that time I discovered something called the Five-Foot Shelf of Books, a collection of all the classics of literature, and I started reading them on the trip home. After spending the entire day trying to get an audition for a detergent commercial, I'd relax by reading a chapter of War and Peace. By the time I met Johnny Carson, I was almost four feet smarter. I commuted between Philadelphia and New York five days a week for eight years. I guess it was the contemporary version of a tale of two cities.

  Five-minute auditions usually lasted about a minute. Sometimes as many as two hundred men would be auditioned for a spot, and that almost always included the regulars who hung out at Michael's Pub. We never knew what the agency was looking for, so there was no way to prepare for an audition. The competition was really intense; one good account could pay the bills for a year. Everybody was good, there were only minor differences between us—so no one knew why certain people got jobs and others didn't. On my way to the train in Philadelphia I used to stop at church for morning Mass. Hey, I wanted all the help I could get.

  We went in, read the lines, and waited for a phone call. Sometimes all they wanted was the right sound. They wanted the proper "Ho, ho, ho," or a candy company wanted a perfect "Mmmmmm . . ." Believe me, there is no definition of a perfect "Mmmmmm." I have to admit, my "Ho!" was better than my "Mmmmmm." My friend Bob Delaney got the "Ho, ho, ho" job and remembers spending much of the day in a studio while agency executives sat in the control room debating whether his "Ho" was too happy.

  The first national commercial I
ever got was for New Blue Cheer. One of the premier announcers of early television was the great Jay Jackson. He was the announcer for Philco Playhouse as well as many commercials. But rather than seeing me as a threat, he helped me. He told me, "Ed, you're good and New York needs you." New York needed me? That was a pretty startling thing for me to hear. New York needs Ed McMahon! Boy, New York had a strange way of showing it. Jay Jackson introduced me to Michael's Pub and all the top people in the business. And he got me the audition for New Blue Cheer.

  Now, this story may be apocryphal, but this is the way I heard it: at that time Procter and Gamble made Tide, the number-one-selling washing detergent. One of the major components of soap is nitroglycerin, which is also used to make munitions. During World War II Procter and Gamble had purchased huge supplies of nitroglycerin, and when the war ended they had to find something to do with it. So they created Cheer soap. The ad agency, Young & Rubicam, wanted a spokesman with a "casual, believable, warm and fuzzy" voice. One hundred fifty people auditioned, they weeded it down to twenty, then to eight, then finally to me and Fred Collins. Fred and I went out for a cup of coffee while waiting for the decision. As we sat in a coffee shop on Madison and Thirty-ninth, he said to me, "I want this, but since you're just starting out, I hope you get it." Now, that is a nice human being. The account exec called us at the coffee shop and said I'd gotten the job.

  I felt like I'd just won the Olympics. All of the Olympics. In Philadelphia I'd been the king, I'd won almost every audition, but to win a major audition in New York on one of my very first attempts was a very big deal. Maybe Jay Jackson had been right, maybe New York did need me. I became the spokesman for "New Blue Cheer, for whiter whites and brighter colors." The thing I remember most about it was that my father was so proud of me. The agency would give me a typed schedule of when the commercial would be aired and my father would watch it every time. If it was on at two in the morning, he would set his alarm clock to see my commercial. For my father, television shows were just long pauses between his son's Cheer commercials.

  New Blue Cheer financed my trips to New York for several months. After winning that account I figured I'd get them all. Instead, I won exactly none of them. I'd make it to the final selection, but I wouldn't get the jobs. One day, a day I will never forget, several appointments in a row were canceled, an audition went badly, and I learned that I hadn't gotten some big national account. Now, I don't get discouraged easily, but boy, after not getting a single job in several months, that was a lot of bad news. All my confidence was gone. I sat down by the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel and had the only migraine headache of my life. I began to wonder if I'd picked the wrong business. I thought, maybe I'm not good enough for this business, maybe I should think about doing something else. There was an architectural school near the Lambs Club, so I walked down there and picked up an application. I read it on the train back to Philly. Even the application was too complicated for me. To become an architect I'd have to go back to school for at least four more years. With three children to support, that wasn't possible. I left the application on the train.

  For almost a year I paid my dues. Then, slowly, my career began to pick up. I got on-camera jobs for Redbook magazine and White Owl cigars. I got the General Motors corporate account for radio. I auditioned for several cigarette accounts, which were very desirable, and I came within a few blocks of becoming the spokesperson for Old Gold. The fact that I didn't smoke and had never smoked did not deter me; I didn't do laundry either but that hadn't stopped me from doing commercials for New Blue Cheer. When I heard Old Gold was looking for a new spokesman, I began practicing my smoking technique on the train. I tried to look suave and manly. The fact is that people who don't smoke just don't look comfortable smoking. But after several auditions it looked as though I was going to win the Old Gold account. All that was left was meeting the president of the company to get his approval. As I was being driven to the meeting, the agency account executive, a lovely woman, noticed my technique and asked, "How long have you been smoking, Ed?"

  What was I going to tell her, two weeks? Well, yes. "I gotta confess something to you," I said. "I'm not really a smoker. I've just been practicing."

  She appreciated my honesty. "Turn the car around," she told the driver. She continued, "Ed, I think you're great, but you really have to be a smoker to get this account."

  When I got The Tonight Show, the first sponsor to sign me to do their commercials was Alpo. The second sponsor who approached me was L&M cigarettes. I told them from the first day that I didn't smoke, but they didn't care. They wanted me to be their spokesman and they were going to pay me about fifty thousand dollars a year. It was a great deal, I didn't even have to smoke, all I had to do was hold up the pack. But before we signed a contract, an executive from Liggett and Myers got very nervous; he was afraid that one of the major newspaper columnists would find out I didn't smoke and reveal that the spokesman for L&M didn't even smoke them. I lost that account.

  I was only upset about that for, oh, maybe twenty years. Then all the information about the effects of tobacco began coming out. Believe me, I am very happy I never did a cigarette commercial. As far as I know, there has never been any scientific evidence that Cheer was bad for anyone. And it did make whites whiter!

  My briefcase was my office, but Michael's Pub was my headquarters. Everybody in the business hung out there between auditions. That's where we learned what was going on, who had gotten which jobs, what products were being cast, and what was happening at the various advertising agencies. Most of us used the same answering service, Radio Registry, and when we received an important message, their operators knew that if we weren't at Michael's Pub, somebody there would know where to find us. That was where we celebrated our victories and drowned our defeats.

  One of the people who hung out there was Jonathan Winters, the most brilliant ad-libber I've ever known. He could do twelve minutes of brilliant comedy on a lamp. There were some smart, talented men in that group, but Jonathan Winters would hold court there for hours. That's where we became good friends.

  Most people don't know this, but I was one of the founders of the Liberty Bowl, which has become one of the premier college football bowl games. It's now played in Memphis, but for the first two years it was played in Philadelphia. In retrospect, the concept of playing a college football game in Philadelphia in midwinter may not seem too intelligent, but at the time it seemed like a very good idea. And that time was probably very late at night. I produced a great show for our sponsors and special guests. Among the stars of that show were Johnny Carson and Winters. By that time I knew Winters well enough to know that if I wanted to be sure he would show up, I'd have to bring him there myself. So I drove to New York to pick him up, turned around, and drove right back to Philly. The whole drive back I said three words, "How you doing?" He spent the rest of the trip telling me.

  He entertained me for the whole day and late into the night. About four o'clock in the morning, after the bowl game and the show, a group of us were in my suite at the hotel. We ordered sandwiches from room service. A half hour later, waiters wheeled in three large carts containing mounds of sandwiches covered completely by white table-cloths. As the waiters pushed the carts into the room, Winters took one look and said fiercely, "Oh my God, we're going to be busy in surgery tonight!"

  I was such a regular at Michael's Pub that Gil Weiss, the owner, put the McMahon salad on the menu. It consisted of the heart of a romaine lettuce, carefully diced up, covered with blue cheese dressing and bacon bits. But the McMahon salad was not the only thing I did for that place. For years Gil Weiss resisted any change, he liked his saloon just the way it was. It was a big event when he finally allowed us to bring in a television set to watch the World Series. I wanted more, I wanted music to drink by. In fact, there was a girl singer performing at the Waldorf who I thought was terrific, and after a lot of pleading, Gil finally allowed her to perform there. She was a big hit; she drew a crowd. After sh
e finished her run, Gil started booking jazz groups, and Michael's Pub became known as one of the few really good jazz clubs in New York.

  When The Tonight Show moved to California my friends threw a surprise going-away party for me there. Purely coincidentally, during my party Woody Allen stopped by to see if it might be the right place for him to sit in with a jazz group. I left, Woody Allen came in. Seeing Woody Allen playing clarinet at Michael's Pub on Monday nights became a New York tradition for which I was indirectly responsible.

  Probably my greatest skill in reading my lines in commercials was . . . the pause. I had learned from experience the value of the . . . pause in attracting attention. The longer you can sustain a . . . pause, the more . . . attention you get. When you need to emphasize something, just precede it with a . . . pause. I remember, in the Broadway show Top Banana, Phil Silvers has to figure out how to decorate a room. He can't figure out how to do it, until a buxom blond walks right in front of him. He just watches her chest go by without saying a word. Of course, everybody knows what he's looking at. Finally, after a long, long pause, he says, "I got it . . . We'll use balloons!"

  The pause is like a . . . string. If you pause in the middle of . . . a sentence, the listener will focus on what you're saying. For example, just think about this for one split second

  . . . you may have already won . . . ten million dollars. The pause is effective even when I write it.

  But I had a great big . . . pause. It made my delivery of my lines distinctive and effective. And it had one tremendously important effect: it helped me win a lot of accounts. Once I proved my ability, I started winning them. When City Service decided to change its name to Citgo and its color scheme from green and white to bright red and blue, Barbara Walters and I were hired to be their spokespeople. We did several commercials together.

  One of the commercials Barbara and I did was filmed in the ski resort of Stratton Mountain, Vermont. We flew to Vermont and took a limousine to the lodge. I remember it was a long trip and our driver didn't seem to know where he was going. Every so often he stopped for directions. Barbara and I were in the backseat and she stretched out, put her head on my . . . leg and went to sleep. But I noticed that every time the driver stopped for directions he was having a quick drink. He was getting drunk. Pretty soon the car was weaving back and forth. Finally I told him to stop the car; I got in front and drove the limo. So I can always say I was a limo driver for Barbara Walters. I can, but I don't. But I remember the looks on the faces of the ad agency execs when our limo pulled up to the lodge, the driver's door opened, and I got out.