by Ed McMahon
That day we decided to form a club called the Skipjacks and vowed that we would never go deep-sea fishing again. More than that, I designed an emblem for the Skipjacks: a big marlin hook, almost life-size, with a marlin leaping through it and looking back in disdain that he hadn't been caught. Underneath it was our motto: pisces non florent, which is Latin for "We saw no fish." I had red, white, and blue jackets made for everyone with our emblem emblazoned on the pocket.
But the real reason I stopped fishing was the relationship I formed with my koi. The house that Carson Wright designed for me on Crescent Drive had a pond that ran under the deck, and I stocked that pond with small Japanese koi. Koi can be extremely valuable, with their price based on their markings. A few years ago a white koi with a red circle on its head—the colors of the Japanese flag—sold for more than one hundred thousand dollars. As a gift, someone gave me a baby koi that when grown was worth about five thousand dollars. Koi are really smart fish. They were like pets. They would eat pellets right out of my hand and I got to know them. When I walked on the deck, they would come rushing toward me from wherever they were, but if anyone else walked out they would ignore them.
Well, after that I couldn't go fishing anymore. I mean, I could still eat fish, I just didn't want to catch them myself.
I've also tried skiing and scuba diving. In fact, one night on The Tonight Show we showed a little home movie of me scuba diving. In this film I was swimming peacefully until I spotted something strange and beautiful and started digging in the soft sand. Finally, I reached down and pulled out . . . a six-pack of Budweiser. As I've stated, my only real hobby is working.
Probably the only positive thing about not having any show at all was that I could devote more time to my charities. I get hundreds of requests every year to participate in charitable events. It's a very nice feeling to be in a position to help others and I try to participate as much as my schedule allows. I'm constantly sending signed ties for auctions and my favorite recipe for inclusion in books and pamphlets. The recipe I send is for my very special turkey stuffing. I've developed it over many Thanksgivings and Christmases, each year adding a new ingredient. Currently it consists of country sausage, mushroom, pineapple wedges, applesauce, marmalade, walnuts, pecans, sage, and parsley flakes bathed in half a bottle of Courvoisier. The Courvoisier gives it a woody taste. I've tried to convince Pam that during cooking the alcohol burns off, but she doesn't believe that.
In addition to being an active fund-raiser for St. Jude's Ranch for Children and the Horatio Alger Association, I've worked for many, many charities, including the Bedside Network, City of Hope, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, various animal shelter organizations, and several college scholarship funds. I'm very proud of the fact that I served two terms as president of the Catholic University Alumni Association. At the time I ran for office a major battle was being fought between conservatives and liberals about the philosophical path the university would follow. Because Catholic University is where many members of the clergy were educated, this wasn't just an intellectual exercise; it really would have an impact on the future of the Catholic Church in America. The liberal faction asked me to run and I won a very close and hard-fought election. During my two terms I think we were able to make important contributions to the modernization of the university.
One of the things I tried to do while serving as alumni president was convince the university to build a modern communications center, complete with studios and radio and TV facilities. It would be a place where priests would learn how to communicate. I mean, the dullest thing in the world is going to Mass and listening to a priest who doesn't know how to connect with his audience.
To initiate the building fund I turned the closing of New York City's historic Capitol Theatre into a benefit for Catholic University's Center for Communication Arts. The Capitol Theatre, at Fifty-first and Broadway, had been built in 1919 as one of the first great movie palaces. It was also where some of the first television cameras recorded the New York City premiere of Gone with the Wind for broadcast on an experimental station. It was fitting that I would produce the closing show, because the first theater manager had been Major Edward Bowes, who later created the amateur talent show on radio that eventually led to Star Search.
It was an incredible event. Bob Hope, who played the Capitol when it was a vaudeville theater, was my entertainment chairman. Jerry Lewis sang a song that had flopped the night the theater opened, "Swanee." Among the other people who appeared were Mr. Carson, Alan King, Florence Henderson, Leon Bibb, Jan Peerce, Billy Eckstine, the entire cast of the Broadway show George M!, Doc and the NBC Orchestra, and the new Miss America, whom I had crowned two weeks earlier in Atlantic City.
After the show the performers rode to a champagne dinner at the Americana Hotel on Anheuser-Busch wagons drawn by the Clydesdales while the audience walked there on a red carpet that had been laid down on Broadway. We sold out and raised almost one hundred thousand dollars to begin the building fund.
Eventually we raised several million dollars, but instead of building the communications center, the university built the beautiful Hartke Theatre. It's a terrific place, and honors an extraordinary human being. There is one room in the building devoted to teaching mass communications and there is an Ed McMahon Scholarship given to a student who intends to go into broadcasting, but I still wish they had built the planned communications center.
Years later I did get my communications center built— but not at Catholic University. My daughter Linda is a very talented musician. She plays the flute, piano, and guitar. Now, believe me, this story does result in a mass communications center. She wanted to go to a college where she could study jazz. I spoke to the brilliant trumpet player in the Tonight Show band, Clark Terry, and he introduced me to Quinnipiac College in Hamden, Connecticut. We drove up there one night in a rainstorm and I spoke at a dinner. I liked the place immediately, I could see they were trying to do innovative things there. Linda eventually attended Quinnipiac, and the more I got to know about the school, the more impressed I became.
In the late 1980s the impressive young president of the university, John Lahey, flew down to meet me in Florida and told me Quinnipiac wanted to build a state-of-the-art communications center—and they wanted to name it the Ed McMahon Mass Communications Center. He didn't expect me to donate a huge amount of money—although he wasn't going to turn it down if I wanted to donate it, either—but he hoped that my name would attract the attention of both contributors and students.
Now that was pretty flattering. Lowell, Massachusetts, once dedicated a park bench in my name, so an entire communications center was very impressive. (Actually Lowell did offer to name the whole park after me, but I was quite pleased with just my bench and I flew in for the dedication.) The communications center was to occupy a wing of a large business education center named after Quinnipiac graduate Murray Lender. Murray Lender had made his fortune in the bagel business, so I guess they felt it was appropriate to combine the bagel king with a big ham. The Ed McMahon Mass Communications Center, which is part of the Lender School of Business, contains state-of-the-art classrooms, television and radio broadcast studios, film and videotape editing equipment, and print journalism resources. I'm very, very proud of the McMahon Center. At its dedication Claudia told me the equipment was better than what she was then using at ABC News.
I've gotten involved in several charities because my friends asked for my help. For example, at Frank Sinatra's request I served as master of ceremonies at a fund-raiser for the Italian-American Civil Rights League held at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden. The Italian-American Civil Rights League had been organized to help dispel the notion that most Italians belonged to the Mafia. Unfortunately, it had been organized by Joseph Colombo, who ran a Mafia crime family. On the bill that night were Italians like myself, Vic Damone, Connie Francis, Jerry Vale, and black comedian Godfrey Cambridge. "I got a strange invitation to this thing," Godfrey Cambridge told the
audience. "A rock came through my window."
I didn't really know what it was all about. Frank Sinatra asked me to be there and that was all I needed to know. I flew in from California on the red-eye the night before. That afternoon I'd gone over to the Felt Forum with my manager at the time, Bob Coe, to find out where I was supposed to stand and which microphone I was supposed to use. While I was there, a polite young man named Joseph Colombo Jr. came up to me and said, "Mr. McMahon, I'd like to speak to you privately for a moment."
"It's all right," I told him. "This is my manager, he's in on everything I do."
"I'd prefer to speak to you alone," he insisted. We sat down in the audience and he told me, "My father wanted me to extend his greetings. He'll be here tonight, but he wanted you to know how appreciative he is that you flew all night to be here today. You're not Italian, you have no reason to be here, but it's an important night for my people. My father told me to tell you this: if you ever need anything . . . ," and he grabbed my arm with both hands to emphasize his point, "and I mean, anything, you just have to call and it's done."
"Okay," I said. "I'll remember that." Now, like just about everyone in show business, I'd heard all the stories about Mafia involvement, but until that moment I'd never had any involvement with them. I immediately got in touch with my friend Jimmy Breslin, who knew about all this stuff, and asked him, "Did I make a mistake agreeing to do this? Am I involved in something I really don't want to be involved in?"
"I'll find out," he said. Several hours later I saw Jimmy again. He had spoken to several FBI agents and apparently they told him to tell me that it was okay that one night. I will never forget my opening line that night: "Good evening, fellow Italians."
My involvement with the Muscular Dystrophy Association began when my friend Jerry Lewis asked me to appear on his Labor Day telethon in 1967. At that time I don't even think the telethon was broadcast nationally; it certainly wasn't the spectacular event it was to become. I wasn't working with Jerry, I was just a guest. I was going to make a brief appearance, explain why viewers should pledge money to help Jerry's kids, and leave. But almost as soon as I got there, Jerry told me, "I have to go to the bathroom." Now, in those days we never said "bathroom" on television. We couldn't even use the word "pregnant"; the expression we were instructed to use was "in a family way." There was no alternate expression for "bathroom." The reason for that was simple: nobody on television ever went to the bathroom. As far as anybody knew, for example, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson's house didn't even have any bathrooms.
So without any explanation, Jerry disappeared, leaving me standing there onstage. Being a professional, I introduced the next performer at the proper time. "Ladies and gentlemen, here they are, let's give a big round of applause, aren't they great, the Flying . . ." As I finished I looked into the wings and saw Jerry standing there, arms folded, watching me. "Go ahead," he told me, "you're doing a great job." That first year I hosted for about ten minutes.
The following year I did eight hours. "Oh, Ed," Jerry said, "you were terrific. I really leaned on you. I wish you could do the whole show with me."
He needed me for the whole show? We could raise millions of dollars for kids? One billion five hundred million dollars later, I'm still doing the Labor Day telethon with Jerry. I don't think anybody realizes how much of his life he has devoted to helping kids with this terrible disease. It's a year-round cause with him, not just something he does on Labor Day weekend.
My job on the telethon is to be his support system, to provide some sort of structure to what is basically a pretty loose program. Jerry is the entertainer, the showman; his job is to push all the emotional buttons. I'm the broadcaster; my function is to make sure we hit the cues on time, that people get the proper credits, that the telethon moves along smoothly. I'm the anchor. Jerry is free to do whatever he wants to do, knowing that I'm always there to bring him back to center stage.
Nothing I've ever done is like the telethon. Twenty-one and a half hours on the air. The only way to prepare for that is to stay up that long in a rehearsal, which would be like running a marathon to get to the marathon starting line. For more than twenty years I did the whole show; I never left the studio, I never got out of my tuxedo. Every few hours I'd go into my dressing room and touch up my makeup, have a cup or two or three of coffee, and then go right back out there again. But I found that taking short breaks, getting away from the stage for a while, enabled me to be strong at the end when Jerry started to get tired.
Jerry's stamina is amazing, although there have been times when he's collapsed backstage from exhaustion and I had to take over the show. On occasion he's been so tired that he's allowed his frustration or anger at the pace of contributions to show and I've had to calm him down. Like Johnny, Jerry trusts me. This is his telethon, these are Jerry's kids, and I've always been careful not to get in his way, but many years ago he told me, "Ed, you interrupt me any time you want. Just come right in when you think it's necessary."
And sometimes when it's not quite so necessary. The hours do take a toll. Twenty-one hours and thirty minutes. It's like doing twenty consecutive Tonight Shows. It's more television in one weekend than the cast of a sitcom does for an entire season. And sometimes we do get a little giddy. One year, for example, when we were doing the telethon at the Aquarius Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, I surprised him by walking out from the wings dressed in my pajamas and carrying a big teddy bear. "Could you hold it down a little?" I asked him. "I'm trying to get some rest." Then I turned around and left.
Even after the first twenty or thirty cups of coffee everybody starts to wear down. There are certain times when fatigue comes over everyone like a wave. There are times, like at three o'clock in the morning, when the phones aren't ringing quite as much, you really wonder who's out there watching. But then the sun comes up, and with it the phones start ringing again and bring a renewed energy.
The Muscular Dystrophy telethon is unlike any other show ever done. Filling that much time requires an extraordinary range of talent. And we've had it all, the singers and dancers, the comedians, rock groups and jazz groups, marching bands and choirs, plate spinners, the entire cast of Broadway shows, jugglers, magicians, impressionists, actors and athletes, even the animal acts. We've had just about everybody from Frank Sinatra to Bobby Berosini and his Orangutans. Every year we put on a great vaudeville show for an audience estimated at seventy-five million people.
After doing the show for three decades and at least a thousand acts, the shows run together in my memory. But one of the things I'll never forget is the reunion between Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. I helped make it happen. Martin and Lewis had been one of the most successful teams in show business, but after breaking up they hadn't spoken in decades. The reunion was actually Frank Sinatra's idea. I was with him one night several weeks before the show and he said, "You know what I'd like to do? I want to come on the telethon and bring Dean Martin with me. How do I do that?"
Jilly Rizzo and I worked out the details. While Jerry was onstage we snuck Dean into my dressing area and had him wait there. Jerry was completely surprised when he saw Dean walking toward him. Almost without a pause he said, "So, what have you been doing?"
I'm an unpaid volunteer on the telethon. For me, the payoff has been the progress we're making toward eliminating this disease and the assistance we're able to provide for those people who suffer from it. When I started working with Jerry, not only wasn't there a light at the end of the tunnel, they hadn't even started building the tunnel. It was a hopeless situation. Each year they would introduce me to the Muscular Dystrophy poster child, I'd spend a little time talking to this child, but I didn't want to get to know these kids too well because I'd be devastated a few years later when they were no longer with us. For a long, long time, progress in fighting this thing was very slow. Every few years there would be some sort of scientific breakthrough, just enough to keep hope alive. No one ever dared use the word "cure."
But the situation ha
s changed drastically and rapidly. They've isolated a few of the genes believed to cause this disease. Now scientists use words like "gene replacement." In 1995 for the first time I heard one of our researchers say flatly that we will have a cure. We're still in the tunnel, but now at least we can see sunlight at the other end.
The billion and a half dollars that you gave has made that reality. Using money raised by the telethon we have been able to fund research centers around the world. There are now approximately four hundred research centers connected by computer, enabling scientists at UCLA to confer instantly with researchers in Sweden. Now, when I meet these poster children, I know they've at least got a chance at a full life.
The money we've raised has also been used to improve the quality of life for people afflicted with the disease. Since we've started, I've seen the development of things like motorized wheelchairs and lifts that make vans and buses accessible to the handicapped. I got to know firsthand how the money we raised actually helped people when Claudia spent a year working for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. "I've never seen anything like it," she told me. "I've never had to say no to a patient's request. Whatever they need—an electric wheelchair, a ramp built onto their home—the organization provides it for them without any red tape. It's the most incredible thing."
Sometimes, when I started to get tired after sixteen straight hours, I remembered that. It was a lot better than coffee.
Of all the jobs I've done on the telethon, I've taken only one donation. But it was a big one. I was in my dressing room one evening and the great Bob Ross, the executive in charge of everything at the telethon, came and asked, "Would you recognize Frank Sinatra's voice on the phone?" A man claiming to be Sinatra was pledging twenty-five thousand dollars and they wanted to verify that it was really him.