For Laughing Out Loud

by Ed McMahon

  "I think so," I said. "We've got a little code that I can use to tell if it's really him." When I got on the phone, I said, "Is this Mr. Sinatra?"

  "Ed," he said, "how are you?"

  Now, Frank Sinatra and I long shared a little private toast. Whenever we had a drink, he'd raise his glass and proclaim, "To the festival," to which I would raise my glass and respond, "To the incredible festival of life." So I asked the person on the phone, "To the what?"

  "The festival," he said.

  I turned to Bob Ross and told him, "Take his money."

  How do I feel when I've completed a telethon? Well, each year I join with friends to celebrate Harry Crane's birthday. My responsibility at this party is to supply the cake, which I have specially made. One cake I had made was called "The First Joke." On it a little caveman in a loincloth, Harry Crane, was sitting in front of a cave scribing into stone tablets. Next to him were tablets he'd tossed away, and into them were carved bits and pieces of the jokes he'd rejected, "that was no cavelady . . . ," ". . . two nuns get off a wheel . . . ," ". . . a man walked into a bar with a pterodactyl on his head . . . " But the tablet he was finishing was the world's first joke, which read, "I spent a week in Phoenicia one night . . . "

  That's what it feels like to complete a telethon. I spent a week on television one day. Believe me, entire careers haven't lasted as long as a single telethon. It's not just the broadcast, it's trying to prepare for the broadcast several days before and recovering from it for several days afterward. That's why nobody does two telethons a year. Well, almost nobody.

  When Anheuser-Busch was looking for a spokesperson to reach the black community, I recommended Lou Rawls. He'd done The Tonight Show several times, and besides being a terrific person, he was a great talent. After the brewery hired him he conceived the idea of a telethon to benefit the United Negro College Fund. Anheuser-Busch, who sponsored the telethon, asked me to be his cohost. They offered to pay me the same amount as I was getting to do the Muscular Dystrophy telethon! Now, how could I turn down an offer like that?

  In fact, I was very pleased. The United Negro College Fund was an organization I'd strongly supported for a long time—there are forty-six excellent colleges connected to the fund, and the money we raised on the telethon was to provide an education for deserving kids who would not otherwise be able to go to college—so I gladly accepted.

  I did it for fourteen years. The telethon was twelve hours long for several years, but eventually it was cut down to six hours because we found the pledges slowed down late at night. Believe me, it was very different from the Muscular Dystrophy telethon. One year, for example, I was introduced as LL Cool Ed, the Beverly Hills rapper. Lou Rawls started a rap song, Nancy Wilson picked up on him, and then I came out to finish it.

  America's hope, America's future, that's what we're all about. America's hope, America's future, c'mon, lemme hear you shout! Let me hear you shout. I said, let me hear you shout . . .

  Let me hear you shout, let me hear you shout.

  This is LL Cool Ed, and here's what I said,

  If we're gonna reach ya, we gotta teach ya!

  Now, I couldn't dance at Lowell High School, and I certainly didn't get better as I got older. But they taught me all the moves and gestures and, actually, I looked just like . . . like Ed McMahon doing a rap number.

  This was not a job for my tuxedo. I dressed properly, including a baseball cap worn backward. It was my favorite cap, it was bright red with the gold letters USMC, and above those letters were gold wings exactly like those I'd earned in the Marine Corps. When I finished the number, I turned the cap around to reveal the letters and wings. After we'd finished the song, I went backstage and someone asked if they could have the hat. "No," I said. "Not this one. I'll get you another one just like it."

  "Tell you what," he said. "I'll pledge a thousand dollars if you give me that hat."

  I took it off my head and handed it to him. We got the pledge, he got my cap. The problem is that I haven't been able to find another one just like it. And I really liked that hat. So if anyone knows where I might get another cap just like that one . . .

  If my show business career was winding down, there were always charities who needed my help, but I knew that wouldn't be enough to keep me busy. One area I knew I would not be going into was politics. Not that I couldn't have. How does this sound . . . Senator Edward McMahon. It almost happened. The only two elective offices I've ever held were president of the freshman class at Boston College and president of the Catholic University Alumni Association. However, I have met several presidents of the United States; Lyndon Johnson and I once drank Canadian whiskey out of Slurpee cups on his ranch in Texas, as he proudly showed me the carpentry work he had done personally in a new bathroom. I remember thinking, this is the man whose finger is on the button to blow up the world, and what he's most concerned with is how well the corners were mitered.

  I had a shot and a beer with John Kennedy when he was running for president. He was campaigning at the country club I managed outside of Philadelphia, and the Secret Service had him wait in my office for a brief time. I had the opportunity to tell him that we were cousins, I told him all about Katie Fitzgerald McMahon and how maybe because of his brother, Joe Kennedy, I had become a marine aviator. He was polite and seemed interested, but I suspect he didn't go home that night and write in his journal that he'd met cousin Eddie.

  I advised Richard Nixon how to make the best possible impression on The Tonight Show and produced an inaugural gala for him. I met George Bush at a luncheon for Catholic University in Washington. I'd just ordered a vodka martini when the then vice president came in and sat next to me. "That looks good," he said, "I'll have one, too." Somehow he knew I'd been a fellow navy aviator and we spent part of the afternoon talking about flying.

  I first met Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California. When he was reelected president in 1984 I hosted a closed-circuit inaugural celebration that was broadcast to embassies around the world. But it was Nancy Reagan who invited me to be the secret Santa for the press corps Christmas party. Iwas brought into the White House through the back door and hidden upstairs in the presidential quarters. Eventually I went downstairs dressed as Santa and the press corps tried to guess my identity. I disguised my voice, I probably have the most recognizable "Ho ho ho" in America. After they guessed who I was, Sam Donaldson ended up sitting on my lap, and I warned him, "You'd better stop being so mean to the president or you're going to have a very stingy Christmas this year."

  Bill Clinton appeared on The Tonight Show after making one of the longest nominating speeches in American political history at the 1988 Democratic Convention. As he sat down, Johnny said, "Before we start, let me just do one thing." Then he pulled out a giant hourglass and turned it upside down.

  I was offered an opportunity to participate in national politics. Near the end of my second term as president of the alumni association, I mentioned casually to one of the people who had championed my cause, "You know, politics have always intrigued me. I'd love to be a United States senator." I mean, I was just fantasizing. I didn't expect anyone to take me seriously.

  But he did. Several months later I was invited to a meeting with the leaders of the state Democratic party of New Jersey. The back room in which we met wasn't exactly smoke-filled, it was more martini-filled. At that meeting I was offered the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate and told that if I chose to run, "we can guarantee you'll win."

  I owned a house in New Jersey, so legally I was qualified to run. It was tempting. Senator McMahon. I'd received honorary doctoral degrees from both Brown and Catholic Universities so I was already Dr. McMahon, but Senator . . . "I don't know," I said. "I've got contracts with NBC, Anheuser-Busch, American Family Publishers . . ."

  "We've spoken to everybody," I was told. "We can get you out of those contracts."

  This wasn't a joke. This was a serious offer. And I considered it very seriously. For some people, a
n opportunity to serve in the United States Senate would be a dream come true. But for me, my dream had already come true. I was a broadcaster, I was doing exactly what I had dreamed of doing as a child. No matter how enticing it was to be able to say, "Heeeeere's the Senate majority leader," I just couldn't give up my career. I loved what I was doing too much to give it up. I mean, no politician I'd ever heard of had given away ten million dollars. So after careful consideration, I declined that wonderful offer.

  No matter what happened with my broadcasting career, there were many business opportunities available to me. I had a lot of experience as a businessman. In fact, the last time in my life I'd been involved in business it had cost me only one million four hundred thousand dollars.

  In the early 1970s with some friends from Catholic University I founded Unicorn Creations, a cutting-edge design company. We started with a great board game, the Game of Love. It was sort of a combination of Monopoly and Spin the Bottle. Instead of street names, each square had an instruction: kiss your partner's elbow, take off your sweater, give your neighbor a big kiss. Players rolled the dice to move and had to follow the instructions wherever they landed. It was a bit risqué, but this was the beginning of the sexual revolution.

  From the game, we expanded into a larger stationery company. We created all types of psychedelic paper products and gimmick items. We hired very bright, very clever artists, many of them right out of the Rhode Island School of Design, who created a wonderful product line. Even the great artist Peter Max designed products for us. Unfortunately, our products were a lot better than our knowledge of business.

  I am reminded of an old black-and-white movie costarring Jack Oakie. In this movie he announced proudly to his partner that he had managed to get them an airplane for free. When his partner looked out the window and saw the airplane, he was overwhelmed. He couldn't believe that Jack Oakie had actually managed to obtain an airplane for free. "How did you do it?" he asked.

  It was easy, Oakie explained, all he had to do was buy a thousand planes and then he got this one for free. Well, that was the way my partner in Unicorn Creations did business. His business philosophy was that in order to wholesale a paper product for four dollars, our production cost had to be under a dollar. That made sense, that was a four-to-one ratio. The problem was that the only way to get production costs down to that price was to order a tremendous amount of the product. Believe me, we had warehouses full of psychedelic stationery. It was coming out of our ears in very bright colors. And if we had ordered twice as much, we could have saved even more on our production costs.

  The biggest problem we faced was that most of our customers were small stores who often paid late or failed to pay for the products they ordered. These weren't big orders, so it would have cost us more to pursue payment than just write it off. Maybe the one good thing about this company was that when we had to write off our losses, we certainly had a lot of paper.

  I think what eventually killed the company was that we tried to do too many things. If we had focused our attention on one product line, the game or the stationery, we might have been successful. Instead we ended up owing more than a million dollars. When the company failed, I could have just walked away from our obligations, but I didn't want to do that. I refused to file bankruptcy. I just couldn't walk away from the people who had loaned us money to start the business or the suppliers who had trusted us. So with the guidance of Lester Blank, I personally paid off every penny that we owed.

  I've been involved in several other business ventures, but none of them has been very successful. When the franchise industry was just beginning, I had an A-to-Z Rental Center, a little company that rented business equipment. For a little while I owned a drive-through grocery store in Florida called Pick-a-Pack. The concept was that people would drive up to a window and order their groceries without getting out of their car. It seemed like a good idea to me. The fact that I rarely shopped for groceries didn't stop me from investing. The best thing about both A-to-Z and Pick-a-Pack was that they were less unsuccessful than Unicorn.

  I discovered that I was a much smarter golfer than businessman. As a golfer I had been smart enough to quit. I wish I'd done that with some of my business ventures. But I was always able to convince myself that business was going to get better tomorrow. And who knows, maybe it still will.

  As it turns out, Pam is the businessperson in our marriage. Pam and her partner, Greg Mills, the former senior vice president of Perry Ellis and president of Isaac Mizrahi, have created a full collection of exquisitely tailored clothes. Women's Wear Daily loved their first collection. And although the Pam McMahon line is now carried by major department stores and fashionable shops, the dresses have actually been carried across the country by Ed McMahon, schmatta schlepper extraordinaire.

  I'm not a businessman. And I'm not interested in being a politician. The closest thing I have to a hobby is the work I do for charities. What I am is a broadcaster, an announcer, a host, an actor, a master of ceremonies, a second banana, a spokesperson. I'm an entertainer, a performer, a salesman. I've got a nice tuxedo and a clean shirt, I'll be there when the band starts playing, and I'll know all my lines. I can tell a joke, sing a song, play the good guy or the bad guy. So for the first time in nearly five decades, I began to look for a job.

  Almost immediately people started approaching me with ideas for shows they wanted me to do. We started developing a sitcom titled After You've Gone, on which I played a man who'd died and gone to heaven. The only person able to see me or talk to me was my widow. It was a ghost comedy, like the classic series Topper.

  We hired several top writers and developed the concept. We approached the great actress Rue McClanahan to play the role of my widow. We found a recording of the song "After You've Gone." Then we made our pitch to one of the most respected executives in the television industry. "It won't work," he said, shaking his head knowingly. "See, ghost shows won't work on TV anymore. The audience is too sophisticated for that."

  Obviously that was before Touched by an Angel became one of the highest-rated shows on television. Technically, though, he was correct: an angel is not a ghost.

  I nearly became the host of a new version of the old quiz show The Liar's Club. It's a simple game, contestants have to determine which of our panelists are lying. We were going to use some of the great young comedians on our panel, many of them from Star Search, the format would give them an opportunity to stretch their imaginations. We spent more than a year and a half developing it and finally found a production company that wanted to buy it and put it on the air. Hours before we were going to make our final presentation—literally hours before—and after we'd made all the changes they'd requested, the president of the company was fired and replaced with someone determined to wipe out everything he'd done. We were first to go.

  Fifty years and I never knew that television was such a tough business.

  Pam and I developed a concept for a syndicated radio program called The Comedians. This was a daily five-minute show featuring material from three living comedians and one legendary figure. We were unable to sell it.

  I was working regularly. I did a television movie, I made several guest appearances. I wasn't getting desperate, but I was beginning to wonder if maybe the well had run dry.

  I began getting asked to audition for sitcoms. One popular show offered me the role of a slick car salesman, but I turned it down. This was a really unpleasant character, not a role I would have enjoyed playing. Then one day my theatrical agent, Harry Gold, called and told me that he'd found the perfect part for me; the producers of a new show titled Spin City wanted me to read for the part of the mayor. It sounded like something I would enjoy doing; the pilot script was very funny and Michael J. Fox was the star. But just as I was about to audition, somebody with the show decided I would be too noticeable, too widely known to play that role. My audition was canceled. Coming when it did, that was very disappointing.

  Several months later Harry Gold cal
led again to tell me he'd found an even better role for me. A new show to star Tom Arnold was looking for someone to play the host of a breakfast show in St. Paul, Minnesota. Well, that was perfect for me. I'd actually hosted a breakfast show in Philadelphia in the 1950s. Supposedly the breakfast show had been on the air for forty years and the people of St. Paul wouldn't think of starting the day without having Breakfast with Charlie.

  Now, coincidentally, Tom Arnold has been a friend of mine for several years. We share the same birthday and have started celebrating it together. I don't know how much I believe in astrology, but Tom is so much like me that he could be my son. But he had no idea I was auditioning for the role. He was on the road promoting his new movie and I didn't want to put any pressure on him at all.

  Eight of us auditioned for the role. They were all about my age, all character actors, all of them recognizable. A group picture of us might have been captioned "Oh, look, there's what's his name. I remember him from . . ." This was like the old days in New York when I auditioned for commercials; everybody was very good. I read my lines with the talent coordinator, who told me, "Thank you very much, we'll call you." I wasn't particularly pleased with my reading, I didn't think I was going to get the part, but at least she didn't send somebody to my house to rip out the phone.

  I made the first cut. Four of us were asked to audition again. Once again, "Thank you very much . . . ," and out I went. The next day they called again, and asked me to read again that night. What I didn't know was that Tom Arnold had been told I was auditioning for the role and wanted to read with me. After we read a scene together, he stuck out his hand and said, "Welcome aboard."

  We began shooting The Tom Show in April 1997. Charlie was an old codger, a man set firmly in his ways, an old fuddy-duddy, which is exactly the opposite of how I am. But I do have friends like that, friends who eat at the same time and order the same foods every night. Tom Arnold played Tom, the producer of the show, a man who had worked for Charlie many years earlier, then gone to Hollywood where he had married a big star, and returned to St. Paul after the divorce to get his life started again. Where do they come up with these wild ideas?