We rehearsed at the Phyllis Anderson Theater on Fourteenth Street, near the great old German restaurant Luchow’s, in the heart of what had once been the Yiddish theater district. Chita and I met on the first day of rehearsals and instantly hit it off. Both of us were clowns and made each other laugh. Gower sent us home one day after we couldn’t stop ourselves from laughing. He was a quiet man and under a lot of stress from directing and choreographing the show, and he just snapped.
“Just go home!” he said.
We left the theater like naughty schoolchildren, laughing even though we knew nothing was funny. I thought we were going to get fired.
I lucked out being able to dance with Chita. She was a natural, a whiz-bang genuine crowd-pleaser. I didn’t have to do much of anything except move with her, and as a result, I ended up looking like Fred Astaire. Her husband, Tony Mordente, later spotlighted in West Side Story, was understudying the role of Birdie and assisting Gower, and he grew jealous of how chummy Chita and I became.
He was jealous of any guy who got near Chita or gave her a look. He blew up if a cabdriver said something to her. All of a sudden he got the idea Chita and I were stepping out on him, and one day he confronted me. For a moment I thought he might kill me.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “I don’t do that.”
Luckily he believed me and we all stayed good friends.
One night, just before we left town to workshop the show in Philadelphia, I exited the theater and started down the snow-covered sidewalk on Fourteenth Street when a tall, skinny guy came up to me and said, “Excuse me, do you have a dresser yet?”
I looked up—and up—and immediately recognized one of the tallest people I knew: Frank Adamo. A fairly recent acquaintance, he had recently lost his job as a junior ad executive at the J. Walter Thompson agency, and he was looking for something else, something different.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s a dresser?”
I really didn’t know.
When I had done Girls Against the Boys the previous year I didn’t know that theater people did their own makeup. On the first night, I asked someone to point me toward the makeup room. They laughed and explained that I had to do it myself. That night, I borrowed makeup from some people and went out looking like Emmett Kelly the clown.
Frank smiled.
“Sure,” he said. “A dresser is the person who takes care of your wardrobe, makes sure it’s clean and hung up and ready for you every night. I’ll also do all the other things you will need done.”
“Oh, I see,” I said.
“I also need a job,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Well, you got one,” I said. “We’re opening at the Shubert Theater in Philadelphia.”
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“Then I’ll see you there.”
We shook hands, and the next time I saw Frank was in Philadelphia where he had my clothes hung up in my dressing room, as promised. Somehow he intuitively knew I was particular about my clothes. He also took care of everything else. He was so good, in fact, that he ended up staying with me for years, later serving as my secretary and stand-in on The Dick Van Dyke Show. And later still, he worked for Mary Tyler Moore.
Philadelphia was where the show came together and I got to know my talented castmates, and they were a brilliant lot, starting with Gower and my pal Chita. Then there was Paul Lynde. No one has ever played the part of Mr. MacAfee like him. My God, he was funny, just off-the-charts funny, but he was also very prickly. He made it known that he didn’t want anyone stepping on his lines, and God help those who did. He could be vicious.
Michael J. Pollard was a sweetheart, though on matinee days he went out between shows and got a little tipsy, and invariably, not long before the second show, I’d hear a knock on my dressing room door, and there would be Michael, his smile just a little off, his eyes glazed, wanting to know what was going on. I didn’t even have to ask. I knew that he was plastered.
I brewed him some coffee, threw him in the shower, and he was fine by showtime. If he wasn’t, I never knew the difference.
I was especially fond of my understudy, Charles Nelson Reilly. I hadn’t met anyone quite like him, but I took to him instantly. He was hysterically funny, clever, quick, and intelligent. I was never bored around him. On the first night of previews, it was raining and he came into my dressing room with a scarf around his head and purred, “Hello, my name is Eve Harrington. I’m such a fan of your work.”
He did the whole scene from All About Eve, which put me on the floor. He was one of a kind.
The truth is, I owed everything to Gower, who put me in the show and then gave me the benefit of his time, talent, and creative eye. I can’t tell you what he saw in me as a singer and dancer, but he saw something, and then he made the most of it, or rather enabled me to make the most of it. As a dancer, I was strictly an amateur. Yet he taught me tricks and moves that not only added to my ability and repertoire but also made me more comfortable, and that was key.
Singing was another matter. I could carry a tune. That much I’ll say. But I was not a good singer. Dick Gautier, who had the title role as Conrad Birdie, was the same way. Both of us learned that you can’t sing incorrectly eight times a week without getting hoarse. We had a scene where he came downstairs holding a beer and I said, “Hi, Conrad. How are you doing?” Between the two of us, we barely managed to eke out a sound.
It wasn’t really funny, but it was to us, and we laughed. Others weren’t as amused, though. Unbeknownst to me, during previews, the show’s producers didn’t think I was cutting it. I probably wasn’t; not then, anyway. They wanted to replace me, but Gower stepped in and asked for more time.
“Look, he’s going to be all right,” he said. “Let me work with him.”
He had an idea. He put the writers to work and overnight they came back with a revised version of the song “Put On a Happy Face,” which they had originally written for Chita. But Gower gave it to me, explaining, “The skinny kid doesn’t have anything to do in the first act. Give it to him.”
Of course, that song changed my life.
The show opened in New York at the Martin Beck Theater on April 14, 1960. I was a nervous wreck all day and into the evening before the show. I brought Margie and the kids into the city and we got adjoining rooms at the Algonquin Hotel. Despite my nervousness, the performance could not have gone better. We heard nothing but enthusiastic applause after each song and a long, foot-stomping ovation at the end.
It felt like a hit, and it was—even though the New York Times’ venerable critic Brooks Atkinson chided the show’s folksy simplicity and called some scenes “ludicrous.” But he praised Dick Gautier and Paul Lynde. My role puzzled him. “Mr. Van Dyke is a likeable comedian, who has India-rubber joints; and Miss Rivera is a flammable singer and gyroscopic dancer.” But, as he put it, our scenes “have little relevance to the main business of the evening.”
As a group of us read the review together in Sardi’s that night, we wondered if he had seen the same show we had performed. Apparently the critic had the same sense, too. “Last evening, the audience was beside itself with pleasure,” he wrote at the close of the piece. “This department was able to contain itself.”
A short time into the run, the production moved from the Martin Beck to the 54th Street Theater. By then I had grown comfortable in the part and was bringing much more to it than the New York Times’ critic had seen on opening night. I had also fallen into a nice daily routine. I went home after the show, then spent the next day relaxing until I went into the city, usually in time to have an early dinner at Sardi’s. I loved their cannelloni. On matinee days, I had it for both lunch and dinner.
During intermission one night, my wife called me. She was frantic. Our ten-year-old son, Chris, had run away and she couldn’t find him. She thought he had been kidnapped. I was distracted the whole second act; two-thirds of my brain was thinking about something else the whole time I was onstage. I raced home after the show and foun
d police cars in the driveway and cops and bloodhounds searching through the woods behind our backyard.
They found Chris sound asleep under a tree, oblivious to the surrounding panic. It turned out that he’d had an argument with his younger brother, Barry, and my wife had sided with Barry, a decision that Chris thought was unfair. So he decided the hell with such injustice, and he ran into the woods.
From then on, I knew that boy was going to be a handful—and I turned out to be right. But he was always a good kid, and eventually he became a lawyer, a good one, too—the state district attorney in Salem, Oregon, in fact.
In some ways, those sorts of interruptions of the normal routine weren’t unusual. There was one night, for example, when I got caught in a blizzard on my drive into Manhattan and never made it to the theater. I had left home a little later than usual, after having an early dinner with Margie and the kids, and about halfway into the city, my Corvette ran into an enormous snowdrift. It was snowing hard, almost whiteout conditions, and the highway was no longer navigable.
I wasn’t the only one who got stuck, either. There were a few of us, and we got out of our cars, nodded and said hi, and started walking. I wasn’t that bundled up, and along with a couple of others, we thought we might freeze to death in the biting wind and snow.
We came to a restaurant, though, one of those diners right off the highway, and went inside. A bunch of other people had also taken shelter there. Making the show became moot. I spent the night in a booth, drinking coffee, talking, and waiting for the storm to let up.
The next morning, I caught a ride back home on a snowplow. The snow didn’t stop for days, and then it took a couple more before it began to melt. When I finally went back to get my Corvette, I found it in two pieces. A snowplow had come along and blindly cut it in half.
During one show, I looked out and recognized Fred Astaire out front, in the house seats. He was one of my idols. Imagine trying to dance in front of Fred Astaire. I had a long moment when I thought my so-called India-rubber legs might not only freeze mid-dance, but actually walk offstage on their own accord and refuse to go back on.
Another night we were told Cary Grant was in the house. I couldn’t see him during the performance, but afterward I was in my dressing room and there was a knock on the door. I opened it up, and there was Cary Grant. When I saw him, I prayed my eyes didn’t betray my surprise. Before I could think of what to say to him, he pushed me aside and started going through my closet. I wore my own suits in the show, some of which were tailored and quite handsome, and my assistant, Frank, had hung them neatly.
“These are very nice,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “Actually, I was given the After Six Award as the best-dressed on Broadway.”
“Well done, young man,” he said.
Years later, Cary asked me to do a movie with him, one of those Doris Day–type romantic comedies, and I declined. I don’t know what the hell was the matter with me. I could have worked with Cary Grant. Thank goodness I had better sense when Carl Reiner came to the show and offered me the role that changed my life.
9
ROB AND LAURA PETRIE
In his book My Anecdotal Life, Carl Reiner called me “the finest all-around performer to ever grace a situation comedy,” so it’s only appropriate that I take a moment to return the compliment by saying that in the history of television, Carl is the finest all-around writer to ever create a situation comedy. He’s also one of the finest human beings to do so.
But that represents only a fraction of my admiration for this very funny, intelligent, and kind man.
Long before I met him, Carl was already among my heroes. I worshipped the Bronx-born comedy genius as a mainstay on Your Show of Shows, the classic variety series starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Airing on NBC from 1950 to 1954, it also featured Howard Morris and Nanette Fabray. Carl, though a regular performer, also considered himself one of the writers, an illustrious bunch that included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, his brother Danny, and head writer Mel Tolkin.
Each season was thirty-nine weeks, and the show was broadcast live for ninety minutes. It was understandable why Sid would get a little crazy whenever people asked him how many retakes they did. The answer was: none. There weren’t any second takes. They had one chance every week, and they had to get that sucker as perfect as possible the first time.
The show was a milestone in TV comedy, and in the summer of 1959, it inspired Carl, who won two Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Actor during that period, to write a sitcom based on his experiences as a writer there.
At the time, Carl was living with his wife, Estelle, and their three children in New Rochelle, New York. He went off to Fire Island and wrote his first sitcom script. He called it Head of the Family. Being a visionary and a prolific storyteller, he didn’t stop with that one script, either. He wrote thirteen episodes—one-third of an entire season!
Then he shot a pilot starring himself as TV writer Rob Petrie and Barbara Britton as his wife, Laura. He cast Sylvia Miles and Morty Gunty as his writing partners on the fictional Alan Sturdy Show, and he put actor Jack Wakefeld in the role of Alan Sturdy. CBS liked the pilot, but not enough. However, they did respond to Carl, who was advised to try again.
As he regrouped, Carl was introduced to Sheldon Leonard, a brilliant TV producer with a Midas touch. His credits already included two classics, The Danny Thomas Show and The Andy Griffith Show. After viewing the original pilot, Sheldon, like everyone else, became an instant and devoted fan of Carl’s writing. He also made a suggestion, not an easy one, either, considering the stature of the person to whom he was making it.
He told Carl the show needed to be recast.
And Carl—did I also mention he was one of the wisest men to ever create a situation comedy?—understood.
He also agreed to let Sheldon direct the pilot, which, in retrospect, was like Babe Ruth welcoming Lou Gehrig into the lineup. Or something like that. The two of them were superstars, and Carl knew Sheldon’s sensibility and experience were only going to help this project that was so personal to him.
I say God bless both of them—and thank you—because in thinking about who should play Rob Petrie, Sheldon recalled seeing me in Girls Against the Boys, and he came to the theater to see me in Birdie. A short time later, he returned with Carl, with both of them looking at me as their lead actor.
I had no idea they were in the audience and neither man came backstage afterward. But later I heard that Carl had been very entertained and impressed, and he left the theater thinking that I was the right guy.
Over the years, I have heard and read about other actors they considered, including Johnny Carson. I have also heard and read various accounts of why they liked me. My favorites? I wasn’t too good-looking, I walked a little funny, and I was basically kind of average and ordinary.
I guess my lack of perfection turned out to be a winning hand. Let that be a lesson for future generations.
Through my agent, I received eight scripts from Carl—the first eight scripts of this new series that didn’t have a title or any actors. No longer called Head of the Family, Carl had rewritten each episode, not that it would have mattered to me. I hadn’t read the originals. I’m sure they were as brilliant as those sent to me. The eight I read were magnificent. They were fresh and funny. They resonated with real-life energy and insights that I recognized from my own life and the lives of people I knew. Carl was dialed in, as they say.
I read one after another eager to see what was next. Midway through, I turned to Margie and said, “My God, this guy is good.”
It’s one of the great understatements in TV history.
He was Carl Reiner.
So no one accuses me of venturing into hyperbole, let me say there were no one-liners in these scripts, no corny or cheap jokes for the sake of comedy. The humor grew out of the people and their relationships to one another and their jobs. It was organic, natural, real, and timeless. I keep going back to the same po
int, but anyone who has been in a hit TV series will mention the same thing as the essential ingredient. It was the writing. It was fantastic.
“I want to do this,” I told my agent. “What’s next?”
Next, I met with Carl. He offered me the job and asked me to fly to Los Angeles to make the pilot. Part of me was ready to go right away, but I had some reservations about leaving a hit play and uprooting my family from a place where we’d grown very comfortable. In my meeting with Carl I found myself working out this conflict perhaps subconsciously by telling him about an idea I had for a series that I was calling Man on a Scooter.
Inspired by the great physical comedy of Jacques Tati’s 1953 movie Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, I envisioned myself playing an associate professor from a small Ohio college who takes a sabbatical and travels through Europe with his typewriter on the back of a Vespa, having one adventure after another.
I had already pitched it to a network and a few producers without any interest, and Carl reacted like everyone else, only kinder. He said that while he, too, admired Tati, he thought my idea was a movie, not a TV series.
“It’s one idea,” he said, and a TV series, he explained, had to have an infinite number of story ideas, like real life—and like his scripts about Rob and Laura Petrie, their son, Ritchie, Rob’s coworkers Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrell, their boss, Mel Cooley, and their neighbors Jerry and Millie Helper.
After getting a week off from Birdie, I flew to Los Angeles and met with Sheldon Leonard and Carl in Carl’s second-floor office at Desilu Studios. I had signed on for $1,500 an episode, and I was very excited. I felt like I was a little twig on the Sid Caesar family tree; I was honored and thrilled to have any sort of attachment to that comedy lineage. Once we began to work, I was not only honored and thrilled, but I was also impressed.
Sheldon and Carl had already cast Rose Marie as Sally Rogers, and she had told Carl about Morey Amsterdam, who was also hired, to play the role of Buddy Sorrell. Both were comedy veterans. As for Mary, it’s well-known that Sheldon and Carl considered dozens of actresses before settling on Mary Tyler Moore, a young actress whose previous work, outside of commercials and dancing, was playing a receptionist on the series Richard Diamond, Private Detective, though her great legs were all that anyone ever saw of her.
My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business Page 6