From the outset, Carl envisioned a show that would be timeless. He wanted it to be fresh to audiences fifty years down the line. It was such a bold, confident vision, and correct. To that end, he made sure the scripts never contained references to the period. In other words, no politics, no slang, no mention of popular TV shows, films, or songs. In their place, he emphasized work, family, friendships, and human nature.
Carl was the master of knowing the difference between funny and not funny, but occasionally Sheldon took exception and the two of them got into a discussion that typically had them meeting in the middle, in agreement, and understanding that their difference of opinion came from their different approaches. Carl was a comedy purist, and Sheldon was all about the story, all about how the show was built.
I received a first-class education in comedy from listening to these two brilliant men argue with each other not about whether something was funny, but about what constituted funny, and what made something funny.
I listened to such discussions, but I stayed out of them, and avoided debates in general. My dislike of confrontation was so obvious that Rosie turned it into a joke. She dubbed me “the Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O,” and anytime it seemed like someone needed to speak with Carl about a line, a scene, or some other issue, she turned to me and said, “Let’s send the Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O.”
From the get-go, we cracked each other up all the time. It was part of the process, and out of all of us, Richard Deacon, who played Alan Brady’s brother-in-law Mel Cooley, was the worst at keeping it in. He started in the very first episode when he asked Rob if the writing staff could show him a little respect and Morey quips, “A little respect is all we’re trying to show you.” It was just zing—funny on the page and even funnier when we performed it.
And when Richard started to crack up, he got a quietly determined but panicked look in his eyes, and a single tiny bead of perspiration popped out on his forehead, which destroyed me. I always lost it before he did, then suffered the mirthful wrath of director John Rich yelling, “Cut.” That was par for the course. Two seasons later, Joan Shawlee came on to play Morey’s wife, Pickles, and little Larry Mathews, who played our son, Ritchie, kept saying, “Hi, Aunt Wrinkles.” And that stopped the show.
Likewise, on one of the later episodes that season, I was supposed to toss my hat onto the hat rack in my office. All week long during rehearsals, and even during the run-through on the day we filmed, I flipped my fedora toward the peg and missed. Usually I missed badly. But when we got in front of the audience Tuesday night, I tossed my hat and it went straight onto the peg, and I mean straight, as if it were on a string. I looked genuinely surprised, which I was and which was okay—it still worked in the scene—and Rosie gave me a look that said, Not bad, which also worked as a beautifully underplayed moment that got a laugh on its own. But Morey ruined it. He couldn’t hold back his astonishment.
“Holy shit!” he said to the audience. “He’s been trying to do that all week.”
Part of the fun of that first season was getting to know everyone. I was the new kid in town, so my eyes were wide open, and everyone had a full life going on outside of work. Rosie had been a performer since childhood, when she was a cute singer known as Baby Rose Marie, and she was a warmhearted New Yorker whose husband, Bobby Guy, the lead trumpet player in the NBC Orchestra, went through a mysterious illness that eventually took his life. She never lost the twinkle in her eyes, but it was hard on her.
Richard, who also played Lumpy Rutherford’s father, Fred, on Leave It to Beaver, was a gourmet cook and connoisseur of fine things. He enjoyed laughing at himself and often noted that the best acting advice he ever got came from Helen Hayes at the start of his career when she told him to give up any thoughts of becoming a leading man.
Richard and Morey were unlikely best pals, but they were, and they frequently went out for drinks after work and came up with some of the best one-liners, insults, and bad jokes. That was Morey’s specialty, coming up with those spot-on, hilarious insults.
Morey was a fascinating character with a joke for every person, situation, moment, or occasion. He claimed to know a hundred thousand jokes. But he had another side that few saw—or heard. The son of immigrants, he was a skilled musician who’d done stand-up with his brother in vaudeville and, as a teenager, worked in Al Capone’s Chicago speakeasy. He wrote a couple of well-known songs in the 1940s, including “Rum and Coca-Cola.” Few people know he also wrote lyrics to the show’s theme song.
So you think that you got trouble
Well, trouble’s a bubble
So tell old Mister Trouble to get lost.
Why not hold your head up high, and
Stop cryin’
Start tryin’
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.
When you find the joy of livin’
Is lovin’
And givin’
You’ll be there when the winning dice are tossed.
A smile’s just a frown
That’s turned upside down
So smile, and that frown
Will defrost
And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed.
I don’t think anyone outside the show ever heard those lyrics until I began performing them with my singing group around 2004. Once you hear them arranged with the theme song, they put a smile on your face.
Morey was like that, too. He was a devoted husband and father of two children, and above all else a very happy man. He used to say he was the happiest person he knew. He was probably right.
On the set, Morey was usually on the phone with his broker or reading the business section of the paper and then talking to his broker. It was as if he ran a second business. During rehearsals, someone was always paging him, “Morey, we’re ready for you. We’re waiting.”
It turned out the human joke machine was a financial genius. If not a genius, he had the magic touch when it came to picking stocks. He had bought a couple of winners early on, maybe Bethlehem Steel and Polaroid, and made a mint. I think he was richer than all the rest of us combined.
Mary was a hard worker who was going through a divorce from a man she had married at eighteen and was now falling in love with Grant Tinker, a former advertising executive turned TV producer who was frequently on the set with her. Mary kept her personal life quiet. She was a load of fun, though. Before we shot the pilot, Carl jokingly (I think he was joking) suggested that she and I go away for the weekend and get to know each other. We didn’t. Once the show began airing, though, our chemistry was such that people actually thought we were husband and wife in real life.
When she was about seven or eight months pregnant, my wife came to the studio and watched a show being filmed. Afterward, she came backstage and said it didn’t look like I was acting at all.
“You’re exactly like you are at home,” she said.
She was right, and that was all due to Carl’s ability to render me perfectly on the page. I was pretty much the same person on and off the set—maybe to a fault. Early on, Sheldon gave me the only acting lesson I ever had when he came up to me after a taping, put his hands on my shoulders, and told me that I was doing a terrific job except for one small thing. It was my voice. He said that I spoke the same in every scene, in a monotone.
“Exaggerate a little,” he said. “Let the audience hear your reaction.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t do much,” he said. “Just raise and lower your voice.”
I did. It worked. Simple.
11
CANCELED
That fall was a wonderful time in our lives, with a new show and the kids starting new schools, making new friends, trying to comprehend that they were still able to play in the swimming pool in October, and then, miraculously, saying hello to their new baby sister. It was four in the morning when Margie shook me awake and said, “It’s time.”
Only a moment passed before I realized she wasn’t referring to the clock
on the nightstand. No, she meant that after nearly nine months of watching her tummy grow, it was time to go to the hospital and meet the newest addition to our family. She was ready to have the baby.
The birth was like clockwork. Within thirty minutes, we were at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and though it was the same place where we’d had an unpleasant experience a decade earlier, this time the only tears we shared were from the joy of welcoming our second daughter, Carrie Beth. She arrived with a smile on her face and wisps of blond hair on top of her pinkish head. Later, I handed out cigars to everyone on the set.
As Morey shook my hand, he exclaimed, “Wow, four kids with just one wife?”
That day, the L.A. Times’ TV critic Cecil Smith was following me around for a story. We were working on the sixteenth episode of the season, “The Curious Thing About Women,” which had Rob getting annoyed at Laura for opening his mail. During a break, I took a phone call from my agent and learned that I’d been asked to host the CBS Christmas showing of The Wizard of Oz. They wanted me to include my children, Chris, eleven, Barry, ten, and Stacy, six. I told my agent about our newest addition and he said, “She’s included, too.”
It gave Cecil a great anecdote for his story. After hanging up, I turned to everyone and said, “How about that? Three hours old and she’s already in demand.” In all seriousness, though, I thought she was too young to appear on TV. Morey immediately claimed injustice.
“Who’s her agent?” Rosie asked.
“Never mind her agent,” Morey said. “Who’s her lawyer?”
Even when I tried to be serious, I failed. I used to say that I was getting paid to play. I often went into the set on Saturdays to work out little bits. I couldn’t turn my brain off, that’s how much fun I was having on the show. Take the episode “Where Did I Come From.” One of my favorites, it opens with six-year-old Ritchie looking through his baby album while Laura and Rob sit on the sofa. After commenting on a photo, he asks where he came from.
Mary and I, as Laura and Rob, exchange one of those frightened looks that is familiar to parents caught off guard.
“Wha-wha-what did you say, Ritchie?” Rob stammers.
He repeats the question and Rob says there’s not enough time to explain such a complicated thing. Then he turns to Laura and asks when she will have time to explain it to Ritchie. Unwilling to let her husband off the hook, she says there is still a half hour before bedtime, which sends Rob scrambling for Dr. Spock’s child-rearing book. Something akin to that moment had actually happened to me at home, where Dr. Spock was our top and only authority. Our copy of his book was dog-eared in a hundred places.
“Rich, where do you think you came from?” Rob asks.
“Same place that Grandpa Helper came from,” he says. “New Jersey.”
Realizing Ritchie is not ready for Dr. Spock, and in fact isn’t ready for the kind of specifics he feared, Rob says, “You didn’t come from New Jersey. You come from New York. Don’t you remember that?”
That line helps send the rest of the show into a wonderful series of flashbacks and reminiscences about the twenty-four hours leading up to Ritchie’s birth. It was all about being a nervous husband, something I had recently gone through with Carrie Beth’s birth, by the way, and something that came naturally to me. The show developed during rehearsals, where we all took a simple idea and kept adding to it until it was jam-packed with the most delicious comedy bits.
After this whirlwind, it concludes with Ritchie asking his mom if she liked that story. She nods yes.
“Better than Black Beauty?” he asks.
“Yes, better than Black Beauty,” she agrees.
In November, about a month after Carrie Beth was born, we had our own hell’s a poppin’—or rather, hell’s a burnin’—adventure: the Bel Air fire.
One day Margie looked up from the front yard and all of a sudden she called me to come see, to hurry and confirm the mind-boggling sight of flames shooting up across the horizon. If devils wore top hats, we were seeing the tips of them dancing up and down behind the not-too-distant mountains.
Within no time, the flames began to march over the hill and we had to evacuate. Police cars drove up the street, ordering residents to leave. We packed up quickly and I took the whole family to the studio. At night, we checked into a motel and stayed there for a couple of days.
The fire burned some houses along our street but skipped ours. During the next rain, though, the hillside above us slid down into our pool. I needed to have the entire hillside replanted and reinforced.
For about a week, all any of us talked about at work was the fire. It prompted everyone on the cast to talk about various disasters they had been in throughout their lives, which let Morey tell about a thousand new jokes on marriage. I talked about some of my days in the service, my various car problems, and of course the numerous tornado warnings I had experienced growing up in the Midwest, which also led me to share some stories about my younger brother, Jerry.
“The hardest I’ve ever laughed,” I told people, “was one time when Jerry and I had jobs as surveyors.”
“A summer job?” someone asked.
“No, it was winter,” I explained. “I was seventeen, and Jerry was twelve. We were out in a field. There was snow up to our knees. And it was freezing cold—below freezing, actually. We were trying to take measurements and he said something funny and we started to laugh. Except our faces were frozen stiff. We couldn’t laugh. We could see it beneath the surface, but we couldn’t get it out. If you look at someone who’s trying to laugh but can’t, it’s even funnier. As we stared at each other, we laughed even harder. We were dying.”
My brother, who had been funny his whole life, had gotten into show business, too. He and my parents had driven out to California (and camped the whole way) when I was doing the Merry Mutes act. They saw Phil and me perform at the Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica. Impressed that I was making a living—such as it was—lip-syncing to records, Jerry went home, got himself a partner, and started doing our act, pantomiming to songs.
When he went into the Air Force, Jerry got into Tops in Blue, a comedy-variety show that traveled from base to base. He swiped material from Dick Shawn’s act, including a piece called “Massa Richard,” which he performed better than Dick. He also incorporated jokes from other comics. In those days, no one could check.
Gradually, he included his own material. When I first saw him, I thought, My God, he’s got the timing! If you don’t have that talent, you can’t do stand-up. But my brother had it, and he began working some of the Playboy clubs, which put him on the map. Dan Rowan and Dick Martin took him on the road with them. Later he opened for Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.
He had just turned thirty the summer I began doing The Dick Van Dyke Show, and Carl heard me tell stories about Jerry’s antics, from punching the high-school dean to his skill playing the four-string banjo.
One day after the Bel Air fire, a bunch of us were telling stories around the table and I mentioned that my brother had been a longtime sleepwalker. It had lasted until he was in his late teens.
“He’d just get up out of bed and leave,” I said, getting up from the table myself and acting out the way Jerry used to walk through the house as he slept. “We had to go get him one night. Some people called from across town. He had walked there in his pajamas.”
Rosie, Morey, and the others were incredulous.
“One night I caught him going out the door with our dad’s golf clubs,” I said. “He had the bag over his shoulder. I asked where he was going and he said, ‘To play golf.’ ”
“Did he know what he was doing?” Carl asked.
“Yes, that was the strange thing,” I said. “Growing up, we slept in the same bedroom, and I’d say, ‘Jerry.’ He’d say, ‘I know. I’m asleep. Just give me a few minutes.’ Then he continued walking around the house. He almost got thrown out of the Air Force because he still walked in his sleep.”
Carl, who was always li
stening to, adapting, and incorporating our real-life stories into the show, caught Jerry’s act in Las Vegas, thought he was as funny as I had said, and wrote a two-part episode based on the stories I’d told about Jerry being a sleepwalker and nearly getting thrown out of the service because of it. Once again, Carl amazed me with his finely tuned ear and creativity.
Jerry was excited about being on a network show. It was a break for him, and he hoped it might lead to something else, something bigger, as did I. He did gain more recognition, and we had a good time working together, the first time we’d done so on camera.
By the time the two-parter aired at the end of March 1962, though, it seemed as if there might not be another chance. Worse, it appeared that I would have to go looking for another job myself. CBS canceled the show. Sheldon delivered the news on the set. It was a ratings issue, he explained. Despite good reviews and a whole season of thirty-nine episodes to prove ourselves, we lost the ratings war each week to our more popular time-slot competition, The Perry Como Show. In short, we didn’t find an audience.
“Or they didn’t find us,” someone said, voicing a frequent complaint that we didn’t receive enough promotion from the network.
As the Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O, I didn’t see the point in complaining. The facts were the facts, and the network had made its decision. I felt sick. The whole lot of us was practically suicidal. We knew we had something good and we didn’t want it to end prematurely. I glanced around the set. It felt like a foreclosure, like we were being wrongly booted from our home. It seemed like such a tragic error in judgment.
The show aside, I was personally devastated. We had just moved across country, bought a house, and had a fourth child. I had recently signed on to do the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie. My salary would hold us for about a year. But then what?
My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business Page 8