In the sixties I was hired by Allen Funt to be a writer and director for Candid Camera. I’m still not sure exactly why he hired me. I know he had liked me in a Broadway show he had seen, but I had played a nerdy Wharton Business School graduate, nothing that would suggest I’d be good for Candid Camera.
A young agent, Owen Laster, who went on to become a major literary agent, set up a meeting with Mr. Funt. I don’t remember anything that transpired at the meeting. All I know is I was hired and given my own film unit.
There was a slight hitch, though. I had been asked to go to Hollywood to be on a soap opera, The Young Marrieds. I had no interest in doing that, having worked for a short time in New York on a soap opera called Love of Life, which was the most difficult thing I’d ever done. It really was a challenge to memorize so many lines each day. I felt if I read the teleprompter it would look like I was reading a teleprompter—not exactly a good career move. I couldn’t get anywhere near the level of acting I was capable of, because there simply wasn’t enough time to be confident enough with the lines, so it would be next to impossible to embody the character. I don’t watch soaps or much of anything on television besides news and sports, but I’m sure there are some actors and actresses on soap operas who, after playing their character for years, do it a lot better than I did.
I accepted the job on The Young Marrieds because I had a six-year-old daughter and bills to pay. I said I’d only do it for six months and was surprised when they accepted that. It was there I met Ted Knight, who later played Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Ted played my boss on The Young Marrieds, and it was almost impossible for us to act the soap opera story together as it was a variation of the same scene over and over, which reduced us both to helpless laughter throughout rehearsal, much to the chagrin of the people in charge. I loved Ted. Once I was driving down a steep hill in Los Angeles with him and the car’s brakes failed. In order not to go over a cliff, I crashed the car into a brick wall of a garage. Amazingly, neither one of us was hurt. Ted passed away years later after refusing chemotherapy for what I assume was incurable cancer.
It was at his house at a gathering after he passed that I met Dabney Coleman. Dabney and I are close to this day, decades later. I wish I could have spent time with Dabney and Ted together, if even for one night. Sadly, it never happened.
After my six months were up, I headed back to New York and Candid Camera and immediately ran into an unforeseen obstacle in the person of an executive who worked under Allen who seemed to openly resent that I had been hired without her knowledge.
She met with me alone in an office and wanted to hear my ideas. I’d had six months to think about it, so I had about twenty-five I presented to her. She responded to each with variations of, “I don’t like it. That won’t work. We’ve done something like that. No. No. No,” and more noes. Then she sat back in her chair and looked at me, I guess to see if I would just leave the building. She obviously had no idea she was dealing with a thirty-one-year-old who had overcome being impeached at ten.
I said, “I know I can be wrong, but I don’t believe I can be wrong twenty-five times in a row.” It was decided we should go see Allen Funt, after she had expressed her feelings about me to him. Allen had just emerged from a Jacuzzi or a sauna, and he was sitting on a table wrapped in a towel. He asked me what I thought was my best idea. I told him, and he told me to do it.
The idea was that I was a young aspiring singer from Pittsburgh, and my uncle, played by the late Joey Faye of vaudeville fame, would tell a professional singing coach that he promised his late sister, my mother, that he would back me in a singing career, but he wanted a professional’s judgment of my potential.
We paid a coach for the use of his studio, and the coach called about six other coaches, telling them he had to be out of town and asking if they could come over to hear this young man and give their judgment. I believe we paid each one twenty dollars. Again, this was the 1960s. We scheduled them about an hour apart so they wouldn’t run into each other.
The studio was rigged with hidden cameras and mikes. The piano player, of course, was with us, and I burst into a completely sincere but way less than mediocre version of a somewhat operatic piece called “Be My Love,” made famous by Mario Lanza.
All day long the coaches were stunned, surreptitiously glancing at the piano player and Joey Faye, both of whom acted as though something reasonably acceptable was coming out of me.
A middle-aged heavyset male coach just stared at me as I sang, stunned. When I finished, I said, “I did this song for a group of Shriners in Pittsburgh and got a standing ovation! Of course, I didn’t do it as well as I just did it now.” The coach said, “I wonder what the hell that sounded like?”
One woman coach said to me indignantly, “I manage a baritone whom the New York Timeshas called one of the ten finest singers in this country, and this man cannot make a living!” I looked at her a moment and asked, “Does he have my range?”
Their outrage was hilarious. I went back to my office feeling great. The phone rang, and it was my agent. He said, “Congratulations!” I thought, “Wow, good news travels fast,” but I soon realized he was being facetious. He then said, “You’re fired.” “I’m fired?” He said, “You set a record. Candid Camera is knownfor firing people, but nobody ever got fired on the first day.”
Evidently, a couple of coaches had already threatened lawsuits, and Allen Funt was very upset with me. I went to see him and asked him to look at the footage to see how funny it was, even though we couldn’t show the segment. He did and rehired me.
I did some good work after that. Once we took over a sightseeing bus in New York, and Joey Faye described the sights of what we called the Garage and Warehouse Tour. The bus drove up and down streets filled only with garages and warehouses, and Joey would say things like, “Trucks come here every day and load up with supplies that are taken to stores around the city.” The camera was on the passengers, who were growing more and more agitated. Suddenly, an English fellow called out, “Where’s the Empire State Building?! Where’s the U.N.?” and Joey said, “The Garage and Warehouse Tour is our most popular tour.”
Another time we took over a New York restaurant called Voisin. Every time someone would take a sip of water, I would rush over and fill their glass. If there were any crumbs on the table, I would swoop in and sweep them off. Then I’d go back and listen with my headset to their comments, which began with, “Boy, they have some service here,” and then changed to, “This is starting to get on my nerves.” Ironically, when we announced we were from Candid Camera, no one would sign a release, because at every table we had miked, people were with someone they weren’t supposed to be with.
After a short time Allen asked me to go out to Kennedy Airport and put up a fake men’s room door. I told him I didn’t think it would lead to comedy when people came off a plane wanting to use a bathroom and then couldn’t. That shoot was a disaster, and I was notified at the airport that a call had come in from the Candid Camera office saying I was fired again. I chose not to go see Allen and remind him I had been against the idea in the first place.
Years later, after I had directed an Emmy-winning television special, my agent got a call from Candid Camera asking if I’d be interested in directing a special they were doing, but I declined. The lesson was, don’t ever accept a job from someone who has already fired you twice.