It was the spring of 1958, and Garry Moore asked me to sub for him when he went on a month-long sailing vacation. That should have been a sign that I was on my way up at CBS. I had made numerous appearances on his show in the past, including one of my favorites, a skit with Chuck McCann featuring the two of us as Laurel and Hardy (me as Stan Laurel and Chuck as Oliver Hardy). But just as I began to find my comfort zone, two things happened that seemed to foreshadow my future at the network.
First, a zookeeper came on with an anteater, which relieved itself on the stage. It would have been funny if not for a noxious odor that quite simply stunk up the entire studio.
Then, on another show, I was chatting with Garry’s sidekick, Durward Kirby, who pointed at someone in the audience. As I turned to look, his fingernail sliced into my nose. I bled like a pig. Durward finished the show for me while I went offstage and got bandaged.
While my bleeding stopped, it was too late to save me at CBS. After a three-year run, they let me go. They said they didn’t know what to do with me, and frankly, I didn’t know what to do with me, either.
I drove home and told Margie that I had lost my job. My voice cracked several times as I relayed the details. She put on a good face, but I saw the concern in her eyes. I’m sure she saw the same in mine. I reminded her that we had been in worse spots, but it was really more for my benefit. With a wife and three children, and a house at the end of a cul-de-sac, I shouldered the responsibility of keeping everyone fed, warm, and feeling secure, and I was scared to death.
Around that same time, my agent set me up with a reporter who promised to do a little puff piece that would keep my name in circulation. The reporter asked me to describe my career goals.
“I want to eat,” I said.
He laughed.
I wasn’t joking.
I liked the life we had made for ourselves. Our neighborhood was full of families similar to us. The couples were young, upwardly mobile, with kids the same ages as ours. Everyone knew one another. Every Saturday night someone had a party. We had dinner, with a lot of drinking before and after, and played charades, which got pretty competitive. Once I got so wrapped up in the game that I broke out in hives.
Until this time, I didn’t drink. Margie and I always kept a bottle of Early Times whiskey in the cupboard for company, but it went untouched for years. I began to enjoy a cocktail only as our social life picked up. I found a martini or two, and eventually three or four, got me past my shyness and helped me have a good time. And in those days, everybody drank and smoked and thought nothing of it. You were given odd looks if you didn’t.
I taught Sunday school at the Dutch Reformed Presbyterian Church, and when I saw friends with whom I had partied the night before, I would roll my eyes and ask if they had recovered from the good times. I made it look sort of funny. It would not be as funny later on when I realized that I had a drinking problem. But that was still a long way off, and it was an even longer time before I understood it.
The drinking never interfered with the work, which picked up again when I landed a guest spot on The Phil Silvers Show as Sgt. Bilko’s cousin. Then I was doing weekly pantomimes on The Pat Boone Show when I ran into Gil Cates, a young producer who went on to have an excellent career directing movies and producing TV, including more than a dozen Academy Awards telecasts.
Gil liked me. He was launching a daytime game show called Mother’s Day, and he hired me to emcee. We shot at the famous Latin Quarter nightclub on Broadway and Forty-seventh Street. I stuck it out for an entire season because I needed the money, but unfortunately for both Gil and me, overseeing diaper-changing races and floor-mopping contests was not my thing.
I went on to host another game show called Laugh Line. On it, a group of actors struck a pose while a panel of funny people, including Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Shelley Berman, Orson Bean, and Dorothy Loudon, attempted to come up with a humorous description for it. With a panel full of comedy Hall of Famers, you’d think that show would still be on the air. But it didn’t matter how funny those people were, and they were funny. The show didn’t work.
And pretty soon, neither did I.
But the whole time I hosted those game shows, I hedged my bets against unemployment by auditioning for plays. As soon as I finished the show, I raced into the theater district. I was trying to expand my options as a performer. That’s how I found out I could sing and dance. Sure, I had sung in high school and danced in some school plays, but I never considered doing it professionally. I was at one of those auditions and someone asked if I could sing and dance.
“Sure,” I said.
Hey, fear of being hungry and homeless will do that to you.
I would have said yes to almost anything short of tightrope walking and then at least tried it.
As it happened, I could sing and dance some. I found that if I went with the music and just did what I felt, I could do pretty well.
Well enough, anyway.
I landed a little variety show with Peter Gennaro, the gifted dancer and choreographer (he’d collaborated with Jerome Robbins on the original Broadway production of West Side Story), and Ruth Price, who was eighteen and a knockout. The show closed after a very brief run, but Aaron Ruben, a writer-producer from The Phil Silvers Show, noticed my work and took a shine to me. He became a friend and supporter.
Aaron and I began palling around together, working out at the Y and talking over coffee. Eleven years older than I was, he had written for George Burns, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, and Sid Caesar, and would go on to co-create The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Some people have the magic touch, and he was one of them. He promised to look out for possible jobs for me, and when he started doing the company sketches for Girls Against the Boys, a comedy revue, he got me in as part of the chorus, as well as in short pieces between scene changes.
The show starred Bert Lahr, Nancy Walker, and Shelley Berman. Aaron warned that “these people were hysterical,” and he was right. Bert could just look at the audience and get laughs, and Nancy knew when to do those kind of takes, too. I had one sketch with Nancy set in a deli in which I played a married man meeting up with a girl, and Nancy was the deli owner who attempts to distract me from the girl with her chopped liver.
It was funny, but after eating chopped liver eight times a week, I got nauseous just thinking about eating it.
Aaron also helped me write a pantomime of a guy who came home very drunk, but the second his wife appeared, he was as sober as a judge. Every time she turned her head, though, he was drunk again. The pacing kept speeding up, and so did the antics. I got a lot of laughs—and a good review.
In early November 1959, after workshopping the show in Philadelphia, we moved to Broadway. Despite some relatively good notices and a Hirschfeld cartoon in the New York Times, Girls Against the Boys was too light to compete with the drama-heavy season that included Mary Martin in The Sound of Music, Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, and John Gielgud in Much Ado About Nothing, and the show closed after a mere two weeks.
But that was enough time for me to impress noted choreographer Danny Daniels, who introduced himself to me after the opening and said, “Boy, I’ve never seen anybody move like you do.” He and Aaron got me on The Fabulous Fifties, a TV special celebrating the decade that was just about to end. In one sketch, I played a shy wallflower-type who learns to mambo, but then goes to a nightclub where everyone is doing the cha-cha. So he returns to the dance studio, learns the cha-cha, and then finds everyone at the club doing the Frug. So he learns the Frug, and so on. It was nonstop—and on live television. I had to dance twelve minutes straight. I almost died from exhaustion.
Aaron also put me into the lead of The Trouble with Richard, a pilot for CBS that we shot at an abandoned hotel in Lower Manhattan. I played a simpleminded bank teller who lived with his two aunts and infused the character with traits I had loved in Stan Laurel. But the network passed. As I recall, they said that “it looked cheap.”
Disappointed, I phoned my agent at MCA, hoping he had some prospects. He put me on Mike Stokey’s Pantomime Quiz, a charades-like TV game show that had been running since the late 1940s. I was partnered with Howard Morris and series regular Carol Burnett, whom I knew from working together on The Garry Moore Show, and that turned out to be a lucky break.
Carol and I were dynamos as teammates on Pantomime Quiz. Our personalities clicked, and so did our competitive juices. Thanks to a slew of imperceptible hand signals we came up with to tip each other off—some impromptu, some we worked out away from the show—we were unbeatable. It was a good thing, too. I needed the two hundred dollars we were paid each time we won to buy groceries.
My prospects brightened considerably when I learned that my agent had booked an audition with Gower Champion for another Broadway show. Champion was an actor turned director who had won a Tony Award a few years earlier for Lend an Ear, the show that made Carol Channing a star, and from what my agent told me, he was getting set to stage another musical, called Bye Bye Birdie. My agent said he had a good feeling about this one.
What he didn’t tell me—perhaps he didn’t know—was that Aaron Ruben had already been in there, on the inside, with Gower, laying the groundwork for me. He also smelled a hit and thought I was perfect for a key part as a songwriter-agent.