In the department of inspired silliness, Johnny and I once did a fashion show that no one had ever seen or ever will see on an American runway.
After I returned from a vacation, Johnny and I began talking about what I had done.
“So where did you go, Ed?” he asked. “I know Cincinnati is in season.”
“I went to Acapulco, Johnny,” I said.
“What was it like there? And feel free not to tell me.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, Johnny, I studied some weird local customs.”
“That’s what I do in Burbank.”
“I went to this one restaurant and it had the craziest custom
I’ve ever seen. If you’re wearing a tie, they cut it off when you walk in the door.”
“Sort of a silky circumcision.”
“Not exactly, Johnny, because then they nail the tie to the wall and I don’t think they do that in a . . .”
“No, they probably don’t.”
“So the whole wall of the restaurant is filled with people’s ties.”
“That’s totally insane,” he said.
“No it isn’t, because once you’re sitting there with just a piece of your tie, the whole tone of the evening changes.”
“You feel less tied down.”
“I wouldn’t have said that, but you do feel totally relaxed.”
“It still sounds like one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.
Maybe this country should consider cutting its ties to Mexico. And if I do another bad tie joke, please tie me up,” he said.
“Johnny, it was actually so much fun that—well, if I had scissors right now . . .”
At that moment, I knew if I extended my arm, the propman would put a pair of scissors in my hand—which is precisely what he did. He slapped it into my hand like a forceps for an operation.
And now, armed with my instrument, I did the only thing that a graduate of a major university could do. I reached across the desk and with the courage expected of a Marine, I cut off Johnny’s tie. I put the tie down in front of him and put the scissors on top of it, wondering if the Jesuits who had taught me would have been proud.
Johnny responded like the civilized man he was. He rose, came around the desk, cut off my tie, and put it and the scissors on the coffee table before me. Proudly, like a matador having presented a bull’s ear to his beloved, he returned to his desk. And Laurel and Hardy would have been proud of him too.
The curtain now went up for Act Two of The Cutups. In dramatic proof that I had only a tenuous connection to maturity, I reached over to Johnny and snipped off all the buttons on his shirt. There was, of course, only one sensible response for him. He came back to me and cut off the points of my collar.
The audience was going crazy. Johnny and I, of course, beat them to that destination. Some of them must have wondered what the two of us would do when we were finally nude.
After Johnny had let the crescendo of laughter play out, he told me, “I want you to know what you’ve done.”
“I think I do,” I said. “I was paying attention.”
“What I mean is I’ve been wearing this tie for seven years.”
“Well, you won’t be wearing it again,” I said.
And now, in spite of the continuing laughter, Johnny and I stopped our tailoring because we were aware that we had gone far enough. If we had begun cutting our suits, we would have been damaging something of greater value and showing insensitivity to some guy in South Dakota who had just lost his job and had only one suit to wear—not shred.
After recovering from the wackiness, Johnny paused, looked at me in wonder, and began the little litany we loved: “Two grown men.”
And of course, I replied, “Graduates of major universities.”
THREE FAVORITES
The “two grown men who were graduates of major universities” phrase was one of our great running gags. And there were others.
Every year on The Tonight Show, Johnny and I did three particular jokes to which our audiences always responded. The first one came in December.
“Ed,” Johnny said, “I was really devastated when I learned there was no Santa Claus.”
“That can be devastating,” I said. “How old were you, Johnny?”
“I was twenty-five at the time.”
In the second joke, I played straight man again.
“Ed, you never forget your first sexual experience,” he annually said.
“That’s for sure,” I replied. I could really zing those comebacks.
“How well I remember mine.”
“Where was it, Johnny?” asked the Kinsey of NBC.
“In the backseat of my father’s car.”
“In the backseat of your father’s car?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“Johnny, can you remember with whom you had this first sexual experience?”
“I was alone at the time.”
That car, by the way, is in the Imperial Palace Museum in Las Vegas. You expected the Smithsonian?
In the third joke, Johnny asked, “Ed, did I ever tell you about a special girl in my old high school, Lincoln High?”
“Every year,” I said, “but I never get tired of hearing about her because I never get tired of being employed.”
“You better not, or you’ll be seeing a lot of Dick Clark.”
“You know, I used to live next to Dick in Philadelphia. In fact, it was Dick who was really responsible for my getting the job on . . .”
“No one’s interested, Ed. Not even your wife. Let’s get back to that special girl.”
“Yes, we don’t want to leave her.”
“Her name was Jenny Satchitori and she was voted Miss Lincoln. Do you happen to know why?”
“No, Johnny. Why was Jenny Satchitori voted Miss Lincoln?”
“Because everybody took a shot at her in the balcony.”
BANANA ADVICE FROM ED
For those of you interested in a career as a second banana instead of legitimate work, here’s a tip you won’t learn when getting your A.B. (Advanced Banana) degree: You have to know how to ask the star precisely the right questions.
When the star says that his first sexual experience was in the back of his father’s car, you can’t say, “What happened?” or “Oh, really?” or “No kidding.” Those words don’t lead to the payoff. You have to ask, “Can you remember with whom you had the first sexual experience?” It’s not brain surgery; it’s not even dermatology; but it’s a minor art form that I practiced for thirty-four years with the funniest man I ever knew.
THREE PRIVATE JOKES
Johnny and I also had some private jokes that came up regularly. One that still makes me smile involved the sixteenth president of the United States. From time to time, Johnny would put on a stovepipe hat, a beard, and play Abraham Lincoln in a bit that always ended up the way Lincoln did after catching that show at Ford’s Theatre. Johnny always made it funny for me, however, and probably just for me. He was too subtle for most of the studio audience or the network viewers. After another Lincoln bit lay there like Lincoln in state, Johnny would turn to me and say, “Too soon.”
“Yes,” I would say, “too soon.”
We meant, of course, that it was tasteless of us to joke about Lincoln only 120 years after he was shot.
“Too soon” was not the only private joke that Johnny and I shared. For the four years of Who Do You Trust? and the first three years of The Tonight Show, I commuted to New York from Philadelphia, where I had built my dream house. Yes, I know that W. C. Fields would have said, “If your dream house is in Philadelphia, you don’t need a haunted one.” But there it was, and every day I had to take a train to New York, which passed the Gordon’s Gin plant in Linden, New Jersey. That plant was hardly the Statue of Liberty, but I happened to notice it, and the Statue of Liberty made nothing I drank.
During this time of my commuting, The Tonight Show had a bit called “The Homework School of the Air,” in which Johnny gave funny answers to questions from youngsters in our audience.
Well, they were supposed to be funny answers, and if the show had stayed on a second thirty years, one or two of them might have made it.
One day in the first year of the show, I said, “Johnny, here’s a nice letter from a little boy named Gordon in Linden, New Jersey.
He asks, ‘Why is the sky blue?’”
“Why not?” Johnny replied. “Let him think about that, but not too long.”
A few weeks later, Gordon from Linden wrote again, this time to ask why the sea was salty.
“It is?” said Johnny. “I never noticed that.”
And then a third letter came from Gordon with another question Johnny couldn’t answer. He should have been doing the “Every Child Left Behind School of the Air.”
“That Gordon from Linden, he writes a lot, doesn’t he?” asked Johnny with the smile of a man who knew what I drank.
“Yes, he’s thirsty for knowledge,” I said.
“Nice that he keeps in touch with us. I wonder if he knows any little foreign students in his school. Like the Smirnoff boy from Minsk or little Sherry from Marseilles.”
Another running private joke came about because Johnny got upset when he read a newspaper headline about his matrimonial life, which had its ups and downs during three marriages. That all changed when he finally found the love of his life, Alexis Mass, and remained on a high with her for fourteen years. I remember a day when one of his downs was caused by a newspaper story about the alimony he was paying to his second wife. Johnny always read newspapers to feed his monologue; but every once in a while, they fed his temper. On a day like that, no one wanted to be near him—not the writers, not the producer, not the propman.
My routine at the show was always to go first to one of our two producers, either Fred de Cordova or Peter Lassally, to find out if there was anything in particular that I should know for the show that night.
“Boy, he doesn’t want to see anyone today,” Fred told me that morning, “except maybe a certain newspaper editor to fight a duel. They’ve got his alimony payment again, and it sounds like first prize in the lottery.”
I had to see Johnny for my usual seven minutes of preparation to ad-lib, however, and the Marine Corps would have expected me to have the courage to do it. Just before I saw him, I did some calculating and figured out how much his alimony came to for each minute of the marriage. When I walked in, I gave him this figure and then asked, “Awake or asleep?”
He was silent for a moment, while I began figuring out how much per minute my severance pay would be, and then he banged his fist on his desk, said, “You no good son of a bitch!” and began to laugh.
A few hours later on the show, he turned to me and asked with a sly grin, “Awake or asleep?”
Americans must have been mystified to hear one of our three private jokes—“Too soon,” “Gordon,” and “Awake or asleep?” And Johnny, who never forgot anything, later threw the joke back at me. After my own alimony had been in print, he said, “Ed, I saw something about your alimony payments in today’s paper.”
“Oh really, Johnny.”
“Awake or asleep?”