When I was growing up, theater and music were my first loves, so my original show business goals revolved around being in musical comedies on Broadway, like Ethel Merman and Mary Martin. My stage break came in the spring of 1959, when I was cast as Winnifred the Woebegone in the musical comedy Once Upon a Mattress, a takeoff on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea.” It was an Off-Broadway production at the Phoenix Theatre, directed by none other than the iconic George Abbott, “Mr. Broadway” himself!
The show was originally scheduled for a limited run of six weeks, but it was so popular that it was moved to Broadway and ran for over a year. I got my wish; I was on Broadway! Because no one had expected the production to be so successful, there were numerous booking issues that caused our little show to be bounced from theater to theater—from the Phoenix to the Alvin to the Winter Garden to the Cort and, finally, to the St. James. There were a couple of jokes going around the business about the production during this period. I remember Neil Simon quipped, “It’s the most moving musical on Broadway! If you haven’t seen Once Upon a Mattress yet, don’t worry, it’ll soon be at your neighborhood theater.”
My second big break came in the fall of 1959 when I was asked to be a regular performer on The Garry Moore Show, a terrifically popular TV comedy-variety series. For almost a year, until the summer of 1960, I doubled up and did both shows. I would perform in Mattress on Tuesdays through Fridays at 8:30 p.m. and then do two shows a day on Saturdays and Sundays.
I would rehearse for Garry’s show eight to nine hours a day Monday through Friday, and then we would tape his show on Friday, in the early evening, which gave me just enough time to hop the subway and head downtown to arrive at Mattress in time for the 8:30 curtain!
I had no days off. Hey, I was young, I told myself—but evidently not that young, because one Sunday, during a matinee, I fell asleep…in front of the audience!
Normally, the scene involved Princess Winnifred trying her best to get a good night’s sleep on top of twenty mattresses, but she couldn’t. The mattresses were highly uncomfortable and lumpy, resulting in a very active pantomime in which I jumped up and down, pounding on the offending lumps, and finally wound up sitting on the edge of the bed wide awake, desperately counting sheep as the scene ended. Not this Sunday. As I lay there on top of twenty mattresses, I simply drifted off to dreamland. Our stage manager, who was in the wings, called, “Carol?” And then louder, “Carol!” I woke up with a start and nearly fell off the very tall bed. The audience howled, but the producers changed the schedule after that and moved the Sunday performance to Monday, so I could have Sundays off.
By that time The Garry Moore Show had switched to tape, like everyone else, but we still performed in front of a live audience as if it were a live show—no retakes, no stops. We wanted the excitement and spontaneity that went with the feeling of live theater—which was exactly what made the show so good, every Tuesday night on CBS.
The musical numbers and the writing were certainly worthy of being on the Great White Way; in fact, our junior writer was Neil Simon, whom we called “Doc.” He had worked for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. It’s a little-known fact that Neil wrote Come Blow Your Horn, his first play, while he was working for Garry, who was one of his first investors!
Garry’s show was a great learning experience for me. I remember sitting around the table reading the script the week that the famous vaudeville performer Ed Wynn was the guest. Then in his seventies, he had begun his career in vaudeville in 1903 and had starred in the Ziegfeld Follies beginning in 1914. He told great stories about those days. He got on the subject of “comics vs. comedic actors.”
Garry asked him what the difference was.
“Well,” Ed said, “a comic says ‘funny things,’ like Bob Hope, and a comedic actor says things funny, like Jack Benny.”
That’s what I wanted to be…someone who “says things funny.”
I left Mattress in June of 1960, while I was still a regular on Garry’s show, but I really never dreamed television was going to be my “thing,” even though I found myself falling in love more and more with the small screen. Garry’s show allowed me to be different characters every week, as opposed to doing one role over and over again in the theater. In essence we mounted a distinct musical comedy revue every week—week in and week out—in front of a live studio audience, just like in summer stock.
However, I still harbored my dream of starring again on BROADWAY and being the next Ethel Merman.
CBS asked me to sign a contract with them after I had been on Garry’s show for a few seasons. The deal I was offered was for ten years, from 1962 to 1972, paying me a decent amount to do a one-hour TV special each year, as well as two guest appearances on any of their regular series. However, if I wanted to do an hour-long variety show of my own during the first five years of the contract, they would guarantee me thirty one-hour shows!
In other words, it would be my option! CBS would have to say yes, whether they wanted to or not!
They called this “pay or play” because they would have to pay me for thirty shows, even if they didn’t put them on the air. “Just push the button!” was the phrase the programming executives used. This was an unheard-of deal, but I didn’t pay much attention to it, because I had no plans to host my own show—never dreamed I’d ever want to. I was going to focus all of my energy on Broadway.