In Such Good Company, page 5
A younger Ernie Flatt danced in Gene Kelly’s An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain. After he became a choreographer, he won several awards for his choreography, including Emmys, a Christopher Award, and a Golden Rose. He was one of the most versatile people I’ve ever known. Aside from the work we had done together on Garry’s show, Ernie staged the dances for two of the specials I did with my chum Julie Andrews, plus several others.
Every week for The Carol Burnett Show, he created incredibly original dance numbers for our finales, and also for the guest stars who danced, such as Gwen Verdon, Juliet Prowse, Chita Rivera, Rita Moreno, Bernadette Peters, Ken Berry, and many more. After our show, Ernie went on to stage and direct various Broadway shows including Sugar Babies, Honky Tonk Nights, and others. Ernie retired to Taos, New Mexico, where he died in 1995.
Don Crichton
I met Don when he was one of the Ernie Flatt Dancers on The Garry Moore Show. He was so gifted that he soon became the lead male dancer. He was also very tall and handsome, so Ernie had him “partner” every dancing female guest star. Don and I hit it off immediately, and often ate together on our lunch breaks. He, too, followed us to California and became the lead male dancer on our show for the entire eleven seasons. As talented as he was as a dancer, he could sometimes be an absolute klutz. The big joke was that when he simply walked, he would often trip! In Studio 33 at CBS Television City, there were steps that led up to our stage from the audience. Whenever Don had to run up onto the stage from the audience when we were rehearsing, he would inevitably trip! One time, I said, “Don, why don’t you try dancing up the stairs?” And it worked! Nary a stumble. Also, he had one whale of an appetite. He could pack it away and never gain an ounce. The female dancers, who lived on lettuce, wanted to kill him when he showed up for rehearsals scarfing down a hero sandwich and polishing off a couple pints of ice cream for dessert.
Don was also the lead dancer on several specials I did. After our show went off the air, he became a successful choreographer. We met fifty-seven years ago, and to this day, he remains one of my closest friends.
Artie Malvin
Artie was the first special musical material writer we hired, and he was with our show for the entire eleven seasons. He arranged not only the vocal numbers for already existing songs but also wrote original lyrics and music.
During World War II, Artie performed with Glenn Miller as part of the Crew Chiefs. Recordings of his performances with Miller and the Army Air Force Band were released as V-Discs.
After World War II and Glenn Miller’s death Artie became heavily immersed in the popular music of the 1940s and 1950s, everything from children’s music, to the beginnings of rock and roll, to jingles for commercials. In the late 1950s he worked in television as the music arranger for The Pat Boone–Chevy Showroom.
He had a gold-plated résumé when we asked him to come on board. I just loved him. He was always smiling and eager to contribute.
Artie collaborated with other writers, Buz Kohan and Bill Angelos the first few seasons, and then Ken and Mitzie Welch when they came on board for seasons five through ten. He also worked with Stan Freeman during our eleventh year.
Artie used to make a tape of the music I had to learn for the following week so I could take it home on Fridays and listen to it over the weekend. I didn’t read music, but after listening to the number several times, I was ahead of the game when Monday rehearsals rolled around. When Ken and Mitzie were writing on our show, and I had a number to learn that week, I would listen to Mitzie sing my part, which made it that much easier for me to learn, and Artie would sing the other part. Depending on the guests that week, he would be Steve Lawrence, Bing Crosby, Ray Charles, etc., etc., and sometimes even Eydie Gormé! Always a delight, Artie welcomed working with other creative musicians and lyricists. There never was any ego involved. After we went off the air, Artie, along with Ernie Flatt, created the wildly successful Broadway musical Sugar Babies, starring Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller. He also wrote a number for me (as Miss Hannigan) and Albert Finney (as Daddy Warbucks) to sing in the movie Annie, called “Sign.” He wanted no credit. Artie died in 2006.
Music
Since my first show business love was musical comedy, it was a given that we would have lots of music in our variety show. And what music! We had a live twenty-eight-piece orchestra (unheard of today!), conducted and orchestrated by Harry Zimmerman (who had been the musical director on The Dinah Shore Show and The Garry Moore Show) for our first three years, and then Peter Matz (a composer and conductor for stage and screen, also famous for his work on Barbra Streisand’s early albums) for the final eight years. I couldn’t wait for orchestra rehearsals on Thursday nights.
All week long we would be rehearsing with just a piano and drums, and then Thursday would roll around, and we’d all be thrilled to hear the beautiful sounds that came out of the band shell. Since I never learned to read music, the only way I could learn a medley where I had to sing harmonies was to look at the lyrics printed in my script, and pencil in “squiggles,” which was my own personal invention, a sort of shorthand. If a note went “up,” I would draw a line over the lyric that swooped up, or I would draw a line that swooped down if the note descended. If I had to look at the cue cards for a lyric, our cue card guys would copy the squiggles from my script! For instance, here is a sample of how the squiggles would work with “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat.”
I never liked singing alone, as myself. I was okay with it when I was doing a character, but singing a straight solo always scared me. However, I was fearless when it came to singing duets with our musical guests. (Some might say I was too fearless, but I didn’t care because I was in “medley heaven!”) Our special material writers would brilliantly weave several different songs together that usually had a theme. There were some amazing singers who graced our show over the eleven years: Ella Fitzgerald, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gormé, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Mel Tormé, Ray Charles, the Carpenters, and Marilyn Horne, to name but a few. The medleys we sang were so well written that I can remember a lot of them to this day.
We wrote our own musical takeoffs on Show Boat with Hal Linden, Cinderella with the Pointer Sisters as the evil stepsisters, a Fred and Ginger movie (“Hi-Hat” with Ken Berry and Roddy McDowall), and many more. All of them had original music and lyrics by our special material writers over the years: Ken and Mitzie Welch, Artie Malvin, the team of Buz Kohan and Bill Angelos, and Stan Freeman, and all of them won Emmys for their creations. Then there were the solo performances by our many musical guests.
In 1968, there was a musicians’ strike that lasted three weeks, and guess who our guest was the first week? Ella Fitzgerald! Great timing. Ella lip-synched her recordings of “Day In, Day Out” and “Skylark.” I lip-synched a recording I did of “The Trolley Song,” where our director Dave Powers bet me a dollar that he could foul me up by randomly speeding up and slowing down my voice from his perch in the booth. It was a hoot, and I won the dollar. The wildest part of these shows was that our singers replaced the missing orchestra by humming everything, from the opening theme song to all the play-ons and play-offs! It was pretty funny and we had a blast making do without the band, but I sure was happy when everything was settled and we got our orchestra back.
Our Sound Effects
I was somewhat obsessive when it came to sound effects. It began when I was on Garry’s show. We had a sound effects man (I wish I could remember his name) who was a throwback to radio. Back in the day, so many radio shows depended on sound effects to help tell the story—and generate laughs. I remember listening to Jack Benny when I was a kid. The sound effects were so important that you could almost say they were another “character” on the show. I remember Jack’s footsteps walking down to his basement where he kept his money in a vault, and the sound of him removing the heavy chains wrapped around the safe, and then the creaking noise as he opened the vault’s very heavy door: hysterical.
In doing Garry’s show, the sound effects man would simulate a body fall whenever one of us fell down. If a gunshot sound was required, he’d provide it at that very moment. If we fell out of a window, you’d hear a slide whistle denoting the fall, followed by the sound of garbage cans being banged into, and maybe the loud meow of an angry alley cat.
When I got my own show, we hired the brilliant Ross Murray, who was blessed with perfect timing and a terrific sense of humor. He had a small booth upstairs, behind the audience, that looked out over our stage and was filled with various recordings and tangible objects he invented to create the effects that were needed in whatever sketch we were doing. We did a LOT of physical stuff, and he never once missed a cue in eleven years.
Lots of times we would do something that required an effect that we hadn’t even rehearsed. For instance, the first time I was asked in a Q&A if I ever got nervous when performing, I said no and then, out of the blue, pretended to faint and fall on the floor. Ross was right there with a “body fall,” and the audience screamed with laughter. They wouldn’t have laughed as hard without the added benefit of the sound of my body hitting the ground. I always preferred “real” sound effects, as opposed to comic ones. To me, the real ones were funnier. Alas, today this is a lost art. If sound effects are required in a television show that’s being taped or filmed before a studio audience, they are added later in the editing room. The studio audience never hears them, and the spontaneous laughs they would have generated are lost. It’s really too bad. Ross Murray always made our sketches funnier with his live inventions.
CBS Censorship
Over the years we had a great censor, Charlie Pettyjohn, who came to every run-through and taping and never gave us any grief. Maybe because we never gave him any grief. However, one week, in 1968, Harvey and I were doing a sketch where he was interviewing my character, who was a nudist in a nudist colony, standing behind a fence showing bare shoulders and bare legs, with high-top sneakers on my feet. Harvey asks, “What do you nudists do for recreation?” My reply was “We have a dance every Saturday night.”
“How do nudists dance?” he asks. My answer was “Very carefully.” Charlie was okay with that line, but somebody higher up who was with CBS Program Practices (and Charlie’s boss) considered the line to be too risqué, so we had to come up with a different joke. We came up with a different one, all right. And CBS bought it.
“How do nudists dance?”
“Cheek to cheek.”
Go figure.
Actually, the network pretty much left us alone. Besides Charlie Pettyjohn, there was always a CBS representative around who never said much and who also didn’t do much, for which we were grateful. One of our writers said once, “Looks like his job is to warn us when an iceberg’s heading down Fairfax Avenue.”
The Writing Staff
During our show’s long run, I often didn’t know who took the lead in writing each of our sketches, with a few exceptions. I wish I could name those exceptions, but it wouldn’t be fair to single out any writers from within the different groups while not being able to give credit to others whom I’m in the dark about. There were a number of factors that reluctantly led me to this decision, one of those being the credit guidelines of the Writers Guild of America, an institution I greatly respect.
But for some reason, there was never a “byline” when I was handed a sketch to read. I suppose Joe felt that if I knew who wrote it, I might start to favor a particular writer or writing team over others. I wasn’t like the “boys”—i.e., Gleason, Caesar, Berle, etc.—who were joined at the hip with their writers and spent hours with them in the writers’ room kicking around ideas and throwing out one-liners.
So, later on in this book, when I describe certain sketches where I actually know who did have the initial idea, I can’t give those writers credit, even though I would like very much to do so, out of a concern for fairness to all the others and a desire to be 100 percent accurate.
Join me in celebrating the immensely talented and hilarious writers who graced the show with their fine work over our eleven years by turning to this page, where you will find a comprehensive list.
I was like Lucy, when her husband Desi Arnaz was at the helm. She and her cast were simply the performers who brought the writing to life. Joe was my “Desi.” He had run Garry’s show, overseeing the writers, sketches, and musical numbers, so I was comfortable letting him do the same for me. I trusted his judgment. Joe hired our head writers and producers, Arnie Rosen, and later Buz Kohan and Bill Angelos, and after them Ed Simmons—all terrific at their jobs. They would assign certain sketches to the writing staff, or if a writer turned in an idea of his/her own, it would either be approved and make the cut or be deep-sixed without seeing the light of day.
I did have a say in many sketches, such as which particular movies I wanted to parody, and occasionally I would propose other ideas. In rehearsal, I had no hesitation in suggesting changing a line here or there, and I encouraged the cast, and those of our guests who were seasoned sketch performers, to speak up if an idea occurred to them. To their credit, the writers had no objection to our input if it helped make the sketch better. I wonder how it would’ve been different if I had been in on everything from the ground floor up.
In thinking about it over the years, I realize that this schedule allowed me to have a normal life all those years. I wasn’t burning the midnight oil working with the writing staff—I was raising a family—so I can’t say this way of doing it was wrong. Besides, we did wind up with a pretty successful show.
Our writers were brilliantly funny, on the page and off. There was one particular time that stands out from early on in our run, when Arnie Rosen was at the helm. Arnie’s office was across the hall from mine, and often during our lunch break Arnie and the rest of the writers would watch kinescopes of the all-time television greats—Berle, Gleason, Caesar, etc.—on a portable screen set up at the end of the room. Some of our writers had started out with these shows, and stories would fly back and forth about the good old days. Lots of times I would cross the hall to watch some of the sketches for a few minutes. Those sketches held up and were still as funny as they were back when.
During this one lunch break I went into his dark office to question Arnie about a particular sketch we were doing that week. Not looking at the screen, I bent over to whisper in his ear. I heard moaning and grunting and turned around to look at the screen. Ohmigod! They were watching porn! They had set me up, and were howling at my reaction. I had never seen a porn film in my life, and I sputtered, “Ohhh! Ohmigod! That’s just AWFUL!!!”
Arnie said, “Well, gosh, Carol, he’s doing the best he can!”
Several years ago, I found myself sitting next to Larry Gelbart at a dinner at the State Department in Washington, D.C., celebrating the Kennedy Center Honors. Larry was right up there with Neil Simon when it came to writing comedy.
He began as a writer at the age of sixteen, for Danny Thomas’s radio show, after his father, who was Thomas’s barber, showed Thomas some jokes Larry had written. During the 1940s he also wrote for Jack Paar and Bob Hope. In the 1950s he wrote for Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour. He worked with writers Mel Tolkin, Michael Stewart, Selma Diamond, Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Woody Allen on two Caesar specials.
Larry was one of the main forces behind the creation of the television series M*A*S*H, writing the pilot then producing, often writing, and occasionally directing the series for its first four seasons. He earned a Peabody Award and an Emmy for M*A*S*H. His movie work included the screenplays for Tootsie and Oh, God! and he received Oscar nominations for both.
There are a lot more of his credits to add, but you get the picture. At the dinner we got into a conversation about the “dumbing down” of America when it came to television.
ME: “I don’t know, but when I watch a comedy show on TV today, I know exactly what’s coming as far as the writing goes. No surprises. No originality. Usually it’s the ‘setup’ first, and then comes the obvious joke, and then you hear that awful laugh track. It’s as if all the shows are alike and repeating themselves.”
LARRY: “I think it’s because most of the writers today grew up watching television. That was their childhood, so they’re writing about life once removed.”
ME: “What do you mean?”
LARRY: “They never played stickball in the street.”
Joe and I were at a dinner party at the producer Jennings Lang’s home in Beverly Hills. Walter Matthau and his beautiful wife, Carol, were there along with a lot of other movie folks. Some I knew, and some I didn’t know. During cocktails, I got into a conversation with a nice young man about writing. He said he was a fan of our show, but he kept asking, “Why can’t there be funnier endings to the skits? They start out great, and then they usually peter out.” Obviously, this guy wasn’t up on how difficult it is to write anything, especially comedy. I asked him what his name was. Edward. I tried to explain, “Well, Edward, writing a terrific punch line for a comedy sketch (I prefer that word to ‘skit’) isn’t as easy as some folks, who don’t write, might think.” As I’m sitting there attempting to give a simple lecture on the difficult art of putting words down on paper, our host comes up to us and says cheerfully, “Carol, I see you’ve met Edward Albee.”
Audiences love the recurring sketch—provided the characters are likable and funny, of course. They look forward to their favorites and get particular pleasure when those characters show up in that week’s episode, whether we’re talking about Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden or Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd’s Wild and Crazy Guys. We were lucky to come up with a group of comedy sketches that we loved doing, and characters that our audiences looked forward to seeing again and again. Here are some that were an important part of our show. I hope you’ll enjoy spending more time in the company of these characters.
Every week for The Carol Burnett Show, he created incredibly original dance numbers for our finales, and also for the guest stars who danced, such as Gwen Verdon, Juliet Prowse, Chita Rivera, Rita Moreno, Bernadette Peters, Ken Berry, and many more. After our show, Ernie went on to stage and direct various Broadway shows including Sugar Babies, Honky Tonk Nights, and others. Ernie retired to Taos, New Mexico, where he died in 1995.
Don Crichton
I met Don when he was one of the Ernie Flatt Dancers on The Garry Moore Show. He was so gifted that he soon became the lead male dancer. He was also very tall and handsome, so Ernie had him “partner” every dancing female guest star. Don and I hit it off immediately, and often ate together on our lunch breaks. He, too, followed us to California and became the lead male dancer on our show for the entire eleven seasons. As talented as he was as a dancer, he could sometimes be an absolute klutz. The big joke was that when he simply walked, he would often trip! In Studio 33 at CBS Television City, there were steps that led up to our stage from the audience. Whenever Don had to run up onto the stage from the audience when we were rehearsing, he would inevitably trip! One time, I said, “Don, why don’t you try dancing up the stairs?” And it worked! Nary a stumble. Also, he had one whale of an appetite. He could pack it away and never gain an ounce. The female dancers, who lived on lettuce, wanted to kill him when he showed up for rehearsals scarfing down a hero sandwich and polishing off a couple pints of ice cream for dessert.
Don was also the lead dancer on several specials I did. After our show went off the air, he became a successful choreographer. We met fifty-seven years ago, and to this day, he remains one of my closest friends.
Artie Malvin
Artie was the first special musical material writer we hired, and he was with our show for the entire eleven seasons. He arranged not only the vocal numbers for already existing songs but also wrote original lyrics and music.
During World War II, Artie performed with Glenn Miller as part of the Crew Chiefs. Recordings of his performances with Miller and the Army Air Force Band were released as V-Discs.
After World War II and Glenn Miller’s death Artie became heavily immersed in the popular music of the 1940s and 1950s, everything from children’s music, to the beginnings of rock and roll, to jingles for commercials. In the late 1950s he worked in television as the music arranger for The Pat Boone–Chevy Showroom.
He had a gold-plated résumé when we asked him to come on board. I just loved him. He was always smiling and eager to contribute.
Artie collaborated with other writers, Buz Kohan and Bill Angelos the first few seasons, and then Ken and Mitzie Welch when they came on board for seasons five through ten. He also worked with Stan Freeman during our eleventh year.
Artie used to make a tape of the music I had to learn for the following week so I could take it home on Fridays and listen to it over the weekend. I didn’t read music, but after listening to the number several times, I was ahead of the game when Monday rehearsals rolled around. When Ken and Mitzie were writing on our show, and I had a number to learn that week, I would listen to Mitzie sing my part, which made it that much easier for me to learn, and Artie would sing the other part. Depending on the guests that week, he would be Steve Lawrence, Bing Crosby, Ray Charles, etc., etc., and sometimes even Eydie Gormé! Always a delight, Artie welcomed working with other creative musicians and lyricists. There never was any ego involved. After we went off the air, Artie, along with Ernie Flatt, created the wildly successful Broadway musical Sugar Babies, starring Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller. He also wrote a number for me (as Miss Hannigan) and Albert Finney (as Daddy Warbucks) to sing in the movie Annie, called “Sign.” He wanted no credit. Artie died in 2006.
Music
Since my first show business love was musical comedy, it was a given that we would have lots of music in our variety show. And what music! We had a live twenty-eight-piece orchestra (unheard of today!), conducted and orchestrated by Harry Zimmerman (who had been the musical director on The Dinah Shore Show and The Garry Moore Show) for our first three years, and then Peter Matz (a composer and conductor for stage and screen, also famous for his work on Barbra Streisand’s early albums) for the final eight years. I couldn’t wait for orchestra rehearsals on Thursday nights.
All week long we would be rehearsing with just a piano and drums, and then Thursday would roll around, and we’d all be thrilled to hear the beautiful sounds that came out of the band shell. Since I never learned to read music, the only way I could learn a medley where I had to sing harmonies was to look at the lyrics printed in my script, and pencil in “squiggles,” which was my own personal invention, a sort of shorthand. If a note went “up,” I would draw a line over the lyric that swooped up, or I would draw a line that swooped down if the note descended. If I had to look at the cue cards for a lyric, our cue card guys would copy the squiggles from my script! For instance, here is a sample of how the squiggles would work with “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat.”
I never liked singing alone, as myself. I was okay with it when I was doing a character, but singing a straight solo always scared me. However, I was fearless when it came to singing duets with our musical guests. (Some might say I was too fearless, but I didn’t care because I was in “medley heaven!”) Our special material writers would brilliantly weave several different songs together that usually had a theme. There were some amazing singers who graced our show over the eleven years: Ella Fitzgerald, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gormé, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Mel Tormé, Ray Charles, the Carpenters, and Marilyn Horne, to name but a few. The medleys we sang were so well written that I can remember a lot of them to this day.
We wrote our own musical takeoffs on Show Boat with Hal Linden, Cinderella with the Pointer Sisters as the evil stepsisters, a Fred and Ginger movie (“Hi-Hat” with Ken Berry and Roddy McDowall), and many more. All of them had original music and lyrics by our special material writers over the years: Ken and Mitzie Welch, Artie Malvin, the team of Buz Kohan and Bill Angelos, and Stan Freeman, and all of them won Emmys for their creations. Then there were the solo performances by our many musical guests.
In 1968, there was a musicians’ strike that lasted three weeks, and guess who our guest was the first week? Ella Fitzgerald! Great timing. Ella lip-synched her recordings of “Day In, Day Out” and “Skylark.” I lip-synched a recording I did of “The Trolley Song,” where our director Dave Powers bet me a dollar that he could foul me up by randomly speeding up and slowing down my voice from his perch in the booth. It was a hoot, and I won the dollar. The wildest part of these shows was that our singers replaced the missing orchestra by humming everything, from the opening theme song to all the play-ons and play-offs! It was pretty funny and we had a blast making do without the band, but I sure was happy when everything was settled and we got our orchestra back.
Our Sound Effects
I was somewhat obsessive when it came to sound effects. It began when I was on Garry’s show. We had a sound effects man (I wish I could remember his name) who was a throwback to radio. Back in the day, so many radio shows depended on sound effects to help tell the story—and generate laughs. I remember listening to Jack Benny when I was a kid. The sound effects were so important that you could almost say they were another “character” on the show. I remember Jack’s footsteps walking down to his basement where he kept his money in a vault, and the sound of him removing the heavy chains wrapped around the safe, and then the creaking noise as he opened the vault’s very heavy door: hysterical.
In doing Garry’s show, the sound effects man would simulate a body fall whenever one of us fell down. If a gunshot sound was required, he’d provide it at that very moment. If we fell out of a window, you’d hear a slide whistle denoting the fall, followed by the sound of garbage cans being banged into, and maybe the loud meow of an angry alley cat.
When I got my own show, we hired the brilliant Ross Murray, who was blessed with perfect timing and a terrific sense of humor. He had a small booth upstairs, behind the audience, that looked out over our stage and was filled with various recordings and tangible objects he invented to create the effects that were needed in whatever sketch we were doing. We did a LOT of physical stuff, and he never once missed a cue in eleven years.
Lots of times we would do something that required an effect that we hadn’t even rehearsed. For instance, the first time I was asked in a Q&A if I ever got nervous when performing, I said no and then, out of the blue, pretended to faint and fall on the floor. Ross was right there with a “body fall,” and the audience screamed with laughter. They wouldn’t have laughed as hard without the added benefit of the sound of my body hitting the ground. I always preferred “real” sound effects, as opposed to comic ones. To me, the real ones were funnier. Alas, today this is a lost art. If sound effects are required in a television show that’s being taped or filmed before a studio audience, they are added later in the editing room. The studio audience never hears them, and the spontaneous laughs they would have generated are lost. It’s really too bad. Ross Murray always made our sketches funnier with his live inventions.
CBS Censorship
Over the years we had a great censor, Charlie Pettyjohn, who came to every run-through and taping and never gave us any grief. Maybe because we never gave him any grief. However, one week, in 1968, Harvey and I were doing a sketch where he was interviewing my character, who was a nudist in a nudist colony, standing behind a fence showing bare shoulders and bare legs, with high-top sneakers on my feet. Harvey asks, “What do you nudists do for recreation?” My reply was “We have a dance every Saturday night.”
“How do nudists dance?” he asks. My answer was “Very carefully.” Charlie was okay with that line, but somebody higher up who was with CBS Program Practices (and Charlie’s boss) considered the line to be too risqué, so we had to come up with a different joke. We came up with a different one, all right. And CBS bought it.
“How do nudists dance?”
“Cheek to cheek.”
Go figure.
Actually, the network pretty much left us alone. Besides Charlie Pettyjohn, there was always a CBS representative around who never said much and who also didn’t do much, for which we were grateful. One of our writers said once, “Looks like his job is to warn us when an iceberg’s heading down Fairfax Avenue.”
The Writing Staff
During our show’s long run, I often didn’t know who took the lead in writing each of our sketches, with a few exceptions. I wish I could name those exceptions, but it wouldn’t be fair to single out any writers from within the different groups while not being able to give credit to others whom I’m in the dark about. There were a number of factors that reluctantly led me to this decision, one of those being the credit guidelines of the Writers Guild of America, an institution I greatly respect.
But for some reason, there was never a “byline” when I was handed a sketch to read. I suppose Joe felt that if I knew who wrote it, I might start to favor a particular writer or writing team over others. I wasn’t like the “boys”—i.e., Gleason, Caesar, Berle, etc.—who were joined at the hip with their writers and spent hours with them in the writers’ room kicking around ideas and throwing out one-liners.
So, later on in this book, when I describe certain sketches where I actually know who did have the initial idea, I can’t give those writers credit, even though I would like very much to do so, out of a concern for fairness to all the others and a desire to be 100 percent accurate.
Join me in celebrating the immensely talented and hilarious writers who graced the show with their fine work over our eleven years by turning to this page, where you will find a comprehensive list.
I was like Lucy, when her husband Desi Arnaz was at the helm. She and her cast were simply the performers who brought the writing to life. Joe was my “Desi.” He had run Garry’s show, overseeing the writers, sketches, and musical numbers, so I was comfortable letting him do the same for me. I trusted his judgment. Joe hired our head writers and producers, Arnie Rosen, and later Buz Kohan and Bill Angelos, and after them Ed Simmons—all terrific at their jobs. They would assign certain sketches to the writing staff, or if a writer turned in an idea of his/her own, it would either be approved and make the cut or be deep-sixed without seeing the light of day.
I did have a say in many sketches, such as which particular movies I wanted to parody, and occasionally I would propose other ideas. In rehearsal, I had no hesitation in suggesting changing a line here or there, and I encouraged the cast, and those of our guests who were seasoned sketch performers, to speak up if an idea occurred to them. To their credit, the writers had no objection to our input if it helped make the sketch better. I wonder how it would’ve been different if I had been in on everything from the ground floor up.
In thinking about it over the years, I realize that this schedule allowed me to have a normal life all those years. I wasn’t burning the midnight oil working with the writing staff—I was raising a family—so I can’t say this way of doing it was wrong. Besides, we did wind up with a pretty successful show.
Our writers were brilliantly funny, on the page and off. There was one particular time that stands out from early on in our run, when Arnie Rosen was at the helm. Arnie’s office was across the hall from mine, and often during our lunch break Arnie and the rest of the writers would watch kinescopes of the all-time television greats—Berle, Gleason, Caesar, etc.—on a portable screen set up at the end of the room. Some of our writers had started out with these shows, and stories would fly back and forth about the good old days. Lots of times I would cross the hall to watch some of the sketches for a few minutes. Those sketches held up and were still as funny as they were back when.
During this one lunch break I went into his dark office to question Arnie about a particular sketch we were doing that week. Not looking at the screen, I bent over to whisper in his ear. I heard moaning and grunting and turned around to look at the screen. Ohmigod! They were watching porn! They had set me up, and were howling at my reaction. I had never seen a porn film in my life, and I sputtered, “Ohhh! Ohmigod! That’s just AWFUL!!!”
Arnie said, “Well, gosh, Carol, he’s doing the best he can!”
Several years ago, I found myself sitting next to Larry Gelbart at a dinner at the State Department in Washington, D.C., celebrating the Kennedy Center Honors. Larry was right up there with Neil Simon when it came to writing comedy.
He began as a writer at the age of sixteen, for Danny Thomas’s radio show, after his father, who was Thomas’s barber, showed Thomas some jokes Larry had written. During the 1940s he also wrote for Jack Paar and Bob Hope. In the 1950s he wrote for Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour. He worked with writers Mel Tolkin, Michael Stewart, Selma Diamond, Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Woody Allen on two Caesar specials.
Larry was one of the main forces behind the creation of the television series M*A*S*H, writing the pilot then producing, often writing, and occasionally directing the series for its first four seasons. He earned a Peabody Award and an Emmy for M*A*S*H. His movie work included the screenplays for Tootsie and Oh, God! and he received Oscar nominations for both.
There are a lot more of his credits to add, but you get the picture. At the dinner we got into a conversation about the “dumbing down” of America when it came to television.
ME: “I don’t know, but when I watch a comedy show on TV today, I know exactly what’s coming as far as the writing goes. No surprises. No originality. Usually it’s the ‘setup’ first, and then comes the obvious joke, and then you hear that awful laugh track. It’s as if all the shows are alike and repeating themselves.”
LARRY: “I think it’s because most of the writers today grew up watching television. That was their childhood, so they’re writing about life once removed.”
ME: “What do you mean?”
LARRY: “They never played stickball in the street.”
Joe and I were at a dinner party at the producer Jennings Lang’s home in Beverly Hills. Walter Matthau and his beautiful wife, Carol, were there along with a lot of other movie folks. Some I knew, and some I didn’t know. During cocktails, I got into a conversation with a nice young man about writing. He said he was a fan of our show, but he kept asking, “Why can’t there be funnier endings to the skits? They start out great, and then they usually peter out.” Obviously, this guy wasn’t up on how difficult it is to write anything, especially comedy. I asked him what his name was. Edward. I tried to explain, “Well, Edward, writing a terrific punch line for a comedy sketch (I prefer that word to ‘skit’) isn’t as easy as some folks, who don’t write, might think.” As I’m sitting there attempting to give a simple lecture on the difficult art of putting words down on paper, our host comes up to us and says cheerfully, “Carol, I see you’ve met Edward Albee.”
Audiences love the recurring sketch—provided the characters are likable and funny, of course. They look forward to their favorites and get particular pleasure when those characters show up in that week’s episode, whether we’re talking about Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden or Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd’s Wild and Crazy Guys. We were lucky to come up with a group of comedy sketches that we loved doing, and characters that our audiences looked forward to seeing again and again. Here are some that were an important part of our show. I hope you’ll enjoy spending more time in the company of these characters.
