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April 15, 2002 · 2:00 AM PDT · link

AND, THIS MORNING, Game Show Network ran the episode of What's My Line? from the Sunday after Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her apartment.  Very sad to see host John Daly and the panel trying to do a merry game show in a collective state of week-old shock.  Kitty Carlisle was borrowed from Goodson-Todman's To Tell the Truth to sit in Dorothy's chair, and Steve Allen, in the guest seat, tried his best to get some laughs in the funereal atmosphere.  Bennett Cerf made reference to another historical marker — one that my pal Rick Scheckman e-mailed to remind me about.  Kilgallen died either late the night of 11/7/65 or early the next morning.  36 hours later, much of the Eastern Seaboard was plunged in darkness with The Great Power Outage of '65.

Then, four days later, they did the show that aired this morn.  Perhaps because the series was live and always had a feeling of "family" about it, it seemed more touching and genuine that most of the instances, in recent years, where TV shows have had to address the death of a cast member.  In recent years, game shows have gone farther and farther with dazzling video effects and arresting lighting and music.  I wonder if anyone at the networks, groping for the next gimmick to perhaps replicate the success of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, has thought to look at these old, gimmick-free game shows.  Without fancy sets or high-tech hardware, they developed long and loving followings because the participants were relatively constant and had a chemistry, and there was no way the producers could tamper much with it.  The joke of the recent "reality shows" is in how, with the pre-taping and industrial strength editing, so little reality is allowed to remain.  (And don't get me started on how little spontaneity is permitted to occur on today's talk shows...)

A number of folks e-mailed to ask if I'd divulge the identity of the tactless celebrity who sent the telegram quoted in our previous news item.  I would if I knew who it was.  I told as much of the story as I know, and it does not include the lady's identity.  Anyone have any idea?

April 14, 2002 · 4:00 AM PDT · link

ANOTHER BIT of history this A.M. on the Game Show Network's Black and White Overnight.  They ran the 11/7/65 episode of What's My Line? with regular panelists Dorothy Kilgallen, Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf, plus guest panelist Tony Randall.  The show was broadcast live and, at the end, moderator John Daly said good-night to them all, as usual.  The following morning, Ms. Kilgallen was found sitting up in her bed, fully-dressed, dead from what the coroner determined was a lethal combo of alcohol and barbiturates.  The odd circumstances of her demise quickly became fodder for those out to prove a conspiracy in the death of President Kennedy.

They claimed she had recently returned from Dallas where she'd interviewed Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, and had been telling associates that she was about to blow the Kennedy assassination case "wide open" with startling revelations.  The premise, of course, is that someone murdered her to silence her, and conspiracy buffs would point out that her notes from her meeting with Ruby were never found.

None of this, of course, is verifiable.  There is some question as to whether she ever met with Ruby and, if so, if she even took any notes.  Ruby was, by this time, pretty well out of his mind, babbling all sorts of delusions to whatever reporters got in to see him.  There's no reason to assume he had a lucid moment and told Ms. Kilgallen anything of note, or that she had done much legwork on the matter.  Friends of hers said she never claimed to be about to break the J.F.K. killing "wide open" and that she only planned to write a brief chapter about Kennedy, Oswald and Ruby in a book about sensational murders — hardly the place one would solve the crime of the century.  In any case, the coroner ruled her death accidental and no one ever came up with a coherent theory as to why it wasn't.

Still, the death of Dorothy Kilgallen rocked the nation, albeit briefly.  One of the more amazing reactions took the form of a telegram to Mark Goodson, producer of What's My Line?  It was from a prominent actress and it read:

I KNOW HOW DISTRESSED YOU ARE AT DOROTHY KILGALLEN'S PASSING AND ALL IN SHOW BUSINESS SHARE YOUR SORROW.  SHE IS IRREPLACEABLE BUT PERHAPS I COULD BRING TO THE "WHAT'S MY LINE" PANEL PROMOTIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT VALUES THAT WOULD BE ALMOST AS EFFECTIVE.  COULD WE CHAT ABOUT IT.  MAY I CALL YOU TUESDAY FOR AN APPOINTMENT.

The telegram was time-stamped Monday morning, November 8 at 3:36 AM — or about the time Dorothy Kilgallen's death was first reported on the radio.  (No, its sender did not get the job of replacing her.  No one did.)

April 13, 2002 · 3:30 AM PDT · link

AS WE'VE MENTIONED, the Wondercon occurs next weekend (April 19-21) in Oakland, California.  Details can be found here.  And if you're around that weekend, you might want to drop by the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.  They're now situated in new digs, with walls lined with rare and lovely comic book pages and strip originals.  A retrospective of Calvin & Hobbes is just closing and a big exhibit of Spider-Man art is being unveiled.

Friday evening, April 19, they're hosting a "rent party" and the place will be crawling with great cartoonists and — who knows? — they may even let me in.  But Spider-Man artists John Romita, Sr. and John Romita, Jr. will both be present to cut the ribbon (er, webbing) on the new showing, and there'll be other folks and food and music and you can find out all about it at the museum's website.  Even if you can't make it to this event, the museum deserves your support.  It's a great place to visit and see how good comic art can look when it's properly framed and displayed with a little sense of class.

April 12, 2002 · 9:30 PM PDT · link

IN 1977, the original cast 'n' crew of Saturday Night Live attempted to do a prime-time episode, and to do it live from New Orleans in the midst of Mardi Gras.  It was a fiasco, about which many of those involved later said, "How in the name of God did we think that was possible?"  Here's a link to an article that describes a little of what went wrong.

April 12, 2002 · 7:30 PM PDT · link

HERE'S A VERY early "Set your TiVo" alert.  One of the times I chatted with Milton Berle, someone (not me) brought up the subject of him stealing material from other comics.  He semi-exploded on the topic, saying it was just an act, a fictional flaw he'd milked for laughs the way Jack Benny had allowed the world to think he was cheap.  He stole jokes when he started out, Berle said, but everyone did, and they stole them from each other.  ("The guy I stole a gag from stole it from someone else and he stole it from someone else...")  Once he became an established pro, he claimed, he never knowingly stole anything from anyone.  This view does not seem to have been shared by any of his friends and peers, but let's leave that aside for now.

That day we spoke, he denounced the charge as a smear on the part of jealous, less successful comedians and noted that, when you're Mr. Television, the number one comic on TV, every other comedian is, by definition, a "less successful comedian."  The one he singled out as most often spreading the slur was Bert Lahr and he said approximately the following to me.  (This is my memory; not a recorded quote.)

I did a movie called Always Leave Them Laughing and it was my movie.  It was at the peak of my stardom so I owned a hunk of it and I had every kind of script and cast approval you could possibly have.  I had final cut and I even directed part of the movie because the director took ill.  It was about a younger comic, played by me, who steals an older comedian's act and his wife.  You see, I wasn't afraid to play a joke stealer because I knew it was just a character.  It wasn't me.  Anyway, it was my idea to cast Lahr as the older comic.  I thought he'd be great in the part and he was.  He was a terrific comedian and actor.  However, after the film came out, Lahr was suddenly telling everyone that I tried to cut him out of the picture, that I ruined his best scenes.  Bert's son wrote a book about him [Notes on a Cowardly Lion] in which he repeated these charges.  They're bull but don't take my word for it.  Read the book.  See what Lahr said about the movie and what he says I did.  Then watch the movie.  It's on The Late, Late Show every ten minutes.  You'll see that Lahr is terrific in that movie.  Yeah, one or two of his scenes hit the cutting room floor.  Ten or fifteen of mine got cut.  Scenes get cut out of every movie.  But you watch the movie and see if Lahr isn't great and if I'm not supporting him in every scene we have together, letting him be great.  He's got this great dying scene and I could have horned in on it, had them cut away to my reactions more and stuck in a lot of dialogue for my character but I didn't.  Because it was Bert's scene and it worked best to let it be his scene.  But like I said, don't take my word for it.  Read the book, watch the movie and if you believe I tried to hurt his performance, then all the things they say about me must be true.  I will stake my reputation on that.

That's almost exactly what Mr. Berle said, and "I will stake my reputation on that" is verbatim.  But he was wrong that Always Leave Them Laughing is on TV every ten minutes.  It airs almost never and I haven't had the chance to catch it since that day, which was close to twenty years ago.  It is, however, airing on Turner Classic Movies on April 25...so let's all tune in and see if all the things they say about Berle must be true.

MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, a late-night high-speed chase ended on my front lawn.  It was two members of the Beverly Hills Police Department pursuing a fellow of Vietnamese extraction who'd been out drinking.  He was under the legal definition of drunkenness but he was also on probation for a previous drunk driving conviction and one condition of that probation was that he never imbibe even a drop of alcohol when operating a moving vehicle.  The B.H.P.D. pulled him over for busted headlamps and, when they did, he panicked and took off, clocking somewhere between 70 and 80 mph on residential streets.

This is an incredibly dumb thing to do, even at two in the morning.  I asked one of the officers what the odds are of someone actually getting away in such a situation.  He said, "The only way it ever happens is if we hit someone — and even then, we had this guy's license number so someone would have nabbed him.  His chance of getting totally away was close to zero."  The chase ended with the car smashing into a wall around my house, as I reported in this news item last March.

In the thirteen months since, the hole has remained in my wall as I waited for the Wheels of Justice to deliver unto me just and proper recompense.  Those are some slow wheels, I tell you.  The fellow pled "Not Guilty" to about a half dozen charges that pretty much boiled down to "Driving Under the Influence of Incredible Stupidity."  I asked the Deputy District Attorney, who was handling the case, on what basis the driver could possibly claim innocence.  He replied, "I'm dying to hear this one, myself."  Then he added that suspects sometimes do that, hoping for the million-to-one chance that the court docket will be so clogged with important cases that someone will offer a plea bargain.

No one did, and the driver was sentenced to a few weeks of jail time, a few months of CalTrans work and three more years of probation.  Oh, yeah — and he had until today to pay me the $4300 it'll cost to undo the damage.  This afternoon, on or about the last possible minute, he delivered a certified check to the Deputy District Attorney...whose name, by the way, is Peter Geisness.  Mr. Geisness was everything you'd want in a situation like this — cooperative, responsive, responsible...and he ever dropped the check off here this evening, on his way home from the courthouse.  He and his fellow Deputy D.A., Teresa DeCastro, did a fine job for me.  I dunno if either of them will ever happen upon this website but if they do, they'll see my thanks posted here.  Boy, am I glad that, apart from a load of construction work, this is over.

April 12, 2002 · 12:30 AM PDT · link

THE SCARY-LOOKING gent at left is another entry in our roster of "People I've Always Admired and Heard From Because of This Website."  He's James Randi, and he's probably only scary if you claim to have psychic powers or to be able to heal sick people by pulling evil spirits out of them.  Once upon a time, he was a top magician and escape artist but he has long since transformed himself into the world's greatest debunker of hokey claims of impossible powers.  I am, obviously, a skeptic about such assertions; ergo, I cheer the work he does via the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Its website, which you can access by clicking here, is a wonderful oasis of sanity.  (Would that the Internet offered even a tenth as much sanity as pornography.)  Randi is a feisty exposer of frauds, charlatans and folks who would have you believe they possess paranormal abilities.  He offers a million-buck reward for anyone who can demonstrate the genuine article and his cash looks pretty darn safe.

Randi is also a gentleman.  I remember seeing him one time on a TV show, exposing a nugget of Uri Geller's chicanery.  In the circumstance, the easiest thing for him to have done was to reveal the secret of the magic trick involved, but he did not.  It was a trick sometimes employed by legit magicians (i.e., those who do not pretend to any superhuman abilities) and exposure might have robbed one of them of a chunk of livelihood.  Instead, Randi replicated the feat, admitted it was achieved via a gimmick and effectively debunked without ruining anyone's act — except, of course, for Geller's.  It's obvious that if Randi ever went over to the dark side, claiming powers of E.S.P. or telekinesis, he could wrest millions out of those who are keen to believe.  (It is a lesson, not just about fraudulent psychics but for life in general, that human eagerness is at the root of most scams.  The putative medium can usually not pretend to read your mind unless you are hoping for them to succeed and unconsciously helping them along.)

Mr. Randi wrote me recently because he wanted to get in touch with my partner-in-comics, Sergio Aragonés, to replenish an old friendship.  He also said he'd enjoyed my article here on Peter Hurkos, and I've given him permission to re-post it on his site.  And what's amazing is that I predicted this would happen.  You see, a couple weeks ago while I was bending spoons with my brainwaves, I had a premonition...

HERE'S A link to an interesting article about gun control.  It's of interest to me because of what it has to say about finding a middle ground between the notion that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of some psycho to own a Howitzer and the view that the government should (or even could) confiscate every gun in the country.  I've long felt that as long as the debate rebounds between those two extremes, it can never truly be discussed, let alone resolved.  This article suggests it can move to another level.  Maybe.

I GET A GREAT many e-mails asking me to write about other great cartoon voice actors besides the ones covered here.  Alas, I don't really know enough about some — like Paul Frees, to name one — to do their careers justice.  Or take Allen Swift, for instance.  For a few decades, Swift was to New York-based animation what Mel Blanc was to Hollywood.  He lent his voice to a staggering percentage of all cartoons that were recorded in Manhattan, did loads of commercials and kids' records and even had a couple of good runs in live children's television.  He was a vital part of The Howdy Doody Show, and some called him the man who saved the show...twice.

Swift was not a part of the original cast but, just before Christmas of 1952, most of the actors quit or were fired (pick one), leaving all those puppet characters without voices.  Swift came in and did an uncanny job matching the sounds of Flubadub, Mr. Bluster and others — all except Howdy himself, whose voice was pre-recorded by the show's host, "Buffalo" Bob Smith.  Later on, when Smith had a heart attack and was off the show for months, Swift saved the day again, learning how to replicate Howdy's voice.  This enabled the title character to appear with the various guest hosts who filled in while the Buffalo recuperated.

Later on, Swift gained a young, loyal following hosting Popeye cartoons from 1956 to 1960 on WPIX, channel 11, in New York.  The photo above is him in his "Captain Allen" character, as cribbed off the cover of a kids' record he made at the time.  Of the many TV cartoons he did, he is probably best remembered for playing Odie Cologne (the skunk) and Itchy Brother on King Leonardo, most of the villains (including Simon Bar-Sinister) on Underdog, and Tooter Turtle in cartoons that ran on both those shows.  Mr. Swift is still (happily) with us, occasionally doing a voiceover or playing an on-camera role.  He had a small part in Safe Men, a barely-released feature of a couple years back, for instance.

And his genes are well represented on the Broadway stage.  His son is Lewis J. Stadlen, one of the funniest stage actors of our generation.  Stadlen rose to prominence playing Groucho Marx in Minnie's Boys and A Day In Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine.  More recently, he played opposite Nathan Lane in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and The Man Who Came to Dinner, and was in the short-lived Neil Simon comedy, 45 Seconds From Broadway.  (Stadlen has a long history with Neil Simon.  Years ago, he also played one of those Hispanic flight attendants in Simon's female version of The Odd Couple that we mentioned here a week or two ago and before that, he played the nephew in the original production of The Sunshine Boys.)

He is said to be the leading contender to play Max Bialystock in the about-to-start-touring company of The Producers.  I'm not sure anyone could ever top Mr. Lane in the role but I'd sure like to see Allen Swift's kid try it.

LEWIS BLACK has a special that begins multiple runs today on Comedy Central.  It's called Lewis Black: Taxed Beyond Belief and I haven't seen it yet.  But as I've laughed at darn near everything Mr. Black has done, I thought I'd mention it.  Also: "Smilin'" Stan Lee will be on the Home Shopping Network on Monday, April 15, hawking a number of signed, limited-edition items and celebrating the 40th anniversary of Spider-Man and the release of the movie.  It'll air in different times around the country but I think it's 4:00 in the afternoon on the west coast.  Better check to make sure.

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