The unseemly man on the comic book covers above is Maurice Gosfield, who played Pvt. Duane Doberman on the old Sgt. Bilko TV show, also known as The Phil Silvers Show and/or You'll Never Get Rich. (There was a Sgt. Bilko comic and it did quite well for a while. Since DC was paying a flat fee for the rights, they decided to try and get a second hit comic out of one license fee…so Doberman got his own book.
And wouldn't you know it? It started outselling the Bilko comic!) This weekend, the cable channel TV Land is rerunning three installments of that fine program, including the pilot and "The Face on the Recruiting Poster." The latter is an episode about which the late Phil Silvers told me a wonderful anecdote. I'll share it with you in the next paragraph…but first, I have to observe Internet decorum and post a SPOILER WARNING. In telling the story, I'm also going to tell the ending of that episode. Proceed with caution.
Now then: The premise is that the extremely unphotogenic Doberman is accidentally selected for a recruiting poster and no one has the heart to tell him that he will not be appearing thereupon. One officer after another withers at the task until, finally, the Army calls in the toughest soldier in the service. The punch line to the episode comes when he arrives and, since he looks almost exactly like Doberman, says, "Very good-looking soldier. He should be on the recruiting poster!"
The Casting Director was sent forth to find a ringer for Mr. Gosfield and located a guy who worked in a carnival pulling a cannon with his teeth. All week long, the gent practiced his few lines, invariably getting them wrong. As Silvers told the tale, the cannon-puller kept getting more and more flustered and kept muttering, "I can't understand it…I've been in show business for twenty years…"
Finally, the evening of filming arrived. The man playing the tough general was out of his mind with stage fright. Just before they were about to roll film, he ran up to Phil Silvers and said, "Mr. Silvers, I just had a thought that would make me feel better. How about if, when I make my entrance, I'm pulling a cannon with my teeth?"
Phil Silvers told me this tale over brunch at Nate 'n Al's delicatessen in Beverly Hills. He said, "From that moment on, any time I was doing a play and I felt a twinge of stage fright, I thought about entering, pulling a cannon with my teeth — and I'd laugh and break the tension." (By the way: The actor went on, sans cannon, and did his lines perfectly.)