I receive a daily e-mail from the Larry King Live TV show that announces that evening's guest. Here's the heading of the one I got this afternoon…
Subject: "Mary Tyler Moore – she's THAT GIRL and a whole lot more"
From: Larry King Live
Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 16:58 -0400
I never knew Mary Tyler Moore was THAT GIRL. The things you learn in e-mail…
Click right here to read an interview with Stephen Sondheim in The Baltimore Sun. Or, if you don't have time for that, read this quote, which is about A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Before the show went into rehearsal, Sondheim asked his friend, playwright James Goldman, what he thought of the project…
[Goldman] said he thought the book was brilliant, and he said the score was a delight. He said the only problem was, they don't go together. I had written a rather salon-like score, full of cleverness and kind of literary puns — I wanted so much to show off as a lyricist — whereas [the book] was a very elegant low comedy. I learned from that to be very careful in the future to write the same show.
I pulled that quote out because, on TV projects I've worked on, I've become kind of a pest about quoting Mr. Sondheim, wringing variations on a similar, earlier quote that went something like, "The most important thing is to make sure you're all doing the same show." If I had to pay him royalties on every time I've said it, it would dwarf whatever he made off "Send in the Clowns." (Another allied quote is from Alan Jay Lerner: "More shows fail because of a breach in style between Act One and Act Two than any other reason.")
Anyway, it's always nice to read an interview with Sondheim. And now I have to return to a script and pray that everyone involved intends to do the show I think I'm writing…
Jack Benny accomplished many "firsts" in his career but a biggie was that he was the first radio comedian to ever give credit to his writing staff. This did not sit well with certain other comedians of the day. Several went to Benny and urged him to reverse his decision, ostensibly because they thought it would destroy an important illusion. The public, they told him, wanted to believe that the performers were really that witty. A comedian crediting writers, they told him, would be like a swashbuckling screen star telling people — or reminding those that already knew — that his most daring feats were accomplished by a stuntman. They really believed this. Benny heard their advice, politely rejected it…and went on to become one of the most successful comedians of all time.
And what's amazing is that, even though he credited his writers, most of the public seems to have believed that he actually was that stingy; that Rochester really was his valet; that he lived next door to Ronald Colman, etc. Telling the world that his shows were written sure didn't hurt those illusions.
He had a great writing staff, too. Most of them were with him for much of his career and all distinguished themselves in one way or another. Two are of special interest. Harry Conn was the sole writer of The Jack Benny Program when it had its initial success. Later on, Al Boasberg was Benny's "punch-up" guy, getting paid well to add a key joke here or there. Both men were recently profiled in a couple of articles in Written By, the Writers Guild's magazine, and they have those pieces online. Read 'em right here.
One of comics' most prolific writers, Robert Kanigher, passed away yesterday at the age of 87. Early in his career, Kanigher dabbled in all kinds of writing — radio, stage, pulps, short stories — before settling into the comic book industry in the early forties. He worked for almost every publisher but most notably for MLJ on Steel Sterling and their other heroes before settling in at DC for a very long haul. Over 40-some-years, he produced hundreds of scripts for their books, creating many of their key characters and also working as an editor for about half that time.
He was known for being incredibly fast and fiercely outspoken, and the best of his writing was very, very good. Most of it was on DC's war comics but he also wrote (and edited) Wonder Woman for twenty-some-odd years, authored the first episode of the Silver Age "Barry Allen" Flash, scripted dozens of stories of Batman, Flash, Black Canary, romance stories, etc. If I start listing the comics he authored, your browser will be loading this site for the next hour.
Colleagues referred to him as a Writing Machine and told tales of him turning it on and off with little contemplation. Another editor at DC would peek into his office and say, "Bob, I'm desperate for a quick six-page ghost story" and Kanigher would stop whatever he was doing — probably another script he was halfway-through — roll fresh paper into his typewriter and immediately begin writing Page One of the six-page mystery story without any idea what would happen on Page Two. The result would sometimes read like the writer hadn't a clue where he was going but he succeeded a lot more often than one might imagine.
From my viewpoint as a reader, he generally had good ideas and insight, but often wrote far past the point when he had anything to say. One of my favorite books of his, Metal Men, illustrated this mercurial nature of his work. He created and wrote it and the first dozen-or-so stories were terrific, while the remaining issues read like feeble imitations of the first dozen-or-so. His acclaimed Enemy Ace series was the same way: The same brilliant, fascinating portrait of a German World War I pilot told over and over with diminishing returns. His Wonder Woman stories…well, I don't think he or anyone ever wrote any great Wonder Woman stories but Kanigher kept wringing out variations on some template that worked for him.
The big exception to this was Sgt. Rock, the long-running war feature about a hero with whom, you could tell, Kanigher deeply identified. It had its missteps — Rock and his beloved Easy Company meeting another Kanigher hero, the anachronistic Viking Prince, for instance — but, over the years, it was always worth a read when Kanigher wrote it. Even late in the game, he retained the capacity to bring something new and oddly personal to a hero of simple premise. I never felt Rock was quite Rock when anyone else wrote him.
Among his peers, Kanigher was deeply controversial. About half the artists who worked with him loved the guy; the others fantasized about his painful demise. In the sixties, several fled to Marvel, preferring to work for lower pay than to work for Kanigher. Still, it seemed to me, all respected the quantity of his work and a respectable percentage of its quality. A lot of us who write comics still count him among our influences and I'd sure like to see his better work reprinted in permanent, collectible volumes. There sure was a lot of it.
I've recently been worrying that blind people weren't losing enough money gambling. "When," I've wondered, "will the gaming industry realize that they've been neglecting a potential gold mine among the sightless?" Well, my worries have been put to rest. Bally Industries has come out with a line of slots and video poker machines featuring the likeness and music of Mr. Ray Charles.
These devices, which are turning up in casinos the world over, feature Braille labels and special audio assists. And for the patriotic gambler, the machine also plays a video of Ray singing "America the Beautiful." Another machine in the line is called, "What'd I Pay?" which I guess is someone's clever switch on Ray's song lyric, "What I say." Or maybe it's intended to suggest that the machine is blind and doesn't know how much it's paying out. (On that machine, Ray appears with, not his back-up singers, The Raylettes but with the "Paylettes.") I have the feeling that, when one of these machines cleans you out, you hear a rousing chorus of, "Hit the Road, Jack."
Have I mentioned that this thing is out? Well, it is. The Groo Maiden is a collection of four more Groo reprints from way back in the days when Marvel/Epic Comics was making serious money off comics like this instead of penny-ante, nickel-and-dime stuff like Spider-Man movies. The stories stories in this, our thirteenth collection, spotlight the non-edible love of Groo's life, Chakaal the Warrior Woman and the cover looks like that. For some reason, as I write this, the Amazon.Com listing is displaying a copy of the cover of the next of these paperbacks (The Groo Nursery, which will by out in July) with the title from this one pasted on it. I cannot conceive of any reason for that since this cover was done long before that cover but, with Groo, things happen for which there is no logical explanation. So I've learned not to ask questions about why odd things occur.
In any case, you can order this book from Amazon and if you go to their site by clicking on either of the links in this paragraph, we get a tiny percent of whatever you spend on that visit. Add this to the tiny percent we make off this book in the first place and you have two tiny percents which, added together, make yet another tiny percent. Just another mystery of higher mathematics.
A P.S. on the Bill Maher/Politically Incorrect riff I posted an hour ago. Two months ago, demon broadcaster Paul Harris did a good interview on this topic with Mr. Maher. You can hear excerpts from this on-line at Paul's website. If you're interested, go do this.
A friend over at ABC tells me that the network is in serious talks with Jimmy Kimmel about doing some sort of talk show to replace Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect. This bothers me, and not because I don't think Kimmel is funny. I think he's very funny, especially when he gets off the topics of tits, beer and other fratboy notions of all that matters to our gender. Alas, the substitution seems to be saying, "We've got to get rid of the guy who occasionally offends people with political comments. Let's find a guy who'll only offend them with sexual comments."
Maher stirred up a storm not long after 9/11 with a remark that I believe was almost deliberately misinterpreted by folks who already didn't like him. This seems to be part of the New Rules of political discourse in the land. It doesn't matter what your foes actually said, or what they obviously intended to say. If you can convince people that Al Gore actually claimed he invented the Internet…well, that's so much better than trying to debate what he actually says. That Maher's comment wasn't as outrageous as some later made it out to be is demonstrated by the fact that there was no outcry, no outrage the night he said it or the next day, either. A few days later, those most reliable of sources — the Internet and talk radio hosts — made it out to be much worse than he'd obviously intended, and sponsors started fleeing.
That is, of course, their right. It's just regrettable, if only because it can't help but cast a pall on a lot of televised discussion. Right now, most of those who write for or ad-lib on TV are putting everything through an extra laundering process, asking themselves, "Is there any way this can be misinterpreted?" Because they know, if it is and there's a protest, sponsors won't hesitate to cast them adrift. For a time, it looked like Maher might get axed right away. That did not happen, in part because ABC didn't have anything to stick on in his place. But they're obviously afraid of the next time and they may be close to having something — if not Kimmel, someone else — for the slot.
This will probably not mean the end of Bill Maher in that format. If his agents can't parlay this into a secure, long-term deal on a cable channel, he oughta sue them for malpractice. He could very well wind up with a better deal and even a better show. Still, I think it's unfortunate that, at a time when network TV seems to be growing up in its vocabulary — when Ozzy Ozbourne can even use the "f" word on The Tonight Show with minor notice — comments about real, important issues still make people nervous.
There's a nice article over at CNN on my pal, Brad Oscar, who's taken over the lead in The Producers on Broadway. The show has been re-reviewed with the new stars and he fared pretty well.
More on "Deep Throat," the famed secret source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Watergate investigation…
The question I find most intriguing about this is why Deep Throat, whoever he is, would hold Bernstein and Woodward to their pledge of secrecy for what is now thirty years. For a time, the assumption was that D.T. had some sort of career in Washington and feared that exposure would affect him; that associates would shun him, distrust him, whatever. Woodward said, in a long-ago interview, something to that effect. This was one of the things that made many folks suspect Alexander Haig who, for a while, was chasing the Republican presidential nomination and could ill afford the hostility of old-line G.O.P. leaders.
(The other main bit of evidence which led to Haig — apparently erroneously — was the Bernstein-Woodward book, The Final Days. Haig was obviously a major source and he comes off as something of a hero in the proceedings. Some figured it was their payback for previous help.)
But a lot of time has passed. Haig's candidacy faltered long ago and almost no one on The Deep Throat Suspect List is still in remotely the same job. Most are completely out of politics or government service. So why doesn't Deep Throat, who supposedly is still alive, come in from the cold, write a book, reap some rewards? A friend of mine in the near-Washington press corps sends the following note…
The thinking seems to be that Throat wants the secret kept, not for any political reasons but just because he's old and wants his privacy. That might indicate Mark Felt, the FBI guy who was on everyone's list of suspects. He's ill (he had a stroke some time ago) and retired and won't even answer questions about things that are on the record from his career. He's denied he's Throat but I don't believe Woodstein ever has. Like you, I've always felt Throat was FBI. Most of those guys have a weird code of honor about leaking to the press. It's a sin, even if it's for a good cause. People outside the FBI would hail Throat as a hero but they certainly wouldn't inside the bureau.
That's as respectable a theory as I've seen…which, of course, doesn't mean it might not be dead wrong. Deep Throat could still turn out to be Joey Bishop, relaying info he got from Frank.
If it is Felt, however, there's an interesting twist to this story. Felt was convicted in 1980 of ordering illegal break-ins of the Weatherman organization. He was pardoned shortly after by then-President Reagan. Wouldn't it be interesting if it turned out that the man who helped expose Nixon's role in one break-in scandal had his own? Or that one Republican president was pardoned by the next, and then the next Republican president pardoned the man who brought down the first guy?
I find myself strangely uninterested in the new Spider-Man movie. My affection for the character faded about the time Stan Lee stopped scripting his comics. (I don't question that talented, brilliant writers and artists have done great stories since. They're just writing about a guy I don't particularly care about.) I also have an unrelated, natural reticence to patronize anything with that much advertising and promotion behind it. What seems to happen with "the new, hot movie" is that I put off seeing it the first weekend because everyone's going to see it, and I don't want to fight the crowds.
Then, by the second weekend, I've seen so many articles and talk show appearances and clips and reviews that I feel like I'll overdose if I go see the film. (For a time, at parties, I used to discuss current releases with people, just to see if they'd figure out that all I'd seen were the talk show clips. No one ever did.)
Then, the third weekend, there's usually a new blockbuster opening and I have no desire to go to the theater and fight that crowd to see the previous blockbuster. Then, week four, they're already talking about releasing the film on DVD and tape, so I figure it's no longer time-sensitive and I might as well wait and catch it on HBO…which I rarely do. I still haven't seen any of the Batman movies. Or any of the Superman films after the second one. I only saw X-Men because I was working for Stan Lee Media at the time and they had a big afternoon screening for the entire staff and passed out free lunches. (I was bored silly and would have walked out on it, had I not been sitting in front of Stan.)
The maddening part is that every time a comic book movie comes out, people I encounter all assume I've not only seen it but that I camped out overnight to be first in line. They're already starting conversations by saying, "So, what'd you think of the Spider-Man movie?" One even asked, "How many times have you seen it so far?" When I tell them I haven't seen it even once and am in no hurry, they act like I've just revealed some dire illness. No, I tell them; I just don't see what the rush is. At the moment, it's not a movie, it's an event. If it sticks around long enough to become a movie and there's nothing more promising on the marquee, maybe I'll catch a matinee. Eventually.
We have reports that long-time comic book artist Tom Sutton was found dead the other day in his home — "probably," one person theorized, "slumped over his drawing board." That was the man's usual habitat and, considering his output during certain times, it's doubtful he ever left it for long. Sutton was one of the few artists to get into comics in the late sixties, starting with westerns for Marvel and eventually moving into every other kind of book they had. His work was always competent and showed vast amounts of effort but it always struck me that he was perfectly suited for some kind of comic that no one was paying him to draw.
Lurking around the edges of his super-heroes and science-fiction tales was a wicked sense of humor, kind of what you see in old stories by Jack Davis (one of Sutton's heroes) before the world realized he was a humor artist. For a long time, Sutton drew ghost comics for Charlton where he obviously expended a lot more effort than their page rates warranted. He seized upon the freedom they offered in lieu of decent pay and produced work that was quite experimental and at times, obviously somewhat personal. When he did a job for DC or Marvel, as he did when he took on illustrating a new Star Trek comic for the former, he usually became a much more conventional artist…and therefore to his fans, not as interesting.
I never met the man in person but we corresponded briefly. What I recall from his letters was that he never stopped being a fan, never stopped wanting to learn how to be a better artist. In one note, he listed about twenty questions he hoped I could answer about Jack Kirby (another hero), all of which boiled down to, "How does he do that?" With one, he sent me a lovely print of a cover he did around '68 for Bill Spicer's Graphic Story Magazine. It was a huge, cluttered western barroom brawl that, I suspect, showed the kind of thing he could do when he was more interested in pleasing himself than in pleasing editors. It made you wish he could have made a living pleasing himself.
Nice article in The New York Times by Stan Lee about the enduring appeal of Spider-Man. You know how to get there.
More thoughts on the identity of Deep Throat, which John W. Dean says he will expose in an upcoming book. This will be Dean's third "unmasking" of the famed shadowy source. I said he'd previously fingered Alexander Haig but I forgot that, before that, he was peddling the notion that the man who gave Woodward and Bernstein their inside info on the Nixon Administration was U.S. attorney Earl Silbert.
The problem with Dean's revelation, of course, is that it will be just another guess in a long line of supposedly well-investigated guesses by folks who ought to know but probably don't. Former Nixon insider Leonard Garment wrote a book that spent many pages arguing that D.T. was Republican strategist John Sears. Others have identified FBI agent Mark Felt and a CBS News inquiry claimed — rather foolishly, I thought — that it was L. Patrick Gray, who was then the acting director of the bureau. That was foolish because their main bit of "evidence" was that the parking garage wherein Woodward met Deep Throat had been described in terms that seemed to match the parking garage of the building wherein Gray was living at the time. Leaving aside the fact that half the parking garages in America could have fit the description, there's this: Does anyone think that Deep Throat held clandestine meetings in the garage of his own building? That he left the privacy of his own apartment, took the elevator down to the cold, less-private garage and stood there for hours talking to Bob Woodward, hoping not to be seen?
Still others have offered up names as bizarre as Henry Kissinger and John Ehrlichman. You could actually build a strong case for Kissinger, who certainly had a great many mixed feelings about Nixon and who was obviously wary of how their mutual history would be written. But apart from that being such an incredible possibility just because it's Kissinger, there's one clue that doesn't fit. In All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein say that Deep Throat was a smoker…and Kissinger never was. Matter of fact, when Oliver Stone's film of Nixon came out, Kissinger complained mightily that the actor portraying him was always seen with a big cigar and that he'd never touched tobacco in his life.
I am inclined to disagree with those who speculate that there was no Deep Throat or that he was a composite. First of all, it was a dangerous lie for Woodward and Bernstein to tell their editor. If Ben Bradlee had demanded to know who it was, what would they have said? A promise of confidentiality to a source doesn't mean you can't tell your editor and, in fact, they eventually did. I also find it hard to believe Bradlee would have gone along with a phony source. The Washington Post had too much riding on two relative novices. The paper would have been humiliated if the Woodward/Bernstein reporting had proven bogus and doubly humiliated if it got out that it had been based on a phony source. Moreover, a number of people have died who could have been Deep Throat. If it had been a fraud, I think Bernstein and Woodward would have seized on one of those opportunities to say, "That's the guy. He was Deep Throat. Now, get off our backs about this."
So Dean will make his guess. Bernstein and Woodward will either "no comment" or, if the subject gets upset and convince them to do so, they'll announce no, it was not him…and the mystery will continue until the right guy dies and they say it was him. What I hope is that, along with a name, we eventually get a couple of Whys — why he did it, why he insisted on not being identified for 30+ years — and also a What: What did he think of what occurred as a result of his leaking? Unless they manage to restore the famed 18-and-a-half minute gap on one of Nixon's tapes, as one lab is reportedly attempting, those will be the final secrets of Watergate. It's about time we put the last of them to bed.
Dark Horse Comics has released the second volume of Little Annie Fanny, collecting the wonderful feature that Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder did (with the occasional help of others) for Playboy. It's kind of hard to believe that this was once a naughty comic strip but it was. Back in our old Comic Book Club, circa '68, we used to have contests, in game show format, of funnybook knowledge. The prize was always some old comic of modest value and, one week, one of our members won a copy of the first Annie Fanny paperback collection. Problem: The member was 14 years old and, though he loved the thing, he knew his folks would regard it as hard-core pornography since, after all, it had the occasional naked woman in it.
His folks also routinely searched his room so he dared not bring it home. The solution? He immediately offered it up for sale to any other club member. New problem: Since our members knew he had to sell it, they all made lowball offers. I think the book retailed for around $9.95 and our members — who wanted the book but more wanted to see this guy squirm — offered him fifty cents for it, escalating to about a dollar. "But it's worth ten dollars," he kept pleading, as if we were somehow obligated to pay him that or something in the vicinity. He actually got mad because none of us would make him what he considered a real offer.
This went on all afternoon. He had to sell it but he got increasingly upset that he couldn't sell this book — which had cost him nothing in the first place — for what he believed to be its true value. Finally, if only to put him out of his misery, I made him an offer: Three dollars…but my offer was only good for two minutes. He threw a tantrum, accused me of shamelessly exploiting him, begged anyone else to offer more…and then, one minute and fifty seconds after my timed offer, he took my three bucks.
I still have that copy and it's quite nice…vastly superior in its reproduction to the current volumes. The first of the new ones was disappointing and this one is actually poor in some places. But unlike previous reprintings, these collections are complete and feature articles and examples of preliminaries and other bonus materials by Elder and Kurtzman. The supplementals are worth the price, just by themselves. So I bought the books and you might want to, as well. You can give us a cut by ordering from Amazon.Com. Click here to buy Volume One or click here to buy Volume Two. And if you look around, you'll probably find one of those zowie Amazon offers to purchase both at the same time for a savings of one cent or less.