Here's another one of those photos. Phil Silvers and Zero Mostel chat at (I'm guessing) some preview of the movie of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Mostel, of course, starred in the original Broadway version after Silvers turned it down. (Before they signed Mostel, Milton Berle was briefly set to star but he had differences with the producers and withdrew.) Mr. Silvers told me of his great admiration for Mostel's skills as a comic actor, but said something about Zero's anger preventing him from ever becoming quite as a big a star as he deserved. Silvers also mentioned that he regretted never having the opportunity to play Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. I bet he'd have been quite unusual in the role, but good.
I never met (or even saw in person) Zero Mostel but always admired him from afar, and not just for his movies. One of the funniest TV shows I ever saw came one night around 1970 when Mostel guest-hosted The Dick Cavett Show and, I suspect, decided to see how much of a shambles he could make of the proceedings. His main guests were Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin and, as I recall, they didn't get to say much. Mostel decided he was "too close" to them for him to be able to ask questions so he went out into the audience, up to the back row of the balcony, and tried to shout queries to them from there. Deciding he was "too far" for them to ask questions, he ran back on stage, made Benjamin sit on his lap, then put Ms. Prentiss on her hubbie's lap, and…well, it got even sillier after that. Through it all, Dick and Paula just went along with it all, pretty much baffled as to what else they could do. With one thing and another, Zero almost got through the whole 90 minutes without asking a single intelligible question. And unlike some other talk show hosts we could all mention, he did this deliberately. I loved him with a great script but I wish we could have seen more of him without one.
