Monthly Archives: December 2003

I mentioned meeting Carlotta Monti the other day and a reader made me promise I'd tell how that happened and all that I recalled. It was around 1974, a period when I often found myself in Westwood Village, right outside the U.C.L.A. campus. My Aunt Dot was donating two days a week as a saleslady at the United Nations Gift Shop, which was a charity enterprise that sold globes and flags and little sculptures that you'd never want in your house. When I was in the area, I'd drop in and say howdy to Aunt Dot and one day, she introduced me to another of the women who volunteered their time in the store. When she said, "This is Carlotta Monti," little bells went off in my head and I thought, "Hey, I think this is the lady who was W.C. Fields' mistress." She seemed about the right age (just shy of 70) but I wasn't sure enough to say anything other than, "Oh, I certainly know of you." Matter of fact, I think I changed the subject swiftly and awkwardly and hurried off. Once home, I consulted her autobiography, W.C. Fields and Me and, sure enough, it was the same lady.

I checked with Aunt Dot to find out when Ms. Monti would be there again and took the book up to get it signed. We wound up going to a shop down the street for cola and coffee, and I could see that Ms. Monti was thrilled to have a new audience for her tales of "Woody," as she called him. The way she pronounced it, it rhymed with "moody" and no, I have no idea where the nickname came from. She was proud of the book and upset that "certain people" who knew Fields or defended his memory felt she'd exploited her relationship with him. These "certain people" (unnamed) were also upset that she had sold or was about to sell the film rights…and I recall thinking to myself, "That's one movie that will never get made." Two years later, it was. Filmdom would have been much better off if I'd been right.

She kept coming back to the fact that she was being criticized for writing about her life. Her side of it, which did not surprise me and which I am not suggesting was at all wrong, was that she'd given "the best years" of her life to Fields and received precious little. So selling her life story was her inheritance, and "Woody" would have wanted her to be comfortable in her old age. She said she had plenty more stories…enough to fill several more books, but would have to wait a few years before embarking on one.

I asked her to tell me one of these stories and she mulled several possibilities before telling of an aging prostitute Fields knew. She wasn't sure if "Woody" had ever been a patron but they were friends, and Fields was always trying to find a way to throw her a few bucks since she was too old to get much work in her main occupation. There's a tale that makes the rounds about some guy who's in the hospital, attended by nurses and/or nuns and one day, one comes in, locks the door and begins ripping off her clothes and performing sex acts on his person. This of course shocks the patient who is unaware the nun (or nurse) is a hooker that his friends have hired for this treat/trick. Well, according to Ms. Monti, Fields's friend specialized in such missions and owned all the necessary costuming. Now that she was older, he occasionally hired her for non-carnal nun impersonation. He'd arrange for her to be in some restaurant or other public place when he was with some pals and he'd start verbally abusing this nun and saying foul, vulgar things to her. This would horrify Fields' friends who would try to shut him up but he would persist…until finally, the "nun" would start firing back with even better obscenities, and Fields' cronies would realize they'd been had. According to Ms. Monti, "Woody" loved the reactions.

The other main thing I recall beyond the talk about him wanting to play Scrooge was that she felt Fields's last few years had been squandered by Hollywood. He'd had a bad check-up and from that point on, no studio wanted to start a movie with him in the lead. He was in constant demand for short cameos but many offers fell through and some of what he did film was never released. She made the comment that he might have lived longer if the business hadn't decided prematurely that he was dying.

She didn't have a lot of time that day so we agreed to get together again for a longer chat but never did. And though she lived almost two decades after our chat, she never wrote that second book. I'm sorry I didn't spend more time with her because…well, how often do you get to talk to someone who slept with W.C. Fields? These days, hardly ever.

That eBay auction of my pilot script and bible for Dungeons and Dragons ended at a price of $255.00, and I have no idea how I feel about that. I guess I'm afraid that some animation studio is going to see that and decide that's what they should pay writers for writing these things in the first place.

Speaking of eBay, I have nothing to do with it but a one-of-a-kind, hand-carved Porky Pig walking stick is currently up for bids. It was made for my pal Bob Bergen, who usually does Mr. Pig's voice these days, but it's the wrong length for him. So you can buy it (or at least see it) by clicking here.

Did you know Kay Kuter died last month? Yeah, me neither. I just found out that the venerable character actor (and fixture at autograph shows) died November 12 from pulmonary complications. I didn't see anything in the papers about it, even though a lot of folks probably remember him as Newt Kiley on Petticoat Junction and Green Acres…six years, playing the same character on two popular series. At those autograph shows, that's all they seemed to ask him about. He wearily but good-naturedly answered questions about Arnold Ziffel. We chatted occasionally about an amazing career that went back to bit parts opposite Bogart in Sabrina, Sinatra and Brando in Guys and Dolls and Jack Benny in the recurring hillbilly act that graced the Benny program.

His listing in the Internet Movie Database will give you a brief sampling of what he did. As you'll see, he never played big roles but he sure played a lot of them.

Went to a party last evening at the home of Leonard and Alice Maltin. Got to talk to lots of fun folks including Stan Freberg, Chuck McCann, Richard Sherman, Ian Whitcomb, Phil Proctor and John Landis. It was a lot more fun than the last time I was with John Landis. It was 1963 and we were in the same classroom at Emerson Junior High School in West Los Angeles, hearing over the P.A. system that the President had been shot.

Lots of fun talk. Richard Sherman was telling everyone that things are finally set to bring the stage musical version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (which is a hit over in London) to Broadway in Fall of 2004. (There are video clips and fun facts over at the show's website.)

A couple of folks suggested that, in the spirit of the holiday, I put up a pointer to this article I wrote about Mel Tormé. So there it is. Hope you enjoy it.

Thanks to a Christmas Eve e-mail from the all-knowing Rick Scheckman, I corrected a minor factual error in the preceding post.

Also, several folks have written me to note that while Fields never played Scrooge, impressionist Rich Little did play Fields playing Scrooge. Chris Smigliano offers the following recollection…

It was a cable TV special, late seventies/early eighties, if i remember, called Rich Little's Christmas Carol. It wasn't a concert performance. It was a fully setted and costumed presentation, the idea being that Little would play about every major role in the story and each character would be based on a "celebrity," which basically meant there were a lot of back of the head shots as the camera cut back and forth between Little and a stand-in when his characters "interacted." The video tape editor for this special must have gone nuts after all the cutting and resplicing this thing required!

So it was Fields as Scrooge, Paul Lynde as Bob Crachit, Truman Capote as Tiny Tim, Johnny Carson as Scrooge's nephew Fred, Groucho Marx as Fezziwig and Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau as the Ghost of Christmas future. Sadly, memory fails me on the rest of the cast, but I'm sure Jimmy Stewart and Richard Nixon were somewhere in the mix.

Yes, I remember that now, and I just looked it up. Edith Bunker was Bob Cratchit's wife and the three ghosts were Bogart, Peter Falk as Columbo, and Sellers as Clouseau. Nixon was cast as Jacob Marley and instead of chains, he was burdened down by tapes, which was still a more-or-less topical reference in 1978. I recall the whole show as a joke that didn't sustain for the hour. Anyway, thanks to everyone who wrote and I'm going to take the rest of Christmas Eve off from weblogging. Have a nice holiday, everyone!

There have now been over 72,500 adaptations of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, with most of the film and television versions getting rerun during a holiday viewing season that extends from just before Columbus Day 'til well after the Winter Solstice. The other night on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno and Billy Bob Thornton were agreeing that the best was the one with Alastair Sim as Scrooge, followed closely by George C. Scott in the TV Movie. Wrong both times. As should be clear to anyone who doesn't have razzleberry dressing for brains, the best (and oddly, one of the most faithful) was the one that starred the myopic Quincy Magoo. Watched it again the other day and, boy, it holds up, cheapo animation and all. The only better interpretation I can imagine is one that never happened and, sadly, never will.

Years ago, a lady named Carlotta Monti told me that her boy friend had longed to play Ebenezer. His name was W.C. Fields and she said it was a pet project of his, though I've never seen it mentioned in any books about him. The way Ms. Monti told it, he had this idea not long after playing Micawber in the film version of David Copperfield. Unfortunately, by the time he got around to acting on it, the 1938 film of A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen was already in the works, and the studio (Universal, I guess) told him, "We can't have two versions out so close to one another. Let's wait a while." So they did but alas, by the time sufficient years had passed, Fields's health wasn't sound enough for them to star him in a movie. So he didn't get to do it and we didn't get to see it, and his lady friend thought this was a major shame. "He would have been wonderful," she told me. Then she added, "Of course, he did want to change the ending…"

It really is the perfect Christmas story. Years ago, there was a vice-president at one of the networks who couldn't imagine a holiday show based on anything else. He kept calling me in to discuss ideas for animated Xmas specials based on pre-existing properties and no matter what I pitched, he'd shake his head and say, "What if [name of grouchiest character in the series] was like Scrooge, and three ghosts visited him on Christmas Eve?" This happened over and over until I made the mistake of saying I thought the idea had been overdone, whereupon he began calling on other, less sacrilegious writers.

It was probably just as well. Before he gave up on me, we did develop a couple of Christmas Carol knock-offs that never got produced, and I kept running into another problem. Someone had taught this exec that the lead in a story always had to be "likable." So when I pitched out a story where the Scrooge doppelganger was acting miserly and mean, he would stop me and ask, "Why do we care about this person? I wouldn't watch someone like that." I'd patiently explain that the story was about a rotten man who turns good; ergo, we had to establish his rottenness at the beginning. "I understand that," the man said. "But couldn't we let people know that deep down, he isn't really a bad guy?" No wonder those scripts never went anywhere.

Anyway, I just wanted to suggest that maybe we've had quite enough versions of A Christmas Carol. We've seen it with Magoo. We've seen it with Flintstones. The Six Million Dollar Man did it with Ray Walston as Scrooge. The Jetsons did it with Mr. Spacely as Scrooge. The Muppets did it with Michael Caine as Scrooge. WKRP in Cincinnati did it with Mr. Carlson as Scrooge. Disney even did it with Uncle Scrooge as Scrooge. We've seen every possible version short of A Christmas Carol as performed by guinea pigs.

Oh, wait. That's been done, too. (Thanks to Rephah Berg for the link.)

You see a lot of silly animations on the Internet but occasionally one really impresses you. Last year on my other site, I recommended you take the time to visit this Christmas cartoon, and it's still one of the cleverest things I've seen. Try clicking the deers off and on in different patterns.

And this year, they have the sequel! Go have a look.

These are offered up by a web company called ICQ but I have no idea who actually devised and created these wonderful little animations. I searched the 'net to find that info and couldn't locate that information. I captured the Shockwave files to disk and dismantled them, figuring that the artistan(s) might have secreted a signature within. If they did, I couldn't find it. So I dunno who should get the credit but hey, if you're out there, nice job!

Governor George Pataki of New York has granted a posthumous pardon to Lenny Bruce for saying naughty words on stage. Here's the news report.

I was never much of a fan of the Dennis the Menace newspaper strip by Hank Ketcham. It was nicely drawn but there was something about its attitude towards children that struck me as needlessly condescending. At times, it was almost like Dennis was not a kid but a pet in need of better housebreaking. This attitude extended to the TV show with Jay North but only occasionally to the comic books, which are among the most overlooked of great comics. Ketcham didn't write or draw the comics (nor his strip's Sunday pages) and they were generally the work of writer Fred Toole and artist Al Wiseman. (That's Fred above with the mustache; Al's the guy in the photo at right.) The stories were very clever and some were long enough that you could make a case for them as among the first graphic novels. In an article on his weblog, Fred Hembeck explains what he loved about them. I'm not sure he's right in identifying Owen Fitzgerald as the Dennis artist whose work he once didn't like, but otherwise he pretty well summarizes my thoughts. (Hembeck is a darn good cartoonist, himself. Browse around his site and see for yourself.)

Starting in a week or so, Comedy Central loses their package of Saturday Night Live reruns to the E! network. As a last hurrah, the former is airing what they're billing as "The 50 Greatest SNL Episodes" in five 10-hour blocks, one block per day starting tomorrow. It probably won't be the fifty best since E! already has custody of the first five seasons, and Comedy Central doesn't have the last few years, either. So I guess it's actually the fifty best of the years 1980-2001, as ostensibly determined by this online ballot at the Comedy Central website. (The voting seems to be closed now, judging by the fact that the voting function on that site is no longer operative.)

So what will Comedy Central be running? So far, they seem to be keeping it a secret but I wouldn't mind seeing some of the episodes they haven't rerun in a long time. The shows done during the absence of Lorne Michaels have rarely been seen the last few years. For some reason, both Comedy Central and the NBC All Night rerun (early on Sunday A.M.) have occasionally announced an episode from those seasons and instead aired one from the Michaels years. It was like they tried to sneak one in and got caught before they could broadcast it. They've also given the shortest of shrift to shows from 1986-1993, airing only a couple of selected ones over and over.

No word yet on which ones E! is going to run, but the channel seems so fixated on who's hot this week, you suspect they'll concentrate on the ones spotlighting current stars. I hope not because there was some really good work on episodes featuring people who don't have a big, heavily-promoted movie or CD coming out next week.

The eBay auction of my pilot script and bible for Dungeons and Dragons is rolling along. Up over a hundred bucks now with several days yet to run. Let's see how high this thing will go…

Here's Robert Scheer with one side of an issue that has me genuinely on the fence. Increasingly, government officials are leaking stories to reporters that turn out to be either not quite true or not at all true. The leak is calculated to advance the official's agenda and may even be a crime…but the ethics of journalism are supposed to protect the leaker: The reporter is honor-bound not to reveal who told him or her what they printed, in effect covering for someone who may have broken the law. There seems to me little doubt that someone in the government, figuring they could hide behind that shield, planted phony stories about Wen Ho Lee, the scientist who was locked away in solitary confinement for nine months and hit with all sorts of espionage charges that later evaporated. The stories were obviously intended to scare the accused into some sort of plea bargain and confession to a crime for which there was otherwise insufficient evidence. Should the reporters who printed those stories be compelled to reveal their source? One doesn't want to see that kind of sleazy trial-by-phony-leak tactic go unpunished but one also doesn't want to see the mechanism put in place to uncover legit news sources. So I dunno…

Same thing with the Valerie Plame leak. Someone may have broken the law by "outing" a C.I.A. operative but if so, that someone can never be caught as long as the reporter who received and published the leak can claim First Amendment protection. I see both sides of the argument in this one. Anonymous leakers and sources have helped the press uncover enormous amounts of wrongdoing and scandal…but they have also created a lot of it, as well.

There has always been a certain conflict between the two positions. Back during the Impeachment Festivities, it seemed pretty evident that Ken Starr's office was leaking anti-Clinton info to reporters in probable violation of the law. Reporters who were printing those stories were also reporting that others were charging Starr with such leaks, and then they were publishing Starr's denials. This made for an odd situation. If Starr was not leaking, then reporters who knew the charges to be false were publishing them without comment. If he was leaking, then reporters were publishing his denials, knowing full well they were lies. Either way, someone was wrong and the reporters knew who it was and weren't telling.

Going back a few more scandals: During Watergate (and before that, the Pentagon Papers), we heard a lot about the right of reporters to protect their sources but also more discussion of the need to weigh that right against possible abuse. The Wen Ho Lee case sure feels to me like a definite abuse. Before it, I felt that nothing should ever force a member of the working press to divulge a source. Now, I'm not so sure.

Another great voice has been silenced. Les Tremayne starred in many memorable radio programs, including The Falcon and The Thin Man before becoming one of those "works all the time" character actors in motion pictures and television. His listing in the Internet Movie Database is woefully incomplete but even it will give you some idea of how many times you saw and heard this man. Comic fans will probably best identify him for his role as Mentor on the 1974-75 Saturday morning series, Shazam! and he also was heard on many cartoon shows. He was the Voice of Christmas Present in Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, the voice of Churchy LaFemme and other characters on The Pogo Birthday Special, and the villain in dozens of Hanna-Barbera shows. Here's a link to an obit and I thank Tommy Raiko for calling it to my attention.