Funny guy, that Frank Gorshin. The first time I saw him perform live was at a Bar Mitzvah reception for a classmate of mine. The classmate was a relative of a gent named Arthur Ellen who was a somewhat famous hypnotist of the day, performing on TV and asserting he could help people become what they wanted to be. Ellen got up at the event to put on a little demonstration and somehow — I never understood how or why — Frank Gorshin appeared on the little platform with him and preempted the hypnosis by doing about twenty minutes of impressions for the crowd: Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, the works.
I subsequently heard Gorshin on some talk show say that he owed a large chunk of his career to Mr. Ellen's therapy, so I guess that was the connection. But one thing hypnosis didn't do for Frank Gorshin was to help him stop smoking. Every time I was around him, he was going from one cigarette to the next. Once at a comic book convention, we were chatting and Frank was smoking. A security guard came by and politely pointed out a No Smoking sign. Frank apologized as if he hadn't seen it, stubbed out the Marlboro and then, the second the guard was gone, out came the pack of cigarettes again. Without even pausing in conversation, maybe not even aware he was doing it, Gorshin lit up another. So I'm not all that surprised that Cause of Death is listed as lung cancer, emphysema and pneumonia. As I mentioned here, reporting on a luncheon where he was honored, everyone was urging him to quit and he said he was trying.
I enjoyed talking with Frank at comic conventions and even interviewing him once or twice in front of audiences. Naturally, everyone was asking him about playing The Riddler on the Batman TV show and some even asked him about the one episode of the original Star Trek in which he appeared. He was polite about it, in large part because he was selling autographed photos from those gigs. But he vastly preferred talking about the other 98% of his career. You could see him light up (as a performer and as a smoker) when, after answering the 93rd question about Batman, one of us would mention something where he didn't wear tights, especially his recent projects. I saw him twice playing Nathan Detroit in a touring company of Guys and Dolls with Jack Jones as Sky Masterson and Maureen McGovern as Adelaide. Apart from the fact that Nathan occasionally lapsed into a Dean Martin impression, Frank was very good…and very glad that I'd seen and praised his performance.
The core of his career was, of course, his stand-up act and I had the pleasure of seeing the whole thing once, and with a full orchestra behind him. It wasn't all impressions. He sang and he told stories and he even did a little dramatic moment — a monologue about an actor learning he's been fired and what it meant to his life. As a mimic, Gorshin had an uncanny way of getting inside Big Stars and capturing their essence, but that was only part of what he did.
My sympathies go out to his family and also to his close friend and agent, Fred Wostbrock, who took very good care of him. Gorshin's final performance will be broadcast on Thursday's episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigations but I'll bet you we see the man in reruns forever.