Thanks to Greg Novak, I just read (and you can read) this great piece by Matt Weinstock about the late Shari Lewis. She may well have been my first "crush" though as an amateur ventriloquist aged in single digits, I probably didn't realize it at the time. I remember feeling somehow it was wrong for a "girl" to be doing that kind of thing…especially doing it a lot better than I would ever be able to do it. I also recall an odd reaction when I saw her on an episode of Car 54, Where Are You? The premise was that she'd been fixed up with Francis Muldoon (Fred Gwynne's character) and he was around 6'6" whereas she was under five feet so romance seemed out of the question. I realized I had the same problem as Muldoon. At age nine I was already taller than she was or close to that, and a doctor had told my parents I'd easily top six feet. I hadn't particularly had any thoughts of marrying Shari Lewis but it was still jarring to have them dashed like that.
Apart from her first network Saturday morning show which was clever and funny, I never cared much for the material she performed but I liked her. We had one brief encounter on a show I worked on in the early eighties. She was kind of frantic owing to the demands of the performance she was there to do so it wasn't possible to talk much. That didn't happen until around ten years later when I was hired to write a pilot for a new Saturday morn series she'd pitched successfully to CBS. It was a cute idea. She would be the only human being in it — a strict, humorless school teacher. All of her students would be puppet characters, none of them (probably) voiced or operated by her. She wanted to find and train a band of younger puppeteers because it was to be a real generation-gap series in which, as per her concept, the teacher learns as much or more from the kids as they do from her.
We met a few times at her home in Beverly Hills where you were greeted in the front hall by a stuffed Lamb Chop doll that was taller than I was…and when she stood next to it, it seemed even taller. She did have a kind of "school teacher" air about her and she knew it. One of the amazingly self-aware things she said to me was that she had a tendency to talk to everyone, including folks older than she was, as if they were children. For the proposed series, she wanted me to write her that way — to make that a flaw of the character but to also capture the idea that she didn't "talk down" to people because she was arrogant but because she'd simply spent her whole life talking to children from that vantage point. That plus the passion she had for doing a show we could be proud of made me fall in love with her all over again.
Sadly, the project never went the distance. I hadn't even written the pilot script I was hired to write when the brass at CBS decided they could only have one live-action show on their Saturday AM schedule and it would be or would continue to be Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Our series development came to a screaming halt and I felt sorrier for her than for myself. She told me she wasn't giving up; that her agents would shop it elsewhere…and I never heard another word about it. Months later when I ran into her at a video convention in Las Vegas, that show was a distant memory and she had several others in various stages, one of which she asked me to write. I said yes but it never happened.
A number of articles about Phyllis Diller's retirement have rightly argued for her importance as a woman who broke down barriers for others of her gender, succeeding in comedy when it was so overwhelmingly a man's world. Not taking anything away from Ms. Diller but I would also argue for Ms. Lewis. In 1960 when she did it, how many other women had starred in a network TV show with their name in the title? Okay, we can name a few. But how many of them didn't play a ditzy character who kept getting into trouble and needed a man to help bail them out? How many of them succeeded without ridiculing their own looks? How many of them even had an identity not as somebody's wife? And Shari wasn't just the star of her 1960 show. Playing Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse, Hush Puppy and the occasional other role, she was most of the cast.
She was a remarkable lady…and one deserving of wider recognition for what she did. Nice to see her getting a little.
