In the above photo, the guy with the glasses is Stan Freberg. The fellow at right is his clothheaded friend Orville who accompanied Stan on his occasional forays into ventriloquism. His other lines of work have included doing voices for cartoons, recording hilarious and best-selling satirical records, producing brilliant funny commercials, writing books and articles, and just being one of the cleverest minds in all media. Today is his birthday and I wanted to wish him many more.
I've been fortunate to know and work with many of my heroes. He and his terrific wife Hunter came to my birthday party last year, which was not so much my birthday party as it was an excuse for my mother to meet an awful lot of my friends while she still could. (It was darn near the last time she was well enough to leave her home for anything non-medical.) A lot of people said to her, "It's easy to see Mark got his sense of humor from you." Sometimes, she would reply — and she wasn't kidding — "Actually, I think I got mine from him." But at times, she'd point across the room to Stan and say, "I think Mark got his sense of humor from that man." She wasn't kidding about that, either.
I first knew Stan from his records, which achieved the highest honor you can have as a satirist. People even loved and laughed at Freberg records when they didn't know the material he was spoofing. Beginning at around age eight, I bought them all and played them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. They are all deeply embedded in my memory. A few years ago, Stan, Hunter and I were riding in a limo in San Francisco and he challenged my claim that I knew every one by heart. I said, "Name one." He chose "B-B-B-Ball and Chain," which is a fast-talking, impossible-to-sing tune with about eighty words per square inch. I sang it for them and didn't miss a syllable.
Stan intersected with most of the things I loved as a kid. He was the other voice, the guy who wasn't Mel Blanc in a ton of Warner Brothers cartoons. He and the brilliant Daws Butler were Beany and Cecil and everyone else on Time for Beany. He was involved with the early MAD magazine. He was in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. He was even an unwilling participant on The Soupy Sales Show. I first "discovered" Stan when the puppets on that program would mime to Freberg records.
I am hardly the only person who feels this way. Going places with Stan is like what traveling with The Pope must be like. People grovel before him and figuratively (occasionally, literally) kiss his ring.
One night a few weeks after Stan's first wife passed, I dragged him out to dinner — at Matteo's, a very famous, old school Italian restaurant on Westwood Boulevard here in L.A. I picked it because he liked it and, to amuse myself, because it's about 200 yards from the former site of the record store in which I purchased my first Stan Freberg LP.
I haven't been to Matteo's since it changed ownership a few years ago but under the old owners, the foyer was practically a shrine to one of their past customers, a fellow named Frank Sinatra. When you came in, the maître d' would often act like he was granting you a rare privilege when he said, "I'm going to seat you in Mr. Sinatra's booth." That was impressive until you learned that at Matteo's, every booth was Mr. Sinatra's booth.
As he led Stan and me to "Mr. Sinatra's booth," we passed a wall of Sinatra photos. One of them was this picture…
It's from a party thrown by Capitol Records, back when they were one of the biggest entities in their industry. The gent at lower left is Glenn Wallichs, who was one of the company founders. The other men were their top recording artists back then — in the back row: Sinatra, Danny Kaye, Gordon MacRae and Nat King Cole. In the front row, we have Wallichs, Dean Martin and Stan. Stan's the only one in the photo who is still with us.
As we passed the photo in Matteo's, I said something like, "Hey, Stan…there's you with Mr. Sinatra." The maître d' turned in shock and gasped, "You…you actually met him?" (Stan not only met Frank, they were close friends. Stan was even the opening act one year when Sinatra did a tour of Australia.)
We had a lovely dinner. When it was over and I asked for the check, our waiter said, "It's been taken care of." I thought Matteo's was comping us but no. A minute later, he came over with a napkin on which another diner in the restaurant — one, the waiter said had already left — had written in ballpoint pen…
Mr. Freberg…you don't know me but your work has meant so much to me over the years. It's an honor to pay you back in even a tiny way by paying for your dinner tonight.
Stan gets that kind of reaction a lot and with good reason. Anyone with that body of excellent work deserves it and more. Happy Freberg Day, Stan!