With Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent in the middle.
I've been privileged to meet and know many of the great contributors to my childhood entertainment. One person I can't believe I knew was Bob Clampett, who gave the world Beany & Cecil and who directed many of the very best Warner Brothers cartoons. And you got a bonus if you got to know Bob because you also got to know his kids and his wonderful wife, Sody. They were both very nice to me…which is not a brag on my part because they were very nice to everyone I saw around them.
Sody assisted Bob with a lot of the business end of his work and carried it on after his passing in 1984. I'd occasionally go by and take her to lunch — always at either Musso-Frank's or the Farmers Market, both places where I'd often encountered Bob or the both of them — and I regret that I did not see her more often. She was a bright, lovely woman and she left us yesterday after, I'm told, being in very poor health for some time. This sounds like one of those "Thank God it's over" deaths but it's still sad to hear about.
My favorite memory of Sody is from one of those evenings when she or Bob would call and say, "We're having people up to the house tonight to watch cartoons and we're going to bring in pizza. Please come." I would always cancel whatever I was doing and race to their lovely home in the hills, not far from the Hollywood sign. There would be between a half-dozen and a dozen folks who represented the "young generation" of the animation field. They'd run 16mm prints of some of Bob's work and he'd discuss it and answer every last question in painstaking detail. Sody would play hostess and serve the pizza which they steadfastly refused to let any of us help pay for.
One evening, they were running "Russian Rhapsody" — one of Bob's best but I'd seen it too many times lately so I wandered out into their balcony to take in the spectacular view and get some air. Sody was out there and I felt I had to apologize that I wasn't in watching Bob's work with the others. She said, "That's all right. I understand."
I told her, "I've seen this film at least fifty times, maybe a hundred. How many times have you seen it?" She thought for a second and said, "A lot. Maybe five hundred times."
I asked her, "Do you still like it?"
She glanced about to make sure Bob couldn't hear and then she told me, very softly, "It's a great cartoon but it loses a little something after the four hundredth viewing."