Yearly Archives: 2015

Is he? It's all over the 'net that Talk Show Legend Joe Franklin has left us…but at this moment, it's not on any official news site. We're waiting until it's on several — or from a reliable source — before we believe it.

Yesterday, we were jesting about the announced bankruptcy of SkyMall, the store whose showroom is right next to the airsick bag. I've never ordered anything from them though I must confess that at least twice, I've seen an item in there that I thought might come in handy in my life…then done an Internet search and ordered it elsewhere. Maybe everyone's doing that and that's why they're bankrupt.

No, that can't be the problem and it isn't. This article will tell you what is.

Baseball Legend Ernie Banks has died and people in and from Chicago feel a special sense of loss. One of them, our friend Bob Elisberg, explains why.

Okay, let's all go see if Abe Vigoda is still alive.

I put this up here on 12/29/03. It's about me meeting the woman who lived for years with W.C. Fields. Looking back, I see that for some reason, I left out my favorite of all the W.C. lines she quoted for me. One time when Fields was out of work, his agent suggested he go play golf with the powerful producer, Jack L. Warner. Fields immediately responded, "If I want to play with a prick, I'll play with my own." I wish I'd taken notes on the other ones…

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.

Hal Roach was the greatest producer of comedies in the silent and early talkie eras. Mack Sennett was more famous but Roach ran the lot where the best pictures were made.

I was privileged to visit Mr. Roach for an afternoon at his home around 1983 during which I asked him about his films and he asked me about how easy or difficult it was to get actresses and other young women into bed "these days." It was an odd conversation but I'm sure glad I got to spend that time with him.

On 1/21/92 when he was one hundred years and one week old, Mr. Roach was a guest on The Tonight Show, guest hosted by Jay Leno. This is his segment and he tells a few anecdotes that are not exactly true…but who cares? When you get to be that age, you're no longer bound by the truth. He passed away in November of that year…

• I never bought anything from SkyMall. I never had the need for a combination garden gnome and doghouse that can double as a footwarmer.

• The owners of SkyMall are filing for bankruptcy. Apparently, they've given up on the dream of anyone ever ordering anything from SkyMall.

The PBS series American Masters is profiling Ricky Jay in its new installment. It debuts on some stations tonight and on others later this weekend. If you aren't familiar with the work of Mr. Jay, you oughta be. Describing him as one of the greatest sleight-of-hand magicians is a serious act of missing the forest.

That's right: Two Mushroom Soup Days in one week. But keep in mind that when I'm too busy to post on this blog, I still post more than most people do on their blogs when they're not too busy to post. Or something like that.

This will interest about three people, all of them in Los Angeles. We have a cut-off low heading our way in next week's weather and the weatherfolks don't have a clue where it's going to go or what it's going to do. It could bring us a decent amount of rain on Tuesday or not a drop. It could linger into Thursday or go away immediately. Most of the time, the National Weather Service does a superior job of predicting but every so often, they get one of these storms that causes the computer models to spit out contradictory data with each run. Even as we speak, the forecasters are trying to figure out how to word their statements so as not to say, "We dunno." But the truth is they dunno.

Back later with something.

Teller (partner of Penn) gives away some secrets of magic.

The Lumberjack Song. In Italian.

Peggy Charren, a children's television activist who has been credited with revolutionizing children's programming, recently died at the age of 86. Obits like this one hail her for her impact on the medium…

Frustrated with the vapid quality and hyper-commercialization of TV programs her children watched in her Newton home the late 1960s, Peggy Charren helped found Action for Children's Television, a grass-roots organization that brought about landmark legislation and sweeping changes in programming for young viewers.

I'm getting a number of e-mails asking me to comment because if you go to her Wikipedia page, it says, "Although denounced as an advocate for censorship by her critics, including animation writers Steve Gerber and Mark Evanier, Charren has insisted she is an outspoken critic of censorship, and has cited her stance against the American Family Association's campaigns to ban various programs." Since Steve is no longer with us, I'm the one getting asked how I feel about her and her work.

I believe the Wikipedia page is wrong to suggest that either Steve or I ever singled Ms. Charren out but we were among many writers working on cartoon shows in the eighties who doubted that the "parents' groups" (which sometimes did not actually represent any parents) were doing good things or even accomplishing much of what they claimed to be accomplishing. We criticized all those crusaders, not her in particular. One of these days, I'll write a long post about all this.

November 10, 2006: Actor Jack Palance passes away and I ignore his stellar career to bring you this moment of trivia…

Sorry to hear of the passing of actor Jack Palance, a classy presence in an awful lot of movies over the years. I'm afraid I never met Mr. Palance and have absolutely no anecdotes about him.

However, I can't help but mention an interesting sidelight to the man's stellar career. In 1970, the great comic book creator Jack Kirby introduced a villain named Darkseid (pronounced "Dark-SIDE") who has since become one of the great bad guys in the history of the medium. Darkseid has appeared often in the pages of DC Comics ever since and also made it onto TV cartoons and the toy shelves.

The style and substance of this master antagonist were based on just about every power-mad tyrant Kirby had ever met or observed, with a special emphasis on Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon was kind of the monster du jour for many in 1970 and he's still a fine template for various forms of villainy.

Beyond that kind of thing, it is not uncommon for comic artists to "cast" their creations, using someone they know or have observed as reference, and Kirby used Jack Palance as a model for Darkseid. I don't mean that he thought the other Jack had ever tried to enslave the universe…but Kirby had been impressed by one or more Palance screen appearances. They inspired some aspect of Darkseid…a look, a posture, a gesture, whatever. Most of all, it was probably a voice. When J.K. wrote dialogue for his comic book evildoer, he was "hearing" Palance in some film. (I have no idea which one. Another Kirby scholar has suggested the 1968 TV-Movie, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Palance in both title roles, but I don't see any points of comparison.) In the same way and in the same series, Kirby based the likeness of businessman Morgan Edge on actor Kevin McCarthy and super-heroine Big Barda on singer Lainie Kazan (right after she was in Playboy) while a villain named Glorious Godfrey was an amalgam of Billy Graham and Arthur Godfrey.

To the best of my knowledge, Jack Palance was unaware that one of his screen images was purloined for a comic book baddie, and no one seems to have thought of voicecasting him for any of Darkseid's animated appearances. And I want to emphasize that Kirby had no negative thoughts whatsoever about the actor. Quite the contrary, he thought Palance had a great screen presence, giving off a power that was worth putting to use in a comic book.

Also to the best of my knowledge, whenever Darkseid scored a triumph, he never dropped to the floor and did one-handed push-ups. But if I'd written more of his adventures, he probably would have.

Much to do today so you get the soup can…but I'll be back later with a Golden Oldie or something. (Hey, if you're browsing older messages in the Archives on this site, do me a small favor. If you come across one where there's a big hole because an illustration is missing, drop me a note and let me know. I keep finding those and fixing them.)

The most interesting thing to me about the second Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore was how totally the host has given up on Bill Cosby. (So has Jay Leno.) I think that's becoming the default position. Just as all mentions of O.J. Simpson in the media kinda presume we all think he killed those two people, all mentions of Bill Cosby will assume we all agree that most if not all of his accusers are speaking the truth.

Wilmore's stance is significant because it's a major black comedian willing to say it…and a guy who has an important forum. Leno's obviously matters less but it would matter a lot if he still had that nightly monologue in front of all of America.

I have to run to an appointment. More posting later tonight or maybe tomorrow morn.