Steve Stoliar sent me this link to a good piece on Woody Allen. I am intrigued by the notion that Mr. Allen might write his autobiography. Until he does, the best book about him is the one by my cousin David.
Steve also writes…
P.S. Are you familiar with a song called "Up the Ladder to the Roof"? I've been going positively nuts trying to find video of anyone singing it!!!!
Steve, my friend. I think I may be able to help you out…
Yesterday, I posted a message about something chilling that Robert Blake had said on a 1974 Tonight Show with Mr. Carson. Here's a message I got after that from Douglas McEwan…
I too watched that Carson show the other night, and posted remarks about his amazingly chilling remarks. However, your correspondent misquoted Blake's quote of Wally Cox's remark. When I was posting about it, I ran and reran the moment I was quoting to get the quote exactly right. Here is what Blake said: "You go ahead and you have your little caprice, have your little affair, and if the bed turns out to be a drag, you're lucky. You just walk away. And if it turns out to be terrific, you shoot her."
Note the important change is "You shoot her," not "You shoot your wife." In fact, in the full quote, it's not clear if Wally was referring to the wife or the girl friend, though it looks more to me like it meant the girl friend. Either way, it's a horrific "joke," especially when spoken by a future wife murderer, and seeing Johnny break up at it and hearing the studio audience laughing loudly at it was creepy icing on the creepy cake. Folks, HE MEANS IT!!!
On the show, Blake also said he'd worked with the Marx Brothers, though I'll be damned if I can find anything to back up that claim.
I met Blake back in 1972. And in 1973 he did me a solid without knowing it. He so pissed off Dick Whittington's then-radio-producer that said producer quit and the job became mine. So thanks Robert Blake. Your being a dick got me one of the best jobs I ever had.
I just ran the episode on my TiVo and Douglas quotes it accurately…and it sounds to me like Blake was saying (quoting Wally Cox) that if you cheat on your wife and you fall in love with the Other Woman, you shoot the Other Woman. Still, it's kind of an eerie foreshadowing.
For those who don't know: Dick Whittington was a Los Angeles radio personality from the sixties to the mid-nineties. He was very funny and very original and a lot of other radio guys were praised for things that "Sweet Dick" did first. He's retired now.
And I can't think of what Blake did with the Marx Brothers but I doubt he was lying. He also talked about working with Laurel and Hardy — which he did — and his account of that seemed accurate. He even remembered the name of the movie. Blake may have appeared with the Marxes in some live appearance or in some scene that got cut. He was certainly working on the MGM lot when they were. Thanks, Doug.
This is three men and one woman performing "Up the Ladder to the Roof"…
So what's up with the next Stephen Sondheim musical? Alan Burnett sent me this link to an article that tells us what is presently known about it.
And today, the letter in the E-Mailbag is from Josh Pincus…
I know, from your blog, that you are a fan of the Antenna TV reruns of the Tonight Show, so I thought you would find this interesting.
A few nights ago, my wife and I were watching an episode that was originally broadcast on May 15, 1974. The evening's guests were Robert Blake, Fernando Lamas, Charles Fleischer and Victoria Principal.
Mr. Blake was the first guest and he and Johnny had a weirdly prophetic chat. First, he talked about fighting with his wife (who, at the time was Sondra) to the point of threatening divorce. Then, he talked about hiking with the late Wally Cox. Wally, he explained, gave him advice on cheating on his spouse. He said Wally told him, "If it works out and you want to stay with the woman you are cheating with, just shoot your wife." The audience laughed. My wife and I looked at each other. This was a full 27 years before Robert's second wife Bonnie Lee Bakley was shot and killed under mysterious circumstances, with Blake soon charged (then acquitted) of her murder.
Johnny mentioned that Wally Cox was good friends with Marlon Brando. Blake grimaced at the mention of Brando's name. He said he had met the actor and just didn't like him. Years later, when Blake met Bonnie Bakley, she was also in a relationship with Christian Brando, Marlon's son. When she became pregnant, it was disputed and debated as to who was the father — Blake or Christian Brando. She claimed it was Christian. DNA tests proved it was Blake's child. He married Bakley. It was his second marriage and Bakley's eleventh.
It was very strange listening to a hip, pre-Baretta Robert Blake discuss his long career and mention events that would parallel future events in his life.
Chilling. By the by, I always found Robert Blake's appearances with Johnny to be very odd. They struck me as two guys from different planets who somehow found a way to get along. If I weren't antsy about people doing long-distance psychology, I might even think Johnny — who was so measured in what little he revealed of his own feelings and insecurities, envied Blake's tendency to say just about anything without hesitation.
I'm still enjoying those reruns on Antenna TV so long as I can fast-forward through entire guests and I have been known to bail after the Act Two desk spot. It's too bad they have to avoid the episodes with great musical performances. There were some terrific ones on Mr. Carson's program.
Josh Marshall nails what's really, really wrong with the Trump candidacy: They're simultaneously trying to get black votes and the votes of those who believe blacks get too much consideration and favoritism. At some point, they seemed to have believed they could win the White House with just the latter but the polls show that ain't happening so now, someone thinks they can pivot. Or maybe pivot enough to get some of the black vote without losing whites who resent catering to blacks…or something. Whatever it is, it's not possible. Not after months of the first approach.
But I also think what Trump's after are white voters who are uncomfy with his more racist appeals. I think a lot of this is an attempt to soften his image and maybe pick up some of them. And I don't think that can possibly work either.
And there's one more thing that I think it working against Trump. His position on way too many issues is basically "Trust me. I'll come up with something great." What's his plan for health care if he does as he promises and kills Obamacare? He'll come up with something great. What's he going to do to stimulate the economy? He'll come up with something great. And now, what's he going to do to better the lives of black people? He's going to come up with something so great that when he runs for his second term, he'll get 95% of the black vote.
You can get away with that early in a campaign but as Election Day grows near, people want to hear a little bit about what that "something great" is.
This is a group of Asian men performing "Up the Ladder to the Roof"…
There are a lot of articles and quizzes online designed to tell you if you're a Libertarian and just don't know it. I'm not sure Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president, could pass any of them. He certainly doesn't strike me as anyone who should be president even though I agree with some of his positions. So do Clinton and Trump, by the way.
Here's a piece on where Johnson stands on the issues. Frankly, I see very little to recommend this man for the job. If you're a real Libertarian — as opposed to whatever he is — you might give him your vote to hope that the party will remain viable and might someday have a candidate with a chance. If you just want to cast a protest vote against the two main candidates…well, that doesn't sound like a good reason to me.
Lots of folks out there are speculating why Donald Trump won't release his taxes. What the heck is in them that he doesn't want anyone to see?
I would like to speculate that there may not be a specific thing he's hiding. He knows that the minute he makes them public, opposition research is going to go to work, scrutinizing every last item and trying to see if there's any way they can spin it as a negative for him. He knows this because that's what everyone does, what his forces do with every bit of information they can get about Hillary Clinton.
During the Impeachment of Bill, that was a lot of what was going on. Under the guise of investigating and demanding "transparency," a lot of Bill's enemies were saying, in effect, "Let us dig deeper into your files in search of stuff we can use against you! Maybe we can find an actual crime in there…and even if we can't, there's probably something we can make sound like a crime!" So it may just be that Trump doesn't want to make it easy for them to do that.
Then again, if this article is true, the thing Trump fears most is people believing he's not as rich as he claims to be. You can make fun of his hair, his failed marriages, his failed businesses, his weight…you can even say he yearns to bang one of his daughters. But don't you dare say he's not fabulously wealthy. So maybe it's that.
This is four men performing "Up the Ladder to the Roof"…
I have developed a plan on how I'm going to become the next President of the United States. Martians will land on Earth and they will seize control of the minds of every registered voter in this country. They will decide to install an Earthling under their control in our White House and for technical reasons, it will have to be someone who's 6'3" tall and born in a leap year, who used to write Woody Woodpecker comic books and who was once punched in the arm by Jack LaLanne. After checking out millions of other Americans, they will decide that I am the only person who meets those requirements and on Friday, January 20 of 2017, I will be inaugurated as the 45th President of these United States.
Impossible? Absurd? Hey, it's no less likely than the way Evan McMullin figures he's going to become president.
Several folks have written in to ask about tracking the Electoral College, which is (I think) the important way to look at the election. The last week or so, Trump has gained somewhat in the national vote but when you look at the state races, he's still losing as many states as ever and Hillary is still way ahead in enough to give her way more than 270 electoral votes. Here are the main sites where you can track all this…
All of these sites called the last presidential election with reasonable accuracy…and they did that at a time when Dick Morris was on Fox News saying the polls were wrong and that Mitt Romney would win in a landslide. There are individual pollsters out there with no track record saying that Trump's ahead in Pennsylvania or that he's even on a national level and you can believe them if you want. I'm sticking with these five sites.
Eddie Murphy almost never grants interviews. He also doesn't make many movies these days but he recently made one and to promote it, he sat for this interview. Thanks to Jeff Abraham for letting me know about it.
Another interview with Larry Wilmore and talk of the end of The Nightly Show. Mr. Wilmore seems rankled that there wasn't more cross-promotion between The Daily Show and his program. Unasked in this and all the other interviews I've seen is the question of to what extent he thinks the termination of The Nightly Show was due to bad ratings from its lead-in. I'll bet he thinks, "A lot."