Okay, so some of you probably do need to know who this Billy DeWolfe is…or in this case, was.
Billy DeWolfe was a character actor of a kind that I don't think exists anymore. It's the performer who did such a good job playing men who were probably gay that you assumed the actor himself was probably gay. That is, if you thought about such things and most people didn't. There were people who were shocked one day to discover that Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly weren't just really good straight actors playing campy the way Bill Dana played a Mexican.
DeWolfe played prissy, fussy men and he was very funny doing so in a lot of movies in the forties, mostly for Paramount. In some of the drearier ones, he's today the only reason to watch them.
Before that, he was a dancer who segued into acting. Wikipedia says, "At some point during World War II, he served in the United States Navy until he was discharged for 'medical' reasons in 1944." I think the quotes are someone's way of suggesting that maybe he was really kicked out for being a homosexual. I don't know nor do I particularly care if he was one but we should remember that not all that long ago, you could get booted out of the military just for that.
However, you could still have a good career on stage and screen, sometimes playing roles that suggested gay stereotypes — and DeWolfe did. He sometimes turned up on shows playing a character named Mrs. Murgatroyd who was kind of a "Dear Abby" type dispensing advice to the lovelorn. His neatly-trimmed mustache added an extra note of the bizarre to the sight of Billy DeWolfe in drag.
In an interview I once heard, he said his career stalled out a bit in the late fifties, early sixties. I'm not sure anyone noticed that but him. What he said resurrected it was his guest appearance on The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1965. He played the proprietor of a beauty salon for dogs in one episode and so totally stole every scene he was in that other shows raced to hire him. Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, who'd written for the Van Dyke show, cast him as the station manager in their one-season 1966 sitcom, Good Morning, World.
DeWolfe was on a lot of other shows but there are two I'll bet a lot of people reading this remember him from. One is that he did the voice of the crummy magician Professor Hinkle in the 1969 animated special, Frosty the Snowman. And then at one point, Mr. DeWolfe became a favored guest of Johnny Carson, who couldn't mention his name without lapsing into an impression of Billy doing his catch-phrase, "Busy, busy, busy."
I'm remembering one night when Johnny had Billy on. This was probably around the time he was a regular on The Doris Day Show. It was probably not long before Mr. DeWolfe passed away, which happened in 1974.
The guest before was Sammy Davis Jr., who really tore up the place with a great musical number followed by another great musical number. Then Carson introduced DeWolfe who came out, took the guest's chair and said something like, "Johnny, I don't know why you'd want to talk to me when you have this fabulously talented man here. He should do another song!"
Three things then happened almost simultaneously: The audience applauded wildly, Johnny started to say that he wanted to talk to Billy instead…and Sammy leaped up, walked to center stage and told his musical director which song to start playing. Mr. DeWolfe went largely uninterviewed that evening.
I don't think this was prearranged. Maybe it was. Maybe since Sammy was so good, Johnny or his producers were afraid anything else would be anti-climactic so they told Billy to say that and promised to have him back real soon to make up for it. But my impression at the time was that it was real. In fact, it seemed like Johnny was a bit annoyed that he'd lost control of his own show because suddenly, Sammy was out there doing his third song — an unrehearsed and unplanned number. It went fine of course but you weren't supposed to perform on Johnny Carson's show without Johnny's okay.
That kind of thing — this happening outside the host's control — did sometimes occur on talk shows back in the era when they weren't as carefully planned as they all are. Still, I can't think of another time on one of those programs when a guest unexpectedly donated his screen time to another guest.
Anyway, that was Billy DeWolfe. Oh — and I forgot to mention another series he was on — a highly-forgotten, quickly-terminated 1969 CBS sitcom called The Queen and I about the crew of a luxury ocean liner. This was what Larry Storch and a lot of folks involved in F Troop did after F Troop was canceled, with a couple of refugees from McHale's Navy (including the great Carl Ballantine) climbing on board for the brief voyage.
I remember it fondly and have been curious to see it again, just to see if it was as good as I remember it to be. I'm not expecting that would be but you never know. I had fond memories of The Munsters and My Favorite Martian until I tried watching some again years later. On the other hand, the episodes of The Defenders that are now out on DVD are now even better than they were when they were first telecast.
I've never seen an episode of The Queen and I anywhere since it went off the air. Some scholars of such history tell me they haven't either and wonder if any still exist. But mentioning that show has reminded me of a story about Larry Storch and Billy DeWolfe that you might like. I'll try and tell it here tomorrow.