The other day here, I wrote about a great character actor named Billy DeWolfe. That's him on the right in the above photo. The man on the left is Larry Storch, another pretty funny guy. The still is from the very short-lived 1969 sitcom The Queen and I, which featured the both of them. The show was on the CBS schedule and off in a flash, and I don't think all the episodes they made were even aired. Perhaps because I never saw the show again after it went off the air, I have good memories of it.
Mr. DeWolfe left us in 1974. Larry Storch is still with us and still working at the age of 93. Here's a story about Larry that is also about Billy…
When I was doing the first season of Garfield and Friends, I was casting a number of my favorite voice actors and, of course, I wanted Daws Butler on the show. If you visit this site, I assume you know who that is. If you don't, do some Googling and find out about the man I think was one of the two or three best voice actors who ever lived…and he was also a very nice man, beloved by all who knew him. You could start here with this three-part article by me.
Daws had worked for years with Stan Freberg (another great voice actor, along with all else he did) and sometimes when Daws was telling me stories about those days, he'd lapse — often without realizing it — into a very funny Freberg impression. I asked him once if he'd ever used that anywhere in a cartoon or commercial or anything and he didn't think he had.
I had a role in one Garfield episode for an arrogant boss and I decided to book Daws and have him do that impression. I wanted to have him on the show anyway and I thought this would be a way to preserve the impression so others could hear it. Also, this was before I started booking Stan himself to do characters on the show and I wanted to see if anyone would call me and say, "Hey, Evanier! Wasn't that Freberg doing that voice on the show last Saturday?" I'll bet someone would have. (When Daws first created the voice of the cat Mr. Jinks on the Huckleberry Hound Show, at least one reviewer thought it was Freberg. Actually, it was Daws doing a rough impression of Stan's rougher impression of Marlon Brando.)
Daws was all set but a few days before the recording, he phoned and asked if I'd do him a favor. I said, "Of course! Anything!" If Daws had asked me to box the Heavyweight Champion of the World, I'd have been in trunks faster than you could say "Muhammad Ali." But what he wanted was to be let out of the booking.
Daws had suffered a stroke not long before and while he had returned to work — on a prime-time special I wrote, in fact — he was still very concerned about not being able to perform up to his very-high standard. I would have taken him at his worst because it was still better than most actors' best but he said, "I'm having some trouble lately with my peripheral vision." That meant that it was harder for him to "read ahead" a bit in his script and that, he feared, would have affected his performance. He said, "If you really need me, I'll come in and give it my all but if there's any way you can replace me, I'd like you to."
I agreed to replace him and he suggested a few actors who he thought would be fine and even said, "Why don't you get Stan Freberg? I've heard he does a good Stan Freberg!" I joked back, "Naw, he's all wrong for it," and told Daws I'd try to book him again in a month or so. He said, "Great. I'm thinking this thing will clear up and I'll be better by then. Thanks." As it turned out, he passed away before we could get him in.
I don't know why but after that call, I didn't try to get Stan. Instead, I called a voice agent I knew and asked him if he had any interesting clients to suggest. If you'd been listening to that conversation, this is what you'd have heard:
"Well, Larry Storch is in town I'll take him!"
The first six words were the agent talking. The last three were me, agreeing instantly with no air between one speech and the next. A few days later, Larry Storch walked into our studio and we made the obvious Big Fuss over him with not just Yours Truly but everyone in the building telling him how brilliantly funny we all thought he was. He seemed a bit overwhelmed by it…and oddly a bit anxious. He had not done cartoon voices in over ten years, he said. He was afraid he was outta practice.
From his billfold, Larry pulled a tattered three-by-five card. On it in very tiny handwriting was a list of all the impressions he did. Almost all of the cartoon voices he'd ever done were impressions of celebrities. He said, "Here's a menu of what I can do. Pick the voice you want."
I had abandoned the idea of a Freberg soundalike so I just looked it over for a voice that would be right for the arrogant boss character. There were many there to choose from: Frank Morgan, Sidney Greenstreet, Jimmy Cagney, Peter Lorre and about three dozen others, all of that vintage. Many of them would have been fine but I turned to Larry and said, "I just thought of someone who's not on your list but I'll bet you can do him."
He looked even more worried. "I really only do the voices on that list. Who do you have in mind?"
I said, "Billy DeWolfe."
And Larry Storch broke into the biggest grin. "Billy," he said. "What a wonderful man. What a sweetheart." A pause, then: "Okay, I'll take a stab at it." He did quite well with it and after, he told us a half-dozen anecdotes about how lovely and funny his friend Billy was. Larry was pretty lovely and funny himself.
That's one of my proudest moments of casting, partly because it worked well on the show…partly because Larry seemed so happy that we were preserving a little bit of his friend…and partly because of a phone call I got after that episode aired. A friend called me up and congratulated me on thinking to hire Billy DeWolfe. He said, "He's such a great talent and no one's thought to hire him for years. Isn't that disgraceful?"
I said, "Yeah. Well, some producers have a silly prejudice against hiring the dead."