I played hooky from work 'n' blogging yesterday and had a three-hour lunch at the Magic Castle with my friend, actress — and everybody's favorite Matinee Lady — Teresa Ganzel. We did not spend three hours eating. We spent three hours talking, joined for much of it by another friend of both of us, Trish Alaskey. Trish is the niece of the late, wonderful voice actor Joe Alaskey and she's on the staff of the Castle, which in case you don't know is a private club for magicians up in hills above Hollywood. I love being a member and I especially like lunching there because I don't have to wear the mandatory-in-the-evenings jacket and tie.
Teresa has done hundreds of different roles on television but we spent some time talking about her years as a sketch player and frequent interviewee on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. I've been watching old episodes on Antenna TV and they tend to run a lot of ones with Teresa. There's probably a reason for this apart from the fact that she was really funny and charming on the show. To avoid paying a lot of loot for music clearances, Antenna TV tends to not run many shows with big musical guests. That means they run a disproportionate number of episodes with big comedy sketches; ergo, more Teresa. There was one on just the other night.
As a fierce Carson-watcher, I had an observation recently which I shared with Ms. Ganzel and I'd like to share it with you. Those old Carson shows are a great time capsule and they show you a lot about how the world evolved from around the mid-seventies (the earliest shows they seem to have) to 1992 when Johnny left us. It has to do somewhat with the Tea Time Movie sketches that he did with some regularity, parodying an afternoon TV pitchman long after such personalities had disappeared from most channels. Lovable Art Fern — the man who would sell you anything and everything — was always accompanied by his lovely Matinee Lady co-host.
When Johnny first began doing the sketches, the Matinee Lady was played by a different actress each time. Usually, it was someone booked as a guest on the show and they'd draft her into service in the Mighty Carson Art Players skit. I remember Paula Prentiss doing it on a number of occasions. Around 1971, Carol Wayne became the steady co-star of these bits. Ms. Wayne was very lovely and sweet but I don't know that she ever understood a single line that they gave her to say. If she did, she did a good job of pretending she didn't and a lot of Art Fern's comedic "takes" were at the space cadet nature of her delivery.
I knew a few of Carson's writers and we talked about this a few times. Basically, because the way (and the when) she would say a line was so unpredictable, there were only two kinds of jokes they could write for her. One kind was based on the premise that her breasts were huge; the other kind was based on the premise that her brain was not. I am not saying that the latter was a fair appraisal of Ms. Wayne, though the one time I met her did nothing to disprove it. In any case, that's what she played on the screen…and of course, if you're a writer of jokes, those two premises are real easy to work off of.
They were also completely consistent with an attitude many TV shows had then and it was very much in evidence on Johnny's. If you were a woman and you weren't a superstar like Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett, you were there to be looked at. The comedy was best left to men. My pal Nick Arnold, who wrote for Johnny for a time, once told me that the secret to getting a sketch approved by Carson was "B.I.B." I asked what that stood for and I should have guessed. Nick said it stood for "Babe In Bikini" or maybe "Bimbo in Bikini." Then he told me, "If the sketch was really weak, you might need more than one." If you read any criticism of Carson during that era, it usually included a reference to "airhead starlets" and the show's love of booking them.
Carol Wayne died in 1985 in a mysterious accident. Carson suspended the Tea Time Movie sketches for not all that long before trying them with a couple of different actresses, all of whom were cast mainly for their bustlines and they all tried to do Carol. In the meantime, Teresa had become a recurring occupant of Johnny's guest chair. She had first turned up there in 1983 when she was on to promote a situation comedy on which she was then a regular — Teachers Only, which not coincidentally was produced by Carson Productions. Johnny found her amusing and charming, and had her back several times. She fit the eye candy requirement but was smart-funny as opposed to stupid-funny.
Finally, around late '86, they tried her out as the Matinee Lady and not only kept her in that esteemed position but began using her in other sketches, including a very funny series where she and Johnny played salesfolks on a channel not unlike the Home Shopping Network and another batch where they played TV news co-anchors. The thing that struck me as notable about them is that she was not just there as eye candy. They actually wrote jokes for her and in many, they had equal roles.
I remember thinking at the time that Johnny's sketches had grown up a lot. Before Teresa, a woman in a sketch on the Carson show was either playing gorgeous-but-not-too-bright or she was Betty White. She rarely had lines that presumed the lady — whoever she was if she was not Betty White — had the ability to deliver a line.
It is perhaps worth noting that Johnny Carson did that show from October 1, 1962 until May 22, 1992…a span of 29 years and 7 months. During that time, he went through something like a hundred writers. Not one of them was a woman. During this time, a lot of women were becoming important as writers and even producers on situation comedies…but not on Johnny's show.
Not long before Teresa became Art Fern's sidekick, Johnny had been getting some real bad press. Comediennes — most notably Elayne Boosler — had been complaining that they were not given the same consideration as male stand-ups. In a Rolling Stone interview, Carson had said — and probably regretted saying this — that he did not like "the new breed of female standup comic" because they were too "aggressive." About the only one he had on was Joan Rivers, whose act back then was mostly about how her husband didn't find her attractive. The few female stand-ups like Phyllis Diller and Totie Fields basically came out on stage and talked about how ugly they were.
Johnny didn't like the criticism so his show's lead talent scout, Jim McCawley, was dispatched to find some good, up-and-coming female stand-ups for the show. I knew Jim a little. He was a nice, smart guy with a near-perfect sense of What Johnny Will Like. When people write of how Carson "discovered" comics like Garry Shandling and Jay Leno and David Letterman and — well, you know the list — they're probably robbing Jim and a couple of other Tonight Show staffers of credit. Johnny himself occasionally dropped into the Improv or the Comedy Store but it was guys like McCawley who sat there all night, sitting through thirty bad comics in search of one with possibilities. I'd see him at those places, drinking 7-Up and fending off legions of ass-kissing new guys who knew exactly what a good Tonight Show shot could do for their careers.
He had trouble finding female stand-ups that Johnny would appreciate. The criticism of his show wasn't entirely fair. There weren't all that many of them then and some came off as fiercely hostile to males in almost a militant lesbian way. That, Johnny would not have wanted on his program. In one case that I know of, Jim even tried creating the kind of break-out female comic Johnny wanted to showcase. McCawley found a lady who could deliver jokes well but whose material was rather weak and he tried using his clout — and ability to promise male comics a turn for themselves — to get them to write material for her.
He put her on the show but she failed to click. For a while, his best "find" was Victoria Jackson, who was funny but who did nothing to change the image of The Tonight Show as liking its women cute and clueless. It wasn't until 1986 that a new female comic scored big on Johnny's show without playing or being dumb. That was Ellen DeGeneres and one does wonder if she'd have been booked if they'd known then that she was gay. I don't know.
But all during this time, there was Teresa Ganzel, not doing stand-up but doing panel and appearing in sketches, increasingly as a full partner with the star. I thought she was wonderful and I didn't even know her then. There were also fewer and fewer of the airhead starlets on the show. Johnny was not dumb. Among the many reasons he stayed on the air so long was that he recognized when something wasn't working and changed it.
He had dozens of guests who appeared frequently and then one day, he'd decide they'd worn out their welcome and instead of appearing every 3-6 weeks, they'd suddenly be down to once a year or not at all. Among these were Charles Nelson Reilly, Tony Randall, Jaye P. Morgan, Charles Grodin, Orson Bean and Robert Blake. At one point, he decided that his back-up bandleader Tommy Newsom was dragging the show down and thereafter, Tommy just remained in the band with no lines. Carson also sensed that audiences were not finding "drunk" jokes as funny as they used to and he cut way back on jokes about his announcer Ed McMahon consuming mass quantities of liquor.
And his show became much more open to smart, funny women like Teresa. She was the breakthrough. She took the Matinee Lady from being someone to be ogled and laughed-at because her I.Q. was lower than her bra-size to being a skilled comic actress playing that kind of character. As I watch the sketches with her in them, it's obvious the writers were giving her lines that poor Carol could never have handled…and Carson's performance is better because he was on stage with someone he trusted to come in at just the right moment, not when she suddenly noticed one of her lines creeping up on the TelePrompter.
This all may wind up to a tiny milestone in the evolution of women on TV but I think it's quite real and that Teresa deserves some real credit. I told her this over lunch not just to flatter her but because it's true. I admire her so much that maybe I shouldn't have stuck her with the check.