The fine actor/conductor has passed away at the age of 75. I can't think of anything he did on screen that I didn't think was well done and my personal interactions with him consisted of one long day and a couple of follow-up phone calls. To hear from someone who really worked with the man, go read my pal Ken Levine.
In 1996, I helped Stan Freberg out when he recorded the long-awaited — and by "long," I mean like three and a half decades — Volume 2 of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America. There's a long story of why it took so long but it has nothing to do with the late Mr. Stiers. One of the main contributions I made was to talk Stan out of using his old stock player, Jesse White, in many of the key roles. Jesse had been the co-star of Volume 1 and if Stan had done the second one in the sixties, seventies or even the eighties, Jesse could well have filled the parts Stan had him down to play.
But in '96, I'd worked with Jesse recently enough to know that fine performer was no longer up to it. In fact, he passed away early in '97. Jesse was instead assigned a small cameo role on the album and Stan chose Stiers to fill most of the roles Jesse was to have done. David was honored and thrilled to part of the project but early in the recording session, he began to have trouble with Stan's tendency — which he himself used to admit and joke about — to do way more takes of a song than were necessary. As I mentioned at the June Foray Celebration last September, Stan once had her, the rest of the cast and the Capitol Records Orchestra do 100+ takes on a record…and when the record was released, what was on it was Take #2.
David was worried that his voice would not hold up for the rest of the day but he was too polite/professional to tell that to Stan. Instead, he took me aside and asked/told me, "Please…if we start a song and you think it's not perfect, please stop it instead of letting us sing the entire thing." I told him I would and to the extent possible — since Stan was in charge and he always said, "That's fine but let's try it one more time" — I did.
During breaks, David and I talked about…well, about everything except his years on M*A*S*H. That may very well be what you know him best for and I never heard him say a negative thing about the show but he clearly did not want to be thought of just as a guy who was on that series. We talked a lot about his first love, which was classical music. I don't know a lot about that subject but I do know Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Gilbert & Sullivan and a few others that were close enough.
He was charming and bright and utterly disinterested in the money for the job, which was not much. And when someone asked him about M*A*S*H, he was polite but he rapidly moved the conversation elsewhere.
Years ago, a producer I knew told me, "There are two kinds of actors in the business…those who want to be rich and famous but also want to do good work, and those who just care about the good work." Based on what I've read and seen about David Ogden Stiers along with that one day we worked together, I'd peg him as the Poster Boy for the second kind. He certainly succeeded in that category.