From Mark Bosselman…
I asked Leonard Maltin if he ever met Paul Frees on live Instagram/Facebook chat Sunday and he said no. Leonard mentioned your name and he said you haven't twirked with him either. Is this true and if it's not, do you have any Paul Frees stories that you can share?
Well, I'm not sure anyone ever met Paul Frees on live Instagram/Facebook chat on Sunday but I think I know what you're asking. I "met" Paul Frees on the phone for brief (very brief) conversations twice but never in person and never for very long.
I have always felt truly fortunate that I grew up on cartoons with voices by Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, June Foray, Don Messick, Stan Freberg, Bill Scott, Jimmy Weldon, Julie Bennett, Shepard Menken, Dick Beals, Gary Owens, Chuck McCann, Frank Buxton, Arnold Stang, Marvin Kaplan and a few others…and in my alleged adulthood, got to meet and work with Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, June Foray, Don Messick, Stan Freberg, Bill Scott, Jimmy Weldon, Julie Bennett, Shepard Menken, Dick Beals, Gary Owens, Chuck McCann, Frank Buxton, Arnold Stang, Marvin Kaplan and a few others. I'm sure everyone reading this can understand why that would be meaningful on several levels.
By the time I got into the animation business, Paul Frees had largely gotten out…and had totally gotten out of Los Angeles. He'd moved up to Tiburon, California, which is near San Francisco. He said the air there was much better for him and June told me that Paul had reached the stage in his life where he had an awful lot of money and not an awful lot of desire to work.
He did work once in a while. If you offered him enough money, he might (might!) agree to go to a studio somewhere near his home and record there. June told me that on rare occasions, someone would offer Paul so much loot that he'd fly down to Los Angeles to record something, record it and then fly right back. I recall her complaining once, "He was down here last week for three hours and he wouldn't even delay his flight home to have lunch with me."
One time when I was visiting Daws Butler (one of the nicest and most talented people I ever met), we got to talking about Paul and he spent a lot of time telling me how great Paul was. Before I left, the phone rang and it was Paul…and Daws put me on the line with him for a few minutes. Paul spent most of that time telling me how great Daws was.
At the time, I was head writer for a program called The Krofft Superstar Hour which ran on NBC on Saturday mornings for not-very-long. We were taping shows and our cast included Lennie Weinrib and Walker Edmiston, who worked off-camera supplying the voices of many of the Krofft characters. Lennie and Walker were two more guys I knew from their voicework when I was younger, though both of them did more on-camera work than off. Walker, who I wrote about here and here and other places, had a great kids' show on local TV in Los Angeles for a time.
At the time, he was supplying the voice of Ludwig Von Drake for a series of educational filmstrips or recordings or something that some division of Disney was doing. Mr. Frees, of course, had originated the role of the eminent Professor Von Drake but he wasn't tempted by the scale fee that Disney was offering for these projects. Walker, who did a pretty fair imitation of Paul's voice as Ludwig, was the go-to second choice.
Most voice actors work under an unwritten Code of Honor not to imitate another voice actor while that person is alive and possibly available. Walker abided strenuously by that rule. So what would happen is that Disney would call and ask him if he could come in next Tuesday and record a few tracks for them and Walker would say — every single time — "I can but I have to check with Paul first."
The guy at Disney would say, "Walker, you don't have to check with Paul. He's fine with you doing this for us. He's said yes the last twenty-three times you asked him." Which was true but Walker felt he still had to check with Paul. He'd call Paul and Paul would say "Fine" and Walker would thank him and go in and do what Disney needed him to do as Ludwig..
A week or two after my chat with Frees at Daws' home, Walker came into my office where we were doing The Krofft Superstar Hour. We were on a break from taping and he asked if he could use my phone to call Paul Frees up in Tiburon. I said, "Yes, if I can say hello to him." Walker called, got Paul's permission to talk like him and then put me on the speakerphone.
Paul remembered me from the call with Daws and in that second (again, brief) conversation, I asked him about doing his impression of Peter Lorre on a Spike Jones record. Paul told me how he'd do anything for Spike and how when he met Peter Lorre, Mr. Lorre said, "You sound more like me than I do" and they spent some time teaching each other how to sound more like Peter Lorre.
The story was told, of course, with Paul playing both roles. He played Paul Frees imitating Peter Lorre and he also played Peter Lorre talking the way he really talked…and he even played Peter Lorre trying to sound more like Paul Frees imitating Peter Lorre. It was one of the many "Boy, do I wish I'd had a tape recorder running" moments of my life.
The call ended soon after and that was my last-ever contact with Paul Frees, who passed away in 1986. Before he went back to work that day, Walker demonstrated for me how he occasionally did Peter Lorre and said that what he (and everyone else who imitated Peter Lorre) was doing was an imitation of Paul Frees imitating Peter Lorre. Walker did that in a lot of cartoons so somewhere out there, there's probably someone who thinks they do a great imitation of Peter Lorre but they're really doing an imitation of Walker Edmiston doing an imitation of Paul Frees doing an imitation of Peter Lorre.
Here is the Spike Jones record on which Paul Frees imitated Peter Lorre. Paul's part starts around a minute and a half into it but for the full effect, listen to the whole thing…
