Yesterday, I mentioned how George Carlin once called Tony Randall an asshole. I probably should have mentioned that I think George Carlin called everyone an asshole at one time or another. In any case, our pal Douglas McEwan wanted equal time…
I want to counter George Carlin's remark about Tony Randall. I met Tony in 1975 when he guested on a radio show on which I worked. On the air, he talked a lot about fine wines, and about wine in general.
As George Pal's 7 Faces of Dr. Lao is one of my favorite movies, in which Tony plays six characters. (The movie credits him with 7 roles, but the Abominable Snowman is actually played by George Pal's son, Peter Pal), I wanted to talk with him a bit about the movie, of which he was justifiably proud.
In those days, I was a cigarette smoker. (Two days ago was the 33rd anniversary of my last cigarette.) Though I had sense enough not to smoke around Tony, he saw the pack of ciggies in my pocket, and said to me, "You really should stop smoking. It will kill you."
I told Tony, "You talked a lot about booze, excuse me, wine, in your interview. I never touch alcohol, and never drink a drop of it." (This is true. I'm a lifelong non-drinker.) "So tell you what. When I'm lying in a hospital bed dying of lung cancer, I'll see you in the next bed, dying of cirrhosis of the liver, and say 'Hello.'"
Tony looked at me askance for a moment, trying to decide whether to be insulted or not, then he broke out in a loud laugh, grabbed my hand in both of his and shook it as he said, "It's a deal!" Then we talked about Dr. Lao.
So my experience of Tony Randall was of a non-asshole. (And he was right. I now have COPD. I haven't smoked a cigarette in over 3 decades, and they're still going to kill me!)
Oh, I hope not. In the meantime, this is as good a place as any to say something I think I've said here before but should say more often. I've met a lot of famous people. Most have been very nice to me (i.e., not assholes) but I think before or after meeting them, I heard a bad story about 90% of them. Or to put it another way, if I avoided everyone who someone warned me about, I would have missed out on most of the best relationships of my life.
Maybe the derogatory anecdote was a momentary lapse on their part. Maybe there was another side to the story. Maybe the story was utterly false. There was a guy running around for a while on the Internet claiming I'd been rude to him at a comic convention in the United Kingdom, a country I have never visited. We all have moments in our lives which we would not like pointed to as typical of how we behave all the time.
Also, stories tend to get embellished or "improved" as they are passed from mouth to mouth. At one Comic-Con, I moderated a panel on E.C. Comics wherein Al Williamson and Al Feldstein exchanged a few contentious words…just a little friction between two men who later hugged each other. I still sometimes am asked about if it's true one of them took a swing at the other and we had to separate them.
The person who asks me about it heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy…
I keep remembering other times I saw Tony Randall in person. As I wrote, we never met but at least twice — maybe thrice — I got to sit in the bleachers at a rehearsal of The Odd Couple TV show over at Paramount. I've written here about poaching often in the Burbank studios of NBC, visiting the sets of Laugh-In and The Dean Martin Show and other programs then taping there. I also had an "in" to get on the Paramount lot and I used it a few times.
Klugman and Randall were utter professionals rehearsing, stopping every now and then to discuss lines and blocking and every aspect of their craft. I remember noting the selfless way each criticized, always in a constructive manner, what the other was doing. Sitting in the bleachers as I did, you could feel the mutual respect. I think I learned a lot about acting just sitting there, eavesdropping on those men.
In the meantime, I've heard from a number of people who saw that production of Inherit the Wind in 1996 that I didn't get to see. Some saw George C. Scott playing opposite Tony Randall. Some saw Charles Durning and Tony Randall. Sometimes, Tony Randall was holding the script, sometimes not. I haven't heard yet from anyone who saw Scott and Durning but there must have been some, and not just on opening night when the critics were in the house. I wish I'd seen any of these combinations.