Beginning in late 1979, I had about five or six of the most interesting and fatiguing months of my life. I was the Head Writer of a variety show on NBC that starred a very good comedian and two Japanese ladies who were ultra-mega-superstars in their own country but unknown in this one. The program was called either Pink Lady or Pink Lady and Jeff and I'm not fibbing when I say that neither I nor anyone associated with it was ever sure which was the official title. It was on and off the air before we could figure that out.
I've actually been working for about fifteen years on a book about those months — every year or so, I write another chapter — and if/when I finish it and if/when it's published, you will not believe what we, the folks who worked on that short-lived series, went through. It was all day/all night seven days a week with every possible thing that could go wrong going wrong. And in hindsight, it was one of those experiences I wouldn't have traded for the world or a mint condition copy of Batman #1 — whichever's worth more these days.
The photo above is me with Mie and Kei, two very sweet and talented ladies who were collectively known as Pink Lady. We all seem happy in this picture because it was taken at the wrap party when the show was over. I went off to another TV series that people actually watched. They went back to Japan where they were still stars. Every so often, someone asks me about it and recently, it was a gent named Evan Chung who does a podcast that is now online over at Slate.
Evan interviewed Sid Krofft (one of our Exec Producers), Jeff Altman (the aforementioned very good comedian), myself and a few other folks who worked on the show but didn't make the final cut of this podcast. More interestingly, he interviewed Mie and Kei, who I haven't seen since the night of that wrap party. I was delighted to hear that they did not have some of the bad feelings about the whole experience that I could certainly understand them having. They were thrust into an impossible situation just in terms of the hours of work that were demanded of them.
I have other books I need to finish before I finish the Pink Lady book but it's the story of a TV network thrashing about and doing all sorts of crazy things, us having to produce a show under impossible conditions, Sid Caesar, Jerry Lewis, Hugh Hefner and a bevy of Playmates, guest stars who never showed up, guest stars we wished had never shown up, a director who hated the show and was doing it under duress, Roy Orbison, Standards and Practices battles, some wonderful comedy players, crooked agents and managers, Red Buttons, Lorne Greene, an elephant with diarrhea, dancers, balloon drops…and me, a Show Biz Junkie, in the eye of the tornado. I was having what may not have seemed at the time a wonderful experience but in retrospect, to crib the title of a movie that my ex-partner wrote, it just might have been My Favorite (Half a) Year.
You can listen to the podcast here.