Monthly Archives: May 2022

The Muppets on The Ed Sullivan Show for February 21, 1971. This is a weird one…

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.

We are now 49 days from the opening of this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego…and yes, unless we all come down with monkeypox, they're going to have one.

This is the time of year when I traditionally make my lame joke about how if you're going and you'll need a parking space, leave now. On a more serious note, I will tell you that if you're going and need lodging, book it now. This link may help. And if you don't, don't write or call me in late June to ask if I know of any available hotel rooms.

Also, don't ask if I can help you get a panel you want to do on the schedule. The schedule is almost set…and yes, I'll be hosting a passel of panels there. Again, we are assuming no monkeypox. It will be posted on the website two weeks before the con and I urge you, if you're attending, to study it and make a list of what you want to attend.

And while you're at it, you might also write down the things you'll try to get into if your first choices are full and also plan where you want to go in the hall and where you want to dine. A little advance planning can make your Comic-Con experience much, much better. You might also want to figure out where you're going to park if you don't leave now.

Since we've been talking here about the play Inherit the Wind here, I'll toss out a trivia question about it. There is a connection between that play and the cartoon show, The Jetsons. Know what it is? If you need the answer, go read this.

Gary Sassaman, who was so interesting recently on the podcast of the San Diego-Comic Con Unofficial Blog, sent the following…

I did, in fact, see that production of Inherit the Wind on Broadway in 1996. As I remember it, I must have seen it while it was still in Previews. I think I was there in early March, and I remember flying in from Pittsburgh into an ice storm in NYC, which made getting around very dicey. The night I saw it, Tony Randall was in for George C. Scott, but I seem to recall it was because Scott was embroiled in a scandal for harassing his personal assistant (which, of course, they didn't mention on stage). I did a search, and sure enough, Scott was sued in May 1996. Maybe I'm combining the two stories and Scott was out because he was ill, which was reported at the time. The show closed in May, either because of his ongoing illness or the lawsuit.

I remember Randall coming out and announcing he'd be playing the Clarence Darrow part ("Henry Drummond") and to please be gentle with him, since he didn't know the part that well, but I don't remember him having a copy of the script with him. I thought he was wonderful, as was Durning and I really enjoyed this production of the play, which was always one of my favorite movies.

On a side note, I worked with a very attractive anchor/reporter when I was a graphic designer for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh. At one point, she had her own half-hour afternoon talk show on another Pittsburgh channel and she had Tony Randall as a guest one day. The host was also an actress who appeared in local productions (I saw her in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as Martha) and she asked Randall how he stays so calm and collected on talk shows. He replied, "Well, I imagine the host is naked…and right now I'm having a wonderful time!"

I never met Tony Randall but I always liked him as a performer, even (maybe especially) when he was nagging people to stop smoking. I do remember though that the first time I met George Carlin, he said to a group of us, "I just did The Mike Douglas Show and I learned why Tony Randall is always so convincing playing an asshole."

It was sadly ironic that smoking largely destroyed the voice of Randall's close friend, on and off screen, Jack Klugman. I saw the two of them on stage twice, once before Klugman's voice began failing him due to throat cancer. In 1975, the year they stopped being The Odd Couple on TV, they did a tour of the original Neil Simon play and I saw it at the Shubert here in Los Angeles.

I believe my pal Ken Levine saw it and has said good things about it on his blog. We must have seen it on different nights since it was pretty weak the night I went. The sound in the Shubert was terrible and the two stars seemed to be on auto-pilot, just running the lines without a lot of performance behind them.

Then in 1997, the National Actors Theatre — the same group that stiffed me on those Inherit the Wind tickets — mounted a production of The Sunshine Boys on Broadway with Klugman as Willie Clark (the Walter Matthau part, if you remember the movie) and Randall as Al Lewis (the George Burns role).

It was terrible. By now, Klugman's voice was raw and raspy…and I'm sorry. No matter how gifted a comic actor is, nothing sounds funny when every sentence sounds like the speaker is in acute pain. The reviews said it almost enhanced his performance and maybe it did on opening night when the critics came. By the time I saw the show, it was just sad and too distracting.  Some people left at intermission.

Randall wasn't much better, delivering his lines with a thick Jewish accent that sounded neither real nor like Tony Randall. It's a testament to how good those two men were in the other things they did that I wrote those two plays off as aberrations in otherwise successful, award-worthy careers.

Turning to George C. Scott, I went and looked up his New York Times obit and found this in it…

In 1996, he was on Broadway again in a revival of Inherit the Wind as a lawyer based on Clarence Darrow. It was the kind of flamboyant role that should have been the capstone of his career. But he became ill during rehearsal and the opening was postponed. When the play finally opened, Mr. Scott received favorable notices and was nominated for a Tony Award, an honor that had eluded him. Because of illness, he missed several performances. Once he left the stage in the middle of the show and was replaced by Tony Randall, who produced the play through his National Actors Theater. Subsequently, it was disclosed that Mr. Scott had an aortic aneurysm.

Further clouding his triumphant year, an actress who had been his personal assistant accused him of sexual harassment. Early in May he left Inherit the Wind and went to California for medical treatment.

That production of Inherit the Wind did its last performance on May 12, 1996 so maybe my friend was wrong when he said I'd just missed seeing George C. Scott's last stage performance. I only saw Scott on stage once…

In 1978, he starred in Larry Gelbart's Sly Fox, at the Shubert out here…with audio much better than they had when Klugman and Randall did The Odd Couple on that stage. Scott was wonderful in it and so was the supporting cast — Jack Gilford, Trish Van Devere, Gretchen Wyler, Jeffrey Tambor and Hector Elizondo.

Scott was one of the greatest actors of his generation and I'm glad I got to see him at least once. I still wish though I'd seen him in Inherit the Wind…and not just because I wanted to get what I paid for.

John Oliver discusses certain rocks…and certain other things…

It's been a while since I did one of these. My infamous mixtape had a number of songs on it that were kinda extolling the joys of marijuana but not really. In the music business, there seemed to be a cognitive dissonance — there must be a better term for it than that — with regard to "drug" songs. Various stations and TV shows would say they would never air anything that glorified drug use but once a record was "high" on the charts, they'd decide it wasn't really about drugs. They'd opt for the more wholesome meaning of the double entendre and look askance if someone suggested there was another.

I was and remain against recreational drugs but that's just for me. You do you, as they say. If a song was catchy enough, I didn't care what it was about. Most of the hits of the day weren't really about anything…or if they were, they weren't seriously about it. "Grazing in the Grass" was a hit in 1968 for Hugh Masekela but nobody paid much attention to it because it was an instrumental and you could argue that the "grass" in the title was the kind people have in their front lawn.

In 1969 though, The Friends of Distinction recorded a version with lyrics and the meaning of its "grass" was inarguable. The original members of the group were Floyd Butler, Harry Elston, Jessica Cleaves and Barbara Jean Love. Mr. Elston wrote the lyrics and was lead singer, and I was amused by the part that went, "Rock it to me, sock it to me, rock it to me, sock it to me," etc. The rest of the lyrics included…

Sure is mellow grazin' in the grass
(grazin' in the grass is a gas — baby, can you dig it?)
What a trip just watchin' as the world goes past
(grazin' in the grass is a gas — baby, can you dig it?)
There are too many groovy things to see while grazin' in the grass
(grazin' in the grass is a gas — baby, can you dig it?)
Flowers with colors for takin', everything outta sight
(grazin' in the grass is a gas — baby, can you dig it?)

That same year, Ed Sullivan had them on to perform it as per below. The story is that shortly after they performed it on his show, Ed was on some local talk show and the interviewer challenged him for putting a "drug song" on his program. Ed, who was famous for not having any range of facial expressions whatsoever, said with that straight puss of his, "Oh, that song's not about using marijuana. It's about lying in the grass, looking at how beautiful the clouds in the sky are."

Whatever it meant, it was on my mixtape so here it is, as performed (which is to say, lip-synced) on the Sullivan show on December 27, 1970…

Yesterday's performances of Mr. Saturday Night on Broadway were canceled and its producers are saying the next performance will be June 7. Why? Because Billy Crystal has tested positive for you-know-what. As it happens, he has great timing because they were scheduled to be on hiatus starting today until 6/7 due to some prior commitment he had. There is, of course, no understudy or stand-by for the role because who would want to see that show with anyone else?

Which reminds me, as most things do, of a story…

In 1996, there was a revival of the play Inherit the Wind produced on Broadway by the National Actors Theater, a group headed up in some way by Tony Randall. Their version starred George C. Scott in what we might call the Spencer Tracy role and Charles Durning in the part Fredric March played in the 1960 movie version.

Could you ask for better casting than that? Unfortunately, there were problems getting both Mr. Scott and Mr. Durning on that stage every night. The show wound up playing 42 previews and 45 performances before closing prematurely.

I dunno what those problems were but the person who arranged for me to get good seats cautioned me that the night I went, one of those two star roles might by played by Tony Randall holding a copy of the script. He was the stand-by for both roles but he had not memorized either. Interestingly, in the original 1955 production of the play, Mr. Randall played the reporter E.K. Hornbeck — the part Gene Kelly played in the film.

It was a gamble on my part, sure, but I figured the worst that would happen was that I'd see Scott and Tony Randall or Durning and Tony Randall. Both Scott and Durning were said to be terrific in their parts. And maybe I'd be lucky and they'd both be there that night.

I called a lady I knew back there and asked her if she wanted to go to dinner and a Broadway show with me. She said yes and asked if we could go see Smokey Joe's Cafe, which her friends had all told her was wonderful. I told her I had tickets for Inherit the Wind and she asked, "What's that about?" I told her it was a drama about teaching evolution in schools.

The topic somehow did not thrill her and she asked if I could get tickets to Smokey Joe's Cafe for us and then go see Inherit the Wind some other night either alone or with someone else. I explained to her than I'd already bought the tickets and all my other nights in New York were booked. "You'll get a chance to see at least one and maybe two of the best actors in the business," I told her.

She agreed to accompany me but she didn't sound overjoyed about it. In my life, I've had plenty of dates that went forth on that basis.

The day before The Date, I heard that performances of Inherit the Wind were being canceled left and right, hit or miss. That afternoon, I took my tickets for it down to the Royale Theatre on W. 45th Street, which is where the play was…or was supposed to be. (The Royale is now the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, if you're interested in such things.) A nice lady in the box office told me it had just been announced that the show was closing because "Tony Randall can't play both leads." She gave me an address to mail in my tickets and assured me I'd receive a full refund.

I then walked over to the Virginia Theatre on W. 52nd St. — now the August Wilson Theatre — where I bought tickets for Smokey Joe's Cafe. The next evening, I took my New York friend to dinner at Ben Benson's Steakhouse, which was just down the street from the Virginia and which is no longer there, and then we saw the show she wanted to see.

The dinner was great, the show was very entertaining and I remember thinking the evening hadn't worked out so badly. Of course, that was before I knew my refund for the Inherit the Wind tickets would never arrive. As far as I'm concerned, when Tony Randall died in 2004, he owed me $120.

Soon, the fellow who got me those tickets told me that if I'd gotten them for two nights earlier, I would have seen what would probably turn out to be George C. Scott's last stage performance ever. And sure enough, it was.

Mr. Scott passed away three years later and only did films for the rest of his life, ending with a TV-Movie version of Inherit the Wind in which he played the Fredric March part and Jack Lemmon played the Spencer Tracy part. I still wish I'd seen him in the proper role at the Royale. Or maybe my date and I could have both been happy if he'd joined the cast of Smokey Joe's Cafe and done a couple of the Elvis numbers.

And here's the kids from Parkview Elementary School doing their version of a James Bond movie. I am not kidding when I say I enjoyed this more than I enjoyed No Time to Die, if only because their 007 film didn't feel like it was seven hours long…

I just saw this on the Instagram feed of the New York Times…

Legend has it that the tuna melt was accidentally invented in the 1960s at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Charleston, South Carolina, when the cook didn't notice that a bowl of tuna salad had tipped over onto a grilled cheese. We may never know if this story is true, but there's no doubt that the tuna melt has become a classic American diner food.

I'm always intrigued by stories like this — and there seem to be hundreds of 'em — which pinpoint how and where a certain food item was invented…and how it was invented by accident. They always seem to involve accidents. The hot fudge sundae was invented by someone accidentally spilling some hot fudge on a dish of ice cream. Don't you think it's more likely that someone at some soda fountain or ice cream shop who had vanilla ice cream and hot fudge at hand thought, "Hey, you know…these things might go well together."?

And that maybe more than one person had that thought? We're not talking The Invention of Penicillin here, people.

So consider the tuna melt. Someone accidentally got melted cheese on a tuna sandwich and someone liked it? Couldn't someone have thought of that? I suspect that there is no food in the history of mankind that someone hasn't thought could be improved by melting cheese all over it. In fact, I'll even wager that somewhere, someone has tried putting the melted cheese on the vanilla ice cream and the hot fudge on the tuna sandwich.

And how do we know where and when this happened? Did the guy working the Woolworth's lunch counter in Charleston, South Carolina spill the cheese on the tuna and then alert the media? Did he quickly call up the biggest newspaper in Charleston and say, "Get a reporter down here on the double. I've got your headline story right here!"?

I think it's more likely that one day, the manager of that lunch counter had a reporter eating there and the reporter said, "Gee, you seem to serve a lot of tuna melts." The manager, aware of what a little publicity might do for business said, "We should! We invented them, you know." And then, to get this claim into print, he had to come up with a story and "Our chef just thought it might be good" seemed too boring…so it became an accident and other papers picked up on it.

You may find this cynical on my part and you're right. It is. That doesn't mean I'm not right about it. Not all food combinations are accidents except maybe the one below. No living, breathing human could have done this on purpose…

• Apparently, the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a bunch of good guys with guns waiting outside for more than forty minutes.

Andy Rose wrote to ask…

I'm curious as to how you are able to sleep effectively at times when most of the rest of the world isn't. I used to work overnight shifts, and I was never able to sleep entirely comfortably on those days. Even with blackout curtains and the phone turned off, I couldn't stop the birds from chirping, sirens from going by, neighbors from mowing their lawns, or the occasional knock at the door.

I tried an additional sleep mask and ear plugs, but I found that they caused as many problems as they solved. The mask would often get shifted or tight as I turned in my sleep, and ear plugs would often fall out for the same reason. Is there a trick here I was missing, or are you just naturally better adapted to sleeping at random times?

I wasn't but I am these days. I never slept that well during the day but due to COVID, I've now had over 800 days of a different lifestyle. I don't have very many places I have to go and that seems to make a difference. Today, I do have somewhere to go but the next few days, probably not. It does seem to make a difference that when I go to sleep, I'm not usually thinking, "I need to be up by X:00!"

Birds chirping or sirens passing never bothered me. I think my brain has become programmed to consider them part of the norm. My gardener's leaf blower sometimes bothers me but he comes late in the afternoon, a time I rarely sleep, and only once a week. One difference from you (probably) is that I sleep with a C-PAP unit due to my sleep apnea. It gives off a comforting "white noise" to which I've become addicted.

And it also really helps that most of the projects I'm currently writing are the kind of things that don't have to be done tomorrow by 2 PM. Nothing ever kept me awake as lying there, thinking I should get back to the computer and finish what I'd been working on.

When I'm lying awake, genuinely unable to sleep, I often get up, trudge down the hall back to the computer, and write a little more. A half hour, later I give sleep another try. The key thing, at least for me, is to not stress over not sleeping.

Here's an episode of the 1966 Batman TV show with Adam West. Well, no, it isn't. What is really is is an episode of that show as it might have appeared if it had been done by students from the 4th and 5th grades at Parkview Elementary School in Van Buren, AR. Looks like they had the same budget and the same acting coach as the original…

My pal, mystery novelist Lee Goldberg, posted this on Twitter…

Let me get this straight. Trained, armed, law enforcement officers were afraid to go into the school & confront a shooter who is armed w/a AR-15…but the GOP's answer is to have a third grade teacher, armed w/a handgun, to take him on instead. Are they insane!?

I dunno…supposing the Gun Lobby had all their fire power pointed at your head and your life depended on coming up with an answer to the question, "How do we stop school shootings?" that wouldn't displease them. Could you come up with anything better? Maybe something about mental health programs which you're not going to vote for either?

My third grade teacher was a lady who was very good at teaching but she couldn't write on the blackboard without making the chalk squeal and/or break. Imagine Edith Bunker gripping a .357 Magnum, trying to take down a crazed man clad in body armor and wielding two AR-15-style rifles. Somehow, it doesn't sound like a Dirty Harry moment to me. Not even if you replaced Edith with Clint Eastwood.

Here, also from his new album, Randy Rainbow performs "Lida Rose" from The Music Man. One can't help but wonder what Meredith Willson, who wrote that show, would have thought of this. I imagine he'd already be glowing that his show was once again a smash hit on Broadway — as it will probably be the next time it's revived and the time after that and the time after that…

…and I imagine he'd be happy that people of the next century still want to perform what he wrote. But to see it performed by five gay men, all of whom are the same person — that might be a little baffling…