I've given up, probably forever, on my two favorite telethons to watch. Both were pretty unwatchable this year.
The MDA Telethon — transformed into a two-hour network music special interspersed with MDA pitches — was probably fine for what it was, and it appears to have succeeded as a fund-raiser, raising more dough than anything else the organization could possibly have done these days. Okay, that's great. But sans Jerry or a comparable figure, it's just a show with infomercial segments throughout…and I think it was all pre-taped. There's no sense that you're staying up, watching in real time as all those volunteers sweat to raise the money and you want to reward their efforts with donations. Another of the almost-extinct live, anything-can-happen TV programs has gone away on us.
The week before — but more recently semi-watched on my TiVo — was the annual Chabad Telethon. I say "semi-watched" because I had to speed through it and eventually give up altogether, in large part because of its unctuous host, Dennis Prager. There are conservative commentators I can respect even when I don't agree with them — you've seen me link to a number of them here — but Mr. Prager is not among them. I think he spreads bogus information and constantly demonizes those who don't share his precise views and, more importantly, his religion as interpreted by Dennis Prager. He's a very dull, uncharming man who has no business hosting a telethon to begin with and when he started by touting his various outside enterprises, I started fast-forwarding. Oh, for the days before Jan Murray passed away. Murray, who hosted the Chabad Telethon for years, understood that the telethon wasn't about him and where he was appearing next week.
What I did pause to watch — especially the moments featuring the charismatic Rabbi Cunin — was honest enough…and at least the show was live. But I'll tell you what I really miss on there. I miss Stanley Ralph Ross.
It's no one's fault that he wasn't on the show. Stanley, an actor and TV writer who was a good pal of mine, died in 2000. I told some of this story before here but it's been ten years. Time for a refresher.
Stanley was the pushiest writer I ever knew and he was absolutely shameless about promoting himself. There are a lot of people in Hollywood who are like this but Stanley was the Beethoven of harassing people into giving you work. You said "yes" to Stanley because he made it too much work to say "no."
That most didn't shun him for this was largely due to the fact that he could be very funny and charming, and that he'd often do very nice, selfless things for people. He did me a number of favors early in my career when it didn't look like I could ever possibly be of any use to him. Most pushy people won't do something nice for you unless they're setting up a very specific quid pro quo.
But Stanley could be very generous with his time and effort even as he was relentless in selling himself as a writer. Relentless. And he usually managed to snare an acting job in everything he wrote. A few years after his passing, I was watching an old Banacek rerun on TV. I'd seen this episode before — it was the one about the million dollars vanishing from a display case in a Vegas casino — but I hadn't noticed Stanley's writer credit in the opening before. Immediately, I thought, "Ah, he'll be in this episode somewhere" and I began watching for him.
And watching and watching. Two-thirds of the way through the episode, it felt like all the suspects and key players had been introduced…and there was no sign of Stanley. I thought to myself, "Where is he? Why isn't he in here?"
Just then, Banacek asked someone where he could find the hotel publicist. The someone said, "Oh, he's down by the pool, photographing bikini girls." Immediately, I thought: Ah, here comes Stanley! And sure enough, there he was in the next scene, probably having written the part with himself in mind.
Stanley had lots of credits, and many of those who read this will know him as one of the main writers of the Batman TV show (the one with Adam West) and the developer of the Wonder Woman TV show (the one with Lynda Carter). But to me, his greatest credit was his work on the annual Chabad Telethon.
Stanley volunteered every year to do anything and everything. I'm sure he pushed to be its host but Jan Murray did it in those days. And I'll say this for Stan: He would have been a lot better than Dennis Prager. By that, I mean Stanley in his present condition would have been a better host than Dennis Prager.
So he did some announcing and he did a few pitches and in the dancing sequences, where the rabbis come out and dance to celebrate a new high on the tote board, you could usually spot Stanley in the outer fringe, dancing and trying to make his way into the shot. He was hard to miss because he was around 6'6". He also had a deep, gravelly voice which you need to keep in mind during the following.
He'd work the phone banks, taking calls…and he performed a special function there. Every hour or so, they'd get a call from someone who was outraged to see so many Jews on his TV set, which apparently did not have any sort of control via which one could change the channel. So he'd call up and start cursing out Jewish people and saying how Hitler had the right idea and threatening to bomb the TV studio. I am generally against comparing people to Nazis but if it talks like a duck and it goosesteps like a duck…
And what the Chabad people would do when they got one of those calls was to switch it over to Stanley. He was the expert at handling them. He'd cue the Stage Manager who'd in turn cue the director to cut from whatever was transpiring on screen to a shot of the phone bank…and Stanley. In fact, I think the part of this that Stanley enjoyed most was that he got to be on TV when he did it. In his low, menacing voice — a voice Hanna-Barbera often booked to play a super-villain in a cartoon show — Stanley would say, "Look at your TV screen, you piece of worthless shit! You see that 6'6" Jew there? That's me. If you've got any balls, come on down to the station. I'll meet you in the parking lot, you coward, and you say that to my face!"
They always hung up immediately. And somehow never showed up in the parking lot.
Stanley told me how he did this once or twice every telethon and when the next one occurred, I made a point of watching for it. Sure enough, right in the middle of a song by some boys choir, they cut to the phone bank and a shot of Stanley. There was no audio of him but you could see he was glancing to camera and threatening the caller and I could lip-read "son of a bitch" and "Nazi bastard." And then you could tell the guy hung up because Stanley started laughing and laughing. I laughed too and when I finally stopped, I called up and pledged a hundred bucks in honor of Stanley Ralph Ross. After he passed, I sometimes called in and made the same pledge.
The photo of him I inserted a few paragraphs above was taken at the 1977 San Diego Comic-Con…the annual event now known as Comic-Con International. I had arranged for Stanley, because of his Batman connection, to be a guest of the convention. "Guest" just meant that he would get in free but Stanley, being Stanley, promptly alerted Variety and the Hollywood Reporter that he was the ***Guest of Honor*** and began calling the con to firm up how many talks he'd give and how many trophies he'd receive. I think they gave in and presented him with an Inkpot Award and he may even have gotten them to actually list him as a Guest of Honor. Like I said, a pushy man.
As it turned out, he gave one of the funniest, most interesting lectures I've ever heard at the con and later, he somehow convinced them to let him be the auctioneer for the charity art auction. He was terrific at it and raised more money than anyone else could have or ever had. In part, he did this by declaring hefty opening bids on certain items…and if no one would offer that much, he'd just buy it himself.
I can't look at that photo of him and his terrific wife Neila without noticing that in it, Stanley had one of his constant cigarettes going…and that we lost him to lung cancer. It was very sudden and very sad. He drove me nuts at times but I still miss the guy. One of these days, I'll tell a few more stories about him and you'll wonder how I could be friends with this person. I guess you had to know him to understand it. At his funeral, I sat next to Julie Newmar, who credited him with the best moments on the Batman show. She turned to me at one point and asked me of all the things Stanley had done, what was my favorite? I told her it was manning the phone banks at the Chabad Telethon. I'll forgive a lot of pushy job-seeking in a person who does something like that.