When I was first starting out as a professional writer, I had a lot of brief 'n' odd jobs. For about six months, I wrote things on a freelance basis for a publicist who handled a lot of very famous performers. Actually, I think some of them were more famous before he began handling their publicity but that's neither here nor there.
I basically got two kinds of assignments from him. One was to "write panel" for his clients who were appearing on talk shows — usually Merv Griffin's or Mike Douglas's but occasionally Johnny Carson's. He had clients who basically had no stories to tell…and often, they couldn't get booked on these shows until a Talent Coordinator had met with them, heard a few airable anecdotes and told the producer that the performer had some good stories to tell. So I would try to "enhance" stories they already had but would sometimes wind up just making them up. A few of those humorous tales were eventually uttered from Merv's guest seat and Mike's and even from Johnny's.
The other thing he had me do was to write up press releases and bios of his clients. He'd hand me scraps of notes and it would be up to me to expand and polish them into something that might be of use to a reporter somewhere. One time when I went in to deliver some work, he asked me if I could quickly — like, immediately — write up a bio on one of his clients, a popular male singer. It was needed within the hour so I was shoved into a little room with a typewriter and basically told I wasn't leaving until I got the thing done.
I was about halfway through it when I heard a commotion in the outer office — a lot of yelling and the sound of furniture being moved or slammed or something. I went to see what it was.
What it was was the popular male singer — the fellow whose bio I was composing. He'd stormed in and began screaming at the publicist. I didn't know what it was about. I still don't know what it was about but jeez, was he angry about something. He finished his tirade, then went over and kicked in the screen of the publicist's 30" color TV set. Then he stormed out. I scurried back to the typewriter.
A few minutes later, the publicist — looking quite shaken — poked his head into the room and said, "Uh, never mind about that bio…"
A week or two later — no connection to that incident — the publicist offered me a full-time job…and by "full-time," he meant that he wanted me to write for him and only for him. I was to put in a 40-hour week for him at his office. Then in the evenings and weekends, I was not to write anything for anyone else: No articles, no books, no comic books, no jokes for comedians, nothing.
I didn't understand that as a condition of the job. If I did all the work he wanted me to do, why should he care if I wrote a comic book during what otherwise would have been my free time? He wouldn't explain. He just kept saying, "This is how I do business. Take it or leave it." I decided to leave it, he never gave me another job directly again…and I was glad to get away from him and that kind of work. That was in early 1971 and I have never been exclusive on any job I've done since then.
A few weeks after I left this man's occasional employ, I got a call from a very wealthy gentleman. I will call him Mr. Richman. Mr. Richman had been referred to me by the publicist. Mr. Richman's wife was a lovely actress, a client of the publicist and a spouse of the trophy variety. She was usually cast in the role of blonde bimbo for, as I would learn, the same reason that Billy Barty usually was cast as a very short person.
As stars went, she was not a big one but she had a not-unimpressive list of credits. Mr. Richman, being a rich man, was willing to spend whatever was necessary to make his spouse a much more famous and employed actress. So far, the gains that had been made in this area had been achieved primarily through photography and travel expenses.
Mr. Richman had hired — for a fee I presume was not a small one — the world-famous glamour photographer Peter Gowland and equally-expensive folks to do Mrs. Richman's makeup and hair. They had taken thousands — I am not exaggerating — of photos of the lovely actress in a few dozen outfits, most of them designer bikinis.
Mr. Richman, also at great expense, often engaged a top freelance news photographer. When Mrs. Richman got a two-line part on, say, a Bob Hope Special, Mr. Richman would get permission to send his photographer to the set to snap pictures of the taping — pictures which, of course, prominently featured Mrs. Richman with Bob and/or his stellar guest stars. She would go to every premiere and charity event that would have her…and the camera guy would tail along, snapping pics of her incessantly. They had thousands of these photos, also.
Her publicist — the guy I'd worked for — had little trouble planting many of these photos in magazines and newspapers. Magazines and newspapers do love free photos of a beautiful woman in a bikini and/or with a big star. However, that was not enough. What Mr. Richman really wanted to make happen for his beloved was for her to sit in the guest chair on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and be witty and funny.
She had actually been on the Carson show three or four times already but had not said more than three or four words. When they needed a cute blonde to walk onstage in swimwear, they called her, which I found remarkable. Why? Because she lived in Beverly Hills and The Tonight Show was then based in New York. I have a hunch that if you were a casting director there and you needed a gorgeous blonde in a bikini, you could find one somewhere in the city of Manhattan or the outer boroughs. Instead, she flew in — at her hubby's expense, of course — to do a job that paid way less than the airfare and lodging.
She thought she was a shoo-in to be a full-fledged guest. Johnny, after all, loved it when he could interview an airhead blonde with breasts the size of Buicks. "We have access to the Talent Bookers on The Tonight Show," Mr. Richman explained. That was because of her bikini walk-ons. Twice before, she had flown expressly to New York to sit down with the bookers for a chat that was supposed to prove she was funny and witty enough to be an actual guest on the program.
And twice before, they had decided that she just didn't have stories that were sufficiently amusing. "We're confident they'll give her one more audition," Mr. Richman said. That was where I came in. The publicist suggested that paying money to me might make that last chance audition pay off. So I went to their home — an estate so large it had two sets of servants — one for each zip code it covered. Mr. and Mrs. Richman were very gracious to me and even though I was but nineteen, very sure that I could help them achieve their goal.
He offered me a modest fee to work with her, write stuff for her and rehearse her. A very nice, impressive sum of money would be paid to me if my efforts succeeded in getting her on the show. I asked, "What if I get her on The Tonight Show but with a guest host instead of Johnny?"
He thought for a moment and offered me half the impressive sum should that happen. Then he added, "The real goal, of course, is to get her on with Johnny." But of course.
When I'd done this for other celebrities, I'd chat with them a while, take some of their real-life anecdotes and exaggerate one to make it funnier and, more important, get us to a solid punch line. Try as I might though, I just could not get even get the scraps of a decent story out of Mrs. Richman. She and I sat by her pool for an hour or more and I couldn't find any reality on which to build. I finally resorted to just making things up from the whole cloth.
The one they liked best was pretty lame. I'll tell it to you here and you can just imagine how weak the others were. Just remember I was new at comedy-type writing. But she and her husband howled when I told it to them, and when I rehearsed her in it, she was pretty adorable and funny with it. Factoring in Johnny's pre-arranged questions, it would have gone something like this…
JOHNNY: You've been on our show several times and we always have you wearing a bikini and barely letting you say anything. I feel bad about only asking you to do that so I'm glad we could get you on here, fully-clad.
HER: Oh, I don't mind it, Johnny. It's what most people hire me for. I wore a bikini on a Bob Hope special. I wore a bikini on a Dean Martin Show. [And here she would mention several movies in which she also wore a bikini.] I'm just happy for the work.
JOHNNY: And I suppose they make you audition dressed like that.
HER: All the time. A few weeks ago, a very important director wanted me to read for a scene. It was for a big, important movie and I read the script and I said, "I want to be part of this movie!" My scene was a real good one but it called for me to be climbing out of a swimming pool, dripping wet and wearing a swimsuit. So I wanted to make a great impression and I went out and bought a new red bikini just for the audition. I must have tried on two dozen of them but I found the perfect one and I paid a lot of money for it. Then I went on a vigorous diet and exercise program to get my body in shape.
JOHNNY at this point would have had about ninety possible planned ad-libs. I suggested a few she could suggest. Then…
HER: I didn't eat for three days before and I looked great. I went in and put on the bikini and read the lines for the director and I thought I did great. The next day, my agent phoned and he said, "I've got good news and I've got bad news." I said, "Give me the bad news first." He said, "I'm afraid you didn't get the part." Well, I was disappointed but I said, "Okay, what's the good news?" He said, "They loved the red bikini and they want to buy it from you and get another girl to fill it."
JOHNNY: That really had to hurt. Did you sell it to them?
HER: Of course. You know, some women would say no out of spite but I figured, I love this script and if there's anything I can do to make this movie happen, I'm going to do it. So I sold them the bikini for not much more than I paid for it…and I even fixed it up for them first. I re-sewed all the seams on it.
JOHNNY: That was very nice of you. Why did you have to re-sew the seams?
HER: Well, I have this thread that dissolves when it gets wet…
Like I said, kinda lame. But I thought it was the kind of thing Johnny and his staff would love…and sure enough, when she and Mr. Richman went back to New York, I got a call from them — staying, of course, at the Plaza. She'd been up to the Tonight Show offices and had told that story and the others we rehearsed to a Talent Coordinator. He laughed and said the bikini story was terrific. "I'm sure it'll get me on as a guest with Johnny," she told me. But the next day, they phoned and politely passed.
Mr. Richman was giving up. He had paid me the modest sum and there would be no more spent, no more effort. He said she'd use the story on Merv Griffin's show or somewhere else, thank you very much. That, I thought, was that.
Eight months passed. I didn't see her listed on any other talk show but one afternoon, I tuned in Dinah Shore's program because she had Robert Klein on and before she got to Mr. Klein, she had on a blonde actress who did a lot of bikini parts…and she told the story I'd made up. Same exact story with the exact same punch line about the dissolving thread. I grabbed up the phone and called Mr. Richman to alert him it had been somehow stolen.
"No," he said. "We gave it to her. My wife went in to tryout for Dinah's show and they didn't take her, either. They loved the story but they didn't want her on for some reason. Then this friend of hers got booked because she's on a new series and she needed a story so we told her, 'We've got this one lying around that the talent coordinators over there already like.'"