Hey, let's talk about Stan Berman, a cab driver from Brooklyn who attained a smidgen of fame in the early sixties as a "crasher." He went to parties and weddings and important public functions without a ticket or invite but with a lot of chutzpah, cleverness and occasionally a tuxedo. And we can start this discussion by watching his appearance on an episode of I've Got a Secret that aired on 2/12/62…
You'll notice Mr. Berman is very evasive and often absolutely wrong with his answers to the panelists' questions. I suspect this was a habit he picked up in all those event-crashings. He seemed to have learned to be evasive and to lie when asked anything. (Another interesting point: His New York Times obit said that he also sometimes worked as a private investigator.)
Want to know more about Stan? Donald Liebenson has written a fine article about him for Vanity Fair. But Liebenson missed one of Stan's greatest moments. MAD did an article in its December, 1962 issue called "Celebrities' Home Movies" in which various celebs — John Wayne, Alfred Hitchcock, Lloyd Bridges and others — narrated brief snippets of their home movies. The last one was Stan Berman and here are the first two and last two panels of it…
That was drawn by Wally Wood, the subject of much discussion on this blog lately. A year or two later, he got himself bounced out of MAD — not entirely to his regret — and wound up wandering over to Marvel Comics. It does not look like he had much if any reference on what Stan Berman looked like.
The timing on this intrigued me the way some odd things intrigue me. The December '62 MAD would have gone on sale around October so it went to press around late August. Back-timing further, it seems possible that Larry Siegel and/or Arnie Kogen, who were credited as writers of the MAD piece, saw that I've Got a Secret episode and it gave them the idea to include Berman. Larry's no longer with us but I just got off the phone with Arnie.
He only vaguely remembers it but he said, "I'm pretty sure I didn't see that I've Got a Secret. I think I read about him somewhere. I probably wrote the article and then they asked Larry to add more material to it but I think I was the one who put that guy into it."
I don't know how I feel about that guy. You could view him as a prankster, I guess. You could also consider all the meals he ate that others paid for, and shows he went to that others paid to attend. I mean, there's a certain amount of thievery in what he did, and he did sometimes disrupt public events. I know people who are sad that they can't afford — or can but are unable to get badges — for Comic-Con in San Diego. How should we feel about the people who sneak in? I don't admire them or write them off as harmless.
Like me, you've probably had times when at some event, overzealous security personnel tried to keep you out of someplace you were supposed to be. I once had to practically fight my way into a building at Comic-Con to get to a Jack Kirby Tribute Panel I was supposed to be hosting in three minutes. I had the proper badge with the big GUEST ribbon on it but the guy thought I was trying to cut the line to get into Hall H, which is not at all where I was headed in such a hurry.
Every time that happens to us, we can "thank" people who crash and sneak their way into things for it. And on I've Got a Secret, he bragged about crashing some strangers' wedding and kissing the bride. I wonder if that recently-married couple was watching the show that night and how they felt about his "hobby."
And yet in my youth, I occasionally "crashed" (I guess you'd say) a TV or movie studio and went where I had no permission to be. I think I even helped myself to a donut from the craft services table at a Laugh-In taping at NBC. It's not exactly the same thing but it's close. I wonder how the I've Got a Secret people who put Stan Berman on their show and sort of glorified what he did would have felt about someone crashing their security.
And also, there's this: The game show treated it as a kind of admirable accomplishment that Berman was able to crash the inauguration of President Kennedy and get into the presidential seating area. Would that have seemed so harmless and fun after 11/22/63? He probably couldn't have done it after that and maybe that's a good thing.