by Dick Cavett
After several hours of laughing at nonstop Jonathan, they would simply have to go home, weak from mirth.
Carsey came to work one morning around 9 a.m. from New Jersey after one of these sessions and Jonathan was still there in Hurley’s—in a manic phase—still “on” and still killing ’em.
Jonathan’s improv versatility is legendary. Jack liked to surprise him on-air with an unexpected ordinary object, challenging, “See what you can do with this.” A phone, a hat, a bucket, a billfold … whatever.
Robin Williams’s fine piece in The New York Times on Jonathan told of the legendary Night of the Stick. Jack, perhaps thinking he might stump Jonny, handed him a two-foot plain stick of polished wood, and a classic was born. Instantly it became a fishing pole, Jonathan orally supplying authentic sounds of the reel and the splash.
Then, in rapid order, it morphed into about ten more things including a flute, a sword in the hands of an inept matador (who lets the bull get behind him), a violinist’s bow drawn across his crooked left arm (“Think what I could do with the other part”), a golf club (as Jonathan magically transforms himself, with total vocal accuracy, into Bing Crosby), and a giant monster-movie beetle’s antenna.
After some more transformations, suddenly it flies into his chest and, gripping the (now) spear that has fatally impaled him, he utters in a strangled voice, “The United Nations recognizes the delegate from Zambezi.”
Seated now beside Jack and in mock annoyance at something Jack said, Jonathan turns the stick into a fairy’s wand, wiggled at Jack with a mincing, “I make you vanish!”
Thank God for YouTube. It contains a trove of great Jonathan moments. The day Jonathan died, an inconsolable friend of mine canceled everything in order to spend the next day there, simply feasting on Jonathan.
Find “The Stick” and another Paar appearance when Jonathan, during an early stand-up, suddenly asks the viewers with solemn seriousness, “Did you ever undress in front of a dog?” If you fail to laugh at what follows, you may have expired.
He loved James Thurber and, like Groucho, idolized writers over performers. Both stated they’d have preferred to be revered more for their literary output than their performing. And both could write.
Virtually every obit used the word “genius.” I suppose some would be offended at using the same word that is applied to Mozart or Einstein for a mere entertainer. But to hell with those people. If Jonathan wasn’t a genius, who was? Herbert Hoover?
I try to imagine someone who’s reading this who never saw Jonathan and can’t imagine, for example, what’s funny about a white-haired old lady (Maude Frickert) in black bombazine and spectacles and old ladies’ buttoned-up Enna Jettick shoes charging up out of Jack Paar’s studio audience, pulling away from a man on the aisle who reached out toward her and reporting to Jack, “Did you see that? He tried to paw me!”
Jack: “I’m so sorry.”
Jonathan: “Never mind, sonny, I’m a horny old chick!”
No familiar clichés for Jonathan. On one occasion, “Maudie” reported that a Mexican dinner had caused her the distress of “the green apple quickstep.” And his invented names for his characters were perfect. For a rube, Elwood P. Suggins. A hick, Lester Cratchlow.
The sad part of Jonathan—I should say one of the sad parts—is that despite all that talent and all that greatness, his career was erratic, with short-lived Jonathan Winters Shows now and again, hundreds of hilarious guest appearances, and some mildly funny stuff in movies—a medium that couldn’t accommodate his great improvisational talents. He was doubtless the greatest of improv comics, but not a great comic actor when bound to other people’s scripted words. His film stuff is often uncomfortable and at odds with everybody else’s style. His gifts lay elsewhere.
And nobody else had them.
APRIL 26, 2013
Missing: Jonathan Winters. Badly.
I remember once mentioning the name Jonathan Winters to Groucho Marx.
The reply: “There’s a giant talent.”
Among the pains suffered by Jonathan was an undeserved and unnecessary one. It was the up-and-down, here-and-there bumpy nature of his TV career. Not his great guest appearances, but actual Jonathan Winters Shows, which came and went, sometimes too quickly, over the years.
The terms “misunderstood talent” and “bum career management” circulated.
Herewith, a case in point.
One day I sneaked out of my Tonight office at NBC. “Jonny Winters is rehearsing in the next studio!” somebody whispered. I moved quickly.
It was the first of a series of specials in what was to be still another try at TV for him.
He had a hilarious routine he’d done, seated, on the Paar Tonight Show in which he created before your eyes an entire Western movie. A wagon train scene in which he was all the characters: wagon master, Grandma, dumb cluck, little boy, tongue-tied cowhand, outlaw, sissy sheriff, troubled cow, scared wild-stallion breaker … and more.
But this was prime-time television. Big budget. So what did the numbskulls do? They felt the need to “dress it up” for prime time.
They committed an artistic crime: a literal wagon train setting with a real covered wagon, a couple of uncomfortable live horses, bales of straw, milling extras, old ladies in sunbonnets and old gents sucking pipes, a small boy whittling, and … I can’t go on.
In the midst of this, Jonathan enters, impeccable as usual in modern dark suit and tie, picking his way through the mob and the clutter to do his monologue. To refashion his imaginary but vivid world of characters while half drowned in distracting superfluities. A world created within his mind, more vivid than the literal one he was now in competition with. (His characters were always so perfectly drawn—with his ear not only for voices, dialects, and accents, but for regional, folksy terms and locutions.)
I wanted someone to charge down an aisle shouting “Fire the actors! Strike the set! Single spotlight on Jonathan! From the top!”
It was heartbreaking. Greatly talented performers don’t know, often spectacularly, what’s best for them, don’t know what their talents really are and don’t know what’s just plain wrong for them. But somebody should.
People that remote from any perception of what Jonathan’s talent was all about would probably suggest putting up a real glass wall for the mime Marcel Marceau to press his fingertips against. Or take down van Gogh’s Sunflowers and put up some real ones.
I hope whatever alleged management and advisers on Jonathan’s payroll allowed such a travesty to be inflicted on him have passed beyond the reach of my intemperate words. But I’d be tickled if they’re seeing them. Are you there? Shame on you. Every man jack of you.
Needless to say, another Winters TV attempt was short-lived.
You could almost say the guilty deserved to be tied up and whipped, as Grandma was in the original Jonathan wagon train piece. “Lash ’er up there, Luke.” With Jonathan’s genius oral sound effects supplying the whish and snap of the bullwhip on the poor old lady. It was hilarious in the original verbal improv, neutered amid all the imposed, literal junk.
A book could be written about great talents who have been—to the amazement and distress of almost everyone around them—doggedly, self-destructively loyal to bad advisers and dull-witted management types who truncate their careers.
Mental (bipolar) and alcohol problems also toughened life for Jonathan.
It seems certain to me, in keeping with some bizarre Law of Negative Compensation so often visited upon the greatly talented, that the worlds of pleasure he gave to us far, far outweighed any he was able to have himself. I hope I’m wrong. At least in degree.
I ran into him one day in a parking lot outside the Robin Williams Mork & Mindy studio. There was a slight awkwardness between us because he was, oddly, never on my show, although he had said he one day would be. I feel as though he was, and then I realize I’m recalling the many Paar nights when I stood only a few feet from him, off camera, drinking it in as Jo
nathan shone, bringing the studio audience to tears. And then reveling in it all again a few hours later on the air.
An associate of his said he might have not wanted to go on with me for fear of offending Johnny Carson. We were, after all, on opposite each other. That struck me as more funny than likely. Jonathan and I were always cordial, and I’d forgive him anything. But the regret is real. It just would have been so damn much fun to sit there with him.
As we stood there in the parking lot, Jonathan began doing stuff so funny that I felt guilty being the sole audience. I actually felt the strong wish that unhappy folks and sick folks could be feeling the tonic of this—at the risk of injuring themselves, laughing as hard as I was.
He magically danced from character to character, then suddenly switched into still another one, and that very straight one asked me, “Dick, did you ever think that Jack [Paar] was maybe deep in the closet?”
As I see it, it was his “Jonathan Winters” character speaking. The one I sensed he had devised to pass off in life as himself. Those eyebrows up in the middle, the odd smile that sometimes showed only the bottom teeth and that sincere, friendly demeanor. I’m sure that Jonathan, like the half mad (or more) Peter Sellers, was always more comfortable when talking as somebody else.
I’m sure I’ve all but lost friends by maintaining that, despite their love for it, I always saw Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as more of an exercise in anticomedy than humor.
Of course, I loved Jonathan and the gas station in that film, but I’ve always deplored this lumbering heffalump of attempted humor that, “though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve.” (Bill Shakespeare, not Cavett.)
Chasing, crashing modern cars, no longer funny but ugly killing machines, unlike the funny, flimsy, almost butterfly-like, light-as-air “tin lizzies” of the silent days, showed a lack of sensibility that … Oh, forget it. Stanley Kramer was a nice man.
While making the thing, the lucky cast members were endlessly convulsed almost to illness by Jonathan between takes, in their trailers, and during meals. I know that any thirty minutes of those choice and lost improvised gems would outvalue a dozen Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Worlds.
Someone else can now have the soapbox.
The Jack Paar appearances represent J. Winters’s finest work, and however many survive should be preserved in a “Fort Knox of Comedy” vault. Surely I’m not the only one who remembers that Jonathan actually hosted Tonight for a full week back in the fifties, his cohost perched beside him: a live owl.
Where, NBC, is that lode of comedy bullion?
(My residential college at Yale had but one or two TVs in the basement. For the whole dorm. No student had a TV that I knew of. In order to see those great Paar appearances, my roommates and I would have to outnumber and edge out booze-soaked DKEs who preferred to watch wrestling or the Three Stooges.)
Typing this right now I keep being drawn, fondly, to the phone at my left elbow.
Earlier this year, Richard Lewis floored me, saying, “I talk to Jonathan on the phone every day.” Assured it was true, I asked Richard for the number, got it, and a couple of months ago I called.
The familiar voice answered and my skin responded.
I heard, “Dick Cavett. My God!” and for the next hour was totally entertained as we reminisced about the old days and made each other laugh. He seemed much livelier than I’d expected, having heard how many illnesses he was coping with.
There were serious moments. He said he envied my having met Stan Laurel; that he worshipped Laurel and his work.
“Damn it!” he said with pained regret, “I’m the only one out here who never managed to meet him. And there he was, sitting right out there in Santa Monica all those years. The Oceana Apartments, wasn’t it? I’ll never get over that.”
I was sorry that I told him that all that time, Stan Laurel was in the phone book. “Oh, Dick. You could have spared an old man that.” (Laughter.)
Dept. of Self-Inflicted Pain: I resolved that in our next phone chat I’d tell him I would send him my two columns on meeting Laurel, deciding that two weeks would be a decent interval to call him again, but maybe shouldn’t wait too long.
I did by three days.
The Richard Lewis–Jonathan Winters relationship is the stuff of a book or a big long article for a good magazine. Richard has granted me permission to include the following from an e-mail that followed my asking him about their unique friendship.
Here in that flowing, gift-for-language Lewis style is what he wrote.
I talked to Jonathan almost daily on the phone when he was feeling well. In the past eight or nine years he must have left me hundreds and hundreds of insanely funny messages in my voicemail, each a different character and all gold. If I failed to mention the premise of his call I was always touched when he asked me if I dug the bit. Imagine!? My childhood idol was asking me! We had a father-son comedy relationship. Both being recovering alcoholics we related on that level, Jonathan with a staggering fifty-three years sober before passing, and growing up we had a horrible time of it getting support from most of our family, diving into show business but mostly we free-associated in life and on stage and “got” the most obscure references from one another. He had special relationships with a handful of buddies that I know he treasured. We were his standing ovation every time we saw him or talked to him. (Every day.)
Do the book, Richard, with pages of those phone messages.
Why did this have to swim up out of memory? Part of my job with Jack was to spend one or two hours a week scanning viewer letters. A thankless chore. You are about to encounter the prizewinning dumbo one. It was from a woman in Cleveland who peppered the show with guest complaints. Ready?
Dear Mr. Paar,
Why do you keep having that Jonathan Winters on? He thinks he knows it all.
Yours,
Irene [Something]
Did I exaggerate? Might you not call this the cake taker of misapplication? The paragon of nitwittery? The Mount Everest of brain deficit? (The answer is yes.)
Sitting here, looking at that phone that the great man and I spoke on, random fragments of Jonathan keep surfacing in my head. One just did. It’s only the first two lines that began a fall-down-funny sketch, showing how quickly and economically Jonathan could set and convey a scene and its theme:
Jonathan (as motorcycle cop’s siren): RRRRRRrrrrr [and sound of braking]
Cop (big, tough, surely homophobic): Okay, buddy, where’s the fire?
Jonathan (sweetly): In your eyes, officer. In your eyes!
There was Jonathan, and then there was everybody else.
MAY 10, 2013
Hel-LO! You’re … Who Again?
It takes a certain amount of guts to go to your class reunions.
Particularly when your graduation ceremonies—from high school and from college—are about a half century back in time. There are too many reminders of “Time’s wingèd chariot.”
By the time I signed up for the first high school reunion I went to, I had become a “television personality.” A fact that skewed the otherwise normalcy of the occasion.
I couldn’t wait. What would my classmates’ behavior be? Adoring? Awed? Fawning? Pointedly unimpressed?
Would I have the almost surreal experience of actually signing autographs for my classmates? (Yes.)
I blush now to recall how I fantasized what the impact would be of my grand entrance into a milling, partying crowd of those classmates. When it happened, the effect was enough to gratify even an excessive ego. I could immediately see, “He’s here!” “He came!” and “There’s Dick!” on numerous lips.
More confession, this one a bit cringe-making:
What I was feeling, irrationally and way too strongly, it took a moment to identify. It was: Why couldn’t this famousness have been true back then, when I felt socially inept and awkward with girls? Then would Barbara Britten have gone out with me?
I was partly
embarrassed by it all and partly struck with myself. I felt a bit like Bob Hope in a period comedy, stepping out of a carriage to an adoring crowd with “I wonder what the dull people are doing.”
Not an entirely pretty sight, self-adoration-wise.
Working into the crowd at the Legion Hall—or was it a restaurant?—I tried to make eye contact whenever possible. When I was able to actually pluck a name from memory, the reaction was almost embarrassing.
I saw a guy named Berwyn Jones not far away and mouthed his first name through the din, an easy name to read at a distance. “Yes!” he mouthed back, pleased as punch. His delight was touching.
Of course there had to be at least one instance of the inevitable. A guy deep in his cups, with a redwood-sized chip on his shoulder, shoved at me a big glass of scotch: “I bought you this drink.”
“A few sips of wine are my limit,” I said politely.
“So I guess you’re too damn good to have a drink with a nobody like me?”
Thank goodness, I suppressed anything like “You’re not far from the truth” as his embarrassed wife led him away.
A surprising thing began to come clear. The girls I’d known long ago in school were now of two distinct sorts. Some of the prettiest had become with time, um, less so. But some who back then would have been, in the awful phrase, “desperation dates” had miraculously blossomed, with time. Into lovely and appealing women.
Time giveth and time taketh away.
A startling piece of news. One of the queens of my class—a beauty and a “big wheel” whom I had deemed a goddess too far above me by half to even speak to—had ended up a divorced mother of three, toiling as a waitress in a roadhouse café in Texas. My mind ran to Ecclesiastes’ “Time and chance happeneth to them all.”
Adonises from my class were fat and balding.
And I still felt inferior to them, as I had way back then. Until winning a state gymnastics championship assuaged any wimp factor floating about.
