by Carl Reiner
One late afternoon, driving home from Manhattan to New Rochelle, on the East Side Drive, I was approaching Ninety-Sixth Street and thinking about a premise for a situation comedy that might suit me. I asked myself a question.
Before I tell you what I asked myself, I want to say that I actually did talk to myself, out loud—and still do. I recommend it highly, especially to intelligent people like yourself. I suggest that an intelligent person asking him- or herself intelligent questions is likely to get intelligent answers.
“Reiner,” I asked myself, “what piece of ground do you stand on— that nobody else it the world stands on?”
“Well,” I responded, “I live in New Rochelle with my wife and two kids. I work in Manhattan as an actor-writer on a comedy-variety television show.
“That’s it!” I told myself. “Write about that!”
And that is what I wrote about. A character who lives in a split-level home in New Rochelle and who, six mornings a week, drives to Manhattan, where he works as an actor-writer in a weekly variety show and, eight hours later, drives back home. While at home, he discusses with his wife the problems that beset him at the office, and while at the office, he unburdens himself to his co-writers about his life in the suburbs with his loving wife and kids.
And thereupon, a pilot arose that I called, Head of the Family.
My pilot script was well received, so well that my agent, Harry Kalcheim, arranged for one of his clients, actor Peter Lawford, to finance a pilot. Peter had been looking for a project to produce.
The pilot script had flown out of my typewriter in about four or five days, and when I was told that Peter Lawford had made it a “go” project, I panicked.
I thought, Hey, if the pilot is sold, and I was to star it in, how in the world would I find the time to get enough episodes written for a series?
I knew that I would need writers to help me, but I also knew that from my one script, they could not know enough about who and what made these characters tick. To that end, I wrote what I considered to be a “bible” for the show. The bible consisted of the thirteen complete episodes I wrote during our six-week vacation on Fire Island.
Using my wife and me as templates, I wrote about characters I knew—what they thought and how they might behave and interact in any given situation.
Before shooting the pilot, I received a request from my agent to mail a copy of the script to Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of President John F. I asked “Why in the world would he want to read it?” and I was told that since his daughter, Pat, was married to Peter Lawford, which made Peter a member of the Kennedy clan, Joseph P. wanted to be certain that my script reflected good morals and wholesome values.
We sent the script off to Florida, where the old man resided, and I remember saying to my agent, “Harry, that man, who makes millions as the world’s biggest distributor of scotch whiskey, is going to be an arbiter of wholesomeness! That man, who cheated on his wife and humiliated her by having a scandalous affair with his mistress, Gloria Swanson, the star whose movies he financed? He is concerned about my morals?”
As far as I know, the one positive thing Joseph P. Kennedy ever did was not object to his son-in-law financing my pilot.
I liked Peter Lawford. I particularly enjoyed him in the MGM musical, Good News, in which he co-starred with one of my all-time favorites, June Allyson—but mostly I appreciated Peter getting my pilot made.
We assembled a fine cast that included Barbara Britton as my wife and Morty Gunty and Sylvia Miles as my co-writers, Buddy and Sally. We shot the pilot, Head of the Family in late 1958, at the Gold Medal Studios in my hometown, the Bronx!
The excuse given by some, including me, as to why Head of the Family failed was that situation comedies were not selling. It was the year of “the horse and the gun”—and unless the star played a cowboy or a detective, it had no chance of getting on the air. In hindsight, and to be completely honest, Head of the Family was a good show but not nearly good enough.
I was disappointed and came out of it a bit bloodied and only slightly bowed. I say slightly because I had another iron in the fire that I had not realized I had placed there. It was placed there months earlier, when Mel Brooks and I attended a dinner party given by Broadway producer Joe Fields. Joe was a fan of the 2000 Year Old Man. He had seen us do our routine many times at the dinner parties he hosted for friends who loved to laugh.
At this one outing at his home in Beverly Hills, we entertained a group of what Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper once dubbed, “A-list celebrities.” After we caused these “A-Listers” to laugh till their sides ached, a number of them came up to shake our hands.
George Burns asked us if we had recorded an album of what he had just heard, and when we said we had not, he said, “Record it…or I’ll steal it!”
Edward G. Robinson, sounding like the Al Capone-type character he played in Little Caesar said, “Make a play out of that material. I’d like to play that ‘Thousand Year Old Man’ on Broadway!”
“He’s two thousand,” I corrected him.
“One thousand, two thousand,” he shouted, “I can play either age—just write the play!”
Steve Allen came up to us and made us an offer we did not refuse. He offered us a studio and a live audience to hear us record our 2000 Year Old Man. He wanted no recompense for it, just the pleasure of bringing laughter into the world. It was because of Steve that the 2000 Year Old Man’s voice was first heard by the public—and can still be heard in a boxed set containing four newly mastered compact discs.
At that very same dinner party, after the others had left, Ross Hunter, a most successful film producer at Universal Pictures, came up to me and asked if, perchance, I had “an idea for a screenplay.”
I asked why he had thought that I might, and he said that from the way I ad-libbed questions, he surmised that I had a might have a story idea in my head. I really had not thought about writing a screenplay but was intrigued by his saying that he was looking for a vehicle for Judy Holliday and that he would be interested if I could come up with an idea for her.
I, like most people who had seen Judy Holliday in her Broadway and film performances in Born Yesterday and Bells Are Ringing, loved Judy Holliday!
At the time, I did not have an idea, but the thought of working with that great lady sparked one.
I recalled a moment of pique that I had experienced when hosting the game show, Keep Talking. It was sponsored by Regimen, a diet product that guaranteed weight loss. It was moments before airtime, and I still had not been made up because the make-up artists were busy fussing with advertising agency reps and their models who had taken Regimen diet pills. During the commercial, each model would step on a scale to check her week’s weight loss. It was one minute to airtime when I slid my face in front of one of the models and shouted, “Hey, do me first!”
A second later, the announcer’s voice boomed, “Welcome to Keep Talking! And here is our host for the evening, Carl Reiner!”
With make-up drying on my face, I dashed on stage, accepted the huge applause that the small audience was instructed to give me, and started hosting.
The day after Ross Hunter asked if I had an idea for Judy Holliday, I found myself thinking about the day, and my wife and I drove with our friends Pat and Larry Gelbart to their home in the country. I was thinking about the day I vied with the Regimen models for the attention of a make-up artist, and it triggered a story idea. I told Larry about Ross Hunter and Judy Holliday and the nub of an idea I had for a film about people in advertising agencies who cared more about marketing their stupid diet product than they did about the contents of the show they were sponsoring.
Working for a couple of hours in Larry’s den, he and I managed to bang out a three-page story outline that we thought pretty darn funny. We even had a provocative title for it, The Thrill Girl. Sadly, for me, Lar
ry had committed to fly to London and write a film for Peter Sellers and so was not available to continue to work with me on a screenplay.
A couple of days later, with Larry’s blessing, I delivered our three-page story outline to Ross Hunter, who liked it well enough to make a deal for me to develop a screenplay for The Thrill Girl. He also arranged for me to meet Judy Holliday at her apartment and pitch the idea to her.
Judy lived at The Dakota, a building famous for its celebrity clientele and also infamous as the assassination site of the brilliant John Lennon.
Judy Holliday could not have been more charming and gracious. She knew who I was and seemed sincere when she said that she loved the skits I did with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. She asked if I would read to her our short outline of The Thrill Girl, and I obliged. She had a big smile on her face as I told her that the part she would be playing was that of a housewife turned glamorous TV spokeswoman who becomes famous and makes more money selling soap than her obstetrician-husband does delivering babies. Judy laughed heartily when I described a scene we had not yet written that entailed her husband unwittingly driving his car into a swimming pool that his wife’s sponsor had, unbeknownst to him, constructed in their back yard. Judy found it funny and laughed so hard that she slid off her chair and onto the floor. While lying flat on her back, she complained that she had sprained it laughing so hard.
When I asked if I could help her up, she inhaled deeply and said that she would like to lie still for a while. She smiled and winced as we shook hands to say good-bye.
Very shortly after that extraordinary meeting, we heard that Judy Holliday learned from her doctor that she did not have a sprained back but an incurable cancer that would soon take her life.
As you might expect, all who knew her and loved her were in shock. I lost interest in the project, but Ross Hunter and the Universal front office, shocked and saddened as they were about Judy’s passing, had a “go” project on their front burner and a major star available to take over the title role of The Thrill Girl. They had been looking for a new project for one of their biggest box-office draws, Doris Day! Her last film, Pillow Talk, which co-starred Rock Hudson, was a huge success, and the studio was anxious to find a new vehicle for her.
That vehicle turned out to be The Thrill Girl, now re-titled, The Thrill of It All, and it also turned out to be the vehicle that launched my moderately successful film career.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Three Fond Memories of Julie Andrews that I Most Happily Recalled after Rummaging through a Large Cardboard Carton of Publicity Photographs and Finding a 1974 Color Picture Postcard Promoting a Show Done in Great Britain and Starring Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, and Myself as the Ghost of Covent Gardens Which Was Performed in Both a Film Studio and Also at the Famous London Produce Market
I feel very lucky and very proud. Lucky to be reminded of something for which I should not have needed a reminder, and proud to have written a title for a chapter that could very well end up in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest title for a chapter in a showbiz memoir, written by an author who has just passed his ninetieth birthday and yet doggedly continues to believe in the goodness of man and the non-existence of an almighty being.
I first met lovely Julie Andrews at Longchamps, an upscale Manhattan restaurant, where a luncheon had been arranged for us by two enterprising theatrical publicists. NBC’s Caesar’s Hour hoped to reap the benefit of this arranged tête-à-tête with Julie, and The Boyfriend, an off-Broadway hit, would garner whatever jump-in box-office sales might be engendered by a photo of Julie and me having lunch together.
I found Julie Andrews to be beautiful, shy, charming, self-effacing, and in need of a champion. We spoke of many things—I about my wife and two children, she of getting used to the limelight and being called upon to do things she did not feel comfortable doing. She told of an audition she had for a new musical which the producers and the writers agreed she was perfect to play the lead role. She, on the other hand, thought “they were daft!” She was quite adamant about their having made a big mistake and upset about her agent having his own best interests at heart when he talked her into signing a contract to play the lead in a musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
Julie actually thought that she was all wrong for the part. As I recall, her exact words were, “I am all wrong for the part!”
And I, a practicing thespian and a student of theater, said—and these are my exact words: “Wrong for the part? There has never been anybody righter for that part than you!”
Julie was 100 percent wrong in her assessment, and I, of course, was proven to be 100 percent right!
My wife and I were privileged to attend the exciting Broadway production of My Fair Lady and see Julie Andrews not play, but become Eliza Doolittle. I had seen many great Broadway performances, but never had I felt or reacted the way I did on the night I saw a glowing Eliza Doolittle glide gracefully down a long flight of stairs while singing “I Could Have Danced All Night!” I had what some people have come to describe as “an out-of-body experience.”
I literally felt some part of my being leave my body, float up toward the balcony, and hover there until Eliza sang the final note of her song.
As we applauded, I turned to Estelle and told her of the unusual reaction I had to Julie’s singing; she nodded and described a similar reaction.
Apropos the 1974 TV show that I had the pleasure of performing with Julie and Dick Van Dyke, I just Googled the title, Julie and Dick at Covent Gardens, and my computer coughed up a clip of the three of us in the scene at the produce market where I, the Ghost of Covent Gardens, meet tourists Dick and Julie. I did not remember any of this when I started this piece, and boy, am I glad I Googled. I actually laughed when I saw myself as a bearded Ghost of Covent Gardens, decked out in Shakespearean doublet and hose and describing how he died and became a ghost.
“I was a young actor playing Laertes in Hamlet,” the ghost explained, “I was in my dressing room and nervous—I had just opened a bottle of spirit gum, when my dresser, to calm my nerves, handed me a cup of mulled wine, which I drank in one gulp—only it wasn’t the mulled wine, it was the spirit gum! I pasted my guts together and glued myself to death!”
He goes on to explain that as punishment for his stupidity, the ghost of this terrible actor was constrained to haunt Covent Gardens for eternity or until he could act better or at least well enough to discourage audiences from booing him and tossing things at him.
And I try. At the very end of our show, so that I might rest in peace, I attempted one more time to “act better.” I struck a pose, declaimed, “To be or not to be”—and was immediately met by a barrage of foodstuff.
Without warning me, our devilish director, Blake Edwards, having faith I would come up with a suitable last line, instructed the crew and the vendors to pummel me with as much fruit, tomatoes, and vegetables as possible—and they did! I was really surprised but managed to come up with a button for the scene. I laughed triumphantly and shouted, “My acting has improved. Tonight, much less garbage was thrown at me!”
In that same show, Dick and I did another sketch—a traditional English Christmas pantomime that required us to dress as women. In my years with Sid Caesar, we assiduously avoided wearing women’s clothes. Dressing in drag was Milton Berle’s domain.
The one thing I learned from that experience is that I made for a very unattractive woman—but, I daresay, a more attractive one than Dick will ever be—and Dick concurred.
At our first meeting at Longchamps, I did perceive that young Julie was right for a particular role, but I never could have foreseen that she would go on to become one of the most celebrated, admired, and beloved performers of our time. Nor did I have an inkling that one day, she and her daughter Emma would become bestselling authors of delightful children’s books. I feel that Julie Andrews, had she kept her Mary Popp
ins umbrella, could, if she chose to, still fly over rooftops.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I Am Cleveland
At lunch a few months ago, an old friend, Joe Smith, the legendary record mogul and one of the producers and promoters of The 2000 Year Old Man album, asked if I had any thoughts of retiring.
“Retire?” I said. “Right now, I am writing a memoir, and recently I played small parts on two very popular television series.”
I mentioned too that I had recently performed on a CD as Albert Einstein in The Universal Properties of Acceleration, written by my nephew, Barry Lebost.
To play the great mathematician, I wore a wig that a Cleveland toupee-maker had presented to me thirty years ago. When I thought of the two television shows on which I have roles and of Albert Einstein’s Cleveland-made wig, a small bell tinkled in my hearing aid. I realized that in this past year or so, Cleveland has become an integral part of my life. Besides donning Einstein’s Cleveland-wrought wig, I had a recurring role as Max in Hot in Cleveland, and in the animated The Cleveland Show, I give voice to Murray.
Albert, Max, and Murray! I have been given the opportunity to portray three distinct and clever, old Jewish men and, as a bonus, one of these old Jews has had the opportunity to kiss Betty White—thrice—and on the lips!
Retire? I may be old but I am not crazy!
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Homer’s Major Contribution to Scientology
The Homer referred to in the title is not the revered, epic poet who lived in Greece from 800 BC to 733 BC but the beloved Great Pyrenees-Australian shepherd who lived in California, from 1981 AD to 1992 AD. There is no record of the weight and height of the great Greek philosopher, but the Great Pyrenees stood three feet high and weighed 126 pounds—and from whence did Homer the dog come? Hearken.
