Funny Letters From Famous People

by Charles Osgood

  So, Fred, I say to hell with the U.S. mails. I would be deeply indebted to you if you would write your congressman asking him to vote against any further appropriations for the post office. Without funds this monster would soon wither away and die and I could then spend my declining years with an empty wastebasket and a light heart.

  Fred’s reply came several weeks later:

  dear groucho—

  your recent letter, complaining about the quality of fan mail you have been receiving, has had to await a reply until your problem had been thoroughly mulled. unlike cider mulling, this takes time, the man bent on mulling a batch of cider merely heats his poker, or his shish kebab lance, over an open fire and plunges it into his cider. a man who mulls over a letter may be busy mulling for weeks.

  it seems to me that your dilemma is posed by high standards. you cater to a class of radio and tv owner who can write. when you appeal to a literate element, people who not only own radio and tv sets but who also own pens and pencils and know how to use them, you have to expect mail.

  if you are going to eliminate mail you cannot hope to do it through closing up the post office and the postal department. without the post office politicians would have no places to put their brothers-in-law. you can only stop this avalanche of fan mail through lowering your standards and going after the illiterate crowd.

  Hermione Gingold

  ACTRESS HERMIONE GINGOLD once got a nasty letter complaining that her performance in Fallen Angel was “a disgusting exhibition” and “a slur on English womanhood.” Oddly, the letter was signed “A Friend.” Gingold’s reply appeared in her book Sirens Should Be Seen and Not Heard:

  Dear Friend,

  How clever and capricious you are, cloaking yourself in anonymity, and I must confess I cannot for the life of me guess which of my many friends you can be. You have sent my head spinning and my imagination whirling. Could you be found among my dear friends, intimate friends, close friends, childhood friends, pen friends, family friends, friends of a friend, friends in distress, friends who are closer than a brother, friends in need, or school friends? Your letter quite clearly shows that you are not illiterate, and therefore we can rule out my school friends. Your masterly command of the language banishes the thought that you could be found among my friends from overseas. Your witty criticism of my performance makes me think that I might find you amongst my nearest and dearest “bosom friends,” that is, if you did not choose to address me as “Dear Madam”—a clever move this, and one that reduces my last thought to mere stupidity and you to a “casual acquaintance.”

  An awful thought has dawned—it is all a joke—and you aren’t really my friend at all. I must try to dismiss this thought. It depresses me. To lose a friend like you in a few words, oh no.

  So, dear anonymous friend, if this should chance to meet your eye, please keep your promise and come round one night—yes, and bring your friends, too, for I know intuitively that your friends will be my friends.

  Cordially yours,

  Hermione Gingold

  Bob Hope

  DURING THE FILMING of Fancy Pants, Bob Hope was thrown from a prop horse. Although he wasn’t seriously injured, he underwent a series of complicated medical examinations and tests. Afterward, he wrote the following letter to Paramount head Henry Ginsburg:

  Dear Henry:

  I want to thank you for your kindness during my recent illness and tell you that you did not have to do it, I wasn’t going to sue.… Inasmuch as you are going to have to explain my $4,500 doctor bills at the next stockholders’ meeting (assuming you are still with the company), I think I should explain that they are not out of line.

  You and I know that in the old days when a man fell on his back, he got up, tightened his belt, and walked back into the bar.… But medicine has made great strides during our generation. When I woke up in the hospital, four nurses were standing over me, a doctor was feeling my pulse, and a specialist was busy on the phone checking with the bank to see how much we would go for.

  Then they started the tests which you find on Page Three of the bill.… Meantime, no one would tell me how I was doing. Finally I picked up the phone, got an outside wire, called the hospital, and asked how Bob Hope was doing. I’d taken a turn for the worse.… We’ve sure come a long ways from sulphur and molasses.

  B.H.

  Eddie Cantor and Florenz Ziegfeld

  THE LEGENDARY SHOWMAN Florenz Ziegfeld was well known for his constant and frantic use of the telephone and telegram. He would often send his performers telegrams after watching their work from the back of the theater, offering criticisms or suggestions. Once, when Eddie Cantor was playing Kid Boots in Chicago, he received a twelve-page telegram from Ziegfeld with a variety of suggestions, from line changes to the removal of an entire song, and remarks about the other performers, certain scenes that needed attention, and so forth. The entire telegram was such a jumble of questions, Cantor knew that to address each question would result in the longest telegraphed interchange ever conducted. So he simply wired back:

  Yes.

  This did nothing to deter Ziegfeld, who promptly fired off another telegram, twice as long as the previous missive, which ended:

  What do you mean, Yes? Do you mean yes you will take out the song, or yes you will put in the lines, or yes you will fix that scene? Or yes you have talked to the other actors?

  Cantor wired back:

  No.

  Andy Rooney

  ANDY ROONEY could be called the greatest curmudgeon of our time. And even at his crankiest, he can be riotously funny.

  He’s justly famous for being able to summon strong—and often contrary—opinions about practically everything on the planet. Here, in a letter to a Ms. Worth, he gives it to poetry—but good!

  Dear Ms. Worth,

  Thank you for your invitation to the poetry reading next Tuesday evening at the YMCA, by what you call “three outstanding local versifiers.”

  I don’t understand most poems when they’re printed, even after I’ve read them over several times. If I don’t understand a poem in print, how could I understand a poem that’s read aloud just once, and often poorly, by its author?

  I don’t like to sound like a know-nothing but it is my opinion that most of the people who like to call themselves poets are no more poets than all the people who paint pictures are artists.

  I don’t know when poets decided the end of one line doesn’t have to rhyme with the end of the next one—or, at the very least, the one after that. To me, if it doesn’t rhyme, it isn’t poetry Robert Frost said; “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”

  Carl Sandburg, whose work I often confuse with Robert Frost’s, said “poetry is a spot halfway between where you listen and where you wonder what it was you heard.”

  I still read some poetry in Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker just to make sure I still don’t like it. I don’t know whether it’s my lack of taste or lack of intellect that fails to attract me to modern poetry. I’m careful to say “modern” because there are hundreds of old poems and books of poetry that I like and reread. Most of what I like rhymes. Modern poets feel superior to poets, new and old, whose verses rhyme. They are brothers-in-art to the painters who don’t feel that what they put on canvas has to be OF anything. All of it, the paint and the poetry has so much hidden meaning that it hurts my teeth to think of.

  Some newspapers print poems regularly. They are often either unintelligible or just plain bad. I’d like to meet an editor who chooses the poetry and ask him a few questions.

  “Am I not a person of average intelligence who

  should be able to comprehend a poem?”

  “Why don’t I?”

  “Am I culturally retarded?”

  “Heaven forbid and I hardly dare mention it but … are you sure it isn’t the poet’s fault?”

  “Is there any possibility that the poet conned you, the editor, into thinking there was more content to his words than is
apparent to me from reading them?”

  When I was in high school, I could get all choked up reading Edna St. Vincent Millay. In her later years she wrote about getting old.

  “I only know that summer sang in me

  A little while, that in me sings no more.”

  Pardon me for saying so, Edna, but now that I’m old it strikes me as pretentious hot air. Life—summer, winter, fall, or spring—sings in me as it always did and I don’t want the music to stop.

  I’ll tell you why I think poets write lines whose meaning isn’t clear. I think that they don’t have a clear idea themselves of what it is they’re trying to say. I further think that if they did have a clear idea and wrote it down clearly as prose, it wouldn’t amount to much.

  Tell me I’m wrong but explain clearly why. Poets themselves have always been defensive about poetry. In college I read Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry.” Shelley was a poet I understood and I wonder if he’d defend the modern poets?

  Maybe you could make the readings by the three poets more interesting next week to people who don’t care much for poetry, by making a contest out of it. Give two prizes—one to the poet who reads best and another to the one whose poems are judged to be the best. A crass contest like that might bring the poets back down to earth.

  Here Rooney turns his curmudgeonly attention to “celebrity cookbooks.” His own explanatory headnote precedes the letter:

  Anyone whose name is known to more than ten people gets frequent requests from people assembling what they call “a celebrity cookbook.” Years ago I got one from a columnist for the New York Times, Enid Nemy, whose work I had read and admired. She said she was putting together a book of favorite potato recipes of well-known people and would like a contribution from me.

  In a moment of pique, I put down an outrageously impractical recipe for “Baked Potato Ice Cream” and sent it to her with a note:

  Dear Enid,

  When dinner is over and I disappear into the kitchen my guests invariably start chatting incoherently in anxious anticipation of what I’ve prepared for dessert. (Do I have the genre so far?)

  Although I hesitate to select one potato recipe as my best I must say that I get a great many favorable comments on my potato ice cream. Don’t serve this to guests who are calorie conscious.

  Take four large Idaho potatoes. Peel them, setting the peels aside. Cut the potatoes longwise into half-inch slices. Discard the rounded top and bottom slices. Place the stack of slices, which now have a flat surface, on the cutting board and slice them again, producing long fingers of potato. Turn these parallel to the edge of the cutting board and slice them once more into small cubes.

  In six cups of water, to which you have added a cup and a quarter of sugar, simmer the potato cubes until the water evaporates and one of the cubes adheres to a single chopstick. Place cooked potatoes in blender with two cups of heavy cream and a dash of paprika for color and blend until well … blended. My mother, who taught me how to make this, used to serve it to us as a treat when we were good.

  Pour the potato mixture into a divided ice cube tray and place in freezer. If you have a microwave freezer, all the better. When mixture begins to thicken, but before it hardens, insert one toothpick in each and continue freezing. Mixtures should be of such consistency that the toothpick stands upright. When toothpick no longer pulls out easily or turns blue, the potato ice cream cubes are ready. Plan on three cubes per guest and serve with a bowl of rich chocolate sauce for dipping.

  After dinner, throw out the potato peels.

  Imagine Rooney’s sheer incredulity when Nemy’s editor called him six weeks later to ask him in all seriousness how many people this preposterous recipe would serve. The publisher included the recipe in Nemy’s book, and when Nemy found out the recipe was a parody, she was so furious that she stopped speaking to Rooney.

  A woman named Susan Parris, assembling her own celebrity cookbook to benefit her son’s school, heard about the potato ice cream fiasco and chastised Rooney in a letter. His reply:

  Mrs. Susan Connolly Parris

  Trenton, New Jersey

  Dear Mrs. Parris,

  There’s a great deal of idiocy about celebrity in America and I have no desire to contribute to it. Enid Nemy is a big girl now and if she undertook to collect a cookbook she should, at the very least, have known enough about food to recognize a joke when she read one.

  I don’t think any responsible publisher would issue a cookbook without having kitchen-tested the recipes.

  There are two possibilities:

  1. They tested my recipe for Baked Potato Ice Cream and found it to be delicious.

  2. They knew it was a joke and thought it would be fun to have in a book that no one would take seriously anyway.

  As for your own celebrity cookbook, making an effort may relieve a helpless feeling you have but I suspect the proceeds will amount to less than [what] a few well-directed requests from rich friends would net for your son’s school.

  Sorry we disagree. It’s my opinion celebrity cookbooks are nonsense and should be treated as such.

  As you’d expect, Andy Rooney is inundated with letters from people who have ideas for his 60 Minutes segments. Here’s his reply to one such letter, from a Jacqueline Armstrong:

  Dear Jacqueline,

  When someone sends in an idea, I don’t often respond because the idea is either terrible, I’ve already done it, or they sue if I use it. Several years ago, I was coming up to my office in the elevator on a rainy day. Everyone was dripping and one young woman said, “You ought to do a piece on umbrellas.”

  I did a piece on umbrellas and that’s the last time I recall taking a suggestion from anyone. (The basic problem with umbrellas is, the handle is right in the middle of where you want to stand to stay dry.)

  All that stuff of yours is good but it’s a written piece, not for television. Years ago I did an hour for Harry Reasoner called “The Strange Case of the English Language.” It was fun for me and reasonably successful but the number of people who care about the niceties of usage don’t make a large television audience.

  Two weeks ago I took a piece to Hewitt on the subject of the ways we write our alphabet. Handwritten letters are hard to read because there are too many different ways to form our letters. The small “r” is easily mistaken for an “n.” Capital “D” or capital “R” are ridiculous letters when written with all the flourishes so many people use. Don hated the idea.

  For years, when I write letters, I’ve dropped the apostrophes from words that are unmistakeable without them but I can’t get a publisher to go along with it in a book. “Dont,” “isnt,” “arent,” “wont,” “wasnt.” It’s hard to be consistent though because you need the apostrophe in “she’s,” “we’re,” etc.

  While there isn’t usually as much excuse for writing excess verbiage in a written piece, some fat is understandable and even necessary in spoken English. We all speak faster than people can listen and there has to be some padding in the language to give people time to hear—and ourselves time to get the next thought ready before we say it. Clichés are useful for that purpose, too.

  But thanks. I really did like your ideas.

  Sincerely,

  Andy Rooney

  Rooney really had the last say on why one wouldn’t want to give out autographs. Every night, he throws away eight to ten self-addressed stamped envelopes from people who want an autographed photograph. He wrote an amusing and characteristically rankled letter to an Eleanor Mahoney to explain why:

  Dear Eleanor Mahoney,

  This is in response to your letter asking for my autograph. I don’t sign my name on a sheet of paper for people who ask me to do that and for some reason, your letter has moved me to try to say why.

  If you’re going to succeed, you have to have confidence in yourself and it’s difficult to be confident without being too confident. It amuses me to think that my appraisal of myself is close to what it ought to be. I’m not egotistical b
ut I’m not especially modest.

  It’s best if you can count out what other people say they think of you. Everyone wants people to like them and, generally speaking, we all try to make friends with everyone we meet. We hope they overestimate us. We don’t want them to have an accurate opinion of us. We want them to have a better opinion of us than we deserve. That’s why we smile even though nothing strikes us as funny and we praise them even if they haven’t done much to deserve it. We tell stories about ourselves that make us look good and skip the ones that make us look bad.

  All that may be okay but if we succeed in making people think more highly of us than we deserve, it’s best if we, at least, don’t take their elevated opinion of us seriously.

  I’m recognizable to a lot of people and they write me for my autograph, as you have, because of my regular appearance on television.

  I hope you’ll excuse me for saying that people everywhere, but Americans in particular, have this dumb way of equating celebrity with excellence, competence, and intelligence in everything.

  Those attributes don’t have much to do with being well known. The well-known person usually knows how to do one thing well but he or she is not necessarily a wonderful or exceptionally smart person because of it.

  I’ve almost certainly given a lot of people the impression I’m a conceited jerk because I won’t write my name on the card or piece of paper that they push at me on the street or in a restaurant.

  I was thinking I ought to be clear in my own mind why I won’t give my autograph. To begin with, if it’s important to make an accurate appraisal of yourself, it’s certainly best if you make that appraisal without any help from outside. You shouldn’t put much faith in what other people think of your ability—and that goes both ways, too. You shouldn’t get thinking you’re better than you are because other people think you’re good and you shouldn’t get depressed when other people have a low opinion of your ability. You ought to decide for yourself.