CHAPTER FOUR
BOO-BOOS, BLUNDERS & UTTER CATASTROPHES
Whenever I'm asked what a TV comedy writer's job was like back when variety was king, people most often refer to the old "Dick Van Dyke Show" where Rob, Buddy and Sally sat in an office trying to think up funny lines for their star, Alan Brady, to deliver. While actual joke writing did make up about half of the job, the other half was often devoted to heading off disasters of one kind or another. Comedy, like any activity performed in public for pay, is fraught with hidden dangers.
London Derriere
London, April 1979. It's the day before we're scheduled to tape an hour-long special, An Evening at the Palladium, for a black-tie audience that will include Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Gig Henry and I are going over the script with Hope in his dressing room and, as invariably happened when he was about to perform for royalty, he's wrestling with some last-minute jitters.
Also present are executive producers Sid Vinnage and Elliott Kozak and a British writing team who had been hired to assist us, Dick Vosburgh and Gary Chambers.
The phone rings. Hope picks it up and on the other end of the line is one of our guest stars, Richard Burton, whose voice fills the room even though it's not a speaker-phone. It seems that Dick's "people" (read: new wife of some three weeks, one of Burton's "between Liz" marriages) don't think it's in the actor's best interest to be doing a love scene with costar Raquel Welch in a sketch we'd prepared for them -- a parody of the popular PBS series "Upstairs, Downstairs" that we had re-titled "Backstairs at Buckingham Palace."
Hope cups his hand over the mouthpiece and asks us if we can rewrite the sketch omitting the kissing. We all shake our heads "no" -- if the love scenes go, there's no sketch. Hope tells Burton he'll get back to him and hangs up.
We carefully go over the sketch line-by-line just to be sure and Hope agrees that, unless Burton has lip privileges with the downstairs chambermaid, we'll have to write a whole new sketch and time, as they say over there, is frightfully short.
The phone rings again. Hope cups the receiver and whispers to us, "It's Larry Olivier. He wants to know if he can help in any way." (Olivier wasn't even on the show, but word of our "problem" had leaked out and he called from his home outside London.)
Hope gets an idea. He calls Burton back and asks him if it would help if the chambermaid were someone other than Raquel. Several minutes elapse while Dick again checks with his people. That would solve the problem very nicely, he tells Hope. Good-bye, Raquel.
Vinnege starts calling his British contacts and soon locates actress Susan George who's appearing in a stage play about three hundred miles south of London. Susan, an experienced performer who had become known to American movie audiences costarring with Dustin Hoffman in "Straw Dogs," finishes her matinee and arrives at the Palladium just hours before showtime.
After a quick rehearsal, she bravely goes on for Raquel and ends up sharing equal billing with Welch, Burton and Leslie Uggams. Later, Raquel explains to a group of British reporters that she had withdrawn from the sketch because she was unhappy with the material. For once, the comedy factory was happy to take the rap.
"Two Vikings go into a bar..."
To be sure, unforeseen problems bedeviled every show to one degree or another, but by far the most ill-fated special Hope ever produced was taped at the Oscars Theater in Stockholm before Sweden's King Carl Gustav and Queen Sylvia in February, 1986.
Billed as a command performance, Hope had agreed to emcee the black-tie gala, the proceeds of which were to go to the king's favorite charity, the Children's International Summer Village. Hope would host the show and in return own the American rights which he'd license to NBC for, it was hoped, a tidy profit. Prospects for this looked excellent since most of the production expenses would be picked up by the Swedish government.
But even before the Scandinavian Airlines 747 had been loaded with our luggage at LAX, the hex kicked in. As Gene Perret and I sat in the executive lounge putting the finishing touches on a Viking sketch we were confident would have the fun-loving Swedes in hysterics from Goteborg to Lapland, producers Elliott Kozak and Dick Arlett came in and hit us between the eyes with the news that Sweden's Prime Minister, Olaf Palme, had just been assassinated while walking his dog on a Stockholm street.
The room fell silent. Glenn Campbell, who had been sitting across from us noodling a few licks, put down his guitar and stared ahead blankly. Only moments before, we had entered the lounge filled with excited anticipation of what promised to be a fun-filled and interesting journey to a land few of us had visited.
Two other troubadours who would appear on the show, Shirley Jones and Emanuel Lewis looked on in shock as transatlantic phone calls were hurriedly made to decide whether the show would be canceled. Our departure was pushed ahead an hour while we all sat biting our collective show business fingernails.
Shortly, word arrived directly from the king: Since preparations for the gala were set (the invitations had already been sent out), postponing the performance, ruled the Monarch, would cause world-class headaches all around. The show, as they say, must go on. (Where this old saw originated, I have no idea, but there are instances where it flies in the face of common sense and this was, undoubtedly, one of them.)
Picture, if you will, taping the Colgate Comedy Hour just three days following the death of JFK. Same problem -- similar reaction. The entire Swedish nation had been plunged into mourning. On our drive from the airport, we could see people lining the street, carrying candles and holding bouquets of flowers they'd place beside the spot on the frozen sidewalk where the PM had fallen.
A leaden pall hung over the capital -- literally and figuratively. Ships in the harbor stood at anchor, rigid and icebound -- prisoners of a climate that almost half of the year chills the bones and, one suspects, is no small contributor to the highest suicide rate in all of Scandinavia.
But forget all that. The assembled glitterati applauded dutifully as the king and queen were escorted to the royal box. The show began with a rambling, largely incomprehensible introduction of Hope by Swedish actress Liv Ullman. It was obvious that she would have preferred being somewhere else and who could blame her?
Hope did his best to deliver his usual opening monologue, but had about as much luck getting laughs as the keynote speaker at a pet euthanasia seminar. The evening's slate of performers -- Boy George and the Culture Club, Omar Sheriff, Dolf Lundgren, Scott Grimes as well as Glenn, Emanuel and Shirley -- carried on like the pros they are, but the project was doomed from the start. It was like watching the lounge act on the Hindenburg. It was a wake with entertainment.
As fellow writer Gene Perret and I stood offstage, puzzled why our carefully crafted Viking jokes were getting a cooler reception than Jesse Helms at a Abortion Rights rally, one of the Swedish technicians pointed out that we had named Hope's Viking character, Olaf. In all the confusion, no one had caught what now appeared to be a tasteless and insensitive joke. There was no time to re-shoot the sketch that, mercifully, ended up on the cutting room floor and was never seen by the American TV audience. Would that the whole show had been left there.
I should have suspected that the special was doomed back in L.A. when I arrived at LAX without my passport and was allowed to enter Sweden just by flashing my California driver's license. But that's another story.
Seashell Shocked
The season following the debacle in Stockholm, it was decided that we should get right back on the horse before we lost our nerve. And what more relaxing locale in which to regain our confidence than lush, tropical Tahiti? Well, it sounded good on paper, anyway.
Once again, our co-producers were Elliott Kozak and Dick Arlett -- could these guys have been carrying around a voodoo curse? They had arranged what appeared to be a mutually beneficial promotional arrangement with America-Hawaii Cruises.
The hour-long special would include guest stars John Denver, Howard Keel, Jonathan Winters, Morgan Brittany, and the reigning Miss America, Susan Aiken. It would be taped in and around Morea and the island chain's capital, Papeete. Hope would perform an eight minute monologue from the promenade deck of the cruise ship S.S. Liberte that was docked in Cook's Bay.
We were in a tropical paradise known the world over for its crystal-clear lagoons and azure blue beaches crawling with topless, grass skirted beauties renowned for their warmth, charm and indigenous friendliness. What could possibly go wrong?
Well for starters, Hope, introduced from off-deck, strode out in a straw hat and multicolored Hawaiian shirt and began his monologue with this line: "Here we are aboard the S.S. Liberte on the island of Morea. S.S. Liberte. Spend a few days on a cruise liner and you'll understand what the "S.S." stands for -- 'Swingin' Ship.'" The audience, huddled together on deck chairs, stared back at Hope like they'd just been struck by an iceberg. If this bunch had ever done any swinging, it was during the Roaring Twenties.
And their roar was down to a whisper. We had written a monologue for the Love Boat and it was being delivered on the S.S. Geriatric. In our rush to get aboard and set up, no one had bothered to check the passenger manifest and now, since the vessel was scheduled to depart within hours. it was too late to regroup (shades of Stockholm). So Hope had no choice but to press on, hoping that we could edit in some canned laughter back home.
"This is the Liberte which means "freedom" in French and judging from all the cabin hopping I heard last night, it's well named." Again, the audience hasn't a clue as to what he's talking about. If they had done any cabin hopping the night before, it was to borrow a cup of Metamucil from a neighbor.
As Gene and I stood at the railing seriously considering jumping ship, Hope glanced over at us with a look that said, "I should have become an accountant." But Gene, ever cheerful, mouthed the words, "Keep going. You're doing great." Hope did, but he wasn't. "One guy's been so busy at night, he couldn't remember where his own compartment was. He just found out it's on another ship."
Right about now, Hope looks like he'd prefer to be on another one, too. "One gal asked the captain to perform a marriage ceremony and showed up with four guys. The captain said, 'Which one's the groom?' And she said, 'Don't rush me.'" At last, a huge round of applause from a group of couples celebrating fiftieth wedding anniversaries. After a few more jokes, the bellman announces that it's time for another buffet, the audience files out en mass and we hold an impromptu burial-at-sea for the monologue.
We had learned the hard way that Hope's on deck performances worked best when the audience was in uniform. Several months later, the cruise line declared bankruptcy and the Liberte was sold at auction, refitted, repainted and renamed. We never found out if we had anything to do with it.
Things began to look up when we settled into our assigned accommodations on Morea -- thatched huts on stilts tucked among the volcanic ash and pearl white sand of a beach that a few decades earlier had made Gauguin relocate. Each suite had its own waterfall/shower carved from coral and at high season rates of $400 a day, they were a cut above Holiday Inn.
Every morning, Gene and I did most of our writing at the long, open-air bar overlooking a beach where halter tops appeared to be illegal. But somehow we managed to put the finishing touches on comedy bits for Jonathan (in which he'd portray an American tourist, a Tahitian politician and a French chef) as well as our "Mutiny on the Bounty" sketch.
Along with our comedy colleagues who were holding down the fort back home, we had been hammering away at the script for several weeks. The plan was to tape the sketch aboard an exact replica of the legendary schooner that had been built by director Dino de Laurentis for his movie version of the epic tale.
Unfortunately our happy ship would run aground, but not before a preliminary bout with the weather. On our final night in Morea, Howard Keel was scheduled to sing "Some Enchanted Evening" at the same location Rosanno Brazzi had performed Bali Hai in the movie South Pacific. The taping was to begin precisely at sundown so that when Howard hit the final eight bars, the golden orb would be tucking itself behind the aforementioned mountain. Dramatic. Beautiful. And technically tricky.
Our director, Walter Miller, would have only one shot at it and, if anything went wrong, he'd get no second chance -- we're out of there the next day.
Just before Howard arrived to go to work, a few clouds formed in the otherwise pristine sky. Though they blocked our view of the mountain, they looked fluffy and harmless to the crew -- a form of wishful thinking common among men who depend on light for their livelihood.
All at once, the sky parted and dumped enough rain on our little party to turn Death Valley into a Raging Waters theme park. The equipment was quickly covered and everyone sprinted for cover. The producers convened an emergency summit meeting to devise Plan B. It's quickly calculated that, without Howard's number, we don't have enough show. We'll just have to shoot the scene back in Burbank in front of a picture of the Bali Hai mountain.
But Howard has an idea: Would the audience notice the difference between a sunset and a sunrise if they see only three minutes of it? Why don't we tape the number, reasons Howard, when the sun comes up? Howard's inventive nature earned him a four-thirty a.m. wakeup call, but the number went off in the crisp, clear post-monsoon morn without a hitch. If you should ever see a rerun of the show, look carefully; the evening is so enchanted it gets lighter instead of darker.
Now we headed to the Bounty which was anchored in a lagoon on the opposite side of the island. Our richly-costumed period sketch would feature Hope as the cruel, crew-beating Captain Bligh, Howard as the ship's doctor, Susan Aiken as his nurse, Morgan Fairchild as the prim, schoolmarm passenger, John Denver as the young, Wahini-smitten Fletcher Christian and Jonathan Winters as his tribal chief, soon-to-be father-in-law. Even under ideal studio conditions, accommodating such a large cast on the small screen is a tall order for any director and Walter Miller, one of the best, had his hands full with this one.
While the ship had been satisfactory for de Laurentis who had the time to set up multiple camera shots, it was quickly apparent that it wasn't big enough to do our sketch on. People were a lot smaller in the eighteenth century and everything was about three-quarter scale. In many of the scenes, members of the cast were sardined on her decks tighter than Cuban boat people; they looked like they were performing in a telephone booth.
Walter tried setup after setup, trying to create the illusion of size and depth. As a result of these problems, the taping ran long and the entire company was scheduled to depart that evening. A few crew members were sent back to our hotel-on-stilts to pack for those who had to remain to get the sketch, such as it was, in the can.
Finally, at about four p.m., Walter yelled "Cut! That's a wrap!" The cameras, lighting and sound paraphernalia were stowed into dockside trucks in record time. Electronic equipment hadn't disappeared that fast since the L.A. riots. Everyone raced to the waiting busses which would convey us to the harbor where the swiftest picket boat on the island was standing by.
We arrived at the airport in Papeete with only minutes to spare but as it turned out, our plane was grounded in New Zealand with mechanical problems and wouldn't arrive until the next day. At this point, Howard called a panic alert. He was due on the set of Dallas in less than forty-eight hours to film some key scenes. If he was delayed in Tahiti, it would cost the producers (and him after the lawsuit) hundreds of thousands of dollars. A smiling Quantas representative assured him that the plane would arrive in the morning as promised.
We were given our hotel assignments; a night's free lodging was offered by the airline as a gesture of apology for our inconvenience. They also threw in a free phone call so we could notify our next-of-kin of the delay. "Swell," responded a tired, hungry and Bounty-weary Jonathan. "I'll call my brother. He's dead."
Our patched up 747 arrived on schedule and Howard made it to Culver City with minutes to spare. And you thought show business was fun.
Joke-to-joke Resuscitation
Sometimes, problems waited to arise until after a show had been taped which made them even more troublesome and costly. One year, we did a Halloween special on which one of the guests was Cassandra Petterson, an actress who played an Addams-like character named Elvira.
We had written a sketch parodying the popular sitcom "Cheers," casting Cassandra as a customer in the bar opposite Hope who played the show's original bartender, Coach. The character was portrayed on the sitcom by Nick Callesandro (who was succeeded by Woody Harrelson). In the sketch, Cassandra entered the bar and said to Hope after looking him up and down, "Nice job. Who's your undertaker?"
Our Halloween special was set to air on a Sunday night, but on the previous Friday, Callesandro suffered a massive heart attack at his home in Burbank and was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital where he was pronounced dead.
Only minutes after the news of his passing was broadcast, my phone rang. It was Hope with instructions to call all the writers and have them begin working on a replacement line that could be over-dubbed onto the master tape which had already been delivered to the network.
In the meantime, he said, he would notify Cassandra to meet us at the sound studio for the emergency looping session. The line we were to come up with not only had to make sense in the context of the sketch, but it also had to match as closely as possible the actress's lip movements.
We tried five or six replacements until everyone settled on "Nice job. Did your makeup man quit?" The syllables matched perfectly and even on a large studio monitor, it was difficult to tell that her voice had been superimposed.
It was only a small change, but Hope had gone to the trouble and expense of fixing the line, knowing that failure to do so might make him appear crass and unfeeling to a television audience unaware that segments of so-called "live" shows are often taped well in advance. When it came to protecting his image in the eyes of the public, Hope's judgment was usually sound.
But not always. One day, the phone rang and it was Hope in need of a quick joke fix. It was a Friday afternoon about four and he was scheduled to appear as a guest on the Tonight Show which in those days began taping at five-thirty. He was at home in his makeup chair with makeup and hair man, Don Marando performing his usual duties.
Hope had just learned that the guest following him -- he always insisted that Carson bring him on first -- was comedian Richard Pryor who would be making his first television appearance since his near-fatal encounter with an exploding crack pipe some nine months earlier. Pryor had undergone extensive skin grafts to his face, neck and chest at the top-rated Sherman Oaks Burn Center and his slow and painful rehabilitation had been covered extensively in the press -- coverage which Hope had somehow missed, I was about to find out.
A member of the Tonight Show staff had called with a special request from Johnny that Hope remain for an additional segment -- "move one down on the couch" as they used to say -- during Carson's interview with Pryor. Now Hope was to go on television in little over an hour and while we had already provided him with plenty of "ad-libs" to trade with Johnny, he had no jokes relating to Pryor.
It was a situation in which he always felt vulnerable and unprepared. To him, having a few lines in his pocket to cover every situation was like an insurance policy.
I assured Hope that Pryor's appearance wouldn't be packed with laughs since he'd be relating a near-death experience, hardly a topic for levity. Hope disagreed. He didn't believe that Pryor's injuries had been that serious and he wanted something witty to say when the two shook hands. "Like what?" I asked, unable to envision anything even remotely appropriate to the moment.
"Something like this," he said. "Tell me, Richard, how did it feel playing your own birthday cake?" I was stunned. I knew he couldn't get away with a line like that and told him so.
"You're wrong," he insisted. "His accident wasn't that big a deal." Even if it weren't, I pointed out, the public perceived it as life-threatening and any flippant reference to it would make him appear heartless, unfeeling and worse, stupid.
I stood firm. Hope was stubborn, but you could argue with him if you were fairly sure you were on solid ground. He appealed to Don whom I could hear in the background supporting my position. Reluctantly, Hope gave up on the idea of doing a joke, but continued to insist that we were both wrong.
That night I taped the Tonight Show and the next morning watched as Johnny finished with Hope (who managed to slip in a few of our jokes) and introduced Pryor who, slowly and obviously still in considerable pain, came through the curtain wearing a ball cap to hide his unhealed scars. He appeared genuinely touched as the audience gave him a minute-long standing ovation as Hope stood beside him with a look that said, "Boy, did I dodge the bullet."
"Did I really say that?"
His occasional lapses of good judgment could get Hope in hot water with members of his comedy factory as well. I had been on the payroll only a short time when my wife, Shelley, and I were invited to London along with other staff members and their wives for a royal command performance that Hope would host.
We were the guests of Sir Lew Grade (now Lord Grade), a cigar-chomping transplanted former vaudevillian who became one of England's most successful producers, attained the rank of unofficial czar of show business there, accumulated millions and was knighted.
Grade was an old pal of Hope's and was set to produce "The Road to the Fountain of Youth" before the sudden death of Bing Crosby.
We taped the show at the London Palladium and it aired in the US several weeks later. Charlie Lee (who had passed on the free trip) spotted a joke in Hope's monologue that he considered anti-Semitic and at a writers meeting a few days later, told him so.
Hope defended the line and told Charlie that he had tested the joke among his friends, none of whom had objected to it.
"What on God's green earth," demanded Charlie, "would your white bread and mayonnaise buddies know about anti-Semitism?" (Charlie never pulled any punches with the boss and had gotten away with it during his twenty-five years on the staff because he was such a good writer.)
"Now, wait a minute, Charlie," Hope pleaded, trying to calm him down. "I even checked the joke with Lew Grade who said it was perfectly okay." Now Charlie was livid. "Lew Grade," he shot back, "hasn't been a Jew for thirty years!"
This was the joke. You be the judge: "Isn't it great that the Jews and the Arabs are getting back together again? I mean, the Arabs couldn't have gone on buying retail forever."
The joke hadn't been submitted to Hope by any member of the comedy factory. Hope had picked it up somewhere in the course of his travels. He enjoyed trading the latest raunchy stories going around with a telephone network of cronies that at one time had included Ronald Reagan, Tip O'Neill, Dan Rostenkowski, General William Westmoreland, Stuart Symington and for a brief time in the early sixties, JFK.
Hope loved a good joke from whatever source, but whenever he veered very far afield from his prepared material, the consequences could be disastrous.
In the summer of 1983, he agreed to deliver a ten-minute routine during a charity benefit aboard the Princess, an elegant, destroyer-sized yacht owned by Donald Trump and anchored in New York harbor. On the vessel that night was the A-list of New York society led by Governor Hugh Carey.
During the cocktail reception preceding dinner, Hope visited the restroom where another guest, docked at an adjoining urinal, told him a joke he'd just heard. (Something that happens often to comedians and comedy writers -- "Hey, maybe you can use this!")
Both men laughed heartily and Hope decided that the line might, indeed, be a welcome addition to his factory-prepared material. It was tailor made for a New York crowd, he reasoned, since it concerned one of their proudest landmarks, the Statue of Liberty.
So, several minutes into his routine, he casually dropped in a joke that would reverberate for months and let loose something Hope was unaccustomed to -- an avalanche of adverse publicity. He said: "Hey, have you heard? The Statue of Liberty has AIDS. Nobody knows if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Ferry."
The following morning, a reporter for the New York Times led off with the gaff in his coverage of the event and the worms, as they say, exited the can. Ward Grant, Hope's faithful publicity man and spin-meister extraordinaire quickly drafted a press release explaining that the line had been misinterpreted, taken out of context or some such inane excuse PR men must come up with whenever a client finds himself munching on a mouthful of foot.
But the incident would require more than the standard damage control. Gay and lesbian groups across the country demanded a formal apology. After the furor refused to disappear, Hope apologized and promised that in the future, he'd be more sensitive to gay issues.
He'd later appear at several charity benefits for AIDS at the behest of Elizabeth Taylor. (The incident recalled the bad press that resulted back in 1971 when Hope was quoted in a Life Magazine cover story as having said: "The Vietnam War is a beautiful thing -- we paid in a lot of gorgeous American lives, but we're not sorry for it.")
Throughout his career, Hope avoided making many mistakes that would draw the public's ire, but whenever he did, they were beauties. He had learned the hard way that as advancing age was putting him more and more out-of-touch with the sensitivities of his audience, he'd best stick to the script. He realized, wisely, that his days of ad-libbing a joke that hadn't been written for him were over.
("Inside Bob Hope's Comedy Factory" (c) Copyright, 1996 Robert L. Mills)
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