When Star Search went off the air I found myself without a television show for the first time in my professional career. From the day I'd begun at WCAU in Philadelphia, September 12, 1949—except for the time I'd spent in Korea—I'd always been under contract to a network or a show. I had assumed Star Search would continue indefinitely. We'd become a major attraction at Disney World, and what could be more permanent than that? So being without a show was very strange for me. And I didn't like the feeling at all. As much as I tried to dismiss the thought, I couldn't help but wonder if my career was over.
Maybe the most difficult thing for me to deal with was free time. For me, time had always been just like money—I spent just a little more of it than I had. I was always busy, always going from one appointment to the next. But with the end of Star Search I actually had time to do whatever I wanted to do—unfortunately, what I really wanted to do was have every minute of my day filled.
Johnny Carson's retirement allowed him to fulfill his passionate love of tennis; he had time to play the game and follow the professional tour around the world. My passion— besides my wife, Pam, and my children—was broadcasting. Same as it had been when I was a child. And one thing you can't do when you retire is work.
I've never had a real hobby. Tennis, for example, Johnny's passion, never really interested me. I've tried golf because I wanted to play with friends like Newhart and Dick Martin. I bought a set of clubs, joined the Bel Air Country Club, and took lessons. I always hit the ball a long way, unfortunately even when I was putting. I'm not good at not being good at something. I get frustrated. After one particularly bad day, I emptied my locker, resigned from the club, and gave my beautiful clubs, gloves, shoes, and golf balls to Patrick Marwick, who loved golf, telling him, "From now on, you're my designated golfer."
I don't think I realized how bad I was until I lost a putting contest to a . . . blind golfer. Please note the judicious use of the pause right there. This contest took place at my golf tournament. I may well be the only nongolfer to have had his own celebrity golf tournament. The Quad Cities Open, played in the cities of Bettendorf and Davenport, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, was having difficulty surviving because it was played annually on the same weekend as the British Open. The local Jaycees hoped they could draw attention to the tournament by attracting celebrities. Now, they realized that my greatest strength as a golfer was that I made a great host. I was great after we finished the first eighteen holes. So I became the host of the Ed McMahon Quad Cities Open. And the plan worked: among the celebrities who came to play in my tournament were Bob Hope, Telly Savalas, Buddy Greco, and Tommy Sullivan. Tommy Sullivan is a wonderful singer, and although blind, he is a good golfer and played in the Ed McMahon Open every year.
My third year as host, Tony Amendola, Tommy Sullivan, and I were having dinner with our drinks, and Tony suggested that a putting contest between Tommy and me would attract a lot of publicity. At the time, that seemed like a great idea. It was only when I woke up the next morning that I realized I was in a terrible situation; if I won, I'd beaten a blind man. If I lost, I'd lost to a blind man. How could I explain either result?
Part of me wanted to play for fun, to make it obvious to everyone that I wasn't really trying to win. But I realized that wasn't fair to Tommy. So I played it straight—it's just that my putts didn't go straight. We played eighteen holes on a large putting green. He beat me on the last hole.
I hosted the tournament for five years. I stopped when NBC hired me to go to Russia as a feature reporter during the Moscow Olympics. I was going to do Ivan-on-the-street interviews. That was the year that we boycotted the Olympics in response to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. If I'd gone, just imagine what might have happened to my career! But that was the end of my association with my golf tournament.
With one exception. When I was in Florida with Michael, Jeff, Lex, and my son-in-law Peter, we had our own tournament. I had trophies made for Very Best Golfer, Could Have Been the Best Golfer, Might Have Been the Best Golfer, Possibly Could Have Been the Best Golfer, and Tried Very Hard. I got the trophy for trying.
I was a much better fisherman than golfer. In fact, I was a member of a very exclusive fishing club known as the Skipjacks. When I had my summer house in Avalon, once each year six of us would charter a deep-sea fishing boat with a captain and mate for a day. It cost us about five hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in the late 1960s. We'd start the day with Budweiser for breakfast and when we finished several cases of beer we'd ease into the vodka. For years we didn't catch a single fish. But one day, one incredible day, I was strapped into the deep-sea fishing chair and I got a bite. Everybody got excited, they were all screaming instructions: give him line, yank him in, fight 'im, tire him out. I fought that fish as best as I could. And finally I won, I reeled him in. This was a great moment. We finally caught a fish.
When I got him close to the boat, the mate said, "Oh, it's a goddamn skipjack."
A skipjack is a small fish, it's a cousin of the bonita. I don't swear often, but when I heard the mate say that, I turned to my friends and said, "Five hundred dollars a day, four cases of Bud, six bottles of vodka, and it's a goddamn skipjack?" We unhooked the fish and threw it back in the water. I suspect that fish was embarrassed enough having been caught by me.
That day we decided to form a club called the Skipjacks and vowed that we would never go deep-sea fishing again. More than that, I designed an emblem for the Skipjacks: a big marlin hook, almost life-size, with a marlin leaping through it and looking back in disdain that he hadn't been caught. Underneath it was our motto: pisces non florent, which is Latin for "We saw no fish." I had red, white, and blue jackets made for everyone with our emblem emblazoned on the pocket.
But the real reason I stopped fishing was the relationship I formed with my koi. The house that Carson Wright designed for me on Crescent Drive had a pond that ran under the deck, and I stocked that pond with small Japanese koi. Koi can be extremely valuable, with their price based on their markings. A few years ago a white koi with a red circle on its head—the colors of the Japanese flag—sold for more than one hundred thousand dollars. As a gift, someone gave me a baby koi that when grown was worth about five thousand dollars. Koi are really smart fish. They were like pets. They would eat pellets right out of my hand and I got to know them. When I walked on the deck, they would come rushing toward me from wherever they were, but if anyone else walked out they would ignore them.
Well, after that I couldn't go fishing anymore. I mean, I could still eat fish, I just didn't want to catch them myself.
I've also tried skiing and scuba diving. In fact, one night on The Tonight Show we showed a little home movie of me scuba diving. In this film I was swimming peacefully until I spotted something strange and beautiful and started digging in the soft sand. Finally, I reached down and pulled out . . . a six-pack of Budweiser. As I've stated, my only real hobby is working.
Probably the only positive thing about not having any show at all was that I could devote more time to my charities. I get hundreds of requests every year to participate in charitable events. It's a very nice feeling to be in a position to help others and I try to participate as much as my schedule allows. I'm constantly sending signed ties for auctions and my favorite recipe for inclusion in books and pamphlets. The recipe I send is for my very special turkey stuffing. I've developed it over many Thanksgivings and Christmases, each year adding a new ingredient. Currently it consists of country sausage, mushroom, pineapple wedges, applesauce, marmalade, walnuts, pecans, sage, and parsley flakes bathed in half a bottle of Courvoisier. The Courvoisier gives it a woody taste. I've tried to convince Pam that during cooking the alcohol burns off, but she doesn't believe that.
In addition to being an active fund-raiser for St. Jude's Ranch for Children and the Horatio Alger Association, I've worked for many, many charities, including the Bedside Network, City of Hope, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, various animal shelter organizations, and several college scholarship funds. I'm very proud of the fact that I served two terms as president of the Catholic University Alumni Association. At the time I ran for office a major battle was being fought between conservatives and liberals about the philosophical path the university would follow. Because Catholic University is where many members of the clergy were educated, this wasn't just an intellectual exercise; it really would have an impact on the future of the Catholic Church in America. The liberal faction asked me to run and I won a very close and hard-fought election. During my two terms I think we were able to make important contributions to the modernization of the university.
One of the things I tried to do while serving as alumni president was convince the university to build a modern communications center, complete with studios and radio and TV facilities. It would be a place where priests would learn how to communicate. I mean, the dullest thing in the world is going to Mass and listening to a priest who doesn't know how to connect with his audience.
To initiate the building fund I turned the closing of New York City's historic Capitol Theatre into a benefit for Catholic University's Center for Communication Arts. The Capitol Theatre, at Fifty-first and Broadway, had been built in 1919 as one of the first great movie palaces. It was also where some of the first television cameras recorded the New York City premiere of Gone with the Wind for broadcast on an experimental station. It was fitting that I would produce the closing show, because the first theater manager had been Major Edward Bowes, who later created the amateur talent show on radio that eventually led to Star Search.
It was an incredible event. Bob Hope, who played the Capitol when it was a vaudeville theater, was my entertainment chairman. Jerry Lewis sang a song that had flopped the night the theater opened, "Swanee." Among the other people who appeared were Mr. Carson, Alan King, Florence Henderson, Leon Bibb, Jan Peerce, Billy Eckstine, the entire cast of the Broadway show George M!, Doc and the NBC Orchestra, and the new Miss America, whom I had crowned two weeks earlier in Atlantic City.
After the show the performers rode to a champagne dinner at the Americana Hotel on Anheuser-Busch wagons drawn by the Clydesdales while the audience walked there on a red carpet that had been laid down on Broadway. We sold out and raised almost one hundred thousand dollars to begin the building fund.
Eventually we raised several million dollars, but instead of building the communications center, the university built the beautiful Hartke Theatre. It's a terrific place, and honors an extraordinary human being. There is one room in the building devoted to teaching mass communications and there is an Ed McMahon Scholarship given to a student who intends to go into broadcasting, but I still wish they had built the planned communications center.
Years later I did get my communications center built— but not at Catholic University. My daughter Linda is a very talented musician. She plays the flute, piano, and guitar. Now, believe me, this story does result in a mass communications center. She wanted to go to a college where she could study jazz. I spoke to the brilliant trumpet player in the Tonight Show band, Clark Terry, and he introduced me to Quinnipiac College in Hamden, Connecticut. We drove up there one night in a rainstorm and I spoke at a dinner. I liked the place immediately, I could see they were trying to do innovative things there. Linda eventually attended Quinnipiac, and the more I got to know about the school, the more impressed I became.
In the late 1980s the impressive young president of the university, John Lahey, flew down to meet me in Florida and told me Quinnipiac wanted to build a state-of-the-art communications center—and they wanted to name it the Ed McMahon Mass Communications Center. He didn't expect me to donate a huge amount of money—although he wasn't going to turn it down if I wanted to donate it, either—but he hoped that my name would attract the attention of both contributors and students.
Now that was pretty flattering. Lowell, Massachusetts, once dedicated a park bench in my name, so an entire communications center was very impressive. (Actually Lowell did offer to name the whole park after me, but I was quite pleased with just my bench and I flew in for the dedication.) The communications center was to occupy a wing of a large business education center named after Quinnipiac graduate Murray Lender. Murray Lender had made his fortune in the bagel business, so I guess they felt it was appropriate to combine the bagel king with a big ham. The Ed McMahon Mass Communications Center, which is part of the Lender School of Business, contains state-of-the-art classrooms, television and radio broadcast studios, film and videotape editing equipment, and print journalism resources. I'm very, very proud of the McMahon Center. At its dedication Claudia told me the equipment was better than what she was then using at ABC News.
I've gotten involved in several charities because my friends asked for my help. For example, at Frank Sinatra's request I served as master of ceremonies at a fund-raiser for the Italian-American Civil Rights League held at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden. The Italian-American Civil Rights League had been organized to help dispel the notion that most Italians belonged to the Mafia. Unfortunately, it had been organized by Joseph Colombo, who ran a Mafia crime family. On the bill that night were Italians like myself, Vic Damone, Connie Francis, Jerry Vale, and black comedian Godfrey Cambridge. "I got a strange invitation to this thing," Godfrey Cambridge told the audience. "A rock came through my window."
I didn't really know what it was all about. Frank Sinatra asked me to be there and that was all I needed to know. I flew in from California on the red-eye the night before. That afternoon I'd gone over to the Felt Forum with my manager at the time, Bob Coe, to find out where I was supposed to stand and which microphone I was supposed to use. While I was there, a polite young man named Joseph Colombo Jr. came up to me and said, "Mr. McMahon, I'd like to speak to you privately for a moment."
"It's all right," I told him. "This is my manager, he's in on everything I do."
"I'd prefer to speak to you alone," he insisted. We sat down in the audience and he told me, "My father wanted me to extend his greetings. He'll be here tonight, but he wanted you to know how appreciative he is that you flew all night to be here today. You're not Italian, you have no reason to be here, but it's an important night for my people. My father told me to tell you this: if you ever need anything . . . ," and he grabbed my arm with both hands to emphasize his point, "and I mean, anything, you just have to call and it's done."
"Okay," I said. "I'll remember that." Now, like just about everyone in show business, I'd heard all the stories about Mafia involvement, but until that moment I'd never had any involvement with them. I immediately got in touch with my friend Jimmy Breslin, who knew about all this stuff, and asked him, "Did I make a mistake agreeing to do this? Am I involved in something I really don't want to be involved in?"
"I'll find out," he said. Several hours later I saw Jimmy again. He had spoken to several FBI agents and apparently they told him to tell me that it was okay that one night. I will never forget my opening line that night: "Good evening, fellow Italians."
My involvement with the Muscular Dystrophy Association began when my friend Jerry Lewis asked me to appear on his Labor Day telethon in 1967. At that time I don't even think the telethon was broadcast nationally; it certainly wasn't the spectacular event it was to become. I wasn't working with Jerry, I was just a guest. I was going to make a brief appearance, explain why viewers should pledge money to help Jerry's kids, and leave. But almost as soon as I got there, Jerry told me, "I have to go to the bathroom." Now, in those days we never said "bathroom" on television. We couldn't even use the word "pregnant"; the expression we were instructed to use was "in a family way." There was no alternate expression for "bathroom." The reason for that was simple: nobody on television ever went to the bathroom. As far as anybody knew, for example, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson's house didn't even have any bathrooms.
So without any explanation, Jerry disappeared, leaving me standing there onstage. Being a professional, I introduced the next performer at the proper time. "Ladies and gentlemen, here they are, let's give a big round of applause, aren't they great, the Flying . . ." As I finished I looked into the wings and saw Jerry standing there, arms folded, watching me. "Go ahead," he told me, "you're doing a great job." That first year I hosted for about ten minutes.
The following year I did eight hours. "Oh, Ed," Jerry said, "you were terrific. I really leaned on you. I wish you could do the whole show with me."
He needed me for the whole show? We could raise millions of dollars for kids? One billion five hundred million dollars later, I'm still doing the Labor Day telethon with Jerry. I don't think anybody realizes how much of his life he has devoted to helping kids with this terrible disease. It's a year-round cause with him, not just something he does on Labor Day weekend.
My job on the telethon is to be his support system, to provide some sort of structure to what is basically a pretty loose program. Jerry is the entertainer, the showman; his job is to push all the emotional buttons. I'm the broadcaster; my function is to make sure we hit the cues on time, that people get the proper credits, that the telethon moves along smoothly. I'm the anchor. Jerry is free to do whatever he wants to do, knowing that I'm always there to bring him back to center stage.
Nothing I've ever done is like the telethon. Twenty-one and a half hours on the air. The only way to prepare for that is to stay up that long in a rehearsal, which would be like running a marathon to get to the marathon starting line. For more than twenty years I did the whole show; I never left the studio, I never got out of my tuxedo. Every few hours I'd go into my dressing room and touch up my makeup, have a cup or two or three of coffee, and then go right back out there again. But I found that taking short breaks, getting away from the stage for a while, enabled me to be strong at the end when Jerry started to get tired.
Jerry's stamina is amazing, although there have been times when he's collapsed backstage from exhaustion and I had to take over the show. On occasion he's been so tired that he's allowed his frustration or anger at the pace of contributions to show and I've had to calm him down. Like Johnny, Jerry trusts me. This is his telethon, these are Jerry's kids, and I've always been careful not to get in his way, but many years ago he told me, "Ed, you interrupt me any time you want. Just come right in when you think it's necessary."
And sometimes when it's not quite so necessary. The hours do take a toll. Twenty-one hours and thirty minutes. It's like doing twenty consecutive Tonight Shows. It's more television in one weekend than the cast of a sitcom does for an entire season. And sometimes we do get a little giddy. One year, for example, when we were doing the telethon at the Aquarius Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, I surprised him by walking out from the wings dressed in my pajamas and carrying a big teddy bear. "Could you hold it down a little?" I asked him. "I'm trying to get some rest." Then I turned around and left.
Even after the first twenty or thirty cups of coffee everybody starts to wear down. There are certain times when fatigue comes over everyone like a wave. There are times, like at three o'clock in the morning, when the phones aren't ringing quite as much, you really wonder who's out there watching. But then the sun comes up, and with it the phones start ringing again and bring a renewed energy.
The Muscular Dystrophy telethon is unlike any other show ever done. Filling that much time requires an extraordinary range of talent. And we've had it all, the singers and dancers, the comedians, rock groups and jazz groups, marching bands and choirs, plate spinners, the entire cast of Broadway shows, jugglers, magicians, impressionists, actors and athletes, even the animal acts. We've had just about everybody from Frank Sinatra to Bobby Berosini and his Orangutans. Every year we put on a great vaudeville show for an audience estimated at seventy-five million people.
After doing the show for three decades and at least a thousand acts, the shows run together in my memory. But one of the things I'll never forget is the reunion between Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. I helped make it happen. Martin and Lewis had been one of the most successful teams in show business, but after breaking up they hadn't spoken in decades. The reunion was actually Frank Sinatra's idea. I was with him one night several weeks before the show and he said, "You know what I'd like to do? I want to come on the telethon and bring Dean Martin with me. How do I do that?"
Jilly Rizzo and I worked out the details. While Jerry was onstage we snuck Dean into my dressing area and had him wait there. Jerry was completely surprised when he saw Dean walking toward him. Almost without a pause he said, "So, what have you been doing?"
I'm an unpaid volunteer on the telethon. For me, the payoff has been the progress we're making toward eliminating this disease and the assistance we're able to provide for those people who suffer from it. When I started working with Jerry, not only wasn't there a light at the end of the tunnel, they hadn't even started building the tunnel. It was a hopeless situation. Each year they would introduce me to the Muscular Dystrophy poster child, I'd spend a little time talking to this child, but I didn't want to get to know these kids too well because I'd be devastated a few years later when they were no longer with us. For a long, long time, progress in fighting this thing was very slow. Every few years there would be some sort of scientific breakthrough, just enough to keep hope alive. No one ever dared use the word "cure."
But the situation has changed drastically and rapidly. They've isolated a few of the genes believed to cause this disease. Now scientists use words like "gene replacement." In 1995 for the first time I heard one of our researchers say flatly that we will have a cure. We're still in the tunnel, but now at least we can see sunlight at the other end.
The billion and a half dollars that you gave has made that reality. Using money raised by the telethon we have been able to fund research centers around the world. There are now approximately four hundred research centers connected by computer, enabling scientists at UCLA to confer instantly with researchers in Sweden. Now, when I meet these poster children, I know they've at least got a chance at a full life.
The money we've raised has also been used to improve the quality of life for people afflicted with the disease. Since we've started, I've seen the development of things like motorized wheelchairs and lifts that make vans and buses accessible to the handicapped. I got to know firsthand how the money we raised actually helped people when Claudia spent a year working for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. "I've never seen anything like it," she told me. "I've never had to say no to a patient's request. Whatever they need—an electric wheelchair, a ramp built onto their home—the organization provides it for them without any red tape. It's the most incredible thing."
Sometimes, when I started to get tired after sixteen straight hours, I remembered that. It was a lot better than coffee.
Of all the jobs I've done on the telethon, I've taken only one donation. But it was a big one. I was in my dressing room one evening and the great Bob Ross, the executive in charge of everything at the telethon, came and asked, "Would you recognize Frank Sinatra's voice on the phone?" A man claiming to be Sinatra was pledging twenty-five thousand dollars and they wanted to verify that it was really him.
"I think so," I said. "We've got a little code that I can use to tell if it's really him." When I got on the phone, I said, "Is this Mr. Sinatra?"
"Ed," he said, "how are you?"
Now, Frank Sinatra and I long shared a little private toast. Whenever we had a drink, he'd raise his glass and proclaim, "To the festival," to which I would raise my glass and respond, "To the incredible festival of life." So I asked the person on the phone, "To the what?"
"The festival," he said.
I turned to Bob Ross and told him, "Take his money."
How do I feel when I've completed a telethon? Well, each year I join with friends to celebrate Harry Crane's birthday. My responsibility at this party is to supply the cake, which I have specially made. One cake I had made was called "The First Joke." On it a little caveman in a loincloth, Harry Crane, was sitting in front of a cave scribing into stone tablets. Next to him were tablets he'd tossed away, and into them were carved bits and pieces of the jokes he'd rejected, "that was no cavelady . . . ," ". . . two nuns get off a wheel . . . ," ". . . a man walked into a bar with a pterodactyl on his head . . . " But the tablet he was finishing was the world's first joke, which read, "I spent a week in Phoenicia one night . . . "
That's what it feels like to complete a telethon. I spent a week on television one day. Believe me, entire careers haven't lasted as long as a single telethon. It's not just the broadcast, it's trying to prepare for the broadcast several days before and recovering from it for several days afterward. That's why nobody does two telethons a year. Well, almost nobody.
When Anheuser-Busch was looking for a spokesperson to reach the black community, I recommended Lou Rawls. He'd done The Tonight Show several times, and besides being a terrific person, he was a great talent. After the brewery hired him he conceived the idea of a telethon to benefit the United Negro College Fund. Anheuser-Busch, who sponsored the telethon, asked me to be his cohost. They offered to pay me the same amount as I was getting to do the Muscular Dystrophy telethon! Now, how could I turn down an offer like that?
In fact, I was very pleased. The United Negro College Fund was an organization I'd strongly supported for a long time—there are forty-six excellent colleges connected to the fund, and the money we raised on the telethon was to provide an education for deserving kids who would not otherwise be able to go to college—so I gladly accepted.
I did it for fourteen years. The telethon was twelve hours long for several years, but eventually it was cut down to six hours because we found the pledges slowed down late at night. Believe me, it was very different from the Muscular Dystrophy telethon. One year, for example, I was introduced as LL Cool Ed, the Beverly Hills rapper. Lou Rawls started a rap song, Nancy Wilson picked up on him, and then I came out to finish it.
America's hope, America's future, that's what we're all about. America's hope, America's future, c'mon, lemme hear you shout! Let me hear you shout. I said, let me hear you shout . . .
Let me hear you shout, let me hear you shout.
This is LL Cool Ed, and here's what I said,
If we're gonna reach ya, we gotta teach ya!
Now, I couldn't dance at Lowell High School, and I certainly didn't get better as I got older. But they taught me all the moves and gestures and, actually, I looked just like . . . like Ed McMahon doing a rap number.
This was not a job for my tuxedo. I dressed properly, including a baseball cap worn backward. It was my favorite cap, it was bright red with the gold letters USMC, and above those letters were gold wings exactly like those I'd earned in the Marine Corps. When I finished the number, I turned the cap around to reveal the letters and wings. After we'd finished the song, I went backstage and someone asked if they could have the hat. "No," I said. "Not this one. I'll get you another one just like it."
"Tell you what," he said. "I'll pledge a thousand dollars if you give me that hat."
I took it off my head and handed it to him. We got the pledge, he got my cap. The problem is that I haven't been able to find another one just like it. And I really liked that hat. So if anyone knows where I might get another cap just like that one . . .
If my show business career was winding down, there were always charities who needed my help, but I knew that wouldn't be enough to keep me busy. One area I knew I would not be going into was politics. Not that I couldn't have. How does this sound . . . Senator Edward McMahon. It almost happened. The only two elective offices I've ever held were president of the freshman class at Boston College and president of the Catholic University Alumni Association. However, I have met several presidents of the United States; Lyndon Johnson and I once drank Canadian whiskey out of Slurpee cups on his ranch in Texas, as he proudly showed me the carpentry work he had done personally in a new bathroom. I remember thinking, this is the man whose finger is on the button to blow up the world, and what he's most concerned with is how well the corners were mitered.
I had a shot and a beer with John Kennedy when he was running for president. He was campaigning at the country club I managed outside of Philadelphia, and the Secret Service had him wait in my office for a brief time. I had the opportunity to tell him that we were cousins, I told him all about Katie Fitzgerald McMahon and how maybe because of his brother, Joe Kennedy, I had become a marine aviator. He was polite and seemed interested, but I suspect he didn't go home that night and write in his journal that he'd met cousin Eddie.
I advised Richard Nixon how to make the best possible impression on The Tonight Show and produced an inaugural gala for him. I met George Bush at a luncheon for Catholic University in Washington. I'd just ordered a vodka martini when the then vice president came in and sat next to me. "That looks good," he said, "I'll have one, too." Somehow he knew I'd been a fellow navy aviator and we spent part of the afternoon talking about flying.
I first met Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California. When he was reelected president in 1984 I hosted a closed-circuit inaugural celebration that was broadcast to embassies around the world. But it was Nancy Reagan who invited me to be the secret Santa for the press corps Christmas party. Iwas brought into the White House through the back door and hidden upstairs in the presidential quarters. Eventually I went downstairs dressed as Santa and the press corps tried to guess my identity. I disguised my voice, I probably have the most recognizable "Ho ho ho" in America. After they guessed who I was, Sam Donaldson ended up sitting on my lap, and I warned him, "You'd better stop being so mean to the president or you're going to have a very stingy Christmas this year."
Bill Clinton appeared on The Tonight Show after making one of the longest nominating speeches in American political history at the 1988 Democratic Convention. As he sat down, Johnny said, "Before we start, let me just do one thing." Then he pulled out a giant hourglass and turned it upside down.
I was offered an opportunity to participate in national politics. Near the end of my second term as president of the alumni association, I mentioned casually to one of the people who had championed my cause, "You know, politics have always intrigued me. I'd love to be a United States senator." I mean, I was just fantasizing. I didn't expect anyone to take me seriously.
But he did. Several months later I was invited to a meeting with the leaders of the state Democratic party of New Jersey. The back room in which we met wasn't exactly smoke-filled, it was more martini-filled. At that meeting I was offered the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate and told that if I chose to run, "we can guarantee you'll win."
I owned a house in New Jersey, so legally I was qualified to run. It was tempting. Senator McMahon. I'd received honorary doctoral degrees from both Brown and Catholic Universities so I was already Dr. McMahon, but Senator . . . "I don't know," I said. "I've got contracts with NBC, Anheuser-Busch, American Family Publishers . . ."
"We've spoken to everybody," I was told. "We can get you out of those contracts."
This wasn't a joke. This was a serious offer. And I considered it very seriously. For some people, an opportunity to serve in the United States Senate would be a dream come true. But for me, my dream had already come true. I was a broadcaster, I was doing exactly what I had dreamed of doing as a child. No matter how enticing it was to be able to say, "Heeeeere's the Senate majority leader," I just couldn't give up my career. I loved what I was doing too much to give it up. I mean, no politician I'd ever heard of had given away ten million dollars. So after careful consideration, I declined that wonderful offer.
No matter what happened with my broadcasting career, there were many business opportunities available to me. I had a lot of experience as a businessman. In fact, the last time in my life I'd been involved in business it had cost me only one million four hundred thousand dollars.
In the early 1970s with some friends from Catholic University I founded Unicorn Creations, a cutting-edge design company. We started with a great board game, the Game of Love. It was sort of a combination of Monopoly and Spin the Bottle. Instead of street names, each square had an instruction: kiss your partner's elbow, take off your sweater, give your neighbor a big kiss. Players rolled the dice to move and had to follow the instructions wherever they landed. It was a bit risqué, but this was the beginning of the sexual revolution.
From the game, we expanded into a larger stationery company. We created all types of psychedelic paper products and gimmick items. We hired very bright, very clever artists, many of them right out of the Rhode Island School of Design, who created a wonderful product line. Even the great artist Peter Max designed products for us. Unfortunately, our products were a lot better than our knowledge of business.
I am reminded of an old black-and-white movie costarring Jack Oakie. In this movie he announced proudly to his partner that he had managed to get them an airplane for free. When his partner looked out the window and saw the airplane, he was overwhelmed. He couldn't believe that Jack Oakie had actually managed to obtain an airplane for free. "How did you do it?" he asked.
It was easy, Oakie explained, all he had to do was buy a thousand planes and then he got this one for free. Well, that was the way my partner in Unicorn Creations did business. His business philosophy was that in order to wholesale a paper product for four dollars, our production cost had to be under a dollar. That made sense, that was a four-to-one ratio. The problem was that the only way to get production costs down to that price was to order a tremendous amount of the product. Believe me, we had warehouses full of psychedelic stationery. It was coming out of our ears in very bright colors. And if we had ordered twice as much, we could have saved even more on our production costs.
The biggest problem we faced was that most of our customers were small stores who often paid late or failed to pay for the products they ordered. These weren't big orders, so it would have cost us more to pursue payment than just write it off. Maybe the one good thing about this company was that when we had to write off our losses, we certainly had a lot of paper.
I think what eventually killed the company was that we tried to do too many things. If we had focused our attention on one product line, the game or the stationery, we might have been successful. Instead we ended up owing more than a million dollars. When the company failed, I could have just walked away from our obligations, but I didn't want to do that. I refused to file bankruptcy. I just couldn't walk away from the people who had loaned us money to start the business or the suppliers who had trusted us. So with the guidance of Lester Blank, I personally paid off every penny that we owed.
I've been involved in several other business ventures, but none of them has been very successful. When the franchise industry was just beginning, I had an A-to-Z Rental Center, a little company that rented business equipment. For a little while I owned a drive-through grocery store in Florida called Pick-a-Pack. The concept was that people would drive up to a window and order their groceries without getting out of their car. It seemed like a good idea to me. The fact that I rarely shopped for groceries didn't stop me from investing. The best thing about both A-to-Z and Pick-a-Pack was that they were less unsuccessful than Unicorn.
I discovered that I was a much smarter golfer than businessman. As a golfer I had been smart enough to quit. I wish I'd done that with some of my business ventures. But I was always able to convince myself that business was going to get better tomorrow. And who knows, maybe it still will.
As it turns out, Pam is the businessperson in our marriage. Pam and her partner, Greg Mills, the former senior vice president of Perry Ellis and president of Isaac Mizrahi, have created a full collection of exquisitely tailored clothes. Women's Wear Daily loved their first collection. And although the Pam McMahon line is now carried by major department stores and fashionable shops, the dresses have actually been carried across the country by Ed McMahon, schmatta schlepper extraordinaire.
I'm not a businessman. And I'm not interested in being a politician. The closest thing I have to a hobby is the work I do for charities. What I am is a broadcaster, an announcer, a host, an actor, a master of ceremonies, a second banana, a spokesperson. I'm an entertainer, a performer, a salesman. I've got a nice tuxedo and a clean shirt, I'll be there when the band starts playing, and I'll know all my lines. I can tell a joke, sing a song, play the good guy or the bad guy. So for the first time in nearly five decades, I began to look for a job.
Almost immediately people started approaching me with ideas for shows they wanted me to do. We started developing a sitcom titled After You've Gone, on which I played a man who'd died and gone to heaven. The only person able to see me or talk to me was my widow. It was a ghost comedy, like the classic series Topper.
We hired several top writers and developed the concept. We approached the great actress Rue McClanahan to play the role of my widow. We found a recording of the song "After You've Gone." Then we made our pitch to one of the most respected executives in the television industry. "It won't work," he said, shaking his head knowingly. "See, ghost shows won't work on TV anymore. The audience is too sophisticated for that."
Obviously that was before Touched by an Angel became one of the highest-rated shows on television. Technically, though, he was correct: an angel is not a ghost.
I nearly became the host of a new version of the old quiz show The Liar's Club. It's a simple game, contestants have to determine which of our panelists are lying. We were going to use some of the great young comedians on our panel, many of them from Star Search, the format would give them an opportunity to stretch their imaginations. We spent more than a year and a half developing it and finally found a production company that wanted to buy it and put it on the air. Hours before we were going to make our final presentation—literally hours before—and after we'd made all the changes they'd requested, the president of the company was fired and replaced with someone determined to wipe out everything he'd done. We were first to go.
Fifty years and I never knew that television was such a tough business.
Pam and I developed a concept for a syndicated radio program called The Comedians. This was a daily five-minute show featuring material from three living comedians and one legendary figure. We were unable to sell it.
I was working regularly. I did a television movie, I made several guest appearances. I wasn't getting desperate, but I was beginning to wonder if maybe the well had run dry.
I began getting asked to audition for sitcoms. One popular show offered me the role of a slick car salesman, but I turned it down. This was a really unpleasant character, not a role I would have enjoyed playing. Then one day my theatrical agent, Harry Gold, called and told me that he'd found the perfect part for me; the producers of a new show titled Spin City wanted me to read for the part of the mayor. It sounded like something I would enjoy doing; the pilot script was very funny and Michael J. Fox was the star. But just as I was about to audition, somebody with the show decided I would be too noticeable, too widely known to play that role. My audition was canceled. Coming when it did, that was very disappointing.
Several months later Harry Gold called again to tell me he'd found an even better role for me. A new show to star Tom Arnold was looking for someone to play the host of a breakfast show in St. Paul, Minnesota. Well, that was perfect for me. I'd actually hosted a breakfast show in Philadelphia in the 1950s. Supposedly the breakfast show had been on the air for forty years and the people of St. Paul wouldn't think of starting the day without having Breakfast with Charlie.
Now, coincidentally, Tom Arnold has been a friend of mine for several years. We share the same birthday and have started celebrating it together. I don't know how much I believe in astrology, but Tom is so much like me that he could be my son. But he had no idea I was auditioning for the role. He was on the road promoting his new movie and I didn't want to put any pressure on him at all.
Eight of us auditioned for the role. They were all about my age, all character actors, all of them recognizable. A group picture of us might have been captioned "Oh, look, there's what's his name. I remember him from . . ." This was like the old days in New York when I auditioned for commercials; everybody was very good. I read my lines with the talent coordinator, who told me, "Thank you very much, we'll call you." I wasn't particularly pleased with my reading, I didn't think I was going to get the part, but at least she didn't send somebody to my house to rip out the phone.
I made the first cut. Four of us were asked to audition again. Once again, "Thank you very much . . . ," and out I went. The next day they called again, and asked me to read again that night. What I didn't know was that Tom Arnold had been told I was auditioning for the role and wanted to read with me. After we read a scene together, he stuck out his hand and said, "Welcome aboard."
We began shooting The Tom Show in April 1997. Charlie was an old codger, a man set firmly in his ways, an old fuddy-duddy, which is exactly the opposite of how I am. But I do have friends like that, friends who eat at the same time and order the same foods every night. Tom Arnold played Tom, the producer of the show, a man who had worked for Charlie many years earlier, then gone to Hollywood where he had married a big star, and returned to St. Paul after the divorce to get his life started again. Where do they come up with these wild ideas?
I wasn't a bit nervous about doing the show. When we went on the air my reviews ranged from "much better than I would have dared to write myself " to "aren't there laws against writing things like that?"
The show was produced by Universal but broadcast on the WB, the new network owned by Warner Bros. The WB asked me to help promote the show around the country. Appear on TV to talk about The Tom Show on the WB? Do radio interviews to tell people why they should watch The Tom Show on the WB? Speak with magazine and newspaper writers about The Tom Show on the WB? Naturally, I hesitated . . . Offering me a microphone is like putting a ten-thousand-dollar pledge in front of Jerry Lewis. I toured the country telling people why they would enjoy The Tom Show on the WB.
Believe me, I know how difficult it is to attract attention to a new network. ABC had been a distant third network when Johnny Carson and I had started together on Who Do You Trust? I think we were one of the very first afternoon shows they broadcast. So at every opportunity, I told people about The Tom Show on the WB. And the WB was very pleased with my work.
How pleased were they?
Well, every network has a logo: CBS has its eye, NBC has the peacock, and the WB has the frog. The network's logo is a frog. But they're so pleased with my work promoting The Tom Show on the WB, they began to refer to me as the network's first "spokesphibian."
That's quite a compliment. I was particularly pleased by that after noticing that Budweiser now uses talking frogs on its commercials. So perhaps . . .
Besides working with Tom Arnold on The Tom Show on the WB, I finally found a product in which I believed strongly enough to do an infomercial. Incredibly, this was a product I actually helped create in my own kitchen. When my doctors told me that for health reasons I had to give up most fried foods, I tried to find a way I could enjoy the great taste of fried foods without being hurt by the fat and grease.
Impossible, you say. Can't be done. Fried foods need that fat and grease. Now, I know you believe that. I did too. But suppose, ladies and gentlemen, just suppose I was able to prove to you that you can now enjoy the incredible taste of fried foods—cooked in your very own kitchen—without worrying about the damaging effects of fat or grease.
That's right, forget about the twenty-eight grams of fat usually found in fried chicken. Now you can have the great taste of fried chicken containing only six grams of fat. Onion rings, which normally have twenty-three grams of fat, now have . . .
Zero. Make your own potato chips—with absolutely no fat! How can I make this claim? The answer is . . . the all-new, unique, guaranteed Ed McMahon miracle fryer.
That's right, my friends. Developed with the great young five-star chef George Engel, the Ed McMahon miracle fryer enables you to use the thermal rays that circulate in your oven to fry low-fat and fat-free foods. This patented system consists of a mesh rack that, sitting on top of a deep-base pan, allows the hot air to circulate all around your food, locking in the taste. Delivering the great taste of fried foods without the added oil and grease . . . The fat drips away so the food doesn't sit in it while cooking . . .
French fries, pizza, sausages, even fish and hamburgers— all the foods you love—now with reduced fat or no fat . . .
And if you act right now, we will also send you your own copy of Ed McMahon's Favorite Low-Fat Fried Foods, featuring more than forty recipes by world-class chef George Engel . . .
And yes, there's even more. Tell you what else I'm going to do. As an added bonus, we're going to throw in . . . the miracle fryer slicer! The perfect frying companion because the adjustable blades allow you to slice potatoes for potato chips, and onions for onion rings. And even more, let me demonstrate on a red ripe tomato. Look how you can adjust the blade so low, you can slice a tomato so thin you can read a newspaper through it. I know a lady in Bayonne, New Jersey . . .