One of the important things I learned from Johnny Carson was the danger of overexposure. That was something I was always careful to avoid when, in addition to appearing nightly on The Tonight Show, I hosted daily quiz shows like Snap Judgment, Missing Links, and Whodunnit? as well as numerous parades, appeared on countless television specials, made records, did my nightclub act, acted in motion pictures and both on and off Broadway, sold items on the cable shopping channels, produced and served as master of ceremonies at events like Nixon's inaugural gala, the bicentennial celebration, and many fund-raisers, and hosted successful programs like Star Search and Bloopers and Practical Jokes.
I couldn't even begin to estimate the number of parades in which I've marched, ridden, or broadcast, from Macy's spectacular Thanksgiving Day parade to Virginia's Apple Blossom Festival. I've been the King of the Rice Festival in Louisiana and the King of the Winter Carnival in Lake Placid, New York. You get three people standing on a corner waiting for the light to change, I'll describe it to you. For me, hosting a parade requires good assistants, people who provide correct information when you need it, and warm socks. Generally, when you broadcast a parade you stay in the same spot for several hours. Invariably your feet get cold. Very, very cold. One of the greatest presents I ever got was a pair of electric socks. Battery-operated socks. I put a triple-A battery in each sock and they warmed right up. People would laugh at my beloved electric socks, and they kept laughing until right about that moment when their toes began to turn blue.
When I served as King of Bacchus in New Orleans's Mardi Gras parade I had to ride on a float for seven hours. Now, there are no bathrooms on a float, and parades do not make rest stops. So the other device that proved invaluable to me is called "the policeman's friend." It's a little pipe that runs down your leg and enables the Budweiser that comes in to go out without the whole parade having to stop and wait for you. That just worked for me; the year before the king of Bacchus had gotten a bit tanked and had fallen off the float. Now, on occasion I may have fallen off the wagon, but I was determined not to fall off the float. I guess you might say, thanks to my "policeman's friend," I stayed afloat.
Ooooooooo.
I did, however, fall off the roller-skating elephant. I've ridden on just about every type of conveyance in parades, from the Clydesdale horses in New York's Puerto Rican Day parade to the back of a convertible at the Indianapolis 500. But one Thanksgiving, producer Dick Schneider came to me with an unusual idea. Heading the parade that year was an elephant on roller skates, and Dick thought it would be just great if I opened the parade by riding in on that elephant. I don't even like to ride horses, and an elephant is as big as . . . as an elephant. I didn't particularly like this idea, but because Dick wanted me to do it, I agreed to. So at the proper time they got a stepladder and the elephant leaned down and I climbed up on his neck. Now, if you've ever noticed, when girls ride elephants in a circus they hold onto its ears and they lean way back. Apparently that is proper elephant-riding technique. But it's a little more difficult to do that when you're holding onto a microphone and leading a parade.
"Well, here we are friends," I said when we went on the air. "This is the biggest parade you'll ever see, and I just had to arrive on the biggest animal you've ever seen . . ." And that was just about the time the elephant decided to get rid of whatever was on his neck. He flipped his head and I went flying off. I was caught in midair by several policemen. Which is why I consider myself one of the policeman's friends.
Now, broadcasting a parade is not particularly difficult as long as everything proceeds as planned. The prepared copy provided all the information I needed to describe the great high school marching band, the floats, the balloons, and the dancers. Here they come, there they go, weren't they marvelous . . . But things rarely go as planned. One Thanksgiving, for example, I was just beginning my introduction for the Snoopy balloon. "Coming down Broadway next is my favorite character. This is the part of the parade I look forward to every year . . ."
And as I was describing Snoopy, I suddenly heard Dick Schneider screaming into my earpiece, "Don't mention Snoopy. Snoopy just blew up!"
How do you tell all the little children watching the parade and waiting for Snoopy that he's exploded? How many nightmares will that cause? Listen, I knew it wasn't the Hindenburg. It was Snoopy. "But that will be coming a little later in the show," I continued, without a pause, "so right now let's look at the beautiful costumes on the . . . "
Although I've participated in numerous parades, there are some things that even I can't adequately describe.
Macy's parade always ended with Santa Claus, which announced the beginning of the Christmas season. One year, as he climbed down off his sleigh a little girl handed him a bunch of balloons. He held the balloons in one hand, took the little girl's hand with his other hand, and together they started walking into the store. And as he did, on national television, his pants fell down to his ankles. As I watched, Santa Claus started waddling into the store in his long johns. "And so, ladies and gentlemen," I said as quickly as I thought of it, "if you want to know what to get Santa for Christmas, get him a belt."
For most performers, it's their success on the stage or screen that gets them invited to appear on talk shows. It was just the opposite with me. Nobody really knew if I could act, but producers believed viewers would buy tickets to see me in a different role. I wasn't a classically trained actor, but I had performed in several plays at Catholic University and I was familiar with basic stage terminology, words like "stage" and "script." I started my acting career working in off-Broadway theaters. Way, way off-Broadway. Several states off-Broadway. Ohio.
During my vacations from The Tonight Show, I did theater-in-the-round in big tents for Lee Guber, who was later married to Barbara Walters, in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. I played Rusty Charlie in Guys and Dolls, I played Buffalo Bill in Annie Get Your Gun,and I got to sing the magnificent song "There's No Business Like Show Business." I believed every word of that song. And to get to sing it every night, that was thrilling.
Robert Ludlum, who eventually became one of the best-selling writers in America, owned a theater in a mall in Paramus, New Jersey. I did Anniversary Waltz for him. The moment The Tonight Show finished, I'd get in a car and race to New Jersey for the performance. On matinee days, I'd do the show, drive into New York to tape The Tonight Show, then turn right around and make it back just in time for the opening curtain.
I starred with singer Carmel Quinn in Wildcat in summer stock for a great producer named John Kenley. On closing night the cast did everything they could to try to upset me. In one scene, for example, I dropped a coin into a wishing well. Unbeknownst to me, that last performance a crew member was hiding in the well. I gently dropped my coin, and in response a bucketful of water came splashing out of the well all over me. In another scene I had to enter a jail cell through a door. The crew installed the set upside down, so that while saying my lines I had to climb up and over the transom into the cell. See, these are the kind of professional problems an actor has to learn to overcome on his way to the Broadway stage.
I made my Broadway debut in 1966. My friend Alan King was appearing on Broadway in the comedy The Impossible Years. When he had to leave the show for two weeks to fulfill a nightclub commitment, he asked me to substitute for him. Actually, I'd worked on Broadway before. I'd sold Morris metric slicers and toy gyroscopes out of a Broadway storefront with great success. Obviously this was very different, this time the audience paid before they saw my performance.
I rehearsed for several weeks in the afternoons, and by the time I opened I was well prepared. Not only did I know my lines, I knew everybody else's lines, I knew the stage manager's cues, I knew the ushers' names, I even knew the guy who stood in the front of the theater at intermission asking for money. One of the sweetest sounds I've ever heard was my first laugh on opening night. Believe me, the first laugh is always the toughest. Until that moment I was nervous, uncomfortable. After that, I just sailed through my performance. You know, when an audience doesn't have expectations, it's very easy to fulfill them. Nobody really knew what to expect when they saw me onstage, and I like to think that I surprised them. The theater critics were very nice about my performance, but perhaps my favorite review came from a friend of mine, who said, "You know, you didn't remind me of you at all."
The worst review I've ever received—for anything I've ever done—was Women's Wear Daily's review of my nightclub act. I had never really considered doing a nightclub act. I mean, what was I going to do—sell slicers? But as I became known, people wanted me to host luncheons and banquets and affairs. I'd put on my tux and do the regular hello, how are you, did you hear the one about, let's hear it for our honored guest, thank you for coming. With four kids to put through college, the added income was welcome. And I enjoyed myself, I enjoyed meeting people, I enjoyed good food. While doing this I became friendly with a man named Frank Banks, who was running the St. Regis Hotel. He began urging me to put together a nightclub act and play the Maisonette Room at the St. Regis. Finally, he pinned me down to a date. It was almost a year in the future, so far away it didn't seem it would ever actually arrive.
But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. Both Johnny and Doc would often do weekend concerts and nightclub dates and earned considerably more in one night than I received for a month of dinners. I decided to put together an act. With my talents, I had absolutely no idea what to do. I hired writers, I took singing lessons, and I put together an act unlike anything previously seen in New York. My set consisted of a theatrical trunk covered by a piece of black velvet. I walked out onstage and removed the velvet to reveal . . . a Morris metric slicer! "Ladies and gentlemen," I began, "let me introduce to you the famous Morris metric slicer. Now forget about the two dollars they were made to sell for . . . that's all right, madam, I was astonished to hear myself say that too . . ." I did the whole pitch, I showed how to cut a potato in a curlicue so that it popped right back. When I threw in the plastic juicer, I drained several gallons of water from a grapefruit—then showed the audience how I filled it in a bucket of water "for the next generation." And I closed that pitch with the line that always got the biggest laugh on the boardwalk—and I prayed to God that it would work in a sophisticated club— "with this slicer you can slice a tomato so thin you can read a newspaper through it. That's right, I know a lady in Bayonne, New Jersey, who had one tomato last her all summer long . . ."
It worked. The audience laughed. Oh, maybe I didn't sell any slicers, but it got my act off to a great start.
Then I sang several songs. I'd always been able to carry a tune, just not too far. Once, I remember, I sang with Count Basie's band at the Riverboat in the Empire State Building. On the show, I'd sung a little when we played Stump the Band, although the way I sang some of those strange songs, it was more like Confuse the Band. But in preparation for my nightclub act I took singing lessons with a vocal coach. In the act, I sang the pitchman's anthem, "Trouble" from The Music Man, I did a medley of rainy day songs, a medley of songs about New York, and some Cy Coleman songs.
And finally I did a whole bit about the "Drinkers' Hall of Fame." For this I needed no coach. I'd conclude this with a tribute to W. C. Fields. I did an impersonation of him; as I sang a final song, I'd slowly put on his gloves and his hat and his bulbous nose and finish as Fields. It was a nice act.
Overall, my reviews were very good. The New York Times wrote that I proved a "genial second banana also can be a genial top banana . . . he has the ability to handle complicated lyrics . . . altogether the results are likable." Count Basie said, "His act is a bitch!" In fact, the only negative review came from Women's Wear Daily, whose critic wrote, "This is the worst act I've ever seen!"
Compared to what, I wondered. Armed with that review, I took the entire back page of Variety and printed almost all of the reviews—and right in the middle of it included that terrible review. That might be the worst review ever used in an advertisement.
While getting ready to do my act I was terrified. I didn't know how people would respond to me. But once I did it, and got good reviews and a wonderful response from the audience, I decided to take my act to Las Vegas. All the hotels had great shows. I knew I wasn't ready to play Vegas. My act was about an hour long; in Vegas an opening act was always less than a half hour—the hotels want their guests back in the casinos as quickly as possible—so I decided to tour with my act until I had refined it to twenty-eight killer minutes.
For two years I performed in the smallest and strangest places you can imagine. I played a restaurant in Westchester County, New York; after dinner they pushed the tables out of the way and brought in a small stage. I played Great Falls, Montana; Moscow, Idaho; Akron, Ohio; Chicago, Houston, Lake George. In one small town I performed at the county fair; I showed up at the fairgrounds wearing my tuxedo and the guard didn't want to let me in—he wanted proof I was the entertainment. I mean, I was wearing my tuxedo. I don't know what kind of town this was, but I sort of assumed most people did not put on their tuxedo to go to the fair. In the middle of my performance one of the band members sitting behind me started eating a meal from Burger King. In one small town in Illinois, my business manager, Lester Blank, didn't trust the men running the fair, so he told my assistant, Corrine Madden, not to leave the grounds without our check. At the end of the show, Corrine went to get the check and Lester and I waited in the limousine with the motor running. She leaped into the car with the check and screamed, "Okay, let's go!" We handed her a glass of wine and took off.
Not fast enough, as it turned out. The check bounced.
Now, it's well known that music groups make demands when they sign a contract. They want certain beverages in the dressing room, they want bowls of M&M's with the blue ones removed, they insist on all types of perks. Well, I had some pretty specific demands written into my contracts too: I insisted that they supply half a head of cabbage! And not only that, I also demanded a tomato, a potato, and a grapefruit. I mean, when I arrived in a town I didn't have time to go grocery shopping for my act.
After two years of preparation I knew I was ready to play Las Vegas. I was the opening act at the New Tropicana Stage for Ann-Margret. She had a colossal show, set changes, backup singers, lavish costumes, even motorcycles. I had my Morris metric slicer. Opening night in Las Vegas was one of the very few times I've ever been nervous before a show. So many of my good friends had successfully played Vegas, the audience was filled with people I knew. But as soon as I got that first laugh I relaxed. I was well rehearsed and I knew from two years of experience that my act worked.
My backup "group" was Corrine Madden. At one point in the act I began talking about Budweiser beer and that was her cue to stick a can of Bud through the curtain. Supposedly I didn't know it was there. That can of Bud always got a big cheer. But as time passed, Corrine's hand got stagestruck. Instead of simply holding up the can, she'd stick it through the curtain, then when I turned around, she'd draw it back, or she'd wave it back and forth. This might be one of the few times in show business history that the performer was upstaged by the can.
I played Las Vegas for five years. I was the opening act for top names like Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme, Shirley MacLaine, and Mac Davis. I worked every big stage: the Tropicana, the MGM Grand, the Frontier, Caesar's Palace.
For a long time I would finish The Tonight Show in Los Angeles and race to the Burbank airport, where a private plane was waiting for me with its engines running. I'd change into my tuxedo on the plane, a car would meet the plane in Las Vegas, and by four minutes of eight I'd be tying my bow tie as I walked toward the stage. I'd do two shows, have dinner, and go to bed, then take a commercial flight back in the morning.
Although I had a wonderful time performing, I never made any money. I was paid twenty-five thousand dollars a week, which was tremendous for an opening act, but the private plane would cost me fifteen thousand dollars, and after I finished paying everybody else and tipping the waiters, I barely broke even. I did, however, get to keep all the cabbages I could carry.
Most people don't think of me as a movie star. Probably because I'm not. But I've made several movies, playing everything from a ruthless mob boss to the father of a teenage werewolf. Martin Sheen, Donna Mills, Beau Bridges, and I all made our film debuts in the same 1967 movie, The Incident. The story is about a group of people terrorized by two hoods on a New York City subway car. I played Mr. Don't Get Involved, who eventually provokes the incident by defending my daughter. Now, acting is one of the few professions in which the key to success is defined as "don't be yourself," and I think director Larry Peerce was concerned I'd play too much Ed McMahon. He didn't want an Ed McMahon character, which is why I got the part. So in order to evoke real emotion from me for my big scene, Sheen and Tony Musante staged a fake fight in rehearsal. I knew they were faking it, but I acted as if I believed it was real. No one knew I was acting, which is the goal of all actors. And so when I was successfully not myself in the scene, everyone believed it was because I believed the fight was real. Acting can be very complicated sometimes.
In Slaughter's Big Rip-Off I played a mob boss out to kill Jimmy Brown. Naturally, I get killed at the end. It was great fun for me to play a nasty, mean, downright dirty character. At the end I got shot. Several of the reviews complimented my death scene.
Fun with Dick and Jane, starring George Segal and Jane Fonda, was the best movie in which I appeared. It's the story of an upwardly mobile Los Angeles couple trying to cope after he loses his job. At first Jane suggests they economize by not using the swimming pool heater, but when their landscaper literally rolls up their front lawn and carts it away because he wasn't paid, they turn to a life of crime. I played the executive who got drunk and fired George Segal. I got very friendly with both Jane Fonda and George Segal. Jane was the kind of person nice enough to come to work at four in the morning for hair and makeup so we could get my work done early enough for me to get to The Tonight Show. I'll never forget the director, Ted Kotcheff, telling this million-dollar cast, "Okay guys, we've gotta get this one done because Ed has to leave." Imagine telling Jane Fonda to hurry up because I had to get to NBC.
Not only did I get excellent reviews—the New York Times wrote, "The members of the supporting cast, headed by Ed McMahon as Dick's alternately smarmy and sozzled former employer, are excellent"—but Columbia Pictures campaigned for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for me. Although I wasn't nominated, I was invited to the Academy Award ceremony that year. Apparently I was quite proficient at playing "sozzled."
Unlike many actors, I've never been worried about being typecast. Please, typecast me. In Love Affair, with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, for example, I played the role of a commercial spokesman named Ed. I like to claim I'm a method actor—in this case my method was just showing up. I was a natural in the role.
Most people loved Steve Martin's Father of the Bride. The worst picture I've ever made could have been titled Father of the Werewolf . Instead it was called Full Moon High, with Alan Arkin and his son, Adam Arkin. This was sort of unusual casting; even though Alan is Adam's father and appeared in the movie, they felt I was more believable in the role. That's some compliment. Adam played a high school football hero I took on vacation to Transylvania and while there he got turned into a werewolf.
I've acted in several movies made for television. I worked with Gary Coleman in a wonderful remake of the baseball fantasy The Kid from Left Field . In the miniseries The Star Maker, Rock Hudson played a famed movie director who turned his beautiful conquests into movie stars. I played his manager, and Jeffrey Tambor, who created the role of Garry Shandling's sidekick, Hank Kingsley, on The Larry Sanders Show, played his lawyer. A lot of people don't remember that I was in the semiclassic Great American Traffic Jam and a movie about the Los Angeles Olympics, The Golden Moment, with Stephanie Zimbalist. The last movie I made was Disney's Safety Patrol, with Leslie Nielsen. I was offered a role in the comedy feature PCU, meaning Politically Correct University, but against the wishes of my agent at the time, I turned it down.
The producers offered me quite a bit of money, and my agency put great pressure on me to do it, but I just didn't see myself in that kind of movie. Actually I ended up leaving the agency because of this. There was a lot of contemporary, colorful language in the script and I was uncomfortable with that. I don't use that language in my home, so I just didn't feel comfortable using it on the screen. Besides, I was hosting Star Search at the time, and it didn't seem feasible to me that I could play a character using foul language, then turn right around and introduce a nine-year-old young man playing a piano concerto.
Even though I've done an incredible variety of things, I've turned down many, many more opportunities. For example, I almost left The Tonight Show to become the host of Good Morning, America. I didn't want to leave, but NBC did not want to properly compensate me for the work I was delivering. So I secretly flew to New York and met with executives from ABC. The negotiations were very serious and they went on for a long time. But I didn't like the thought of getting up every morning at four, and I wasn't sure I was ready to move back to New York. Most of all, when it came down to making the decision, I didn't want to leave Johnny Carson. As far as I was concerned, we were joined at the desk. So I turned it down.
The brilliant broadcaster Al Masini, who created Solid Gold and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, wanted me to host his new show, Entertainment Tonight. I liked the concept, I thought it might work, but my contract with NBC prohibited me from appearing on any show that might be broadcast just before, during, or after The Tonight Show. Because Entertainment Tonight was to be syndicated, meaning each station that bought it could run it whenever they wanted, Masini couldn't guarantee the time slot.
Another show created by Al Masini that I initially turned down was Star Search. The amateur talent contest is one of the oldest formats in broadcasting. Major Bowes and Ted Mack had been very successful at showcasing amateur talent. Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts had been a big hit on television. Even my friend Dick Clark had briefly experimented with a show called World of Talent. The executive producer, Bob Banner, said that they specifically wanted me to host Star Search because I wouldn't be in competition with the talent presented on the show.
I looked at their pilot. It wasn't bad at all; in fact, the spokesmodel on that very first show was a beautiful young woman named Sharon Stone. Talk about getting it right from the very beginning. But I turned down their offer. I just didn't want to do an amateur talent show.
They persisted. We negotiated. I knew The Tonight Show couldn't go on forever—after the first fifty years or so I figured Johnny might start to slow down—and I'd started thinking about my future. So when Masini and Banner offered to make me their partner I agreed to host the show.
Star Search was a one-hour syndicated show. Two performers competed for prize money in each of eight categories, including male and female vocalist, dancing, comedy, and female spokesmodel. The winners returned the following week and at the end of the season the big winners competed for the one-hundred-thousand-dollar first prize. In 1984 we managed to tape our first show at KTLA in Los Angeles in only eleven hours. Eleven hours! In that time I could have taped a week's worth of Tonight Shows, sold a hundred slicers, flown a mission over the Korean DMZ, broadcast a parade, and filmed several Budweiser commercials. I mean, eleven hours. That's almost half a telethon. In the time it took us to tape one show, Jerry Lewis could have raised twenty-five million dollars for muscular dystrophy. "Gentlemen," I explained to the producers, "I love this show, but I think we're going to have to find a way to speed this up."
At first it was hard for us to prove to our audience that we were serious about finding real talent. The last successful TV talent show had been The Gong Show, which was really a comedy show featuring people doing strange tricks. But we really were searching for potential stars. In fact, when our first major discovery, Sam Harris, heard about the show, he thought, "It sounds like Bowling for Dollars, only with talent." Sam appeared on our fourth show, and by the time he'd made his thirteenth appearance and won one hundred thousand dollars, he'd signed with Motown—his first album went gold—and had become known throughout the country. After Sam's success we were deluged with requests for auditions and tapes. In our first year our eight talent coordinators auditioned more than twenty thousand acts, taped six thousand of them, and eventually selected the 170 people who competed on the show. We had an open call in Hollywood and four thousand performers showed up, some of them waiting on line for more than a day. We had about seven thousand people show up for auditions at a mall in Minnesota. Of course, a few of those people claimed their talent was doing dog-barking imitations, but most of them were talented young people trying to break into show business.
With such tremendous competition just to get on the show, we were able to produce a terrific weekly variety show. I mean, so many great young performers made their first national appearance on Star Search. We discovered Rosie O'Donnell, Sinbad, Martin Lawrence, Drew Carey, Linda Eder, LeAnn Rimes, Tiffany, Lara Flynn Boyle; Jenny Jones was a comedienne; Dennis Miller; the country group Sawyer Brown; Richard Jeni; Allison Porter of Curly Sue was on the show when she was five years old; the soap opera star Scott Thompson Baker, Kevin Meany, Carrot Top . . . I mean, I was in New York and one night I went to see a revival of Grease. In the first act Sam Harris just stopped the show cold, dead cold, standing ovations. In the second act our 1992 winner, Billy Porter, did the same thing. And Rosie O'Donnell—this was before she even started her talk show—brought down the house. The audience loved her. And how about this? At the end of the show Rosie interrupted her curtain call and asked Sam Harris and Billy Porter to join her. Then she told the audience, "We would not be standing on this stage tonight if it was not for that man right there, Ed McMahon. Ed McMahon, would you please stand up?" That was thrilling for me. That was worth my whole life in show business.
Now, although I say "we" discovered these great performers, it wasn't really me. I had the easiest job of all. I just showed up and said, "The champion has owned the stage for a week and plans on keeping it . . . here's our next challenger . . . please welcome from Detroit, Michigan . . . and the winner is . . ." I didn't even rehearse. Sometimes I'd finish taping The Tonight Show and get to the Star Search set just in time for taping to begin. Normally our great stage manager, Kenny Stein, read my lines in the rehearsal. When it was possible, I'd watch the rehearsal on a monitor in my dressing room while putting on my tux, learn how to correctly pronounce the contestants' names and enough about them to conduct a good interview, and then go out and ad-lib my way through the show.
I had absolutely no input in selecting talent for the show. Believe me, I preferred it that way. I did attend a lot of auditions in shopping malls and comedy clubs, but I didn't participate in the selections. It seemed as though everywhere I went people were ready to audition for me. If I was on the Star Search bus and we stopped for a traffic light people on the sidewalk would start dancing. I remember I had the same limousine driver in Detroit for several days. When he picked me up the last day to drive me to the airport, his cousin was with him, and as we unloaded my luggage from the car, his cousin started tap dancing for me. I hated to disappoint people, but there wasn't anything I could do to help them. The system was set up to make sure of that. The best I could do was hand out a card with the phone number of the production office.
The talent coordinators had to deal with this every day. Once, the office had to be evacuated because of a bomb threat. The rumor was that the threat had been called in by a contestant who didn't get on the show. While the staff was standing outside the building waiting anxiously as the bomb squad searched the premises, one of the policemen in charge asked talent coordinator Gary Mann, "So, can I get my niece on the show?"
In one city, a singer actually bought a busboy's outfit so he could get into one of our talent coordinators' hotel rooms and audition for him.
As far as I know, only once did such an approach pay off. In Detroit one day my daughter Claudia had spent ten hours auditioning acts. The crew had seen hundred of acts and everyone was exhausted. But as they were packing up, a man who worked in the building asked Claudia, "Do you think you could audition me? I don't have any music with me, but could you please let me sing?"
Claudia didn't have the heart to refuse. The man got up on the stage and began singing a cappella. Three bars into his song Claudia broke out in goose bumps. He was so good he just blew away everyone else. His name was Keith Washington, and he eventually appeared on the show and went on to become a popular R & B singer.
Hundreds of videotapes arrived every week at the production office. Most of them were pretty rough. One singer felt the acoustics were better in his bathroom, so he submitted a tape of himself singing in the shower. I mean, as he was singing, he lathered up and shaved. When we turned him down, he pitched himself as a male spokesmodel. We got a lot of tapes from comedians and singers whose living room performances were interrupted by their mother shouting from the kitchen that dinner was ready or by the phone ringing or their friends making faces in the background. But we watched every one of those tapes and if the performer showed any promise at all we would arrange to have a more professional tape made.
For a lot of performers these auditions represented their one chance at stardom. Basically they had thirty seconds to change their lives. Talk about pressure. At one audition at a mall in Kansas City, a seven-year-old girl explained seriously, "I've been waiting my whole life to be on Star Search."
Listen, an appearance on Star Search changed a lot of lives. Rosie O'Donnell was performing in a Long Island comedy club when Claudia discovered her. Her routine was based on her experiences in Catholic school, which wasn't right for our show, but Claudia felt she had something special. So she offered her a second audition. But before that audition she worked with her, helping her select the right outfit, the most flattering hairstyle, and her best material. For Rosie, this really was a last chance. It was just a few months before her twenty-fourth birthday and she had decided to quit show business if she wasn't successful by that day. Her second audition was much better and she was picked for the show. Ironically, the first person she competed against was the owner of the Long Island comedy club where Claudia had found her. Rosie won five weeks. The late Brandon Tartikoff, head of programming at NBC, saw her on the show and gave her a part on a sitcom, which led to her movie career, which led to her great success on television. Which was exactly the way the show was supposed to work.
Tracey Ross, who won our first spokesmodel competition, was absolutely penniless when she was discovered. She'd dropped out of college and would sneak back to the campus to eat. After appearing on our show she got a recurring role on a soap opera, and a network contract.
A lot of the young comedians who worked the comedy club circuit had problems coming up with two and a half minutes of clean material for their audition. Like Martin Lawrence. Claudia found him in a club in Washington, D.C., and recognized his talent, but until he was able to do a clean act we couldn't use him. When Claudia finally called to tell him he had been selected to be on the show, his mother answered the phone and thought it was a friend of his playing a big joke. He was a three-time winner.
Young performers knew the power of Star Search to launch a career. When Drew Carey heard we were doing auditions at a small comedy club in Milwaukee, for example, he drove several hundred miles and lived in his car until he had a chance to perform.
We missed a few good ones too. Tim Allen auditioned for Claudia five different times and never got on the show. She felt he was much better as a comedic actor than as a stand-up comedian. Finally he asked her, "What's the problem, why aren't I getting on?"
"Your material is too male-oriented," she told him. "Car jokes and home tool jokes just don't make me laugh." Years later, after his great success on Home Improvement, she saw him in a restaurant and sent him a note reading "Well, at least I was right about your ability as a comic actor."
The hardest part of my job was standing on that stage and telling one of the contestants that they'd lost. Oh boy, that was tough. For a lot of people losing represented the end of their dreams, they thought it was the end of their career. A lot of tears were shed backstage. After the show, I tried to spend a little time with the people who hadn't won. I reminded them that by just appearing on the show they'd gotten great national exposure. I told them I knew exactly how they felt, that when I was trying to get started in radio I'd lost an audition for an on-air job to Ray Goulding. "That's proof," I said, "that you don't have to come in first to have a nice career in show business."
If telling adults they'd lost was difficult, imagine what it was like telling a five-year-old that they'd lost. I remember the first year we had kids competing for the one-hundred-thousand-dollar first prize. The two finalists were a twelve-year-old and the five-year-old Allison Porter. I had absolutely no prior knowledge of the judges' decision. "This is just awful," I told the producers. "How am I gonna do this? You've got to get me something to give to the five-year-old if she doesn't win. Get me a big stuffed animal or something."
When I was handed the judge's decision I took a deep breath and said proudly, "And the winner is . . . Mary Johnson. Mary gets the one hundred thousand dollars!" And then I immediately turned to Allison Porter and said quickly, "But Allison, look what we have for you!" They brought out a huge stuffed panda, it was almost as big as she was, and she was thrilled. Believe me, not as thrilled as I was, but very happy.
Several years later Allison was on The Tonight Show, and I saw her in the office before the show. "Everybody gets excited when they come into my room," she told me, "because I've got my giant panda bear sitting on the shelf. They all ask me where I got it and I tell them, 'Ed McMahon gave it to me when I was on Star Search. And you know what his name is? Big Ed!' "
The worst moments of all came when a performer froze onstage. The pressure on these people was incredible, and sometimes they would forget the lyrics, or miss a step in their routine, or as happened with several comics, their minds just went blank. Watching a young performer struggling and not being able to help was just awful. We had a woman comic come out and start her routine and suddenly she just stopped. She couldn't remember a joke. The clock was in front of her, ticking away her career. I mean, can you imagine doing jokes while watching the clock? What I wanted to do, what I have done in other situations, was go over to her, put my arm around her, and tell her, "You know, the same thing happened to me one night in Toledo. It's the worst feeling in the world. I just looked for a hole to drop into. You know what I did, I took a couple of deep breaths. I just calmed down and all of a sudden the joke came back to me. Now what was the idea of the joke you were about to tell?" But I couldn't do that, this was a competition. It seemed like the longest 150 seconds of my own life.
There wasn't anything anyone could do about it except watch her suffer. Center stage can be a very cruel place. At times, if we had a technical problem, we would stop the tape and start again. But this wasn't a technical problem. And maybe on three or four occasions when an act had fallen apart during the actual taping, we retaped their performance after the show for broadcast. There was nothing wrong with that. It didn't affect the judging—the performer had already lost. But it saved them from potential embarrassment and it gave them the opportunity to be seen at their best by producers and agents.
Over the years the show changed. We dropped the male and female actor categories, we tried to include more contemporary music, we added a male spokesmodel category; Star Search had always been conceived as a variety show and we changed to make the show as entertaining as possible. But one category that never changed was female spokesmodel. Viewers always enjoyed looking at pretty women. And so did the host. With the media's celebration of the supermodel, we felt the category had its place. We were always trying to find the next Christie Brinkley. Who isn't?
Most of our spokesmodel competitors were actresses or models. They usually were submitted to us by their managers or agencies. In later years we added a question-and-answer segment to the competition, but in our early days of production it was just show and tell. Mostly show. The requirements were that contestants possess "poise, beauty, and the ability to speak effectively in a variety of situations." Basically, an attractive woman who could talk. One of our champions later won the Miss U.S.A. pageant, and several others ended up with roles on soaps or sitcoms, but it was our first spokesmodel, Sharon Stone, who enjoyed the greatest success.
Maybe my most embarrassing moment on the show occurred one night as I stood between two buxom young women waiting for the judges' decision. "This is it, ladies and gentlemen," I said. "You've seen them and you've heard them. Will our champion Tiffany come back next week, or will Stephanie be our new champion?" Then I paused and said, "I've never stood between two more beautiful treats in my life."
Star Search was a wonderful show. I loved doing it. My greatest value to the show, besides serving as host, was to get out on the road and promote it. For several years, in fact, I packed up and went on long publicity tours to promote the show. The first year Pam and I traveled by plane to thirteen cities to plug the show. We'd visit the local TV station that broadcast the show, every radio station, and newspapers, anybody who would help promote Star Search. It was so successful that the next year we decided to tour the country by bus. We visited twenty-eight cities. This was the ultimate promotion tour, just about everything we did was sponsored. We traveled on a magnificent (Prevost) bus, a luxurious bus with a shower, Jacuzzi, queen-size bed, big kitchen, copy machines, fax machines, several phones. The Hilton Hotel chain provided beautiful rooms at night. Snapple not only helped finance the tour, they even sent Wendy the Snapple Lady with us. There was great flooding throughout the Midwest that year, so we enlisted the American Red Cross as our official charity. Wherever we stopped, we passed buckets around; we literally raised buckets of money. I can't even estimate how many interviews I did on that tour. Hundreds. I did just about every local show in twenty-eight cities, I even did The Today Show four times from cities on the tour. As we left one city at five in the morning, I'd be on the phone with radio stations in the next city telling them that we were on our way.
The arrival of the Star Search bus was a big event in many cities. They welcomed our caravan with parades and dinners and special events, and wherever possible we held auditions in malls and at comedy clubs.
That tour was so successful that the following year we went to thirty-eight cities in twenty-five days. The show was being taped in Orlando, Florida—we were a major attraction at Disney World—and we had a big sign on the bus announcing WE'RE ON OUR WAY TO DISNEY WORLD. Our charity that year was the Starlight Foundation, which grants wishes to children with difficult medical problems. In every city, we stopped at another one of our sponsors, Boston Market, where we held a drawing for a trip to Disney World and received two thousand dollars for the Starlight Foundation—all the while promoting the show. In Washington, D.C., the bus stopped at the White House, where one of the little boys from the foundation met Hillary Clinton. The Star Searchtour was a promoter's dream; every sponsor got tremendous publicity out of it—I mentioned each of them in every one of the hundreds of interviews I did—and in Orlando I was able to give a check for fifty thousand dollars to the Starlight Foundation.
All the work done by so many people paid off; Star Search was one of the most successful syndicated shows on television. Almost two hundred stations broadcast the station to just about the entire country. In some cities we were on five days a week. The move to Disney World had been so successful that on my dressing room door I insisted they put two mouse ears over the o in my name. I mean, the show had been on the air thirteen years and there was every reason to believe it could continue forever, even without me.
But Al Masini had sold his company to a corporation that really wasn't interested in syndicated television. In cities like Chicago and Miami we were still doing extremely well, but in New York and Los Angeles our ratings had declined—mostly because we'd been moved out of a time slot accessible to the younger audience we attracted. And the syndicated market had changed. Hour-long shows were no longer desirable. Talk shows and reality-based shows like COPS, which were much less expensive to produce, and tabloid shows like Hard Copy had become very popular. So we were just eased out of existence. I pleaded with the producers, but they just decided to end it. They did the same thing to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which also could have gone on for a long time. As far as I'm concerned, Star Search was not ended with any sense of style or class. I just felt a show that had introduced so many talented performers deserved a little more respect. We should have ended with a celebration of our success, rather than just disappearing. When The Tonight Show ended, Johnny, Doc, and I walked away feeling as though we had done it about as well as it could have been done. There was a feeling of completeness. Not so with Star Search.
But I took so many great memories away from that show—in addition to my red Mickey Mouse suspenders. For example, I'll never forget the adagio team who appeared on an international version of Star Search. I don't know what happened between this dance team before we went on the air, but in the middle of their act he tossed her high into the air—and then missed her completely as she landed on the stage. Then, without a word, he turned around and walked away. They did not win the competition.
Nor will I forget the night comedian Bob Zaney won for the third time. As he walked toward me for the traditional interview—congratulations, very funny, see you next week—his feet suddenly went out from under him and he fell flat on his face. I didn't know what to do. But before I could help him, he looked up at me with a big smile on his face and said, "I've got news for you. My lawyer's in the audience. No matter what happens, I'm gonna walk away with that hundred grand."
Hosting Star Search required very little rehearsal and a lifetime of preparation. It was similar, in that way, to my job as cohost with Dick Clark on Bloopers and Practical Jokes.
We had this great staff of producers, writers, and technicians who actually put the show together. I showed up on time wearing a clean shirt.
Dick Clark is my oldest friend in the television industry, yet somehow he still doesn't look much over 1950. Dick Clark and I were a match made in Philadelphia. I think the most surprising thing was that with all of the different programs and commercials that we've both done, it was still almost forty years before we finally worked together.
Since our days as neighbors in Philadelphia, Dick Clark has become one of the most successful producers in television history. Dick's like me; while he's busy working on two shows, he gets anxious if he has only three more shows in development. So trying to get the two of us together was sort of like trying to find a convenient time for a meeting of Workaholics Anonymous. When Bloopers and Practical Jokes was created I was busy doing The Tonight Show and Star Search while he was producing shows on all three networks as well as for syndication. Naturally both of us loved the idea of working together on another show.
Carson Productions had created a program called Practical Jokes, while Dick created and hosted TV's Uncensored Bloopers. Both shows did very well in the ratings and NBC put them together. We were on for several seasons and then did a series of specials. The show was a combination of mistakes, miscues, technical errors, and very elaborately planned practical jokes. I mean, I've made my share of bloopers. I am the person who introduced "President Agnew" to a large audience. Gaffes happen, and when they do, there is really nothing you can do about them except just keep going and hope nobody noticed—and then let Clark and McMahon show them to millions of viewers. The bloopers ranged from outtakes from popular TV shows to tapes of news broadcasts, although we never used anything that was humiliating or would hurt someone's career. For example, while rehearsing a Golden Girls episode in which one of the girls was dating a younger man, Bea Arthur said seriously, "Why are you getting upset? You see older women with younger women all . . ." At that same rehearsal Bea walked all the way across the living room to answer the doorbell—which rang for the first time just as she opened the door. One news reporter covering a hurricane had just finished explaining that the winds were dying down—when he was blown right out of the picture. And a very serious and perhaps nervous newsman said somberly, "The stock market took a big dump . . . uh, dive . . ."
The practical jokes were often elaborate and expensive to set up. I mean, for a single bit we would build a fifty-thousand-dollar set. Once, for example, we invited the football star Deacon Jones to what he thought was a costume party, for which he was beautifully dressed as a ballerina. So you can imagine his surprise when he walked into what appeared to be an ordinary restaurant wearing a tutu. The restaurant was actually an elaborate set and every person there was an actor.
We convinced heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield that we had developed a cologne for him—and it was just about the worst thing you've ever smelled. I mean, it was just awful. He tried so hard to pretend he liked it, even offering suggestions about how with just a few little changes it would be even better.
When Vanna White was launching her clothing line, we arranged a very special fashion show for her. As she described to "buyers" the dresses she'd designed, one of her models came out wearing her dress backward. Vanna kept going, calling it "very classy." The next model came out with a bizarre food-and-flower attachment sewed to the back of the dress. Vanna just kept smiling, even when Merv Griffin, trying to help a model out of a jacket, accidentally pulled off the entire dress.
Not everybody immediately got the joke. A few days after Ernest Borgnine and his wife, Tova, had returned from a trip to a Third World country, she helped us get him out of the house. While he was gone we covered the entire house—and this was a big Hollywood home—with a canvas tent. When he came home he was stunned to find people wearing sealed space suits walking in and out of the house and very scientific-looking instruments all over the lawn. It looked as if he'd been invaded. Our "biological expert" told him that a strain of mysterious ants never before seen in North America had been found in the golf bag he'd brought back with him from the trip, and that the house had to be quarantined and fumigated. The setup looked completely authentic, and he was not happy. But when we finally told him the whole thing was a big joke— well, it took him a little while but we all breathed a sigh of relief when he laughed.
For Mickey Mantle we arranged an autograph session— and just imagine how surprised he was when absolutely nobody showed up. He relaxed when a large group of people walked in yelling, "Mickey! Mickey!"—until they went right past him into the back room where Mickey Rooney was signing autographs. Now, I'm a marine, and I've spent a fair amount of time in the great saloons, but when Mantle found out he'd been fooled, he started laughing and strung together words in combinations I've never heard. We edited out the words but kept the laughter.
Working with Dick Clark was about as easy as anything I've ever done on television. We taped two or three shows at a time. We'd show up at the studio on time wearing clean shirts and there would be a stack of cue cards five feet high ready to go. The director rolled the tape and we'd read our cards, ad-lib, and have fun, and finish within, oh, half a second of the allotted time—but only if we were being careless. When we needed to, we hit the time right on the nose. There was no pressure, no strain, just two old friends enjoying each other's company.
Now, I enjoyed watching these practical jokes being played on other people. In fact, the best thing about practical jokes is that they are never played on you. I knew that I was just a little too savvy, a little too sophisticated to ever be tricked. They couldn't fool me. Not me. Couldn't happen.
So I thought. There's a sign at the gate on the NBC lot informing drivers as they leave that their cars are subject to inspection. Now, the last time anyone was searched they had to look under the saddlebags. But one night as I left the NBC lot my limousine was stopped by a guard. I was in the backseat watching a World Series game, when my driver, Patrick Marwick, said, "Boss, they want you to get out of the car."
"What?" I hadn't been paying any attention. Patrick had been working for me for sixteen years. He was my friend as well as my driver. I relied on him for many things. I trusted him completely.
"Would you mind stepping out for a moment?" he asked. "I don't know how to handle this."
I was tired, I didn't know what was going on, and admittedly I was a little irritated. But I got out of the car. Patrick and two NBC security guards were staring into the open trunk. When I looked into the trunk myself I was stunned. The trunk was crammed with NBC equipment and supplies. It looked like an NBC store. A guard asked me if I had a pass for all of that stuff. I mean, Patrick and I had been together sixteen years, I couldn't believe he was stealing from the network. "What the hell is all this, Patrick?" I asked.
Patrick, my friend, my driver, immediately bailed out on me. "Don't look at me, boss," he said. "It's got to belong to you."
One of the security guards started listing the items in the trunk. "There's a typewriter here, this is NBC stationery, bathroom tissues, paper towels, cups . . ."
I didn't know what to think. Naturally, I tried to protect Patrick. "He's had the car all day," I immediately told the guard. "He dropped me off this afternoon."
" . . . another typewriter, there's a pay phone in here . . ."
A pay phone! "I have no idea how it got there," I said. "I don't know anything about it."
" . . . an adding machine, some more stationery, pencils . . ."
"That's not mine," I insisted. Patrick wasn't saying a word. I was stunned. I thought I knew him so well. I couldn't imagine him stealing. "You know anything about this, Patrick?"
"Don't look at me, boss," Patrick repeated.
The guard asked me, "You know anything about this at all?"
"I know nothing about this," I said firmly.
Just then a lieutenant approached us and asked what was going on. He was hidden in shadows and his cap was pulled down partially covering his face. "He has no requisition pass," the guard explained. "He has no idea how this stuff got in here."
"This your equipment?" the lieutenant asked me. He shook his head in disbelief. "This is incredible."
Something about the lieutenant looked vaguely familiar. And as they started reading me my constitutional rights, I thought I recognized him. "Wha . . . ?" I asked, confused.
"And welcome to our practical joke special," Lieutenant Johnny Carson said.
I had been fooled completely. Tricked and caught on camera. I mean, naturally my first instinct was to protect Patrick. Or, as Carson acknowledged later, "You certainly stood up for him. He was on his way to the slammer, thanks to you."
Eventually the practical jokes became too expensive and time-consuming to set up, so I dropped out and Dick Clark continued with the blooper specials. But when I look back on that show, I can't help but think of the Australian broadcaster who said at the end of his show, "Remember what I always say at the end of a show . . ." He paused and stared into the camera. "I always say the same thing . . . but I forget what it is."