5
In 1949, Phil and I got a job in Atlanta at the Henry Grady Hotel, an excellent establishment with a large ballroom. We performed two shows a day, one in the afternoon for kids and another at night for a more mature crowd. Children’s favorites and slapstick were de rigueur for the early show, and then we spiced up the nighttime routine with Spike Jones, Bing Crosby, and popular songs on the radio, as well as more mature jokes.
With Phil as the straight man, more or less, and me in the role of rubber-limbed comedian, tirelessly mugging, miming, dancing, and inventing antics on the spot, we filled the room every show. We also did local events, radio, and even store openings. All the exposure made us quite popular around town. In turn, Phil and I fell in love with the city.
At the time, Atlanta still felt like a small city. With only about 250,000 people living there, it was quaint, comfortable, and affordable. Charmed by the surroundings and buoyed by our success, both of us decided to put stakes in the ground. We took advantage of the GI Bill and bought homes. Mine was a tiny three-bedroom with prefabricated sides that seemed to go up in days. Even as the workmen slapped it together, Margie and I beamed with the pride of new and naive homeowners.
The backyard was up against the woods, and though we had only a couple flower beds, shrubs, and several baby trees, it looked to me, with my vivid imagination, like the grounds of an estate. Wanting the front to look good, too, I carted in umpteen wheelbarrows of sod and had it looking like a magazine ad—until a hard rain washed all that greenery and hard work away.
In 1950, Margie gave birth to our son Chris, and thirteen months later we had a second baby boy, Barry. Like Phil, now that I had a family, I lost my taste for the road. I got a job as an announcer at the local CBS radio station, WAGA. Pretty soon they gave me my own slot as an early-morning disk jockey, and a little later, when there was an opening at night for a fifteen-minute record act, Phil and I took it.
You couldn’t be in Atlanta for any appreciable amount of time without hearing me, which worked in my favor when the local television station owned by the Atlanta Constitution, WCON, needed a full-time announcer. They turned to me. I got the job reading all the news, announcements, and commercials—anything that needed announcing over the course of an eight-hour day.
I proved myself adept and inexpensive, and eventually the station’s management gave me an hour-long show of my own. I was thrilled.
But let me tell you, no matter how excited and eager I was to do well—and I was—it didn’t take long before those sixty minutes felt like six hundred minutes. It ate up material. I mean it devoured material. Few things are as terrifying as standing in front of a camera by yourself and realizing you have used most of your best material and still have to fill fifty-four minutes.
On my first night, I felt like the clock had stopped. It didn’t seem like the hour would ever end. I read the newspaper, told jokes, and interviewed people—whatever I could think of. It was like an episode of The Twilight Zone. A young performer’s dream comes true when he’s given his own hour-long television show, except when that hour never ends and the performer goes bananas.
Fortunately, I figured out the pacing and quickly got to where I was so comfortable in front of the camera that I forgot I was on the air. I never gave it a thought—until the red light on the camera went off and I began to think about the next day’s material.
I never worked as hard. At night, I sat in front of the TV with Margie and the boys, with a portable typewriter on my lap, and read through the newspaper, through joke books, and listened to the TV, all the while writing furiously.
Was it quality material?
I had no idea. But I got very good at producing a lot of it.
I pantomimed records, told jokes, and interviewed people on the street about popular topics. I also came up with a running bit where I put some soft clay on a slant board and told a story while I sculpted. I kept the bit going throughout the hour. At the end of one show, I put the finishing touches on a guy and then punched him under the chin. His face scrunched up and I quipped, “Well, there’s a funny-looking old fart.”
This was the early 1950s, when there were only a few stations on the dial, and oh my God, the phone calls poured into the station. I was almost fired.
Eventually the station moved into a more proper studio and I partnered with a quick-witted woman named Fran Adams (later Fran Kearton) on The Fran and Dick Show, also known as The Music Shop. We wrote and produced skits, clowned around, satirized popular TV shows, and pantomimed hit songs. Like all such shows done live, it was a little bit of everything we could think of.
In her 1993 memoir, Fran recalled a play on the show Dragnet, with Detective Friday and his partner, Thursday, investigating the murder of Goldilocks, of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” fame. She was found on the street “wearing a derby and slacks,” intoned Friday. “At least she died like a man,” said Thursday. Ugh. As I said, it was everything we could think of.
One day, as I was lip-syncing Andy Griffith’s 1953 comedy hit “What It Was, Was Football,” a monologue about a hillbilly preacher watching his first football game and trying to figure out what was happening on “the pretty little green cow pasture,” I looked up and saw Andy himself, watching me.
It turned out he was in town promoting his record, but no one told me he was stopping by the studio. I was too far into the bit to stop. I thought, Oh, God, I’m in trouble. He’s not going to appreciate my interpretation. (Given the quality of the Dragnet satire, you can only imagine.)
But Andy was quite amused.
And I was quite relieved.
At some point, I left Fran and repartnered with Phil on a show for WSP, the local NBC affiliate. The show was more elaborate than anything either of us had done up to that point. We had a little band, a girl singer, and a kid who helped us write. In other words, it was a real show.
We embraced the challenge of producing what was essentially a variety show every day. We poured every ounce of creative energy into writing sketches and rehearsing songs. I even painted scenery on the weekends. I was so passionate that I was nearly possessed. It was also fun, and the show was quite popular—or so we thought. We figured we would do it a long time.
Phil had also opened a comedy club called The Wit’s End. It was located near the Biltmore Hotel and Georgia Tech University. The club’s motto was to the point: “Bring money.” And people did. It was an instant hit with the college kids and would, by the 1970s, send improv groups all over the country. In its early days, though, it complemented our TV show.
After about a year, the TV station’s general manager came to me and said they wanted me to do the show alone.
“What about Phil?” I asked.
The station manager shook his head.
I raised my eyebrows. I didn’t know what that meant.
“We want you to do it,” he said. “We don’t need Phil.”
I felt a pit in my stomach. I had been in this situation before. Now, granted, it wasn’t the Mob making me an offer. It was the station manager. But he was persuasive. He said they were going to cut back and fire Phil, anyway. They didn’t want to pay two people for a job they thought one person could do adequately enough.
I needed a job, but I couldn’t leave Phil hanging like that. I didn’t know what to do until I remembered that some months earlier a New Orleans TV station had contacted me about a job. I ignored them at the time, but I found out the position was still available, and though it paid the same as I currently made, two hundred dollars a week, I took it. It still meant breaking up with Phil, but I thought it was better than continuing to do our show without him.
I didn’t tell him about my conversation with the station manager, and he was hurt when I left. He thought I was deserting him. Later, we talked it out and patched things up, and moved on with our lives and careers.
It was 1954 when we arrived in the Big Easy, and on my first day in town, before I had even visited the station, I met the general manager at a motel. He took me into a conference room, where I improvised for about a half hour in front of a half dozen potential sponsors. They were local businessmen and regional reps for larger companies. They wanted to see what I had to offer.
Talk about pressure. And poor conditions for a performance. But I knew my livelihood was on the line. If I didn’t get sponsors, they would find someone else and I would have to look for work.
Luckily, I nabbed a couple of them, including a biggie, Louisiane Coffee. My new boss gave me a congratulatory slap on the back and then I went back to my motel, downed two beers, and passed out.
Once past that stressful day, New Orleans felt charmed. Margie and I had a cute little house and pretty soon we added our third child and first daughter, Stacy. The station was located in the French Quarter, and I was able to walk to work in the morning as the restaurateurs and barkeeps cleaned up from the previous night and cafés brewed fresh coffee. It was nice.
For the show, I had a combo of musicians, did some man-on-the-street interviews, and brought kids into the studio, which was almost always comedy gold. I incorporated them into skits and songs. I had learned a lot over the years and was very comfortable in front of the camera. Within about six months, I owned the New Orleans market. I was beating Arthur Godfrey’s national broadcast, which, in those days, was something.
My ratings got the attention of the network in New York, specifically my old Air Force buddy Byron Paul. We had kept in touch over the years as Byron rose up the ranks at CBS, from a cameraman to a director. He told the executives about me and suggested they bring me to New York for an audition.
There was some skepticism, of course, but Byron said if they didn’t hire me, he would personally pay all of the expenses. I heard that and said, “Really? That’s very generous—and brave—of you.” But he felt confident it was not going to cost him a cent.