Make 'Em Laugh, page 35
Offstage, it was Meadows who was frequently tempted to send Gleason to the moon. No despot ever ruled with more disdain for the needs of others than Gleason. “Jackie Gleason did not like to rehearse,” said Randolph. “He said comedy is not funny if it’s over-rehearsed, and boy, we weren’t over-rehearsed. We saw him only Saturday, the day of the show. We went through the show with him once. Just once.” Sometimes they were lucky to get even that. The cast frequently had to go to his apartment or country house just to get a line-through. Gleason, who far preferred to tuck into a cocktail or two than spend hours memorizing his lines, would breezily encourage everybody to buck up: “We’ll get down to the studio pretty soon and shoot another one of ’em—Civil War style.” While Meadows was suffering through the two episodes that the cast shot every week in front of a live audience, wondering what would come out of Gleason’s mouth, a production assistant asked if he could bring her anything. “Yes,” she replied, “a cake with a file in it.”
For a large man, Gleason was incredibly adept at walking a tightrope—especially while tight. Garry Marshall, who observed filming one day, remembered:
They had written this whole skit where he’s talking to a baby. Jackie took a drink once in a while, and would come in late. And he came in and he had never read the script, it was too late, and they were going on live. He was supposed to be talking to this bundle, the baby, a doll, and the greatest thing I ever saw him do was he just dragged this bassinet out on the stage, and he says, “I’ll do it this way”—and he put the script in the bassinet! He would be talking and acting, but he was reading from the script! But you couldn’t tell he was reading it. Then when he had to turn the page, he went, “Coochy coochy coo!” And he’d turn the page! So, Jackie never missed a line.
Meadows must have simply shrugged at his genius; in that same episode, where the Kramdens try to adopt the baby, she said, “the live audience cried so much that we ran out of time with the performance uncompleted.”
Livin’ large: Gleason picks up the tab at pal Toots Shor’s bar.
Ironically, once The Honeymooners broke out on its own, it diminished in popularity. Gleason pulled the plug in 1956, after thirty-nine episodes. “The excellence of the material could not be maintained and I had too much fondness for the show to cheapen it,” he told the press. By the early 1960s, Gleason had moved his variety show to Miami Beach and reinvented The Honeymooners in a dozen different ways—as a musical segment, as a color segment, in an ongoing miniseries where the Kramdens and Nortons travel to Europe together. Even the casts changed, with Carney as the only other constant; hardly a way to “maintain the excellence of the material” (and fans can barely bring themselves to refer to these cheesy excursions), but then Gleason always did what he wanted.
Years before the phrase was coined, Jackie Gleason lived large. There hardly seemed to be any showbiz perquisite he disdained—a house with three swimming pools and twelve separate bars, a private train—and he built his own television empire. In reality, he achieved the kind of epic grandiosity to which poor Ralph Kramden always aspired. In some kind of bizarre reversal of the Horatio Alger myth, Gleason used his considerable clout and fortune to reconstruct his faded brown childhood poverty in Bensonhurst. It was the most impressive get-poor scheme in television history. Comedian Richard Lewis, who was once heckled by Gleason in a Miami nightclub, still admired his genius:
Gleason was just, you know, one of a kind. He, as they say, “owned the stage.” He ate the stage, the scenery, the audience, he was the monster that ate Cleveland. He was able to play this poor bastard who so loved his wife and so wanted to pull through, but he was such a dramatic loser. So, you wanted him to be as arrogant as he could be. That combination of being a loser and arrogant—he pulled it off like nobody I know in history.
He was the greatest.
Even if The Dick Van Dyke Show had been nothing more than a link in the evolutionary chain between Your Show of Shows and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, it would still have been a seminal event in the history of television. But it was much more than that; it was arguably the quintessential 1960s situation comedy.
“OH, ROB!”
THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW
The program did have its roots in Your Show of Shows, or more specifically, with the show’s key writer and performer, Carl Reiner. After the various incarnations of Sid Caesar’s programs left the air, Reiner found himself billed as a “not-so-special guest star” on The Dinah Shore Chevy Show as the 1960s began. Feeling stuck between the demise of the variety genre and unimpressed by the sitcom pilots that were offered to him, Reiner had an epiphany at, of all places, the Ninety-sixth Street exit of the East River Drive: “I asked myself, ‘What piece of ground do you stand on that nobody else stands on?’ Oh, wait a minute, I live in New Rochelle, I’m married, I have a kid, I worked on a comedy variety show with Sid Caesar and the Show of Shows. I’ll write about that.” Reiner worked like a demon in the summer of 1959 to grind out thirteen scripts about a television writer who commuted between the Westchester suburbs and his job in Manhattan. It resembled Reiner’s life in the 1950s in nearly every detail, except “I used three writers because seven writers is too expensive.”
The show was called Head of the Family and starred the one actor who could perfectly capture Carl Reiner’s world: Carl Reiner. Unfortunately, he wasn’t right for the part and the pilot was shot down. Then series producer Sheldon Leonard stepped in and told Reiner to buck up: “We won’t fail. We’ll get a better actor to play you.” The two final choices to play Rob Petrie were an up-and-coming game-show host named Johnny Carson and an up-and-coming song-and-dance man from Danville, Illinois, named Dick Van Dyke. Van Dyke was currently starring in Bye Bye Birdie on Broadway. “I had a couple of scripts of another series I wanted to do and Carl sent me eight scripts he had written and I just threw mine out the window. The writing was so great. And I said, ‘I’m with you from now on.’ ” Reiner and Leonard recruited the rest of the cast from every corner of show business. For Rob’s cowriters, they got Rose Marie, who had been in vaudeville since the age of five, and Morey Amsterdam, a comic and gag writer who had performed in every possible venue. For Rob’s wife, they chose a nearly unknown television actress whose previous distinctions had been her shapely pair of legs: Mary Tyler Moore. Compared to her cohorts, she had next to no comedy experience, but according to one of the show’s writers, Garry Marshall, “She became a great comedian by osmosis. You can learn, if you’re smart and you can follow.”
WE HIT EVERYTHING THAT WAS FORBIDDEN. THAT PEOPLE DIDN’T REALIZE.
—Rose Marie
One of Reiner’s major innovations was the split focus of the comedy:
The Boss: Van Dyke and Rose Marie placate the irate Alan Brady—played by the off-camera boss, Carl Reiner.
Some very bright critic wrote, “This is the first time that we know what the man does. When he says ‘Honey, I’m home!’ we know where he’s home from.” When we first took it to the network and they said, “Couldn’t he be, like, an insurance salesman?” I said, “Insurance salesman? Are you not aware that when our people talk about their work they’re talking about jokes? What do you talk about when you work in insurance? Your fiduciary plan?”
The home / work dichotomy was so important to the show’s identity that, for a while, it was called Double Trouble.
However, by the time the show was picked up and debuted on CBS in October of 1961, it was called The Dick Van Dyke Show, largely by default—besides, even though no one had heard of Van Dyke, if the show was a hit, audiences would certainly know who he was. It took awhile for the series to catch on, and its popularity was added to immeasurably when CBS chose, as its lead-in, the sophisticated show’s absolute opposite, The Beverly Hillbillies. If audiences watched closely, and eventually they did, they could recognize the important innovations of the show. According to Rose Marie, “We hit everything that was forbidden. That people didn’t realize. We had a show where the neighbor had crab-grass, and everybody was mad at him because he wouldn’t cut it. It was real. You believed it.”
A large part of the show’s appeal was the adult charm shared by its leads. Before The Dick Van Dyke Show, claims Reiner, “the comedies that really worked were husband against wife. Battle of the sexes. Instead of two against each other, we had two against the world. They had mutual problems they solved differently. But they were obviously in love with each other. There was a sexuality between Dick and Mary that was very apparent.” But Reiner also brought a unique vision to the often contrived universe of the television sitcom; it seems odd that it would take so many years for a program to realize it, but the best way to reach millions of viewers was actually to focus on what happened to one person. “Carl used to bring the writers in and you’d sit around, and you’d just talk about how things happened to you that were either so silly or so embarrassing,” said Marshall. “He said much of our show is based on embarrassing moments you had and then you write ’em and transfer ’em to Rob Petrie.” And one other grace note, as recognized by Van Dyke: “Carl said at the outset, ‘I don’t want to ever mention anything that’s in news. I don’t want to hear any current slang. Any of that stuff, because it will date the show.’ ”
New Frontier: Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore; Kennedyesque glamour and presidential fiber.
Even so, The Dick Van Dyke Show represented, for many, the perfect time capsule of Camelot and the Kennedy era, with its youthful, good-looking, stylish leading couple. Certainly the program captured the aspirations of a new generation trying to make things go right in a changing world; the Petries had inherited the future—now what were they going to do with it? “My favorite thing about Rob,” said Van Dyke, “was he was educated and bright and very nice but he had a fear of authority that he had had from childhood. And he always began to stammer when he was around a cop or a judge or anybody like that. So we had a lot of fun with that insecurity of his.” Nowhere was that more apparent than with two groundbreaking episodes that brought the Petries face-to-face with the ramifications of the burgeoning civil rights movement. One, broadcast in 1963, called “That’s My Baby?” had the Petries convinced they had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital—until they discover, in the end, that the supposedly mistaken baby’s parents are black. In 1965, in the course of “A Show of Hands,” the Petries accidentally dye their hands black while making a Halloween costume for their son, hours before they are supposed to appear at a community banquet celebrating racial equality. In both cases, the climax of the shows showcased Rob and Laura’s genuine shame at their preconceptions in front of African American characters—a rare and noble gesture in the early 1960s.
But fittingly, considering the rubber-band contortions of its titular hero, The Dick Van Dyke Show’s greatest asset was its elasticity. Nearly anything could happen on the show, and did. Reiner’s basic concept allowed for some first-class vaudeville and song-and-dance turns from his cast whenever The Alan Brady Show-within-a-show called for them. It bounced ideas off of sex education and civil rights and science fiction fantasies—it even, improbably, featured a grown man getting bar mitzvahed in a later episode. For its five seasons, The Dick Van Dyke Show lived within the parentheses of Carl Reiner’s borscht belt sense of humor and Dick Van Dyke’s midwestern affability; between the show’s creator and his alter ego, there was a composite of everything Americans found amusing and likable on the home front of the New Frontier.
“YOU CAME RIGHT STRAIGHT OUT AND CALLED ME COLORED”
NORMAN LEAR AND ALL IN THE FAMILY
Jeny Lewis had reduced Norman Lear to tears. In 1950, Lear was a fresh young writer on Martin and Lewis’s television showcase, The Colgate Comedy Hour, and Lewis had actually gone ahead and demolished one of Lear’s carefully written sketches to an explosion of comic shenanigans.
It’s a changing world, Arch. What’re you gonna do?
–Mike (Rob Reiner), “Meet the Bunkers”
“I thought the sketch had some Everyman kind of meaning—don’t ask me what the meaning was, I can’t remember—but Jerry had destroyed the meaning and I was devastated because I thought that the piece had something to say,” recalled Lear. “I never wrote anything that didn’t come from a serious mind.”
Nearly two decades later, Lear had evolved into a successful writer, director, and producer, teaming with another Colgate alum, Bud Yorkin, to create Tandem Productions. They had made some successful film comedies, but their accountant warned them that if they wanted to keep up their standards of living, they were going to have to go back to television, where the money was. The trouble was there was nothing on television that appealed to Lear: “The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction—those were the shows on the air—the biggest problem anybody faced was the boss coming to dinner and the roast beef got burned, you know?” Not the kind of thing for a serious mind. Lear had heard about a BBC comedy called ’Till Death Do Us Part in which a hardnosed, bigoted dockworker lived with his nagging wife, his daughter, and her sponging husband. It seemed like just the kind of uncompromising view of a family that Lear thought was missing from the networks—and the kind of family he recognized from his childhood.
Lear’s father was a Jewish appliance salesman in the middle of Connecticut who frequently complained about his hard-knock life, disparaged schwartzes, put down his son, Norman, as “the laziest white kid he ever met,” and told his wife to “stifle” herself when she got on his nerves, which was often. “My family lived at the end of their nerves,” said Lear.
Once Lear and Yorkin screened the BBC comedy, they knew some changes were in order to make the show more palatable for American audiences—but not too palatable. They thought they should bring the pilot script to ABC, which was in such desperate straits in the late 1960s that they would try anything. Those Were the Days, as the pilot was called, starred two relatively unknown actors with stage and film backgrounds: Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton. In one of the luckiest breaks in television history, Mickey Rooney had turned Lear down for the role of the character who was originally called “Archie Justice.” When Lear brought O’Connor in to read, “He looked at his script which I had sent him, read a half a page, and that was it. Archie grew to be a combination of what we put on paper and what he invented, not by way of story, but by way of language, on the spot, when he slipped into the character.” O’Connor was not sanguine about the project—“There is a saying that satire is what closes on Saturday night. I thought the American public was too dour to laugh at itself”—but the forty-five-year-old actor was not inundated with prospects.
MY FAMILY LIVED AT THE END OF THEIR NERVES.
Bundle from Britain: Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett and his American counterpart, Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor).
Lear was emboldened, in the pilot episode called “Meet the Bunkers,” to show things that happened in millions of homes across America, but just never on their actual television sets. Archie was a working-class veteran of WWII (“the Big One,” he’d remind people) with a bigoted view of anyone and everyone outside his constricted circle—“Hebes” or “spics” or “coloreds” or “fags,” as he called them. Archie was, as it were, an archconservative. His wife, Edith, was a literal-minded chatterbox with a heart of gold, whom Lear based on several of his aunts. (“She would come from love. Whatever the subject, whatever the difficulty, she came from love,” he said.) The Bunkers’ daughter, Gloria, had married an eternal college student, the “bleeding heart liberal” Mike, who was forced, out of economic necessity, to, well, bunk with the Bunkers. They brought a healthy dose of real sexuality to the show. Although Mike and Gloria were not as colorful as their parents, they were a crucial aspect of the program, a balancing act and a lens through which the audience could judge Archie’s more outrageous pronouncements.
King Lear: Norman Lear gives notes to his hard-working cast on the set of All in the Family (Rob Reiner, Sally Struthers, Jean Stapleton and O’Connor).
Yet however desperate ABC may have been for noteworthy programming, they passed on both versions of the “Meet the Bunkers” pilot that they had Lear film for them, for a total of $250,000. Luckily, the president of CBS, Robert D. Wood, was getting as frustrated as Lear was with the evergreen cornball comedies on his network. A combination of demographics and greater creative freedom in the movies made Those Were the Days suddenly appealing to the network. According to television historian Gerard Jones, “There was a genuine desire to make TV a little more relevant to what was going on, particularly since so many of the older, very wholesome shows were dying right and left. We had to do something to look younger, if we wanted to get young people to stay home from the movies and watch a TV show. I’m sure they smelled big ratings, as well.” CBS gave Lear the green light for a mid-season replacement, with two provisions: change the name to something that sounds less old-fashioned, and don’t broadcast the incendiary pilot as the first episode.
But Lear stuck to his guns. The pilot episode, with its barrage of ethnic slurs and clear intimation of sexual intercourse between Mike and Gloria, was the perfect way to introduce the world to the Bunkers. “You jump into a swimming pool, you can’t get wetter than wet,” Lear told the network. “And this gets Archie all wet, three hundred and sixty degrees of him, so this is the one we’re gonna do.” The fight between Lear and the network went all the way up to the night before the January 12, 1971, initial broadcast, when William Tankersley, head of CBS Program Practices, called up Lear and told him, “You’ve got your way, Norman. You’re gonna blow your whole series, but you go right ahead.” CBS ran a disclaimer—something about “a humorous spotlight on frailities, prejudices, and concerns”—and ordered extra phone operators to deal with the expected onslaught of complaints.
