Make 'Em Laugh, page 37
He sent the first two-thirds of the comedy to Walter Matthau, who accepted the role of Oscar on the spot, on the strength of the first two acts. “It was very funny without making you suspend your disbelief,” said Matthau, who drove Simon crazy over lunch one day by suggesting that he should play the role of Felix instead. Thankfully, in the end, Matthau was matched with Art Carney as Felix, and under the expert direction of Mike Nichols, The Odd Couple opened in March of 1965. It was such a smash that it repaid its investment within a month and went on to run nearly a thousand performances. Matthau repeated his role as Oscar in the 1968 screen version, opposite an enervatingly Chekhovian performance by Jack Lemmon. The Odd Couple would spawn scores of productions and replacement casts around the world, including a London version featuring Jack Klugman as Oscar and a Chicago tour with Tony Randall.
The cooking, the crying, the cleaning: Tony Randall and Jack Klugman (opposite); their movie ancestors, Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.
When Paramount decided to reconfigure the play into a situation comedy for ABC, they hired Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson to produce the series. Marshall lured Randall and Klugman back to prime time and created what was, to many minds, the best Felix / Oscar combination of all time. The two actors were indeed opposites in a variety of ways—Randall was an opera connoisseur, while Klugman’s hobbies consisted of betting on the ponies—but they were also experienced stage actors whose early training came out of the Method-oriented disciples of the Group Theater. Randall and Klugman were admired but they were not television stars. ABC was dubious.
OSCAR: I can’t take it anymore, Felix, I’m cracking up. Everything you do irritates me. And when you’re not here, the things I know you’re gonna do when you come in irritate me. You leave me little notes on my pillow. Told you 158 times I can’t stand little notes on my pillow. “We’re all out of cornflakes. F.U.” Took me three hours to figure out F.U. was Felix Ungar!
Even Simon had his doubts. According to Klugman, “Neil said, ‘How many neat and sloppy jokes can you do?’ Well, he didn’t know us. We went beyond that.” Indeed, they did. Although the first season somewhat slavishly mined all of the play’s possible scenarios, by the second season, when Klugman and Randall also insisted that Paramount ditch the laugh track and perform the show in front of a live audience, the show achieved liftoff. Sure, there were still jokes about Oscar’s horrendous habits—his favorite meal was to take one Chinese TV dinner and one Italian TV dinner, mush them together, and shake well—and Felix’s fastidiousness: “Everyone thinks I’m a hypochondriac. It makes me sick.” But eventually The Odd Couple worked harder and worked deeper for its jokes. Marshall gave the credit to his stars: “Tony Randall said, ‘We don’t want to be embarrassed, Jack and I. We’ll be at the home for the old funny people soon, and people will visit and we will play them these shows because what else are we gonna show them? And we don’t want to be embarrassed. So let’s do better.’ And they forced all the writers to write a little better.”
Klugman’s Oscar was all id, taking no responsibility for his health, his love life, his laundry, his income tax, or his paycheck. He was the kind of guy you’d love to play softball with and have a beer with (but stand back when he opened the can), only never, never trust him to put your insurance premium in the mail. Randall’s Felix was the embodiment of the superego, the ultimate control freak who thought that all of life’s messiness—including ambition, love, marriage, devotion—could be micromanaged and arranged as neatly as a table service. He would go to pieces when human nature exploded all around him. A male Jewish mother (Randall was born Leonard Rosenberg), Felix, in the words of Klugman, “didn’t want you to be neat because he wanted it, but because it would help you—you’d live your life more if you were neat.” In their near-Jungian tangle, Randall and Klugman presented not only the impossibility of being roommates, not even simply of being married, but the essential impossibility of coexistence in human society. Sounds heavy, but it made for a lot of laughs.
Oscar, Oscar, Oscar… Randall is lucky he can even find Klugman.
The show was never a big hit during its network run, though both stars eventually won Emmys. ABC was always nervous that viewers would perceive Felix and Oscar as a homosexual couple and threw many girlfriends and ex-wives into the episodes. (Again, to the show’s credit, it was a pioneer in producing a conclusive final episode after its cancellation: Felix remarried his beloved ex-wife Gloria.) The writers often twitted the studio executives with some outlandish possibilities, never filmed. Randall once recalled, “We had a script where Oscar was doing an article on homosexuality in sports, and I come across the article on his desk and I think he’s writing about himself. We had the wonderful line, ‘Gee, if it was either one of us, you’d think it would be me!’ ” The Odd Couple was also a quintessential urban show—while it hovered in the national basement of TV ratings, it was always in the top ten in New York City, and cultivated the fame and admiration it truly deserved when it went into syndication.
Randall and Klugman remained good friends after the series came to an end in 1975; Randall helped nurse Klugman through a near-fatal bout of throat cancer and Klugman gave his all to support Randall’s pet project, a repertory theater company in New York. The simple answer to Randall and Klugman’s on-camera chemistry was clearly that they were so good at driving each other crazy because they were so crazy about each other.
“DAD CAN I?”
BILL COSBY
One of the things you learn when you become a parent is the horrible thought and the reality that your children will be your children for the rest of your life! That’s why there’s death.
–Bill Cosby
When Bill Cosby made this kind of trenchant remark about children on The Tonight Show in the spring of 1984, he had already been one of America’s best-regarded comic voices on the nature of parenthood for more than two decades. The next fall, Dr. William H. Cosby, Ed.D, would graduate to the head of class with The Cosby Show, one of the most influential and popular television programs of all time. It would be fair to say that Cosby had been studying for his role of developmental counselor since the day he was born.
That was July 12, 1937. Cosby was born and raised in one of the poorer sections of Philadelphia. His father left the household when Bill was a youngster. He remembered Christmas as so cheerless that his family barely had enough stockings for their feet, let alone for Santa; young Bill made a Christmas tree by painting an orange crate with some watercolors. He kept on the straight and narrow during his adolescence, working as a shoe-shine boy, for fear that if he got arrested for the kinds of things his pals were up to, “Who’ll look out for Mom?” Eventually, he went into the navy and enrolled at Philadelphia’s Temple University, to become a physical education instructor. He knew he had a funny way with a line, and to make some additional cash, played some nightclubs in Philly and New York. To his surprise, it all went very well, and by 1962, he was playing the New York scene with confidence and gaining a following.
Just Cos: As a popular stand-up; and as an acclaimed TV espionage agent in I Spy.
For most black entertainment pioneers in the 1960s, the road to fame could be rocky. Not quite so with Cosby. According to Joan Rivers, who was also starting out at the same time, in the same clubs:
I always said Bill suffered terribly from the time he got in the train in Philadelphia to when he got off in New York—maybe he didn’t get a seat— because he was very successful immediately in New York. He was colorless. It had nothing to do about black or white. And that’s why he was so accepted immediately because everybody would go, “He’s just funny.” They didn’t have to make a decision with him.
Early on, Cosby was tempted to bring race into the picture, mostly because in the early 1960s that was expected from black entertainers. One early gag went, “Can you imagine the first black president? ‘For Sale’ signs in the yards of every home up and down Pennsylvania Avenue,” but he soon dropped the pose in favor of what he knew best—the life of Bill Cosby. Fellow Philadelphian Jack Klugman remarked that “He wouldn’t tell jokes, he would tell stories about his family: his father, his mother, and he would create attitudes. He would create these characters and he would make them real.”
Whether he was talking about shivering under the covers as a kid listening to a horror show on the radio or getting hammered after school with a “slush ball” or trying to relate Noah’s incredulity at being chosen to save the human race, Cosby connected immediately with his audience. Perhaps the most revolutionary thing he did in the frenetic 1960s was to take his time. As he told an interviewer: “I am not the kind of person who enjoys line, line, line, laugh, laugh, laugh. I think that people get on a roll from a thought, a picture, an idea, or something preconceived, and they go with it.” He was able to expand his gift for portraiture on a series of record albums in the mid-1960s. He was taken under the considerable wing of Allan Sherman, who gave Cosby his first late-night shot when he guest-hosted The Tonight Show and then convinced Warner Bros. to sign Cosby for a record contract. Cosby would go on to win six consecutive Grammys from 1964 to 1969, and his LPs brought him his first legion of fans, including a young Jeff Foxworthy: “He was just a great storyteller. He was always clean, so you didn’t have to worry about listenin’ to it in front of somebody or retellin’ it.”
But again, in the mid-1960s, it would be disingenuous for a major black entertainer to assume he could be divorced from racial issues. Still, Cosby assiduously stuck to his mantra, which he repeated for hundreds of interviewers:
I’m tired of those people who say “You should be doing more to help your people.” I’m a comedian, that’s all … my humor comes from the way I look at things. I see things the way other people do. … A white person listens to my act and he laughs and he thinks, “Yeah, that’s the way I see it, too … that must mean that we are alike.” Right?
Cosby’s profile only increased when, in 1965, he became the first black performer with a starring role in a network series since Amos ‘n’ Andy had been canceled in 1953. I Spy was a tongue-in-cheek espionage buddy drama that ran for three seasons—and Cosby copped the Emmy for Outstanding Leading Actor in a Series each year. During the 1970s, Cosby expanded his profile further, going solo and either appearing in or creating five new series for television, including two separate variety shows and a charming sitcom, The Bill Cosby Show, which featured him as a low-key inner-city phys-ed instructor.
But truth to tell, by the time the 1980s began, it seemed as if many trends in entertainment had passed him by. Everyone acknowledged Cosby was the preeminent black comedian—of an earlier generation. Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy were giving black and white audiences cutting-edge comedy (and, in his stand-up act, Murphy used his devastating imitation of Cosby to portray his mentor as an uptight old fogey), and there had been several successful black sitcoms on the air—The Jeffersons, Good Times, Sanford and Son, and so on. Yet, for Cosby, the tone of the black explosion was all wrong. He blamed much of the decline of civility on All in the Family: “People don’t want Mr. Nice Guy. They want Archie Bunker. A lovable bigot.” As he told Phil Donahue in 1985, “My opinion is that the man never apologized for anything. [He] became a hero to too many Americans for his shortsightedness, his tunnel vision. And I’m really a believer that the show never taught or tried to teach anybody anything.”
I DID THIS SHOW BECAUSE I WAS CONFUSED.
Pudding Pop: Father of a beloved TV family; Phylicia Rashad is to the right of Cosby.
And so Bill Cosby set out to create a show that might teach somebody something. NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff was impressed with Cosby’s family-friendly routines on The Tonight Show, but when Cosby approached the network about developing those ideas into a show, they were uneasy. Sitcoms were on their way out, and Cosby’s record on TV—a spate of big-time commercials notwithstanding—was mixed at best. They gave a half-hearted fall commitment to Cosby for a handful of episodes; he countered their ambivalence by demanding that the show be taped live, and in a studio in Brooklyn. The network figured it had little to lose, and so The Cosby Show debuted in September of 1984.
“I did this show because I was confused,” Cosby said during a retrospective. “When I became a parent I had certain thoughts and things didn’t go according to plan. You’d think a person having been a child would understand how to raise one—but it really doesn’t work that way. You would think that these small people—who we’re feeding, getting clothing for, saving the life of—you’d believe that every now and then that they’d believe you every once in a while when you gave them some information. Not so, said the brown turtle.” There was nothing turtlelike in Cosby’s pace in controlling his show. He told his staff, “This is how it’s going to be”—just the way that Jackie Gleason did—and according to one producer, the show was built around “Bill’s philosophy, universal in its message, that we were all alike when it comes to parenthood and children.”
I DID NOT HAVE CHILDREN SO THAT YOU CAN CHANGE MY NAME TO “DAD CAN I?”
Cosby’s take on his television family was radically retrograde. He starred as Dr. Cliff Huxtable, a successful gynecologist who lives with his wife, a successful attorney (cannily played by Phylicia Rashad), and their five children in a tastefully decorated brownstone in Brooklyn. (Cosby, by the way, also had a wife and five children.) Along the way, the Huxtables would make sure that any family conflict was tastefully and respectfully handled and that the children (and occasionally the parents) would grow and learn from whatever mishaps or misapprehensions occurred. Cosby also situated the Huxtables in a vibrant world of African American culture; jazz music was heard, the portraits of historically important black figures were seen on the walls, the civil rights movement was discussed, and great black artists, such as Lena Horne, B.B. King, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sammy Davis were featured in guest spots. All of these grace notes were conducted under Cosby’s controlling gaze.
What he could not—and did not—predict was the commercial and critical reaction to his show. Its success with viewers was immediate; after its first season, the series finished third in the ratings. For the next four seasons in a row, it landed at number one. It pulled NBC immediately out of the ratings cellar and made it the most successful network on the air. What was more difficult was how The Cosby Show was dividing critics and creating criticism within the black community. Dick Gregory, a racial pioneer if ever there was one, pointed out that “Ninety-nine percent of white folks never saw a black doctor or a black lawyer! Where would they see one? And so Bill Cosby every week brought a black doctor and a black lawyer into your living room.” But many African Americans felt that Cosby’s view was simply too contrived. One black respondent to a focus group expressed that the Huxtables were “the type of blacks who have made it, everybody’s happy, the don’t-worry-be-happy type of black people; again, it’s a total farce, and they don’t represent what the black masses in this country are really like.” While another respondent thought that “it was good that black people and whites could see that we don’t all live in ghettos and projects and kill each other,” one critical journal called the show “Father Knows Best in blackface.”
Cosby himself was bewildered by the response. Echoing a sentiment that he had espoused decades earlier, he said, “I don’t think you can bring the races together by joking about the differences between them. I’d rather talk about the similarities, about what’s universal in their experiences.” What never—never—was mentioned in any of these debates was, simply, what a great comedian Cosby was. True, his honorable intentions made him a wider target for social moralists who demanded more; “I have a problem with the fact that the show will build a thirty-minute episode around [Cliff] building a hero sandwich—why aren’t we dealing with some real issues that are confronting the black middle class?” wrote one audience member. But no one was funnier at building that hero sandwich than Bill Cosby.
Catching the funny: Cosby, with the one kid he couldn’t charm; ruler on the set.
Cosby was a great, elastic clown on his show. He could be clumsy while dancing and graceful while cooking. He could be imperious to a five-year-old and reduced to infancy by his wife. His incredible timing and his way with a one-liner were priceless; when he told his intransigent son, Theo, “I am your father—I brought you in to this world and I’ll take you out,” he captured all the braggadocio, fierceness, and love inherent in that statement. As a producer and star, he was smart enough to allow for an ad-lib-friendly environment on the show that encouraged many of his best moments—“Leave it open and catch the funny” was his motto.
“I think you and I should get up, get in the car and go. Let ’em have the house,” said Cliff to his wife, Clair, in one episode, and in the final one, in April 1992, they did nearly that, dancing together across the set, into the audience, and out of the studio. The two hundred episodes of The Cosby Show earned the highest syndication fee of its time, and there were more sitcoms on television after the show called it quits than at any time in network broadcast history. Tommy Davidson said that The Cosby Show “gave us a warm, loving, value-system-oriented lifestyle of the African American experience. We couldn’t ask for more out of Bill Cosby. He made that foundation in society for us.”
It’s a shame, in a way, but it was perhaps unavoidable that the differences between whites and blacks adhered to Cosby, despite how determinedly he chose to step away from them. But there was always a greater dichotomy in his work than even race. Bill Cosby embodied both parent and child; each inhabited his body simultaneously and never stopped squabbling with the other. That was the comedic struggle in his soul and he told us it was eternal; he seemed a very credible expert on the subject. In a later episode of The Cosby Show, his eldest daughter, Sondra, had just given birth to twins, and told her father, “I just hope I do as good a job with my children as you did with us.” “Well, let me tell you something,” responded Cosby. “It’s impossible.”
