The Long and the
Short of It
Andrew
and I have had the honor of working for three legendary geniuses during our higgledy-piggledy
writing career. One was Johnny
Carson. The second was George
Carlin. This is the story of the third.
The
Beginning:
Once upon a time,
two young and impoverished Canadian writers were sitting in a cramped,
cockroach infested apartment in Van Nuys (The Oshawa of L.A.) with no prospects
and virtually no hope. They had bravely ventured
down to this mystical land of tinsel and broken dreams a scant six months
earlier and were now facing the ominous fate of having to go back to Oshawa
(the Oshawa of Oshawa)…and it was all their own fault!
Invaluable back
story:
It
had been our utmost dream to work in Hollywood
since before we were born and trying to scrounge out a living as writers in Canada had done
nothing to quell that desire. Our home
and native land at the time produced a mere two sitcoms, both run by a
primordial ooze with a beard named Jack Humphrey. (Andrew, many years later, would dance on the
Variety announcement of his death in our agent’s office.) As I recall, Jack had the appearance of Roger
Whittaker but could scream like Roger Daltry when brought to a boil. Alas, a relatively innocuous comment in his
office one ill-fated afternoon brought our sitcom career in the Great White
North to a screeching, screaming halt. (Musical
trivia: Jack had a son in Blue Peter and
another son in Savoy Brown. – but he was still an untalented prick)
One
dreary day, while moping around my shitty little apartment in Oshawa (the
Oshawa of Oshawa), busily not writing for any of the two sitcoms in Canada, I
got a call saying that Alan Thicke was looking for material and would we like
to submit? Amazingly, we did, and he
bought some of our jokes. In fact, he
liked us so much; he brought us down to L.A.
for three weeks to write for his Canadian show, “Fast Company.”
It
was everything we’d ever dreamed and more (except for the money). There were naked girls, trips down sunset and
an interview with Gary David Goldberg (Growing Pains) at his Broad Beach
home. We literally almost crashed our
car into Jackie Coogan (Uncle Festus on The Adam’s Family) trying to make a
u-turn, on the way there. And, as if
nearly killing a former child star who has an entire law named after him wasn’t
pie-in-the-sky glitz-tastic enough, we were invited to bunk at Alan’s home on Mulholland Drive
and at his beach house in Malibu. But there was yet another healthy dollop of
tangy hollandaise sauce being plopped atop our big steaming plate of Eggs
Benedict. The Fifth Estate was following
us around for a segment they were doing on “Joke Writing”. Hallelujah and rejoice, for all of mankind
will be forever warmed by the light of our glory!
And then after three
weeks, we came back to Canada
and…it was everything we’d dreaded and more.
We were unemployed for about 9 straight months. Instead of being impressed that we’d gotten
the magical call to “go south” most producers seemed to be pissed off. Petty little shits.
Luckily,
Alan called again. Now, he had an
American show “Thicke of the Night”. He
wanted us to come down to the big town and work as researchers plus write monologues
for the version that aired in Canada on Global (all for one researcher salary,
of course…split between us…at a very bad exchange rate). Hey, I was 25 and eating fish cakes (I can
still taste those fucking things) and frozen peas for calories and gnawing on
my apartment’s hideous shag rug for fiber.
I really didn’t see the downside.
We
landed back in L.A.
on June 5th, 1983 sporting righteous career boners and got our first
taste of staffing a real live American television show.
I
will cover the depthless flailing pit of hell that was “Thicke of the Night”
another time. Let’s just say for now
that the experience wasn’t all refried beans and chocolate pudding and it maybe
advisable to put the children to bed and hide the womenfolk before giving it a
read.
We
lasted 6 months (which meant we had outlived far better men than ourselves) on
that black-hole-of-souls but unfortunately, we had a personal sense of honor
(In show business, having a “personal sense of honor” will kill your career
deader than a Pioneer Chicken.). We were
promised certain things by Alan and he didn’t keep his side of the bargain so
we stupidly, stupidly, STUPIDLY quit the show.
Of course, in subsequent years, we learned that someone keeping a
promise in the entertainment business is about as likely as the Queen of
England getting caught having unprotected sex with a balloon animal. The young have so much to learn.
So
there we sat with the cockroaches, watching a twenty dollar television set and
hoping that some rich eccentric would cruise down Burbank Blvd. soliciting humorous
one-liners from the window of his stretch limo. It didn’t happen. But something nearly as surreal did.
Legendary
Genius Number 3:
One
dreary day, while moping around my shitty little apartment in Van Nuys, busily
not writing for any of the 47 sitcoms in Hollywood,
our ten dollar phone rang. It was Janie
– a girl we’d spoken to about twice in our lives. She was briefly Alan’s personal assistant but
now worked for legendary Hollywood crazy woman
and agent Ruth Webb. “Hi, Mickey Rooney
is looking for a new writer because his old one just died. He’ll be calling you in 20 minutes.”
“Huh?!”
I
think we drew straws and I lost, so it was my anxiety-ridden job to answer our thriftily-priced
phone. I didn’t know what I was going to
say. Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry
about that.
Ring
Ring. “Hello, this is Mickey
Rooney. So I hear you’re the new hot
shots. Well, I do this bit see, in Sugar
Babies where I come out as a woman. A
dame. Do you hear me, kid? I’m a woman and I do local jokes, topical
jokes. You understand? I’m going to be in Philadelphia.
So I need Liberty Bell, The Eagles, cheese steaks. The Super Bowl is coming up, it’s Christmas
time. New Years Eve, hangovers and
brotherly love. Can you do me up some
jokes like that?”
“Ah,
sure.”
“Where
the hell are you? You sound like you’re
talking from the bottom of a toilet.”
“It’s
the phone.”
“Doesn’t
matter. Get me the stuff and we’ll take
it from there. I need it in a week. And make sure it’s funny. Lots of yucks. Do you hear me? So what do ya want to get paid for this? One thousand?
Two thousand?”
“Ah,
that would be fine.”
And
then he was gone.
This
was big doin’s! Two thousand bucks in
1983 was a real chunk. Our cockroaches
wouldn’t have to go hungry, after all!
Now, you can write
the very best George Carlin monologue ever but if you’re writing it for Red
Buttons, it better have “Never had a dinner!” in the punchline. In short (pardon the pun), you write for the
customer. Sugar Babies was pure
pie-in-the-face, seltzer-down-your-pants Vaudeville. So Andrew and I set to work writing a passel of
Catskillian gems.
For the next five
or six days we bashed out a Liberian tanker-full of one liners that would have
made Henny Youngman blush.
“I
asked my husband what he wanted for Christmas.”
“He
said, ‘surprise me.’”
“I
said, ‘Okay, they’re not your children.’”
You
get the idea. Oodles and oodles of jokes
of that seemingly antique ilk. We filled
up the pages and we sent them off via snail mail (This was way, way before the
internet was even a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye.) and we waited. And we waited some more. Eventually, we contacted Ruth Webb’s agency
and asked what was going on. They put us
in touch with his lawyer. His lawyer
said he’d talk to Mickey. Was our
seemingly miraculous rescue from penury and ignominious deportation a mere
illusion? Turns out, when the lawyer
talked to Mickey it spurred him to actually read the stuff we’d written…and he
flipped for it. We got our money and
another call from the Mickster telling us how great we were.
Thus
began a ten year roller coaster stint as Mr. Rooney’s personal scribes. An unpredictable period of time when the
phone could ring at any moment of the day (usually very early in the morning or
even earlier), depending of where in the world Mickey was calling from. Each time he excitedly wanted something
written that instant, which meant we had to call his lawyer during business
hours and find out whether he had any money to pay for it. Along with the Sugar Babies material we were
commissioned to write a Broadway play called “Wait Till the Swelling Goes
Down”. He called us one afternoon from
God knows where to find out how it was going.
“Well,” we
informed him.
“Has
it got any jokes in it?”
“Thousands.”
“Thousands.”
“YAAHHOOOOOOO!”
came the reply.
And then there
were the projects that his lawyer wisely managed to talk him out of. Among the dozens of middle-of-the-night phone
calls we didn’t get paid to write were movies like “Saturday Night Dead” and a
film about a women who comes to Holllywood, gets used and abused and ends up
dying in a horrible fire with her illegitimate baby in her arms. “Ya hear me kid?” The latter idea came to him after he’d been
shown some great “burn victim” makeup that involved gluing strips of bacon to
the actress’s face (I’m not making this up).
We were also tantalizingly close to creating a sitcom with him called
“Maple Leaf Rag” for the U.S.A. Network but he signed a huge deal to do Sugar
Babies in England
and killed it.
We
also have files for a one man W.C. Fields show (I don’t even recall that one –
it was also going to be a musical film), The Drunkard, Maggie & Jiggs,
Sugar Babies: The Movie, something called “Belly Laughs” (these were to be live
shows, videos, TV interstitials and books), something else called “Winner’s
Weekend” with Martha Raye, “Jowls” (a parody of Jaws with a gigantic dog,
starring Nathan Lane and a one hour mystery “Professor Crime”.
And
then….
Andrew
and I got yet another call. “Come out to
Thousand Oaks. Mickey wants to talk to you about a movie.” It was an amazing experience getting to meet
the short, tubby legend in the short, tubby flesh. Upon arriving at his office, Andrew took out
a pad to take notes. Mickey put up his
hand and said, “Stop! Put that
away. You’re going to remember this story
for the rest of your life!” And, for the
next forty-five minutes, he proceeded to act out the entire film from
memory. After announcing the credits, he
said, “Now go! And write!” And we did.
“The Picture Nobody Should See” was a pretty good idea and has since
been done (sort of). A short, fat old
guy (Mickey Rooney) decides that he’s going to quit being a milkman and write
and star in his own porno film with his equally rotund and unattractive wife.
It
didn’t sell but it was a lot of fun to write and we did get paid for it.
There
was also a two man show with Donald O’Connor and a one man show “Mickey Rooney
in Mickey Rooney” (talk about a tight fit) and numerous years of the Bob Hope
Golf Classic dinner speeches. I’m
exhausted just thinking back on it all.
Mickey
made a lot of money but he spent it in equal measure and then some. The last project we were contracted for was a
series of one man shows he was going to do in Australia
and New Zealand
while filming “The Black Stallion.”
“I
want Down Under, Shrimps on the Barbie, Kangaroos, Criminals, Sheilas and those
big cans of fucking beer. You hear me,
kid?”
It
was in December of 1996 that we got a legal looking piece of paper in the
mail. Mickey was filing for bankruptcy. I think he still owed us 500 bucks from the
Australian tour and Andrew and I were among the crowds of people who had a
legal claim on his assets. We wrote back
and thanked him for a great ride and relieved him of his remaining debt. He’d been there for us when we needed him
most and it would have been churlish in the extreme to stand in line to scrape
the last bits of meat from his bones.
Sleep
well, little man. With the crazy life
you have led, I’m sure you could use the rest.
Some
Jokes From Our Decade of Rimshots.
Halloween:
“When
some kids came to our house trick or treating, I asked my husband what I should
put on to scare the children at the door.
He said, “The porch light.”
“Down Under” when he was filming Long John
Silver:
On
the flight out here, my flight attendant said, “Mister Rooney, would you like
to stretch your legs?” I said, “I’d love
to, but this is as far as they go.
I
should have come out to Australia
years ago. It’s so remote. You have women out here I haven’t married
yet.
I
worked with Ann Miller in Sugar Babies.
Ann had her legs insured with Lloyd’s of London for a million
dollars. I saw them unshaved, and all I
have to say it, I sure hope is was fire insurance.
His
two man show with Donald O’Connor in Vegas:
“Donald
did six movies with Francis the talking mule and I did the last one. He may have done the more famous films but I
was there for the barbecue.”
“I
saw a terrible show in Vegas the other night.
David Copperfield is a great magician but his assistant was Rosanne Barr
and it took him 13 hours to saw her in half.
“I
finally figured out why Mr. Rogers doesn’t have any kids. Look how long it takes him just to get his
sweater off.”
“I
was just thinking what a good thing it is that men hold women above their head
in ballet and not in opera.”
Mickey
as a woman:
“Last
night my husband and I ordered a prune pizza and were up all night with
pizzeria.”
“Christmas
time makes me think of chestnuts. And
believe me, with this girdle, that’s just about where they are.”
Tags – Mickey Rooney, Johnny
Carson, Alan Thicke, Sugar Babies, Darrell Vickers, Black Stallion, Donald
O’Connor, Hollywood, Oshawa,
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