On Thursday I might have gotten a call from the model coordinator at The Ontario College of Art offering me some September bookings. Then maybe I went downtown and busked.
Saturday, 22 August 2026
Friday, 21 August 2026
Billy Barnes
I worked on memorizing the fourth verse of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian and the last verse of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg. I should have at least the latter nailed down on Wednesday.
I weighed 91.6 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since August 10.
I played my Martin during song practice and it went out of tune all the time.
Around midday I pulled out the dressers from the east side of my bedroom and steamed the baseboards and the floor.
I weighed 92.15 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 92 kilos at 18:35.
I was still three days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up.
I had a potato with margarine and my last piece of roast pork while watching an interview with Ken Berry about Carol Burnett.
He once had a summer replacement comedy variety show in 1972 called Wow. He found out that he couldn’t carry a show. He already had the utmost respect for Carol but when he discovered how difficult it is to star in a variety show that admiration soared even higher.
When he starred in F-Troop he improvised with prat falls and things like that and it was written into the script that he would do so. Buster Keaton was a friend of Ken’s who he met through his ex-wife Jackie. Buster was not one to offer compliments but one time after watching F-Troop he called Ken up and told him, “That was a good gag last night.” There was no reason for F-Troop to be canceled.
Ken and his wife became good friends with Carol and her husband. She handled her fame gracefully and never was a diva. She was kind to all of her guests and it was hard to be mean to her. She was the star but couldn’t wait to see somebody else get a laugh.
They hired Harvey Korman to direct Mama’s Family because the show had a sketch type feel and Harvey understood sketch comedy.
Lucille Ball had been a beautiful starlet at MGM but when she became a comedian on TV she blew the roof off the business. But Carol took it a step beyond. She was also a great theatrical singer who could fill a theatre with her voice sans microphone. Nobody was more versatile than Carol.
When Ken had been in the army for a year he found out at the last minute about a talent contest on the base and the winner would get to travel to New York and be on the Arlene Francis Soldier Parade Show. He grabbed his ukulele and his tap shoes and went down to the latrine to work out a number with a trick at the end to get applause. He won the contest and went to New York. After the show he got an invitation to join the Third Army Special Services outfit in Atlanta, Georgia. The sergeant who ran the outfit was Leonard Nimoy. Then the All Army Talent Contest came around and Ken won third place and was among the winners who got to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. Leonard sent wires about the upcoming event to casting agents for the big studios. As a result Ken got contacted by both Fox and Universal. Leonard was in on the decision for Ken to go to Universal. They were looking for a replacement for Donald O’Connor in the Francis The Talking Mule series of films. But then Mickey Rooney got the part and so Ken didn’t get a Universal contract after all.
Ken was in The Billy Barnes Revue in 1958 when Lucille Ball came to ask if he’d like to be part of her talent department. At the time she was in charge of Desilu. There were about thirty performers in the stock company and one of them was Majel Barrett, the wife of Gene Rodenberry. Ken met Carol around that time as well when she came to see the show. She was already friends with Billy Barnes and some of the other performers. Carol went back to New York and suggested to her future husband Joe Hamilton that he invite Ken to be a guest on The Garry Moore Show. After that he was one of the co-stars of a TV special called Carol Burnett and Company.
Ken became good friends with his former Sergeant Leonard Nimoy. Leonard starred in the boxing film Kid Monk Baroni in 1952.
Ken guest starred on Dr. Kildare. Richard Chamberlain was a nice guy who used to skateboard around the studio. He got more fan mail than anyone in the history of MGM.
When Ken was between shows he went on the road because he couldn’t afford to stay in town. He did tours, summer stock and dinner theatre. Community theatre paid very well. Just from his guest spots on network TV shows Ken was recognized by someone everywhere he went.
Because his character Captain Parmenter was very clumsy and yet well loved by his men, Ken got a letter of appreciation from a father who told him he’d boosted the confidence of his uncoordinated son.
On the set of The Dick Van Dyke Show there was a sign that read “Nothin Beats Fun!”
Ken says Carl Reiner looked like he imagined god would look as a person. He says Carl told him a story about a guy who dies and goes to Heaven where he meets God. But God is surprised to see him and says, “I don’t remember creating you. What are you?” “I’m a man.” “Man? I don’t remember that creature. I remember the birds but not man. What is it that you do.” So the man starts singing and doing a soft shoe dance and God gets very excited. He asks, “Can you show me how to do that?” He says the moral is that you might do something inconsequential but it could mean everything to some people.
Sometimes Ken would do his own steps for his dance number on The Carol Burnett Show and Earnie Flatt would build the choreography around it. Ken says Toni Kaye from the Ernie Flatt Dancers was as good a dancer as Ann Miller. Ernie had also been the choreographer for Your Hit Parade.
The last time Ken danced professionally was in a show called From the Top that he did with Carol when he was 60.
Fred Astaire was dancing and winning Emmy Awards into his mid-60s. They only dancer who was better was the young Fred Astaire.
Ken says you can’t find a better person than Carol Burnett. She’s the closest thing to an angel anybody ever saw.
Ken played the prince in two TV productions of Once Upon a Mattress.
Ken always wanted to be in motion picture musicals but then the genre died.
The Carol Burnett Show and The Garry Moore Show were run like clockwork. By comparison The Glen Campbell Show was very sloppy.
If you were nasty to any member of Carol’s crew you wouldn’t be invited back.
Ken never worked in any of the Mama’s Family sketches when he was on the show. But he was hired to be Philip the TV movie of Eunice and then he was cast in the Mama’s Family sitcom.
Ken doesn’t like rock and roll.
Billy Barnes was known as the revue master of Hollywood. His revues included Billy Barnes People, Billy Barnes Hollywood, Billy Barnes Party, and Billy Barnes L.A. Barnes wrote the songs “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?” and “Something Cool” that were introduced in the original Billy Barnes Revue. He was the music coordinator for Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. He wrote special material for Carol Burnett, Sonny and Cher, Danny Kaye, Lucille Ball, and The Academy Awards. He wrote the songs for the TV musical adaptation of Pinocchio. He guest starred on three episodes of Mad About You.
August 21, 1996: The Art Bar reading series disapproved of my bending the rules but enjoyed it
On Wednesday night I went to the Csarda Hungarian restaurant on Elm Street for the Art Bar reading series open stage. I talked with the host Pierre Labbé about my feature performance last week. He seemed to enjoy it while at the same time disapproved of my bending of the rules.
Thursday, 20 August 2026
Beatrice Lillie
After yoga I memorized the third verse of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian and the fifth verse of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg. The Vian song has two verses left and the Gainsbourg song has only one.
I weighed 90.85 kilos before breakfast.
I played my Kramer during song practice for the last of two sessions and it stayed in tune.
I weighed 92.05 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 91.95 kilos at 18:00.
I was still three days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up.
I had a potato with margarine and a piece of roast pork while watching three interviews of Jerry Lewis, Jim Nabors, and Julie Andrews on the topic of Carol Burnett.
Jerry met Carol when she was in the cast of The Garry Moore Show. He did a sketch with her and was stunned by her rhythm. She was unique in that she gave pieces of herself to everyone she worked with. Carol is the essence of the great Beatrice Lillie. Beatrice has been forgotten and Jerry had just heard some things about her when he first got into the business at 12. She was the greatest female physical comedian 30 years before Carol was born.
Carol never left her femininity in the dressing room. There’s never been a female genius comedian like Carol. She was stronger and prettier than Anna Magnani. “When she sang a ballad my skin crawled.” Carol was a clown and clowns come from a very unique place that has no name. Those of us that come from there recognize others who come from there.
The country hasn’t had a good lesson in judgement, taste and class. That’s what’s coming down the pipe now to make up for all the garbage that we’ve been put through since 1948.
Jim Nabors says he was a fan of Carol’s before he met her. Her show preceded Gomer Pyle USMC and she wrote him a fan letter (I think when he says “her” show he means Garry Moore’s show since Nabors already knew Carol and was her first guest on her own show). Nabors went to a taping of the show and when Carol saw he was there she ran up and embraced him. It was instant love for Jim.
Carol and Jim did an act together in Las Vegas and it was a big success.
When he was on The Andy Griffith Show he had to try very hard to not laugh when doing a scene with Don Knots.
Near the end of Carol’s series the new writers were presenting her with ideas for sketches but she frequently had to tell them that they’d already done that. He says variety shows don’t work any more because both the comedy and singing are gimmicky. He says he heard someone singing the other day and it was all electronic but he couldn’t find a melody.
Jim says when he first went to the Indianapolis 500 he was invited to sing the song but he thought they meant “The Star Spangled Banner”. He didn’t find out until five minutes before start time that it was the Indy theme song “Back Home Again In Indiana” written in 1917 by James F. Hanley and Ballard MacDonald. His singing of the song was such a success that he continued to sing it there every year until he was 84.
When Carol was looking at buying property in Hawaii next door to Jim she climbed a coconut tree and did her Tarzan yell.
Julie says when she and Carol did their first special at Carnegie Hall they were emulating with tongue in cheek a special that had been done years before by Mary Martin and Ethel Merman.
Carol is hugely generous to work with.
Kenny and Mitzi Welch wrote the songs for their special and Kenny asked Julie if there’s something she always wanted to do. She told him she’d never played a cowboy. They came up with “Big D” which even stopped the show in rehearsal.
Carol thought that rain was a good omen and it poured during the two days of rehearsing and shooting the special.
Carol breaks Julie out of her primness.
They parodied The Sound of Music musical long before Julie ever starred in The Sound of Music movie.
They did three specials together, each one ten years apart. They got to be more and more expensive. “Wait Till the Sun Shines Nellie” became a very successful closing number.
Carol is her chum. Her very very very good friend. When she first met Carol when she was doing Once Upon a Mattress they bonded instantly. Not long after that Julie guested on Garry Moore and then they did Carnegie Hall. But Julie never appeared on The Carol Burnett Show. Maybe they felt it was best to save it for the specials.
Julie and Carol were asked to do one of their medleys for the inauguration of Lyndon Johnson. They were at their hotel in Washington when Mike Nichols called and asked if they wanted to get together for tea. They waited for him but he didn’t show and so they got into their pajamas and were going to go to bed when Mike called and asked if it was too late. They said it wasn’t. They went down the hall in their dressing gowns to sit on the couch in front of the elevator and wait for Mike. They decided to prank him by kissing so Mike would see it when the elevator opened. When the elevator arrived Julie bent Carol in her arms and pretended to give her a passionate kiss. But when the door opened the elevator was full of Secret Service agents. The elevator door closed and went away and then another came, which had to be Mike. But it was the First Lady of the United States Lady Bird Johnson. She took one look at them kissing and then walked down the hall but stopped, turned around and came back. Carol had crawled behind the sofa and was laughing until she was crying. Lady Bird leaned over the couch and asked, “Are you Carol Burnett?” Carol said, “Yes and this is my friend Mary Poppins!” Lady Bird went to her room. The elevator came and Julie started kissing Carol again. This time it was Mike Nichols. He saw them kissing, said, “Hi girls!” and walked down the hall.
Julie thinks Carol felt free to be outrageous on her show because her husband was the producer.
Carol once scared away a mugger by doing her Tarzan yell.
Canadian comedian Beatrice Lillie was born in 1894 Toronto. She sang with her mother accompanied by her sister on piano in an act called The Lillie Trio. Her mother took their act to England. She made her professional stage debut at the Chatham Music Hall in 1914. She made her London West End debut the same year in The Daring of Diane. Her first revue was André Charlot’s Not Likely, also in 1914. She starred in six more of Charlot’s revues over the rest of that decade. She skillfully interwove sketches, songs, and monologues with parody and satire. In the 1920s when her husband became a lord, she became Lady Peel. She starred in The Nine O’Clock Revue in 1922 for which her sister Muriel wrote the music and which ran for a year. When she returned to North America in 1924 she was an instant success on Broadway in The Charlot Revue, which took New York by storm. She came to be called the funniest woman in the world. Noël Coward and Cole Porter wrote entire shows just as vehicles for her. She premiered Coward’s song “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” at The Third Little Show in 1931 on Broadway. In his Set To Music revue in 1939 she debuted his and “I Went to a Marvellous Party”. She made her film debut when she starred in Exit Smiling in 1927. She co-starred in Doctor Rhythm and Thoroughly Modern Millie. Her 1972 autobiography was Every Inch a Lady.
August 20, 1996: I featured at my own open stage
Thirty years ago today
On Tuesday night as always I hosted my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage. But we started something new in hopes of increasing attendance, which was to have one featured poet every week. I decided that anyone could be invited to be a feature as long as they’d read at the Orgy on two occasions. I kicked things off by making myself the first feature and Brian Haddon accompanied me on recorder. As I recall we had a fairly good turn-out that night.
Wednesday, 19 August 2026
Dave Garroway
I worked on memorizing the third verse of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian and the fifth verse of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg.
I weighed 91.45 kilos before breakfast.
I played my Kramer for the first of two sessions and it stayed in tune most of the time.
Around midday I pulled out the dressers on the east side of my bedroom and vacuumed the floor and the baseboards. I found at least one bedbug on the back of the dresser at the south east corner. On Tuesday I’ll steam the area.
I weighed 92.15 kilos at 14:00.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 91.2 kilos at 18:05, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since July 28.
I was back to being three days behind in my journal. I haven’t been caught up for about a month. I guess eventually I will be.
I made pizza on a slice of Rudolph’s sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, a sliced hot Italian sausage, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching an interview with Harvey Korman.
The interviewer Jenna asks if he had any nicknames growing up. He says his grandmother used to call him Vontz, which is Yiddish for bedbug. He says he was a loner and so there were probably names for him he never heard. Harvey had a tendency in this interview to go off on tangents and forget the original question. He says a lot of entertainers are loners and less than popular. Comedians in particular tend to be shy and withdrawn but also tend to be very bright.
He studied drama when he was 10 and started working on stage in Chicago at 12. He doesn’t think that he ever really grew up and he thinks that’s another thing entertainers have in common.
They sat around in front of their big Philco radio console and listened to Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, The Shadow, boxing matches, baseball games, and political events. He was a Chicago White Sox fan. He was entranced by Benny, Cantor and Orson Wells. As a kid he used to go downtown where a theatre would have a movie, then a vaudeville stage show, followed by another movie. He would stay there all day and work his way up until he was in the front. He was much more interested in the live performers. When they got a television it was one of those little ones with a huge magnifying glass. He watched Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which he adored. In those days Chicago was at the vanguard of television with The Dave Garroway Show, The Studs Turkle Show, and Ed Sullivan.
It was going to the movies though that really got him and the stars were gigantic gods. Later when he became a TV star and he met these gods he was astounded and jolted when they told him that they were fans of Harvey Korman.
He played baseball and touch football and also loved music crossword puzzles.
After high school he went to the Goodman School of Drama. He performed in the classics and discovered that he was a very good actor. He left Goodman in 1950 and his goal was Broadway. He had been an honour student and the top of his class but when he went to New York he was instantly driven to his knees. He worked for ten years in restaurants so he could be around food. He lived in cold water flats and had to boil water on the stove to transfer to the tub for two hours so he could have a hot bath. But he always managed to go to the opera, the ballet, and the New York Philharmonic. The tickets were only $3 in those days.
He studied acting with Uta Hagen, who he worshipped. She was not a diva. She would teach her classes, raise her daughter, and do her own grocery shopping during the day, and then star on Broadway at night.
He failed in New York and went back to Chicago to do dinner theatre and summer stock. Summer stock was really how he learned his craft because there was a different show every week. One learns where the laughs are, one learns character, reality, and conflict. That’s why the Carol Burnett Show was so successful because they prepared it like summer stock.
The producers of The Red Skelton Show were doing a play in Chicago called Mr. and Mrs. starring Jackie Coogan and they used Chicago actors like himself for the secondary roles.
He got married and the choice was to either go back to New York or to move to LA. He decided if they were going to starve they might as well do it where it was warm.
In LA he got work first for The Donna Reed Show on which me played a maître d’ and had about three lines but made the most of them. If you get a shot you’d better do something with it. He made $125 in three days. They liked him at Screen Gems so he started to get work on Hazel and Route 66. Jenna reminds him that he was on The Untouchables and he’s surprised to hear that. He says he’s been told he was on Perry Mason but doesn’t remember that either. On Dr. Kildare he played a young doctor for three or four episodes. Michelle Lee’s father was the makeup man.
He was on Red Skelton who was somewhat disturbed but cute about it. Harvey used to see him on vaudeville and couldn’t believe he got to work with him. Through Red Skelton Harvey became a second banana on The Danny Kaye Show. He did that show from 1963 to 1967.
Danny Kaye was a very complicated man. Harvey remembers seeing him in Up In Arms at The Brooklyn Paramount and there was never a performer like him. To work with him was extraordinary. He was inclined to be depressed and very moody. He was a perfectionist and as this was Harvey’s first job he was a wreck. Carol was the opposite of Danny Kaye in that the most important thing was to have fun rather than being perfect. Danny could be so charming and loving and then sometimes a wall would come down.
Harvey worked a bit with Lucille Ball. He says, “I love Lucy!” Lucy will be able to make people laugh until the end of time. She was very perfectionistic and when she was a guest on Carol’s show she tried to tell Harvey what to do but he put her in her place, which she accepted.
In the mid 60s he became a voice performer on The Flintstones. He was the voice of The Great Gazoo for only about 13 episodes but now the cells with The Great Gazoo on them are worth lots of money. He just made him superior and elite but says he’s not a very good voice over actor. He also doesn’t think he’s a very good movie actor either because he’s very intimidated by the camera.
In order to be a star one has to have a persona and a rapport with the audience and Carol Burnett had that. When she started with questions and answers on the first show the audience was already in her pockets. Carol was the kind of performer that needs to have someone who can bounce the ball back quickly.
He tells his friend George Siegel not to be happy with four laughs because you’ve got to get six or eight.
When he does his live shows with Tim Conway the back and forth they have with the audience is like communion, like a religious experience.
He loves doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. It takes him hours but he nearly always finishes it.
That was the end of the Korman interview but the video still had another twenty minutes of general interviews about the show with clips I’d already seen.
Dave Garroway had a degree in Abnormal Psychology. He began working as a page at NBC in 1938. He graduated from NBC’s School for Announcers and got a job at a Pittsburgh radio station. he gained a reputation for going to great lengths to get a story. After two years he moved to Chicago. After WWII he became a DJ, He was the host of The Dave Garroway (radio) Show from 1947 to 1955. He hosted the experimental radio show Garroway at Large from 1949 to 1951. He was the first host of The Today Show from 1952 to 1961. His easygoing presence attracted a large audience. He hosted The Dave Garroway Show from 1953 to 1954. He would tell the audience to respond to music by snapping their fingers rather than by applauding. He created a jazz circuit of local clubs and organized concerts. he was voted the best DJ in the US by other disc jockeys in 1948, 1949, and 1951. He was the first host of the NBC radio show Monitor in 1955. From 1955 to 1958 he hosted the weekly documentary series Wide Wide World. He co-starred in The World Through the Eyes of Children. He would sign off by holding up his palm and saying, “Peace!” In 1960 there was a board game called Dave Garroway’s Today Game. In 1961 he began to suffer from depression and would sometimes disappear in the middle of a Today broadcast. He quit the show in June of that year. He returned to work as a DJ. He began reading law books and on a bet took the bar exam, which he passed. He moved to LA in the 70s and began taking acting lessons. His acting debut was on an episode of Alias Smith and Jones. He collected and restored vintage cars and sometimes raced his SS Jaguar 100. He appeared in the first commercial for the Chevrolet Corvette in 1953 and the Ford Falcon in 1964.
August 19, 1996: I rehearsed with Brian for our feature
Thirty years ago today
On Monday I rehearsed with Brian Haddon for our feature at my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy open stage on Tuesday at the Gladstone Hotel.
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