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 Comedians in particular tend to be shy and withdrawn but also tend to be very bright.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.
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