In my Laurel Canyon apartment. Notice the Ed Kienholz on the wall, one of the first artworks I ever bought, acquired from a local gallery.
Bill McEuen was rebellious, defiant, and loved to watch the big guy squirm. After I had achieved success, he said to me, “Right now there are a lot of old-time comedians saying, ‘What the fuck?’” He had banged his way out of nowhere, too, living just a few miles from me in Garden Grove and growing up under the thumb of a critical father. He had long hair before it was fashionable and kept it not only after it was unfashionable but forever. He also loved comedy. We were united in our worship of Johnny Carson, Don Rickles, Steve Allen, and Jerry Lewis. You can hear Bill’s laugh buried somewhere on each of my albums. He even came up with one of my staple jokes of the period: “Do you mind if I smoke? Uh, no, do you mind if I fart?”
We started hanging around together—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—along with his beautiful wife, Alice, who was an excellent photographer. My MGB GT seated two, which meant one of us had to ride in the hatchback trunk, and it was always Bill, who, at six-four, had to curl up like a cat to fit into the car. Bill, after seeing my act a hundred times, asked if he could manage me. “What’s a manager?” I said. After he explained, I didn’t quite understand, and I don’t think he did, either, but we struck a handshake deal for no other reason than that we had nothing to lose.
Bill and Alice McEuen, me, and their cat “White Cat,” in Laurel Canyon.
John McEuen, whom I hadn’t seen in about a year, came to the house. He had been on the road and grown his hair long, which surprised me, because I was still resisting. He noted my response, stroked his locks, and said, “Part of the business.” Soon after, I grew my hair long and with my earnings from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, financed a garish collection of turquoise jewelry that I would wear onstage. I was now a full-blown hippie, though not walking around stoned because of my earlier disastrous experience. I riffed on the drug era with this bit, which was delivered in a secretive, low whisper:
“I’m on drugs…. You know what I’m talking about…. I like to get small…. It’s very dangerous for kids, because they get realllly small…. I know I shouldn’t get small when I’m driving, but I was drivin’ around the other day and a cop pulls me over…says, ‘Hey, are you small?’ I say, ‘No, I’m tall, I’m tall!’ He says, ‘I’m gonna have to measure you.’ They give you a little test with a balloon. If you can get inside it, they know you’re small…and they can’t put you in a regular cell, either, ’cause you walk right out.”
The Smothers Brothers show continued to rankle the brass at both CBS and the federal halls of power. Sketches dealing with race, war, and politics, mixed in with anomalies such as Kate Smith singing “God Bless America,” made it a hit in the ratings and at the watercooler. It thrived on controversy, but we writers didn’t know the level of rancor the Brothers were facing. One morning in 1969, I was driving to work when I heard on the radio that the Smothers Brothers show had been ignominiously axed. Ostensibly, CBS canceled the show because of late delivery of an episode, but I knew what really had canceled it: a trickle-down from President Nixon. The Brothers had surely made Nixon’s enemies list, and probably all of us writers had, too, and the political pressure must have been too much for lumbering CBS, which didn’t need static from the FCC. After the show’s demise, our team of eight writers won Emmys, the academy’s defiant response to the CBS brass. Even after this gold-plated recognition, my father still urged me to go back to college so I would “have something to fall back on.”
No comment.
Comedy was now fully charged with political energy. George Carlin transformed himself from the Hippy Dippy Weatherman into a true social commentator. So did the volatile Richard Pryor, who dropped the gags, appealed to the underground audience, and used “motherfucker” as poetic punctuation. Robert Klein was the educated one; you sat in the audience nodding in agreement with his tart observations. After The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour fell, I joined in with my never-miss Nixon jokes (“Nixon’s best friend is Bebe Rebozo, a name that means ‘to have bozo-ed again’”). All I had to do was mention Nixon’s name, and there were laughs from my collegiate audiences.
Bob Einstein and I had become a solid workhorse writing team. When The Smothers Brothers ended, we continued to get jobs, including The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, which kept me busy for seven months out of the year. During the hiatuses, I would slog away at my act. Bill had put me on the road, opening the show for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and I am grateful to them because they really didn’t need me. We went everywhere. Atlanta, Spokane, Madison, Little Rock, Tallahassee, you name it, I was there. Colleges, clubs, and concert halls in what seemed like every state in the union. One magical night, on a lonely road in upstate New York, the bus pulled over and we all got out for a stretch of the legs. We looked north into the moonless black sky. Above us, in this low latitude, shimmered the aurora borealis.
Mostly, I was alone on these road trips, and I would while away the solitary daytime hours by indulging my growing interest in American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I haunted museums and galleries, making quick visual checks in the local antique stores in hopes of finding a Winslow Homer that had gone astray. I never did, but I managed to buy a nineteenth-century picture by the English artist John Everett Millais, thinking I had made the find of the century, only to discover that it was a tired old fake that had been around the art market for years. This was a cheap lesson in my art-collecting hobby, which would develop fully a decade later. I also killed time in college libraries, browsing for books on American art. After spotting a rare and valuable book in the stacks at the University of Tulsa—it was Mabel Dodge Luhan’s early treatise on southwestern painting, Taos and Its Artists—I wondered if I could smuggle it past the lowtech librarian. But my better judgment prevailed, and I left it in place.
IN LOS ANGELES, there was an exploding number of new afternoon television talk shows. The Della Reese Show, The Merv Griffin Show, The Virginia Graham Show, The Dinah Shore Show, The Mike Douglas Show, and my favorite, The Steve Allen Show. Steve Allen had a vibrant comedy spirit, and if you tuned in, you might catch him playing Ping-Pong while suspended from a crane a hundred feet in the air, or becoming a human tea bag by dropping himself in a tank of water filled with lemons. In his standard warm-up for the studio audience, when he was asked, “Do they get this show in Omaha?” Steve would answer, “They see it, but they don’t get it.”
I had developed a small reputation from my appearances at the Ice House, and on May 6, 1969, I wrangled a meeting and auditioned in an office for Steve Allen’s two producers, Elias Davis and David Pollock. They accepted me with more ease than I expected, and when I spoke with them afterward, they commented, “There seems to be a dearth of young comedians right now.” I looked puzzled. I said, “That’s odd, I don’t think there are many at all.” Their stares made me realize my blunder. I knew the word, but I had the definition backward.
For my first appearance on The Steve Allen Show—which was also my first appearance on television as a stand-up—I wore black pants and a bright blue marching-band coat I had picked up in a San Francisco thrift shop. Steve’s introduction of me was ad-libbed perfectly. “This next young man is a comedian, and…” he stammered, “…at first you might not get it”—he stammered again—“but then you think about it for a while, and you still don’t get it”—stammer, stammer—“then, you might want to come up onstage and talk to him about it.”
The Steve Allen appearance went well—he loved the offbeat, and his cackle was enough to make any comedian feel confident. Seated on the sofa, though, I was hammered by another guest, The Dick Van Dyke Show’s Morey Amsterdam, for being unconventional. But I bore no grudge; I was so naive I didn’t even know I had been insulted. The Steve Allen credit opened a few doors, and I bounced around all of the afternoon shows, juggling material, trying not to repeat myself. I developed a formula of convenience: “If I do a bit on
Merv Griffin, which comes on at two P.M., it’s okay to repeat the material on Virginia Graham, which comes on at four P.M. If I do a piece on Steve Allen, which comes on at five P.M. on Wednesdays, I can do the same bit on Mike Douglas, which comes on at three P.M. on Fridays.” Or something like that. Through the three or four years I did these shows, I appeared probably fifty times.
I recently viewed a musty video of an appearance on The Virginia Graham Show, circa 1970, unseen since its airing. I looked grotesque. I had a hairdo like a helmet, which I blow-dried to a puffy bouffant, for reasons I no longer understand. I wore a frock coat and a silk shirt, and my delivery was mannered, slow, and self-aware. I had absolutely no authority. After reviewing the show, I was—especially since I was writing an autobiography documenting my success—depressed for a week. But later, searching my mind for at least one redeeming quality in the performance, I became aware that not one joke was normal, that even though I was the one who said the lines, I did not know what was coming next. The audience might have thought what I am thinking now: “Was that terrible? Or was it good?”
Weird hair on The Virginia Graham Show.
FROM THESE TELEVISION APPEARANCES, I got a welcome job in 1971 with Ann-Margret, five weeks opening the show for her at the International Hilton in Vegas, a huge, unfunny barn with sculptured pink cherubs hanging from the corners of the proscenium. Laughter in these poorly designed places rose a few feet into the air and dissipated like steam, always giving me the feeling I was bombing. One night, from my dressing room, I saw a vision in white gliding down the hall—a tall, striking woman, moving like an apparition along the backstage corridor. It turned out to be Priscilla Presley, coming to visit Ann-Margret backstage after having seen the show. When she turned the corner, she revealed an even more indelible presence walking behind her. Elvis. Dressed in white. Jet-black hair. A diamond-studded buckle.
When Priscilla revealed Elvis to me, I was also revealed to Elvis. I’m sure he noticed that this twenty-five-year-old stick figure was frozen firmly to the ground. About to pass me by, Elvis stopped, looked at me, and said in his beautiful Mississippi drawl: “Son, you have an ob-leek sense of humor.”
Later, after his visit with Ann-Margret, he stopped by my dressing room and told Bill and me that he, too, had an oblique sense of humor—which he did—but that his audience didn’t get it. Then he said, “Do you want to see my guns?” After emptying the bullets into his palm, he showed us two pistols and a derringer.
Ann-Margret and her husband, Roger Smith, were, and still are, a fun and generous couple, and they provided me with work when others wouldn’t. The next year they asked if I would open for Ann-Margret at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. I arrived at the hotel, which at the time was very old-world, with an even older clientele. I still had my helmet hair, long black frock coat, and turquoise jewelry, and I’d added a really unattractive beard. Opening night, I peeked at the audience. Older Jewish couples. I smelled disaster. Jerry Lewis once described standing backstage before a show and, listening to the tone of the audience, concluding: “I knew I was dead.” I could hear the echoing rattle of forks on plates and the low, enervated dinner chitchat. I went on…and killed. Night after night. I was going over like it was a raucous college campus. Why? I wondered. I was baffled until Roger Smith explained it to me. “They look at you in your hippie clothes and beard and think, ‘Aw, it’s my son.’”
THE PLUM TELEVISION APPEARANCE during the sixties and seventies was The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Bob Shayne, who in the late sixties booked The Steve Allen Show, had moved over to The Tonight Show and mentioned me to its producer, Freddy De Cordova. Bob showed Freddy a kinescope (an expensive sixteen-millimeter film financed by my bank account) of my appearance on The Steve Allen Show, and Fred replied, “I don’t think he’s for us.” But Bob persisted, and Johnny saw the film and said, “Let’s give him a try.” To close the deal, I went to NBC one afternoon and auditioned on the soundstage, in front of staff and crew, while cables were being pulled and cameras were being moved. I was booked on the show in October 1972.
There was a belief that one appearance on The Tonight Show made you a star. But here are the facts. The first time you do the show, nothing. The second time you do the show, nothing. The sixth time you do the show, someone might come up to you and say, “Hi, I think we met at Harry’s Christmas party.” The tenth time you do the show, you could conceivably be remembered as being seen somewhere on television. The twelfth time you do the show, you might hear, “Oh, I know you. You’re that guy.”
But I didn’t know that. Before the show, as I stood in the backstage darkness behind the curtain of The Tonight Show, hearing the muffled laughter while Johnny spoke and waiting for the tap on the shoulder that would tell me I was on, an italicized sentence ticker-taped through my head: “I am about to do The Tonight Show.” Then I walked out onstage, started my act, and thought, “I am doing The Tonight Show.” I finished my act and thought, “I have just done The Tonight Show.” What happened while I was out there was very similar to an alien abduction: I remember very little of it, though I’m convinced it occurred.
I was booked back and did the show successfully several times. I was doing material from my act, best stuff first, and after two or three appearances, I realized how little best stuff I had. After I’d gone through my stage material, I started doing some nice but oddball bits such as Comedy Act for Dogs (first done on Steve Allen), in which I said, “A lot of dogs watch TV but there’s really nothing on for them, so call your dog over and let him watch because I think you’re going to see him crack up for the first time.” Then I brought out four dogs “that I can perform to so I can get the timing down.” While I did terrible canine-related jokes, the dogs would walk off one at a time, with the last dog lifting his leg on me. The studio audience saw several trainers out of camera range, making drastic hand signals, but the home TV audience saw only the dogs doing their canine best.
Another time I claimed that I could read from the phone book and make it funny. I opened the book and droned the names to the predictable silence, then I pretended to grow more and more desperate and began to do retro shtick such as cracking eggs on my head. I got word that Johnny was not thrilled, and I was demoted to appearing with guest hosts, which I tried not to admit to myself was a devastating blow.
I WAS GROWING FRUSTRATED with writing for television. Although the income was financing my performing career, I was marking time, and the prize of performing regularly on one of the shows was not materializing. I realized that the performers were just using my material as a starting point and, of course, I thought the better joke was to do it as written. On The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, I was thrown the occasional performing bone, appearing as a walk-on with a line or two in a sketch, but I felt no resonance from the producers or audience. There was a baffling moment when Sonny Bono and his partner, Denis Pregnolato, who were becoming showbiz entrepreneurs, approached me at work and took me aside. Sonny and Denis had seen me perform—I don’t know where—and Sonny said, “Steve, we’ve been watching you. We think you are the next big thing, bigger than David Brenner, bigger than Albert Brooks. We would like to work with you and develop a show for you.” I nodded my excitement and never heard from them again, not one word.
In the early seventies, I had two memorable auditions. One was for Greg Garrison, the producer of The Dean Martin Show. The audition went like this: I did my act for his secretary, then she did it for Greg. She even borrowed a prop from me to take into his office. My other audition began with a call from a producer who told me about a sitcom pilot called The Fireman’s Ball. “They specifically asked for you,” he said. I heard this sentence as “They specifically asked only for you.” I practiced the scene, went to the audition, and was surprised to see at least a dozen other young guys marching around a foyer holding scripts and inaudibly mouthing their lines. I didn’t get hired, but the experience was significant for me. I understood I would never be hired in that s
ituation, that the odds of confluence on a certain day of the producers’ desires, my talent, and a good reading were low, and that the audition process was a dead end. I decided to leave Hollywood and go on the road.
I resigned from television writing against the advice of my agent, a man who had wisely vacuumed up all the young talent discovered by the Smothers Brothers. He said plainly, “Stick to writing.” Which was a polite way of saying that my performing was headed nowhere. I took this warning with a strange delight. It was, in a way, the necessary ingredient in any young career, like when Al Jolson was told in The Jazz Singer, “Jolie, you’ll never become a sing-gah!”
Bill McEuen had moved to Aspen, Colorado, for the skiing, and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to escape the Los Angeles smog and traffic. I was twenty-eight years old when a bleak thought occurred to me: “What if nothing happens?” I had never really imagined success; I was just trying to be a performer, but I could not see myself playing dreary nightclubs into my thirties, forties, and fifties. I would have struggled composing a real-world résumé, as my abilities were at best vague and at worst unusable. I decided to give it until I was thirty, and then I would have to figure out something else to do.