I can’t tell you how good that made me feel.
I never got credited as a writer on The Admiral Broadway Revue, but Sid was happy to keep paying me out of his own pocket because he valued my contributions. I told him that I needed a little more money, as I was living in a hovel in Greenwich Village. He went to visit my place, which was a cellar on Horatio Street outfitted with a bed, a chair, a toilet, a stove, and a small refrigerator. He said, “Mel, you don’t live in a hovel. You live under a hovel.”
Sid increased my pay to fifty dollars a week. I helped write his monologues on the show and also contributed some jokes to pep up his part in the sketches. Making Sid Caesar laugh was one of the great joys of my life. He was not only one of the greatest performers in history; he was also one of the best audiences.
The Admiral Broadway Revue ran only nineteen weeks, from January 28 to June 3, 1949, and was not renewed. I was perplexed. I knew the show, which appeared on two networks at the same time—NBC channel 4 and DuMont channel 5—was getting very good ratings and was really popular. And then I discovered the reason. The show was so popular that Admiral could not keep up with the demand for television sets that the program generated. When the show first began, Admiral had been producing fifty to a hundred sets a week, and selling the same number. The popularity of the show caused business to pick up, and within months orders skyrocketed to five thousand sets a day. They were way beyond what they could produce. The company was faced with a choice: It could continue to sponsor the show, or it could take that money and build a new factory. They chose the latter. Bizarrely enough, The Admiral Broadway Revue was and is probably the only show in history to be canceled because it was too successful.
Advertising executive and future NBC president, Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, had the idea that people would stay home on Saturday nights if they got the same quality of entertainment at home on TV that they could get by going out to a movie. To that end, he created a two-and-a-half-hour special variety show called Saturday Night Revue. The first hour, from eight to nine p.m., was The Jack Carter Show, coming from Chicago. Then the next hour and a half from nine to ten-thirty p.m. would be Your Show of Shows, coming from New York and starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. The Jack Carter Show didn’t last very long, but Your Show of Shows was an instant hit, and became a standalone ninety-minute show. It was one of the five top-rated shows of the season. It turns out that Pat Weaver, who went on to create Today and The Tonight Show, was absolutely right. Sixty million Americans were ready to stay home and be entertained by ninety minutes of live television every week for thirty-nine weeks a year. The show was so popular that Broadway show receipts were down on Saturday nights, and so were restaurant and taxicab profits. A group of Broadway movie-house owners went to an NBC executive and begged him to use his influence to get Your Show of Shows rescheduled for a time slot during the week. Maybe a dead night, like Monday? But it never happened.
Your Show of Shows was conceived and produced by Max Liebman, who had previously produced The Admiral Broadway Revue. It was an amazing concept, a new Broadway revue broadcast live every week for thirty-nine weeks. It had singing, dancing, opera, ballet, comedy, pantomime, and a new guest star every week. The show was a great success.
I knew that I was not a favorite of Max Liebman. He thought I was too self-assured, cocky, and brash. And he wasn’t wrong when he said I was “very disruptive.” For instance, quite often during a dance rehearsal, I couldn’t resist the shiny wooden floors. I would run like mad and slide all across the floor between the dance director and the chorus. When I hit the far wall I’d yell, “SAFE!” Everybody laughed, except Max Liebman. Sometimes Max was so angry that he would take a lit cigar from his mouth and hurl it at me. Sometimes, he blew on them to make them hotter. Thank god he always missed.
I had just found out that Sid and Max were going to meet with Pat Weaver, now the head of NBC, and General David Sarnoff, the head of the parent company, RCA. Sarnoff formed the entire Radio Corporation of America. I knew they would be talking about Your Show of Shows, and somehow, I felt I should be part of that meeting. I begged Max to let me come to the meeting. “I won’t make a noise, I’ll sit in the corner,” I promised.
Writing session on the first Your Show of Shows in 1950 with (left to right) Sid Caesar, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, and me.
Not surprisingly (and not politely) he said no. And not surprisingly, I was not taking no for an answer. Every once in a while I would suffer an attack of outright no-holds-barred madness. This was one of them.
I went nuts. I ran around the rehearsal area, which had a lot of props. I saw a straw boater hat and then I grabbed a white duster coat (a long coat that people wore to drive cars in 1893) that Carl used to wear sometimes in sketches. I put on the hat, coat, and a pair of goggles, and I burst into the meeting! I jumped up on the long conference table and yelled: “Lindy landed! He’s in Paris, he made it!” And I hurled my hat out the open window.
They quickly threw me out. Sarnoff and Weaver were puzzled, Max was mortified, but Sid collapsed in laughter.
Two years later, I was working at the top floor of the RCA building and General Sarnoff walked past me with another executive. He nodded at me. And then at the end of the corridor I heard him say to the other executive in a loud whisper: “Lindy landed!”
He never forgot what happened. And I’m sure neither did whoever was walking on the street in Rockefeller Center when the straw hat landed.