Talk about real-life humor!
Tolkin wrote some great stuff, but once in a while he had some silly jokes like, “She married a station beneath her! She got off at One-hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street and he got off at One-hundred-and-tenth!” We all forgave him.
Some time after that first season, I began getting anxiety attacks. I was worried about not being able to come up with the volume of material needed to do show after show, or that what I did come up with wouldn’t be funny enough. I started vomiting between parked cars. I couldn’t figure out why. Mel Tolkin knew everything, so I asked him, “Mel, why am I vomiting between parked cars?”
He said, “You need to talk to a psychoanalyst. He’ll be able to help you.”
Mel sent me to his analyst, Dr. Rubin. In those days, it was twenty-five dollars for a fifty-minute session. He was too busy to take me on as a patient so he sent me to a psychoanalyst on Central Park West named Clement Staff, who was analyzed by Theodore Reik, who in turn was actually analyzed by the world-famous Sigmund Freud. So theoretically I was getting psychotherapy right from the horse’s tail!
I was in therapy on and off for three years. During my sessions, I would go from weeping softly to shouting defiantly. After a while, the therapy opened me up. Instead of continuing to vomit in between parked cars, I found the courage to ask for a raise and, equally important, a real writing credit on the show. I went from “Additional Material by” to “Staff Writer” and a generous raise in salary to boot.
I had become a full member of the writing staff, but I was still learning my craft every day from Tolkin and Kallen. Lucille Kallen was brilliant at writing the domestic sketches. She was responsible for writing a lot of the comedy for Imogene Coca. She also was great at contributing to the guest stars’ sketches. The show featured as guest stars the famous film and theater stars of that time, including Charlton Heston, Geraldine Page, Rex Harrison, Madeline Carroll, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Pearl Bailey, Melvyn Douglas, and many others. Some of them took to television and were good, and some of them were god-awful. (But I won’t name names.)
Like I said before, my forte was Sid’s monologues as well as the German Professor, and later on, the foreign movie satires. It was presumptuous of us to write these foreign movie sketches. After all, how many people out of the millions watching the show at that time had actually seen a foreign movie? They only played in a few big cities in a handful of movie houses. But somehow, they worked. The double-talk in Italian or French and then suddenly a punch line in English always got a big laugh. Sid was absolutely remarkable in his ability to do foreign double-talk. The funniest may have been our sketches based on the Kurosawa Japanese films like Rashomon. It was amazing that Imogene, Carl, and Howie were able to keep up with him.
It was a pretty classy show. In addition to the comedy, Max Liebman booked a variety of musical performances. Your Show of Shows presented arias from famous operas like La Bohème with stars like Marguerite Piazza as Mimi singing “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì” and Robert Merrill singing Marcello, the male lead. There were also musical guest stars such as world-famous cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and pianist Earl Wild. Stars that could easily have been performing at the Metropolitan Opera House or Carnegie Hall, but Your Show of Shows was bringing them into people’s living rooms. In addition to that, Max discovered wonderful dance teams like Mata and Hari, the Hamilton Trio, and Fosse and Niles—the Fosse being the great Bob Fosse who later became a legendary choreographer and director.
Max believed his vision made the show successful. He thought that the musical numbers were driving the show, but he was wrong. It was a case of the musical tail that was wagging the comedy dog. People were tuning in to see the comedy much more than the elaborate musical numbers. More people wanted to laugh than wanted to hear fifteen choruses of an operetta or a classical aria.
The only time music and comedy were in conflict was when musical numbers ran long, and Max directed us to cut the comedy sketches, which were easier to edit right beforehand than the musical pieces because they would have to be rearranged and reorchestrated and that took much too much time. The comedy cuts would always have to be made at the last minute, on Saturday afternoon after the dress rehearsal. Sid would get the writers together, and it was painful. We all loved our favorite jokes and didn’t want to lose them. To get a minute and twenty seconds out of a sketch, you had to cut out a whole section, not just a line. So we would compromise. We generally looked for the weakest sketch and cut from there, but nobody liked the process. We could never take comedy sketches past five or eight minutes, because of Max’s preference for the musical numbers.
Presenting Your Show of Shows was a herculean task. The weekly script, with music, dancing, and six original comedy spots, had to be finished by Wednesday to air on Saturday night. Time needed to be allotted for the mimeograph machines to crank out duplicate scripts for orchestration, props, scenery, costumes, makeup, and sound effects to be readied by performance time. Not to mention the fact that we first had to work on the actual show run-throughs, rewriting, blocking, and rehearsals.
Thursday was the most creative day of the week and also the most stressful. Nothing was complete yet. We had the page, now we had to get it on the stage. We all got together in a big rehearsal room and put the whole show up on the stage, taking the ideas and fleshing them out. We’d add things to the script, cut things out, and make changes on the spot. It was also at this time that I was getting my first experiences as a director when Max Liebman asked me to help out by putting the comedy sketches on their feet and running them a couple of times.
We gave the sketches room to breathe. As soon as Sid, Imogene, Carl, and Howie were comfortable with the script, there would be a loose blocking. They would then rehearse all the places they’d have to hit onstage. There were black lines, blue lines, red lines, yellow lines, green lines, purple lines, which all corresponded to different scenes, where the scenery had to be put and where the camera had to focus.