Sad to hear of the passing of the award-winning political cartoonist Paul Conrad, who leaves us at the age of 86. This article and this one will tell you about him and show you a few of his wonderful, usually-angry graphic editorials. And check out this gallery of a few of his cartoons.
Conrad had three qualities that made him perfect for the job: He could draw, he could spot irony in all its forms and he could get outraged. Politicians infuriated him and he went after every single one who mattered and some who didn't. A staunch Liberal on most but not all issues, he was remembered most for his savaging of Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon...but he was also not particularly nice to Lyndon Johnson, Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton. And he was never nastier to anyone than he was to the Mayor of Los Angeles from 1961-1973, Sam Yorty. If you're tallying his Democratic targets versus his Republicans, you'll have trouble with Yorty, who was a Democrat who always sided with the G.O.P. But really, the final score is that Conrad spared no one who was in power while he was wielding his pen.
During much of this time, his cartoons were so scathing that they seemed to characterize the entire Los Angeles Times. It's hard to tell quite where it stands these days but when Otis Chandler was in charge of the Times, it was a very Conservative newspaper in every aspect but for Conrad...and when he went after Nixon or Reagan, their supporters ignored the Times' steadfast support of both men and decried it as a Commie-Liberal-Democratic rag. That his savaging of the left went so unnoticed by outraged Nixonites seemed to amuse Conrad. One time, he was on TV with Joe Pyne, who was kind of the Sean Hannity of his day. Pyne took issue with an anti-Nixon cartoon of Conrad's and said something like, "I notice you never have anything bad to say about any Democrat." Conrad calmly responded by picking up the book he was there to plug — a book Pyne had just held up for the cameras — and displaying page after page of anti-L.B.J. cartoons. Then he said something like, "It's been obvious for some time, Joe, that you don't know how to read but I thought even you could look at the pictures."
In April of '07, I got to meet and talk with him at a local book fest. He was sitting there, sucking on an unlit pipe and scowling a bit but once we got to chatting, he was quite affable and you could sense a great, non-egotistical pride in his body of work. I asked him about his cartoons depicting Mayor Yorty as one step away from the looney bin and Conrad said he thought in hindsight, he'd been too kind to the man. Frankly, I don't think he was ever very kind to anyone except, of course, his readership. He always did right by them.
While out on a walk the other day, I received a sad and shocked e-mail from someone who thought the guy who played Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Conan O'Brien's show had died. It wasn't until I got home that I learned it wasn't Robert Smigel who'd passed away but Robert Schimmel. So congrats to Robert Smigel for still being alive and condolences to the friends and family of Robert Schimmel.
I didn't know Robert Schimmel and didn't see nearly enough of him...but he was a very funny man with a fresh, honest way of reporting on the world. I think I even liked him being interviewed more than I enjoyed him on stage. My pal Paul Harris, who's the best interviewer on radio, has posted two audio clips of long chats he had with Schimmel and I recommend them to you. If you only have time to listen to one, listen to the second one in which he tells a hilarious — and I'm sure, absolutely true — story about his mother and a porn actor.
He also tells a story about having a colonoscopy. His doctor, he says, plays music during the procedure...so Schimmel made a funny CD for the occasion and had it played instead. It was so funny, he reports, that the doctor started playing it for his other patients. This is good to know because that's my gastroenterologist too and next time I go in for something, I'm going to demand the Schimmel soundtrack.
Here's an intriguing clip...intriguing at least for Yours Truly, a huge fan of The Tonight Show in all its incarnations.
In 1977, back when Tom Snyder followed that program with his, Rob Reiner guest-hosted for Johnny Carson. His guests were basically his buddies — Harry Shearer, Billy Crystal and Albert Brooks. Since I like all four of those folks, I wanted to see it but I had to be somewhere else that evening. Fortunately, I'd just gotten my first VCR...and this was before VHS, before Betamax. Such machines were making their way into the marketplace but I didn't have one. I had this clunky Panasonic U-Matic machine that took huge 3/4" video cassettes. Usually, you used one of those with tapes that held one hour or less. There were 90 minute cassettes but the tape in them was so thin that it often jammed. I don't think I ever had a 90 minute cassette that lasted very long. The second or third time you recorded on one, it would snarl and you'd have to toss it out.
Since The Tonight Show was then 90 minutes, I inserted one in my VCR, set the timer and went out. I got home just as Mr. Snyder's Tomorrow Show was commencing and as I watched his opening, I heard something like the following. This is a paraphrase from memory but I do distinctly recall that Snyder was obviously pissed and practically had steam coming out of his ears...
You know, when you do a show like this, you're always at the mercy of the ratings...and sometimes, when they're down, that's your fault and sometimes, you pay the price for the sins of others. For years, Johnny Carson has delivered a strong lead-in, for which all of us here are grateful. People watch Johnny 'til the end and a lot of them stay tuned for us, and it's helped make this show a success. But some nights, Johnny's off and you get a lead-in like we got tonight from this person named Rob Reiner. We all watched his show, which was taped earlier, before we sat down to do this and...well, most of you probably saw it and it was embarrassing. Mr. Reiner is wonderfully entertaining on All in the Family but he's just not cut out to host a show like that and I'm sure he knows it now because of all the flop sweat we all saw coming off our screens. He had on Albert Brooks, who usually makes me laugh, and he did this bit I don't understand about throwing his clothes in the air and...well, you saw it. Not a snicker. There was a lot of that show that wasn't very funny and that isn't a crime. It happens in television. What got me was that for some reason, Rob Reiner started taking cheap shots at me. Hey, I had nothing to do with that show but here he is on the screen, joking about how poorly it was going and telling America, "Well, at least you can go to bed now and not have to watch that idiot Tom Snyder after this." And I think, "You know, we work hard here to do our little show without much money and without much promotion. It doesn't help us to have a bad show on before us and for that bad show to be telling people to turn off their sets and go to bed. I wonder how long All in the Family would have been on if the show before it did that. Mr. Reiner, I'm not the reason you had a bad night on television. Don't take your failings out on me."
As I said, that's from memory and it's by no means verbatim, but I think I got the attitude right. Snyder looked like he wanted to run over and deck Reiner. Naturally, once I heard that, I couldn't wait to see what had happened on The Tonight Show preceding it...but I never did. The 90-minute cassette jammed during rewind and the tape was trashed. I even attempted reconstructive surgery, opening the cassette and trying to smooth things out but no luck.
There must have been something to what Snyder said. The next night, he opened his show by reading a note he'd received — a pretty humble, sincere apology from Rob Reiner. Tom accepted the mea culpa, called Reiner a true gentleman and the matter was never raised again. I did, of course, wonder about what had happened on The Tonight Show but it didn't seem like anything I would ever see. They didn't rerun shows with guest hosts.
Recently, someone put about eight minutes of that Tonight Show up on YouTube. It's not the Albert Brooks bit and it's not the end of the show, which is when (I understood) Reiner said whatever he said that ticked Snyder off. It's Harry Shearer and Billy Crystal performing a rather funny parody of...Tom Snyder. I never knew they'd done such a thing on the program. Watching it now, I don't think it alone is what upset Snyder. It's not cruel but the intro is kinda close to what Snyder complained about...so I'm wondering now if some or all of my previous assumptions were correct. Particularly in light of that sincere apology, I assumed Snyder had accurately characterized what Reiner had done.
What makes me wonder is that around 1980 or so, I got to have lunch with Tom Snyder. That sentence sounds like it was a closer relationship than it actually was. I was dining at Hamptons, a restaurant in Burbank, with a couple of TV producers and Bruce McKay, an NBC exec who had worked for Snyder. Because of Bruce, our group was invited (more like commanded) to join a nearby table where Snyder was lunching with an entourage and we all sat there for at least an hour enjoying The Tom Snyder Show as he held court. He was a loud, overpowering presence but very, very interesting and witty as he told stories, ventured opinions, etc. One topic I recall was that someone asked him about the by-now-defunct parodies of him on Saturday Night Live by Dan Aykroyd. Snyder made it clear that while he respected Aykroyd's talents and would have been flattered by the occasional spoof, he thought the sketches came out of some deep, inexplicable (he used the word, "pathological") hatred of him by the show's producers and writers.
One thing I especially recall is that he said it was frustrating to him because none of the NBC executives ever watched his show — a statement that Bruce McKay said was only a slight exaggeration. Snyder continued, "Apparently, not one of them knows how to put a video cassette into a tape machine and watch last night's Tomorrow Show. What they do watch is Saturday Night Live and they get confused and they think that's me. They think my show is like that." He told an anecdote about how an NBC vice-president had said something to him about a remark he [Snyder] had made on his show a week or two earlier. Tom hadn't recalled making the remark and later, when he mentioned it to one of his associates, they said, "Oh, that's something Dan Aykroyd said a few weeks ago when he was doing you."
Anyway, I don't know exactly what it was in that Reiner-hosted Tonight Show that upset Tom Snyder but I don't think it was this spoof of him by Shearer and Crystal. Matter of fact, I think I remember Snyder in some interview praising Harry Shearer's impression of him and the way he said it made it sound like he was saying it to indicate that he didn't much like the Aykroyd imitation. And I've gone on way too long about this so I suggest you just watch the clip...
Recently, a J.D. Power survey of the 20 largest airports in the U.S. ranked LAX 19th and apparently a major reason was the food. It has never, in all my memory, been good. Once upon a time, it was mainly these generic, you-never-heard-of-them-anywhere-else cafeterias operated by a company called Host. Host apparently still has the concession out there but a decade or two ago, attempting to upgrade and hold onto the contract, they ditched the no-name cafeterias and brought in the likes of McDonald's and Burger King. That they were a step up should give you some idea how lousy it used to be there.
Admittedly, you're not going to get gourmet cuisine in any airport but I've been in others and it's usually not this bad...though I do recall a stopover once in Cleveland. My mother and I were flying east to attend her mother's funeral and we had a three-hour layover in that city's airport. I went up to a nice lady at our departure gate and asked, "What's the best restaurant in the airport?"
She said, "Across from Gate D-10, there's a Burger King."
I said, "No, we've got a couple hours here. What's the best restaurant in the airport?"
She said, "Across from Gate D-10, there's a Burger King."
I said, "That's the best restaurant in the airport?"
She said, "That's the best restaurant in the city." True exchange. I swear.
Clevelanders: Don't write me like you did en masse last time I told this story somewhere. That was her opinion, not mine. (Also, from checking that airport's website, I see they no longer have a Burger King. I think there's a Pizza Hut there now, which is kinda like the transition from Shemp to Joe Besser.)
Anyway, a war seems to be going on over the future of food at LAX. Other outfits are trying to outbid Host by promising to bring in better eateries that will generate more revenue. Host is, in turn, lining up new food vendors in an attempt to keep their domain. I have no idea how it's going to shake down except for my hunch that those of us with the time and need for a quick bite before our flight will still have the choice of a place that looks like Wendy's (or is) versus a place that looks like Sbarro's (or is). At a time when few airlines serve in-flight meals on most flights, I wonder how come so few food merchants at airports offer what seems to me like an obvious, needed service: Box lunches.
On my recent flight to Indianapolis, I took along a corned beef sandwich from Canter's Delicatessen, makers of (I think) the best ones in Los Angeles. I packed it and a couple of those unopenable envelopes of mustard and when the flight was about a third of the way there, I hauled out half a sandwich, somehow got the mustard open and applied it liberally...
And then I started to notice people smelling and staring.
The plane wasn't crowded and I had a row to myself. If I'd had folks on either side of me, it would have been worse. As it was, I had to contend with a gentleman seated across the aisle staring at me, moistening his lips and vicariously savoring every bite. Every time I put the partially-eaten half-sandwich down, I thought he was about to lean over and ask, "You gonna finish that?" Or maybe he'd say, "I hope you brought enough for everyone." The people in the seats ahead of and behind me kept craning their necks to see what it was they were smelling. I guess I was lucky I didn't bring a pickle.
Then a flight attendant came by dispensing snacks. That made it worse because the passengers around me looked at their little bags of microscopic pretzels, then they looked or smelled my Canter's repast...and really felt disadvantaged.
The flight attendant asked me, "Where'd you get that?" I told her I found it in the seat-back ahead of me, wedged right between the SkyMall catalog and the ominous white bag. When that failed to elicit even a chuckle, I told her, "Canter's Delicatessen."
She said, "That's kind of thin." I told her, "Well, since I'm not, it's really a reduced Canter's corned beef sandwich. I had Gastric Bypass a few years ago so I can't eat an entire Canter's sandwich. I get one and four extra slices of bread. Then I rearrange and I wind up with three corned beef sandwiches, each with a manageable quantity of meat in it. This is half of one of those." I let her peek at the other, untouched half in a little plastic box in my laptop case and in exchange, she gave me three bags of the tiny pretzels. As she continued down the aisle, she said something about how smart I was. Apparently, I was the first person to ever think of bringing a sandwich onto a Southwest Airlines flight.
After I finished Part One of said sandwich, I listened to a podcast on my iPhone and read some paperwork I'd brought onto the plane. About 90 minutes passed and I happened to notice the guy across the aisle glancing at me. Every minute or so, he'd peek over my way and at one point, our eyes met and he realized he had to explain what he was doing. He said, "I'm waiting for you to eat the other half sandwich so I can enjoy the experience from here."
September 3, 2010
