I'm not going to do a real obit column on Morton Downey, Jr., who died the other day because I didn't really (a) know him or (b) like him. Matter of fact, I disliked his on-air routine so much that I wrote a Garfield cartoon in which I parodied the guy. To do the voice, I hired someone I did like — a gravelly-voiced actor (also a writer and producer and restaurant critic) named Stanley Ralph Ross. About a week after the episode was recorded, Stanley met Downey at a party and told him about it, whereupon Downey asked him for my phone number. Ostensibly, it was so he could call and ask for a drawing from the show but, the next day, Downey phoned and tried to convince me to dump Stanley's performance and to re-record the episode with him playing himself.
He said we could even call the character "Morton Downey, Jr." and treat him as a total idiot. I declined…but that almost caused me to dislike the off-camera Downey as much as the on-camera guy. This feeling was reinforced a few months later when I happened to sit near him at the Lawry's Restaurant on La Cienega, and watched him be needlessly rude to the waitress and bus boys. Still, I was sad to hear that all that smoking caused him to die of lung cancer this week. Oddly enough, his death came almost a year to the day after Stanley Ralph Ross died from the exact same thing.