Monthly Archives: November 2012

Here's the Mystery Guest spot on What's My Line? for April 26, 1953 and the Mystery Guest is the great silent film comedian, Harold Lloyd. Mr. Lloyd spent the fifties and much of the sixties trying to re-release and otherwise market some of his old movies but never quite had the success with them for which he hoped. Many who've written about him say that he was less interested in making money off them than he was in recognition. A world that only seemed to recall Chaplin and sometimes Keaton from that era had forgotten that he was at times bigger than both of them. His appearance on the game show was because he was in New York in '53 promoting a reissue of his 1925 masterpiece, The Freshman.

I actually have a story about meeting Harold Lloyd and I thought I'd told it here before but I can't find it so maybe not. It was around 1964 and I was attending Emerson Junior High School in West Los Angeles. I didn't know it at the time but Emerson was apparently built on land that Mr. Lloyd had once owned and he was visiting the campus for some reason connected to that. The principal, Mr. Campbell, had Harold Lloyd in his office and it dawned on him that there was one person on campus who would know who that was and would be thrilled to meet him. That one person was 12-year-old me.

I was sitting in Mr. Cline's English class when someone came in and gave Mr. Cline a "summons slip" (that's what they called them): Mark Evanier to the principal's office, A.S.A.P. I knew I wasn't in any kind of trouble because I was never in any kind of trouble but I couldn't imagine what this was about.

I reported to Mr. Campbell's office where he introduced me to his visitor and my immediate thought was, "Oh, this man has the same name as the great comedian." I mean, he didn't look like the Harold Lloyd I knew from the films, nor was he hanging off a big clock. There was an awkward moment because I didn't immediately go, "Oh my God! The greatest comedian in the world!" Mr. Campbell looked disappointed and Mr. Lloyd looked disappointed. I'm guessing the principal had assured his guest that, yes, there was a 12-year-old kid on campus who knew who he was and now they both thought I didn't.

Trying to salvage the moment, Mr. Campbell said, "I thought you'd enjoy meeting him because you're such a fan of silent movies." I then did a double-take worthy of anyone who ever worked for Hal Roach and I said, "Harold Lloyd from Safety Last?" and Lloyd broke into a big grin. The principal continued, "And I thought you might like to ask him some things about his films."

If I'd had that opportunity a few years later, I'd have deluged the man with curiosity. At that moment, I couldn't think of a thing. I was unprepared, I was scared to be in the presence of Harold Lloyd…and I really didn't know that much about him. He owned most of his major films and rigidly controlled their exhibition so I hadn't seen most of them. There were then few books about him, either. When we shook hands, he grasped my right hand in his left and I didn't know why he did that. A few years later, I obtained a biography that explained. An accident during a photo shoot — a prop bomb turning out to be real — had cost Lloyd a couple of fingers on his right hand so he wore a flesh-colored glove with prosthetic fingers and he hid the hand as much as possible. (The physical feats he did in his films are even more impressive once you know that, along with the fact that he was right-handed.)

The only major Lloyd film I had then seen, I'd only seen in part. A company called Atlas Films sold 8mm versions and, almost certainly with no legal right to do so, they'd released Safety Last in a one-reel, 12-minute abridgement. The entire movie was 70 minutes but the Atlas folks got it down to twelve…and it played fine at that length. You wouldn't have sensed there was ever more to it than that. So I asked him a few obvious questions about that movie without mentioning that I'd only seen (and had purchased) an unauthorized and seriously-trimmed print of it. About all he said was that he'd worked real hard on that film and was very proud of it, which is pretty much what you'd assume.

At Mr. Campbell's suggestion, I walked Mr. Lloyd to his car and we chatted a bit about how Hollywood had changed and he asked me what I wanted to do with my life…and that was about it. I'm sorry, as much for my sake as yours, that the conversation yielded no quotable tidbits. He shook hands with me left-handed again, then got into a big Cadillac (I think) and drove off. Later that day, I told some of my classmates that I'd met Harold Lloyd and they didn't know who that was. So I tried telling a few teachers that I'd met Harold Lloyd and they didn't know who that was, either. No, wait. I believe Mr. Cline said, "Is he still alive?"

Here he is in 1953. He doesn't seem to be trying to conceal his right hand. He does seem pleased that people know who he is and that panel guessed. Actually, in '53, it had only been six years since the release of his last movie, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, and two years since it had been re-released briefly under the title, Mad Wednesday. So he wasn't that forgotten. That would come later…

On this page, recommended to me by the illustrious Robert J. Elisberg, you will find video of pandas playing on a slide and the most adorable photo of baby pandas you have ever seen.

The Rachel Maddow clip I embedded a few posts back was an embed from MSNBC that was slowing up the loading of this page. I've swapped it out for a YouTube version of the same thing which shouldn't stall things. The folks at MSNBC (and Comedy Central and CNN and about a jillion others) should simplify their embeds if they want us to repost them.

I'd like at least my Republican/Conservative friends to read Daniel S. Duffield.

When someone writes the inevitable "Inside the Romney Campaign" book, there are two things I want to know…

One is how and when the decision was made to hide Paul Ryan as much as possible. Romney picked him, established street cred with the Tea Party wing, then we watched Ryan appear less and less and less. Did they even let him near a swing state the last week or two? The day before the election, they had him in Alabama, a state Romney couldn't have lost if he'd started robbing liquor stores. I understand Romney realized he had to move to the center in order to have a shot at winning but did he intend, if elected, to dump the Ryan agenda as he did the man himself? My guess is that as Mitt struggled to keep his own plans and proposals vague, he regretted not picking instead someone like Tim Pawlenty who would also have thrilled the Tea Partiers but who had fewer actual proposals out there.

Then to what extent did the Romney campaign really think they had it won? I understand how you have to say "We're going to sweep" no matter what you expect. You can't let your supporters down because that will suppress your vote totals and you also want voters of your party to turn out and vote for other offices. I also understand why a Dick Morris would tell his audience what they wanted to hear, though perhaps not why he wouldn't leave himself more wiggle room.

But did Mitt think he had a lock on 300+ electoral votes? They said their confidence was based on "internal polls." As we mentioned here, when a campaign says their internal polls are stronger than the public ones, that's usually a lie. We now have anonymous folks near Romney saying he was genuinely stunned he didn't win…so did they really have internal polls that said what they said they said?

And it won't be in any book about Romney but I'm curious as to what kind of offers Nate Silver will be getting. He's really our first Superstar Statistician now and I'll wager one or more of the TV networks will throw money at him to be part of their election coverage next time. Maybe not Fox News because they wouldn't want him on their station predicting any Democrats are likely to win…if indeed that's the case next time. But I can sure imagine the other places wanting him.

I can also imagine a political campaign trying to engage him to supervise their polling and their analysis of others'. Why, if it was Nate Silver leaking their favorable internal polls, they might even be accurate.

This runs sixteen minutes and I think it's worth sitting through unless you're furious about last Tuesday's election and muttering to yourself, "We'll kill 'em next time." Rachel Maddow itemizes all the "wins" for the Democratic Party and for the kind of weak-tea Liberalism we have in this country these days. It will sound to some like a victory lap or an in-your-face gloat but at the end, she points out that it's just Reality crashing down on some folks who could have been unsurprised if they'd ventured out of The Bubble more often. So at least watch the last four minutes or so…

Our buddy Ken Plume talks with a very funny man named Ricky Gervais for about an hour…

You wonder if the Fox News watchers who were told their boy had it in the bag are going to stop and wonder what else their network is telling them that ain't true. Obama's victory did not surprise those who took the time to add up the electoral votes in all the states where the President was running ahead and did some pretty simple math. But there were folks in this country who put more faith in their hunches and desires. When they saw a few outlier polls that put Romney ahead, they seized on those as evidence that what they wanted to believe was so…and then they spread this non-scientific deduction to others. A lot of them said, "Nate Silver? Oh, he's in the New York Times and they always lie in favor of the Democrats." So even though Silver was patiently explaining why he thought what he thought and showing his work, he could easily be denied.

332 electoral votes is not, as Dick Morris called it, "a squeaker." If his prediction of Romney at 325 had come true, he would have proclaimed it as a landslide and an inarguable repudiation by America of everything Obama stood for. I don't think Obama's 332 is all that with regard to the G.O.P. agenda. I think some of it is that people just didn't trust Mitt Romney to divulge (or maybe figure out) his economic plan for the country after Inauguration Day. But it does show that a lot of what the right-wing pundits have been saying about the soul of this country has been…well, about as accurate as a Dick Morris prediction.

I was an only child. When that fact came up in conversation, I used to tell people, "My folks figured that if you get it right the first time, don't press your luck." The truth is that I was a very difficult birth. I was due on February 29, 1952 and my mother spent most of that day and all of March 1 in a hospital in agonizing pain, unable to deliver. Finally on March 2nd, they went in and got me. She was a month shy of 31 at the time and after I was out, the doctor who'd poked around inside her in order to deliver me told her, "Do not under any circumstances let yourself get pregnant again. You will never make it through another birth alive."

Her gynecologist later concurred. That little fact is always on my mind when I read debates about abortion and come across someone who believes they should be illegal with no exceptions. What would have probably happened if my mother had gotten pregnant again is that either she would have aborted or both she and that fetus would have died. The latter option doesn't sound particularly "pro-life" to me.

She told me more than once that if she had gotten in a "family way" then, she would not have hesitated to abort. The gamble that the doctors were wrong was not worth losing her life and leaving my father and me without her. As far as I know, it was never necessary. They were lucky…and also very careful. After my father died in '91, she asked me to clean out his drawer and not tell her about anything in there that I thought she wouldn't have wanted to know about. They had no secrets from each other but each had one small drawer in their bedroom which the other agreed to never open. I have not cleaned out hers yet though she told me once it held letters and photos of male friends who preceded my father. His had nothing I felt she'd care about but it did contain an awful lot of very old and unopened condoms.

I never in my life wished I had a brother or sister. Never for one second. When I went to the homes of friends who had siblings, I only heard screaming and yelling and fighting over belongings…and envy from my friends that I had my own room and the undivided love and attention of my parents. I didn't even wish I'd had a brother or sister after my father passed and I became my mother's only local relative and so had total responsibility for her well-being and needs.

She insisted to her last day on living alone…and she did if you don't count the many days each year she spent in Kaiser Hospital. Every few months — every few weeks the last few years — she'd have some sort of attack and she'd either phone me or push The Button.

What I call The Button was on a little locket-like piece of plastic jewelry she wore around her neck at all times. I called it her "I've fallen and I can't get up" button but it was not the brand you see advertised all the time on TV using that catch-phrase. When my mother got old enough that she needed something like that — a service to monitor her and send help if necessary — I checked out several and found many to be way more expensive than others. The one I chose — and we were really happy with them — was this one. I don't know if there's a better service now but I think I picked the best one around at the time I was looking.

The Button could get pushed at any hour. Occasionally, it was just a matter of me making the 15-minute drive from my home to help her get up off the floor. If I wasn't home at the time, it could be a lot more than 15 minutes and I had friends standing-by in case I was too far. But once, it was a lot less than 15 minutes…

My mother was out in the kitchen one day making herself some lunch. She slipped on something, fell…and while she wasn't injured, she was unable to get back up. The Button was pushed, the monitoring person came online to talk to her (via a super-sensitive speakerphone in the living room) and she yelled to him to call her son. The monitoring person phoned her son…who happened to be two blocks from her home at that moment. I was on my way to Stan Freberg's house for something when my cellphone rang and a man told me, "Your mother is unhurt but she needs you to come over and help her get up." I said, "Tell her I'll be there in 45 seconds!"

Usually though, it wasn't that easy. The last two years of her life, the calls — either from her or someone monitoring The Button — averaged about one every thirty days and in the two decades before that, at least one every six months. The nighttime ones always seemed to come around 4 AM, which is never a convenient time for anyone. As some of you have observed in the time stamps on postings here, I'm often up at 4 AM. All too often, I capped my workday with an emergency call and instead of heading to bed, I was in my car, racing over there. The daytime ones always seemed to come when I was in the middle of something that she dearly regretted taking me away from.

That was a significant part of the problem: The guilt she always felt for disrupting my life. I would always do my best to calm her down and convince her she hadn't yanked me away from something important. Since (a) she usually had, (b) I'm a bad liar and (c) she was so perceptive, I could never quite convince her. One reason I think she died when she did was because she felt so bad about always disrupting my life with those calls.

They came at inopportune moments: When I was on my way to deliver a speech at Joe Barbera's funeral. When I was on my way to opening night of a play I really wanted to see. When I had about twelve hours to write a cartoon script and then sleep before the next morning when that script would be recorded.

Twice, I was out of town at comic conventions. In 1995, I was in San Diego at that year's Comic-Con International, attending the Eisner Awards in a big hall at the hotel where I happened to be staying. Sergio and I had been nominated for an Eisner and I was sitting there awaiting our category when a bellman came in looking for me. My mother had called 911 or pushed The Button. In the emergency room, they asked her about relatives and she'd told them, "I only have one." She meant one within 3000 miles. "But he's out of town. I think he's at the Hyatt in San Diego."

Someone at the hospital phoned the hotel and of course, I was not in my room…but a wise hotel operator switched the call to the Front Desk. Someone there looked me up, saw I was a guest of the convention and figured I might be at the big ceremony then going on in their ballroom. They sent a bellman to see if I was and a person at the door told him, "Yes, he's here. He's a tall fellow seated at Table 1."

One minute later, the tall fellow at Table 1 was out at the house phone in the lobby talking with a doctor. The first thing she said to me was, "Your mother has had what appears to be a mild heart attack. She's resting comfortably and she wanted you to know about it but she said to tell you not to interrupt your trip to drive back."

I said, "I think I oughta drive back."

The doctor said, "I think you should too but that's what your mother told me to tell you."

I phoned my cleaning lady (who was also my mother's cleaning lady) and told her to head for my mother's house to fetch certain supplies I was sure would be needed at the hospital. Then I ran back into the Eisner Awards ceremony to tell Sergio that I was heading for Los Angeles and that he should accept without me if we won. I was just bending over to whisper to him when I heard a voice say, "…and the winners are Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier for Groo the Wanderer!"

Sergio leaped up and threw an arm around me and I found myself being led involuntarily to the stage. When we got up there, Will Eisner pumped my hand and muttered what I think was a compliment but I didn't hear it. Sergio shoved me towards the microphone and said "You go first" and if you were there and perchance wonder to this day why my acceptance speech was so lame and incoherent…well, there's your explanation. I mean, it would have probably been lame and incoherent to some extent if I hadn't been thinking about my mother and all I had to do but it was even lamer and less coherent than my norm. Ten minutes later, I was on the 5 racing north. I made it in a hair under two hours.

When I walked into my mother's room, she had two reactions, one immediately after the other. The first was, "Mark, you're here," uttered with relief and gratitude. The second was, "Mark, you're here," uttered with embarrassment that she'd yanked me away from somewhere else and made me make that drive. I ended up going back and forth two other times that weekend — once by car, once by plane — alternately hosting panels and tending to my mother's needs.

Then in 2009, I was in San Francisco interviewing Wendy Pini at a WonderCon panel when my Blackberry vibrated with the little code I'd programmed to tell me my mother had pushed The Button. I took the call, heard that paramedics were en route to her home, excused myself from the panel, dashed back to my hotel room, grabbed my laptop, taxied to the airport and jumped on the next Southwest flight home. Just before I boarded the plane, I got a call that she'd been taken to UCLA Medical Center.

90 minutes later, I was getting into my car at a lot near LAX when I received a call from a nurse, not at UCLA but at Cedars-Sinai. "I was told she was at UCLA," I said.

The nurse replied, "No, they brought her here," thereby saving me at least an hour of going to the wrong hospital and not knowing where my mother was. "She said to tell you to stay in San Francisco and not fly back here."

Instead, 40 minutes after landing, I walked into a cubicle in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai where my mother was being treated. She had the same two reactions as above, only more severe and again, I wound up commuting back and forth all weekend.

I have many other stories on this theme but I think I'm going to break this in two and continue it next time. I've more than made the point that it was a royal pain all those years to drop everything else in my life and race over to take her into the emergency room or meet the ambulance there. So now I need to explain how I managed to put up with it. I just reminded myself that collectively, it was nowhere near as much pain as she endured between 2/29/52 and the moment of my birth. The scale never even came close to balancing over that, let alone all she did for me after.

And that was all I needed to remember.

I'm telling you about all this — and there's more to tell — because of an e-mail I got from someone who wrote…

I'm somewhat younger than you are and like you are, I believe, an only child. My father is gone. I love my mother but I am afraid of what that's going to mean when she gets older and needs someone to take care of her. I cannot afford the time or money to take care of her and while I will do what I can, I know it cannot be enough. I would appreciate any pointers you can give me about what I have to do and what I can decline to do.

I can't tell this person what they can decline to do because I have no idea what his mother will need, nor can I gauge his sense of obligation and caring. But I can tell you what I did and what I realized was the most important thing I could do for my mother. I'll tell you about it in the next part, which should be along in the next few days here.

My pal Ken Plume is a great interviewer. All he ever needs is a great interviewee. Here's Ken talking for ninety minutes with the greatest interviewee of them all, Mel Brooks…

The 250 movies on IMDB in two and a half minutes. Take this one full-screen…

One election that didn't go quite my way last night was for my Congressman. For hundreds of years, it's been Henry Waxman (D) and I've been very happy with him. With occasional exceptions, he votes the way I'd want and twice now, I've run into him at the Souplantation nearest my house, which I believe is in the same complex that houses his office. I don't know his position on their Creamy Tomato Soup but I do know that on both occasions, he took the time to talk to me about Washington-type stuff and he was either interested in what I had to say or he did a darn good impression of someone who was interested.

So I like the guy…but this time, I voted for a former Republican turned Independent named Bill Bloomfield. Mr. Bloomfield — a wealthy gent who largely funded his run for the seat — has never held public office but I heard him on a telephonic ask-the-candidate forum and I read his website and decided to toss my vote his way. He seemed serious and passionate and under no delusions that he alone could make a big difference, especially as a first-termer. I also liked the fact that he didn't say "My opponent is a Socialist and a crook and he hates America." He actually had a lot of respect for Waxman, acknowledged good things he'd done and basically said, "I think I can serve you better."

I didn't think he'd win but I voted for him because he seemed to be different. Frustratingly, the day after I mailed off my ballot, I received an ad from his campaign that bashed Waxman like most typical politicians try to bash their opponents. It tried to make a big deal out of the fact that "Waxman does not own a home in the district" and make it sound like he was woefully out of touch and didn't care what we thought. I think the person who wrote it was hoping it would be read as "Waxman does not have a home in the district," which is not the case.

Bloomfield did not win but he did better than most folks probably expected. Waxman usually gets over 60% and last election, took 65% of the vote. This time, he won 54% to 46%. 46% ain't bad for an unknown running for the first time and as an Independent in a heavily-Democratic district. Most of Waxman's former opponents got what they got from Republicans voting straight-ticket for some Republican they never heard of.

In a news article today reporting his loss, Bloomfield said of Waxman, "He was very respectful and I really appreciated it. I grew to like the guy as a person. I was always respectful, even before I'd ever met him, with his 44 years of public service. I am in awe of that. But as a person, how he treated me, how he conducted himself, I was very impressed." Wouldn't it be nice if all elections could end with the loser saying that about the winner?

Wanna buy Groucho's last car? His 1973 Cadillac Deville is going up for bids and you can read about it here. [Caution: A video may start playing upon your arrival at that page.]

I've made four or five tries so far at writing how I feel about last night's election. I keep getting about three paragraphs in before I look at what's coming out of me, delete it and start over. The first, I was afraid would read like gloating, at least to those licking their wounds at the moment. But I'm not gloating. If anything, I feel sorry for some friends who to my view, got too carried away in this nonsense about Obama being a Gay Socialist Muslim Commie whose reelection could only mean the end of the United States of America. There's an industry — quite lucrative for some — that thrives on that kind of thing so we hear it and some believe it but it's never been remotely true.

As William Saletan notes today, the guy who just won another four years in the Oval Office is darn near a moderate Republican by any reasonable standard. My most-G.O.P. friend Roger hates and fears for a long list of things Obama will do. Half of them are things Obama never said he'd do and never spent two seconds of his first term trying to do. The other half are things that Roger thought were great ideas when they were promoted by Caucasian Republicans.

So that's why I tossed the first thing I started writing. Roger would think I'm doing a Happy Dance and going "nyah nyah nyah" and he's having a rough time of it today. He's spent months telling me how America would be destroyed by an Obama victory and now he's got to face the chilling prospect that it won't be. As Matt Taibbi noted in a piece written before the polls closed, it has become way too common in American politics to predict total annihilation if The Wrong Guy wins. Elections matter but they don't matter that much.

I threw out two more things I started writing because I was trying to explain why I thought Romney lost. All I was doing was parroting what Jacob Weisberg wrote more eloquently and efficiently. Then I tossed out another one in which I started to argue that folks like Dick Morris, who forecast a Romney landslide, only did that kind of thing because when your income flows from feeding the Fox News crowd, it's kind of within your job description. I don't believe Newt Gingrich actually thought Romney would "carry over 300 electoral votes" but I think he knew that a key part of his constituency would have hurled rocks at him if he'd made an accurate prediction.  Look at how mad some of them were at Nate Silver, who just crunched numbers, showed his work in the margins, and was attacked for telling them pretty much what actually occurred.

So I don't know what to write, which is why I'm resorting to the old I-Don't-Know-What-To-Write trick. I'm pleased. I'm unsurprised. I'm optimistic. I'm not dumb enough to think we won't have the Mitch McConnells of the world now doubling-down on obstructionism and still insisting they speak for the "real" America. And hey, how about whole states voting to accept the idea of Marriage Equality? There was a sea change that went largely unnoticed last night while folks were fretting about slow vote counting in Florida. Not much attention paid to Marijuana Legalization or a lot of women candidates defeating men who seemed to be waging that War on Women.

I think it's going to take a long time before anyone really understands what happened last night because so much happened. But something sure did…and maybe that's really all I wanted to write here.