Monthly Archives: November 2019

This afternoon, the lovely Shelly Goldstein and I were in the front row for a memorial in North Hollywood for the late/looney Rip Taylor. I took the photos that adorn this posting and I would have written the text but my buddy Steve Stoliar beat me to it. That is, I logged into Facebook, read Steve's account of the event and realized he'd written just about all the same stuff I was going to write. So with his permission, I'm quoting him and then I'll be back to add a few more points. Take it away, Steve…

Just came from a very affectionate and entertaining memorial for Rip Taylor at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood. It was produced by Rip's longtime publicist and friend, B Harlan Boll who, by astonishing coincidence, was the publicist for the original hardcover edition of Raised Eyebrows, way back when. He did a superlative job of juggling the venue, the speakers, and the video clips.

The stage was festooned with numerous sparkly costumes from Rip's career, plus one of his wigs — and an urn containing the remains of Mr. Taylor himself! Among those sharing their funny and touching memories were wicked wit Bruce Vilanch, Marty Krofft, Julie Newmar, Johnny Whitaker, Jo Anne Worley, Kathy Griffin, and Alison Arngrin. Many of the clips were deliciously non-PC by today's restrictive, unreasonable standards, and there were also clips from Rip's one-man show where he got into some of the darker elements of his life, which added a lot of texture to the clip reel. At the conclusion, we all sang Rip's theme song — "Happy Days Are Here Again" — and — big surprise — much confetti was unleashed upon the audience.

Also in attendance were my pals Mark Evanier, Shelly Goldstein, Jeff Abraham, Kerry Ross, Hank Garrett, Geoffrey Mark and Jeremy Vernon, plus Lee Meriwether (two Catwomen under one roof, ladies and gentlemen!), George Chakiris, Charlie Brill & Mitzi McCall, Judy Tenuta — and Ann-Margret!

Afterwards, I chatted with Johnny Whitaker about The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming and when Harlan introduced me to Julie Newmar as someone who worked for Groucho, the first thing she mentioned was The Mikado, of all things! She was very impressed with that — and I was very impressed that she mentioned it. Although she now has trouble getting around, she looked remarkably well for eighty-six!

A lovely afternoon.

I agree with my friend Steve…and I should mention that the book he mentions, Raised Eyebrows, is his account of the time he spent working in the home of one Groucho Marx and it's a must-read if you want to know about Groucho's last days and the controversial Erin Fleming who, for good or ill — actually, a little of the former and a lot of the latter, in my view — managed his life in those years. You can order a copy of the new, updated paperback here and I suggest you do. I also suggest this book that Steve wrote in tandem with the fine comedian and director of funny television, Howard Storm.

Getting back to Rip: There were a lot of memories shared of a man who could perhaps be described as mercurial but memorable. Rip was a born entertainer — one of those guys who could never have been happy in any other profession. He was much-loved by the folks who turned out this afternoon and, of course, by the many who loved him on television or night clubs. Oh — and I just realized I took another photo I should share with you…

This table was on stage during the ceremony.  At left, you see one of Rip's old wigs.  At right is a photo of him, possibly wearing the same wig.  And in the center, there was that blue urn containing Rip's ashes which will soon be scattered at sea, much like confetti.

As Steve mentioned, much confetti was strewn about the El Portal, most of it on those of us in the first row.  Some people had to dig Ann-Margret out of it.  I came home with a lot of it in the pockets of my sport coat. I've decided to leave it there and the next time I'm at some social engagement wearing that coat, I'll just pull out a few wads of it and toss them in the air…in honor of Rip.

• Every time Lindsey Graham defends Trump, he acts like a man who knows that if certain photos get out, he'll have to do hard time and then register as a sex offender.

• It's beginning to look like the defining issue of the 2020 elections will be "Medicare for All" versus "Medicare for Almost Nobody."

Groucho Marx had a long-running hit with this game show, You Bet Your Life, which was loved by the public. Actually, it was probably even more loved by its sponsors and whichever network had it at the moment. It was very high in ratings and quite low in production costs.

You Bet Your Life started as a radio program on ABC in October of 1947. Two years later, it moved to CBS Radio and the following year, it went to NBC as a simulcast, broadcast on both radio (until 1960) and TV (until 1961). For its last season, the name was changed to The Groucho Show. By then, reruns of it were already popular in TV syndication under the name, The Best of Groucho. So it had three titles and it ran on three networks plus local stations for a long time.

The minute the show was dropped by NBC — and maybe even before that — Groucho and the same production team made a pilot for a new series called What Do You Want? They kept Groucho's longtime announcer George Fenneman and altered the You Bet Your Life format to make it a bit less of a game show and a little more of a talk show. The new premise was to have the contestants be more colorful and to allow them to demonstrate unusual jobs or hobbies. Actually, they seem to have made at least two pilot episodes, If you can somehow sit through the entire one below, it includes preview clips from another episode…

Not very good, wouldn't you say? We can probably assume potential sponsors and/or the network or someone else felt the same way. Very quickly, the same behind-the-scenes folks retooled it into a slightly different show which debuted on CBS on January 11, 1962…less than four months after NBC broadcast the final The Groucho Show.

For the new series, Mr. Fenneman was replaced by a pair of young, attractive kids — Jack Wheeler and Patty Harmon who had appeared as contestants on You Bet Your Life. Harmon was then the youngest person to ever scale the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps. Joy Patricia Harmon was an up-and-coming actress who later, as Joy Harmon, had a pretty nice career. She is probably best-remembered as the car-washing blonde in the film, Cool Hand Luke.

Groucho's first game show ran one month shy of fourteen years. His second, Tell it to Groucho, fell a bit short of that. It was on for a little less than five months. (George Fenneman fared only slightly better. He went off and hosted a daytime game show, also for CBS, Your Surprise Package. It ran for eleven months.)

Here's the pilot for Tell It to Groucho. It will be of special interest to anyone who has had a burning desire to see Groucho Marx not being very funny…

Most folks reading this will be surprised to learn that that was not the end of Groucho's days as a game show host. In 1965, he spent a few months overseas doing a You Bet Your Life clone called simply Groucho with Keith Fordyce, a British TV "presenter" and host as his Fenneman. This one ran eleven episodes and this is the only one I've ever seen…

After that, Groucho gave up on the world of game shows…or maybe it was the other way around. There were apparently moments in the sixties when there were rumblings about him having his own, gameless talk show. He hosted The Tonight Show for the week of 8/20/62 between the time Jack Paar left it and Johnny Carson took it over and then also appeared on Johnny's first episode. Despite the fact that Tell it to Groucho had just flopped, he apparently had some reason to believe he'd be offered the job if Carson hadn't done well with it.

That of course didn't happen. It's too bad that he never got the chance to really show what he could do with that format.

Headaches seem to be gone.  Catching up on work.  And my e-mail suggests I need to say this again…

This blog is often noted for its obituaries for folks in comics and/or show business. I never wanted it to be that way but when someone in those fields dies and I (a) knew them and/or (b) knew a lot of things about them that are not common knowledge, I feel I should write about them. Often, the news has reached me and not reached many others yet. Sometimes, it's someone who worked in relative obscurity and I think that if I don't write about them, no one will.

When I don't write about someone who's left us, it doesn't mean that I didn't hear they'd died. It doesn't mean I didn't like the person or don't care. It might just mean that I really didn't know them and that others who did are doing more than an adequate job of noting their passing. It's no reflection on them if I don't think I have anything interesting to say about them. Gahan Wilson, who died the other day at the age of 89, was a brilliant writer and cartoonist…and if you knew his work, you don't need me to tell you how good he was.

Sticking with this morbid subject: I said the other day here that the passing of our friend Tom Spurgeon has made me reflect on something. It was how, not all that long ago, a mainstream newspaper like The New York Times didn't note the death of almost anyone who'd written or drawn comic books, let alone someone like Tom who wrote about them. I said I couldn't think of anyone else in his category who'd been so recognized and then I got a message from Gary Groth reminding me the Times had noted the passing of comic strip collector/historian Bill Blackbeard in 2011, followed by a message from Dave Bryant reminding me that the paper had run an obit for Bhob Stewart in 2014. So I stand, as we all should stand at times, corrected.

And could the impeachment hearings be complete without an appearance by Randy Rainbow? Of course not…

A couple of times on this site, I've suggested that Trump might not make it to the final presidential ballot. That's not a real prediction on my part but doesn't it seem a wee bit more possible this week? This whole business with Ukraine won't knock him off but a few more of these scandals could do it. So could a total meltdown/breakdown that convinces much of America he's mentally unstable and he seems to be getting ever-closer to that. So could a lot of things.

The most interesting revelation for me this week was not that Trump ordered the deal to release the funds in exchange for an investigation of the Bidens. We all knew that…or thought we did. I was surprised it was proven as decisively as it was, leaving his defenders with precious little wiggle room to insist it had never happened. I was also surprised that it came out that what Trump wanted was not the investigation so much as an announcement that they'd launch an investigation. It wasn't necessary for them to actually investigate. He knew they'd never find anything. What he wanted was to be able to refer to "the corrupt Joe Biden whose whole family is under investigation." And then he'd allude to damning dirt he'd seen that was being uncovered but we'd never see it. As this article reminds us…

During the height of Donald Trump's relentless birtherism in 2011, the reality TV star claimed he had personally sent investigators to Hawaii to uncover information about President Barack Obama's birthplace and boasted that they couldn't "believe what they're finding."

Of course, we never saw all the dirt they found. We never even saw evidence that Trump has ever sent anyone to investigate…but that's his playbook. Ukraine would have investigated the Bidens the same way. It would be great irony if Trump got himself impeached trying to destroy Biden…and then Biden wound up not being his opponent and he had to start ginning up stories about the corrupt Elizabeth Warren, the corrupt Bernie Sanders, the corrupt Pete Buttigieg…

In case you've forgotten, we love unusual interpretations of the song "The Rhythm of Life" from the Broadway show, Sweet Charity. Here's one from a BBC show called Strictly Come Dancing. It looks to me like they got these costumes by raiding my closet…

I forget who it was but I remember a day not that long ago when someone who wrote or drew comic books passed away and that passing was noted with an actual obit in The New York Times. I was at some comic convention and a bunch of us got to naming other, more important comic creators who'd died with no mention whatsoever in the Times or other mainstream papers. I don't think the deaths of Syd Shores or Bill Everett got much or any attention there. When someone finally did eulogize a comic book guy — and not for his hand in a character like Superman or Batman, known from another medium — it was an important marker. It said that comic books were no longer a fringe art form and were being recognized as a significant one.

That's all a lead up to my observation that another marker may be coverage of the death of someone who didn't write comic books but wrote about them. I can't think of anyone else that was true of before this nice obit for our friend Tom Spurgeon in The New York Times. And yes, its author George Gene Gustines is well-versed and already knew all about Tom. I'm just saying it matters that the loss of someone like Tom now belongs in the obit section of the Times. I'd like to think Tom would have noted the new attitude.

And speaking of Tom, his blog The Comics Reporter now has up a lengthy, well-researched piece about him written by Douglas Wolk. The piece notes that Tom's website will be preserved online in several venues but don't take a chance. Go read Wolk's piece there now.

I have written here before — here, for instance — about Andre's, a little Italian cafeteria that I frequent in the Beverly Grove area of Los Angeles, across the street from the world-famous Farmers Market. Andre's isn't much on decor but there's a reason locals love it so much. It sells great, fresh Italian food for very low prices. It's a friendly place with great service and the only complaint I have is that at dinner time on weekends, there's a long, long line out the door.

A lot of what I've written here about Andre's has been about the current threat to its very existence. It's in a shopping center that is soon to undergo major renovation. When this will happen and what will be done have both changed several times but most of the announced plans would have meant that Andre's would close for many months and perhaps never reopen. This may all change but at the moment, Andre's only seems safe through about June of next year.

So in the meantime, the manager of Andre's opened a clone of it out in the Valley. It's called Grandi Italiani and it's located in Canoga Park on Sherman Way, a few blocks east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. It's the exact same food at the exact same prices and the exact same management. Unfortunately, it is not getting the exact same crowds coming in to eat spaghetti and ravioli and lasagna and pizza and other tasty items.

It's tough to establish a new restaurant…even one operated by experienced management offering a tested-and-proved menu. It can take a long time to build up a following and sometimes the investment becomes too great. That's what's happened with Grand Italiani. The folks in and around that area just haven't discovered its wonderfulness yet. It's in serious jeopardy of closing in the next week or three.

If you live in Canoga Park, Chatsworth, Woodland Hills, Reseda, West Hills or anywhere around it, go there immediately and take all your hungry friends. You will all think, "Hey, we've got to keep this place open." Grand Italiani is open every day except Mondays, 11:30 AM to 8 PM. The address is 21730 Sherman Way in Canoga Park and you can preview its menu right here. Buon Appetito!

During the hearings yesterday, I suggested that some show like Colbert's, Kimmel's or SNL bring in comedian Jeff Ross to play EU ambassador Gordon Sondland in a sketch and let him roast everyone. And that's just what Jimmy Kimmel's show did.

I'm trying to figure out who's in more trouble this morning, Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani…but that's not what's giving me the headache. For those who are new to this blog, I should explain that when I'm too swamped with deadlines to blog or not feeling great, I sometimes declare a Mushroom Soup Day here. In this case, it's a little of each and what it means is that I may do little or no posting here the rest of the day. Note the "may."

So all the folks who said "there was no quid pro quo" in the Ukraine matter have to scramble for a new line, probably that, yeah, it was wrong but it doesn't meet the criteria of an impeachable offense. My feeling is that everyone saying it doesn't would be saying the opposite if it had been done by Barack Obama and especially by President Hillary. It's going to be fun the next few days watching D.J.T. tell us he barely knows Rudy…although given Trump's speeches lately and a few peeks at his notes, that may not be as absurd as it seems. We may yet see him say he's never met Don Jr.

I need to get whatever part of my brain I have functioning off this topic so I'm going to leave you with this thought: Colbert, Kimmel, SNL…they're probably all going to do sketches where someone plays EU ambassador Gordon Sondland testifying and burning everyone. They oughta bring in comedian Jeff Ross — he wouldn't even need make-up — and let him just roast everyone…

I'm starting to think launching this feature was a mistake on my part. Three-fourths of the news sites on the Internet have turned into little Trump Dumps, listing Yesterday's Bad News for Donald Trump and Yesterday's Outrage by Donald Trump. Doing it daily also forces me to spend time reading those sites and there are some days when I'd rather just forget he's there and he has so many people hating each other. The last few days I've had an intermittent headache and while he's not the cause of it, he sure ain't helping.

I couldn't follow all of the hearings today but my impression is that this is the game he and his defenders are playing. If it feels familiar, that may be with how much it resembles the way O.J. Simpson's lawyers made it possible for him to walk. They couldn't argue the facts of his case. They offered no alternate theory of who'd killed those two people if it wasn't Simpson. In fact, after the case was over and O.J. was acquitted, several of those lawyers and others who supported him said they would blow the case wide open with books revealing who really dunnit.

None of them did. Well, F. Lee Bailey eventually published one that was high on conjecture and devoid of facts…but the point is that no one had an even semi-credible argument that someone else killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. Simpson got away because they convinced the jury that there was "something wrong" with all the evidence. They couldn't really say what it was they made that jury generally distrust the whole prosecution and they set O.J. free because to those jurors, a frame-up felt highly likely. It was feelings over facts.

The way this parallels what we're seeing now — and I'm not claiming this is an exact match — is that Trump's defenders are attacking the process and the witnesses saying "something's wrong." No matter how many fact witnesses (and even the not-a-transcript that Trump released) corroborate what The Whistleblower said, they argue that he is evil, he is biased, he is a Never-Trumper, he has always had it in for Donald, etc., and so he's tainted everything that followed. (A "Never-Trumper," by the way, now seems to be anyone who has ever indicated that he or she thinks D.J.T. has ever done anything that wasn't brilliant and perfect and more successful than everyone else.)

In other words, if the process proves Trump committed an impeachable offense, the process cannot be trusted because it involves people who think Trump committed an impeachable offense.

Anyway, there are ten bazillion sites where you can read what was said in the hearings today and why it's so damning to anyone who cares about facts over feelings. I'm going to go lie down and I won't think about Trump except to come up with a new name for this feature without the word "Daily" in it.

Back in this post, we discussed the scathing review that a New York Times food critic gave to my old fave, Peter Luger's Steak House in Brooklyn. Having not been there in a long time, I could not agree nor could I disagree…though a number of the e-mails that I received about the place seemed to think I'd agreed wholeheartedly with the bad review. I also received some nice invites from friends who live back there and want to take me there the next time I'm in the area.

Here's a TV news spot that ran right after that review. I'm posting it just to show you what the place looks like. It was always a fun restaurant in which to eat, especially when someone else was paying…

The gentleman who sent me this message didn't ask that I omit his name but I think I will for now. If he writes and asks me to include it in this post, I'll go back and edit this. What he wrote was…

I appreciated your post on Chick-fil-A today. There are two outstanding problems with the company's announcement. The first is that the company has not admitted that their donations to anti-LGBTQ organizations may have caused irreparable damage to some members of that community. Not only should there be an apology, but also a good faith donation to some charities that help the at-risk LGBTQ community to help heal the damage they had a hand in causing, even if it was indirect.

Second, just because there won't be any more corporate donations to organizations like the Salvation Army and others that hold anti-LGBTQ beliefs, that doesn't mean that the owners of the family-held corporation won't continue to do so from their own pockets.

If they had really evolved in their thinking they'd have made such a point in the announcement. The lack of one proves that as you said, this is merely a ploy to help them increase business in areas hostile to their company. As the parent of an LGBTQ child, I'm far from letting them off the hook for anything. Thank you for your diligence.

I am 100% behind the idea that consenting adults should be totally free to love or marry — or even divorce if they so choose — but I think your expectations are unrealistic. We know very little about why the decision was made at Chick-fil-A HQ but it's probably not because everyone involved was struck by the same bolt of complete enlightenment at the same time. Maybe the decision to donate to anti-LGBTQ charities has increasingly been a conflicted one with some folks there.  Maybe some are concerned with it being bad for business, some firmly behind it, some wavering in some beliefs that Gay Marriage was a bad thing, etc.

Human beings don't usually leap from being firmly against something to firmly in favor of it.  Not unless they're Lindsey Graham, at least.

I have an acquaintance who not so long ago thought same-gender wedlock would trigger the end of civilization as we then knew it. He and I had some (shall we say?) "interesting" debates on the topic but what has really moved him away from that conviction is that it has now been 4.5 years since the Supreme Court made its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. He can't draw any line between that decision and any of 93 things that trouble him about the world today.

He has not evolved to the point of baking gay wedding cakes and atoning for past sins.  His attitude is now more like "I still think it's wrong for them to marry but I'm not so sure the government should be making laws about it."  So he has more or less absented himself from that battle.  If you knew this guy, you would consider that a tremendous "win" for your point-o'-view and would not expect more right away.

Some controversies end that way, at least on a personal basis.  As I understand it, when you hear that some big company has decided to stop advertising on (and therefore supporting) a Tucker Carlson or a Lawrence O'Donnell, it is not that the outfit feels the need to renounce something those gents say.  It's that they just want out of the battle.  I once heard someone say on some show of one such decision, "It was the compromise to stop the fights over outside political matters in the Board of Directors meetings."  Everyone there feels the same way they always did except that a majority no longer thinks it's good for the corporation to wade into that particular fray.  Someone said, "Let's stop trying to change the world and just sell personal grooming aids!"

That may be the case with Chick-fil-A.  They decided to just sell chicken sandwiches, maybe due to increased competition from Popeye's.  It's why your second point is, to me, not something we can or should do anything about.  Individuals are free to donate to causes that you and/or I find abhorrent.  My buying power in the last few days has benefited (among others) Amazon, CVS, Spectrum Cable, TicketMaster, Grubhub, Shell Oil, a nearby car wash, a couple of restaurants, some book publishers and ten or twelve others.

Someone who draws a paycheck, and perhaps a big one from at least one of those firms has probably donated a smidgen of that paycheck to some cause I think is doing the devil's work like opposing minority rights, trying to buy Mr. Trump a second term or, of course, the manufacture of cole slaw.  They're free to do that.  If I hear about it, I'm free to modify my purchasing if I like.  I'm not sure I like or can even track that kind of thing and there's something wrong with boycotting a whole company because one or two folks who work there…

Oh, wait. This is absolutely true: As I was writing the above, I got a text from my associate John that he was on his way over.  I texted him back, "Pick up Pollo Loco on your way."  He'll be here any minute now with our usual order of El Pollo Loco chicken.  Just because I'm writing this piece, I hit Google and entered "pollo loco political donations." And what I found was the perfect example to illustrate what I was just writing about.

It's this statement, which apparently used to be on the company website but which has scrolled away with the passage of time.  It's about Proposition 8, the 2008 movement in California that for a time barred gays from marrying.  I'll quote a little of it here…

Recent TV newscasts or newspaper articles about the Proposition 8 controversy caused many people to incorrectly believe that our company contributed to the campaign to pass Proposition 8. That is NOT the case. NO donations in support of, or against, Proposition 8 were made by El Pollo Loco or on behalf of our franchise organizations. Our inclusion in news coverage is due to the fact that the name of a single individual who is associated with an El Pollo Loco franchise appears in a published list of contributors.

We are proud to be an organization that respects and values the different perspectives of our employees and our guests and our franchise owners. We believe in equal rights and as well as the rights for people to express their opinions. We believe that our company is made stronger because of our differences and we reinforce our beliefs through our training programs. Some of our guests who mistakenly drew the conclusion that El Pollo Loco contributed to the passage of Prop 8 wrote to tell us they would no longer eat at El Pollo Loco restaurants. We invite you to read the letter that one of our executives sent to those guests.

You can read for yourself that letter from a Senior Vice-President.  She had every reason to not support Proposition 8 since she was living with a "partner" (that's what they called them then) of the same gender. A little more Googling will show you a history of El Pollo Loco helping out disaster victims and folks who in everyday life are in need of food.

That's not why I frequently patronize their business. I didn't even know about it until just now. All I knew was that they have great chicken…which, when you come right down to it, is reason enough.