Category Archives: To Be Filed

Two very smart dogs…

Jason Czeskleba wrote me to ask…

A couple of the Joan Rivers obituaries I've read have made note of the fact that she did not appear on the Tonight Show for some 28 years, after her rift with Johnny Carson. They have said that Carson banned her from the show, and that Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien continued the ban to respect Carson's wishes. That latter assertion doesn't seem plausible to me, that Leno would refrain from booking a guest because simply Johnny was angry at her. Since I know you know several people who worked on Leno's show, I'm wondering if you know whether there's any truth to that claim, and if not, what is the real reason Leno never booked her on his show?

As I understand it, there were several reasons, one being that Jay seems to have not thought she was all that funny…and reportedly, that feeling was mutual.

This whole thing about someone being "banned" is kind of a silly way to look at the booking process on a show like that. I would imagine the talent coordinators could make up a list of several thousand people who wanted to be on The Tonight Show and never got on, including a lot of folks who were regulars with Carson. Was Milton Berle "banned" because he never appeared with Leno? (I'm told he had his agents calling constantly…)

For the cartoon show I voice-direct, I am pitched hundreds of actors for work on the series — submitted by their agents or themselves. Simple math tells you that if there are four openings and 300 submissions, most folks are going to go unhired. After two or three submissions without employment, one or two have gone around claiming that I "banned" them from my show. To me, that's a way of playing the Victim Card, trying to assert that you lost work because of some conspiracy against you personally. I seem to have been banned from winning the California State Lottery.

In Jay's case, there were probably other reasons to not have her on. They'd pretty much have to have talked about why he was host of The Tonight Show and she wasn't — a topic which could have been awkward and too "inside." I don't think Jay would have wanted to say, "Thank you for making some bad career decisions which opened doors for me."

She probably would have engaged in some passive/aggressive Carson-bashing, and some might have interpreted the booking as Jay flipping the bird to Johnny, which he surely did not want to do. I seem to recall Howard Stern, back when he was friendly with Leno, urging Jay to book her as a big F.U. to Carson. If I were Jay, I don't think I would have wanted to open that can of nightcrawlers.

Speaking of which…

Verne Gay over on Newsday recently set out to decide who was in the right in the Johnny Carson-Joan Rivers feud…and he did this without being in a position to know a lot about what was going on between them. Clearly, this was both a business and a personal spat.

Joan was losing ratings and favor as Johnny's regular guest host and would probably not have stayed there for very long. This is something that happens all the time in television. Joan was hired to guest host not forever but for as long as they felt she was doing the job…and I've never heard anyone say she had a promise — verbal or on paper — that she would succeed Johnny. At that point, I don't think Johnny wanted NBC to even be thinking about that…and let's remember: That job did not come open for another six years. And if Johnny was even thinking about who'd succeed him, he was likely thinking Letterman.

I've heard people who were around Johnny cite a number of reasons he was mad at her: He was already unhappy with how she was doing his show. She didn't call to tell him about the new show until it was common knowledge. She tried to hire a lot of his key people away to work on her show. After her show debuted, the set and camerawork looked way too much like his show. She was giving too many interviews trying to portray Johnny as the Bad Guy who was afraid of her and had been rude to her. He felt she was trying to bait him into a big public feud that might attract viewers to her show. And so on.

This "feud" always struck me as pretty one-sided, meaning Joan ran around crying that she was the injured party. She was injured the way anyone involved in any TV show is injured when The Folks Upstairs decide they can put someone or something better in your slot. And she wasn't even injured that much because once she realized she wasn't going to guest host for Johnny indefinitely and then get his job, she made a very lucrative deal with Fox.

I don't think there was anything wrong or unusual about Joan taking that offer. I don't think there was anything wrong or unusual about Carson and/or NBC beginning to talk about replacing her as guest host. And once they found out she'd be competing, I don't think there was anything wrong with NBC yanking her immediately off The Tonight Show, lest she use it to promote her new venture. (If she'd had her way, she would have been hosting The Tonight Show the same week it was announced that she would soon be competing with it.)

As for the personal stuff — why Johnny never spoke to her again, why he allegedly hung up on her — I suspect that was about…personal stuff. Things between them that we don't know about.

Mr. Carson could be a very cold bastard and I gather he attributed his long, long run on TV to sometimes being one. He was pretty ruthless with a lot of people who were at times probably close to him, perhaps closer than Joan Rivers ever was. Not all of those stories make total sense to an outsider, either.

I don't think we'll ever know more than we know now. And what we know now is that she got an offer, she took it and Johnny was pissed about some aspect of that.

• Bernadette Peters wore a purple dress to Joan Rivers' funeral. She looked like a Q-Tip dipped in Manischewitz! Oh, oh! Grow up!

• If God had wanted me to finish this script, he wouldn't have invented Sudoku.

The musical Bye Bye Birdie debuted on Broadway on April 14, 1960. It was a hit but not a huge one, lasting 607 performances and closing October 7, 1961. It originally starred Dick Van Dyke but he'd left well before the last performance to do The Dick Van Dyke Show on CBS. In fact, The Dick Van Dyke Show debuted on October 4, 1961.

Others in the cast whose names you might know include Paul Lynde, Chita Rivera, Dick Gautier (as the Elvis clone) and Charles Nelson Reilly. Mr. Reilly had an interesting run on the show. He was not in the original cast but was hired soon after to play one small role and, more importantly, to understudy Van Dyke and Lynde. Paul Lynde was then a regular on The Perry Como Show so the night that show was on each week, Reilly played Lynde's part in Bye Bye Birdie and eventually took it over as a full-time gig.

I, of course, never saw the original show but I get the feeling it was a lot of great performances and great songs and dances carrying a rather weak story. When the movie was made, its producers didn't hesitate to jettison most of that weak story for a slightly stronger and sillier one. You'll notice in the clip below, Mr. Van Dyke sings "Put on a Happy Face" to a sad teenage Conrad Birdie fan, a show-stopping number that occurred on stage in the first act. In the movie, he sang it to his girl friend (the Chita Rivera role, played in the film by Janet Leigh) late in the proceedings. Other songs were changed or omitted for the movie and a new title song was added.

The video presents two numbers performed on separate episodes of The Ed Sullivan Show. The first is from June 12, 1960, two months after the show opened. Sullivan always claimed to have been embarrassed when he went to see the show and discovered there was a song in it about him with Paul Lynde declaring, "I love you, Ed." Apparently, Ed wasn't too embarrassed to put that number on his national TV program and later to play himself in the movie.

The other number — "Put on a Happy Face" — is from November 13, 1960. It's probably a safe assumption that they did the first number on the Sullivan show because Ed insisted on it and they did the second because business was falling off and to remind the ticket-buying public that they'd just moved from the Martin Beck Theater on W. 45th St. to the 54th Street Theater located Guess Where.

At the end of the second, Ed plugs Dick's Thanksgiving special, which I'm assuming is No Place Like Home, a show with Carol Burnett, Rosemary Clooney and Jose Ferrer which ran November 23, 1960. Mr. Van Dyke has been under contract to CBS for some time but they'd never found quite the place to put him. That would change shortly…

Vauhini Vara tells us why CVS Pharmacies stopped selling cigarettes and details a bit of the history of that now-ubiquitous chain. If nothing else, this piece will tell you what "CVS" stands for, which I hadn't known 'til I read this piece.

Personally, I think all the reasons CVS had for dumping cigarettes would apply if they also got rid of the homeopathic "medicines" they sell. There's a lot of medical advice on the CVS website and if you look up homeopathy there, you'll find an awful lot of evidence presented that the stuff doesn't work…but they still sell it.

I actually have a great suggestion for the CVS people on how to improve their business…

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time on the phone waiting on hold to talk to people who might be able to solve problems I have. About half that time was spent with Time-Warner's Tier 3 Tech Support where no one can solve my ongoing e-mail problems and now no one can solve a problem I'm having with my phones. The rest was spent waiting to talk to someone at my insurance company.

Briefly: I take this medicine which costs about $350 a month. That's without insurance. Since I have insurance, it costs me $25, which means it probably costs the company that makes it about two bucks for a month's supply. The CVS website told me the prescription was ready for renewal so I renewed it online, then later walked over to pick it up.

They told me it wasn't ready and wouldn't be because my insurance had rejected the claim. In my presence, the CVS Pharmacist phoned this insurance company to find out why…and I had a slight satisfaction that they kept her waiting on hold as long as I'm kept waiting on hold when I call CVS to speak to someone like her. She was finally told that I need a Prior Authorization for the prescription.

(I've never quite understood the premise of the Prior Authorization. My doctor says I need to take a certain medication. I go to the pharmacy and they check with the insurance company and they tell the pharmacy and then the pharmacy tells me I need a Prior Authorization so I go back to my doctor and he fills out a different form that says I need to take that medication and he faxes it in and then eventually, I get the same medication he wanted me to have in the first place and there's got to be an easier way to do that…easier for everyone.)

Anyway, in this case, I already had a Prior Authorization. I got it last month in order to get my August supply of this drug. The Pharmacist said I needed another, different Prior Authorization and gave me the number to call the insurance company to find out more.

It took me 45 minutes last night to connect with someone at my insurance company…and what she told me was that I didn't need any new Prior Authorization. The problem was that CVS had put through my automatic refill request a day early. For some reason, instead of responding that the request was about 12 hours premature, the insurance firm's computer kicked back a rejection and some nonsense about a new Prior Authorization.

So I waited until after Midnight, put through an online refill request, then went over to the pharmacy at 1:30 AM and got my pills for $25.

I don't think I've ever gotten this particular medicine in one trip to the pharmacy. I go there thinking to myself, "Well, let's see what the reason is this month that I'm going to have to make a bunch of phone calls and at least one more trip here." I'm about ready to switch to the insurance company's online mail order service on the grounds that I'm going to have to call them anyway each month about this.

This will cost CVS a lot of business…and not just because they'll lose whatever profit they make selling me my medication. They'll also lose the revenue from everything else I buy while I'm there. As in most drugstores, the pharmacy counter is in the back of the store and I can't seem to make it from the back to the front without spending at least forty bucks.

Before Obamacare was instituted, its opponents predicted massive rate hikes. Well, the latest study from the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed sixteen major U.S. cities and found otherwise.

Rates used to go up 10% or more each year. In the sixteen cities, there was one (Nashville) with an 8.7% increase, two more in the 6% range and six more at 3% or below. The rest went down a little or in a few cases, a lot. The average was a drop of 0.8%. In many cases, that's people paying less for better insurance.

No, it's not better everywhere and I'm sure the plan's foes will find examples to point to. But I think we see the reason why so many Republican candidates are dialing back on their vows to repeal every word of the Affordable Care Act. In Colorado, there's a tight race between Democratic incumbent senator Mark Udall and his Republican opponent, congressguy Cory Gardner. Gardner is a staunch "get rid of Obamacare" guy…and now the Kaiser survey is saying that insurance premimums are down 15.6% in Denver. How's that going to play out?

Today is Sergio's birthday. Happy Birthday, Sergio. I was thinking of getting you this as a gift.

It's a rare copy of our favorite book, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. This, the most sought-after printing of the classic work was published in 1880 with illustrations by Ricardo Balaca and magnificent hand binding in the finest leather. The opening bid on it is $4,800. It might go even higher than that but I figured nothing is too good for my best (male) friend. So I decided to buy it for you at any price…

…but then I changed my mind. I figured you'd probably just draw tiny cartoons in the margins.

I have friends who are bothered by the growing (and, even they admit, irreversible) acceptance of Gay Marriage. I suggest that they read some of the courtroom arguments that have been made to try and stop it…and the judicial decisions that have overturned laws against it. The arguments against it have been surprisingly feeble. When California's Proposition 8 was being argued before the court that ultimately ruled against it, the lawyer defending 8 did such a bad job, I'm surprised he didn't get accused of throwing the case.

This week, the 7th circuit struck down gay marriage bans in Indiana and Wisconsin. The three judge panel was unanimous and the opinion was written by Judge Richard Posner. I happen to have read a few of Judge Posner's past opinions and many articles by him and I haven't been impressed. I don't know from all the legal justifications for this or that but when he offered opinions based on sheer logic, I usually thought his logic was faulty…even when it got him to the conclusion that I favored.

Judge Posner was expected to rule against Same-Sex Wedlock. In oral arguments he largely devastated the attorney defending the anti-gay legislation. Slate put some excerpts from this debate online. If you listen to only one, listen to the one entitled "Brief It." The first voice you hear is Posner's.

And then you might want to read his opinion. It's a pretty forceful argument for allowing Gay Marriage. I'd be curious to see what kind of rebuttal someone could possibly make to it.

How long would they keep me on hold if they didn't know my time was valuable?

"All customer service agents are busy. Please hold for the next available agent."

Monet Sabel performs one of Mr. Sondheim's less well-known tunes with the Charlie Rosen Big Band…

• NBC announces new format for Meet the Press: No host…just John McCain each week announcing a new country we have to bomb.

Excerpts from a message I received about Joan Rivers…

I've always wondered how different her career might've been had she turned down Fox's offer for her own talk show in the 80s, had she stayed Johnny Carson's permanent guest host. Might Johnny have retired earlier and Joan would've eventually become the star of The Tonight Show?

My understanding is that the reason Joan grabbed the offer from Fox was that she'd come to realize she didn't have much of a future on The Tonight Show. Ms. Rivers had lost Johnny's seal of approval. Ratings on the nights she filled in for him were down but someone on her behalf was leaking cherry-picked numbers to the press that made it sound like she had more viewers than Johnny. (A rumor made the rounds that execs at Fox had been fooled by those releases and that's why they made their offer to her. I don't think I believe that.)

Johnny, I heard, was not happy with how Joan was doing his show, getting some guests upset with things she said or asked, and refusing to limit the amount of time she spent plugging her other enterprises. Given that and descending ratings, I don't think she was destined to remain as guest host for long. And I can't imagine that getting the permanent job — or impacting when Johnny decided to pack it in — were at all in the cards.

I should probably skip this one but if I do, followers of this site will infer all sorts of reasons I don't write about the passing of Joan Rivers. If she'd had a different style of humor, I probably wouldn't write anything about her because it will come off negative…but Ms. Rivers never spared anyone's feelings.

Groping for nice things to say about her, I'll say that, first of all, no one ever worked harder. She started in stand-up at a time when a woman had to hustle and fight to get on stage and to overcome all manner of presumptions that a female just shouldn't be doing that. So good for her for getting past all that crap to become a successful, in-demand performer. She also had to get past the belief that if a woman did for some reason insist on doing comedy, there was really only one appropriate topic for her. Like Phyllis Diller and Totie Fields, she had to get on stage and insult her own appearance and sexuality. And get past that, she did.

I will also say that many people loved her and respected her and are saddened by her passing. In fact, many people I respect a lot are saddened and I don't discount that. The fact that I stopped finding her funny about half-past her time in Johnny Carson's guest chair doesn't mean she didn't succeed admirably in her occupation.

As she got older and angrier, it made me more and more uncomfortable to see her on television. I just wrote three more paragraphs explaining why and thought, "No, this is not the time for that." So I deleted it all, including the part where I called her the Westboro Baptist Church of comedy. I'll just close by saying that I followed her career as long as I could and I admire how long it lasted and what she went through to get there. She was a very important and accomplished performer and she was really, really good at being Joan Rivers and I hope that when I go, no one writes an obit about me with as many mixed feelings as this one.