The Secret of Their Success…

Welcome to the official web site for the new book, ‘The Secret of Their Success: Interviews with Legends & Luminaries,’ by Burt Prelutsky. If you want to know more about Burt, click here.

The book will be in stores in early January. On this blog are excerpts of the book. Just  click a category to the left and you’ll see many of the interviews.  Dates on the calendar in bold are also interview excerpts based on the celebrity’s birthday.

Here’s a mockup of the cover. Be sure to check back often for updates on book signings and other events related to the book.

Marty Allen

TV Personality, Comedian

 

An old man walks into a brothel and says, ‘Madam, I want a woman.’ The Madam looks shocked and says “Mister, how old are you?” “One hundred and two,” says the man. “I think you’ve had it,” says the Madam. “Really? Well, who do I pay?”

It’s these kinds of jokes Allen has been telling since the ’50s. You might remember him. His face is hard to forget – goofy-eyed, wild hair. He’s that comedian with the signature opening line, “Hello Dere.” You’ve seen him in hundreds of TV shows, tons of talk and game shows. He’s performed before audiences from Vegas to Atlantic City and appeared in numerous movies. He and his former partner, Steve Rossi that made up the team Allen & Rossi even opened for the Beatles when they made their U.S. debut.

Now say “Hello dere” to Marty Allen.

Q. When did you get bit by the show biz bug?

A. I always had this bug for show business, for getting laughs. On hayrides, while the other kids necked, I was the one who made jokes.

My dad owned a restaurant and bar in Pittsburgh, but that wasn’t something that appealed to me. When I was in high school, I thought maybe I’d want to be a reporter. But that didn’t last too long. By the time I got out of the Air Force, I knew I wanted to be a comedian.

Q. Did your parents encourage this peculiar ambition?

A. My folks thought it was okay, so long as it was something I really wanted to do and would stick at.

Like most comics in those days, I started out in dives, but I got lucky pretty fast. Sarah Vaughn hired me to open for her, and then her husband recommended me to Nat King Cole.

Q. How did you go from being a moderately successful single to being half of a very successful team of Allen and Rossi for 44 years?

A. Steve Rossi was working as a production singer at the Sands, in Las Vegas. And he happened to mention to Nat Cole that he was getting sick of it. Cole suggested he get in touch with me. At the time, I was performing back east with Sarah. Anyway, Steve called me and I said I’d be happy to meet with him. He flew out, we met and we just hit it off from the start.

Q. How long did it take for the new act to click?

A. We started out in small clubs, but pretty soon we were playing the Copa with Cole. But what really put us over the top came about strictly by accident. One night, in Philadelphia, in the middle of the act, I just blacked out. I couldn’t remember my next line. So, with this goofy expression on my face, I looked at Steve and said, “Hello Dere.” I didn’t think much about it. I was just happy that it had bought me a few seconds, so I could re-group and go on with the act.

Q. At what point did you realize you were on to something big?

A. When the show ended, people from the audience kept coming up to me and saying, “Hello Dere.” Right then I realized we had gold. I mean, Joe Penner had “Do you want to buy a duck?” and Lou Costello had “I’m a baaaad boy,” but most comics go through their entire careers trying to find a signature line, and I had mine just fall into my lap.

Q. Aside from the line, why do you think you made it in a field that has seen so many others fail?

A. I think a lot of comics try to get by with just gags. The ones who last are the ones who create distinct, memorable, personalities.

Q. How would you describe yours?

A. I’m ahead of the game to begin with because I’m bushy-haired and wild-eyed, with the kind of face that’s hard to forget. But audiences can tell that I really like people, and I believe they respond to that. Plus, I always work hard. No matter what the size of the audience, I’ve never dogged it. Every night is like a new experience for me because of the people out there.

Q. When I was a kid watching the Ed Sullivan Show, I had the impression that Allen and Rossi were on even more often than Señor Wences or Johnny Puelo and the HarmoniCats.

A. We must have done Sullivan about 35 or 40 times. Every time was an event. There was a real exhilaration to just being there. We were even on with the Beatles. There were 5,000 screaming kids in the audience looking at me, with my hair, thinking I must be Ringo’s mother!

Q. Some years ago, you and Rossi split up. What caused the rift?

A. Actually, it was an amicable parting of the ways. Some of it had to do with the state of the business. TV variety shows were dying off and a lot of the clubs were closing. But, mainly, it was my idea because I wanted to diversify. I wanted to do more straight acting. I did get some dramatic roles, most notably on “The Big Valley,” with Barbara Stanwyck. For that, I even cut my hair.

 

Read more in the book, available at your local Barnes or on Amazon….

LINDA EVANS

 

When looked at objectively, it often seems that the price of success comes terribly dear. For many folks, success resembles hamsters on a treadmill. They go around in circles, faster and faster, and wind up where they began. Great exercise, I grant you, but a lousy way to travel. People fall off the treadmill occasionally. Sometimes they’re pushed. Only rarely do they elect to step off voluntarily.

 

One who has, and who’s even managed to land on her feet, is Linda Evans. Evans is a Golden-Globe winning actress who is best known for her appearance as Krystle Carrington on the TV show, “Dynasty.” But as you’ll find, she’s a lot more dimensional than Krystle could ever be.

Q. Did you grow up wanting to be an actress?

A. All I wanted was to grow up to be a traditional wife and mother. A career was never, ever, an option, as far as I was concerned. Although when I was four or five, my mom did take me out to test for a Bob Hope movie. Thank god I didn’t get the part. I might have wound up being one of those awful Shirley Temple clones.

By the time I was in junior high, I was so shy I wouldn’t even stand up and give a book report. They forced me to take drama in high school, hoping that would help me deal with my problem.

Q. Why do you think you were so shy?

A. My mother and father were both alcoholics. They had been professional ballroom dancers, but once they started having kids, she retired and he became a house painter. He was very bitter, and it was not a happy marriage. When you grow up in a home like that, you feel inadequate. No matter how successful you may become, you have to heal that feeling of unworthiness inside yourself or you just go on doubting your own value.

Q. Is that why so many people who have had their wildest dreams come true can’t ever just walk away?

A. Absolutely. They never believe they’re any good. They think they’re going to be caught in the act and shown up to be frauds. They keep trying to prove they deserve the acclaim they really don’t believe they’re entitled to. People such as Marilyn Monroe and even Elvis Presley never did get over that terrible feeling of inadequacy.

Q. How did you make the giant leap from shyness to show biz?

A. A girl friend of mine, an actress named Carole Wells, was going out to try for a commercial. She asked me to come along to keep her company. When the director saw me, he gave me the part.

Q. And you actually accepted?

A. Well, we needed the money because my father had just died. But when I got the news, my reaction was not the normal person’s “Wow!” It was more like “Oh, my god! What do I do now?”

Q. Did you find you enjoyed the work?

A. It was actually pretty easy. After I’d done a few commercials, my agent got me my first real acting job on the TV series, “Bachelor Father,” with John Forsythe. The next time I saw him was about 20 years later, on the set of “Dynasty.” His first words to me were, “My, how you’ve grown!”

Q. Did you feel that your career came easily to you?

A. Absolutely. When I got out of high school, MGM put me under contract. Although they offered classes in diction and acting, I never bothered. It wasn’t until I was in my early 30’s that I decided I should study my craft. And even then, I signed up with Lee Strasberg mainly because my friend Valerie Perrine wanted to go, and she talked me into it.

Ed Asner

Actor, TV Personality

Politics aside, he’s an actor through and through. Best known as ‘Lou Grant’, Mary’s grouchy boss on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Asner is more complicated a man than Grant was. After the end of Mary Tyler Moore, he soon had his own series aptly titled ‘Lou Grant’. He recently completed a stint on short-lived TV show, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and continues to appear in movies.

 Along the way he managed to accumulate a slew of Emmys, and even found the time to serve as the president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, a position once held by none other than his political foe, Ronald Reagan.

Everyone who knows Asner will tell you he is known as the sort of person who stands up for his principles even if it costs him potential employment. Even those who disagree with his politics have to give him credit for being a stand-up guy.

Q. What was your earliest ambition?

A. As a kid, I fantasized about archaeology and deep sea diving. I still have those interests. But I always loved being on stage, whether it was acting in plays at Sunday school or singing at Friday night services. I think my parents hoped I’d be a doctor or a lawyer. But I went off to the University of Chicago, mainly to get away from home and Kansas City, and that’s when I became totally absorbed in acting. A few times, my middle brother tried to talk me into coming back and taking over my dad’s junk business. If I’d gone into any business, it would have been that one. But, business just wasn’t for me.

Q. Did you really believe you could carve out an acting career?

A. Frankly, no. In the beginning, I thought I was too ugly, or at least too unappealing, to be successful. And as many Jews as there were in Hollywood, I didn’t really think this Jew was what they were looking for.

While in Chicago, though, I appeared in my first play, “Murder in the Cathedral,” and it entrapped me. I knew there was nothing else I wanted to do with my life. I finally had to drop out of school, though, when my family found out I was having an affair with a shiksa and cut off my allowance.

Q. What did you do next?

A. I did what I could. I sold encyclopedias; worked in a Gary, Indiana, steel mill; sold stuff over the telephone; drove a cab; and got a job at the Ford plant, as a metal finisher. And, whenever I could, I acted. In those days, it was always for free.

It was after I served two years in the signal corps and came back to Chicago that I started doing pretty well as an actor. I decided to move to New York then, to see how well this little fish could do in the big pond.

Q. And how well was that?

A. I dragged along, mostly off-Broadway, waiting for my big break. When I reached Broadway, it was in “Face of a Hero,” which turned out to be a terrible flop. That took a lot of the magic out of New York Theater for me.

Q. How did you get to Hollywood?

A. I had started to do some TV work out of New York, mainly on “Naked City” and “Route 66,” in the early 60’s. Finally I got hired to do a “Naked City” they were shooting in L.A. I stuck around an extra week, meeting people and getting an agent. I still remember calling my wife and telling her that I’d decided to try my luck in Hollywood, and she said, “Oh, shit.”

But I earned more money in the last four months of 1961 than I’d made in any previous year. And we wound up liking it because of the nature all around us, and we got to do a lot of bird-watching.

Q. How did you get the role of Lou Grant on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show”?

A. I went in and did a reading. It was okay, but it was too stiff. They asked me to come back the following week and try it again, but to make it wilder, wiggier. I told them that I didn’t want to come back, but that I’d try it again on the spot. That second reading got me the part. I guess they admired my chutzpah. Also they saw that I was quite willing to make an ass of myself, which is always a plus in an actor.

Q. Did you sense the series would be a huge hit?

A. No. I just knew that it was the best script I’d read and the best character I’d played since coming to Hollywood, eight or nine years earlier.

Q. Looking back, how do you feel about that show?

A. Basically, it was seven years on the Yellow Brick Road. It doesn’t get a lot better than that. Of course there were minor annoyances. In the early years, the guys on the show all felt we weren’t getting as much to do as the ladies. But it all balanced out in the long run.

Q. After seven years as a second banana, you got your own series, “Lou Grant.” Was it a dream come true?

A. No, it was more like a nightmare come true. For one thing, we wanted to have Jim Brooks and Allan Burns, who’d produced “Mary,” produce “Lou.” Then they brought in Gene Reynolds from “M*A*S*H” to be co-executive producer. The problem was that none of them had ever produced an hour show before, and there’s a big difference between producing a three-camera comedy and one-camera drama. There was a hell of a lot of learning by trial and error for the first two years.

In addition, because I was still playing Lou Grant, our old fans would tune in expecting a comedy – and they’d be disappointed to find we were doing a dramatic series loaded with controversial issues. As a result, our ratings the first year were horrible. The only reason they didn’t yank us off the air was because CBS was caught with its pants down and didn’t have anything to replace us with. It was like being in a tunnel with no light at the end.

Q. Were you hoping the network would pull the plug?

A. No. I felt my prestige was on the line, and cancellation would have been a terrible blow to my ego.

 

Read more in the book, available at your local Barnes or on Amazon….

DOMINICK DUNNE

 

If you could only be one or the other, would you rather be a success when you’re young or when you’re old?

 

As much fun as there is in being a 25-year-old movie star, professional athlete or rock musician, it seems somewhat sad to spend the last 50 or 60 years of your life as a has-been, having people asking if you didn’t used to be someone. Life is a continual reinvention process, not a place to rest on your laurels.

 

Modern life seems to place more emphasis on the young achieving greatness than the old. But when you think about it, the idea of becoming successful at about the time you are entering retirement age is far more interesting. And who better to confirm this with than Dominick Dunne, who came into his own in his 60s, a marathoner leaving all the sprinters in his dust.

 

Many will recognize Dunne as the distinguished gentleman and Vanity Fair reporter who sat  thru the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the Phil Spector trial. But there’s so much more to this never-say-die man.

Q. What did you want to be when you grew up?

A. Early on in my life, before puberty even, I knew I wanted a life with glamour and fame and money, although I didn’t have a clue how I was going to get there. My first career, in films and television, took me in that direction. My second career, in books and magazines, got me there. But my interpretation of glamour and fame and money is very different now.

Q. What can you tell me about your parents?

A. My father was a graduate of Harvard Medical School. He was a well-known heart surgeon. Mother was the daughter of a potato-famine Irish immigrant who became rich in the grocery business.

Q. Did either of them encourage you in your dreams?

A. No.

Q. What is the best and the worst advice you ever received?

A. The best advice came from Sanford Meisner, in 1949, when I was studying acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, in New York. He said, “Don’t be an actor, Dominick. That is not what you’re supposed to do. Go behind the cameras.”

The worst advice, which I chose to ignore, came from several New York friends: “Don’t move to Hollywood, for God’s sake. You’ll hate it.”

Q. Have you ever offered advice so good you’d like to share?

A. Yes, in a speech I gave to several hundred as yet unpublished writers at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, I said, “Write every day. Keep a journal of your life. Use it as a warm-up exercise for the book you are writing, in the way that a pianist practices scales every day.”

Q. How big a motivator has money been in your life?

A. Although I was down and out and broke when I started to write at age 50, money was never really the motivator for me, despite having subsequently discovered the pleasures of affluence. I knew there was something in my life that I was meant to do. Discovering what that something was has been my motivator.

Q. Is there anybody you envy?

A. I don’t think I envy anyone. I hate envy.

HARLAND BRAUN

 

 If you believe the famous attorney, Alan Dershowitz, when he contends that well over 90% of criminal defendants in this country are guilty as accused, who would want to make a career out of trying to spring them? I wondered that exact same thing when I visited Harland Braun in his Century City office for the interview. Braun is a well-known criminal defense attorney in California.

 

He’s represented some of the famous and many of the infamous including Robert Blake, Steven Segal, Dennis Rodman, and one of the policemen in the Rodney King beating case to name a few. What’s more, Braun is known not only for representing his clients expertly, but in many cases getting them off.

Q. What did you start out wanting to be?

A. I wanted to be a doctor when I was young. Maybe that was because my mother was a nurse. My dad was in the cattle hide business, and that didn’t appeal to me at all.

Q. How did you happen to veer off the medical track?

A. I became very involved in the California Young Democrats. And at that time, everyone in the group seemed to be going to law school. It was easier than going to Vietnam.

Q. Did you ever consider making a career out of politics, the way your democratic friends like Waxman and Berman did?

A. No. I think you have to lie and kiss ass if you want to be successful in politics, and that didn’t appeal to me.

Q. Did you know from the start that you wanted to be a defense attorney?

A. Not at all. Actually, I joined the D.A.’s office, and prosecuted cases for five years. But, I didn’t care for the bureaucracy and the pay was pretty bad. So, I then went into civil law, but that was boring. It was 1973 before I finally started to practice criminal law.

Q. You are one of the most successful attorneys in L.A. and are therefore offered more cases than you can possibly handle. How do you determine which of the rascals you’ll defend and which you won’t?

A. In almost every case I take on, there’s an important issue at stake.

JOHN CATOIR

Being Jewish, I had never even met a Catholic priest until I won a Christopher Award for my very first TV movie script, “Aunt Mary.” Over the next few years, I won twice more in the same category for “Homeward Bound” and “A Winner Never Quits.”

 

Each time I collected my award, bearing the Christopher’s credo, “Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,” I grew increasingly impressed with the man who presented it to me – Father John Catoir. The majority of us, after all, have jobs, careers and professions. Precious few have callings.

 

When us working stiffs  refer to our boss as the guy upstairs, we only mean that he has an office on the floor above us. When my friend John Catoir says it, he really means The Guy Upstairs.

Q. Did you always want to be a priest? Did some influence in your past that made you gravitate towards the priesthood?

A. When I was growing up in Queens, New York, during World War II, I wanted to be a pilot. We were young kids in grammar school, admiring at a distance the soldiers who returned with their medals and fancy uniforms. None of us had a clue about the horrible reality of war. In those days, the idea of becoming a priest was the furthest thing from my mind.

 

My parents supplied me with an abundance of love which has served me well throughout my life. Their love enabled me to grow in self-respect, which of course is the foundation of my own capacity to love.

 

My dad was a good man and a colorful extrovert who somehow ended up as an accountant with Metropolitan Life. He never complained, though. My mother was a beautiful, graceful woman who loved her family very much. She stayed out of the work force to raise her two children. I was nine years older than my sister Cathy. Both my parents were average church-goers, but not especially religious. There was never any pressure put on me to become a priest. Quite the contrary. I think there was a good bit of unspoken hope that I would do well one day and provide for them in their old age.

Q. At what point did you hear the call?

A. It wasn’t until I had finished college and was drafted into the Army that I began to feel a strong desire to become a priest. This feeling came and went during high school, but I was too interested in the young ladies to take it seriously. As far as I was concerned, people like me got married.

 

In college, the possibility of a career in television began to fascinate me. While attending Fordham University School of Business, I became an announcer on the college radio station. Then I got a job as a page at NBC with the hope of launching my show business career. I worked there for three years. It was the golden age of live TV and I was in charge of pages on the eighth floor where all the major shows originated. We took care of all the dressing room keys. Needless to say, we met the top stars of the era, and I felt as important as any pimply-faced kid could feel in those days.

 

However, it was the time of the Korean War and, after graduation, I was drafted. The Army shaved off my hair, and put me through basic training. I emerged a Military Policeman at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, doing guard duty in the hot sun, wondering every day what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had become disenchanted with show business for a variety of reasons. I had seen enough to know that the almighty dollar was God for too many in that industry. I really wasn’t happy with the idea of giving my life over to superiors who said: If it makes a profit, do it!

And so, what was I to do with the rest of my life? I was praying for an answer, going to mass every day, and through a series of events too complicated to explain here, I ended up as a chaplain’s assistant.

 

I loved every minute of my work with Chaplain George Phillips. He was a quiet gentlemanly priest who taught me a lot. Slowly it began to dawn on me that since I was actually living the life of a celibate in the Army, maybe it was possible to live it as a priest. Gradually the life of being a priest overwhelmed me, and I made my decision. But I didn’t announce it to anyone, though, until after I was discharged. My parents were shocked, but there was no opposition. They simply wanted what was best for me.

Q. Any regrets?

A. I have never regretted my decision to be a priest. Not once.

SID CAESAR

 

Looking back on the 50’s in America, one sees a cultural Sahara filled with Eisenhower and Nixon, poodle skirts, tail fins and Troy Donahue/Sandra Dee movies. Just about the only thing that gave some people the will to go on was the Sid Caesar Show on Saturday nights. On a weekly basis, thirty-nine weeks a year, Caesar and his marvelous cohorts put on a ninety minute live revue that routinely knocked your socks off.

 

In retrospect, it is amazing that, week after week, year after grueling year, they somehow managed to successfully cope with the physical rigors and the technical logistics of mounting such a massive enterprise.

 

More amazing yet, in light of the really dumb, shlocky, comedies that now saturate the tube, is the fact that there was a huge audience for a network show that didn’t hesitate to parody foreign films and satirize jazz musicians. It was comedy that assumed a fairly high level of sophistication and awareness from its audience.

Q. What did you want to be when you were growing up?

A. Early on, I wanted to grow up to be a musician. Funny how it happened. My father had a restaurant in Yonkers. One day, somebody left a saxophone behind. My dad brought it home, handed it to me, and said, “Here, from now on, you’ll play the saxophone.”

Q. How good did you become?

A. Pretty darn good. Eventually I played with Shep Fields, Charley Spivak and even Benny Goodman. By the time I was 16, I had graduated from high school and I was in the Yonkers musician’s union, local 402. I decided to move to New York City, but that meant switching over to the 802. In those days, in order to join the 802, you had to live in New York City for six months and not work as a musician. So I became an usher at the Capitol Theater for $15-a-week. I could save money on that salary. Then they promoted me to doorman and I made $18. Oh, boy, I was living! In those days, I could eat all day on sixty-five cents.

Q. At what point did you decide to switch from music to comedy?

A. Actually, when I was 16 and working in the Catskills, I used to get $10 a week to play in the band and another two bucks for kidding around on stage.

 

But my big break came when I was in the Coast Guard. Actually there were a few breaks that came my way. I guess it all comes down to fate in the end. It was the day after Christmas, 1942, I remember, and they announced that everyone whose last name began A-L was shipping out. That meant me. They got us into gear and marched us to the gate. We were pretty sure we were headed for action in the South Pacific. And, believe me, we were scared sick. Just to make certain, somebody asked an officer where we were going, and he said, “Guadalcanal.” You could hear the moans and groans miles away. He was shocked by our reaction. I think one fellow actually fainted. “What’s the matter with you guys? What do you have against Brooklyn?” Turns out he hadn’t said Guadalcanal, he’d said Gowanus Canal. We were being sent off to guard the piers.

 

It was at Gowanus that I met and became friends with the great song writer, Vernon Duke. He was nearly blind, but he refused to wear his glasses. So I used to tell him to grab my collar when we were marching and just follow me.

 

Morale was terrible at the base, so Vernon and I went to the commander and suggested he hold Friday night dances. If the guys didn’t shape up, they couldn’t come. Worked like a charm.

 

I played the sax and Vernon played piano and did the arrangements. We had no trumpet players at Gowanus, but twelve saxophonists. It made for a strange dance band. I never could figure that one out.

Q. Obviously, people don’t leave trumpets in restaurants. They leave them in pawn shops. So, then what happened?

A. Vernon was asked to collaborate with Howard Dietz on a Coast Guard show, “Tars and Spars.” Max Liebman, who had just put Danny Kaye on the map, was the director. We toured the country doing the show, selling war bonds. When we got to California, we made a movie of it at Columbia.

 

A. It was a big hit for me. I got to do an eight minute comedy routine in the movie that I had originally written with my brother Dave. The preview cards were sensational. Everyone wanted to know who the big blonde kid was. After that, I figured my post-war future would be in the movies.

Q. You figured wrong. What happened?

A. My first job after getting out of the service was working with Tony Martin, at the Chicago Theater. That got me an invitation to play the Copacabana. I had no idea what the Copa was when they called. I was twenty-four years old, and I’d never even been in a nightclub.

 

By 1948, I was doing great without the movies. Max Liebman was managing me, and I was playing the Roxy for $3,500-a-week. In those days, if you made a hundred bucks-a-week, you got married. A Monte Cristo cigar only cost sixty cents.

 

I got an offer to be in a comedy revue. The producer wanted me to do a couple of bits for $250-a-week. I was reluctant to sign on, but Max said I should do it because it would get me to Broadway.

 

They had a comedy sketch in the show called the United Nations, with a lot of people doing foreign accents. I told them I could do all the voices. I’d been doing funny double-talk since I was a kid.

 

By the time the show was ready to open in New York, I was in half of the twenty-four sketches and I was getting $1,500-a-week and five percent of the gross.

 

The show was “Make Mine Manhattan.” I stayed with it for a year, then left to do TV, and they replaced me with Bert Lahr.

Q. Why give up Broadway for TV in 1948?

A. That’s a good question. All I know is that one day Max and I had lunch with Pat Weaver, who was V.P. of television for NBC, and he must have been very persuasive. He asked us if we wanted to do a half-hour, an hour, or an hour-and-a-half show. We told him we’d do the hour-and-a-half, and that was that.

 

On the way out of the restaurant, I turned to Max and said, “Who’s going to write this thing?”

 

In the beginning, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Max and myself, were the entire writing staff. After about six weeks, Mel Brooks joined us. Then Tony Webster came aboard.

 

We tried to emulate a Broadway show every week – a full scale revue. It wasn’t rehashed vaudeville routines, either, like a lot of early TV. I decided that if we were to survive, our comedy had to come out of real life. If you talk about the truth, then no matter how wild you get, it’s still funny and it holds up. Even the foreign movie parodies were based on movies that the writers and I would see in New York.

Q. Was it a prerequisite for your cast members to be able to do the foreign-sounding double-talk?

A. No, but I helped teach Carl Reiner and Howard Morris how to do it. Great as she was, Imogene Coca couldn’t quite get the hang of it. So, we’d write out some funny words for her to say, and then the three of us would just surround her with our gibberish.

PETER BART

 

One of the primary conceits of humankind is that all people can be placed into one of two categories – those highly logical folks who favor the right side of their brains and the artsy-fartsy crowd who think with their left lobes. The plain truth of the matter is that 99.9% of the human race doesn’t think with either side, and rely strictly on instinct to get them through the typical day and help them sniff out cookies, money and members of the opposite sex.

 

A rare exception is Peter Bart. He presumably is a double-thinker, able to use all of his brain, switching careers more casually than the rest of us change our socks. Bart, the editor-in-chief for Variety, the daily entertainment industry newspaper, has published books, produced movies, and even finds time to blog at The Huffington Post.

Q. Did you decide early on you wanted to be a journalist?

A. From childhood on, that’s all I wanted to be. Both my parents were teachers and wanted me to be an attorney like my rich uncles. I stuck to my guns, though. But, when it came time to go off to college, the idea of going to journalism school just sounded silly, so I went to the London School of Economics.

 

When I came back, I joined the Wall Street Journal. It was a very nice place to start. Journalism was even more fun than I thought it would be. It was just delicious! I got to write about the Supreme Court, big business and desegregation. I stayed there for about four years and then hustled a job at the Chicago Sun-Times as a reporter. Within a year, the New York Times offered me a job writing a column about advertising. At the time, I was fascinated with Madison Avenue.

Q. How long did you keep that job?

A. Seven years, all together. The first few years, I did the ad column. The rest of the time, I spent covering California. In the ’60’s, it was a reporter’s dream assignment. It was where everything was happening. Back in New York, they couldn’t tell anything was changing because nothing different was going on in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Q. When did you decide you wanted to get into the movie business?

A. People are skeptical when I say it, but I had no interest in becoming involved with the movies. I was truly a naïf. I got sucked in.

 

Basically, Bob Evans, who was running Paramount Pictures, made my mind up for me. He made it sound very intriguing, and I decided I had nothing to lose. If it didn’t work out, I could always go back to reporting.

 

I started out reading a lot of scripts. But, within a year of my joining Paramount, I was one of the people in charge of deciding what movies got made. In those days, I could commit a hundred grand for a book, two hundred grand for a script, without asking anyone’s permission.

Q. What was it like working with Evans in those palmy days?

A. He was great at getting people like Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson to commit to projects. His greatest strength was that he was so persuasive. If he believed in something, he was very good at getting other people to believe in it.

 

Once I was working with Alvin Sargent in developing a Depression era script based on a book he loved. I happened to mention “Paper Moon” to Evans on a Wednesday. Friday, he called me and said, “I’ve got you Peter Bogdanovich, Ryan O’Neal and his daughter, Tatum.”

 

On the one hand, I was amazed at how quickly he’d moved on it. On the other hand, I was totally disgusted. As far as I was concerned, he’d lost his mind. To me, Tatum was this obnoxious little kid who used to play with my daughter. I had no idea she could act!

Q. Aside from “Paper Moon” and the Oscar little Tatum won just to spite you, what else sticks out from your time at Paramount?

A. Certainly “The Godfather.” That movie had a big influence on my life. It confirmed that at least some of my creative instincts were right.

Q. How long did you manage to hang on to that job?

A. I was at Paramount a little over seven years. It was long enough. By the time Barry Diller was brought in to run things, Bob Evans was sick with his narcotic problems and I was just burned out. I weighed 122 pounds and I was having trouble with my then-wife. It was definitely time to move on.

Q. What did you try next?

A. Max Palevsky had just sold his company and had nearly a billion dollars to play with. He came to me and said, “Let’s you and me make movies. And no committees.” It sounded good to me. We made “Islands in the Sun” and “Fun with Dick and Jane.”

 

Unfortunately, Max, who was a staunch Democrat and a big financial supporter of Jimmy Carter, felt betrayed by the Carter administration. It may sound melodramatic, but I think Carter broke his heart. We stayed in business for about another year, but Bart just didn’t care anymore.

Q. What are your fondest memories of the Hollywood years?

A. Having lunch with people like Hitchcock, Goldwyn, Disney and Selznick. I was extremely lucky to have come out when I did, when these seminal figures were still around. One time I’ll never forget, Disney personally invited me to visit Disneyland. I showed up with my little daughter. As we walked up to him, he greeted us by saying, “I’ve never liked children or Jews.”

JAMIE FARR

I first met Jamie when I wrote several episodes of “M*A*S*H.” He played Klinger, the soldier who hoped that being a cross-dresser would result in his getting a Section 8 discharge from the military. Fortunately, his ploy didn’t work, and Jamie wound up serving 10 or 11 years on the series.

It was only later that I realized I had seen him in the movies as far back as 1955, when he portrayed one of the punks in “Blackboard Jungle.”

Amazingly, he made more money appearing regularly on TV game shows than he did appearing as Corporal Maxwell Q. Klinger.  Another thing, no less amazing, is that someone as nice as Jamie Farr could be as successful as he’s been after more than half a century in the business.

Q. What did you start out thinking you wanted to become?

A. I never thought about it when I was young. My mother wanted me to be a civil engineer, but I didn’t even know what a civil engineer did. I gravitated to show business based on listening to radio shows and going to movies. I didn’t know if I had any talent, but I was in awe of the talented people I saw and heard. I also knew I wanted to make a lot of money so I could make life easier for my parents. I wanted to be able to present them with the luxuries they never got.

Q. Were you pleased with the way things turned out?

A. Yes, I have fulfilled my ambitions to be an actor, an entertainer, though not to the extent I dreamed about. I really wanted to be more famous and richer than I am, but I certainly am not ungrateful for what I have achieved.

Q. Were you able to do everything for your parents that you hoped to?

A. I never got to indulge my father because he passed away at 62, and that was a few years before I started to do well in show business. I did have a great time treating my mother to the things she wanted.

Q. Did your folks encourage you?

A. They neither encouraged nor discouraged me in my pursuit of an acting career. They would have preferred me to be in some more stable field. They couldn’t afford to help me financially during my struggling years at the Pasadena Playhouse, but they would have if they could have. I supported myself with a series of odd jobs.

Q. What did your parents do for a living?

A. My father was a meat cutter, a butcher. My mother was a seamstress and worked mostly at home on her Singer sewing machine.

Q. What was the biggest obstacle you faced?

A. Convincing people in the business that I could act. Most of the time because of my looks – ethnic, Middle Eastern looking, with a large nose – I had a hard time getting roles. My comedic ability helped me to break through.

Q. Did you attend college?

A. I attended the Pasadena Playhouse of Theatre Arts for one year. Then, when I was performing on “M*A*S*H,” I started attending Columbia College, in Los Angeles, and got a degree in Film. It took me several years of attending night classes three times a week, while shooting “M*A*S*H” by day and doing TV game shows on the weekend.

Q. What was the best advice you ever received?

A. Red Skelton told me that I shouldn’t take life too seriously because nobody gets out of it alive. The agent Meyer Mishkin once told me that nobody in show business ever hires you because they want to do you a favor, but because it does them a favor to hire you. And the best advice of all came from Ed Wynn, the great comedian, who said, “Save your money.”

Q. What was the worst advice you ever got, and did you take it?

A. The very worst advice I ever got was being told that I needed a PR firm and a business manager. I took it, and it turned out I didn’t need either. If you’re currently popular, you sure don’t need a PR agent because you’re automatically in demand. And if you’re not currently popular, nobody is interested. After all, if you don’t have anything going, what are you going to talk about? As for business managers, every time I had one, I lost money from lousy investments. Plus, you have to pay them a percentage of your salary just so they can mishandle your money!

Q. Did you have a mentor?

A. I sure did. His name was Red Skelton.

Q. Have there been any books that influenced you?

A. One of the books is “Die Broke” by Stephen Pollan. He says when you die the funeral home should be paid with a check that bounces.

Q. What person has most influenced you?

A. Jesus Christ. The older I get, the more I believe and the more I attempt to live by His and His father’s rules. And I must say, it ain’t always easy.