Still Talking (32 page)

He wants a boy, he looks to my left. He wants a girl, he looks to my right.” I miss her.

Nancy Reagan was a guest, and when she talked about her early courtship years with Ronnie, she teared up on camera. The next night Lucille Ball came on. A few months earlier, with huge fanfare and every magazine cover, she had gone into a new series with a contractual guarantee of a full season’s run. Then her ratings were poor, and she was canceled. She came on my show reeling. She sat there in the chair, forever “Lucy,” a major star, and began to cry. “They don’t want me anymore.”

When she came onto my stage, she received a standing ovation, but she was living every performer’s nightmare. Later, when she was in the hospital dying, fans strung a banner across the street from her window, saying WE

LOVE

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You, LUCY. Meanwhile, nobody wanted to watch her new show. I think you cannot go away from television. Television is a matter of habit. People are happy to grow old with you and tune in as part of their life, but once you’ve been invisible for a while, the habit is broken.

I found that hosting my own show was very different from being the guest host on Carson, where I was in a brick house, totally secure; people would watch me and wonder, God knows what she’s going to say or ask next. The Tonight Show was like going to somebody else’s party in a great dress, and now at Fox I had to throw the party myself, night after night, and worry whether everybody had a good time.

I did not dare say to a major star, “Oh, come on … this is your fourth marriage and he’s a hundred years younger than you are, and you’re telling me it’s true love?” I was praying to get her back-and had been on the phone fifteen times begging her to come to me instead of Carson. Big stars come on your show as a favor and expect thankyous and flowers. I was constantly torn. Linda Evans refused to come on because she was afraid of me. At the same time Billy Sammeth told me I was being too ladylike. And the press was saying I had far more gush than guts.

But that natural caution was not enough for Fox. The Fox people tried to reach out in front of the camera itself to control me. I think what they really wanted was a Barbara Walters spiced with a few one-liners. Whatever Diller’s young lieutenants thought intellectually about the show, no matter how much everybody agreed I had to be different, in the Fox mind-set, mainstream television was still the blueprint for success. I think that, without any feel for late-night content, they were frightened and shocked when they felt the rules were being broken.

From the beginning it was, “Be careful. You can’t. ” They hired me for what I am-dangerous and spontaneous and sometimes tasteless-but the first time I was at all outrageous, they went crazy. During the first two weeks I included an old joke I had used on Carson: “I don’t un-

derstand country-and-western music. They sing, `My husband left me. Sheeet, sheeet, sheeet’-and everybody cries, `Boo hoo hoo hoo.’ Now that’s deep.”

Afterward, Kevin Wendle was waiting in my dressing room, very angry: “How could you say that joke!” I asked, “What joke?” He said, “That shit joke.

You said `shit’ on the air.” He began to yell, shaking his finger in my face. “You are never to say that again. Never. Never. “

It was Peter Lassally all over, but worse because Kevin was so rude. I yelled back, “I’ll say shit all I want! Shit! shit! shit! I’ll give you some more! I’ll give you fucks! Fuck! fuck! fuck!” He turned beet red.

We were both behaving like children. But I felt like a child who was being kissed and slapped at the same timewho had been hired because she could push the limits of TV and was now being told, “Don’t make waves.”

After the scene in the dressing room, Kevin, like Diller, disappeared from our view, but not from our lives, and we dealt almost entirely with Ron Vandor, who requested that my monologue be on his desk every day by three o’clock so it could be circulated at Fox. About a half hour before showtime Ron would come into the dressing room and say, “You’ve got to take out jokes seven and nine; you can’t make a joke about Kurt Waldheim being a Nazi.” Fox was worried about offending Nazis?

I know now that everybody was allowed to have an opinion about what I was doing, and Vandor was just a messenger boy. He also announced he wanted daily hourlong meetings with me to critique the last night’s show. I said no. I felt the whole idea was insulting, and in daily programming you are under tremendous time pressure.

You arrive in the morning and want to know, “Where is my monologue, where are my notes for the interviews?” Somebody tells you, “We lost Meryl Streep,” and you say, “Quick, quick, can we get Susan Sarandon?” Or Eddie Murphy is flying from New York and will arrive at the last minute-and the plane is late. “Well, where are the notes for Murphy?” “Well, we couldn’t preinterview him because he was unavailable. His cousin is graduating

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from college.” “Well, the writers can’t write the snappers without the material.”

Meanwhile, you are worrying, “Who’s going to be on tomorrow?” And there’s nobody good on the booking board for next week-so you put in six phone calls. I should be trying to get Whitney Houston, not sitting with Ron Vandor-and afterward I would have to report the conversation to Peter Dekom, who would tell me, “You shouldn’t have said … “

One night early in the show, the pressure, the disappointment, became unbearable. Fifteen minutes before showtime, after Vandor had given me his instructions in the dressing room, instead of going backstage and waiting to start the show, I just walked out of the building and off the Fox lot.

I stood on a bridge over the freeway and wept and wept. Courtney Conte followed me at a distance, then led me back and pushed me onstage.

Since I was their only show, the executives had nothing to do but sit around and secondguess what we did, tell us, “Too many guests, too few guests; not funny, too much comedy.” They looked at each show as the show and did not understand that the cumulative impact is what matters, that if you make a mistake now and then, it’s okay.

Anything can be pulled apart. You could go through the Bible page by page-“Pillar of salt? Oh, no, I wouldn’t ever turn to salt. No, wait, let’s make it a pillar of dusting powder. Better. I don’t like the use of sandals. I think there should only be Seven Commandments. One for each day of the week.”

A big issue between me and Fox was the stunts we did to establish a separate identity-to go for a younger audience, closer to Letterman than to Carson. Some stunts worked. The biggest laugh I ever got on television came after days and days of ending the show by blowing a kiss to Willard Scott, the weatherman on the Today show. I never told anybody what I was setting up, not even Edgar. They must have all thought I was being truly ridiculous. But Willard began talking about it on the Today show. Finally he came on my show and kept asking why I liked

him so much. I said, “We have a lot in common.” I pulled off a blond wig-and under it I was completely bald.

When Al Campanis of the Los Angeles Dodgers said black people cannot swim, we reacted immediately. That was the point of alive show. Though Vandor and Wendle did their best to stop-“It’s going to cost too much money. It’s not funny”-we had a swimming pool onstage. A black usher and I jumped in and, of course, he swam and I sank. It made all the papers.

Some things that looked funny on paper did not work. Because we lacked the money to travel, we spent a week pretending to be in a different country every night. It was embarrassing. We wore turkey costumes for Thanksgiving.

I explained that we were a poor show and could not afford a real Christmas tree, and I brought on a handsome young surfer who stood there and during the week before Christmas we trimmed him a little more each night. So stupid. Such stunts looked to Barry Diller like random searching, but in fact all shows as young as ours take time to find their footing.

Of course, the day came when Wendle and Vandor came up with their own stunt. They wanted to do a mystery show based on the phenomenon of the mystery weekend, a minivacation pastime then becoming popular around the country. I argued against the idea, but went along, thinking, If you don’t try, you don’t know.

Early in the show our woman saxophonist was “murdered” during a commercial.

Then guests and staff dropped clues. The audience and Jimmy Coco, who played an Inspector Clouseau type, were supposed to solve the mystery. But you cannot superimpose nonreality on a real situation. That is too complicated. Nobody knew what the hell was going on. The audience was confused, I was confused, the guests were confused. Backstage after the show Ron Vandor was saying, “This is our Emmy show,” and I was thinking, You are out of your mind.

Throughout the fall of 1986 the show was two armed camps with little raids conducted back and forth across battle lines, destructive for all concerned.

Almost every day I

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felt hit by a petty crisis. Nothing had much to do with business. It was like The War of the Roses. Everybody had to get everybody. You did this to us, we’ll do that to you. Oh, if you’re going to do that, I’ll do this. Wow!

Did you ever dream I could get you that way? Ha! Ha! It was games, but not my kind. It was insane games.

When I asked for a couch in my little office where the writers’ meeting was held (everyone had to stand up or drag in chairs), Ron Vandor said there was nothing in the budget for my office. So I had to bootleg a couch. When I asked in October for a week off in December, Jess Wittenberg, the Fox lawyer, wanted more lead time.

Fox was angry that I was flying all over the country to do concert dates.

The network thought I was exhausting myself-when in reality my trips alone to Atlanta or Detroit or Minneapolis were revitalizing. I was able to escape and laugh and make contact with real people who kept me in touch with what America thought was funny.

To this day I still wonder why Barry allowed the situation to disintegrate so totally. But who knows how information was translated as it made its way up and down the ladder of command. I remember the producer complaining when Kevin Wendle and Ron Vandor would tell him, “Barry feels that … ” We never knew whether it was true.

For example, I decided to dress Beverly, the saxophonist, in a sparkly dress to make her stand out-she was becoming a personality. Vandor came into my office and told me no. I had insisted on tuxedos for the orchestra when he wanted short rumba jackets. So his general message was, “You wanted tuxedos? Well, then they’ll all wear tuxedos.”

That was the instant when the months of feeling dismissed and disliked, the months of disappointment, of feeling, It’s not fair-all detonated together.

I picked up a glass ashtray and threw it at the wall-and it didn’t even break.

The next day my limousine was canceled because someone told someone I had trashed my office. I telephoned

Barry, and this time he took my call. I said, “They’ve cut off my limo.”

He said, “You trashed your office.”

I told him, “I do not trash offices.”

He would not listen.

I told him, “Come over and look.”

He answered, “I have to believe what my people tell me,” and hung up. I went three days without a limo before Fox relented. It was like a Shakespearean conspiracy. An hour later I was onstage trying to be funny.

Barry was not malevolent. Both of us thought we were fighting on the side of right and God. If only he had come over and looked at the office and started to laugh, then I could have said to him, “You’re putting all this money behind us, leave me alone for six months. If nothing else, I’m an old war-horse, so give me your stamp and let me go.

,.

Instead, we continued to be the Bickersons in Wonderland. I don’t know about other businesses, but when showbusiness people are frightened, we can behave like children. I think immature people gravitate to show business, people needy for the celebrity, the power, and the love it can bring almost overnight-a life larger than life. In show business we can even act out the fantasies that have been our escape from reality, escape from ever having to grow up.

Supposedly Diana Ross was very angry at somebody at Caesars Palace, so during her entire two-week engagement, nobody was allowed to make eye contact with her. Tommy Smothers wanted only American Indians on their last Smothers Brothers TV show, and when the producer disagreed, he was banned from the set. When a major male actor did not get a good parking space soon enough, he left his car under a tree to be covered with bird droppings-then parked it in the executive lot.

A studio head who shall also be nameless arrived at the Los Angeles airport and found a blue limo waiting for him. He was furious. He had told people a thousand times he rode only in black limos. He said, “Only pimps

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ride in colored limos. My bags can ride in this car. I’ll take a taxi.”

I myself reached a helpless point where I wanted to hurt the Fox people so badly that I decided to hide a fish in the posh little executive greenroom, nicknamed “Diner Acres.” It would stink, and they would not be able to figure out where the smell was coming from, and that’s how I would get back at them. I actually bought the fish. Talk about childish revenge! That’s for the third grade, not when you have the house on the hill with servants.

I remember a meeting with Peter Dekom sitting at the head of the table while Jamie Kellner and Barry sat across from Edgar and me. Everybody was shouting and getting personal, and Peter starting laughing. “Do you realize what you are fighting about?” he asked. “People would buy tickets to see this.”

Jess Wittenberg was constantly on the phone to Peter, who warned us that the network was building a case to break my contract, conducting a campaign to annoy and humiliate me-anything it could devise to provoke me into breaching my contract, into not showing up or doing something horrendous on the air.