Billy Gray's Band Box: New Article at WFMU

There is a brand new article up at WFMU called Hollywood's First Comedy Club. It chronicles the ascendance and demise of Billy Gray's Band Box, how it sprung from Slapsy Maxie's and gave early gigs to Buddy Hackett, Shecky Greene, Dick Van Dyke and many more. It's a revised piece cut from my book Drunks, Thieves and Scoundrels: Comedians in America. Grove Atlantic releases the book this time next year. Get updates here.

An Interview with Orson Bean - Part Three

Kliph Nesteroff: I'm going to rattle off a list of different people you worked with and you just tell me whatever comes to mind. You played the Blue Angel with Tom Lehrer.

Orson Bean: Yes, Tom Lehrer was still teaching at Harvard. He played it just for a week and it was packed with Harvard kids. He did Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and all that stuff. I saw him once in a while over the years.

Kliph Nesteroff: February 1954 - you played the Blue Angel with Andy Griffith.

Orson Bean: Yeah, I didn't get to know Andy much. I never found his stuff all that funny. It was more folksy than funny.

Kliph Nesteroff: It's weird that he even did nightclubs.

Orson Bean: Yes, he didn't do it a lot. A Face in the Crowd - that was his metier.

Kliph Nesteroff: Seems that you could get away with that in a New York cabaret whereas if you put that sort of act in Las Vegas it wouldn't go over. There were a lot of comediennes in that cabaret scene like Connie Sawyer and Imogene Coca and Kaye Ballard, who never played the huge rooms.

Orson Bean: That's absolutely right. They would do fine in a small room, were just moderately funny, and the audience considered itself in and hip. They wanted to like you. But I played Vegas and boy, was it a painful experience. It was all heavy hitters from Texas and they didn't know what the fuck I was about. It was a very Jim Crow town. Completely. I used to grab a cab after my last show to where the Black dishwashers and maids lived and go to a little blues club. I was maybe one of two white faces in there. I didn't have a good experience working Vegas.

Kliph Nesteroff: You played the Thunderbird.

Orson Bean: Yes, I played the Thunderbird with a woman named Sunny Gale who had a one hit wonder. In those days the Strip was a hotel and maybe an eighth of a mile of tumbleweed. It wasn't wall to wall clubs like now. Everything was free. At five o'clock in the morning a guy came out in the lobby of the The Thunderbird with a big stainless steel cart and a slab of roast beef and he would cut a thick slab and hand it to you free.

Kliph Nesteroff: Earlier you mentioned Max Gordon of Blue Angel fame. I need you to help me distinguish between the Blue Angel Max Gordon and the Max Gordon of Broadway. As I gather, there were two different Max Gordons in New York at that time that were showbiz impresarios...

Orson Bean: Max Gordon of Broadway produced big Broadway shows like The Solid Gold Cadillac. The other Max Gordon owned the Village Vanguard and the Blue Angel. The last time I saw the Blue Angel Max Gordon it was the fiftieth anniversary. I emceed and Irwin Corey went on. Irwin Corey would famously never get off. Max Gordon's wife came to me, "Can you get him off? Max is tired." All these famous people were waiting to go on. I waited until Irwin got a big laugh and I ran out, grabbed the mic, "Irwin Corey, ladies and gentleman! Let's hear it!" Confused, he bowed. I introduced the next act.  He yelled, "Wait, I wasn't through!" But it was too late.

Kliph Nesteroff: I interviewed him a few months back. He's 99 years old. [Corey has since turned 100]

Orson Bean: Is he 99! Is he still saying however? He actually came up to me - and he meant this - he said, "You stole my word!" I had said however, not as a joke, but in the course of whatever I was talking about and he accused me of stealing his word.

Kliph Nesteroff: There are a couple guys like that. Irwin Corey and Will Jordan say everyone stole everything from them, no matter how slight. Irwin Corey says Woody Allen stole material from him and that Mort Sahl stole "The future lies ahead." Will Jordan says Lenny Bruce and Mel Brooks stole his act. They have convinced themselves of this.

Orson Bean: Will Jordan used to go to a place called The Gag Writers. It was kind of a club where you could try out material. A lot of people did Ed Sullivan impersonations, but Will did the very first. Will Jordan came up to Jackie Mason and said, "That Ed Sullivan impression you do is great. Where did you get the idea for that?" Jackie said, "Years ago there was a place called the Gag Writers Club and there was this fat, Jewish kid with glasses..." Will Jordan said, "I'm that fat kid with glasses!"

Kliph Nesteroff: I've talked with Will Jordan at length. He will talk...

Orson Bean: Endlessly.

Kliph Nesteroff: But he's fun to listen to. I want to ask you about the New York cabaret card system. You were part of a group that organized against it. Can you talk about that a bit? In the 1950s if you were a comedian with a criminal record you weren't allowed on a New York stage - or something like that. Very strange, draconian kind of thing.

Orson Bean: Yeah, I never understood it too much. This literati group mixed with the cabaret people. It was some of the New York Review of Books types. I can't think of their names, but my wife's sister is married to a guy who was the top editor at Random House. He hung out with all these New York reviewers and they got involved because of Lord Buckley.



I met Lord Buckley when I was just a kid in Boston. There was a place called Dave Schwartz's, which was the Lindy's of Boston. After we had done our acts we would hang out there. Buckley was working in town. He said, "Come with me!" And a group of us followed him. We would have followed him anywhere. He would get up on the running boards of cars and deliver a lecture to whoever would listen. He wouldn't sign the police card thing or couldn't get one... and that got a lot of publicity.

Kliph Nesteroff: This issue, the police card - the cabaret card - it broke Buckley and lead to his eventual demise the same way Lenny Bruce was plagued by legal problems.

Orson Bean: Lenny couldn't help himself. Lenny did routines about people learning to gamble by playing bingo in the Catholic church. The Irish cops would come in and arrest him for something tepid. He insisted on fighting his own cases and he became obsessed with it. You're not apt to be funny when you're obsessed with justice.

Kliph Nesteroff: Were you friends?

Orson Bean: I considered him a friend. I don't think he considered me a friend. I idolized him. I thought he was just brilliant. I'd give him books to read. I gave him Lady Chatterley's Lover. He never bothered to read it. I gave him a book called Star Wormwood by a guy named Curtis Bok, a Harvard professor. It was about a kid who accidentally kills someone and then eats him. It was an anti-death penalty book and he found that fascinating. I think he was already using heroin, although I didn't know it. I went to see him shortly after JFK's assassination. He did two concerts. One at eight and one at eleven. I went to the eleven.



I was in a show called Subways Are For Sleeping. I asked Phyllis Newman, who was married to Adolph Green, to come along. They had never heard Lenny Bruce. Apparently at the 8 o'clock show he did assassination jokes that got screams. At eleven, ooh, the audience froze. I think maybe he was tired and didn't do it as wholeheartedly. That outrageous stuff sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

Kliph Nesteroff: You did many panel shows and game shows. You did Pantomime Quiz in the 1950s with Milt Kamen.

Orson Bean: Yes, Milt Kamen was my best friend for a long time. 

Kliph Nesteroff: Milt Kamen is a forgotten stand-up, but he was beloved by comedians.

Orson Bean: He had worked in orchestras and before that he worked as a zepplin pusher. He worked in the garment district when he was young. A zepplin was a rack of clothes that you pushed along the sidewalks at high speeds. He worked for a guy named Bushman.

Kliph Nesteroff: Milt Kamen was Sid Caesar's stand-in on television and I've been told he would invent shtick during rehearsal that Sid would then do on air.

Orson Bean: Milt had to learn everything in the show and those were the days of live TV. They did it from a theater up on 58th and Broadway. In the old days Broadway existed all the way up to Central Park. At the final dress rehearsal it would be packed with an audience and it was Milt performing as the director shouted the blocking instructions. Milt got to do the entire Sid Caesar show in front of an audience of several hundred people every week.

Kliph Nesteroff: Another old school guy on Pantomime Quiz was Peter Donald.

Orson Bean: Peter Donald had been the emcee of Can You Top This with Senator Ford and Joe Laurie Jr on radio. I listened to it because it was fairly hip. I never thought Peter Donald was that funny, but he was still great. Audrey Meadows worked on it and he loved her. I got to know her and Art Carney so I used to go and watch them shoot The Honeymooners. They shot it with Electronicam, which was an invention of Desi Arnaz.

That's why to this day those two shows still exist. Gleason leased the thing from Desilu to shoot The Honeymooners. Gleason would come in not knowing a fucking line - drunk as a skunk - and he was brilliant! A genius! They had to learn all of his lines. To this day you can hear Audrey Meadows go, "Next I suppose you're going to tell me you've invited the boss to dinner." "I've invited the boss to dinner." Leading him in.



Gleason was wonderful. I wound up working with him several times. I used to come around when he was doing his big variety show from Studio 50, which is now called The Ed Sullivan Theater. He would sit there before the show and all the comics would come in. A few times I'd come by and he'd say, "Let the kid in - he's good." He'd tell these wonderful stories and the comics would howl. 

Kliph Nesteroff: Nobody could do a take quite as good as Jackie Gleason. He could make more out of nothing...

Orson Bean: Oh, yes, out of nothing. I loved his Reggie Van Gleason. Wonderful character.

Kliph Nesteroff: You did an ill-fated version of Make Me Laugh hosted by Robert Q. Lewis.

Orson Bean: Yeah, I never found Robert Q. Lewis funny. I also did a Studio One with Robert Q. Lewis. But Robert Q. was one of these guys... there were a certain amount of guys who had a niche... and nobody knew why exactly. There's the story about the guy who falls off a building, hits an awning as he's coming down, slides off the awning as a hay truck is driving by and lands right in the hay. Someone says, "God, you have got to be the luckiest guy in the world!" The guys says, "No. Robert Q. Lewis."

Kliph Nesteroff: (laughs) All the goyish, boyish hosts... Garry Moore, Robert Q. Lewis, Hal March, George DeWitt, Durward Kirby...

Orson Bean: Garry Moore's stage manager on I've Got a Secet was Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.

Kliph Nesteroff: Allan Sherman.

Orson Bean: Yeah, he was the stage manager for Goodson Todman. He used to do routines at parties.

Kliph Nesteroff: I saw an episode that apparently resulted in Allan Sherman's firing. Garry Moore was away and Henry Morgan was the guest host...

Orson Bean: (laughs) I'm already laughing and I don't even know what the story is!

Kliph Nesteroff: Henry wasn't the greatest of hosts but it was one of these rare episodes where they had three guests and they all guessed the secret on the first try so suddenly they had half a show to fill and no more guests and Henry is the host...

Orson Bean: (laughs)

Kliph Nesteroff: You can see Allan Sherman's hands gesturing and then whispering from offstage and then shouting about what he should do. 

Orson Bean: When Fred Allen lost his radio show NBC was still paying him so they had him go on What's My Line or things like that and he hated it. He didn't want to be a panelist. I remember Bennett Cerf saying to him, "You only have two more minutes, Fred." And he said, "It's more than I need."

Kliph Nesteroff: The chemistry of What's My Line, I've Got a Secret and To Tell the Truth was great. They hold up better than almost any other television programming of that era, but most of the quiz shows were forgettable. You were on one called Says Who, which Henry Morgan hosted. One episode the guests were Joey Adams, Dagmar, Jim Backus and yourself.

Orson Bean: Oh, God. Dagmar was the foil for the very first late night show before the Tonight Show - Broadway Open House. But why am I telling this to you? What was the comic's name?

Kliph Nesteroff: Jerry Lester.

Orson Bean: Jerry Lester. Jerry was funny. Dagmar with the big tits was married to this little shrimp of a guy. A comic. Dagmar was like a celebrity for a while. I don't even remember what Says Who was. There were so many of them. Keep Talking and Says Who...

Kliph Nesteroff: Apparently Jerry Lester did not get along with his brother Buddy Lester, who was also a comedian.

Orson Bean: Absolutely. Buddy Lester was a mean drunk. I never worked the Mountains, but I worked one little joint called Chester's. It was filled with old, Jewish Communists near Grossingers and the Concord. One of the old guys came up to me. "Your act is very socially relevant." That was my review.

Kliph Nesteroff: How about Tonight Show host Jack Paar? You were on the episode in which he quit on-air and walked off the show.

Orson Bean: Yeah, I was. He surpised everyone. Hugh Downs was the sidekick and took over. Paar said he was never coming back. I kind of expected that I would replace Paar because I was a regular substitute. I stuck up for Paar. I had heard there was a suit who was really pissed off at me for badmouthing NBC, so I was taken out of the running. Oddly enough, Paar did not appreciate my sticking up for him. Paar wanted people to be beholden to him. When he came back he invited all of his friends to sit in the studio audience and I wasn't invited. I couldn't understand it. Then years later I realized he didn't like that I stuck up for him. It's an odd sort of thing. It was the part of Paar I never understood exactly.

Kliph Nesteroff: Shelley Berman told me that Paar never talked to him again for the opposite reason - because he did not stick up for him.

Orson Bean: Paar was a very odd guy. He was very complicated and strange and moody. He liked me as a substitute host because I didn't threaten him. Johnny Carson always booked subsitute hosts who were good, but not so good that they would threaten him.

Kliph Nesteroff: Jack Paar - when you look back on it - he wasn't even on television that long. His Tonight Show was 1957 to 1962. Compared to today that's nothing. Someone like Stephen Colbert has been on television twice as long. Conan O'Brien four times as long. David Letterman seven times as long.

Orson Bean: Yes, when he retired he really retired and Johnny Carson did the same thing. I must say I loved Johnny but I never socialized with him. We had a great relationship around the studio. "You got a joke for me, Orson?" In the make-up room, that kind of thing. When he retired that was it. Never came back and did a special or anything. Paar essentially did the same. He retired to Maine and bought a local TV station and ran that.

Kliph Nesteroff: How did your comedy LP - Orson Bean Live at the hungry i - come to be? It was on Fantasy Records, the same label as Lenny Bruce.

Orson Bean: Yes, it was. The guy who managed the club was one of the Hollywood Ten. He was no longer in the business so he ran the hungry i and said, "Let me record you." He just edited the thing together and made an album out of it. Lenny and I both shared the fact that Fantasy never paid us a penny. He sued, but nothing came of it.

Kliph Nesteroff: Its cover really encapsulates the era - with you in front of that famous brick wall.

Orson Bean: And the original record is a translucent red.

Kliph Nesteroff: What do you remember of that era when people were being labeled as "sick comedians?"

Orson Bean: It was Leave it to Beaver. There were certain things about the 1950s. If you fell asleep in New York on a hot night in Central Park you just slept there. There was no street crime to speak of. There was a drugstore every other block where you could buy a rubber or something. I would go to 52nd Street to the jazz joints and they were going to three or four in the morning. The subway was a nickel. That aspect of it was nice. Then there was the other side. If you touched Pearl Bailey's arm on television the show would cut away. And people were called "sick comedians" if they were just a little irreverent. I, of course, enjoyed the era because I was having great success all of a sudden.

Kliph Nesteroff: You did a Broadway show with Godfrey Cambridge.

Orson Bean: Yes, Godfrey played my butler in Herman Wouk's play Nature's Way. We opened in Wilmington, Delaware. We all stayed in the same hotel except for Godfrey who had to stay in a cheap hotel by the bus station.

Kliph Nesteroff: You worked with Phil Silvers.

Orson Bean: I did a Sgt Bilko, but I never got to know him. He was a deeply unhappy man. My first ex-wife and I were on Bilko together. Maurice Gosfield played a character named Doberman and he was really a moron. He was popular with viewers, but on set they would make fun of him to his face.

Kliph Nesteroff: How about Buddy Hackett?

Orson Bean: Buddy I saw right to the end. When he would see me he would say, "An Irishman, an englishman and a Jew...:" He wouldn't say hello, he would launch right into a joke. I loved Buddy. Very sweet. He kind of waxed philosophical with me. He found me intellectual. He would tell me a joke and then he would start talking to me about deeper things, which I don't think he mentioned to his other friends. He had this great big stone elephant in his yard that the neighbors were horrified by.

Kliph Nesteroff: Dick Shawn.

Orson Bean: I never liked him and I never found him funny. I was also jealous of him because he got parts I wanted to do. I don't know. I never warmed up to Dick Shawn. I found him arrogant. I remember one time I rode in an elevator with Henry Fonda. I was a young comic. He kind of gave me hard eyes and brushed me off and for years I told people what a prick he was. Then I got to spend a week with him and he was wonderful. I had the most wonderful week with him! And I had bad mouthed him after being in an elevator with him. I thought, "What the fuck was I thinking?" I formed an opinion that had nothing to do with anything. So I don't know...

Kliph Nesteroff: Red Skelton.

Orson Bean: Red Skelton I loved. He was an angel. When I was a young comic he was so generous with me. He walked in on a live show I was doing at the Blue Angel and got a big laugh. He threw his arm around me and he was sweet as sugar. Of course I had adored him in The Fuller Bush Man and all the movies. Liberace was another. People would do that. They would walk into your show and people would laugh and applaud. That's what Bob Hope used to do with Carson.

An Interview with Will Jordan - Part Thirteen

Will Jordan: You put some things on your website about me. I haven't read them, but everybody has been telling me about it. I appreciate all the nice things you said about me - and if you said something bad - well, then I don't appreciate it. Anyway, what can I do for you? Can I help you in some way?

Kliph Nesteroff: I had a couple questions...

Will Jordan: I thought I talked your ear off last time. What more could I possibly... Someone just Facebooked me an appearance of my old friend Adam Keefe on The Hollywood Palace. Once again, and I hate to say it, but here's a guy I knew very well and I'm seeing my bits. Frankenstein bit, Sullivan bit, a thing about Walter Pidgeon. It's amazing. I liked him very much, but I never gave any of these people permission to do my material. Never asked. Just stole it. My material is not for rent, not for sale... It's for being stolen, apparently.

However, Adam Keefe is gone now and there's no point in talking about it, but it's just amazing how all these years later I keep seeing it. They showed a film with Jerry Lewis teaching Ed Sullivan how to do my act. It's from over thirty years ago, but... does it never end? I never stop seeing people steal from me. Incredible. I'm sort of retired, so I don't care as much, but I'm still amazed. Anyway, did you talk to Frankie Ray?

Kliph Nesteroff: Yes.

Will Jordan: Frankie Ray is wonderful.  He is the only living person that can tell you for sure that Lenny Bruce stole from me. I don't have a single living witness except for him. And he will tell you that Lenny copied me.

Frankie was amazingly close to Lenny Bruce and Shecky Greene. Shecky was his friend from Chicago. Lenny Bruce he got to know in Los Angeles and they worked together at all the strip joints. Very good mimic too, by the way. He does very good impressions of George Raft and Leo Gorcey. Interesting to talk to him. It's interesting to get the view of the Chicago mimic. The only other guy I know from Chicago that did impressions of that quality was Shecky.

Shecky was not known as a mimic, but Shecky's impressions were absolutely marvelous. He'll do Ed Sullivan - perfect. He'll do Danny Thomas - perfect. Shecky and this unknown guy Mickey Shaughnessy were the two great nightclub comedians.

Don't get me wrong, I like Don Rickles. Don and I went to school together and Don was great. But for all around entertaining, you can't beat Shecky. This guy Mickey Shaugnessy was also amazing. He could stand onstage for hours and hours. When I first went to Chicago back in 1949 I would meet people like comedian Paul Gilbert. Another superb nightclub comedian. I had not known, in those days, that a comedian could stay onstage for an hour, an hour and a half. Later, you couldn't stop me from doing otherwise. But in the beginning I never thought of staying on for hours - this was the style in Chicago.



Paul Gilbert in 1949 - very talented guy. He became the adoptive father of Melissa Gilbert. We all predicted he'd have a great career, but it was absolutely nothing. Like Shecky, none of the great talent comes across on the screen. It's happened so many times. It's more dramatic to me because I saw how great their talent was in person.



I look at Paul Gilbert and, my God, what happened to all that talent? And Rickles, as much as I love him... well, I like everything about him... but what I think is a shortcoming - Don is not theatrical. Compare it with Jack E. Leonard who did the same style. Rickles denies he copied Jack E. Leonard, but of course he did.



Jack E. Leonard didn't score as well, but Jack E. Leonard did a show. He sang, he danced, he was visually funny. Rickles isn't theatrical at all.  Shecky on the other hand and Paul Gilbert and Mickey Shaughnessy - when you see these people onstage for an hour and a half they do everything under the sun. You wonder, "How can these people not score, not register, in films or TV?" And they don't. Shecky's career was very badly handled. 

Kliph Nesteroff: What was the difference - if there was one - between Don Rickles' act when he first started out in the late 1940s and what he became?

Will Jordan: I am one of the few people that saw that. When he first started it had nothing to do with insults. He worked for a smalltime agent named Willie Weber. Willie Weber was famous for booking one-nighters and several comedians... I wish I could think of their names...  George DeWitt. There's a guy you don't hear much about. Good mimic and extremely handsome, from Philadelphia. Real name was Florentine.



I ran into Pat Cooper the other day, but he was in a hurry. I wanted to list Italian comedians and have him give me their real names, but he left before I could quiz him. What is Guy Marks' real name? What is George DeWitt's real name? George DeWitt - his nightclub act - he played the Paramount theater and was very good. George DeWitt was the best looking comedian. Dick Van Dyke was good looking, but George DeWitt was unbelievable and famous for his hairpiece. It was so good that people kept hiring him just to see his hairpiece.

Kliph Nesteroff: (laughs)

Will Jordan: He took a lot of kidding and a lot of insults. I saw him at the Paramount doing Harry Truman. He bumped into the mic and said, "Is that you, Bess?" He feels the mic and says, "Oh, no, it's my wife." Something like that. Later he had a career as the host of a TV show - Name That Tune. And then I heard... someone said he wound up as a cabdriver in Florida. How tragic for such a talented guy! You wonder who the hell manages these people. How can a man of that status... well, anyway. Very little is ever said of him.



All you ever hear is "good looking guy with a hairpiece." He was a lot more than that. When he broke up with his wife there was a lot of bad publicity. His wife stole all of his material and stole his hairpiece and all these things. There are bad things you should hear about Jack Carter and Rich Little, but they get away unscathed. They are the real evil ones. George DeWitt and Gary Morton took a lot of heat. A lot of heat. I knew these people. And Jerry Lewis talking about how bad his father was? I worked with Danny Lewis for two solid weeks in Phoenix.



Danny Lewis was a very nice man. A lot of people say bad things about Gary Morton and Danny Lewis. Maybe they're true. I've never seen it. When I spoke with Peggy King, she agreed with me about most of the things I said. We talked about the reputation of Arthur Freed, the famous lyricist who became head of the music department at MGM. How he was the biggest lecher in the world. Everyone seems to agree on that. I only knew him slightly because I dated Andre Previn's ex-wife...

Kliph Nesteroff: Let's return to your having seen Don Rickles' act when he was first starting in the late 1940s...

Will Jordan: Oh, yes. The bit I remember - he was satirizing that smoking in movie theaters... we're talking about 1949 or 1950... he was satirizing that smoking in movie theaters was taboo. If you took a smoke in a movie theater you would be very concerned the usher would see you and oust you. That's what he did.



He did a bit about a guy sneaking a smoke. I mean, can you think of anything further from what we see Rickles do now? I never got the feeling that Rickles was doing old jokes, I will say that. Rickles never looked like he copied anyone other than Jack E. Leonard. He was a little more caustic. Coming later, his style was more caustic. By then the public wanted it more caustic.

Kliph Nesteroff: I wanted to ask you about a nightclub called the Club 18. 

Will Jordan: I can't tell you much about that. Wasn't that the club where Jackie Gleason supposedly started to do insults?

Kliph Nesteroff: Jackie Gleason, Frankie Hyers, Pat Harrington Sr, Jack White did insult comedy there...

Will Jordan: Well, I'm just a little too young (laughs). Gleason never had a great nightclub act. Nevertheless, it was good enough for him to get discovered in California. The way I understand it - Darryl Zanuck wanted a backup for Jack Oakie [at Fox]. He had these comedians and the one that appeared to be closest to Jack Oakie was Jackie Gleason. Then he hired Milton Berle and Phil Silvers. The hero's friend. That was the character.

Originally, as I heard it, that characterization was established by Oakie. Another fascinating guy. His book Jack Oakie's Double Takes is one of the best biographies ever. It's got so much information about Carole Lombard. It's marvelous. She would talk about how large George Raft's penis was. When he's talking in the book about Carole Lombard, suddenly the Carole Lombard character takes over and the language changes. For most of the book Jack Oakie is quite nice and considerate, but when it's Carole Lombard suddenly everything is dirty, big cocks and everything.



That's Oakie quoting Carole Lombard. Carole Lombard was enormously popular. Like Jean Harlow she started out doing walk-ons in Laurel and Hardy. Everyone loved her. Earl Wilson used to say she had the greatest ass in the world. What I found interesting about Carole Lombard - here's a woman married to William Powell, she wanted to marry Russ Columbo, then winds up marrying Gable. Can you think of people less alike? William Powell, Russ Columbo and Clark Gable. George Raft, now, she didn't go with him. She was supposedly helping Betty Grable buy a gift for Raft. Story goes that she said to Betty Grable, "Get a cigarette lighter with a giant black snake crawling around it."



They all seemed to love George Raft and he ended up going with Irene Dunne. Irene Dunne, Norma Shearer, Betty Grable - and I think Sally Rand. He would have a hooker come by every day. They'd say to him, "George, you've got the most beautiful women in the world. Why would you have a hooker over?" "Because I want to have it at six PM every day." I thought that was interesting. 

Kliph Nesteroff: You mention George Raft's schlong. I wanted to ask you about Milton Berle's schlong and, specifically, if you know where that legend originated. Everybody talks about it - but when did that whole thing start?

Will Jordan: The reason it perpetuated is because it was the ideal subject for the famous Friars Roasts. Not the ones on TV, of course. The real Friars Roasts. It's amazing that more of them are not available. They are so much better than the TV roasts. You can't begin to imagine how much better. It's dirty - but the material is so brilliant.



There is a company that sells some of them. But the ones that aren't available - oh, boy. Everybody relates to TV and movies, but people don't get the message that they're not the whole world. You're missing a lot. You're leaving out nightclubs. You're leaving out the theater. Especially the New York theater of the 1930s. Certainly one of the greatest forms of entertainment. 1930s theater that had John Barrymore in person. We're missing that. There's no record of that. Jed Harris was on Dick Cavett. What I wouldn't give to see that again. Jed Harris had a bad reputation of being a lecher, but nevertheless a tremendous director who had sex with everyone in the world. That's something I would very much like to see. That and the interview Dick Cavett had where Noel Coward introduced the Lunts. That must exist.

Jed Harris was a very obnoxious man, but brilliant. There's a film with Robert Montgomery, can't think of the name, where he's supposed to be Jed Harris. He plays this wiseass guy. Robert Montgomery playing a real S.O.B. Very good film. What was your question again?

Kliph Nesteroff: Berle's schlong.

Will Jordan: Ah, yes, Dick Shawn...

Kliph Nesteroff: No, no, Berle's schlong.

Will Jordan: Well, Dick Shawn...

Kliph Nesteroff: No - not Dick Shawn - Berle's schlong!!

Will Jordan: Oh, Berle's schlong!