Kliph Nesteroff: I was talking to Robert Klein this morning
and your name came up in relation to Marilyn Chambers the pornstar - before she
was a pornstar.
Buck Henry: Oh yeah, I was instrumental in hiring her for The Owl and the Pussycat. She played Klein’s girlfriend. He goes to bed with her.
Kliph Nesteroff: I want to ask you about That Was The Week
That Was. It is a revered, but forgotten program. When T3 - as it is often referred to in print - aired in the fall of 1963, it was the first attempt at political satire on
network television. What do you remember about working on it and why do you
think it failed?
Buck Henry: It kind of failed because… oh, I don’t
know why it failed. Let me think. There were a lot of reasons. It was somewhere
in between too slick and too loose. It had a lot of talent on it. It was fun to do, but I think it was a
little sophisticated for 7:30 on a Tuesday, and they frequently changed the time slot. They had to listen to the
voluptuously gorgeous Nancy Ames singing tricky, difficult songs. The English
program from which it was borrowed, taken, copied – had no time constraints at
all. Sometimes they went three hours. And they were brilliant performers. Really interesting people. They did real
hardcore politics too.
There was a famous episode in which some guy came out of
the audience and broke the jaw of a well-known commentator from a left-wing
magazine. He was sitting on his stool giving his editorial and this guy just
came out and decked him. That kind of
stuff. The American version was live - but we were not that live. In the second year [during the 1964 presidential campaign] the
Republicans bought our time period four weeks in a row [with paid political announcements]. That did us in. All
expectations left and people forgot we were there. That was probably the first
and only time that ever happened – that politicians bought out a show.
Kliph Nesteroff: That was calculated?
Buck Henry: Totally. Well, I have no reason not to think
that. If they had their choice? It was probably a cheaper half hour, I have to
admit.
Kliph Nesteroff: Leland Hayward, the producer of That Was the Week That Was, said NBC was sabotaging
their own show. Trying to dilute it.
Buck Henry: Mmm hmm. I’m sure they were taking some heat.
Kliph Nesteroff: What was Leland Hayward like?
Buck Henry: He was a real
New York guy’s guy. He had a pilot’s license and he was really handsome,
involved with many interesting women. I’d known him for a long time. He was a
friend of my father’s. He was show business hip - from theater to life. I
liked him a lot. He was an interesting guy.
Kliph Nesteroff: The talent list is amazing. Mort
Sahl, Henry Morgan, Steve Allen, Woody Allen, Dick Gregory…
Buck Henry: Nichols and May.
Kliph Nesteroff: Very impressive roster.
Buck Henry: The shame of it is it just doesn’t exist. They
let them all fall apart and no one kept a kinescope even. I went to an evening at the Museum of Broadcasting to talk about it and they had no more than forty
minutes of material. It had an
interesting, strange history.
Kliph Nesteroff: January 1959 you wrote a script
called Puzzle in the Park. It won a scripting award of some kind.
Buck Henry: Yes, it’s true. Some station in Chicago.
Kliph Nesteroff: It got produced as a teleplay…
Buck Henry: It did.
Kliph Nesteroff: What do you remember…
Buck Henry: Nothing at all.
Kliph Nesteroff: Did it help you get your footing...
Buck Henry: No, I don’t think it had any effect.
Kliph Nesteroff: How did you get hired on The Steve Allen
Show?
Buck Henry: Bob Rafelson with whom I went to college, was working with Dan Melnick at the David Susskind company. It was the first
and most comprehensive theater show on television. What the fuck
was it called? They did famous American
plays and they had great casts. Very
interesting. When Danny Melnick went to program for ABC, Bob Rafelson went with him and they put together The Steve Allen Show. Bob
dragged him to see me in The Premise, the off-Broadway show, and they
hired me out of that.
Kliph Nesteroff: You were teamed with Stan Burns. Was this a
team you were assigned to?
Buck Henry: Yeah, he was the odd guy without a partner because Herb
Sargent had left The Steve Allen Show to do That Was the Week That Was. They were partners for
years. Herb was famous for getting up and leaving the room and never being heard from
again, in the room or in a restaurant or in a show. I didn’t know who Stan
Burns was, but I fell in love with him immediately. He was an incredibly funny
man and a great character. The show only lasted for fifteen weeks.
Kliph Nesteroff: This was a new version of The Steve Allen
Show.
Buck Henry: It was referred to as the ABC Steve Allen Show.
Kliph Nesteroff: You also appeared on screen.
Buck Henry: I was also a performer, yes.
Kliph Nesteroff: Steve Allen started doing a pet segment at that time called Meeting of Minds...
Buck Henry: Oh, God, the horrible Meeting of Minds! No, I don’t think that happened on my show. It was probably on the Westinghouse show which was his next one. He did get Meeting of Minds on that one.
Kliph Nesteroff: Who was the company of players on your version of The Steve Allen Show?
Buck Henry: There were all kinds of discoveries on that version of The Steve Allen Show.
The Smothers Brothers. Jim Nabors. Tim Conway, who was then known as Tom Conway. Some guys who had done previous Steve shows like the Dead End
Kid...
Kliph Nesteroff: Gabe Dell.
Buck Henry: Gabe, whom we loved. There was also Louis Nye, Tom Poston, Don Knotts.
Kliph Nesteroff: How about comedy writers Marvin Worth and Arne Sultan.
Were they there as well?
Buck Henry: Yes, they were. Marvin Worth was a real character. He was very short. He
dressed like a poor hippie and he smoked a lot of dope.
Buck Henry: Well, Sultan and Worth like other duets in the
comedy writing field… one was a comedian and the other
wasn’t. I think it was Arne Sultan who wrote the comedy and Marvin was sort of his manager. Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker were like that too.
Kliph Nesteroff: Mazursky and Tucker got a job writing on The Danny Kaye
Show.
Buck Henry: We were all around at the same time. They wrote the
Kaye show, I wrote Steve Allen. Pat McCormick, of course, was on The Danny Kaye Show as well. So we all got to
know each other very well.
Kliph Nesteroff: Pat McCormick is legendary, at least within
showbiz circles.
Buck Henry: He is to me, yeah. I could write a whole book
about Pat McCormick. There was nobody else like
him. There was a famous roast in which Pat was sitting next to Carl Reiner. Pat took off his pants and underwear under the dais. Pat was six foot four. When he stood up everyone saw this gigantic naked ass coming into view. Carl said it was the loudest, most sustained laugh he ever heard in his life. Pat talked about how he wanted to look good when he stood up so he had been massaging and playing under the dais so it could get some form.
Kliph Nesteroff: Pat McCormick did a lot of roasts and always performed vile and
surreal material.
Buck Henry: Yes, the surrealism of it was really
interesting. I have used Pat McCormick anecdotes on many
occasions. If people don’t know who he is, they think I’m making it
up. I was in many places with him when it looked like we would end up in
prison. I loved him dearly. I hosted a week of The Dick Cavett Show when Cavett was on vacation and Pat McCormick was one of my guests. It was
hilarious and weird.
Kliph Nesteroff: He had an interesting trajectory. He was
also one of the first guys at the Comedy Store when it opened… I don’t know if
he actually did a nightclub act…
Buck Henry: He always did jokes about bowling with
midgets. We did an
act, which Mitzi Shore put onstage a few times. It was called Stand-up
and Blow, a take-off on Stand Up and Sing. It was really a
disparate group. Pat, me and that guy Famous Amos who sold chocolate chip cookies for years. We whistled patriotic songs and recreated the
raising of the flag at Iwo Jima with Pat McCormick as Iwo Jima. Some people came and saw it and thought it was a
meaningful moment. Others were appalled.
Kliph Nesteroff: You also wrote for The Garry Moore Show.
Buck Henry: It was terrific. There were really funny people
that worked on it. Garry Moore was a really nice man. The
head writer was a guy named Vinnie Bogart who was interesting to work for. It
was tailored for middle class, suburban America. It was just a job, but I kind
of enjoyed doing it. As Stan Burns would say, "It was at the worst of
times - good practice."
They
were funny guys, the six or seven
writers. I apparently replaced Woody Allen – so you can imagine how strange
that might have been. I don’t remember them ever talking about him, which is
interesting because these guys could sling some rude words around.
Kliph Nesteroff: Vincent Bogart seems less well known than other guys in the room.
Buck Henry: Yeah, I have no idea where he came from but I suspect that Joe Hamilton, the producer, really
appreciated him. He must have worked on one of Joe’s other shows.
Kliph Nesteroff: Coleman Jaacoby was one of the writers...
Buck Henry: Coleman Jaacoby was hilarious and a real New
York type writer. He hated the West
Coast and would never go there, so his work was confined to East Coast shows.
Kliph Nesteroff: Arnie Rosen.
Buck Henry: Arnie Rosen later produced Get Smart in its
fourth or fifth year. He was Coleman’s partner.
Kliph Nesteroff: And Carol Moore?
Buck Henry: Carol Moore. Really sweet, funny guy who could
move rather well between sitcom and insult comedy.
Kliph Nesteroff: You were a key member of an interesting but forgotten improv-sketch comedy collective called The Premise.
Buck Henry: I was standing in a bar one night. A friend of
mine who was a director off-Broadway said, “Tomorrow this guy Ted Flicker is looking
for someone to replace him. You should give it a shot.” I had no idea what he
was talking about, but I went downtown and I got the job.
Kliph Nesteroff: It’s nowhere near as famous as The
Committee or Second City but it was similar…
Buck Henry: It was famous in New York for other reasons. We
were shut down by the cops several times. There was this longtime cabaret
license feud. If you told jokes in public you had to have a license and all that stuff. Also we campaigned for John Lindsay. We
were pretty well-known. When I came in they had been going for about a year and
Flicker decided he wanted to do something else or back off or something. By
that time it had gathered an audience. We were never empty while I was there.
It was always a good audience.
Kliph Nesteroff: It got enough traction that a film was
made, The Troublemaker.
Buck Henry: I wrote it. Ted Flicker and I wrote it. It
had some good things. It had some funny moments and an interesting kazoo score by Cy Coleman.
Kliph Nesteroff: Was it political in temperament?
Buck Henry: It was local
political. It had local political references because Flicker felt there was an audience interested in his New York cabaret card troubles, but of course, no one was
interested in that. But there were
incidentals that were amusing. The great Tom Aldredge was the core of The
Troublemaker as an innocent come to the big city. It was fun to make, but we bankrupted Janus Films, which has always been on my conscience.
Kliph Nesteroff: How?
Buck Henry: How bankrupted or how on my conscience…
Kliph Nesteroff: How bankrupted.
Buck Henry: Well... we put them out of the filmmaking
business - cost them too much money.... They were, as you probably know, the most interesting….
Kliph Nesteroff: Sure, they distributed all the foreign
films.
Buck Henry: They became a distribution arm. Bergman and
everyone who was interesting came through there. We cost them too much money. I
think the film cost $230,000.
Kliph Nesteroff: Cy Coleman did the music.
Buck Henry: Cy Coleman, yes. It was a wonderfully funny, interesting score. When it came out, it did not do too much business. Bosley Crowther said, “Someone named Buck Henry is giving the
longest running impersonation of Jack Lemmon we have yet seen.” Which never
occurred to me – but it didn’t make me happy – and didn’t make me think anymore highly
of Bosley Crowther.
Kliph Nesteroff: He was a notorious square.
Buck Henry: Yeah, Crowther famously said we should bring in fewer foreign films because they weren’t doing any good.
Kliph Nesteroff: He despised Bonnie and Clyde, famously, in
stark contrast to Pauline Kael who hailed it as a new coming of age in
Hollywood.
Buck Henry: I thought he was a real jerk, so…
Kliph Nesteroff: Let me ask you about some other people in The Premise - Godfrey Cambridge.
Buck Henry: Yes, sure. Flicker put together a Black
cast and it was a great cast. Diana Sands, who died very young. She starred in the play of The Owl and the
Pussycat on Broadway with Alan Alda. She was in a number of Broadway plays. Godfrey, Diana Sands, Al Freeman Jr... He was
a terrific actor and he put together that company. Peter Bonerz was in a whole
other company that worked a lot outside New York. I was only in the Manhattan company with George Segal, Joan Darling,
James Frawley.
Kliph Nesteroff: 1964 you did a comedy record. There
were a slew of comedy records in the wake of Vaughn Meader and The First Family album. I used to have this album – At Home with That
Other Family.
Buck Henry: Is that what it’s called? Jesus Christ. George
Segal got me into that. He called one night and said, "You better get over
here. We’ll be working all night." He said a bunch of names were working on it
and I went over. It was really strange.
It was a lot of people with no ideas at
all. I have the record somewhere and it’s hard to listen to.
Kliph Nesteroff: There was a whole genre of First Family
rip-offs. Ron Clark did one called The President Strikes Back, Rich Little did one called My Fellow Canadians. The one you're on is a spoof of Khrushchev. I had one called The
Last Family, a spoof of the Castros…
Buck Henry: (laughs)
Kliph Nesteroff: At Home with That Other Family also features a young Joan Rivers.
Buck Henry: Good God, I have no memory of that. Hilarious.
Buck Henry: Oh, of course.
Kliph Nesteroff: You were once quoted as saying Get Smart was originally rejected for being un-American.
Buck Henry: That’s my memory of it. Whoever was the ABC guy – or someone working
for him – said, “Look, we can’t put that on the air. You do a jokey thing
about garbage when it’s dinner time in America? You have a cowardly dog and a cowardly hero? This isn't American!”
Kliph Nesteroff: How were they swayed otherwise?
Buck Henry: They weren’t! Somebody gave it to Grant Tinker at a different network and he said, "Okay, we’ve got Don Adams, let’s try it."
Kliph Nesteroff: How involved were you with the day to
day?
Buck Henry: I did two years. Don Adams was swell. He loved doing
it. It was a brutal schedule because we shot
them in four or five days. There was a lot of material and it was one-camera,
shot like a movie. So it was tough. It took a lot of man power to get that
made.
Kliph Nesteroff: Talent Associates was a David Susskind
thing…
Buck Henry: That was his main company, yeah.
Kliph Nesteroff: You wrote a pilot for Bob Rafelson called
Three’s a Crowd.
Buck Henry: Three’s a Crowd, yeah. I had the choice of
writing The Monkees or Three’s a Crowd. I picked Three’s a Crowd. It was
basically a reworked version of The Captain’s Paradise. Bill Bixby did the
pilot.
Kliph Nesteroff: Your other sitcom creation was Captain Nice. It did not endure.
Buck Henry: Among other problems, CBS counter-programmed it with
a comedy about a superhero at the same time - Mister Terrific. At the exact same time!
It was really bad. Then some other show that was a huge hit was on ABC at exactly the same time. That
didn’t help. It may never have found an audience anyway, but in those days those were major deal breakers.
Kliph Nesteroff: You wrote the screenplay to Candy. What kind of working relationship did you have with Terry Southern?
Buck Henry: I didn’t have a relationship with him. We were
passing acquaintances. I got friendlier with him later. Terry didn’t have
anything to do with it. I don’t know why. I assume they just took it away from
him.
Kliph Nesteroff: Around that time you formed a production company with Mike
Nichols and Mace Neufeld.
Buck Henry: I did. There was no purpose to it at all.
Kliph Nesteroff: Buck Mace Productions. Wasn't the purpose to
have somewhere to invest The Graduate fortune?
Buck Henry: No, because Mike wouldn’t let Mace near anything like that. I don’t know what it was. It was
Mace trying to get some business going.
Kliph Nesteroff: There was a rumor in the trades that the production
company was going to produce Carnal Knowledge. “Mike Nichols said Buck Henry will likely
produce Carnal Knowledge because ‘Sex is his field.’ ”
Buck Henry: (laughs) That’s very kind of him to say so, but
it was never discussed nor did it ever happen.
Kliph Nesteroff: Buck Mace Productions was planning on
adapting the autobiography of Aleister Crowley.
Buck Henry: Jesus Christ! I have no idea what came of that.
Kliph Nesteroff: It was going to be a motion picture called
Seven…
Buck Henry: Seven Foot Prints to Satan?
Kliph Nesteroff: Yes, that’s it.
Buck Henry: I don't know why they would report that because it had nothing
to do with Aleister Crowley.
It was a wonderful potboiler novel written by A. Merritt, the great pulp writer.
He was like the road company HP Lovecraft. This was a real
great pulp novel that I kind of adored and I thought would make an
interesting film. People are always
saying, "Let’s make it." They’ve been doing that for forty years, but it doesn’t
get made.
Kliph Nesteroff: That’s the nature of show business, isn't it? So much is announced and then never comes to fruition. I have a list of projects you were supposedly attached to that never came to be. Scoop starring Don Knotts and Jack Weston?
Buck Henry: I wrote a script called Scoop but it never
went into production and as far as I can remember there was never an actor
attached to it. It wasn’t made.
Kliph Nesteroff: 1973 – a screenplay called Scraping By.
Buck Henry: Never heard of it! I
wonder if it’s any good.
Kliph Nesteroff: November 1975 – you were on the board of
something called the American Academy of Humor and they did an award show on ABC. These are fairly obscure things, which is
why I am asking. I hope you don’t mind.
Buck Henry: Yeah, no, I have no memory of that one. People would always call and say, "Would you
mind if we put your name…?" They did this with everybody. Who else is on the board of the American Academy of Humor with me?
Kliph Nesteroff: Steve Allen, Alan Arkin, Bill Cosby, Jules
Feiffer, Sheldon Keller, Alan King, Harvey Korman, Carroll O’Connor, Joan Rivers, Dick Sargent and Neil Simon.
Buck Henry: Hilarious. I never heard of it.
Kliph Nesteroff: There was speculation in the late 1970s
that you were going to testify in the Harry Reems – Deep Throat trial.
Buck Henry: Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and I had all met
Harry and spent time with him at Hefner’s. When he got in trouble - we all being
traditional, leftist, free speech types - said, "We’ll testify." We were all
thrilled that we didn’t have to go and do it. It was in some terrible town
somewhere.
Kliph Nesteroff: Florida.
Buck Henry: Somewhere in Florida. It was not long after
that that Carnal Knowledge got in trouble and was pronounced obscene by
some halfwits in local government. I think in the Midwest, but I’m not sure. I
always thought of those two things as connected, but they’re not really. But
that was what that was about.
Kliph Nesteroff: Saturday Night Live. There’s a story that you were responsible
for the concept of recurring characters.
Buck Henry: I think I said to Lorne Michaels, “I’d like to do
that Samurai thing again if we do another show because it was fun.” I thought it was fun and the
audience really liked it. So, somewhere Lorne gives me credit for the idea,
which I can not even begin to take credit for. But it was nice enough for him to do that anyway and if there were
money involved I would definitely take credit for it.
Kliph Nesteroff: You hosted it several times… but did you actually write on
Saturday Night Live?
Buck Henry: Well, Lorne wouldn’t allow a guest to be called
a writer. But I wrote the first sketch I did on the show with Chevy Chase. Then later on I had input, but I would never be called a writer. I would say let’s
do this or that. And the girls, when they ascertained that I would be pleased
to play Uncle Roy, they asked if I had
any ideas. That happened many times over the five years that I was there.
Kliph Nesteroff: In 1984 you were involved with the other Lorne Michaels sketch series The New
Show. Again, another one of these shows absolutely loaded with talent that
ended up a commercial failure.
Buck Henry: It stopped breathing almost
immediately. All the stuff that made SNL work – didn’t work for The New Show. It was laborious. It was very
heavy, it was expensive, and it took a long time to shoot, as opposed to SNL,
which was ninety minutes and out. We were there at two in the morning still
reshooting stuff all the time. It only lasted fifteen weeks.
Kliph Nesteroff: The writing
staff on that show included future SNL writer Jack Handey.
Buck Henry: Jack Handey came in mainly to write for Steve Martin. SNL fired him, I think. Anyone with a brain would have kept Handey forever because Jack Handey is really funny, but I don’t think I ever sat in the room
with him.
Kliph Nesteroff: The First
Family – the film. It had Bob Newhart, Gilda Radner, Fred Willard, Madeline Kahn, Rip Torn... You were the director. Again loaded with comic talent. A good experience?
Buck Henry: It wasn’t. Failure is
never a good experience. There are just different levels of it and different
recovery periods. But – yeah, there were great people on it. It wasn’t one of
my happiest years.
Kliph Nesteroff: Was that due to studio interference?
Buck Henry: Not at all. No. They interfered sometimes in
various ways, but they were all trying to make it better.
Kliph Nesteroff: The title has no relation to the comedy
record.
Buck Henry: It was not intended.
Kliph Nesteroff: Fred Willard was in the film.
Buck Henry: He probably doesn’t remember it, but I knew him years earlier when he had a
partner named Vic Grecco. Willard and Grecco were hilarious. They did a truly surrealistic
act. Fred has always done good stuff. I knew them from The Garry Moore Show.
Kliph Nesteroff: The film was not what you had hoped. What was
it that kept it from clicking?
Buck Henry: Me, I guess. I can’t really compute it. It was kind of a nightmare.
Kliph Nesteroff: We're almost done here, a couple more things. Michael O'Donoghue is a legendary writer from the early years of SNL.
Buck Henry: I loved Michael immediately. I didn’t know him when Lorne said, "Do you want to do this parody
of Citizen Kane?" Michael had written it and I always found it hilarious. Then, of course, he did his famous impersonator
who was no impersonator at all, but just a guy who liked to suggest
famous people shove needles into their eyes. It would end with them falling on the floor and screaming. I loved it and I said, "Let’s do that one again and again!" It started with Mike Douglas
thrusting needles in his eyes and then we did Tony Orlando and Dawn thrusting needles into their eyes. The third time we did it – I thought
it should be the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, so we had like
fifty men and woman on stage in black robes shoving needles into their eyes and
screaming. I was very, very fond of that bit.
Kliph Nesteroff: You were involved in this notorious
Mardi Gras episode of SNL. I was surprised to find a rave of it in Variety – I had
always been under the impression it was somewhat of a disaster.
Buck Henry: Well, I'm sure it was a nightmare for the
production people, but I was having a good time. Jane and I were on a stage
waiting for this parade that didn’t even show. Herb was feeding us jokes from the
other side of the stage. You can’t get an experience like that everywhere. It
was very weird for everyone. We were surrounded by screaming drunks. It was a very, very weird ninety minutes.
