Laughing It Up with George Schlatter

I was delighted to see, on the People magazine site, an article about George Schlatter. George who? It seems there’s a brand-new documentary, Sock It to Me: The Legend of George Schlatter, now coming onto the market to celebrate Schlatter’s 96^th year.  Back when I was a college kid, Schlatter was the producer of a little sketch comedy show called Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. As a one-off TV special that aired on  September 9, 1967, the show generated such buzz—especially among young audiences—that it returned as a weekly series, replacing the once-huge Man from U.N.C.L.E, at the beginning of 1968. It ran until July of 1973, when its youthful sexiness finally ran out of steam. 

 I take all this personally partly because Laugh-In was must-see TV where I lived. Its inspired brand of silliness (Goldie Hawn frugging in a bikini and a lot of flower-power tattoos; Arte Johnson as a dirty old man constantly being whacked by Ruth Buzzi’s handbag; Lily Tomlin as precocious little Edith Ann proclaiming “That’s the truth!” and blowing raspberries) will always stay with me. At a time when public life seemed increasingly fraught, it was a joy to laugh at bad  jokes and sketches performed by talented showbiz newcomers.

  Hawn and Tomlin, in particular, have certainly gone on to major Hollywood careers. But the show was also so trendy that it attracted guests with high star-wattage. When Schlatter and his writers unearthed Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham’s goofy “Here Comes the Judge” routine, Sammy Davis Jr. started showing up regularly in a judicial robe and powdered wig to increase the hilarity: I’m not exactly sure why we laughed so hard, but it was awfully funny. (Briefly there was even a car model on the market called The Judge, meant to capitalize on the show’s catch-phrase.) There were also frequent guest appearances by major social and political figures. Early on, one of the show’s recurrent gags was for a cast member to say, “Sock it to me,” and then get doused by a pail of water. Pretty soon, there were quick cuts of celebrities—including presidential candidate Richard Nixon—reciting variants on the “sock it to me” line. (Nixon was all innocence, quizzically asking, “Sock it to me?) 

 The other reason I’m delighted to learn of George Schlatter being alive and well is that, as a long-ago budding journalist, I got to do a sit-down interview with the guy.  It was late 1968, I think, and I was writing on entertainment for the UCLA Daily Bruin. With Laugh-In such a money-maker, Schlatter was launching a new and even more adventurous show. Called Turn-On, it was intended to make creative and humorous use of computer technology. But critics hated it, and audiences did too. By the time my article was published, Turn-On had been turned off by the network, after a single episode hit the airwaves. It’s still considered one of the biggest fiascos in TV history.

 As Turn-On was being readied for that fatal first airing, Schlatter was delighted to be interviewed by a young college journalist. He was cordial and funny. After the Turn-On debacle and the publication of my interview, he took time out from licking his psychic wounds to write me a thank-you note. After all these years, I’d have a really hard time digging out either the published interview or his response. But I remember I had quipped that he—then almost forty—relied in conversation on a “predictably with-it vocabulary.” He answered back, “At the risk of exhausting my predictably with-it vocabulary, your piece is a gas!” 

Keep on trucking, George!  

 

O Little Town of Beverly Hills . . . .

Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA

Before 2014 ends, I need to salute the city of Beverly Hills, California, which has been busily celebrating the centennial of its founding.  Personally, I’ve always had a special relationship to Beverly Hills. Meaning: I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, less than half a mile south of the Beverly Hills border. My neighborhood was certainly nice enough, but the kids I met who attended Beverly Hills schools always lorded over me, insisting that their own schooling was far better (and far more rigorous) than mine. Such junior-grade snobbery certainly didn’t endear the city to me. Nor did the fact that the well-equipped Beverly Hills library refused to issue library cards to mere L.A. residents.

Still, I enjoyed living walking-distance from the tacky little monument (on a traffic island where Olympic Blvd. meets Beverly Drive) honoring the Hollywood hotshots who’d helped make a Beverly Hills address a status symbol. The monument displays bas-reliefs of Mary Pickford  and Douglas Fairbank and Will Rogers, and Conrad Nagel (who?), and I’d study them with reverence. Not far from the monument was the supermarket where it was once possible to see an aging Donald O’Connor pushing a shopping card.  Beverly Hills was also the place where I would spot celebrities in my dentist’s waiting room. Then there was the day I emerged from one of the city’s fancier department stores and discovered Sammy Davis Jr. out for a drive in his Excalibur. A one-man parade, he was dressed to the nines, and was happily waving to onlookers who gaped from the sidewalk.

One of Beverly Hills’ greatest treasures, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has been displaying in its lobby some grand old photos of the city’s glory days. There is, if memory serves, a photo of Jean Harlow posing poolside, as well as shots of other stars frolicking on tennis courts and otherwise looking both glamorous and carefree. I know that B-movie maven Roger Corman was overawed by Hollywood glamour when his family moved to the flats of Beverly Hills in 1940. In his graduating class at Beverly Hills High School were the scions of famous Hollywood families, like Lita Warner, Carlotta Laemmle, and the young Adolf Zukor. (The school’s movers and shakers actually tended to be those with more tangential movie connections, like the son of the maître d’ at the exclusive Beverly Hills Hotel.) Beverly High was elegantly designed and situated: its gymnasium, with a floor that opened to reveal an indoor swimming pool, actually had a featured moment in the 1946 classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. Fifty years later, the atmosphere of the high school – with its class divisions and its fashion-conscious student body -- was hilariously captured by Alicia Silverstone and company in Clueless.

The reputation of Beverly Hills as a place of wealth and snob appeal has made it a natural for the movies. Just think of how many films have the words Beverly Hills in their titles. Like Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Slums of Beverly Hills, Troop Beverly Hills, and even Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Not to mention at least four iterations of Beverly Hills Cop (none of which is about the city traffic officer who famously got slapped by Zsa Zsa Gabor.) Television programs trading on the city’s name have ranged from The Beverly Hillbillies to Beverly Hills, 90210 to (inevitably) The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Then, of course, there’s Pretty Woman, in which nothing seems more delightful than being a  hooker let loose on Rodeo Drive with a rich man’s credit cards.