Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia Tribute to Ernie Kovacs

Ernie Kovacs - A Genius of the Visible, He Made the Impossible Plausible and Beat the Odds Every Time but One

When he was the fractious little boy of a Hungarian-American saloon keeper, his mother embarrassingly dressed him in Lord Fauntleroy suits. "It was,'' he said, "like walking around with a sign that said KICK ME." When he grew up, Ernie Kovacs still attracted attention, but the words on the sign, in the hipster parlance of his time, had changed to DIG ME. He checked in at 6'2" and 200 lbs., with a massive pompadour of brown hair, caterpillar eyebrows, a push-broom moustache and a cigar he could have used to hit fungoes.

Two maxims guided Kovacs's life and career: NOTHING IN MODERATION and ON THE CONTRARY. A compulsive gambler, he once phoned a friend with the challenge: "Gotta deck of cards?...$500 says the first card you cut from the middle is red." That was also the color of his bank balance at the end of most all-night poker sessions. He flew to pre-Castro Cuba to bring back those stogies ($13,000 per year). On TV he spent thousands on special effects lasting 10 seconds. He demanded an impossible amount from himself, and even more from his bosses and his staff, who were equally worn out with laughter and long hours. "Your other life had to be from 2 to 3 in the afternoon," said an NBC production assistant, " 'cause the rest of your life was with him."

Previously a radio funnyman, Ernie started out in TV on a small Philadelphia station, unceremoniously plunked into the morning slot at a salary of $125 a week. Within weeks a loyal audience materialized. They called themselves the EEFMS—the Early Eyeball Fraternal and Marching Society, the first stirrings of a cult that was soon to reach Broadway and Hollywood.

After producing hilarity on a shoestring, he was offered a whole shoe case by national TV. Freshly separated from his wife, dancer Bette Wilcox, Ernie and his two daughters moved to the Big Apple in the early 1950s. In those days, sitcoms were heavy on plot, and quiz shows filled the air with shrieks of greed. Kovacs experimented with silent comedy. Under his direction, the ballet Swan Lake was performed by gorillas in tutus. When a gorgeous bather stepped wetly from her tub, she was followed by a long parade of admirers emerging from the water single file. A perfume model started her pitch and received a custard pie in the face. A Volkswagen salesman leaned on a hood and the car plunged through the showroom floor. The legs of the Mona Lisa dangled below the picture frame, while a dog licked her bare feet—La Gioconda's mysterious smile explained at last.

He gave the gorillas a permanent slot as the Nairobi Trio, three musical simians who conked each other with metronomic precision. Jack Lemmon once capered anonymously under one of the rubber ape masks; so did another fan named Frank Sinatra. Meantime Ernie disappeared into a whole cast of screwballs. He was Percy Dovetonsils, the lisping laureate of prime time; Matzoh Hepplewhite, a drunken magician who performed the world's most fatal sword trick with an unwilling volunteer; Whom Dunnit, a panel show emcee who shot contestants when they offered the wrong answer; Eugene, a surrealist who could sketch a lamp and then switch it on.

Kovacs's favorite partner was Edie Adams, a pretty blond singer who became his second wife in 1954. But he had only one real collaborator: the camera. Working with (and against) it, he walked on ceilings, poured milk horizontally and made actors evaporate in mid-scene.

By the late '50s Kovacs was bicoastal. He starred in a handful of indifferent films and continued his pursuit of the extravagant gesture—including an asphalt turntable in his driveway to spare friends the inconvenience of U-turns. Few of them were aware of how little money remained after the gambling debts were paid. Even fewer knew about the miseries of a bizarre battle for his two daughters. Bette had spirited the girls to Florida. It took Ernie nearly three years, uncountable cash and a series of detectives to track them down. Even that didn't ruin his large capacity for fun. "He was not a brooding comic," remembers Edie. "He'd wake up on a manic high. He'd say, 'This is the greatest breakfast, the best eggs! This is the most terrific coffee I've ever had!' Once he threw a paper bag at me—'Here!'—and rattling around inside was a string of pearls. For our first date, he didn't have a car. So he took his entire life's savings and bought a car. He said, 'Well, I didn't want you to have to take a cab.' He taught me to eat caviar by the spoonful. He was a pleasure and a joy to live with."

By the spring of 1961 Hollywood also had fallen in love with him. Kovacs smiled back, rolled high, lost big and acted as if there were one tomorrow. By the night of Jan. 13, 1962, there was none. He left a Westwood party and started to drive home through the rain. His Chevrolet Corvair skidded on the wet pavement and plowed into a utility pole. He was 42.

Twenty-seven years after his death, he continues to influence performers who were hardly big enough to twist the dials in the '50s. Chevy Chase has acknowledged a debt. Billy Crystal is a fanatic Erniephile. Laugh-In tumbled from his voluminous overcoat, as did many of Monty Python's blackout sketches. David Letterman's defenestrated watermelons and Jell-O swims are Kovacsian. It is fitting that Buster Keaton was his last co-star. But somehow all this fails to compensate for the extinguished wit and spirit. Every season it becomes more clear that Ernie Kovacs was the Chaplin of television, and that if genius is imitable, it is irreplaceable.

Comedy Veterans Remember TV Pioneer Ernie Kovacs

Comedy Veterans Remember
TV Pioneer Ernie Kovacs

by NPR Staff

July 2, 2011

 

When Ernie Kovacs was a star in the early days of live television, he was called a clown, an oddball and an innovator. But in the years since 1962 — when he died in a car crash at 42 — he has been hailed as a genius.

Much of the humor for which Kovacs became noted was visual: a trio of musicians wearing gorilla suits and playing as if they were part of a children's toy; or a lady in a bubble bath who gets visitors popping up in her suds.

Kovacs rarely told jokes, and he didn't believe in punch lines. He was funny in an unhurried and usually unscripted kind of way.

Now, a new DVD box set of Kovacs' work — The Ernie Kovacs Collection — is out with 13 hours of shows, specials and bits culled from a time when a television audience could be enchanted by seeing a man pour milk sideways.

His humor didn't make an audience laugh so much as gasp — or just shake their heads.

Weekend Edition calls on three comedy writers and an actress who worked with Kovacs for their thoughts on the pioneer's legacy. George Schlatter was executive producer of the sketch comedy program Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and compared notes with Kovacs; Robert Smigel has written for Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Conan O'Brien; Bill Scheft has been on David Letterman's staff for more than two decades; and Jolene Brand Schlatter, George Schlatter's wife, often worked alongside Kovacs on his various projects.

They join NPR's Scott Simon to discuss how Kovacs helped change the face of television comedy.

Listen here

From the mind of Ernie Kovacs

By Susan King, Los Angeles Times

April 22, 2011

From the early 1950s until his tragic death at the age of 42 in 1962 in a car crash, Ernie Kovacs turned the small screen into his own personal TV funhouse of cerebral, goofy, eccentric and visually inventive comedy, most often working with his wife, singer-actress Edie Adams. His comedic influence can be felt in such later groundbreaking shows as "Monty Python's Flying Circus," "Laugh-In" and "Saturday Night Live."

Thanks to his late wife, who saved an enormous amount of Kovacs' TV work, Shout Factory! has been able to release this week a six-disc DVD set, "The Ernie Kovacs Collection." It features 13 hours of TV content including episodes from his Philadelphia and national morning shows; episodes from his NBC prime-time show; his ABC game show, "Take a Good Look"; five specials that aired on ABC in '61 and early '62; his famed Dutch Masters cigar commercials; and even his hosting of "Silents Please," where Kovacs featured a silent movie each week.

Kovacs, said Paley Center for Media curator Ron Simon, was a breed apart because "he was able to create television almost directly from his own imagination, from his own mind. Television is so much of a collaborative art, but Kovacs made his TV very personal."

Simon said Kovacs realized he was a comedian in a box. "We experienced him as a series of pixels and he played off of that. He instinctively understood that there was a total falsity to being in everyone's living room. His great sign-off line, 'It's been real,' is so ironic. He understood, it's not real at all."

Ben Model, the curator of the DVD collection, said Kovacs' appeal was "the personal connection" he had with viewers. "He always speaks like he is across the room from you."

The DVD set illustrates Kovacs' growth over the decade from being a casual talk show host to "this visionary who did those eight specials that sort of redefined what we think of media," Simon said. "The specials are so strange. There was no linear narrative. "

Veteran publicist Henri Bollinger represented Kovacs from 1959 until his death and then continued to represent Adams until her death in 2008.

"Nobody could figure out how his mind worked," Bollinger said. "I am talking about people who worked with him. He would do things that made absolutely no sense. He never had a script, or at least he never had a script that he showed, anyway."

Bollinger recalled that when he did the specials, the crew and cast would show up and "nobody had a clue as to what the show was about. He would go about and say, 'We are going to do this, we are going to do that.' When I would see the show, I couldn't figure out what it was going to be about until we actually saw the show. The end result would be mind-boggling."

Bollinger said Kovacs was working on a small budget on those last specials because he had to have full control, so Dutch Masters paid for a half-hour show on the network every other week. "They would let Ernie do whatever he wanted to do. He was so identified with cigars, all they wanted was to get him to do commercials for them."

One of the sketches from the specials featured quick little comedic bits with a woman in a bubble bath set to the song "Mack the Knife" in its original German. A periscope would appear emerging from the tub or at another point, her feet would be sticking outside of the tub. Actress Jolene Brand played the woman in the tub.

"I thought he was just the sweetest man. He was laid back," Brand said of Kovacs.

That is, until Kovacs and Brand's husband, producer George Schlatter — who credits the comic for influencing the visuals on his seminal TV comedy variety series, "Laugh-In" — got together.

"He became zany and funny," Brand said of Kovacs. "It was really interesting their philosophy on comedy and what's funny. Ernie would tell him what he was going to do and George said, 'That's great, Ernie, but you should really have a punch line. Don't you feel it needs a punch line and Ernie would say 'no.'"

"One day he called me and said, 'Do you want to come over to the studio?'" Schlatter recalled. "'I want to tell you a punch line and see if it works.' So I go over to the studio and he was standing there. He put his hand on the fender of a car and it went through the stage. He said, 'Is that a punch line?'"

susan.king@latimes.com

The Ernie Kovacs Show

Rex Reed's Review of Barbara Loden's "Wanda"

An "E" for Effort