Dead Folks 2006 (Part 5)

A look back at the notable names and personalities who called it quits last year.

January 26, 2006

Film and TV

 

Virginia Mayo

Peaches-and-cream complexion, mega-watt blonde hair, and a five-star pair of legs made Mayo a second-tier pinup gal behind Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. Often cast as a chorus girl or a can’t-bring-her-home-to-Mom date, Mayo probably typecast herself with an excellent performance in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Playing the wife of a bomber pilot returning from the war, Mayo must have infuriated World War II-era viewers by registering, in no small way, her disappointment at finally seeing the flyboy out of uniform. She was not really dangerous, but never dependable, the type of gal who always stood by her man—until distracted by a diamond necklace, a shiny car, or a night on the town.

She also scored a knockout role opposite James Cagney in the insanely brutal crime thriller White Heat. She was Verna, the deceitful wife of homicidal thug Cody Jarrett. As an out-of-control hoodlum, Cagney was a blazing inferno, but audiences also noticed that the scheming blonde was no slouch at generating heat either. Did she really leap piggyback onto Cagney and ride him upstairs to the bedroom? Could you do that in 1949? —David Pelfrey

Sheree North

Bona-fide babe with a few miles on her—that’s probably the best way to describe the type of women North portrayed at the peak of her career in the late 1960s and early 1970s. North’s start in show business had something to do with her having a striking face and precisely the same “dimensions” as Marilyn Monroe. Fox studio bosses hired North as a threat to hold over an increasingly troublesome Monroe, so naturally the va-va-voom replacement got roles in such hubba-hubba foolishness as Living It Up; How to Be Very, Very Popular; and The Lieutenant Wore Skirts.

Her “look” during the 1950s was the Buxom Blonde Bombshell, but North actually looked better, and leaner, as she entered her thirties, probably because her features were better suited for the earthy, Ventura Highway, older-broad-next-door type (flowing mane, cutoff jeans, open blouse). She was in every medical, Western, and crime television drama you can name, but her best work is on the big screen in Charley Varrick, The Outfit, and other vulgar crime thrillers for which early ’70s Hollywood is notorious. That’s North, by the way, as Lou Grant’s girlfriend on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and as Kramer’s mom on Seinfeld. —D.P.

Paul Winchell

Winchell first gained notoriety as a ventriloquist behind dummies Jerry MaHoney and Knucklehead Smiff. A prolific inventor, he held 30 patents, including one for an artificial heart he designed in 1960. Winchell was also the voice of Tigger in the animated Winnie the Pooh. —Ed Reynolds

Mitch Hedberg

My friend was doing acid, and he said, “Man, the woods are really trippy, aren’t they?” And I said, “Maybe the woods aren’t trippy; it’s just our perception of them that’s trippy.” And then I realized I should have just said, “Yeah!”

That’s the quintessential Hedberg gag: drug reference, 1970s-era lingo, and stoner logic. The standup comic’s shoulder-length shag, blue-tinted shades, and platform shoes reinforced the ’70s vibe, but the soundness of his logic somehow made his jokes a lot funnier than they might be in a less elegant form. Elegance, after all, is any mathematician’s or philosopher’s goal when crafting a logic equation. Hedberg surprised audiences with the speed and concision with which he made his numerous, hilarious deductions, and because surprise is a key element of humor, Hedberg was always halfway home to cracking us up in the first place. Nonetheless, the crucial factor in Hedberg’s humor was that his logic, surprising or not, was unassailable.

Due to a confused, brink-of-disaster delivery, those loopy observations invariably sounded like pot-induced epiphanies, but in Hedberg’s case it’s as though he got so high that he bypassed stupid and came all the way back around to wickedly insightful.

 

	Mitch Hedberg

Sometimes my club intro is, “You may have seen this next comedian on ‘David Letterman.’ A better intro would be: “You may have seen this next comedian at the store.” The audience would go, “Why, hell yes I have! He likes kiwi fruit.”

To open one of his many Letterman gigs, Hedberg once briefly scanned a slip of paper and declared, “Okay, I’ve got 13 jokes, ready to go!” That got a big laugh. I asked him in a 2002 interview why such a straightforward statement was funny, and his response was even funnier: “Well, it is true that there were 13 jokes in that set. Maybe audiences just aren’t ready for the truth. They laughed because they were suddenly nervous. But that’s very strange, because they would not have known the absolute truth until I reached the 13th joke and then stopped.”

I also asked him why he laughed so much during his gigs. “That’s a good question, because the jokes are not cracking me up. As you may have surmised, I am already familiar with the material.”

Not enough people were familiar with Hedberg’s material, unfortunately, because apart from a few appearances on “That 70’s Show,” he was resolutely committed to the stand-up circuit, as opposed to the celebrity status that television specials and sitcoms bring comedians these days. Further hampering his rise as the Next Big Thing was his reputation as an unreliable abuser of substances. (In Hedberg’s mind, that would technically mean that he couldn’t be counted on to abuse drugs.)

That’s a shame, since he was the only genuinely innovative thinker in the comic realm of the past ten years. Jon Stewart, thanks to a team of writers, can mug for the camera and win points doing political satire. Ray Romano can be charming and amusing. Dave Chappelle is merely a one-man series of SNL skits, the punch lines of which are telegraphed far in advance. Lewis Black’s fury lasts only so long. Jimmy Kimmel is, well, he’s involved with a very hot Jewish gal who happens to be the funniest woman on earth. Chris Rock has simply updated Richard Pryor, as though both were some kind of hardcore software.

Mitch Hedberg, by way of strong contrast, stood on the stages of forlorn comedy clubs in Houston and San Diego and Birmingham, reeling off dozens of surreal, absurd, and inventive truths. There was one unassailable bit of logic that seems to have escaped Hedberg, or perhaps it was just that fourteenth joke he didn’t get around to telling until it was too late—that drug and alcohol abuse can destroy careers and kill people at a very young age. On the other hand, it could be that his jokes were not that funny, and perhaps his logic was not that sound. Maybe it was just our perception of his . . . never mind. Ponder these classics and decide.

I read that MTV’s Real World got 40,000 applications. That’s amazing, such an even number. You would have thought it would be 40,008.

I never joined the army because “at ease” was never that easy to me. It seemed rather uptight still. I don’t relax by parting my legs slightly and putting my hands behind my back. That does not equal “ease.” “At ease” was not being in the military.

This one commercial said, “Forget everything you know about slipcovers.” So I did, and it was a load off of my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell slipcovers, but I didn’t know what they were!

I got a belt on that’s holding up my pants, and the pants have belt loops that hold up the belt. What’s going on here? Who is the real hero?

A mini-bar is a machine that makes everything expensive. When I take something out of the mini-bar, I always plan to replace it before they check it off and charge me, but they make that stuff impossible to replace. I go to the store and ask, “Do you have coke in a glass harmonica? —D.P.

John Fiedler

As the voice of Piglet in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons, Feidler’s face is probably best recognized as the nervous, henpecked patient in group therapy on “The Bob Newhart Show.” Oddly, Feidler died the day after Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger. —E.R.

 

	John Fiedler

Sidney Luft

There are really only two kinds of Hollywood legends: those whom everyone reveres, and those whom everyone ridicules. Sidney Luft, Judy Garland’s third husband, falls into the unhappy second category. His marriage to the movie icon led almost immediately to a series of funny, not to say cruel, one-liners, such as studio boss Jack L. Warner’s zinger that “Sid is one of those guys who promised his parents that he would never work a day in his life—and he made good on the promise.”

That’s not the meanest thing anybody ever said about Sid Luft, and it isn’t entirely fair, either. Throughout his hectic and financially troubled life, Luft could often be found busting his ass—only busting it in all the wrong ways. The tough (and volatile) amateur boxer was a test pilot for World War II aircraft, managed a fledgling custom automobile outfit in Beverly Hills, and, after dabbling in horse racing, he produced a couple of B-pictures. His big project was Judy Garland’s “comeback,” which involved, well, getting married to her. It also involved the rather savvy business of transforming the drug-addicted, emotionally unstable movie star into a world-class torch singer, which was a crucial move considering that MGM, who was responsible for Judy’s condition in the first place, had basically dumped her onto the side of the road. Luft also produced the 1954 remake of A Star is Born, Judy’s comeback picture that was art imitating life in all kinds of ways.

Touring major venues around the world and hosting television variety shows ought to have made the Garlands—er, the Lufts—a wealthy couple, but something about bad accounting, mishandled expenses, and lawsuits over contracts had the notorious pair living paycheck to paycheck. Complicating the contactual disputes was Judy’s tendency to go on a binge for a series of no-shows. Even worse, sometimes she did show up. In 1965, Garland divorced Luft and moved on to one Mark Herron, whom she divorced after learning that he was gay, unfaithful, and involved with song and dance man Peter Allen.

That tawdry fiasco isn’t actually a chapter in Luft’s story, but it does earn him the distinction, shared with composer David Rose, as one of Judy Garland’s heterosexual husbands. After all, before Luft came along, Judy was married to Vincente Minnelli (Liza’s dad), and it certainly wasn’t predicted that Minnelli would ever be anyone’s dad. The director of musicals and sensitive melodramas was, as they phrased it in those days, musical and sensitive. This leads to the wittiest thing anyone ever said about Sid Luft. Canadian writer Mark Steyn, in his disturbingly thorough obituary for the former Mr. Judy Garland, described him as “an all but unique figure: a rare friend of Judy who wasn’t a Friend of Dorothy.” —D.P.

Ismael Merchant

The BBC’s online obituary for Ismael Merchant was followed by letters from around the globe expressing sympathy, loss, and fond memories of the legendary producer. An Irishman living in Cape Town thanked Merchant for a recipe for “chicken dijon in clove sauce”; an Indian man in Sheffield recalled his interview with Merchant during which the visibly exhausted producer exhibited much patience in “the hot Calcutta sun.” Another Indian man in New York recalled Merchant’s warm praise for director Satyajit Ray at a retrospective in New York City. The tributes ran for some length. Based on that outpouring, one couldn’t help suspecting that, irrespective of the Merchant Ivory Productions’ contribution to cinema, we had lost a bona-fide gentlemen whose influence on those he met extended far past their appreciation of his work.

That may be because the aptly named Merchant—the money man on the Merchant Ivory team—was by all accounts a charmer when it came to the art of persuasion, as contrasted with the standard film industry hustler. His handsome face and ready smile (in early years, many acquaintances and contacts assumed the Bombay native was a Bollywood idol), along with a knack for conversation and considerable culinary skills, could turn a pre-production meeting into a very pleasant and memorable evening. On a more practical level, it took some time for Merchant to convey fully his daunting knowledge of production design, period costume, and his fondness for literary heavyweights such as E.M. Forster and Henry James. Having investors sit down for a five-star curry dinner that Merchant himself prepared was the producer’s version of what Donald Trump calls “the art of the deal.”

But apart from all that, Merchant loved the hands-on, collaborative process of making movies, and teaming up with director James Ivory and writer Ruth Prawa Jhabvala in 1961 for a decades-long filmmaking venture (the longest partnership in the industry) was his way of proving it. The early productions were often good-to-excellent films that had limited distribution and success, but by the time of The Europeans, Maurice, The Bostonians, and A Room With a View, the phrase “Merchant Ivory” entered the lexicon as a term that described a certain kind of film, rather than merely indicating who made it.

 

	Ismael Merchant