World War II was my war. We fought the Germans. They were the enemy. There was a German problem. Of course, if we had stopped to think about it, which we didn’t because we were too busy trying to win the war, we would have realized that not every German wanted to fight us; maybe not even a majority of them did. But they didn’t oppose the Nazi extremists who had taken over their government and attacked us in the name of German racial superiority. I’m sure a lot of Germans agreed with Hitler. But those who were against him, didn’t dare speak up. A few did, of course, like the great German patriot Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He spoke out against the Nazi thugs. For his pains he was put into a concentration camp and died there.

Jihadist thugs are now attacking us in the name of Islam. No doubt there are a lot of Islamic believers who don’t support this. But like the Germans in World War II, they are not speaking up… for good reason of course, as there was a good reason back in the days of the Third Reich. But because they aren’t speaking up to oppose what is being done in their name, the world has a Muslim problem. Everybody knows this. Not many public figures dare to say it out loud. Some public figures don’t want to know it, much less say it out loud.

Bill O’Reilly, who has taken great pains in recent years to position himself as a centrist, has now had the courage to say out loud what everybody knows. The predictable cries of outrage have ensued. Juan Williams, a true blue liberal who has no doubt outraged his bosses at NPR for years by appearing on Fox, even if it was to espouse their cause, is now paying the price for O’Reilly. They couldn’t fire him; he doesn’t work for them. Juan does, so out he went. (more…)

The Screen Actors Guild just announced that a whole lot of its members will soon be without health insurance. That’s because the union has lost most of its clout and income. Now, you don’t become an actor because security is high on your wish list. If that’s what you want, go to work for the post office (where one of your fellow workers may shoot you). But we used to have a pretty good union with pretty good benefits. What happened?

Fifty four years ago, I was elected first vice president of the New York local of the television actors union which came to be known as AFTRA. My fellow board members and I fought hard to convince members to merge with the Screen Actors Guild.  Double the size of the union, double the bargaining power! But some of the members resisted, afraid that the number of actors competing with them for jobs would multiply. (Virtually all work produced for television was live and did not involve film and therefore SAG. Why let all those west coast people in on a good thing!)

As time went by, things shifted, more and more shows began to be produced on film and SAG became dominant. Now, it was the film actors turn to fear competition. Why let that little TV union in on a good thing. There’s almost no live TV left, these guys are nothing but news-casters and talk show hosts.  Every attempt at merger has failed because a vocal frightened minority in first one union and then the other fought tooth and nail against it on the grounds that there would be more actors competing against them for jobs. These actors are, I think, insecure in their talent so, naturally, scared of competition. (more…)

**If you TiVo there are Spoilers**

Who are you and what have you done with Jack Bauer? That’s what I wanted to scream at the pod person who starred on “24” last Monday. When the conservative creators of the show left and liberals took over, I was apprehensive. But by and large, the quality of the program kept up. I snorted, of course, when a bad character was threatened with torture by other bad guys. She was hauled into a medieval chamber filled with pincers, hot pokers and iron maidens. Then she was strapped down, a washcloth was draped over her mouth… and she was water boarded. Oy. Then, a week ago, Jack murdered her in cold blood, not to get information… she’d already been terrified into offering up the info… but just because he felt like it.

What?! 

But this week the writers went too far. Bauer tortures a bad guy horribly… and enjoys it. In the next room a woman can be heard screaming, “No. No. He’s a human being!” Bauer uses pliers and a blow torch. The guy screams horribly but refuses to give up. Bauer steps aside and mutters to himself, “This isn’t working.” Then, realizing that the terrorist (my word, not theirs) has probably swallowed what Bauer needs, he guts him like a fish, plunges his hand into the dying  man’s stomach and retrieves the cell phone pad or whatever the hell it was.  (more…)

Lenny Bruce was my idol in those days. He performed at the Village Vanguard, a Greenwich Village jazz joint which also booked comics on occasion. I was an up-and-coming comic and worked the club from time to time myself. But when Lenny was on, I sat in the back of the room to learn from the master. The nineteen fifties was a time of tumultuous change. Integration had been made the law of the land. President Eisenhower had ordered the national guard to escort a small group of Black children into their school in Little Rock. They had to pass through a mob of adults screaming nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger. What a terrible word. Lenny Bruce decided to deal with the issue.

One night at the Vanguard I watched in shocked amazement as he pointed to a customer and said, “Oh look, we’ve got a nigger here tonight.” The crowd froze. “And another darky is with him and a third jigaboo.” The silence was deafening. But Lenny was an advocate of the old show business maxim: if you’ve gone too far… go farther. He’d only just begun “Look over here”, he said, “A kike. And a mocky is at the table with him. And we got two spicks in the back. Hey, there’s a fag at the bar.” Slowly, the laughter began. Lenny said nigger a hundred times. Finally the crowd  was howling. The pure outrageousness of it all had gotten to them and they simply had no choice. 

When Lenny had them where he wanted them he turned serious. “It’s all arbitrary,” he told the crowd. “We agree to be offended by certain words. What if we decided that the word dentist was offensive. You dirty rotten dentist! Then that would become the insult du jour. But what if we simply decide not to be offended. What if we just take the sting out of these words and use them as terms of affection. ‘Hey niggah, how ya doin’? ‘Fine, honky, an’ you?’  What if we all just agreed that words can’t hurt? Then nobody could scream insults at a poor little Black girl in Little Rock.”  (more…)

My old Communist girlfriend was an exotically beautiful actress whose parents had emigrated from Russia and settled in New York City. Nola went to Party meetings and kept up with the correct way to think and behave by reading The Daily Worker. This was back in the fifties. In those days, the bulldog edition of the next morning’s Times, Tribune, News, Mirror and even the Worker would appear at the news stand on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty Second Street shortly before midnight. Actors, anxious to read tomorrows review of the latest Broadway play would be waiting there, along with entertainers curious to see if they’d made it into Walter Winchell in the Mirror or Ed Sullivan in the News.

Beautiful Nola was anxious to read the review of the new Off-Broadway show she’d just opened in. The Times and Trib would be covering it but Nola wanted to see what The Daily Worker had to say. Her face fell when she read it. The play was a socially relevant drama, of course, about the struggles of the Negro. She had chosen a dazzling white suit for her wardrobe. The critic said that this was unconscious racism on her part. She had, in fact, picked the suit because it made her boobs look good.  (more…)

Dennis Miller and I were gabbing on his talk show about the Gates-Crowley affair and a thought occurred to me: Professor Gates needs to forgive Officer Crowley and he also needs to forgive the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Here’s what popped into my head on the Miller Show. At the age of five, my mother told me that if my father ever left her she would kill herself, and that if I wanted to prevent that from happening, it was my job to keep him around. This is a heavy responsibility to lay on a kid of five but I accepted it without question. I adored my mother. She was beautiful, smart, sexy and funny. She was also a self-destructive drunk who had room in her heart only for my father. He was a charming sadist with room in his heart for no-one: a hot-shot liberal who helped found the New England branch of the A.C.L.U. but in private often used the word jewbastard.

Their marriage was, to say the least, tumultuous. I had been sent by Central Casting to play the small but important role of the child. After each of their frequent and alcoholic altercations, my father would storm out of the house (actually, the rented, upper half of a house in a working class neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts…Gates-Crowley country) and head off to spend a few days with one of his girlfriends. I’d be sent after him, once actually barefoot in the snow, a sobbing ten year old, to catch up and explain how much I loved and needed him and beg him to come back. “Go home,” he’d tell me. “I’ll be back in a while.” (more…)

I did my teen-age years in World War II. War news was a constant. We kept the radio on in our house to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from the rooftops of London, describing the blitz. Newsreel photographers, flying with Allied bombers over Europe, delivered raw footage to waiting planes at Heathrow Airport. The planes, flying dark rooms, would take off for America and fly overnight to New York. Technicians would edit and develop the film during the trans-Atlantic flight and Movietone News would have the footage ready for showing in movie theaters within hours. “Imagine,” we’d marvel. “These pictures were taken only two days ago!”

My high school pal Parker Swan and I would go to the Translux Theater in Boston which featured non-stop newsreel coverage of the war. When bombings of German cities were shown, we’d cheer. After V-E day, when the battle moved to the Pacific, newsreels featured G.I.s using flame throwers to dig Japanese soldiers out of their caves on Iwo Jima and Wake Island. When the enemy came screaming from his dugout, Parker and I would cheer. I sold newspapers, The Globe and Herald, in Harvard Square by the entrance to the subway station. When the A-bomb, about which we had been told nothing, was dropped on Hiroshima, the headline read New Kind of Bomb Devastates Japanese City. Everyone was elated. (more…)

“The picture got great reviews but let’s take a chance anyway.” That’s what I usually say to my wife when we’re planning a night out at the movies. Critics and I are not usually on the same page. But the Disney release called “Earth,” a compendium of brilliant nature footage cribbed from a BBC series, seemed irresistible, even though it got raves. True, there’d been quibbling about the corn-ball narration and the selection of stentorian-voiced James Earl Jones to deliver it, but the summation of the reviews was: don’t miss it.

Disney had taken miles of extraordinary footage from the long-running English nature series and condensed and shaped it into a story of sorts: mama polar bear and her cubs emerge out of hibernation in the arctic snow, with the adorable babies blinking at their first sight of the summer sun. She begins the task of teaching them to survive. Papa bear, meanwhile, or “dad” as he’s known in the narration, is off on the ice floe, trying to catch a seal for his dinner. But “global warming” is making this difficult to do as the ice is breaking up earlier than usual. Dad falls into the frigid water and begins swimming for his life. He swims and swims till he gets to Antarctica where there is an abundance of seals. But dad is too weak from all that swimming, can’t nab a seal, and lies down and dies. End of family. (more…)

Back in the fifties (the nineteen fifties, not the eighteen fifties) I did some writing for Mad Magazine, along with my friend Ernie Kovaks and a pair of comics named Bob and Ray. Bob Elliot was the father of Chris Elliot, who we didn’t know at the time would turn out to be funnier than his dad. The magazine was started by a guy named Al Feldstein. Well, actually, it was started by a guy named Harvey Kurtzman, a brilliant genius who lasted three issues and then got kicked off his own creation by the publisher, who hired Feldstein to take over. I guess Kurtzman was a little too nuts even for Mad. He was a powerhouse of a guy whose girlfriend at the time was a hot young babe named Gloria Steinem. Men are attracted to youth and beauty; women are attracted to power.

Anyway, I guess Feldstein was just crazy enough to make the magazine a huge success. Now long retired and living in Montana (which seems to be a magnet for marginally crazy people), Feldman, an old lefty, recently forwarded an e-mail to a friend of a friend of mine who forwarded it to me. A million plus people have watched this e-mail by now. It’s a slickly produced film attacking Barack Obama. Any surprise that the President’s base is now turning on him?  It explains that he (Obama), is in the pocket of some amorphous, only hinted-at, world-wide society of manipulators who are behind everything bad in the world: “The Trilateral Commission, founded and conceived by David Rockefeller and his obscenely wealthy (redundancy?) Bilderberg Society cohorts… an amalgam of carefully chosen members of ‘The Elite’… the powerful rich… from the three main areas of the world: The U.S.A…. Europe… and Japan… who would slowly and carefully maneuver the free people of the Earth into a ‘One World’ system of Corporate/Fascism.” This is very old stuff. Conspiracy fodder. Been around for years in one form or another. International bankers turning Canada, the U.S. and Mexico into a single country, etc. And it’s all slickly packaged with music and graphics. (more…)

The Los Angeles Times tries hard to present different viewpoints on its Op-Ed page. But last week, they hit a new low with a column by a lawyer named Joseph Margulies, pleading for mercy on behalf of one of the three terrorists America has water-boarded since 9/11: Abu Zubaydah. Here’s some of what the column said: “Partly as a result of injuries he suffered while he was fighting the communists in Afghanistan, partly as a result of how those injuries were exacerbated by the CIA and partly as a result of his extended isolation, Abu Zubaydah’s mental grasp is slipping away.

“Today, he suffers blinding headaches and has permanent brain damaage. He has an excruciating sensitivity to sounds, hearing what others do not. The slightest noise drives him nearly insane. In the last two years alone, he has experienced about 200 seizures.

“But physical pain is a passing thing. The enduring torment is the taunting reminder that darkness encroaches. Already he cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name. Gradually his past, like his future, eludes him.” (more…)

In September of 2001, I found myself employed at a theater in Los Angeles playing the part of Ben Franklin in the musical “1776.” The show is about the signing of the Declaration of Independence: an entertaining history lesson that concludes with all the bells in Philadelphia ringing and the actors freezing in a tableau recreating the famous painting of the original signers. It stirs up feelings of patriotism in the hearts of all but the most America-hating of theater goers.

As luck would have it, the first week of the show’s run concluded on Sunday September 10th. The next morning, I slept in, then awoke to find an answering machine message from my wife, who’d driven off to a breakfast date. “Turn on the TV,” her breathless voice said. “New York City has been bombed.” I spent the rest of the day, like most of the country, glued to my set, unable to believe what I was seeing or hearing. (more…)

From the Los Angeles Times, Thursday January 29th, 2009:

2 DIE IN HEAD-ON COLLISION

A Culver City police officer and a Van Nuys man were killed Wednesday in a head-on collision that closed several lanes of the 10 freeway for hours during the morning commute.

Sgt. Curtis Massey, 41, was driving east on his way to work when he was struck about 5 a.m. just west of National Boulevard by a silver Toyota Camry traveling the wrong way, said Officer Miguel Luevano of the California Highway Patrol. Massey’s unmarked police car, a four-door Dodge Charger, was engulfed in flames.

 No one else was hurt and the CHP is investigating. Pete Demetriou, a radio reporter for KFWB-AM (980) was driving to work around 4:55 a.m. on the eastbound 10, when he saw a car, driven by the Van Nuys man, coming toward him. (more…)

Why do people do the things they do? Gary Larson could have gone on using his old Far Side cartoons to make calendars forever. People like me would have kept buying them. But this year, he apparently decided he had enough dough and pulled the plug. (God provided: I found an even better calendar: Cats That Look Like Hitler).

Why did Larson give up all that free money? Why did Madoff think he could get away with his Ponzi thing? What made Mickey Rourke become a wrestler? Strange are the ways of human behavior.

Why did I decide to write a book about becoming a Christian? Don’t I have enough trouble? Last year, I was guesting on a TV show, sitting on my canvas chair between takes, reading a C.S. Lewis book called MERE CHRISTIANITY. I can’t tell you how many people, cast and crew alike, came over to ask me about it. There seems to be a hunger out there, even in the vast, atheistic wasteland called Hollywood.

I believe there’s an emptiness in all of us that only the Holy Spirit can fill. Good sex does a pretty good job of plugging it up, but not for long. Cocaine and booze work for a while, too. Fame and money aren’t bad, either. That’s why so many people move to Hollywood. But when they’ve used up all these things, they’re still left with a hole in the middle of them that the Creator stuck there, knowing that eventually they’d feel the urge to fill it and do what they had to do to seek Him out.

(more…)

“What puts the musk in muskrat? Courage!” Thus sings the great Bert Lahr in THE WIZARD OF OZ. Courage. In what short supply is this emotion in our country today. My wife and I just finished watching the HBO miniseries JOHN ADAMS. How brave our founding fathers were. And their fellow colonists as well. Children were not coddled. They learned at their parents’ knees that life was hardscrabble and nothing came easy. Freedom was worth fighting for. Divine Providence was what they relied on, but they knew that God demanded that they do their parts. No sense of entitlement, just hard work, struggle and fighting for what you wanted. And if it didn’t come, no whining, just rolling up of sleeves and starting over.

When at the age of ten I was sent to summer camp, the rule was no phone calls to or from parents. The separation from home was to be complete. I remember the boy in the bunk underneath me, Mouse Taylor, crying for his mom the first few nights. The counselor, an eighteen year old Norwich student and the first grown-up we came to worship, was unmoved. Growing up was what we were there for. At the end of the summer, Mouse and I had tears in our eyes as we parted forever (we had become fast friends) but that was the only crying we had done for all of July and August. Recently in the New York Times, a piece ran on how summer camps today have to hire specialists to deal with anxious parents calling sometimes several times a day to see how junior is doing. Kids are given cell phones, sometimes two in case the first is confiscated. We are raising a nation of sissies.

(more…)

What is it with me? I seem to be an incorrigible black-listee.

Back in the fifties I was the hot, young comic on CBS and a regular on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was also starring in shows on Broadway and acting in dramatic programs on television. Those were the glory days of television. It was like theater. It was live. If an actor forgot a line, he improvised. There was an immediacy to it. Even mediocre programs had the excitement of being live

I was all over the place. A show called Broadway TV Theater put on plays five times a week, live — the same play, Monday through Friday at eight o’clock . Wonderful old chestnuts like Three Men on a Horse and The Cat and the Canary (I played the part that Bob Hope had originated).

I had come to New York seeking my fortune after a few years of honing my craft as a stand-up on the road.

I had played the Moose Hall in Altoona and the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Fall River. There were no comedy clubs in those days where people walk in laughing at the doorman. This was rough training ground: “You stink! Bring out the stripper!” Try coming up with an ad lib in response to that. I wrote all my own material and tried it out in front of hostile audiences who had been trained to heckle the emcee. I had a crew cut and wore a three button suit. My opening line was, “My name is Orson Bean, Harvard ’48 (pause), Yale nothing.”

Only the band laughed: “You’re too hip for the room, man.” I didn’t give up.

(more…)

The movies saved my life. I grew up in the great depression, the only child of a pair of star crossed lovers. My father lost his job. My mother drank. They fought.  The movies were my escape. Of course, this was true of everyone back in the thirties. Forgetting for an hour or two cost a dime. But the movies represented a lot more than escape to me. They represented moral guidance. What I learned at home was despair and hopelessness. What I learned at the pictures was don’t give up the ship, we have only begun to fight, it’s always darkest before the dawn.

Tom Edison (Spencer Tracy) fought against all odds to invent the light bulb (and just about everything else). Young Tom Edison (Mickey Rooney) fought to grow up to be that great inventor. Don Ameche was Alexander Graham Bell who struggled to invent the telephone (and ultimately got to say, “Come here, Mr. Watson, I need you”). Edward G. Robinson played Dr. Ehrlich, whose magic bullet cured syphilis. Clark Gable crossed the wide Missouri.

Greer Garson played Marie Curie who discovered radium. Paul Muni was the great Louis Pasteur, who revolutionized medicine by proving the existence of germs. Jimmy Stewart filibustered in Washington and soloed across the Atlantic. These were the movies I saw and when they were over, I would emerge from the theater into the afternoon sun, saying to myself, “Yes, I can. If they can do it, so can I.”

I truly believe that these pictures saved me, gave me the inspiration to overcome what I was going through at home and do whatever was necessary to make a life for myself.

(more…)