THIS 2004 ARTICLE IN THE CIA FRONT "WASHINGTON POST" IS QUITE THE INSIDE "WINK":
Squashed by the Beatles
The Mop-Tops Weren't the Only Act on 'Ed Sullivan' That Night. More's the Pity.
By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 6, 2004; Page C01
With vintage black-and-white clips and an outpouring of fond memories, the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' debut on U.S. television will be celebrated next week as one of the great turning points in the history of pop culture. Fans will relive the transforming spectacle of the Fab Four on "The Ed Sullivan Show" the night of Feb. 9, 1964, the beginning of the British Invasion, the dawn of a new age in rock.
And Mitzi McCall and Charlie Brill will remember the most godawful night of their lives.
Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall recall Feb. 9, 1964, when they shared the bill with the Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show," as a "nightmare." (Stephanie Diani - For The Washington Post)
"It was a nightmare," says McCall. "We just about wanted to kill ourselves."
Not everybody enjoyed the stateside birth of Beatlemania. Consider, for a moment, everyone else booked to perform on the Sullivan show that fabled night -- the entertainers who had to share a bill with the four lads who changed the world, in the very hour they changed it.
It was a 60-minute show, and John, Paul, George and Ringo played just five brief songs, three at the beginning and two at the end. In between, a benighted cavalcade of aspiring stars gamely tried to distract an audience that couldn't be distracted, offering more typical Ed Sullivan fare: magic tricks, tumbling acts, celebrity impersonations, a song from the Broadway [sic -- British West End] cast of "Oliver!"
And there was a young and unknown comedy duo called McCall & Brill, who thought they'd caught a huge break when their manager told them he had won them a slot on the biggest variety show of the age.
"We were cheering!" McCall says. "And then our manager said, 'It's with the Beatles.' And we said, 'Oh, okay.' We weren't really sure who they were."
McCall and Brill are on the phone from Los Angeles, where they live, still married and not quite retired from show business. They have a sense of humor about their disastrous walk-on before 73 million people -- about 40 percent of the U.S. population -- and they described it one recent afternoon, talking over each other and taking turns with the excruciating details. The passage of 40 years has given them some distance about the episode, and they realize now that the quality of their performance is beside the point. But there are limits. Brill has never watched a tape of their five-minute fiasco, and though it now can be seen on a two-disc DVD of the Beatles' four appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show" ("Ed Sullivan Presents the Beatles and Various Other Artists"), it sounds as if he never will.
"If I watch it, I'm going to be right back on that stage," he says.
The Birth of Beatlemania
The Beatles had released three singles in the United States by mid-December of '63, none of which had gained any traction on the U.S. charts. But by February, the group was a flat-out phenomenon: "I Want To Hold Your Hand" stood at No. 1, and two other tracks, "She Loves You" and "Please Please Me," were rising fast. A strangely worded entry in TV Guide for the Sullivan show that week stated that "30 policemen will be on hand in case a 'Beatle-Mania' reaches the riot pitch." There were 50,000 requests for tickets and just over 700 seats.
When McCall and Brill arrived for rehearsal the day before, on Saturday the 8th, they were shocked by the throng of young fans milling on the street outside the CBS theater. They assumed that the bustle was for Frank Gorshin, an
up-and-coming impressionist who later played the Riddler on the "Batman" TV series.
"We were like, 'Look at what happened to Frank!' " McCall says, recalling her awe. [YOU REALLY HAD NOT HEARD ABOUT THE BEATLES AND THE EFFECT OF THEIR BEING ON THE SHOW? THAT'S HARD TO BELIEVE, LENNON DOUBLE-BRILL]
As it happens, that was Frank Gorshin's reaction, too.
He declined requests for an interview [?!], but
through his agent [??] he passed on his initial thoughts as he arrived that day: "I thought, 'How do they know I'm here?' "
On Sunday, inside Studio 50, as the theater was then known, there was no confusion about the cause of the hubbub. Photographers swarmed the place for a shot of the Beatles. Sullivan, who usually skipped rehearsals, hovered for his cut of the glory.
As McCall and Brill ran through their act, Sullivan watched and decided that their routine, which he'd never before seen, was a little too highbrow for a national audience. So he beckoned the couple into his dressing room and asked them to audition some other material for him, on the spot. They did, and then Sullivan instantly fabricated a new sketch by cobbling together the bits he liked. It was a complicated and confusing patchwork, and McCall and Brill soon slumped to their dressing room, where they desperately tried to remember their instructions.
Then there was a knock on the door.
Brill recalls, "We open the door and there's this weird-looking kid with strange hair and he said something to us that sounded like, 'Give us a ko, glove.' We didn't understand him, so he said it again, and we started to laugh, and the third time he said it we finally realized -- he wanted a Coke. He was saying 'Give us a Coke, love.' "
McCall and Brill had the building's worst dressing room, which happened to house the soda machine.
Their visitor didn't have a dime on hand, so the couple treated John Lennon to a Coke, and only then figured out whom they were treating. They all had a seat and Brill asked Lennon how he felt about the unprecedented fuss he'd managed to stir. [!!!!!!!!]
"It's not for me," Lennon replied. "It's for Ringo."
Lennon had a pen and paper and sketched Brill during the conversation, leaving the portrait behind when manager Brian Epstein finally retrieved the missing Beatle.
"I thought, 'What a pretentious guy,' and I threw it away," Brill says, his voice dripping with I'm-an-idiot scorn.
By 8 p.m. -- showtime -- McCall and Brill had a draft of something. Ed Sullivan delivered his famously wooden introduction of the Beatles, whom he called "tremendous ambassadors of goodwill." He prepped the audience with quick mentions of the season's past highlights, which included a visit from the Italian mouse puppet Topo Gigio and the Singing Nun. Then: "Now yesterday and today, our theater's been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation, and these veterans agree with me that the city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool who call themselves the Beatles."
The audience sounded like it was ready to burst throughout this monologue, which it did when Sullivan finally said, "Let's bring them on!" and the band lit into "All My Loving." "Till There Was You" and "She Loves You" followed. Nobody had ever heard the sort of din that all but drowned out this performance -- not the stagehands who were around when Elvis headlined the program, and not the Beatles, who thought the crowd more crazed than any they'd seen. Lennon later said that, looking out from the stage, he'd thought the audience had gone out of its collective mind.
The Show Goes On
Here's the funny thing about a cultural revolution: There's no intermission to hail its arrival. It would have been perfectly reasonable for Ed Sullivan to return after the commercial break (for Anacin pain reliever) and announce the world just changed, and everyone but the Beatles has the night off.
Repercussions were immediate, but not that immediate. The show as booked went on.
And that's why the next thing the country saw that night was a guy in a tux named Fred Kaps performing, believe it or not, a card trick. (The lengthy silences that greeted his act are more bearable when you realize his bit was filmed in advance and dropped into the telecast.)
The cast of "Oliver!" was up next, with a young Davy Jones -- later the lead singer of the Monkees, a TV imitation of the Beatles -- in the role of the Artful Dodger. Gorshin ran through some impressions of Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Alec Guinness, among others, as he
presciently imagined a time when movie stars went into politics.
Ed Sullivan with the Fab Four during a rehearsal for the show. (AP)
"I'd like to thank all the liquor dealers all over the world for helping me get as high as I am today," Gorshin mumbled, doing a pretty good Dean Martin.
As he did many weeks, Sullivan then asked a newsmaker in the audience to stand up and take a bow. It was 23-year-old Terry McDermott, a speed skater who had just won the only U.S. gold medal at the Winter Olympics, which had just ended in
Innsbruck, Austria. McDermott, who was a barber when he wasn't training on the ice, acknowledged the applause and quickly retook his seat.
"It was an exciting evening," says McDermott, who now owns a manufacturing company in Auburn Hills, Mich. Before the start of the show, he met the Beatles backstage and, for a publicity shot, he pretended to cut Harrison's hair. "They were gentlemen, young guys, about my age, but they were calling me Mr. McDermott and my wife Mrs. McDermott."
Welsh-born actress and singer Tessie O'Shea next sang a medley of show tunes that included "I Got Rhythm," and plucked a banjo for her signature song, "Two Ton Tessie (From Tennessee)."
There was polite applause for everyone, but the audience was desperate to uncork again. One final act stood between the Beatles and their second set.
A Bad Night to Bomb
McCall and Brill were newlyweds in 1964. Each had started out with ambitions to act, and after landing a few small roles, each wound up in a Los Angeles workshop at Paramount Studios, taught by comedian Jerry Lewis. It was Lewis who introduced them;
they fell in love, married and developed a sketch comedy act that was inspired by the work of Elaine May and Mike Nichols. [ALSO KNOWN IN SOME CIRCLES AS "RIPPING OFF", "
IMITIATING" "APING" or PLAGIARISM]
They were in their early twenties the night that Sullivan bellowed out the cue that began the most agonizing five minutes of their lives.
"And now we take you to Hollywood and a very tense moment in the career of an aspiring actress," Sullivan said. "The office of McCall and Brill!"
The skit has a simple premise: Brill, dressed in a suit, plays a producer trying to cast an ingenue for a new movie. McCall, in a white dress, is his neat-freak secretary, though she'll also jump in and out of the frame to play three different gals who audition for the part. The first of them is trembling visibly when she introduces herself.
"Hi, sir. You might not remember me, but I was Miss Palm Springs 1956. I thought I was going to be nervous meeting a producer like you, but I'm not nervous at all." Pretending to be beside herself with nerves, McCall then repeats the whole sentence verbatim.
Nearly dead silence.
McCall portrays two more women -- one an overeager stage mother, the other a pretentious Method actor who, in a punch line that misses, announces that she's been studying her craft for just three days. Brill dismisses them both. McCall goes back to the character of the secretary, and Brill pretends to be struck with an inspiration when he removes her thick black glasses.
"Why, you are the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my life," he says, as she thrills to the possibility that she's about to land the part herself. Then Brill puts the glasses on his own face, takes a second look, and abruptly changes his mind. "Why, you're the ugliest girl I've ever seen in my life, sweetheart. Get out!"
It's too cruel to amuse, but it's the closer. As the band plays, the pair take a quick bow to modest applause. Brill looks defeated.
"We were in a daze," he says now. "It was
an out-of-body experience. I know we were onstage and I know we were doing something, but that's it."
Bombing is a bad idea any night, but if you could pick a night to bomb, maybe Feb. 9, 1964, wasn't such a bad one. All eyes, it seems, were on the Beatles, judging from a few in-person recollections.
Louise Harrison, George's sister, who was living in Illinois [??! What?] at the time and came to New York to nurse her brother through a bad case of strep throat, was sitting in the audience that night with Cynthia Lennon, then John's wife.
"About the only one I remember is Tessie O'Shea," she says on the phone from Benton, Ill., where she lives today. "And that's because she was from England."
Vince Calandra can't recall much about the other acts that evening, either. He was a production assistant at the Sullivan show at the time, and at the Saturday rehearsal he had stood in for the recuperating Harrison as the other three Beatles ran through their set and lights and cameras were blocked out and adjusted. (Sullivan slapped a mop-top wig on him for laughs.) For the show the next night, he was standing just offstage.
"I got the feeling that audience couldn't care less," he says. "To me and everyone else, those acts were just window dressing."
Here's how focused the attention was on the Beatles. One of the commercials that night was for Kent cigarettes, with "the Micronite filter." It was, no joke,
a cigarette with an asbestos filter. The man smoking it in the commercial was Paul Dooley, later to win fame as a character actor in movies like "Breaking Away," "Runaway Bride" and "Waiting for Guffman." A non-smoker, he says he landed the job by inhaling just once on the cigarette -- another puff would have led to a coughing fit -- and then staring at it lovingly.
"They aired that commercial hundreds of times," says Dooley, who now lives in Burbank, Calif. "But I've never heard that it aired the first night the Beatles played Ed Sullivan. Nobody has ever told me that. You're the first."
(Curiously, the Kent commercial has been omitted from the just-released DVD of the show. An ad for Pillsbury has been substituted. To catch Dooley's cameo you need to watch the original, which is available at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York.)
After the Fall
It might have been impossible to get noticed on a night when success was measured in deafening decibels. But for McCall and Brill, the show was so embarrassing that they didn't return home to California.
They headed south to Florida and spent the next week in Miami. One night, after catching a nightclub act, they were walking toward their car when a limo pulled up alongside them. It was the Beatles, who'd flown to the Sunshine State for their second Sullivan appearance, taped at the Deauville Hotel in Miami.
"Lennon rolled down the window and introduced us to the other guys," Brill recalls. "He said, 'What are you doing here?' We said, 'Escaping from you!' "
It was six months before their agent called again, McCall says, an eternity in showbiz time. They regained their footing, gradually. Brill wound up with TV roles -- he was a Klingon on an episode of "Star Trek," and he co-starred for years in the cable detective drama "Silk Stalkings."
McCall wrote for shows like "Alf" and "Mr. Belvedere," and she does voice-over work now. ("I'm in 'Ice Age,' the movie," she says. "I think I'm a turtle.") They both had roles on "7th Heaven," the WB series.
"We're lucky," says Brill. "We're survivors. Being on 'Silk Stalkings,' thank you God, has meant we don't have to have work. We're in our sixties and I can afford to do L.A. theater, which pays nothing, believe me."
"We fly to New York every year and stay at the Trump," McCall adds. "We go to Europe, we see plays."
They're also asked often about the events of Feb. 9. A few weeks ago, says Brill, he met Larry David, and the curmudgeonly comedian knew of the couple's brush with the Beatles and asked all about it. But in the many years they've shared their memories with friends and family, nobody has ever said anything positive about their performance. No one. Nobody has suggested they are judging themselves too harshly, although McCall's mother came close.
"She said we were much funnier when the show was rerun," Brill says, laughing. "She really said that."
www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A17603-2004Feb5(Said like Mr. Spock): Faaascinating ...