Fey Fellows, Alice Ghostley, and "Spicy" -- Garbo

 During a Pandemic Organizing session recently, Ilooked at the cover of this "Laugh-In" cast album and just for a second when I saw the guy next to JoAnne Worley, I was temporarily confused about who he was. I mistook him for Paul Lynde. 

I stood there holding the LP, thinking "I don't remember Paul Lynde being on "Laugh-In." Even if he was, it couldn't have been often enough to be on the cast album. . ."  Adding to the mental muddle, I'd happened, the day before, to have watched a video clip of Paul Lynde chatting with Johnny Carson. Lynde was on my mind.  And you know, it's been a minute since "L:augh-In" was on television.

Eventually my mental gears began to turn, and I realized that the person on the "Laugh-In '69" album cover was not Paul Lynde, but rather Alan Sues. Back to confusion again, though, as I had to sort out the fact that Alan played two characters on the show, both of them named Al. 

So I put down the cast album and went off to watch clips on YouTube. As I went through the short videos, I remembered that of the two characters, the one I found funny was Uncle Al, the Kiddies' Pal. Uncle Al was a hostile, hungover jerk in a Willie Wonka top hat and oversize polka-dot bow tie. After greeting children through a cartoonish faux window and then coming out (as it were) through a cardboard doorway to lead the children in the little rhymed introduction, Uncle Al would look inside his flower-power "Fun Kit" for a prop -- a stuffed animal, a doll, a puppet, something like that. 

The best part of the Uncle Al skits was the off-camera heckling. "Laugh-In" cast members, including Ruth Buzzi, would pretend to be unseen children in the audience, sometimes there was an adult man (who I suspect was George Schlatter) who heckled Al.  The man's heckling was sometimes funny, especially since Uncle Al often responded acidly to the shouted remark. But as I watched the short clips, I began to remember the bad old days before Gay Liberation. I cringed as I encountered one  homophobic slur after another. In one skit, the male heckler suggests that a marionette's name is "Brucie," while in another clip, Al turns his head, startled, as the man yells "I love you, Uncle Al!" After a moment, Sues as Uncle Al says, schoolmarm-ishly, "Oh, I bet you do, Roger!" There's a little more banter and then Uncle Al says to the audience, "Somebody better get the fuzz on Roger." It was just a joke, I know, but I thought "Hey, which side are you on? The cops used to hassle LGBT folk big time."

I can tell, from mislabeled YouTube videos, that some fans confuse Uncle Al the Kiddies' Pal with Sues' other "Laugh-In" character, Big Al the sportscaster. The gag for that one was that Big Al was extremely effeminate. He began each segment by holding up a little tinkle bell, which he would ring before doing his comic sports report. Tinkle bell, Tinkerbelle.  Sigh. 

Once I'd started watching this stuff, I began digging through what I could find on Sues' life and career. But the more Alan Sues TV moments I found online, the sadder and cringier I felt. I clicked on a a daytime-television moment in which the insanely-blonde Carol Wayne, a brash game show regular, bullied Alan while he sat there passively resisting her. The contestant on the show needed to choose a celebrity to answer a question about the word "tutti-fruitti." The player chose Alan (quel surprise) and then everyone reacts.  Carol is the very last to realize where the humor is going and then she begins teasing Alan. I'm sure she thought of herself as tolerant but at the same time I suspect she was a little miffed that her charms were lost on him (for oh so many reasons). After about a minute of watching the game show, I had to turn the video off because it was very hurtful tenth grade stuff. 

But like Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly, Alan recognized that the defiant-fairy routine was his most marketable asset and I imagine he got some pretty good money for being a twirly Peter Pan in this peanut butter commercial. 

And then there's the JoAnne Worley costume. Comic drag is something I personally find hilarious, and many "Laugh-In" fans must have felt the same way, as Sues' impersonation of JoAnne Worley is still something fans of the show write about online, with fondness. And  on the jacket of the "Laugh-In '69" album, who's Alan right next to? JoAnne, of course. 

Sues, who appeared on Broadway and in London in several shows, beginning with "Tea and Sympathy," a play about a young man who is bullied because his peers believe he's gay when he's really just artistic and sensitive.  A female mentor has sex with him, which "proves" he isn't gay. Sues himself married Phyllis Gehring (more on her in a moment) in the 1950s, after Sues had experienced gay relationships while serving in the military. The marriage didn't last long, understandably. 

 In the years after "Laugh-In," Sues did a memorable stint onstage as Professor Moriarty.  I suspect he was good at being the perfect combination of cunning, crazy, and fiendish.  In addition to performing, Alan Sues wrote or co-wrote a number of scripts, and he did at least a couple of one-man shows. He was an excellent storyteller. For example, here's Sues in his early eighties, remembering a ferry dock incident on his way back from a weekend visit to (where else?) Fire Island. 

The video above is from an extended interview by Phyllis, done fifty years after she and Sues divorced. In this first part, Phyllis and Alan talk about how they met and eventually married, but even in this short video, there's discussion where Phyllis remembers that Alan designed the hat she wore when she was married, and Alan says no, it was a friend of his who made the hat, and then he goes off into an apocrophal tale about a man recruited into the army who is issued a sewing machine instead of a gun, because he sews. 

Alan Sues died at age 85, three or four years after the interview was filmed. He died suddenly while watching television at home with his beloved dog Doris. Phyllis lived into her nineties and made a number of television appearances, including on Queen Latifah's program, as a 92-year-old woman who could do amazing yoga poses and dance the tango in competitions. You can find videos all over YouTube -- she was, briefly, a sensation. 

But Phyllis Gehring had also been on television back when the medium is new, appearing as part of a dance team with a man named Don Weissmuller (no relation to Johnny, as far as I can tell). Don was a necessarily-closeted gay man who would go on to spend his life with his partner, with whom he shared a home from 1965 onward. 

In this clip from "The Colgate Comedy Hour," Eddie Cantor, the eternal oaf, makes a big deal about the fact that Gehring and Weissmuller are both single and dance together without being a couple. More cringing. 

The video interviews Phyllis did with Alan Sues helped Sues create an audiobook of his best memories and stories, called "Oh, Nothing. . ." You can find it on Audible. There's also another book about Sues' life, available in various formats, which is one of those as-told-to Hollywood biographies. 

I began working on this post maybe six weeks ago, and then I had to set it aside. I felt deeply disturbed by Sues' life and some of these TV appearances, and conflicted about whether I should direct all my anger at a culture which encouraged someone to mock himself, or at Sues himself for not being able to fend that off. It was unreasonable of me to expect anything else, really, but I had a lot of feelings anyway. 

Then I began thinking of Saturday Night Live, which is the "Laugh-In" of today, and how without Sues being there to represent and endure while viewers decided what they were feeling and what they could deal with, we probably would not have had David Spade (a small blonde fey fellow often mistaken for a gay man) doing his "Hollywood Minute" segment on SNL. 

Or Spade doing The Gap Girls bits with Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. 

Not to mention,  years later, Melissa McCarthy doing the SNL cold open as White House spokesman Seans "Spicy" Spicer. 

For the tagline for the Peter Pan peanut butter commercial, one kid says to the other of Sues as Peter Pan, "He's weird." And the other kid says "But he makes a great peanut butter sandwich." Alansort of weird, and while I can't call his career (especially his television work) "great," he was doing something and being somebody that America needed to come to terms with. Which I definitely think is something of value. 

Bonus One for today's post: Paul Lynde and Alice Ghostley, who both appeared on "Bewitched," each making the same kind of comic face. 

Bonus Two: TV writer Bruce Villanch imitating Paul Lynde from a moment on a TV set in the 1970s, as Lynde recognizing actor Lamar Burton from "Roots" 

Here's the video which includes Bruce doing his full-on Paul Lynde mimicry:

Next week:  Who knows?

Garbo