Paul Lynde - A Biography (12 page)

Chapter 7

“I’ve just lost my career…”

Paul Lynde

“I shot three people, drowned one, and stabbed another. It was so much fun,” Paul told a
Lakeland Ledger
reporter. He had finally been cast in a serious role. He said not one comical line nor did he make any of his amusing facial gestures in the black-and-white detective television show,
Burke’s Law.
Paul played Arthur Clark, a man who kills his own brother in “Who Killed Cable Roberts?” The episode aired on October 4, 1963. The producers were pleased with his performance, and he was a guest star two more times — each time playing a cold killer. (In one of those episodes , the detective finds a feather at the crime scene and wonders if the murderer is a chicken plucker. By the end of that show, it is the feathered pillow that Paul used to silence his gun that gets him caught.)

He told his good friend Kaye Ballard, that he was planning to pursue more serious roles as that was his original intent from age five. According to Kaye, she watched Paul in those episodes of
Burke’s Law
and just couldn’t see him serious. Paul was getting known as the funny guy with the funny voice. She just didn’t understand why he was so intent on doing serious acting. She told her friend, “Paul, they know you; you’ve established yourself.” He didn’t want to believe that.

He did get another small role that began on the serious side, on the variety show
Hollywood Palace,
in 1965. Each week, a different star would host the show. On this particular show, Fred Astaire was the host and he introduced Paul as a “Refreshing and versatile actor-comedian.” In the skit, Paul attempts to stop a woman (played by Carmen Phillips) from jumping off a bridge.

The thirty-nine-year-old always wanted to have a series of his own. Bill Asher knew this, and together they began working on a new pilot for ABC. Paul would star as
Sedgewick Hawk-Styles: Prince of Danger,
a Victorian investigator. The show was set in the late 1900s, and Sedgewick has been assigned a mission from Queen Victoria, who he believes is really a man, to find the stolen Magna Carta. Bill thought it was a wonderful show and really funny. The busy producer and the actor had also just finished shooting another episode of
Bewitched.
This was the first time Paul played his new character, Uncle Arthur. When the filming of that episode was complete, he decided he was in need of a weekend getaway. So on July 17, 1965, Paul invited a friend, twenty-four-year-old Jim (Bing) Davidson, to spend the weekend with him in San Francisco. Jim was a bit actor who was in the 1963 movie
Move Over Darling,
starring Doris Day and James Garner, and just three months prior had a role in another movie,
Take Her She’s Mine.

Paul had booked a room at the Sir Drake Hotel. He and Jim went out for a night on the town. After a night of drinking, Paul had arrived back at the hotel around 2:30 a.m. and went up to his room. Jim followed, but was acting up in the lobby, so hotel security escorted him to his room about fifteen minutes later. Paul saw his friend come in, and later Jim said, “Watch me do a trick.” Then Jim opened the window and hung from the ledge.

A policeman driving by noticed a man dangling from the hotel window. He radioed for the fire department while his partner bolted out of the patrol car and raced through the hotel lobby and up to the eighth floor. The papers reported that witnesses watched in horror as Davidson tried to pull himself up three times. When Paul realized Jim was in trouble, he dashed over to the window and grabbed him by the wrists. He told his friend to grab him around the neck, but Jim kept slipping. A witness said Paul frantically tried to help. Jim couldn’t hang on, and he fell eight stories to his death.

Paul was traumatized having just watched Jim fall to his death right in front of his eyes. He was also sure this incident would destroy him. “I’ve just lost my career,” he said. The policemen told him not to worry, they had seen everything. The coroner report showed the young man had been drinking heavily before the prank, and his death was listed as accidental. Jim’s body was shipped to his hometown in Hastings, Nebraska. Paul told a reporter he received a beautiful letter from Jim’s parents, explaining what happened was inevitable.

Paul returned home and obsessed over what would happen now. He knew some of his friends must have heard, even though it had only been in a few papers, but no one reached out to him. When his longtime friend Jan Forbes heard about the incident, she was very concerned about the effects it would have on her dearest friend. She wrote him a long letter and mailed it from Pittsburgh. Paul’s response was, “I knew I could count on you. You’re the first person I ever heard from.” Paul told her that he wasn’t really paying that much attention to Jim that night. Jim had been showing off and then he hung from the ledge. Paul told her it was the worst thing that ever happened to him.

“He was crushed!” Jan said. The story was squashed except for a few newspapers. It could have ruined him. One of those papers had a photo of Paul with a caption that read: “Actor falls to death.” When Paul’s sister saw that, she fainted. She thought it was her brother that fell to his death.

Paul returned to the Hollywood life and kept himself busy with his new pilot, playing the brilliant detective. Paul said it was his favorite character. The show was scheduled to air in 1966, but suddenly ABC decided to drop it. They were replacing it with
The Pruitt of Southampton,
starring Phyllis Diller. CBS then took on the sitcom, but before it aired, they too reneged. Paul could not believe what was happening. Bill had suspicions the networks got wind of the incident that Paul was involved in and thought it was too risky to chance. Paul thought it was the best work he ever did. Bill agreed, but there was nothing they could do about it. When some of Paul’s friends watched the print of the show, they told him they laughed throughout the whole show. He sadly told them, he didn’t want to hear about. He thought this role showed he had real acting talent, outside of playing somebody’s distraught father.

One month following these disasters, the death cloud continued to plague Paul. He received a call that his youngest brother, Johnny, was dead. He had been lying in a Los Angeles hospital for a year, after a car accident. Johnny had never recovered and eventually died from a heart attack. He was only thirty years old. This was his brother who was such a fan; he used to take pictures of Paul on the screen in the movie houses and made him laugh growing up. Two of his brothers were now gone. Johnny’s body was flown back to Mount Vernon where Paul returned once again, this time for a fourth family funeral.

Paul’s eldest niece, Nancy, was at the funeral parlor to pay her respects to her Uncle Johnny. When Paul walked into the room, he was amazed and touched to see who else was there. “Some of the oldest nuns, who took care of Paul and Johnny, when they were little, came to the funeral,” Nancy said. “When Paul saw them there, he just broke up. These women, who were very old now, came to honor Johnny and Paul.”

After the services, Paul headed back to L.A. Half his family was now gone. Years later Paul explained that “shock was a good thing” and that it was shock that kept him working and not falling apart when he lost his parents and brothers. “If my humor became a little macabre, any wonder why?” he said to Jane Ardmore in an interview for
Weight Watcher Magazine.

Realizing his own mortality, Paul had a will drawn up on Oct 1, 1965. His wishes stated he be cremated and buried with his mother, father, and brothers — though later, he did say he’d like his ashes dropped over New York. His sister Helen was to receive his art collection and his dog, and everything else was to be split equally between her and her sister Grace. His brother-in-law was to receive his clothing and jewelry. He left $10,000 for his nephew to use for college.

Paul was cast in a romantic comedy movie in 1966,
The Glass Bottom Boat.
It had a slew of stars including Doris Day, Rod Taylor, Arthur Godfrey, Dom DeLuise, and Dick Martin. Paul played a suspicious security guard who was determined to prove that Doris was a Soviet spy. In one scene, he wore a blue satin dress with a matching colored bow, which he wore in a red beehive-hair-styled wig.

“I had a drag scene in
Glass Bottom Boat,
” Paul told a newspaper reporter as he laughed. “I wore an elegant gown. Everybody went wild! Doris came over and looked me up and down and told me, ‘Oh, I’d never wear anything that feminine.” Though both Paul and Dom DeLuise did
The Glass Bottom Boat
together,
The New York Times
singled out DeLuise, who went on to do other movies and became a regular in many directed by Mel Brooks. Paul later told the press he would like to perform in
Macbeth
…as Lady Macbeth.

In 1967, the determined actor tried again with another pilot,
Manley and the Mob,
but it never sold. He played a detective, very much like the one in
Get Smart.
Actor Nehemiah Persoff was asked what it was like working with Paul and said, “He was very much closed in within himself. I don’t think anybody knew him.” Paul had his hopes up again when he was cast in a movie called
Silent Treatment
in 1968, with Forest Tucker, Phyllis Diller, and a bunch of other well-known actors, but it was never released. He was beyond frustrated, but still never turned down any offer. He said when he picked up the phone he never said hello, he answered, “Yes I can.”

Game shows were big on television in the sixties and Paul popped up on quite a few of them. Heatter-Quigley had produced a few of them including
The Celebrity Game, PDQ, and Funny You Should Ask.
Bert Parks, who became best known for hosting the televised Miss America show for over more than two decades, was the host for
The Celebrity Game
show. That show had six celebrities, each one was asked the same question, and the contestants had to guess what each celebrity answered. On one show, Bert asked Paul, “Would you do a nude scene in a movie?” Paul answered, “No, never…I lose the power of speech just taking a shower.” He broke up the audience, the host, and the celebrity panelists. The same question was asked to Abbey Dalton, Michael Landon, Jan Murray, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Gypsy Rose Lee, who were suddenly all camera shy.

Paul had just finished filming
Under the Yum Yum Tree,
which starred Jack Lemmon, Carol Lynley, Dean Jones, Edie Adams, and Imogene Coca. Jack had done so many films and had recently starred in such great movies as
The Apartment, The Days of Wine and Roses,
and
Irma La Duce.
He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in
Mister Roberts
in 1955, and later, one for Best Actor in
Save the Tiger.
Paul told
Newsday
that Jack, who did not like
Yum Yum Tree,
was feeling so down about doing the film that Paul talked to him every day before they began shooting, repeating to him what a great actor he was, just to keep him going. Jack played a swinging bachelor in this 1963 romantic comedy, who managed an apartment building with only female tenants. Yet
Yum Yum Tree
did so well at the box office that it helped make Jack the biggest movie star in America. Paul was not happy with the film either, though
The New York Times
wrote: “…Paul Lynde and Imogene Coca are killing as custodians.”

About this time, Ralph Story, who was an American television and radio personality, and also a well-known Los Angeles newscaster, was making an educational film about the need for public transportation in L.A. The film opened with Paul saying, “I’m a professional skeptic, I trust no one,” and he held up a sign that read:
Public Transportation, who needs it?
Paul joined the opposing crowd who challenge Story’s law: Everyone benefits from public transportation. That film was distributed in 1968, to schools and libraries by The Southern California Rapid Transit District. That law never passed.

That same year, a new game show was about to make its debut, another Heatter/Quigley production, called
The Hollywood Squares.
It was played like tic-tac-toe, except there were nine celebrities sitting in each box on a seven foot scaffold of three tiers. Contestants would pick a star and then had to figure out if the stars were bluffing or not when they answered questions read by the emcee, Peter Marshall, to earn their X or O.

Peter had nine slots in his desk that coordinated with where each celebrity was sitting. Some celebrities were given a list before the show, which the audience did not know existed, with written jokes to match the questions they were asked. They were never told the correct answer, just the funny lines to go with them.

The first show had Rose Marie, Wally Cox, Cliff Arquette, Sally Field, Agnes Moorehead, Nick Adams, Abby Dalton, Morey Amsterdam, and Ernest Borgnine. There were new celebrities on each week. Paul was a guest for its first two years and did not sit in the center. Sometimes he sat in the right bottom square next to Rose Marie, who as a child singer, was known as “Baby Rose Marie, and went on to vaudeville and theatre. She appeared on many television shows and is most likely best known for her role on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
along with
Squares.
Paul loved to tease her. He was asked by Peter, “As we know, Paul, instead of letters, the Chinese drew pictures. What would a woman and a broom stand for?” Paul answered, “If it’s flying, it’s Rose Marie.” She was always a good sport about it, and she referred to Paul as her buddy.

Rose Marie’s favorite joke she ever heard Paul say, was when Peter asked him, “You are driving seventy miles an hour and suddenly your brakes go, what should you do?”

Paul answered, “Honk if you love Jesus.”

The audience and home viewers could not get enough of his unique humor. More side-splitters were produced when Peter asked him, “What fictional character ran around saying, ‘I’m late, I’m late?’ ”