Zenith

Here's a between-the-world wars power couple for you, Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson. Husband and wife were equally famous in there day, but I'm afraid Thompson has more or less sunk into obscurity, whereas Lewis is still fairly well-known. This is due to the fact the latter is now part of the literary canon (thanks in large part to winning a Nobel), and if you take a college literature course, he's one of those dead white males you have to read if you want to pass, graduate, and get a job writing ad copy for electronic billboards. However, you don't really need to have Lewis forced upon you. You can read him simply because his 80, 90, and 100-year-old books are...readable. More than that, they're actually relevant. Works such Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry satirize provincialism, materialism, pharmaceuticals, and born-again con men. Like I said, relevant. In fact, the current U.S. President could have come out of a Lewis novel.

Fiction is often written with an eye on posterity. You write it now and hope it can still be appreciated a hundred years hence. However, journalism, Dorothy Thompson's chosen profession, is written in the here and now. Of course, the subject matter journalists cover can be of interest 80 or 90 years hence, but as history, written by historians living a 80 or 90 years hence. The journalism of the here and now may very well still exist in those far-off history books, but as the footnotes and bibliography in the final pages, proof that the historian did his or her research. So if you're an avid footnote and bibliography reader, you've heard of Thompson. Or came across her in a biography of her husband. Or...you've read a biography of Thompson herself. There's been at least three in the 59 years since her death. She did a lot of living in what used to be the here and now.

 

Originally a suffragette, Thompson decided once she had the right to vote that learn a little bit about the world before pulling a lever for this candidate or that. Journalism seemed a good way to accomplish that. A foreign correspondent in Ireland, she interviewed a leader of the Sinn Féin party. She then headed for Vienna where she met John Gunther, a highly respected journalist of the day (though today he may be best known for the rather sad book Death Be Not Proud, about his son who died of cancer.) For a while she was the Chief of the Central European Service for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Two years later she switched to the New York Post (this was decades before Rupert Murdoch got his greedy little hands on it), and became head of its Berlin bureau, where she witnessed the rise of National Socialism, better known as Nazism. In 1931, she interviewed Adolf Hitler, who at the time something akin to a congressman. He failed to impress Thompson, who described him in her subsequent book I Saw Hitler as the "very prototype of the little man." Once the little man became Chancellor (akin at first to a president, then to a dictator), he had Thompson kicked out of the country, and then spent the rest of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s looking for ways to impress her. No, no, no, I shouldn't lay all that on Thompson. Hitler clearly had issues, even as people to this day disagree what those issues were (rejection to art school? Syphilis? A missing testicle?) Back home in the United States, Thompson was asked to write a column for the New York Tribune titled "On the Record". Soon carried by more than 170 newspapers, giving her a readership of over ten million people, she became one of the most popular syndicated columnists, and the second most popular syndicated female columnists behind First Lady Elinor Roosevelt. NBC took notice, and hired Thompson as a radio commentator. Thompson didn't waste her fame on trivialities, as she became a leading spokesperson against the rise of fascism. What did her husband think about all that? Lewis was worried about fascism, too, and not just its rise in Europe. He wrote a novel in 1935 titled It Can't Happen Here about an American dictator (according to Amazon, there's been a spike in sales of late. I can't imagine why.)

Unfortunately, their shared political beliefs wasn't enough to save the marriage. it lasted just 14 years and produced one child, a son. What went wrong? Here's one clue. Lewis joked to his friend, the journalist John Hersey (best known for the book Hiroshima), that he was going to divorce Dorothy Thompson and name Adolf Hitler as a co-respondent. Of course, no such assignation took place. I take it to mean that Lewis didn't like all the globetrotting his wife's job required. Should we then see Sinclair Lewis as a male chauvinist who though a woman's place was in the home? That would be at odds with both his literary output and his romantic life. Lewis was attracted to career women (his wife before Thompson was also one) and this is reflected in his novels. In fact, the heroine in Main Street is a career woman. That book and others he wrote further criticizes a society that forces women to be stay-at-home wives, some 40 years before Betty Friedan made the same argument. Then again, writing about career women in the abstract is one thing. Marrying one may have caused him to blink.

There were other problems, like infidelity. Thompson had affairs with both men and women. Despite Lewis' rather ghoulish appearance (hoping to rid his face of acne scars, he tried expensive radium therapy that only made things worse), he used his fame as a novelist to bed a girl on occasion. But his real mistress was the bottle. An alcoholic long before he met Thompson, Lewis would pass out in the midst of social gatherings, embarrassing Thompson. He also sometimes passed out in their bedroom, which brought it own humiliation. But even minus adultery or booze, the union might not have lasted. They were both writers but different types of writers, he a novelist, she a journalist. Novelists tend, and are even compelled, to be homebodies, with as limited contact with the world as possible (which is why some of the more successful ones end up in cabins in the woods.) Journalists, on the other hand, often work erratic hours and are away from home quite a bit. These two just didn't see each other all that often, and sometimes absence makes the heart grow fouler. The divorce finally came in 1942, albeit without Hitler's name being dragged into it. Some things fortunately don't happen here.

 


 

 

   

Quips and Quotations (People Will Talk Edition)

 Circa 1988

Whether I slept with her or not is irrelevant. I'm perfectly willing to have people think that I did.

--Madonna

It was really fun. We would go to parties and be bitchy--we were bitchy to Joan Rivers....I had a little crush on her, and I loved that people were, like, "Ooh, Madonna likes Sandy!"

--Sandra Bernhard 

Vital Viewing (Oxford Faction Edition)

1942-2020

It was a mere three weeks ago that I put up a Monty Python-related post. Well, here's another, and for the saddest of reasons. Terry Jones has now joined fellow Pythonite Graham Chapman in... 

 

  ...the Hereafter.

But before he's allowed in, Jones first might have to answer to...

...the Almighty Himself!

(Just don't grovel, Terry. If there's one thing God can't stand, it's people groveling.)

As a fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the feature films that sprung from it, I submit the following video clips as evidence for Terry Jone's admission into Heaven.

First up, here's Jones talking to Conan O'Brien:   

Jones mentioned an Oxford/Cambridge split among the Monty Python troupe. Here's the Oxford-educated Jones in a sketch with the Cambridge-educated Eric Idle:

 That's John Cleese at the end, another Cambridge alumni. No wonder Jones was kicked off the set.

Above is Sir Bedivere, one of the Knights of the Round Table. Never mind why he's throwing a sword into a lake. It's not germane to this post. Only know that Terry Jones played Bedivere in the feature film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In this clip he calls upon his great wisdom to decide if an accused witch is in fact what's she's accused of being:    

I know what you're thinking. He wasn't being logical at all! Well, here's a diagram of Bedivere's reasoning. study it carefully:

Now are you convinced?

 The Monty Python troupe were all males. If a sketch has a role for a female, they would sometimes get outside help (usually Carol Cleveland, above), but more often than not...

 ...just played those roles themselves. This continued in the movies. Here's Jones as the mother of a Messiah:

 No, no, no! Not the Messiah who said (depending how far away you were standing) "Blessed are the cheese-makers" and "the Greeks shall inherit the Earth," I mean...

...this Messiah (the aforementioned Cambridge-educated Chapman) and his Oxford-educated mum. Let's have a closer look:

 

Even though Jesus (actor Kenneth Colley, in the film's only non-comic role) and Brian are shown to be two different people, Monty Python's Life of Brian generated its fair share of...

...controversy.

So how's Terry Jones going to explain that to God?

Well, if there ever was a movie that argued against worshiping false idols, it's that one.

Then there's Monty Python's Meaning of Life. Unlike argably Life of Brian, it was neither blasphemous nor heretical. Nevertheless, you may find the following scene disturbing anyway, especially if you have a weak stomach. If you have a strong stomach, after watching this scene you may end up with a weak one. Here's Terry Jones as the unforgettable Mr. Creosote:

I was going to reserve a table, but I think I'll get carry-out instead.

This brings us all back to God (seen here in human form as W.G. Grace, considered one of the greatest amateur cricket players of all time.)  Would he let Terry Jones into Heaven? I think so. If Monty Python was about anything, it was about the complexity and subsequent absurdity of life,  and I think that's something a Supreme Being had a little to do with. 

Surviving Python members are John Cleese and Eric Idle, both of Cambridge, Michael Palin, who went to Oxford, and Terry Gilliam who went to California's Occidental College. Hmm, it would seem Cambridge has the upper hand, but as Gilliam once pointed out in an interview, Oxford and Occidental both begin with the letter O. There's a certain Python logic to that. 

  

Quips and Quotations (Comics Continuity, or Lack Thereof Edition)

I decided it was time to let somebody die.

--Milton Caniff, writer-artist of the once-popular (it ended in 1973) comic strip Terry and the Pirates

Please take the skin off the artist who murdered Raven Sherman.

--Letter to the Editor

In 1941 Caniff precipitated a national incident by permitting one of his characters the almost unheard-of comic-strip prerogative of dying. The victim in this case was one Raven Sherman, an American heiress for whom Caniff had won unusual sympathy by portraying her as an undaunted and high-hearted young lady overcoming all obstacles to aid the Chinese in resisting what Caniff, at the time, was calling the Japanese “invader.” Miss Sherman was rudely pushed off a truck, and subsequently died of her injuries. She was buried on a lonely Chinese hillside in a ceremony so moving that millions of funny-paper disciples were plunged into their own peculiar kind of melancholia. Flowers poured into the offices of the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, which distributes Terry and the Pirates, and several hundred college students in the Midwest felt constrained to bare their heads and turn toward the east in a last reverent gesture.

 --Collie Small, “Strip Teaser in Black and White,” The Saturday Evening Post, August 10, 1946

It saddens us to have to say that the whiplash effect ["SNAP!"] she underwent when Spidey's webbing stopped her so suddenly was, in fact, what killed her. In short, it was impossible for Peter to save her. He couldn't have swung down in time; the action he did take resulted in her death; if he had done nothing, she still would certainly have perished. There was no way out.

--Marvel Comics editor Roy Thomas

Gentlemen,
 As you said, Spider-Man #121 was a shocker. Frankly, I wonder what kind of home life you people must have, or had, as children.

--Letter to the Editor 

 I was just getting ready to go to Europe on some sort of a business trip...to meet somebody to discuss something about Marvel. And I think I wasn't thinking too clearly, because when they said, "We'd like to kill Gwen Stacy," I said, "Well, if that's what you want to do, okay." All I wanted to do was get them out of the office so I could finish packing and get out of there...and when I came back and found out that Gwen had been killed, I thought "Why would they do that? Why would Gerry write anything like that?" And I had to be reminded later on that I had perhaps reluctantly or perhaps carelessly said "Okay" when they asked me.

--Marvel Publisher Stan Lee, who by 1973 had left the writing and editing of the comic books to others. 

She was a nonentity, a pretty face. She brought nothing to the mix. It made no sense to me that Peter Parker would end up with a babe like that who had no problems...So killing Gwen was a totally logical if not inevitable choice.

--Spider-Man scribe Gerry Conway

To this day people ask me for drawings of Gwen Stacy, and tell me how it hurt them when she died. And I tell them the story when [Dude Hennick's] girlfriend Raven Sherman died in Terry and the Pirates. I was 10 years old, and for the first time I remember grown-ups talk about a comic strip character as if they were alive. I remember somebody said, "Did you hear that Raven Sherman died?" And I thought to myself, "Wow! This grown-up thinks of her like I think of her. That that's a real woman." And he says, "Isn't that amazing that Raven Sherman is dead?" That's the closest I've come to that kind of immortality, when people tell me that they still think about the day Gwen Stacy died. You know how great that makes me feel? I want to buy them a drink.

--Spider-Man artist John Romita Sr., who, in collaboration with another artist, Gil Kane, and writer Conway, chronicled the demise of the lovely Miss Stacy.

In Memoriam: Buck Henry 1930-2020

 I guess because it doesn't quite gibe with his irreverent comedy style or, as Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield put it, his status as a "1970s New Hollywood renegade", I was surprised to learn Buck Henry had come from a show biz background. At least one half of a show biz background. His mother was silent film actress Ruth Taylor, who married a stockbroker when talkies became popular and moved to New York City. Still, she must have retained some ties to her old profession, as her son got to meet Humphrey Bogart on the set of The Maltese Falcon when he was about ten years old. Henry's own show biz debut was right after World War II in a New York City-area touring production of Life With Father, playing one of the sons (don't know which one, as there were four) when he was 15. After high school, Henry went to Dartmouth College. Though he wrote for the campus humor magazine Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, upon graduation he went back into acting, but not for long, as he was drafted. An Army aptitude test decided he could best serve his country as a helicopter mechanic in West Germany, but after a year of that, he managed to get a transfer to Special Services, the entertainment arm of the military branch. There he wrote, directed, and starred in a musical titled Beyond the Moon, about a couple of servicemen who are accidentally rocketed to a planet full of beautiful women (the movies Cat-Women of the Moon, Abbot and Costello Go to Mars, The Queen of Outer Space, and Fire Maidens of Outer Space all have similar plots. Obviously there was a whole generation of horny heterosexual young men who saw the rocket ship as a phallic symbol.)

Despite having written his own musical, upon release from the Army Henry went back to acting, taking whatever small part he could get in stage productions and early television dramas. This all changed when he joined the The Premise, one of the many improvisational comedy groups that popped up in the wake of Second City, performing in a small theater in Greenwich Village, his castmates included George Segal and Theodore J. Flicker (best known as the writer and director of  the 1967 movie The President's Analyst, a satire of the national security state, and co-creator of the 1970's police sitcom Barney Miller.) Now to understand just how important this was to Henry's career, know that one of the defining feature's of improv theater is a segment of the show where the performers take suggestions from the audience, and then act upon those suggestions then and there. In In essence, they're writing, and many a improv actor, including the aforementioned Flicker, Elaine May, and, a decade later, Harold Ramis, did go on to become the more traditional type of writer, the once hunched over a typewriter or computer. And so to did Buck Henry once talent scouts for Steve Allen showed up in the audience. Henry was invited to join Allen's new variety show (or simply an ongoing variety show that had simply been shunted from one network to another) as a writer-performer. Among his castmates were Tim Conway, Jim Nabors, and the Smother Brothers, as well as Allen mainstays Louis Nye, Tom Poston, Pat Harrington, Gabriel Dell, and wife Jayme Meadows. Unfortunately, the show only lasted 13 weeks, but Henry now known as both a writer and an actor and would bounce back and forth between the two, sometimes on the same project, for the rest of his life.

While all this was going on, Henry became involved in a bit of tomfoolery dreamed up by his friend Alan Abel, a humor writer best known for staging elaborate hoaxes that were taken quite seriously by a gullible media. One of his earliest pranks had Henry--this was before he became a recognizable show biz personality--pose as G. Clifford Prout, Jr, president of The Society for the Indecency of Naked Animals, which advocated putting clothes on animals as way to avoid accidentally being exposed to dogs, cats, and elephant's genitals. Always eager for the odd story, the print and electronic media of the day lapped the story up with without doing the necessary fact-checking. Henry-as-Prout appeared on The Today Show where then-co-host Barbara Walters tried to talk reason into him by pointing out that fur and feathers were natural clothing. Amazingly, the hoax lasted from 1959 until 1962. Abel and Henry actually had to give back money donated to the cause, as they were only interested in playing mind games and not cheating people out of their earnings (plus, they didn't want to be charged with mail fraud.) It all fell apart when the staff of the CBS Evening News recognized Henry, but only AFTER he had been interviewed on the air by Walter Cronkite, who was furious when he found out that's the way it isn't.

Back to Henry's career in show biz. After Steve Allen's show ended, he got a job as a writer on Garry Moore's variety show (on which a young Carol Burnett was a regular). After that he was again an writer-performer on That Was the Week That Was. Based on a British show of the same name, it was hosted by David Frost (who also emceed the original UK version), and featured radio comedian Henry Morgan, a young Alan Alda, and on occasion song satirist Tom Lehrer and the comedy team of Nichols and May. I've never seen this show, but it's been described as a combination of topical comedy sketches, the songs of Tom Lehrer (performed byNancy Ames) and interviews, it's seen by some as a precursor to The Daily Show. According to Buck Henry, the Left-skewing show went off the air after two years because the Republican Party, in the interest of equal time, kept looking for ways to preempt it.

This all brings us to the mid-1960s. The success of the first few James Bond movies had led to a secret agent craze in popular entertainment. Dean Martin's Matt Helm and James Coburn's Derek Flint were mildly successful knockoffs of the Bond formula, and on TV you had The Man from U.N.C.L.E, I Spy, and even a secret agent western The Wild, Wild, West. it was all ripe for parody (though by Goldfinger, the third in the series, the Bond films were pretty much parodying themselves.) There's different stories on how it began--Henry tells one of those stories in the video section at bottom--but it seems a producer asked Borscht Belt comic-turned-TV writer Mel Brooks to write a pilot film for a spy comedy. But Brooks didn't of being hunched over a typewriter--he was used to the crowded writers rooms of Your Show of Show's and Caesar's Hour, where people just threw out ideas. Well, nobody was going to give Brooks a crowded room, but Henry was enlisted to help with the pilot, and the result was Get Smart, starring Don Adams and Barbara Feldon with Edward Platt as the head of an intelligence agency called CONTROL, which did battle with the mischievous organization KAOS. After the pilot was sold, Brooks left to do other things (such as the write and direct the first film version of The Producers.) Henry, however, stayed on for two more years as story editor. This meant that final teleplay draft, or what's sometimes called the shooting script, went through Henry's typewriter, no matter who got the on-screen credit (it's a Writers Guild thing.) A master of the comic non-sequitur, Henry was able to establish the TV series overall tone, which other story editors had to hew to once he left. Even though Mel Brooks is asked about Get Smart to this very day, it was really Buck Henry's comic sensibility that prevailed (but, hey, you don't have to believe me, just see what Barbara Feldon has to say in the video section.)

After he left Get Smart, Buck Henry created the superhero parody Captain Nice, but it fared poorly as as it was scheduled against another superhero parody Mr. Terrific, the potential audience for each show canceling each other out (plus, people were starting to get tired of Batman, which had inspired these parodies.) But it didn't hurt Henry any as he was about to get the biggest break of his career. A comedian-turned-stage director-turned-filmmaker named Mike Nichols, whom had been a childhood friend, enlisted Henry to write a film adaptation of a novella by Charles Webb  about a recent college graduate who has an affair with the wife of his father's law partner. Since Webb's novel was almost entirely dialogue, Henry's screenplay followed it pretty closely, though he did add the famous "one word: plastics", a suggestion to young Benjamen Braddock as to how he should spend the rest of his life. The Graduate (also the name of Webb's novel) was a huge hit at the box office, ushered in a whole new style of Hollywood filmmaking (though not a whole new style of filmmaking, period. All of Nichol's cinematic tricks--long takes, fragmented editing, point-of-view visuals, use of zoom lenses, hand-held camera work--had earlier been used by the Italians and the French.) But Henry's screenplay, especially the first half, was funny enough that it could have been filmed in a more conventional manner and still been a box office hit. However, that doesn't necessarily make Henry the unsung hero of The Graduate. As I said, there was the original source material, as well as a first draft of the script by Calder Willingham. Henry claimed never to have read Willingham's version, and Nichols backed him up on that, but Willingham nevertheless brought a complaint before the Writers Guild of America-West Arbitration Committee. That committee did indeed see similarities between the two scripts, which Henry argued was simply because each was based on the same novel. Unswayed, one of the arbitrators told Henry he should have changed the names of the characters. Here's to you, Mrs. Peterson. And the onscreen credit ended up reading "Screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry" (Henry once mused that it may have been a good thing that the screenplay lost out at the Oscars as it saved him the awkwardness of having to go onstage and accept the award alongside Willingham.) I read Charles Webb's original novel years ago but can no longer remember what was what. The know the general consensus is that if there's something in the film that's not in the book, then either Buck Henry or Mike Nichols put it there. Shared credit notwithstanding, The Graduate became the cornerstone of Henry's writing career. From 1968 until the end of the century, he would be a highly sought-after, and highly-paid screenwriter. Along with two more films for Nichols, Catch-22 (1970) and The Day of the Dolphin (1972), Henry also wrote Candy (1968), The Owl and the Pussycat (1970), Heaven Can Wait (1978; he also co-directed with Warren Beatty), First Family (1980, also directed), To Die For (1995), and Town & Country (2001; one of many writers on a troubled production that took two years to film, but, according to some accounts, Henry walked away with a cool $3 million.)

For all his success as a screenwriter, Buck Henry still acted. In fact, his acting credits outnumber his writing credits. They were usually small roles, sometimes in films in which he worked on the script, such as The Graduate, where he played the hotel desk clerk trying to make sense of Benjamin Braddock's nervous request for a room. Among his notable roles in films he did not write, there was outer space alien David Bowie's bifocaled business partner in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), a doomed mob accountant in Gloria (1980), a sex-crazed bank manager in Eating Raoul (1982), one of three fisherman who just as soon not have their vacation interrupted in Short Cuts (1993), and a heavily layered IRS agent in Grumpy Old Men (1993) He even played himself in The Player (1992), pitching a Graduate sequel to studio executive Tim Robbins. Yet some of Henry's most memorable roles weren't in the movies but on the medium he thought he'd left behind: television.

After Johnny Carson had demanded that Tonight Show reruns that aired at 11:30 on Saturday nights get yanked from the schedule, a  former Laugh-In writer and a producer of an Emmy award-winning Lily Tomlin special named Lorne Michaels was given the opportunity by NBC to create a new program in that time slot. What he came up with was a 90-minute live variety show that was heavy on sketch comedy aptly called Saturday Night (Live was added to the title a year later.) The show was geared to an under-30 audience, and Michaels wanted guest host that would appeal to that age group. You wouldn't think that would be Buck Henry, who was 45 by then, but there was a certain hip cachet to having been the writer of The Graduate, and that was good enough for Michaels. NBC might have found it curious when trying to promote the show. Though very well-known in the entertainment industry, Henry was hardly a household name in 1975. In fact, during his first few time hosting the show, the comedy revolved around him being a nobody. Once, during the opening monologue, as Henry talked, the names of big stars who had turned down requests to host were scrolled upward on the screen. But Henry didn't remain a nobody for long. Despite the age difference between him and what at the time was called The Not Ready For Prime Time Players, Henry fit right in with the 20-somthing actors. After all, like most of them, he had got his start in improv comedy, albeit about a decade-and-a-half earlier. Henry hosted SNL ten times between 1976 and 1980, and by the time of his final appearance he had indeed become a household name, providing the household had members in their teens or twenties. One of the reasons for his popularity among the cast and crew was his willingness to appear in sketches that other guest hosts had turned. Sometimes with good reason. During its first five years SNL was known for its shock comedy, and Henry appeared in of its most shocking bits, the notorious Uncle Roy sketch (written by two women, Rosie Shuster and Ann Beats), in which a pedophile babysitter persuades his two prepubescent nieces (played by Gilda Radner and Laraine Newman, both in real-life well past the age of puberty) to pose for him in sexually suggestive positions. The innocuous little girls didn't know these were sexual positions and found the whole thing fun (years later in an interview for the Television Academy, Henry apologized to anybody who may have had a real-life Uncle Roy as a child.) Surprisingly, this wasn't the Henry sketch that generated the most angry mail. That instead was skit where played a stunt coordinator involved in a movie about child, in fact infant, abuse. Right before the moment of violence is to be filmed, the "star" baby is taken away and replaced by a stunt double, who is then thrown against the walls and furniture. No real infant was actually harmed while performing the sketch. Both the star baby and the stunt baby were obviously dolls, but it was still a bit too much for some people watching at home. A sketch that wasn't controversial but may have caused Henry a bit of grief anyway involved John Belushi's Samurai character. These were a series of skits where combined Japanese martial techniques with mundane jobs such as being a motel desk clerk or operating a delicatessen. In a sketch titled "Samurai Stockbroker", Henry, as Mr. Dantley, leans a bit too closely to hear some stock tips and gets hit by a sword. This wasn't in the script. I'd like to think Belushi's sword was nothing more than a prop, but can't actually confirm this. Real or not, Henry did get a cut on the head, and had to spend the rest of show wearing a bandage. Though it wasn't meant to happen and this was live TV, Chevy Chase made it one of his news items on Weekend Update. Furthermore, for the rest of the night, various cast members began popping up in sketches wearing bandages. As Henry said goodbye at the end, all the Not Ready for Prime Time Players stood behind him swathed up in a show of first aid solidarity. How's that for improv theater?

If you judge show biz success solely in terms of name recognition (and you really shouldn't) then those 10 Saturday Night Live appearances (11 if you count a Mardi Gras special that aired on a Sunday night) would have marked a high point in Buck Henry's career. His association with that show ended once the original cast left (some sooner than others.) And not just the actors. Lorne Michaels left for a few years, too. One of Michael's projects during his absence from SNL was another prime-time sketch comedy show titled The New Show that perhaps should have been called Friday Night Videotaped. With an ensemble cast of just four people, one of whom was Henry and another of whom was Dave Thomas of SCTV fame. Since the main cast was so puny, there were several guest stars rather than just one, including Steve Martin, John Candy, Catherine O'Hara, Gilda Radner, and Laraine Newman. The show is best remembered for Martin's Michael Jackson "Billie Jean" video parody, in which he had to stomp on the sidewalk in order to get it to light up. I recall The New Show as being funny enough, though there was certain listlessness to the way the whole thing was paced, as if after all those years of producing a live show, Michaels forgot that one of the advantages of tape is that it can be edited. The show never found an audience, and was canceled after just nine weeks. Michaels went back to SNL, but for some reason, Henry didn't follow. But their association didn't end completley as Henry guest-starred a few times as Liz Lemon's goofy father on the Micheals-produced 30 Rock. Aside from all things Lorne Micheal, what used to be a high point in an American actor's career before movies and TV came along, and still has a certain amount of prestige attached to it, Henry, along with George Segal and Wayne Knight (Newman on Seinfeld) appeared in a hit Broadway play. OK, the play I'm talking about, Art, was already a Tony-award-winning hit before these three actors signed on to play roles originally created (in the Broadway version of the Yasmina Reza's French comedy) by Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina, but audiences still turned out to see Henry, Segal and Knight anyway. Henry, by this time in his 70s, again appeared on Broadway as part of a large ensemble in the Paul Osborne drama Morning's at Seven, which ran for about four months. About ten years ago he appeared in Lisa Ebersole's Off-Broadway comedy Mother, opposite Holland Taylor (of Two and a Half Men fame.) The play itself got mixed reviews, but the critics all agreed Henry and Taylor were very good in it.

In preparing this post, I read and watched four or five different interviews with Buck Henry. In about three of those interviews, he referred to himself as "lazy". Given all he accomplished, my jaw almost hit the keyboard when I first came across that self-description. What, so he was just in the right place at the right time over and over and over again? It could have been false modesty, I suppose, but I watched and listened, rather than read, one of these interviews, and he said it so matter-of-factly I have to think he meant it. But why? I wonder if by lazy he means some of higher aspirations of a life in the arts. Henry was by and large a hired gun, writing and acting in projects initiated by others. That's just the way it goes in popular entertainment, popular culture. Certainly not everybody, but most involved in mass media write, direct, draw, paint, sing, dance, and otherwise perform whatever someone pays them to write, direct, draw, paint, sing, dance, and otherwise perform. That doesn't leave much opportunity for a personal statement, or a artistic vision. But one reason I spend so much time writing about pop culture on this blog is I want to see if I find that statement or vision anyway, no matter what the odds. And Henry was really too smart not to have at least a little bit of his psyche sneak into his work-for-hire. But what was his artistic vision, his personal statement? To answer that question to my favorite part of his career, the time he spent on Get Smart. Asked once if the secret agent sitcom was realistic, Henry said no, that instead, reality was "extrapolated" into the television make-believe. What did he mean by that?

Here's my guess. In one episode that Henry is credited with writing, a grizzled, one-legged sea captain reminisces about the time he did battle with the Great White Whale.

Pointing to the wooden leg, Maxwell Smart asks, "Did the Great White Whale do that?"

"No," the sea captain replies. "That was done by a Small Blue Convertible."

Reality bites. Maybe that was Buck Henry's personal statement