Working with the average comedian was about as much fun as having a bus park on your nose.

They say in Hollywood that the funnier a man is while on a stage, the more grouchy and demanding he is off stage.

I have tried to think of the famous comedians I have worked with who were happy, pleasant people to deal with. Dick Van Dyke is the only one who comes to mind right now. Read More→

Singer Ray Charles had just about every bad break a man could have, but he didn’t let them turn him into  sad, grouchy  man. He was delightful and filled with laughter on the day I got to interview him.

I turned on my tape recorder and started asking questions. My first was, “If God came to you today and said,  ‘I took away your sight, but gave you a voice now enjoyed by millions around the world. Would you like to have the sight back in exchange for the voice?’ What would your answer be?”

“Oh, that would be easy,” laughed Ray. “I’d tell him that I’m not interested in sight at this late date. I’ve enjoyed what I do for forty years now, and I wouldn’t trade my voice just to be able to see again.”

He told me about his screaming helplessness in watching his 6-year-old brother drown, and how he went blind  from a minor eye infection just because his mother couldn’t afford the medicine which would have saved his sight, and that he wasn’t even old enough to shave when his mother died and he was packed off to a school for the blind and deaf.

“Don’t you consider yourself an unlucky man?” I asked.

“No. Not at all.  I’m blind, but I can do anything anyone else can do — I just have to figure out how to do things in a different way. I accepted my blindness, put it aside, and went on to enjoy life. Anyone who dwells on a handicap is giving up on their life.  I might have done that, but my mother kept reminding me time and again that I was blind, not stupid.  She’d say, ‘You lost your sight, not your brain.’”

Ray glowed as he told me about an old man named Wiley Pittman.

“Wiley was a neighbor. He had a big, old piano in his living room, and when  I was only 3-years-old I used to walk into his house and crawl up on the piano bench and start pounding away.  Instead of shooing me out of his house he sat down and started to teach me about music and the piano. By the time I went blind he had already taught me the basics. If it hadn’t been for that gentle, sharing old man I might never have been able to find my way into the world of music.”

I asked how he managed to maintain his health while spending most of his time on stage or in an airplane.

“I just learned to listen to my body. Your body knows what it wants and needs, and you just have to learn to pay attention to what it’s telling you. I make a habit of listening to my body and we get along just fine.

“Some folks jump out of bed in the morning  at full speed. But my body doesn’t like to hurry. It says ‘Hey. What’s the rush? Slow down and listen to the world for a while. There’s plenty of time for rushing later on.”

He has the same attitude about food. “When the bod tells me it’s hungry, I sit down and eat.  That can be at any time of the day or night. I don’t follow a schedule. I just listen to my body.  When it whispers, ‘Okay. That’s enough’,  I quit eating, regardless of how much food is still on the plate.

“I sleep the same way. I never go to bed just because it is 10 o’clock at night. I keep moving and enjoying things until the body says, ‘Time for some rest.’ That’s when I go to bed. And I sleep until my body yawns and says,  ‘That’s enough. Let’s get up and do something.’  Sometimes that’s after 10 hours of sleep, and on other occassions it’s after only twenty minutes or so.” 

I asked about an exercise plan, and that really brought a laugh. “Man,” he said, “Haven’t you seen me play the piano? ” said the man who swerved, whirled and was in almost constant motion while performing.

I asked if foreign audiences were different than Americans.

“Yes,” he said. “The folks overseas seem a bit more attentive. Here in America I usually hear a slight bit of noise all the time.  There’s foot shuffling, papers rustling, coughs, etc. But the first time I played in  Europe I was frightened by the silence. They were so quiet during my songs that I thought they might be holding their breath.  But there’s one big exception over there. The Italians!  They let you know what they think of your song right away. They yell, clap, stomp their feet and sing right along with me. I thought I’d been caught in  a stampede.”

I ended our interview saying that Ray Charles sounded like a happy man .

“Yes, indeed, ” he smiled. “God didn’t rob me — He blessed me.”

Fight Forth

Many of you have asked for some more memories from my days as publicist on “Little House on the Prairie,” so here are a few that have drifted to the surface of my old memory pool.

When my family sat down to watch television on “Little House” night my daughters would often ask, “Does Pa cry tonight?” They loved the shows where Mike, as Charles Ingalls, showed a lot of emotion. He was great with tears. They’d show love, anger, pity and a dozen other emotions.

One day on the set I watched him telling his usual great jokes, and then step in front of the camera for a scene, and instantly break into tears. “How the hell can you do that?” I finally asked. “What makes those tears flow so easily?”

“I just think about my father,” he said. “So many sad, sad things happened to that wonderful little guy that I can cry anytime I think about them.”

Mike’s father was a publicity man for several stars of Broadway plays. But when they drifted off to Hollywood to make movies, he decided to follow along. Mike was already living in L. A., trying to get his start in show business. He had arrived out west on an athletic scholarship as a champion javelin thrower at the University of Southern Califorina. But even in those early days Mike let his hair grow longer than most guys, and the other jocks at USC held him down and cut his hair off. “I was convinced that my hair was the source of my strength,” Mike told me. “So when they cut it off I overcompensated and threw my shoulder out — and that’s when USC threw me out.”

Mike recalled the day his father, the new Californiano, asked Mike to drive him to Paramount studios so he could visit a few of his old clients. “I think he wanted to show off a bit, about how he was pals with all those stars. Well, they turned their backs on him, and wouldn’t even authorize him to pass through the gates of the studio. That really hurt him.”

Mike had a long, sad history with his family when growing up in New Jersey. His mother, an Irish Catholic, constantly derided her husband, a short Jewish man from New York. They fought and argued so much that Mike carried memories on into his scripts in  Hollywood.  Charles Ingalls was such a fabulous father and husband because Mike never got to see any of that in his real life. His mother was the type who would turn on the gas and stick her head in the oven just in time to be rescued by Mike as he came home from  school,

“I remember the night she started making fun of my father’s prematurely grey hair. He finally got up, went to the drug store, came back and went  into the bathroom to dye his hair.  But he didn ‘t know what the hell he was doing, and when he came out his hair–and his skin–was bright orange down to his eye brows. Her laughter drove him back to the bathroom,  where he tried to remove the color. But it didn ‘t work, and she kept laughing. So, back to the store. He bought a pumice stone and came home to rub the dye off his skin — but all it did was remove a layer of his skin. He had to wear a hat down to his ears for a month after that.

Mike too often caught the anger of his mother. He was a bed-wetter, and his mother was convinced that the problem was caused by laziness, and she would raise holy hell every morning when she saw his soiled sheets. Thinking she could shame him into breaking the habit, she would hang the sheets out his bedroom window, where the bright stains were visable to all his passing schoolmates. Mike turned into a helluva runner because he raced home each day to pull that sheet in before more pals saw it. Mike fought bed-wetting for years. “I was nineteen the last time it happened,” he told me. “I fell asleep on the plane flying to New York, and I wet my pants in  flight.”

There were no tears when he spoke of his memories of his mother, but he always teared up remembering his father.

“He finally wound up as the manager of a run-down local movie theater,” Mike recalled with a smille. “I’ll never forget the marqee outside the theatre when he was showing a new movie starring Cornel Wilde. I had a tiny part in the movie–one scene with about twelve words– but the marquee on my dad’s theatre said the movie starred ‘Michael Landon and Cornel Wilde.’ He gave me top billing.”

Mike once told me that he hoped to die the same way his father did. “He had a favorite little restaurant down the street from  the theatre. Every day he’d say, ‘What’s the soup today?’ and they’d name it. ‘I’ll have a bowl of that,’ he’d say. On that last day they put the soup down in  front of him, he took a sip, smiled — and dropped dead right into the soup. That’s the way I want to go too.”

But Mike didn’t get that wish. Cancer came after him, and left him with long, painful months before he died.

One his final day, at his home, he was in bed surrounded by many of his close pals, including his long-time friend and producer, Kent McCray.

After a few laughs and memories he turned to Kent and said, “Thank everyone for coming — but I’d like a few minutes alone with Cindy now.”

His friends and family went downstairs in sadness. Fifteen minutes later Mike’s wife Cindy came down and whispered, “He’ gone now.”

We all lost a sweet man that day.

Fight Forth!