TV Radio Mirror (Jan - Jun 1955)

Caesar's Finest Hour (Continued from page 49) faster than the speed of light . . . travels 212,000 miles per second, whereas the speed of light is only 186,000 miles per second. They're getting more out of the spark than they're putting into it — which may revolutionize the whole theory of thermo-physics. It may also revolutionize the theory that you get out of life only what you put into it. A theory I, personally, have never believed. If you put something good into life, you not only get it back, but more besides. "Or maybe we'd talk about some book we were reading — The Day Lincoln Was Shot, let's say, and this leads to a discussion of ballistics. As a lover of guns, and a collector, I know ballistics. Because I do, I know Lincoln could have been saved. I say so. This leads to more talk, discussion, argument. "Talk like this, of other jobs, other professions, other problems, and other worlds is more relaxing, more refreshing than a cruise, a vacation. Cheaper, too. You're 'getting away from it all' while your body, which is expensive to move around, stays put. "A couple of hours of talk, then Florence and the kids come along and join us. Before dinner, Florence and I would have a couple of cocktails. Then dinner, and I'd go off my diet, have lobster with drawn butter sauce, julienne potatoes, apple pie with a big hunk of yellow cheese on the top of it. After dinner I'd like to just sit a while, then take a walk with Florence, • get a little romantic with Florence, thinking, when you live a lot, and at such a fast pace, you don't have enough time to walk, and talk, and be romantic. . . . "Then we'd drive home and, after hearing the kids say their prayers and tucking them in, we'd make for the kitchen where I'd have my midnight snack of stale rye bread, or cornbread (the staler the bread, the better I like it), bananas, American cheese and milk. This is my midnight snack," said the six-foot tall, 206-pound Caesar (who is really built!), "every night. "And so to bed. And so ends," Sid shrugged and smiled, "the day off I haven't had!" And isn't likely to have until that eighth day is added to his crowded calendar. And should have, because this year just past has been not only a crowded year, but also a crucial year in Caesar's life. A brandnew leaf of a year, too, for when, in the spring of '54, Sid and Imogene Coca split up and their co-starring career on Max Liebman's Your Show Of Shows, which made television history, then belonged to history, Sid formed his own company, Shellric Corporation — named for his sevenyear-old daughter Michele (called Shelley) and his three-year-old-son, Richard (called Rick). "I went through a very difficult period for many months," Sid says. "Getting a new organization together is a terrible job. Not only in the matter of getting the right people for the jobs but, and this is even more important, of getting the right people for you. For, if someone you work with is not chemically right for you, you rub each other the wrong way and you don't get anywhereT "But even during the difficult period," Sid said in answer to my question, "I did * not regret — I do not ever regret — that Coca and I split up. I enjoyed working . with Imogene, I had fun, and we worked v very well together. But she is a star in r her own right and there just wasn't enough time for both of us — someone had to suffer. With Nanette Fabray, who is also a star in her own right, and very much so, it is easier to blend — perhaps because, as performers, we're less alike than Coca and I . . . don't have to do the same kind of things and also because, on Caesar's Hour, 'The play's the thing!' If a sketch calls for a woman to have the spotlight, Fabray has the spotlight. If the sketch features a man, I am featured. We don't have to write for two stars. It's as simple as that. "That Coca and I should part company was NBC's idea, however — not hers, or mine. A sound idea for the network since they now have three shows — Max's Spectaculars, Coca's show, and mine — in place of one. For Coca and me, it's a matter of going up, too. Speaking for myself, I'd been with Max for seven years, and he taught me a tremendous amount. But — it's like a child living at home for too long ... all right up to 20 or 21, then a kid has to get out on his own, move on, otherwise he becomes stagnant." That the star, likewise the owner and proprietor, of Caesar's Hour should ever become stagnant is one of The Things Least Likely To Happen — that's for sure! oid not only owns the show, he directs it. He not only directs it, he sits in on all the meetings — with his producer, Leo Morgan, with his musical director, his dance director, the technicians and with his writers, all five of them. It is with his writers that Sid spends the most time — anywhere from one to three hours a day (or night) planning and writing the show. Many of the ideas used are Caesar's ideas. In a recent show, for instance, the camera moved from one couple to another — three in all — as they were arguing about whether they'd go to the fights or, as the wives wished, to a concert. Because the camera had to move from one couple to the other, and show each under a different roof, at the same time, a difficult technical problem arose — but to TV's Caesar, as to Rome's, problems are puzzles to be solved and difficulties merely objects to be removed. His, too, the idea for a dance production, a bullfight number in which the charging bull was played, with stunning effect, by — the camera! Even when Sid is not at a meeting, or rehearsing the customary six to seven hours a day, he's Still man-at-work cataloguing and eventually utilizing people he meets — the things he sees and hears, and also everything he personally experiences — as raw material for his skits, monologues and pantomimes. There was the time visiting relatives spent an afternoon at the Caesar apartment fussing over and cuddling the small Shelley. "She spent four hours on people's laps without once putting foot to floor," said Sid . . . and next thing you know, there was a skit portraying a baby's indignation over adult stupidity. After a harried couple of hours trying to teach Florence to change gears, Sid worked up a car driving routine that was riotous. He's also been a husband who has just had a fight with his wife and suddenly thinks of things he should have said; an awkward boy attending his first dance and then — seen several years later — in all his revolting self-confidence as a jitterbug. He's been a waiter soothing the customers, as only Caesar can soothe, while the restaurant kitchen burns. A Great Lover of the Broadway stage, who loses his voice, his glamour and his girl only to retrieve all three as "the curtain falls." He is, perennially, "The Professor," with his double-talking "foreign" languages. As boys in Yonkers, New York, Sid and his two older brothers worked as bouncers in their father's restaurant, the St. Clair Lunch. It was while listening to the thunderous renunciations of the patrons who were no longer welcome that Caesar began to amass his extraordinary repertoire of dialects, accents and "foreign languages." With "human comedy" as his source of material Caesar is still — at all hours of the day and night, and everywhere — adding to his amazing virtuosity. All this — and the business administration of Shellric, too! For, although the sponsors of Caesar's Hour pay NBC-TV for the air time, they render unto Caesar the monies for the show, and it is Caesar who pays his own salary and the salaries of the talent and the office personnel he himself hires. He also takes the tab for the rental of Shellric's offices, which are sumptuously housed on two floors of the Milgrim Building on New York's West 57th Street. On the lower floor the producer, dance and musical directors, writers and secretaries have their wellequipped offices. On the lower floor also is the rehearsal hall, vast and airy and hung with silken draperies the color of the sun. On the upper floor is Sid's private office and this is quite a deal! The colors of walls and furnishings — well-upholstered, man-size chairs, a wide, deep, extra-long davenport, wall-to-wall carpeting — are mostly strong greens and reds. The ceilingto-floor draperies are putty-colored. There is a 21-inch screen color television set. Among the many paintings on the walls (browsing about art galleries and collecting guns are Sid's two rather incongruous hobbies) I spotted a Picasso and a Rouault. Over the massive desk, a skylight opens to the heavens. Sid's lunch is served him at his desk. It is prepared, in a small kitchenette at the end of the corridor leading to the office, by Homer, the pleasant-faced man who caters to the inner man of Shellric Corp.'s headman. "In this office, and/or the rehearsal hall, 1 spend more time," Sid told me, "than I do at home." With Caesar, as with Steve Allen, Jackie Gleason, Garry Moore and the other headliners on TV, time — or the lack of it — is the chronic and common complaint, as common as the common cold. Lack of time for rest and recreation . . . for friends. Lack of time for family life, which Sid holds to be the gravest lack of all — for, as he so wisely says: "If you have a high TV rating, that's good, that's fine, that's what you're working for, what you want, but — the rating that really counts is the one you have with your family." Caesar's rating, both on TV and at home, which is a comfortable, large apartment on New York's upper Park Avenue, is, as of now, slightly astronomical. That his TV rating should be Up There is to be expected, if the rewards of honest and unremitting labor are all they're cracked up to be. But for the satisfactory state of affairs at work and at home, Sid thanks the cure he has found for the "common complaint" (said to be incurable) afflicting the TV greats. "What I do," says Sid, "I take three days out of each month (three days out of the one week we're not on the air) and go up to this place called Avon Lodge in Woodridge, New York — where Florence and I first met when I was entertaining the summer guests at the Lodge and she was a counselor at a near-by girls' camp. These days out are not to be confused, by the way, with that 'one day off' I dream about. These days have a purpose,