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Whim-indulging Caesar cast Gina Lollobrigida as his leading lady. laxed.” “It was the indecision that tied me in knots,” he says. His split with Max Liebman and Imogene Coca was nudged along by falling ratings and rising costs. It should be noted, how¬ ever, that as star of Your Show of Shows, Caesar earned enough statu¬ ettes, ribbons, scrolls and citations to stock a dozen mantelpieces. And the show didn’t slip from the golden “Top 10” until the middle of its fourth season. Despite his fondness for grunts, Sid has fluent command of English. Only English. The “foreign tongues” he glibly spouts are pure double talk, invented after hearing a language for as little as 15 minutes. Sid claims he doesn’t do pantomime. “It’s a combination of mimicry, pan¬ tomime, farce, everything”—a tech¬ nique he developed as a child. “A lot of people thought I was dumb. 6 But I think I was just inarticulate.” Finding it easier to point or make faces than to talk, he developed a knack for using few words. Ironically, he grew up without once cracking a memorable joke. Most people recall him as being somewhat morose. He had only two interests in life—astron¬ omy and music—and was serious about both. Music, in fact, was the real start of Sid’s career. Though he once aspired to play the clarinet with a symphony orchestra and to compose (he studied at New York’s famed Juilliard School of Music for six months), most of his professional music-making was as saxophonist with Charlie Spivak, Shep Fields and Claude Thornhill. He was in the U.S. Coast Guard dur¬ ing World War II when he met Ver¬ non Duke, who was composing a musical review, “Tars and Spars.” Vernon asked Sid to take part in it— as a comedian, not a musician. After that, comedy was his No. 1 interest. But he still yearned to share a stage with Benny Goodman—an ambition he finally realized this season on Caesar’s Hour. Now that he’s his own boss, he’s indulging other whims, too. Available to help make them realities is some $85,000 per week for talent and pro¬ duction costs. Sid’s business organization is named Shellric, after his daughter Shelley, 6, and son Rickey, 2%. Its home base is in the top two floors of a swank ladies’ specialty shop. Sid broke down the walls to build a gigantic rehears¬ al hall, installed a complete minia¬ ture kitchen, a shower bath, and wall- to-wall carpeting on the back fire stairs that lead to his plush black and gold penthouse office. Sid does almost nothing for relaxa¬ tion. “I get so tired after a day’s work, I won’t walk from here to