Ernie Kovacs

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Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was a creative and innovative entertainer in the early days of television. His on-air antics would influence later TV shows such as Laugh-In, the Uncle Floyd Show, Saturday Night Live and TV hosts like David Letterman.

Born in Trenton, New Jersey, the Hungarian-American Kovacs became a pioneer of television comedy as a distinct medium. Earlier television comedians had mainly continued the comedy styles of vaudeville, film or radio.

His shows were innovative because of their ad-libbed routines; experimentation with video effects (including superimpositions, reverse polarity, and reverse scanning which flipped images upside down); the use of quick "blackouts" and running gags; abstraction and non-sequitur; and a willingness to break the "fourth wall" by allowing viewers to see activity beyond the set - including crew members and, on occasion, outside the studio itself. He would also talk to the off-camera crew, or introduce segments from the control room.

Contents 1 Visual Humor and Characters 2 Use of Music 3 First marriage 4 Second marriage 5 Writing, TV, and Movie Credits 6 Lost and Surviving TV Work 7 Death 8 TV-Movie Bio and Retrospectives 9 Trivia and Interesting Facts 10 Biographies 11 External links

[edit] Visual Humor and Characters

Kovacs invented many camera tricks that are still common today. One of his most popular gags was a bit where Kovacs (as one of his characters, "Eugene") sat down at a table to eat his lunch. He took items out of his lunch box and one by one, each item mysteriously rolled down the table into a gentleman reading the newspaper at the other end. Kovacs then started to pour a glass of milk. The milk appeared to pour from the thermos in an unusual direction. The visual trick, which had not been seen on TV before, was created with a tilted table and a camera tilted to the same angle as the table.

Kovacs constantly sought new techniques and accomplished many visual tricks with primitive and improvised means to create effects that later would be done electronically. He once attached a kaleidoscope to the camera lens with cardboard and tape; the resulting abstract images, set to music, were very much ahead of their time.

Kovacs was rarely seen without a cigar, which he often incorporated as a prop. In one memorable segment, he was seen sitting in an easy chair, calmly reading a newspaper. After a short interval, he took the cigar out of his mouth and exhaled smoke. The unique feature of this otherwise ordinary sequence was that it took place entirely underwater. (The "smoke" was actually milk that Kovacs had filled his mouth with prior to submerging.)

Other popular bits included such gems as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake; a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically to the tune "Solfeggio"; the Silent Show, in which a nerdy character interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects; parodies of typical TV commercials and movie genres; and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. He used everything from long, extended sketches and mood pieces to quick "blackout" gags lasting a few seconds. (One famous example was a bit involving a used-car salesman, a jalopy, and a breakaway floor -- a bit that cost $50,000 to produce and lasted 6 seconds on screen!) There were no wasted moments in a Kovacs show, with yjr humor starting during the opening theme song and continuing even into the midst of the ending credits (which frequently incorporated bizarre fake credits and comments interspersed between the legitimate crew names and titles).

Recurring characters created by Kovacs included fey and lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils; German disc jockey Wolfgang von Sauerbraten; horror show host Auntie Gruesome; bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite; Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show; Frenchman Pierre Ragout; the silent character Eugene (above); and Mr. Question Man, who would answer queries supposedly sent in by viewers.

[edit] Use of Music

Kovacs loved music and its possibilities as accompaniment for humor. His musical choices were certainly eclectic. His main theme song was called "Oriental Blues," by Jack Newlon, which borrows heavily from "Rialto Ripples Rag", a quirky piano number by George Gershwin. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (a song later anglicized to the well-known "Mack the Knife") frequently underscored series of blackout sketches. Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became so associated with the infamous derby-hatted apes that it became better known simply as "The Song of the Nairobi Trio". An unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey" by Mexican bandleader Juan Garcia Esquivel accompanied video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) seem to come to life in rhythm to the music. The piece de resistance were tunes by Leona Anderson, such as "Rats in My Room". Leona was reportedly a kind and gentle soul, whose singing voice, in contrast, could be unfavorably compared to fingernails on a blackboard. Naturally, Kovacs used her songs at every opportunity.

Kovacs also incorporated classical music into his shows, often as background for dialogue-less sketches or abstract visual images and montages. Some selections used were the "Concerto for Orchestra" by Béla Bartók, music from the opera "The Love for Three Oranges" by Sergei Prokofiev, the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird," and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks." The classical piece most often associated with Kovacs is Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," which was indeed written by Haydn, not Roman Hoffstetter[1]), which was used in his memorable Dutch Masters commercials.

Kovacs served as host on a jazz LP record to benefit the American Cancer Society. Released in 1957 and entitled Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs, the 15 minute recording features jazz luminaries Jimmy Yancey, Sidney Bechet, Bunk Johnson, Django Reinhardt, Duke Ellington, and Cootie Williams. The release was recorded for 1957 Cancer Crusade. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their respective collections.

[edit] First marriage

Kovacs married his first wife, Bette Wilcox, on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Bette and Kippie. The courts awarded Kovacs full custody of them, which was extremely unusual at the time (in fact, setting a legal precedent), since it was decided that his former wife was mentally unstable. Wilcox then kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search that included many trips there, Kovacs regained custody.

[edit] Second marriage

Kovacs married actress and singer Edie Adams on September 12, 1954 in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer, and performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each to say "Si" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a very white-bread middle-class upbringing in suburban New Jersey, was smitten by the quirkiness and eccentricities of the Hungarian Kovacs. They remained together until his death. (Adams later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it -- Women's Lib be damned!") The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, in 1959. Ernie frequently incorporated his wife into sketches on his TV shows, including being a member of the Nairobi Trio. He always referred to her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". She was always game for anything Ernie dreamed up for her to do, and was just as likely to take a pie in the face or a pratfall as she was to sing a serious and beautiful song or do a celebrity impersonation (she did an excellent Marilyn Monroe, among others).

[edit] Writing, TV, and Movie Credits

Kovacs wrote a novel entitled, "ZOOMAR (A Sophisticated Novel About Love and TV)" in 1956, published by Doubleday in 1957, and based on the life and career of television pioneer Pat Weaver. While he worked on several other projects in book form, his only other published title was"How To Talk At Gin", published posthumously in 1962. During 1955-1958 he wrote for Mad Magazine, including the recurring "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that also was featured on Kovacs' TV show) and "Gringo," a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed "Droongo" for the TV show. Kovacs contributed to the collection, Mad for keeps: a collection of the best from Mad magazine, writing the introduction. Crown Publishers published this volume in 1958.

According to the British Library[2], there is a 316 page novel T.V. Medium Rare, with Kovacs as its author. The London based publisher Transworld Publishers published the book in 1961 as no. GN1023 in its Corgi Books series. It is unclear whether this is simply a British edition of ZOOMAR or another work.

Some of his television programs included Three to Get Ready (local Philadelphia TV, 1950-1952), Time for Ernie in 1951, Ernie in Kovacsland in 1951, The Ernie Kovacs Show in 1952, The Tonight Show (as a 2-day per week substitute for Steve Allen) from 1956 to 1957, and the game show Take a Good Look from 1959 to 1961. He also did several TV specials, including the famous "Silent Show" in 1959, and a series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC in 1961-62. (These last shows, done on videotape and utilizing unprecedented editing and special effects techniques for the time, are said by many to be his best TV work.) Kovacs' comedic style was lost on many 1950s TV viewers, who were used to a steady diet of sitcoms and variety shows. (His friend Jack Lemmon said that no one ever understood his work because "he was always 15 years ahead of everyone else.") Consequently, while he always had a small, hard-core fan base who "got" what he was trying to do, he never had a long-lasting or highly-rated TV series.

In the last few years of his life, Kovacs found modest success as a character actor in Hollywood movies, often being typecast as a swarthy military officer in such films as Operation Mad Ball and Our Man in Havana. But he also garnered critical acclaim for roles such as the perennially inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly evil head of a railroad company in It Happened to Jane. His own personal favorite was the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in professional widow Cyd Charisse.

Shortly before his death, Kovacs had been chosen to appear as Melville Crump in Stanley Kramer's star-packed comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, along with real-life spouse Edie Adams portraying his screen wife Monica Crump. The role eventually went to comedian Sid Caesar.

[edit] Lost and Surviving TV Work

Most of Kovacs' early shows, such as the local morning show he hosted in Philadelphia from 1950-52, do not survive as they were done live. Only a few short film clips of these shows still exist. Some, though not all of his later 1950s shows exist in the form of kinescopes. Videotapes of his 1960s ABC specials were preserved, but other videotaped shows such as his quirky game show "Take a Good Look" exist only in piecemeal fashion. After Kovacs' death, his widow Edie was horrified to find that the networks were starting to systematically erase and reuse the tapes of Ernie's shows. At great expense and effort, she managed to buy up the rights to the surviving footage and ensure that future generations would not forget her husband's work.

[edit] Death

Kovacs died in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was driving a Chevrolet Corvair Lakewood station wagon. During a rare Southern California rainstorm, he lost control of the car while making a fast turn and crashed into a power pole. Kovacs was thrown halfway out the passenger door, killed almost instantly -- his chest and head taking fatal injuries. A photographer was on the scene moments later, and a morbid image of Kovacs' dead body appeared the next day on the front pages of newspapers across the United States. His close friend, actor Jack Lemmon, identified Kovacs' body at the county morgue when his wife proved unable to do so. At the time of his death, he owed the IRS several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. Kovacs had always felt the tax system was unfair, and had simply refused to pay, resulting in the eventual garnishment of up to 90% of his wages. Edie Adams eventually paid off the taxes herself, refusing monetary help (in the form of a benefit concert) from their celebrity friends, though many of them rallied to help her with film and television work.

Kovacs is buried in Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation-We all loved him".

Kovacs' daughter with Edie Adams, Mia Susan, was killed in 1982, also in an automobile accident (off Mullholland Drive). His daughter Kippie died in 2001, after a lingering illness and an adult lifetime of poor health. She is buried next to her father and younger half sister. Ernie has one grandchild, Keigh, the daughter of Kippie and screenwriter Bill Lancaster (deceased), the son of actor Burt Lancaster. Kovacs' oldest daughter Elizabeth is alive as of 2006.

[edit] TV-Movie Bio and Retrospectives

In 1984, a TV-movie was made about Kovacs' life called Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter, which starred Jeff Goldblum as Kovacs. It focused on his private life, especially his attempts to retrieve his kidnapped children.

The TV-Movie had been inspired by a resurgence of interest in Kovacs, due to the broadcast of edited compilations of some of his work (mostly his videotaped ABC specials) by PBS (produced by WTTW Chicago) under the title "The Best of Ernie Kovacs." This package of shows introduced a new generation of fans to his unique style of humor. (A 5-volume set of these broadcasts is still available on VHS and DVD.)

Later, in the early 1990s, the cable channel known as the Comedy Channel (which later merged with a competing channel called "Ha!" to become today's Comedy Central) broadcast a series of Ernie's shows under the generic title of "The Ernie Kovacs Show." This package included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. There are no broadcast, cable or satellite channels currently scheduling any of Kovacs' TV work.

[edit] Trivia and Interesting Facts

• Kovacs may have said, "Television: a medium, so-called because it is neither rare nor well done." (This quip has also been attributed to radio star Fred Allen.)
• Kovacs was a frequent poker player with other entertainment friends such as Jack Lemmon, who called Kovacs and Walter Matthau two of the worst players he had ever known.
• Ernie disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC in the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects that could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.
• His long battles with the IRS led Kovacs to tie up his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations, both in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company" to thumb his nose at the Feds.
• At the time of his death, one of Ernie's half-hour specials for ABC had been videotaped and edited, but not yet aired. It was broadcast on schedule with an added announcement at the beginning indicating that all connected with the show felt that Ernie would certainly have wanted it to air.
• His tax woes also affected Kovacs' career, forcing him to take any offered work, no matter how ill-suited to his style of comedy, to pay off his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show, and some of his less memorable movie roles.
• In his early days of live television in Philadelphia (early 1950s), Ernie frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. One cold winter morning, a homeless man wandered into the studio seeking shelter from the elements. Ernie allowed him to sleep on the studio floor, and he became a silent, snoozing "cast member" of that day's sketches, introduced by Ernie as "Sleeping Schwartz."
• Although Kovacs was a long-time spokesman for Dutch Masters cigars (resulting in some of the most creative and humorous commercials of the time), in real life Ernie only smoked expensive Havana cigars, as many as 20 per day at a price of $2.00 each. (Quite expensive in 1950s dollars.)
• Ernie was a night-owl and insomniac, surviving on no more than 3 or 4 hours sleep at night, and often much less than that (sometimes no sleep at all if a good poker game was in progress). He credited frequent steambaths followed by a cold swim underwater in a pool for invigorating him and keeping him going when his energy lagged.

• One of the funniest practical jokes of the live TV era was played on Ernie in one of his NBC shows. Appearing as his inept magician character Matzoh Heppelwhite, he would frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort. One evening, stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the gag. The look on Ernie's face upon taking the first shot was priceless, but he pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.
• Those who view Laugh-In as a direct descendant of Ernie's comedic style are correct. Laugh-In producer George Schlatter was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in (or victim of) his pioneering bits.

• In another link between TV generations, Kovacs' usual announcer (and sometimes sketch participant) was a young staffer named Bill Wendell. Decades later, Wendell spent many years as an announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs.
• Kovacs shared hosting duties on The Tonight Show with Steve Allen in 1956-57, taking over the Monday and Tuesday editions of the show while Allen was busy with other projects. Ernie later publicly accused Allen of stealing material and characters from him, then performing them in only slightly obfuscated form.
• Ernie appeared from time to time as a guest panelist on such popular game shows as What's My Line?, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example would be when industrialist Henry J. Kaiser was the Mystery Guest. Previous questioning had established that the Mystery Guest had a car named after him, prompting Kovacs to ask, "This may seem like a long shot, sir, but by any chance are you Abraham Lincoln?" -- a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln brand of luxury automobile.
• Ernie and Edie were the guest stars on the final installment of the one-hour I Love Lucy format, known in network airings as The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show and in syndication as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. Kovacs and Adams appeared in the episode titled "Lucy Meets the Moustache" taped on March 2 and aired on April 1, 1960. It was the last time Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz appeared together before the breakup of their marriage. According to Adams, divorce proceedings began on March 3, the day after the show's taping.
• Kovacs' local TV show Three to Get Ready on Philadelphia's Channel 3 (1950-52) was groundbreaking -- the first regularly scheduled early morning (7-9 am) show in a major TV market. Prior to this, it was assumed that no one would watch TV at such an early hour. The success of Three to Get Ready proved the theory wrong and was one of the factors that led NBC to create The Today Show, which ironically led to the cancellation of Ernie's show in favor of the network offering.

[edit] Biographies

There have been two main biographies written about Ernie Kovacs:

(1) The Ernie Kovacs Phile by David Walley, originally published in 1978 by Bolder Books and reprinted in 1987 by Fireside/Simon & Schuster (ISBN 0-918282-06-3). This trade paperback is a colorful reminiscence about Ernie, with 32 photographs. It is the paperback edition of the original hardcover edition, Nothing in Moderation by David Walley, which was published by Drake Publishers in 1975 (ISBN 0-87749-738-9).

(2) Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs by Diana Rico, published by Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich in 1990 (ISBN 0-15-147294-7). This book, published as both a hardcover and trade paperback, is the definitive treatment of Kovacs' life and work.

Both titles are out of print, but a search of an online used bookseller may turn up copies of each. In addition, many public libraries and university libraries have copies of in their respective collections.

Ernie's widow Edie Adams also wrote an autobiography, entitled Sing a Pretty Song: The "Offbeat" Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years, published by William Morrow in 1990 (ISBN 0-688-07341-7). This title is also out of print, but it should be readily available from used book sources or public and university libraries.

There is also a chapter devoted to Kovacs in the more recently published book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s by Gerald Nachman, published by Pantheon Books in 2004 (ISBN 0-375-41030-9).

In 1982, David Brian Barker wrote his master's thesis on Ernie Kovacs for his degree at the University of Texas, Austin. The thesis title is "Every Moment's a Gift" : Ernie Kovacs in Hollywood, 1957-1962. A copy is available for viewing at the University's library.

Kovacs' search for his kidnapped daughters is the primary focus of the 1984 made-for-television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter. The film stars Jeff Goldblum as Ernie, Melody Anderson as Edie Adams, and Cloris Leachman as Ernie's mother.

Kovacs is also the subject of a play, The Importance of Being Ernie by multimedia artist Sean Sanczel.

[edit] External links

• erniekovacs.net an Ernie Kovacs Tribute Site
• Kovacsland Online!
• The Ernie Kovacs Blog
• The Ernie Kovacs MySpace Page
• It's Been Real a personal tribute to Ernie Kovacs
• Finding Aid for the Ernie Kovacs Papers, 1940-1962 at the University of California, Los Angeles Library 's Department of Special Collections
• Museum of Broadcast Communications: Ernie Kovacs
• Grave record of Ernie Kovacs at Findagrave.com
• Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia: Ernie Kovacs
• Ernie Kovacs at the Internet Movie Database
• Link to the full-text of Sean Sanczel's play The Importance of Being Ernie
• Article on Ernie Kovacs and his work at the New York Times
• Second article on Ernie Kovacs and his work at the New York Times