Rip Taylor

I've created such a monster.

-Rip Taylor

Charles Elmer "Rip" Taylor Jr.
January 13, 1935 – October 6, 2019

Taylor was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Elizabeth, a waitress, and Charles Elmer Taylor Sr., a musician. As described in his 2010 one-man show It Ain't All Confetti, Taylor had a tough childhood, which included being molested while in foster care and having to deal with bullies in school. As a young man, Taylor worked as a congressional page before serving in the Korean War while in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

Taylor's career in show business began after he joined the U.S. Army, where he started performing stand-up in clubs and restaurants abroad. Although a lot of his material were jokes stolen from acts he saw in USO shows, his signature piece would be to pretend to cry as he begged the audience to laugh. From there, he was able to land a spot on The Ed Sullivan Show, making close to 20 appearances. According to Taylor, Sullivan would forget his name but used to say "Get me the crying comedian."

In addition to the Ed Sullivan Show, Taylor appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show in several guest appearances during the 1963–64 season as "the crying comedian."

He appeared in two 1968 episodes of The Monkees as well as having a cameo in the 1969 special 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee. He continued to work as a voice performer in the 1970s cartoon series Here Comes the Grump (as the title character) and in the second The Addams Family cartoon series (as Uncle Fester).

Throughout the 1970s, Taylor was a frequent celebrity guest panelist on TV game shows such as Hollywood Squares, To Tell the Truth, and The Gong Show, and substituted for Charles Nelson Reilly on The Match Game. He became a regular on Sid and Marty Krofft's Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, playing Sheldon, a sea-genie who lived in a conch shell. In addition, Taylor was also a regular on The Brady Bunch Hour, playing a role of neighbor/performer Jack Merrill. He also hosted a short-lived send-up of beauty pageants titled The $1.98 Beauty Show, created by Gong Show producer/host Chuck Barris, in 1978. Taylor appeared as a celebrity on the 1990 version of Match Game.^] In 1979, he was the voice of C.J. from the Hanna-Barbera TV movie Scooby Goes Hollywood. Taylor's other appearances include the television show The Kids in the Hall. He was referred to as Uncle Rip by Buddy Cole, one of the show's characters. He also appeared as himself in the movie Wayne's World 2, one of the special guests invited to "WayneStock" after being visited in a dream by Jim Morrison.

In 1990, he voiced the genie in DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp. Taylor appeared uncredited on a December 1994 edition of WWF Monday Night Raw to assist in a push being given to Jeff Jarrett.

In 1997, Taylor appeared in a segment on the show Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. He played the role of Elmo Middleton in the segment "The Man in the Model T". Also in 1997, he appeared as himself on the sitcom Brotherly Love in the episode "Easy Come Easy Go". He also portrayed Chief Undersecretary Wartle in the graphical adventure game Zork: Grand Inquisitor in 1997. In 2003, Taylor also appeared as himself on Will & Grace. In 2005, he appeared as himself on an episode of George Lopez. Taylor guest-starred as chef "Rappin' Rip" in four episodes of Life with Bonnie. He guest starred in The Suite Life of Zack & Cody episode "Loosely Ballroom" as Leo. He is also in some episodes of The Emperor's New School as the voice of the Royal Record Keeper. He was also in the Jetix animated series Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!. He made a special guest appearance at the end of the 1,000th episode of G4's video game review show X-Play. He made a guest appearance on a 2012 episode of The Aquabats! Super Show!, where he played a genie reminiscent of his character on Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.

Taylor was an accomplice of the Jackass crew. In 1995, he performed the intro for the Bloodhound Gang's Use Your Fingers album, and in 2002, he appeared in the final scene of Jackass: The Movie, wielding a pistol that, when fired, released a sign that read "The End." (Taylor's section of the film was originally considerably longer, and ended with him complaining about the heat, and fanning himself with his toupée. This footage was included on the DVD of the film.) He did the same thing at the ending of Jackass Number Two and Jackass 3D. In the credits of the 2005 remake of The Dukes of Hazzard, Taylor shows up in the blooper reel.

Taylor made occasional appearances in movies, usually in broad comedies like The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977) and the R-rated Deep Throat parody Chatterbox (1977). In Cheech and Chong's Things Are Tough All Over (1982), he picks them up in the middle of nowhere driving a convertible full of props. He then proceeds to drive them to Las Vegas and telling jokes the whole way and moving Chong to tears from laughter (and, later, tears because he won't stop). In Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) a funeral service turns into a celebrity roast when guest Rip Taylor shows up to "honor" the deceased. In 1993, Taylor appeared in Tom and Jerry: The Movie (1992) as Captain Kiddle and in Wayne's World 2. In 1993's Indecent Proposal as Demi Moore's boss, he appears without his toupee. He was also in the 1990 summer movie DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp as the voice of the Genie.

Taylor's first big live show was in 1966, when he went on a tour with Judy Garland and Eleanor Powell in Las Vegas. In 1981, Taylor appeared on Broadway when he replaced Mickey Rooney in the burlesque-themed musical comedy Sugar Babies. He was a frequent co-star with Debbie Reynolds in her live shows in Las Vegas; Reno, Nevada; and Lake Tahoe. Taylor performed frequently in Atlantic City as well. In 2010, he appeared in the one-man show It Ain't All Confetti in North Hollywood, where he shared personal stories about his life and career.

Good Night Mr. Taylor

Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa

Diahann Carroll

I hope that there are no persons that would want to think ill of me in any direction or any behavior.

-Diahann Carroll

Diahann Carrollborn Carol Diahann JohnsonJuly 17, 1935 – October 4, 2019

Good Night Ms Carroll

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Tony Figueroa

Your Mental Sorbet: The War of the Worlds (radio drama)

Here is another "Mental Sorbet" 

A little spark of madness

that we could use to momentarily forget about those

things that leave a bad taste in our mouths

The War of the Worlds is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on Sunday, October 30, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds (1898). It became famous for allegedly causing mass panic, although the scale of the panic is disputed as the program had relatively few listeners.

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Tony Figueroa

This Week in Television History: October 2019 PART I

September 30, 1954

Barry Williams is born Barry William Blenkhorn. 

Best known for his role as Greg Brady on theABC television series, The Brady Bunch. Williams continued to be cast in guest roles on other TV series including Adam-12, The Invaders, That Girl, Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, Here Come the Brides and Bartleby, the Scrivener before being cast in 1969 as Greg Brady on The Brady Bunch.

Following the cancellation of The Brady Bunch in 1974, Williams continued to appear in guest roles on television, and became involved in musical theater, touring with productions such as Grease, The Sound of Music, and West Side Story.

In 1988, Williams appeared on Broadway in the musical Romance/Romance with Tony Award-nominee Alison Fraser. Williams took over the lead male role of “Alfred/Sam” when Scott Bakula left the production. Years later, Williams was able to capitalize on being typecast as Greg Brady. Amid a procession of appearances in TV and movies that played up his famous teen role, he ended up landing a role that was a departure from the Brady image. He was tapped to play English con man Hannibal in 1984, who conspired with Holly Sutton Scorpio (Emma Samms) on the top-rated General Hospital. Williams has appeared in variousBrady Bunch TV movie reunions, including the 1988 Christmas movie, A Very Brady Christmas, in which his sole family problem is missing his wife, Nora. The issue with his wife is solved when Nora shows up at the Brady house on Christmas, poinsettia in hand.

In 1989, Williams was honored by the Young Artist Foundation with its Former Child Star “Lifetime Achievement” Award for his role as Greg Brady.

His 1992 autobiography, Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, co-written with Chris Kreski, stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for three months. The book was adapted into a 2000 TV movie titled Growing Up Brady starring Adam Brody as Williams.

September 30, 1984

The pilot episode of Murder, She Wrote aired on CBS. 

The mystery series starring Angela Lansbury as mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher. The series aired for twelve seasons from 1984 to 1996 on the CBS network. It was followed by four TV films and a spin-off series, The Law & Harry McGraw. It is one of the most successful and longest-running television shows ever for CBS, pulling in close to 23 million viewers in its prime, during its Sunday night slot. It is also hugely successful across the world.

Angela Lansbury has been nominated for a total of ten Golden Globes and twelve Emmies. She holds the record for the most Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress in a television drama series and the most Emmy nominations ever for outstanding lead actress in a drama series for Murder She wrote. It is now considered to be a TV cult classic around the world.

October 2, 1959

The first TheTwilight Zone episode Where Is Everybody? Aired.

Opening narration

“The place is here, the time is now, and the journey into the shadows that we're about to watch, could be our journey”.

This was the only Twilight Zone episode filmed at Universal Studios, the rest of the entire series was filmed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The centerpiece of the episode is the Courthouse Square set, most well known for being used as the town square of "Hill Valley" in the Back to the Future series of films over 25 years later.
The haunting score composed by Bernard Herrmann (Psycho) for this episode would be reused for several episodes of the series, most notably "The After Hours" and "The Last Flight". 

October 3, 1954

Father Knows Best began airing on CBS-TV.

The May 27, 1954 episode of The Ford Television Theatre show was called "Keep It in the Family". This 26-minute episode stars Robert Young as Tim Warren, head of the Warren Family. With him was wife Grace (Ellen Drew), older daughter Peggy (Sally Fraser), younger daughter Patty (Tina Thompson) and son Jeff (Gordon Gerbert). Developed by Young and his partner Eugene Rodney, it was intended as a pilot for a Father Knows Best television series. In the episode, Peggy dreams of making it as an actress but a talent scout who has raised her hopes just wants people for his acting school.

Only Robert Young remained of the radio cast when the series moved to CBS Television:

·        James "Jim" Anderson, Sr.–Robert Young

·        Margaret Anderson–Jane Wyatt

·        Betty "Princess" Anderson–Elinor Donahue

·        James "Bud" Anderson, Jr.–Billy Gray

·        Kathy "Kitten" Anderson–Lauren Chapin

The series began on CBS on October 3, 1954. Originally sponsored by Lorillard's Kent cigarettes in its first season, Scott Paper Company became the primary sponsor when the series moved to NBC in the fall of 1955, remaining as sponsor even after it moved back to CBS in September 1958, with Lever Brothers as an alternate sponsor from 1957 through 1960. A total of 203 episodes were produced, running until September 17, 1960, and appearing on all three of the television networks of the time, including prime-time repeats from September 1960 through April 1963.

October 3, 1964

Underdog debuted on NBC. 

Underdog, Shoeshine Boy's heroic alter-ego, appeared whenever love interest Sweet Polly Purebred was being victimized by such villains as Simon Bar Sinister or Riff Raff. Underdog nearly always speaks in rhyme, as in, "There's no need to fear, Underdog is here!" His voice was supplied by Wally Cox.

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".

October 3, 2004

The first season of Desperate Housewives began. 

Created by Marc Cherry and produced by ABC Studios and Cherry Productions. It aired Sundays at 9 P.M. Eastern/8 P.M. Central, on ABC from October 3, 2004, until May 13, 2012.Executive producer Cherry served as showrunner. Other executive producers since the fourth season included Bob Daily, George W. Perkins, John Pardee, Joey Murphy, David Grossman, and Larry Shaw.

The main setting of the show was Wisteria Lane, a street in the fictional American town of 'Fairview' in the fictional 'Eagle State'. The show followed the lives of a group of women as seen through the eyes of a dead neighbor who committed suicide in the very first episode. The storyline covers thirteen years of the women's lives over eight seasons, set between the years 2004–2008, and later 2013–2017 (the story arc included a 5 year passage of time). They worked through domestic struggles and family life, while facing the secrets, crimes and mysteries hidden behind the doors of their — at the surface — beautiful and seemingly perfect suburban neighborhood.

The show featured an ensemble cast, headed by Teri Hatcher as Susan Mayer, Felicity Huffman as Lynette Scavo, Marcia Cross asBree Van de Kamp, and Eva Longoria as Gabrielle Solis. Brenda Strong narrated the show as the deceased Mary Alice Young, appearing sporadically in flashbacks or dream sequences.

October 4, 1949

The television series Life of Riley debuts, starring Jackie Gleason as bullheaded family man Chester Riley.

The show originated on the radio in the early 1940s and starred William Bendix. In 1953, Bendix took over the TV role from Gleason and stayed with the show until its cancellation in 1958.

October 4, 1954

December Bride debuted on CBS-TV. 

The series centered around the adventures of Lily Ruskin, a spry widow played by Spring Byington, who was not, in fact, a "December" (rather old) bride but very much desired to become one if the right man would come along. Aiding Lily in her search for this prospective suitor were her daughter Ruth Henshaw (Frances Rafferty) and son-in-law Matt Henshaw (Dean Miller), and her close friend Hilda Crocker (character-actress Verna Felton). A next-door neighbor, insurance agent Pete Porter (Harry Morgan), was frequently seen. Married miserably himself, according to his constant complaints about his unseen wife Gladys, he also envied Matt's positive relationship with Lily, as he despised his own mother-in-law. The pilot episode premiered on October 4, 1954 and involved Lily Ruskin moving in with her daughter and son-in-law. December Bride was unusual in that all five stars appeared in all 111 episodes of the sitcom. Most of the scenes filmed for the series took place in the Henshaws' living room.

First-run episodes of December Bride aired for 5 seasons (1954-1959), sponsored by General Foods' Instant Maxwell House Coffee. During the first four seasons, the program was not shown in the summer, supplanted by "summer replacement" series (such as Ethel and Albert) but in its final year, repeat episodes were run in its timeslot during the summer months. On March 26, 1959, as the program wound down, Rory Calhoun, star of CBS's western series, The Texan, appeared as himself in the episode "Rory Calhoun, The Texan".

December Bride was sufficiently popular that even after its production had ceased, CBS used repeat episodes to fill slots in its primetime programming. In July 1960, December Bride repeats were used to fill in for the second half of the Friday 9 pm Eastern timeslot vacated by Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, running until the beginning of the fall 1960 schedule, and again as a temporary replacement on Thursday nights in April 1961. Additionally, repeats were shown on CBS as a daytime program from October 1959 until March 1961. The Pete Porter character became so popular that he and Gladys were spun off into their own series, Pete and Gladys, shortly after the last broadcast of first-run episodes of December Bride.

October 5, 1924

Bill Dana is born. 

Comedian, actor and screenwriter. He often appeared on television shows such as The Ed Sullivan Show, frequently in the guise of a heavily accented Puerto Rican character named José Jiménez. Dana often portrayed the Jiménez character as an astronaut.

October 5, 1969

Monty Python's Flying Circus debuted on BBC television. 

The British sketch comedy series commissioned by David Attenborough, created by the comedy group Monty Python and broadcast by the BBC from 1969 to 1974. The shows were composed of surreality, risqué or innuendo-laden humour, sight gags and observational sketches without punchlines. It also featured animations by Terry Gilliam, often sequenced or merged with live action. The first episode was recorded on 7 September and broadcast on 5 October 1969 on BBC One, with 45 episodes airing over four series from 1969 to 1974, plus two episodes for German TV.

The show often targets the idiosyncrasies of British life, especially that of professionals, and is at times politically charged. The members of Monty Python were highly educated. Terry Jones and Michael Palin are Oxford University graduates; Eric Idle, John Cleese, and Graham Chapman attended Cambridge University; and American-born member Terry Gilliam is an Occidental Collegegraduate. Their comedy is often pointedly intellectual, with numerous erudite references to philosophers and literary figures. The series followed and elaborated upon the style used by Spike Milligan in his ground breaking series Q5, rather than the traditional sketch show format. The team intended their humour to be impossible to categorise, and succeeded so completely that the adjective "Pythonesque" was invented to define it and, later, similar material.

The Pythons play the majority of the series characters themselves, including the majority of the female characters, but occasionally they cast an extra actor. Regular supporting cast members include Carol Cleveland (referred to by the team as the unofficial "Seventh Python"), Connie Booth (Cleese's first wife), series Producer Ian MacNaughton, Ian Davidson, Neil Innes (in the fourth series), and the Fred Tomlinson Singers (for musical numbers).

The series' theme song is the first segment of John Philip Sousa's The Liberty Bell, chosen because it was in the public domain and thus could be used without charge.

October 5, 1989

Jim Bakker was convicted of using his television show to defraud his viewers. 

After deliberating for a day and a half, a jury in Charlotte, North Carolina, convicts Jim Bakker of using his television show to defraud his viewers. Bakker's trial started on August 28 and was interrupted briefly while he was sent to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation after suffering a breakdown.

The government has argued that Bakker solicited donations in exchange for free vacation lodging at his Heritage USA theme park, lodging which he knew he would never be able to provide.

Jim Bakker sold 153,000 of these partnerships between 1984 and 1987. In exchange for $1,000, people were promised three free nights lodging every year for life. Bakker claimed to have accommodations for 214,000 partners, but the government provided evidence that only 258 rooms were actually available.

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa

This Week in Television History: September 2019 PART IV

September 24, 1964

The Munsters first aired. 

The show featured  the home life of a family of benign monsters. It stars Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster and Yvonne De Carlo as his wife, Lily Munster. The series was a satire of both traditional monster movies and the wholesome family fare of the era, and was produced by the creators of Leave It to Beaver. It ran concurrently with The Addams Family.

It was canceled after ratings dropped to a low due to the premiere of ABC's Batman, which was in color. Though ratings were low during its initial two-year run, The Munsters found a large audience in syndication. This popularity warranted a spin-off series, as well as several films, including one with a theatrical release.

September 25, 1929

Barbara Jill Walters is born. 

Walters was first known as a popular TV morning news anchor for over 10 years on NBC's Today, where she worked with Hugh Downs and later Frank McGee and Jim Hartz. Walters later spent 25 years as co-host of ABC's newsmagazine 20/20. She was the first female co-anchor of network evening news, working with Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News and was later a correspondent for ABC World News Tonight with Charles Gibson.

September 25, 1944

Michael Douglas born.

On this day in 1944, Michael Douglas, who will become one of Hollywood’s A-list stars in the 1980s with such blockbuster films as Wall Street and Fatal Attraction, is born in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Douglas is the son of the Academy Award-winning actor Kirk Douglas, whose best-known films include Spartacus and The Bad and the Beautiful. Michael Douglas shares a birthday with his wife, the Welsh-born actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, who was born 25 years earlier, in 1969.

Douglas made his feature film debut in 1969’s Hail Hero! and rose to fame playing a police inspector on the television series The Streets of San Francisco from 1972 to 1976. He scored his first major movie success behind the cameras, as the producer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), which starred Jack Nicholson as an inmate at a mental institution. The film was the first to triumph in all five major Academy Award categories, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Best Screenplay (Adapted) and Best Director (Milos Forman). Among Douglas’ other movie credits in the 1970s was The China Syndrome, which he produced and co-starred in with Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. In the 1980s, Douglas had a string of blockbusters, including Romancing the Stone (1984), which co-starred Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito (Douglas’ college roommate at the University of California at Santa Barbara) and its 1985 sequel Jewel of the Nile. In 1987, Douglas appeared opposite Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, a thriller about a married man who becomes involved with a woman who becomes obsessed with him and stalks his family after he ends their affair. Also that year, Douglas starred in director Oliver Stone’s Wall Street as the ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gekko, whose motto is “Greed is good.” Douglas won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance.
In the 1990s, Douglas starred in such films as Basic Instinct (1992), with Sharon Stone; Disclosure (1994), with Demi Moore; and The American President (1995), with Annette Bening. In 2000, he earned acclaim for his performances in Steven Soderbergh’s drug-war drama Traffic and Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys. That same year, on November 18, Douglas married Zeta-Jones, his second wife and co-star (though they had no scenes together) in Traffic, in a star-studded ceremony at New York City’s Plaza Hotel. Zeta-Jones later won a Best Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar for her performance in Chicago (2002). Her movie credits also include The Mask of Zorro (1998), The Terminal (2004) and No Reservations (2007).

In August 2010, it was announced that Douglas was beginning treatment for an advanced case of throat cancer. The actor confirmed the news on an episode of “Late Show with David Letterman” on August 31.

September 26, 1964

Gilligan's Island first aired. 

Created and produced by Sherwood Schwartz and originally produced by United Artists Television. The situation comedy series featured Bob Denver; Alan Hale, Jr.; Jim Backus; Natalie Schafer; Tina Louise; Russell Johnson; and Dawn Wells. It aired for three seasons on the CBS network from September 26, 1964, to September 4, 1967. Originally sponsored by Philip Morris & Company and Procter & Gamble, the show followed the comic adventures of seven castaways as they attempted to survive (and in a later movie escape from) the island on which they had been shipwrecked. Most episodes revolve around the dissimilar castaways' conflicts and their failed attempts (invariably Gilligan's fault) to escape their plight.

September 26, 1969

The Brady Bunch premieres. 

The show was panned by critics and, according to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, during “its entire network run, the series never reached the top ten ranks of the Nielsen ratings. Yet, the program stands as one of the most important sitcoms of American 1970s television programming, spawning numerous other series on all three major networks, as well as records, lunch boxes, a cookbook, and even a stage show and feature film.”

Created by Sherwood Schwartz (whose previous hit sitcom was Gilligan’s Island), The Brady Bunch followed the story of Carol (Florence Henderson), a widowed mother of three blonde daughters, who marries architect Mike Brady (Robert Reed), a widower and the father of three brown-haired boys. The blended family lives together in a suburban Los Angeles home with their cheerful housekeeper, Alice (Ann B. Davis). The show focused primarily on issues related to the Brady kids--Greg (Barry Williams), Marcia (Maureen McCormick), Peter (Christopher Knight), Jan (Eve Plumb), Bobby (Mike Lookinland) and Cindy (Susan Olsen)--who ranged from grade-school age to teenage. Although set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time of political and social upheaval in the United States, The Brady Bunch generally avoided controversial topics and instead presented a wholesome view of family life, tackled subjects such as sibling rivalry (including Jan’s now-famous complaint about the focus on her sister: “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia”), braces and dating.

After 177 episodes, ABC cancelled The Brady Bunch and the last original episode aired on August 30, 1974. However, the show soon became a massive hit in rerun syndication. The show’s various spin-offs have included a 1977 variety program, The Brady Bunch Hour; a 1988 TV movie A Very Brady Christmas; the 1995 big-screen parody The Brady Bunch Movie (with Shelley Long and Gary Cole as Carol and Mike) and its follow-up A Very Brady Sequel (1996); and the 2002 TV movie The Brady Bunch in the White House. In 1992, Barry Williams published a best-selling memoir titled Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, which provided a behind-the-scenes look at the show and revealed that life behind the Brady Bunch cameras was less wholesome than it seemed on TV.

September 27, 1954

Steve Allen becomes the first host of The Tonight Show.

The first Tonight!  announcer was Gene Rayburn. Allen's version of the show originated such talk show staples as an opening monologue, celebrity interviews, audience participation, and comedy bits in which cameras were taken outside the studio, as well as music, including guest performers and a house band under Lyle "Skitch" Henderson.

When the show became a success, Allen got a prime-time Sunday comedy-variety show in June 1956, leading him to share Tonight hosting duties with Ernie Kovacs during the 1956–1957 season. To give Allen time to work on his Sunday evening show, Kovacs hosted Tonight on Monday and Tuesday nights, with his own announcer and bandleader.
During the later Steve Allen years, regular audience member Lillian Miller became such an integral part that she was forced to join AFTRA, the television/radio performers union.

Allen and Kovacs departed Tonight in January 1957 after NBC ordered Allen to concentrate all his efforts on his Sunday night variety program, hoping to combat CBS's Ed Sullivan Show's dominance of the Sunday night ratings.

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".

Stay Tuned

Tony Figueroa