Monday, August 20, 2012

Laughs Were on Her, by Design

By RICHARD SEVERO and PETER KEEPNEWS NY TIMES
Phyllis Diller, whose sassy, screeching, rapid-fire stand-up comedy helped open the door for two generations of funny women, died on Monday at her home in Brentwood, Calif. She was 95.
Her agent, Fred Wostbrock, confirmed her death.
Ms. Diller, who became famous for telling jokes that mocked her odd looks, her aversion to housekeeping and a husband she called Fang, was far from the first woman to do stand-up comedy. But she was one of the most influential. There were precious few women before her, if any, who could dispense one-liners with such machine-gun precision or overpower an audience with such an outrageous personality.
One chestnut: “I once wore a peekaboo blouse. People would peek and then they’d boo.”
Another: “I never made ‘Who’s Who,’ but I’m featured in ‘What’s That?’ ”
Ms. Diller, a 37-year-old homemaker when she took up comedy, mined her domestic life for material, assuring audiences that she fed Fang and her kids garbage soup and buried her ironing in the backyard. She exuded an image that was part Wicked Witch of the West (a role she actually played in a St. Louis stage production of “The Wizard of Oz”) and part clown.
In her many television appearances she would typically sashay onstage wearing stiff, outsize, hideous metallic dresses (she did this, she said, so she could lie to her audiences about the state of her body, which was really trim and shapely); high-heeled shoes or boots studded with rhinestones; and a bejeweled collar better suited to a junkyard dog or a fur scarf that she claimed was made from an animal she had trapped under the sink.
Slinking along on skinny legs, her feet invariably pointed outward, penguin-style, she originally carried a long bejeweled cigarette holder that held a make-believe cigarette from which she continually flicked imaginary ashes. (Ms. Diller, who did not smoke, later discarded the cigarette holder.)
Her hair was the blond flyaway variety, sometimes looking as if it was exploding from her scalp; her eyes were large and ferocious, her nose thin and overlong (she ultimately tamed it through plastic surgery). And then there was that unforgettable, ear-shattering voice, which would frequently explode into a sinister cackle that seemed perfectly matched to her image as the ultimate domestic demon.
Among Ms. Diller’s few female predecessors was Jean Carroll, sometimes called “the female Milton Berle,” who made numerous appearances in nightclubs and on Ed Sullivan’s variety show, where she mined her marriage and family for laughs. There were others: Minnie Pearl was an outrageous Southern spinster, Moms Mabley an outspoken black philosopher.
But Ms. Diller’s hard-hitting approach to one-liners — inspired by Bob Hope, who became an early champion — was something new for a woman. Her success proved that female comedians could be as aggressive or unconventional as their male counterparts, and leave an audience just as devastated. She cleared the way for the likes of Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, Whoopi Goldberg, Ellen DeGeneres and numerous others.
Although Ms. Diller used writers to help create her act, she estimated that she wrote 75 percent of the jokes herself. Her approach to humor was methodical. “My material was geared towards everyone of all ages and from different backgrounds, and I wanted to hit them right in the middle,” she explained in her autobiography, “Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse: My Life in Comedy” (2005), written with Richard Buskin. “I didn’t want giggles — I could get those with my looks — I wanted boffs, and I wanted people to get the joke at the same moment and laugh together. That way I could leave everything to my timing.”
She liked jokes that piled on the laughs in rapid succession. A favorite of hers was this one: “I realized on our first wedding anniversary that our marriage was in trouble. Fang gave me luggage. It was packed. My mother damn near suffocated!”
Phyllis Ada Driver was born on July 17, 1917, in Lima, Ohio, the daughter of Perry Driver, an insurance executive, and the former Frances Ada Romshe. As a child she became interested in classical music, writing and theater.
After briefly attending the Sherwood Conservatory of Music in Chicago, she entered Bluffton College in Bluffton, Ohio, near Lima, with thoughts of becoming a music teacher. She met Sherwood Anderson Diller in her senior year in college, and they were married in 1939.
She never taught music. The Dillers moved to California, where he was an inspector at a Navy air station and later held various other jobs — none, by Ms. Diller’s account, for very long. They struggled financially, even with Ms. Diller working. She wrote a shopping column for a newspaper in San Leandro and advertising copy for a department store in Oakland, then moved on to writing and promotion jobs at radio stations in Oakland and San Francisco.
She started to move toward a career in show business without realizing it. She was poor and unhappy, and she would meet other poor and unhappy women at the Laundromat and regale them with accounts of her home life. She also tried to inject humor into the advertising and publicity copy she wrote. Word spread about Phyllis Diller, and soon she was being asked to give presentations at parties and P.T.A. meetings.
Her husband thought she should be paid to make people laugh. She lacked the confidence to do it until she read a self-help book, “The Magic of Believing” by Claude M. Bristol. Inspired by its message of empowerment, she began to write her own comedy routines, hired a drama coach to give her more stage presence, and took whatever paid or unpaid performing jobs she could get: at hospitals, women’s clubs, church halls.
She made her bona fide professional debut at the Purple Onion, a San Francisco nightclub, in 1955. At first her act contained as much singing as joke-telling, with Ms. Diller’s persona more mock sophisticate than housewife from hell — her signature numbers included “Ridiculous,” a parody of the Eartha Kitt number “Monotonous” — but she gradually developed the character and the look that would make her famous.
She was soon being booked at nightclubs all over the country, and she became nationally known after several dozen appearances on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show,” beginning in 1958.
She was believable as well as hilarious when she talked about her husband, Fang; her mother-in-law, Moby Dick; and her sister-in-law, Captain Bligh. She was so believable that shortly after she divorced Sherwood Diller in 1965, his mother and sister sued her for defamation of character in an effort to keep her from talking about them in her act. She insisted that she was talking about a fictional family, not them, and eventually settled out of court.
Ms. Diller was never really the grotesque-looking woman she made herself out to be; her body, in fact, was attractive enough that when she posed nude for a Playboy photo spread the pictures ended up not being published — the magazine was going for laughs, and decided that they looked too good to be funny.
And despite her self-deprecating humor, she was concerned about her looks, especially as she began to detect signs of aging in her television appearances in the early 1970s. She became one of the first celebrities not just to have plastic surgery but also to acknowledge and even publicize that fact. By the 1990s she had had more than a dozen operations, including two nose jobs, three face-lifts, a chemical peel, a breast reduction, cheek implants, an eyeliner tattoo and bonded teeth.
She never tried to conceal the work and even kept a plastic surgery résumé, which she would give to anyone who asked. And she continued to make jokes about her appearance. “The ugly jokes would remain a part of my act because my image was already so well established,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Audiences had bought into it because, facially at least, it had been the truth, and for them it would continue to be the truth.”
Although Ms. Diller was a frequent guest on other people’s variety shows, her own network television ventures — “The Pruitts of Southampton” (1966-67), a sitcom, and “The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show” (1968), a variety hour — were both short-lived. Late in life she had a recurring role on the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” and did voice-over work on “Family Guy” and other cartoon shows.
Her movie career was not particularly distinguished. While she made a number of films, including three with Bob Hope — “Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!” (1966), “Eight on the Lam” (1967) and “The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell” (1968) — none were as funny as she was.
But her career was not limited to movies, television or stand-up comedy. Between 1971 and 1981 she appeared as a piano soloist with some 100 symphony orchestras across the country under the transparently phony name Dame Illya Dillya. Although her performances were spiced with humor, she took the music seriously. A review of one of her concerts in The San Francisco Examiner called her “a fine concert pianist with a firm touch.”
She also appeared on Broadway, stepping into the lead role in “Hello, Dolly!” for three months in late 1969 and early 1970. She painted, too. And she wrote a number of books, including “Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints,” “The Joys of Aging and How to Avoid Them” and her autobiography.
Her marriage to Sherwood Diller lasted 26 years; in 1965, the same year the Dillers divorced, she married Warde Donovan, an actor. That marriage, too, ended in divorce. She never remarried, but she was the companion of Robert Hastings, a lawyer, from the mid-1980s until his death in 1996.
Ms. Diller is survived by a son, Perry; a daughter, Suzanne Mills; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
When she appeared in Las Vegas in May 2002, three years after suffering a heart attack, Ms. Diller announced that this would be her last stand-up performance. She stuck to that decision. Her final performance was captured in the 2004 documentary “Goodnight, We Love You,” directed by Gregg Barson.
Asked by Bob Thomas of The Associated Press in 2005 whether she missed performing, Ms. Diller answered: “I don’t miss the travel. I miss the laughter. I do miss the actual hour.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m on dope, but that hour is a high; it’s as good as you can feel. A wonderful, wonderful happiness, and great power.”
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
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Saturday, August 18, 2012

TV talker Larry King goes online with Hulu Internet

Meg James, Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles --
For Larry King, the death of Osama bin Laden provided an awakening.
The veteran talk show host had been nudged toward the door by CNN in 2010 after 25 years of interviewing such titans as Frank Sinatra, Tom Cruise and Barack Obama. After that, King had been giving inspirational speeches in far-flung countries, doing an occasional stand-up comedy routine and taping a few TV specials for CNN. One was supposed to run on a Sunday in May 2011. King had dinner guests over that night for a viewing party.
Instead, CNN cut to live coverage following the Navy SEALs' deadly raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.
"My first instinct was to run to CNN, to get on top of the story," King said last week during an interview at his Beverly Hills home. "And I missed that. Nothing beats being in the middle of the hunt, in the middle of the scene."
The event spurred the 78-year-old broadcaster back into action. A year ago, King entered a partnership with the world's richest man, Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, who is bankrolling a new digital programming service called Ora TV. The venture currently produces just one program, "Larry King Now," which runs on Hulu, the popular online video service.
Old style, new mode
"This is a whole new world to me," King said. "I don't do the Internet, and now suddenly I'm in the middle of this."
The new talk show, which launched last month, is a lot like the old one. The same slightly stooped guy with suspenders asks the same succinct questions of guests such as Seth MacFarlane, Oliver Stone and Matthew McConaughey.
But it feels a little different.
King spent his entire career on a schedule that unfolded with military precision: Awake at 6 a.m. A breakfast of Cheerios, blueberries, 2 percent milk and half a corn muffin, "burnt," at 8:45 a.m. When he hosted a radio talk show in Miami, it ran from 9 a.m. to noon. At CNN, he was in his seat in the network's Sunset Boulevard studio for a live talk show that started promptly at 6 p.m. PT.
Now, people can catch his show on Hulu any time. He tapes interviews when guests are available, whether it is at 11 a.m. or 4 p.m.
"Weird," King said. "But I guess that's how the rest of the world works."
King, who started his radio show in 1957, already has earned the distinction of mastering radio and TV.
"I've broadcast in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s and now the 2010s - seven decades," King said. "How many people in broadcasting can say that? Vin Scully, yeah, he's done it longer. But Cronkite was for six decades and Carson was for six."
Now, King could get new traction on the Internet, said Hulu's senior vice president of content, Andy Forssell.
"Larry is relevant," Forssell said. "He's pretty timeless and it's all about the guests. There is no ambiguity, no mystery to solve, and that clarity works well on the Internet."
'Trophy room' tapings
The first few "Larry King Now" interviews were conducted in King's "trophy room," a memorabilia-laden library off the grand foyer of the Beverly Hills mansion he shares with his seventh wife, Shawn, and their two young sons.
Gone are the calls from viewers in Columbus, Ohio, or Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Instead, questions arrive via Twitter. Crew members can be heard chuckling off-camera. In one segment, the family's Cavalier King Charles spaniel Biscuit landed a part - on Betty White's lap. The actress stroked the dog until he became overwhelmed by the bright lights and attention.
This month, production of "Larry King Now" moved to a new studio in nearby Glendale. Shawn picked paint colors for the new set.
And now the man who spent decades trying to keep himself out of his questions, in an effort to focus the conversation on the guest, is trying to inject more of his personality and opinion into the show. "That's expected on the Internet," King said.
The new forum has allowed the septuagenarian to air his disgust with aging - and his fear of death.
"I want to be you," King told McConaughey toward the end of an interview with the 42-year-old actor once branded the "sexiest man alive." McConaughey appeared amused. "I'd like to be cryonic'ed," he told White. "I'd like to be frozen." The 90-year-old actress looked horrified.
The death thing
"Yeah, I'm afraid of death," King said during an interview at his home. "My father died at 47. I had a heart attack 25 years ago, I've had heart surgery. I think about dying almost every day."
King hasn't actually agreed to have his body frozen. He is intrigued by the concept, but Shawn, his wife, is not on board. Shawn insists there is an afterlife. Her husband shrugs and says he has little hope there is.
Still, King has trouble considering the world going on without him.
"I can't imagine eternity (and), I can't imagine not being there," he said. "If I died today, I wouldn't know who won the World Series - or who won the election."
Perhaps that explains why King refuses to retire?
"No, no. I'm doing the show because I love it," King said. Then he paused for a moment. "I guess it has something to do with keeping me going. I have a sense of being important, of counting, you know."
King's plan is to keep asking questions and continue "Larry King Now" for another seven years - until 2020, or until he dies.
"I think that's the way it's going to end," King said. "I will fall over. And Shawn will emcee the funeral, but she'll be late. She'll be home doing her hair."
 
 

 

 

 

 

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Friday, August 17, 2012

Russian Punk Band Is Sentenced to 2 Years in Prison for Anti-Putin Stunt
By  NY TIMES




MOSCOW — A Moscow judge handed down prison sentences of two years on Friday afternoon for three young women who staged a protest against Vladimir V. Putin in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior last February and whose jailing and trial on hooliganism charges have generated worldwide criticism of constraints on political speech in Russia.       
While a guilty verdict against the three women, members of a band called Pussy Riot, was widely expected, suspense had built over how severe a punishment they would receive. Prosecutors had demanded three-year prison terms.
As the judge, Marina Syrova, read the lengthy verdict, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the courthouse and shouted, “Free Pussy Riot!”
Riot police officers arrested dozens of them, including the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who is active in the Russian political opposition. Mr. Kasparov fought with the police and appeared to be beaten as he was bundled into a paddy wagon.
Near the start of the highly anticipated proceedings, the judge said that Pussy Riot’s so-called punk prayer in Moscow’s main cathedral had amounted to the crime of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. Because the women acted as a group, the maximum sentence under the law is seven years in prison.
They have been in jail since March and a chorus of supporters, including some of the music world’s biggest stars, has demanded their immediate release. Rallies in support of the women were held in dozens of cities around the world on Friday.
The case has become a touchstone in the unfolding political drama that began in Russia after disputed parliamentary elections last December. That is partly because of the sympathetic appearance of the defendants — two are mothers of young children — partly because their group uses music to carry its message, and because it has pitted them against a united power-structure: the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church.
While the case has allowed opponents of Mr. Putin, the president, to portray his government as squelching free speech and presiding over a rigged judicial system, it has also handed the government an opportunity to portray its political opponents as obscene, disrespectful rabble-rousers, liberal urbanites backed by the West in a conspiracy against the Russian state and the Russian church.
The saga began in February when the women infiltrated Moscow’s main cathedral wearing colorful balaclavas, and pranced around in front of the golden Holy Doors leading into the altar, dancing, chanting and lip-syncing for what would later become a music video of a profane song in which they beseeched the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Mr. Putin.
Security guards quickly stripped them of their guitars, but the video was completed with splices of footage from another church.
Because of the support they have received from stars like Sting and Madonna, the women of Pussy Riot have become more famous, at least outside Russia, than the opposition figures who led large antigovernment street protests in Moscow throughout the winter and spring.
But while they have become minor heroes in the entertainment world, Pussy Riot is far more political than musical: Its members have never released a song or an album, and they do not seem to have any serious aspirations to do so.
On Thursday, with tensions rising in anticipation of the verdict and sentencing, the authorities said that threats had been made against Judge Syrova and that bodyguards had been assigned to her.
Mr. Putin, commenting on the case briefly while in London for the Olympics earlier this month, said he hoped that the women were not judged “too severely,” but that there was nothing good about what they had done and that the decision was the court’s to make.
As the trial opened, the women — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 23, Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, and Maria Alyokhina, 24 — apologized, saying they had never intended to offend the Orthodox Church but rather sought to make a political statement against Mr. Putin and against the church patriarch, Kirill I, for supporting Mr. Putin in his campaign for a third term as president.
But prosecutors and lawyers for religious people who where described as victims of the stunt said the women were motivated by religious hatred. The defendants were accused of committing “moral harm” and even of practicing Satanism.
Like defendants in almost all Russian criminal trials, the women were held in the courtroom in a glass enclosure.
As the trial continued, the women seemed emboldened by their mounting international support, including from Madonna, who paused a concert in Moscow to give a speech urging their release and later performed wearing a black bra with “Pussy Riot” stenciled in bold letters on her back.
In a closing statement, Ms. Tolokonnikova, the most outspoken of the defendants, railed against repression in Russia.
“To my deepest regret, this mock trial is close to the standards of the Stalinist troikas,” she said.
“Who is to blame for the performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and for our being put on trial after the concert? The authoritarian political system is to blame. What Pussy Riot does is oppositional art or politics.”
She added, “In any event, it is a form of civil action in circumstances where basic human rights, civil and political freedoms are suppressed.”
Nikolay Khalip, Anna Kordunsky, Ilya Mouzykantskii, Andrew Roth and Anna Tikhomirova contributed reporting.
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Thursday, August 16, 2012

Most Holy Redeemer at crossroads

ON SAN FRANCISCO

C.W. Nevius, SF CHRONICLE

 
 
Most Holy Redeemer is at a crossroads. The Catholic church in the Castro district has arguably the largest gay parish in the nation, and controversial new decisions have members worried about leadership, policies - even that the church might be shut down.
And it all began with drag queens.
When the archdiocese refused to allow drag queens to serve as emcees for charity events at the church's community hall, it fed rampant paranoia about antigay sentiment. The decision was initially blamed on incoming Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage who has been championed by extreme conservative Catholic groups. Some read the drag-queen ban as a calculated slap in the face.
Cordileone doesn't start his new job until October, but clearly the issue is bigger than drag queens at a fundraiser. The decision calls into question the responsibility of a church in the community, of the acceptance of all walks of life and the tenets of religion.
"Paranoia is very high," said Supervisor Scott Wiener, who represents the district. "There are a lot of gay people for whom this religion is very important. It's just very, very sad."
Even the possibility of closing the church, despite its illustrious San Francisco history, seems real.
"The (incoming) archbishop holds the keys to this building," said church business manager Mike Poma. "He could close us any time."
And for some, the move to quell the drag-queen decision by declaring that Ellard Hall would be closed to community events only made things worse.
Most Holy Redeemer's new pastor, the Rev. Brian Costello, who did not return a phone call, arrived in July from a church in the Richmond District. But he made a point in his first official message to welcome "old, young, married, gay, lesbian, transgender, affluent, home-cradle Catholics, radical, traditional, questioning and fervent."
So, while he was initially opposed to having drag queens as entertainment for two fundraisers for sobriety and wellness groups at Ellard Hall, he listened when Poma asked him to reconsider.
"I told him, this is just dinner. It's not a strip show," Poma said. "I told him it was going to be a powder keg."
Poma says Costello responded by making two calls to the archdiocese, where the idea was turned down flat.
"We have to give (Costello) a break," Poma said. "He's got a boss, you know. And he's never been immersed in gay culture in his life. He's learning."
What he's learning is that what might seem very strange in Middle America is everyday life in the Castro. Drag queens may not be mainstream, except at Most Holy Redeemer, where they regularly attend Mass.
"We had some boys in miniskirts last Sunday," Poma said. "And Father Costello met with them."
It should also be said that some of the gay groups that have been using the hall have gone way over the top. Several years ago the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence featured a drag queen known as Peaches Christ, who waved a crucifix shaped like a dildo. Even longtime gay parishioners thought that was too much.
The odd part of this manufactured controversy is how well the church has been working. A robust congregation of 450 to 550 members, more than 80 percent of whom are gay or lesbian, consider themselves practicing Catholics. For a religion that doesn't always seem welcoming to gays, that's impressive.
So are services. Poma says he brought his mother to Mass and she couldn't get over the warm sound of "all those men's voices." Poma says the music at Most Holy Redeemer is so renowned that visitors come from all over the country.
"We had some the other day," he said. "Afterward they said, 'You've renewed my faith.' "
Hopefully, incoming Archbishop Cordileone will also attend with an open mind. And leave with the same feeling.

C.W. Nevius is a Chronicle columnist. His columns appear Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail: cwnevius@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @cwnevius
 
 
 
 

 

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