THE INIMITABLE PHYLLIS DILLER

 Phyllis Diller is a name I hadn’t thought of in years. But I saw this quote of hers that quickly reminded me of what a funny lady she had been, and I could immediately see her, zany, outrageous, self-deprecating and utterly hilarious figure and hear her cackling laugh on the top TV variety shows of the 1960s when I was growing up. The quote—“Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance?”—was a reminder of the simple brilliance of her brand of humor that cast her as totally inept in just about all things that were supposed to characterize “the perfect homemaker” of those times, when Women’s Lib was a brand new buzz word and when the Establishment still believed that “a woman’s place was in the home.”

For us, in west central Ohio, she was more than just a rising comedic star in the New York and Hollywood firmament. She was a local-girl-made-good. She was originally from Lima, Ohio, the industrial city located just fifteen miles north of my hometown of Wapakoneta. Although I always sought to educate people about my town when asked where I was from, it was Lima that most of us used as a reference when telling people from other parts of the state and country where we were from. The answer was most often, “I’m from Wapakoneta,” then adding, “That’s Lima area,” since although just about everybody had heard of oil-town Lima, few had heard of Wapak—that is, at least not before hometown boy Neil Armstrong took a stroll on the moon.

Lima was where our families went out to eat someplace different, or where we shopped with our mothers for school clothes in the big department stores that the city boasted in those days. It was where the nearest hospitals were and where there were a variety of movie theaters if you’d already seen what was playing at the Wapa Theater. Some of our parents were even from Lima originally, like my dad, Whitie, and his three brothers, who grew up in the South End. And many other relatives lived in Wapakoneta but worked in Lima.

In short, Lima was an extension of home. A place nearly as familiar to a lot of us as our own home town. So we shared the pride of Lima folks in its native sons and daughters, people like Nobel Prize-winner William A. Fowler, network TV personality Hugh Downs (although born in Akron, Hugh was raised in the Lima area), jazz great Joe Henderson, famous big-band singer Helen O'Connell, and, of course, Phyllis, who was the one best known to those of us growing up in the sixties.

I had, of course, seen Diller’s thigh-slappingly funny routines on TV, since at the time, she was a frequent guest on variety and talk shows. But I didn’t become a real fan until I started working at Porter’s Music Store (B.S. Porter and Sons) in Lima when I was sixteen. The owner, Mary Porter, liked me and often chatted with me while I was working. She found out about my interest in classical music as well as jazz, and often suggested classical records I should buy for my serious music education. When she found out that I was occasional student conductor in my high school concert band, she also gave me full orchestra scores so that I could practice reading them, and even practice conducting with the recordings I was buying.

An unmarried woman, Miss Porter, as I addressed her until she told me to call her Mary, was a serious and accomplished concert musician, a pianist who, in her youth, had studied at the Paris Conservatory, one of the world’s most prestigious music schools. It seemed strange to me, then, when I found out that she and Phyllis Diller were the best of friends. Diller never came home for a visit that she and Mary didn’t get together.

The reason I thought they made an odd couple of friends, however, was because I took Diller as the daffy, irreverent, ridiculously coiffed and attired clown that she portrayed in her stand-up routines and comedy movies. Little did I know that she was a highly disciplined and highly accomplished woman with a lot more talents than met the eye. And she and Mary shared a great deal more as strong, intelligent and independent women, than the fact that Phyllis could make Mary laugh until she cried.

It was Mary who dissuaded me of the popular notion that Phyllis Diller was simply a madcap buffoon who’d lucked into fame with her penchant for laugh-triggering one-liners. She was, Mary assured me, a brilliant woman who would have been an outstanding talent at just about anything she set her sights on, and one who was carrying around a lot more accomplishment than anyone imagined.

I wouldn’t learn until much later in life that one of the things Mary and Phyllis had in common was that they were both accomplished pianists. That’s right. Phyllis Diller, one of the most successful stand-up comics in history was also a fine concert pianist. She was also a conservatory educated musician, having done advanced studies in piano at the Sherwood Conservatory of Chicago’s Columbia College. And once she found success as a perennial screwball, she was able to indulge her other extraordinary talent.

With Liberace

Never leaving her sense of humor very far out of reach, she took a stage name for her concert tours, calling herself Dame Illya Dillya and did an entire gag-filled comedy routine, rather in the style of the great Victor Borge, before she actually began to play. But there was nothing funny about her actual performances as a pianist with more than a hundred symphony orchestras across the United States, once she set her hands to the keys of a concert grand and began playing Beethoven, Bach or Chopin with such incredible technique that many people thought she was merely pantomiming to a recording. Clearly, she wasn’t, and drew the attention of critics who were nonplused, particularly because she didn’t go on the concert circuit until she was in her early fifties.

Diller, a mother of six (the sixth child died in infancy), began her comedy career, almost by accident, in the mid-1950s. Ever funny and prone to make people laugh, she was working at a radio station in San Francisco as a studio singer and copywriter when her husband, Sherwood Anderson Diller, began pushing her to write a stand-up routine. The couple had met at Bluffton College, north of Lima, in the nineteen-thirties, when she was there studying philosophy, psychology, literature and history. She dropped out of school in 1939, at age twenty-two, to marry Diller, and basically became a homemaker—to hear her tell it, not a very successful one.

Phyllis took her husband’s advice and started writing stand-up routines, which she tried out on other women from the PTA at her kids’ school. These were the sort of Diller one-liner zingers that kept them rolling on the floor:
“We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.”

“Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”

“A bachelor is a guy who never made the same mistake once.”

“I'm eighteen years behind in my ironing.”

“My cooking is so bad my kids thought Thanksgiving was to commemorate Pearl Harbor.”

“Any time three New Yorkers get into a cab without an argument, a bank has just been robbed.”

“His finest hour lasted a minute and a half.”

“The reason the (golf) pro tells you to keep your head down is so you can't see him laughing.”

“You know you're old if your walker has an airbag.”

“My mother-in-law had a pain beneath her left breast. Turned out to be a trick knee.”

“Burt Reynolds once asked me out. I was in his room.”

Of her multiple plastic surgeries, she once quipped that she'd begun having facelifts because she was tired of her dog trying to drag her out into the backyard and bury her.

She eventually landed a gig at San Francisco’s famous Purple Onion nightclub. The renowned Maya Angelou, who was also performing there at the time, later said that they had wanted Diller to change her name. She said Diller refused, saying that if she ever became famous, she wanted people to know it was really her.

Originally, booked for a two-week gig at the club, she became so popular that she ended up being a regular on the Purple Onion’s stage for nearly two years. After that, she took her show on the road for some time in the late fifties before landing another regular gig at the prestigious Blue Angel club in New York. That led to a 1960 appearance on Jack Parr’s Tonight Show, followed by Ed Sullivan's star-making variety hour and her career soared to stardom from there.

Over the course of that career, Phyllis Diller would perform with some of the biggest names in comedy, and as a woman performer, her comedic style and routines were absolutely unique for those times. She would be a major influence for comediennes to come, including Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Ellen DeGeneres and Roseanne Barr.

Diller and Hope

Phyllis herself would end up being taken under the wing of iconic comedy veteran Bob Hope, a fellow Ohioan. Hope immediately spotted the genius of Diller’s work and helped to harness it. And they would eventually end up starring in three comedy films together—Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! (1966), Eight on the Lam (1967), and The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell (1968). Phyllis would also end up appearing on more than a score of Bob Hope’s television specials. They would remain friends until Hope’s death in 2003 at the age of one hundred.

Phyllis herself would live to be ninety-five, passing away in 2012, but not before also demonstrating her expertise as a voice-actor for animated films, a frequent TV guest star, and a regular (playing Gladys Pope) on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. Her autobiography, Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse, would also make her a bestselling author.

A truly versatile and multi-talented woman and an icon in an era when women were struggling to assert their independence, Phyllis Diller was indeed an admirable personality. But her greatest achievement was clearly that, through her hilariously self-deprecating brand of humor, she made millions of us laugh throughout her life, and helped us to take a closer look at our own foibles, stop taking ourselves so seriously, and laugh off many of the feelings of inadequacy that too often burden our daily lives.     

 

CAN I SAY THAT?

 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pernicious nature of censorship. That’s not unusual for a writer and former journalist. Actually, there’s no such thing as a “former journalist”. It’s like “when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way…” Once you’re initiated into the gang, once you have ink running in your veins, you’re addicted for life. But what I mean is that people in my craft and trade are probably more aware of the dangers of censorship than a lot of other people who aren’t constantly dealing with it are. That said, however, it’s an issue that affects us all to a greater or lesser degree, whether we’re aware of it or not.

I remember the first time I heard the word. It was in a cartoon of World War II vintage, black and white. Can’t recall now exactly what the cartoon was about or which cartoon characters were in it, but at one point, one of them was furious, face flushed and steam coming out of his ears, and all of the sudden, the cartoonist slapped a sign over his mouth—black background, white letters—that read “CENSORED”. I asked my mother, Reba Mae, what censored meant and she explained that it was like, during the war, when there were certain things that were secret and the government marked them as “censored” and covered them up (good choice of words).

I didn’t really get it. I’m sure my mother did, because she worked in a defense plant that built Army tanks throughout the war, and for part of that time she was a supervisor. It was a hard concept to explain, though, especially to a grade-schooler. But at least I now had a vague idea of what it meant. Namely, it was somebody else, some authority, telling you what you could and couldn’t say or know.

It was also Reba Mae, however, who first imbued in me the right to know. She didn’t do this in any aggressive, hands-on way, but mostly by introducing us kids to the public library and always leaving the many books she bought and read—besides the ones she regularly checked out of the library—at the disposal of my sister, brother and me. I remember being ten, perhaps, and finding a new book on her bookshelf that she had just received from one of several book clubs she belonged to.

The hardback book by Noel B. Gerson was titled The Conqueror’s Wife, which seemed intriguing. And the illustration on the dustcover was even more so for a boy of my age, since it depicted a dashing soldier in breastplate and chain mail, the dragon of St. George emblazoned on his vest, holding his broadsword high. A lovely damsel all cloaked in white stood just behind him, while all around, battle scenes raged.

I recall carefully taking the book down from the living room bookcase and thumbing through the front matter to the first page of the story. I can still see the print of the first line on the page which read, “Father, I will not marry a bastard.” I was galvanized for a second. I mean Whitie, my dad, said bastard all the time—to describe a rusty bolt that refused to budge, or a door that was swollen shut or open, or the car when it refused to start on cold mornings, or even some other man whose behavior he disdained. But we kids weren’t allowed to use it anywhere within earshot of our mother, and I certainly had no idea you could actually write the word in a book. It was a revelation. And The Conqueror’s Wife was the first adult literature I ever read.

Turned out “bastard” was actually the main character’s middle name, so to speak.  He was William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy. And the lady in question was the fair and clever Lady Matilda, daughter of the richest nobleman in Christendom. When they do indeed marry, it is a marriage fraught with will, passion and unbridled dual ambition in which each tries to control both the kingdom and each other.

In all the years that I was growing up, Reba Mae never asked me where such-and-such a book of hers was, never told me not to touch them, never tried to set rules for which ones were off-limits. So, I was quite often reading well beyond my age group. By my high school years, I’d read books by Conrad, Michener, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Harold Robbins, Pearl Buck, Grace Metalious, Harper Lee, Jacqueline Susann, Salinger, Orwell, Pasternak, Graham Greene, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams and many more books and authors for adult readers. And, as soon as I was making a little money, I was buying books of my own as well, including among other titles, the entire series if Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. I read these and others in addition to voraciously delving into the “outside reading” lists that hopeful English teachers gave us in school, and whatever the Auglaize County Library’s chief librarian—and my mother’s friend—Louise Miller recommended.

It seemed natural to me to read whatever I wanted. Which was why my first experience with censorship was shocking and hurtful. It happened in my senior English class. The teacher, one of the older ones on the faculty, was someone I admired and who was teaching whoever wanted to listen a great deal about journaling, essays, literature and good writing in general. I suspected that she was a frustrated writer herself, who was teaching school more to make a living than anything else. But no matter what her motives were, she knew what she was talking about and how to teach it.

Henry Miller with muse Brenda Venus

If I had gone through school up to then with the nagging thought that “if they ever find out what an idiot I really am, I’m toast,” in her class I felt for the first time a kind of confidence I’d seldom had before, and I was basking in the sensation that, finally, I was beginning to really grasp the art of writing that I could develop from here on. So I had no qualms, when discussing some point or other in one of her classes, about quoting what I considered to be a legitimate example of what I was talking about, and that just happened to be written by Henry Miller.

I should hasten to say that whatever passage I was quoting from wasn’t one of the more lascivious ones that Miller was wont to write—and which he wrote so incredibly well—but one of the ones in which the writer waxes philosophical and sometimes floors the reader with the unfettered truth of his observations. But I had no more than gotten the name of whom I was quoting out when the teacher interrupted me, said, “I wouldn’t know, Dan, because my mother doesn’t think I’m old enough to read Henry Miller,” and called on someone else, thereby managing to insult not only me, but also my mother and one of my favorite writers, besides basically telling me to shut up.

In all fairness to her, I should have known better. Miller had been banned in the United States until six or seven years before, which was why the New York-born author first published his books in Paris. And a lot of people in small-town Ohio figured he should have stayed banned. But I just didn’t understand it. I found censorship not only offensive and invasive but also just plain stupid.

Were people so ignorant, malleable and impressionable that reading a book was going to corrupt their minds forever? Was listening to an idea that challenged “what they’d always believed” going to brainwash them? Didn’t they possess the critical thinking to discern between what they agreed with and what they didn’t, or were they like weather vanes that just turned whichever way the wind was blowing? More to the point, wasn’t banning books and burning them precisely what Hitler had done in Germany in order to impose the stances of the Third Reich as the one and only truth, while supporting a Hitlerian philosophy known as The Big Lie?  And wasn’t that exactly the sort of authoritarianism our fathers had sacrificed so much to defeat in the war that had just ended less than twenty-five years before?

What were people afraid of? Other than maybe learning something they’d never known before, vicariously visiting places they’d otherwise never see, finding out about other lifestyles, or hearing ideas and even just words that challenged them to think about their own, what did anybody have to lose from someone else telling their stories? Moreover, if you were afraid to read something, afraid it might shock you, afraid it might corrupt you, or afraid it might change your mind about things you’d already decided you didn’t want to change your mind about, why read it? Nobody was forcing you to. But who were you to say what I could and couldn’t read? What authority had the right to “protect me from myself” according to its own subjective criteria regarding what was “acceptable” and what wasn’t?

So, these questions have plagued and inspired me since high school. And, as a journalist starting in my mid-twenties, anti-censorship became a major principle of my professional credo.

These beliefs were, parallel to my own in the late-1960s and 1970s, also a main trend in the revolutionary pop movement that took shape around the world. My generation, the baby boomers (born 1946 to 1964), emerging in the wake of World War II, struggled, in reality, to uphold the lessons that the war preached but didn’t always practice. We questioned government intervention in our private lives, societal strictures that ostracized rugged individualism, repressive laws that were legal but not legitimate, and religious judgments that infringed on secular rights and freedoms. We rebelled, in short, against “how things had always been” and demanded the sea-change that the horrors of the worst war in history had promised—including world peace—but was failing to deliver.

The war wasn’t supposed to be simply about defeating the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany. It was about defeating authoritarianism, or in other words, about defending not only the rights of European and other nations to self-determination, but also about defending the liberty espoused in democratic philosophy—the rights of the individual and the freedom of each to choose his or her own beliefs and destiny. It was about being able to express your thoughts and ideas freely and openly, to ascribe to whatever political beliefs and creed you chose without fear of repression, and to be able to debate those thoughts and ideas in an atmosphere of mutual curiosity and understanding. It was also about every race, creed and ethnicity being held in equal respect and esteem.

The boomers were, then, the generation that bucked the system, refused to do what we had to do, wear what we had to wear, think what we had to think and believe what we had to believe. Some more than others—certainly many more than myself—had the courage to take that cultural revolution to its ultimate consequences, to burn their draft cards and brassieres, to challenge puritanical dictates, to demonstrate by the thousands, to fight for their rights and the rights of others, to oppose round two of political witch-hunts following the tragedies of the McCarthy Era, and to resurrect writers, cultures and philosophers from the past who spoke to their current concerns. It was the era of flower power, of free love, of hippy culture, as well as of underground revolutionary movements bent on claiming the civil rights and individual freedoms espoused in theory but all too often ignored in practice by the Establishment. It was a time in which the cultural shift was truly toward the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as promised in our Constitution. And it was the era in which many writers previously banned in my native United States came into their own.      

At some point, however, we became fat, middle-aged and middle-class. We started caring more about “our things” than about our beliefs, and one day, in our thirties or forties or fifties, most of us looked into the mirror and realized that we were the Establishment. Or perhaps we didn’t, but if not, we were wrong.

I’ve been thinking about these things, as I say because the mess the world is in right now, and hardly anywhere more than in my own country, keeps me awake nights. The natural environment that we became so aware of in the sixties and seventies is in crisis—the world is on fire and melting fast. Worse still, we are less united than ever before, with political extremism and social tribalism wreaking havoc and with democracy falling out of style, while authoritarianism is becoming as popular as it was in the run-up to World War II but in totally new and surprising places like the United States. And this includes attempts to suppress ideas and thought, to disguise the truth and to censor dissent. Books are being banned and burned once more, but again, not just in the worst dictatorships on earth, but in my own native land, which was once thought of as a shining example of democracy and the rule of law.

Perhaps it would be easier to ignore all of this and carry on with life as if nothing alarming were happening. It would be, that is, if it weren’t for the advantage, or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it, of my having lived it all in my own flesh. The fact is, that I made my bones as a writer and journalist under a harsh and bloody authoritarian regime. And I had the good luck of being part of something remarkable: the resistance of one editor and one newspaper and one small staff that refused to accept the devastating reality of a tyrannical regime as being inevitable and unchallengeable.

I possess the direct practical knowledge, then, that each voice can make a difference, change minds, alter outcomes, even if only a tiny bit at a time. That developing unity of purpose among many can change a negative tide fueled by an autocratic elite. I know how vitally important it is to defend, far beyond your own comfort zone, the rights of others, to resist oppression, to ignore threats, to tell the story of what’s going on when no one else is telling it or paying attention, to contravene censorship by any and all means. Because censorship (and the big lies that it enables), violence, the suspension of the rule of law, and the restriction of individual rights and freedoms are the primary tools of authoritarianism, which always comes disguised as the solution to “a failing democracy.”

That also means that I have the sad advantage of knowing first-hand the results of accepting the notion that “democracy isn’t working” and that it is no longer worth defending, that it is—in theory and eventually in fact—in need of overthrow. I know what the tragic outcome is when a free society embraces that idea. Believe me, you don’t want to know…but if you value your freedom, you should.