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.