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It was funny, but after eating chopped liver eight times a week, I got nauseous just thinking about eating it.

Aaron also helped me write a pantomime of a guy who came home very drunk, but the second his wife appeared, he was as sober as a judge. Every time she turned her head, though, he was drunk again. The pacing kept speeding up, and so did the antics. I got a lot of laughs—and a good review.

In early November 1959, after workshopping the show in Philadelphia, we moved to Broadway. Despite some relatively good notices and a Hirschfeld cartoon in the New York Times, Girls Against the Boys was too light to compete with the drama-heavy season that included Mary Martin in The Sound of Music, Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, and John Gielgud in Much Ado About Nothing, and the show closed after a mere two weeks.

But that was enough time for me to impress noted choreographer Danny Daniels, who introduced himself to me after the opening and said, “Boy, I’ve never seen anybody move like you do.” He and Aaron got me on The Fabulous Fifties, a TV special celebrating the decade that was just about to end. In one sketch, I played a shy wallflower-type who learns to mambo, but then goes to a nightclub where everyone is doing the cha-cha. So he returns to the dance studio, learns the cha-cha, and then finds everyone at the club doing the Frug. So he learns the Frug, and so on. It was nonstop—and on live television. I had to dance twelve minutes straight. I almost died from exhaustion.

Aaron also put me into the lead of The Trouble with Richard, a pilot for CBS that we shot at an abandoned hotel in Lower Manhattan. I played a simpleminded bank teller who lived with his two aunts and infused the character with traits I had loved in Stan Laurel. But the network passed. As I recall, they said that “it looked cheap.”

Disappointed, I phoned my agent at MCA, hoping he had some prospects. He put me on Mike Stokey’s Pantomime Quiz, a charades-like TV game show that had been running since the late 1940s. I was partnered with Howard Morris and series regular Carol Burnett, whom I knew from working together on The Garry Moore Show, and that turned out to be a lucky break.

Carol and I were dynamos as teammates on Pantomime Quiz. Our personalities clicked, and so did our competitive juices. Thanks to a slew of imperceptible hand signals we came up with to tip each other off—some impromptu, some we worked out away from the show—we were unbeatable. It was a good thing, too. I needed the two hundred dollars we were paid each time we won to buy groceries.

My prospects brightened considerably when I learned that my agent had booked an audition with Gower Champion for another Broadway show. Champion was an actor turned director who had won a Tony Award a few years earlier for Lend an Ear, the show that made Carol Channing a star, and from what my agent told me, he was getting set to stage another musical, called Bye Bye Birdie. My agent said he had a good feeling about this one.

What he didn’t tell me—perhaps he didn’t know—was that Aaron Ruben had already been in there, on the inside, with Gower, laying the groundwork for me. He also smelled a hit and thought I was perfect for a key part as a songwriter-agent.

8

BYE BYE BIRDIE

My audition took place in a dimly lit, empty theater off Broadway, somewhere in the Forties. It was an overcast winter day. I walked into the theater and took off my jacket; I wore a sweater and khakis. There were only a few people there, including Gower, a handsome, serious man. It looked and felt how I imagine most people picture a Broadway audition—dark, austere, tense, and scary.

Gower and his producers sat at a table in front. I stayed in the back until I heard my name, then took my place on the stage. There was one light shining down and a piano player on the side.

After answering a few questions, I sang “Till There Was You” from The Music Man and then “Once in Love with Amy” with a little soft-shoe that I knew. When I finished, Gower came onstage and said, “You