Alan Hamel

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is Alan Hamile, both husband and business
partner of Susie Anne Summers, a television presenter and all
around marketing mabn, Alan, good to have you here. Thank you.
I'm delighted to be here. I love your letter. Thank you.
So how did you meet Susanne? Fifty years ago? Okay,

(00:32):
actually fifty two years ago. I moved to l A
from Canada, and in Canada we had no agents, no managers,
there was none of that. You'd get a call from
the network and they'd say, we're doing a show, do
you want to come in and talk to us? And
we'd go in and talk to them and they give
us a job. So when I came here, I didn't
know about managers and agents. So I called ABC and
I said, who's the head guy? They said Elton Rule.

(00:55):
I said, put me through, so he takes my call.
I said, I am Ellen Hammond. I did a lot
of TV in Canada, and I did a late night
satirical show for five years, out of Control. I said,
there's nothing like that in the States. There's no uh,
there's nothing. There's no that that was the week that
was there's no laughing, there's no Saturday Night Live, there's

(01:16):
none of that. I'd like to show you a three
and a half minute clip. He said, great, he said,
can you be here tomorrow afternoon? Yes, you're calling him
from Toronto from l A. I'm in l A, okay,
and I'm thinking, now what, I don't have a job. Okay,
I've got some money, but i have no job. So

(01:37):
the following day I go up there and he's got
his two programming people there and he said, okay, he said, there,
where's the clip? So I handed to him and he
hands it to some an assistant and they put it
up and they play it back and the clip is
me on my late night show in Canada called Nightcap,
interviewing a topless dancer in front of a live The

(02:00):
ins who's topless? And I'm interviewing her like man on
the streets. Okay, I'm not looking at her chest, no
lascivious remarks, just boring interviewer questions. So when it's all over,
they all looked at each other around the room like,
what the hell did we just see? Because the three
biggest shows in those days were my three Sons, Beverly Hillbillies,

(02:23):
and Green Acres. Okay, there was nothing else on. It
was all pablum. So they said, you know what, let's
do something together. So we negotiated a deal for me
to do a ninety minute comedy special, and they housed
me around the corner in the Hollywood Palace. I had

(02:45):
offices in the Hollywood Palace. Jerry Lewis doing his show
there yet, no, not that I was aware of anyway, Okay,
and I'm thinking, I'm at Hollywood and Vine. I can't
leave it, okay, And every day at lunchtime, I'd stand
at the corner of Hollywood and Divide and think, I'm

(03:05):
at Hollywood and Vine and my offices are in the
Hollywood Palace. Okay. Anyway, we do the show and nobody
knew who I was, so ABC said I was producing
it and also starring in it. ABC said, nobody knows
who you are, so you need a big time guest.
So I called Robert Wagner, who had this huge TV

(03:27):
series and I can't remember what it was called. How
did you know Robert Wagner? I didn't know Robert, okay,
but I was cooking cold calling everybody, so I said,
here's what I want you to do. He laughed. I said,
and here's the money. He said. Forget the money, he said,
I live in Palm Springs, just getting me the world's
greatest golf cart. I said, done. So we do the show,

(03:51):
and we're ten minutes into the show, and I said
to the audience, I said, you know, every big time
special needs a big time guest. We have ours, Laises
and gentleman Mr Robert Wagner. And you know the way
he looked, I mean handsome, okay, with the cuff links
and the perfect shirt and hair, everything perfect, right. He
walked out a huge applause and whistling from the women.

(04:13):
He goes to center stage. He takes a deep bow,
it goes like that, thanking the audience, then walks down
three steps into the audience, up the aisle and out
the front door over here, and I said, okay, now
that we've met our big star, we can carry on
with the rest of them. So the whole show is
like that. Okay, we took on everybody. It was a

(04:35):
satirical show, but like today, it would be no big deal.
But those people were screaming, and we took on everybody.
We took on the Catholics, the Protestants, the Jews, the Poles,
the little whiny. We took on everybody, and I got
death threats. My favorite death threat came from a guy
in Libertyville, Illinois, and I said, the name of where

(04:59):
you live is sort of the antithesis of this letter
you've written to me. You want to do me in? Okay?
Because I don't. I assumed I had the liberty of
free speech in this country. Okay. So he wrote me
back and there were only two words in his letter,
and the second word was you. Okay. So where were we? Okay?

(05:21):
So you had a one in that ninety minutes special? Okay?
So that special aired? Okay, and then what happened to results?
People freaked. It was the second highest rated special all year,
next to Tom Jones. Okay, what's ther word? In what year? Again?
And the uh it's on ABC? It aired in prime time?

(05:43):
When did it air prime time? So? Um? The show aired.
The switchboards for ABC lit up across the country. People
were furious because they've never seen anything. You have to
ask in light of you know, they always talk about censorship.
You had this crazy show. They let you wear it.
They didn't say, hey, this a little too edgy. Okay,

(06:04):
they said to me when the script was written, okay,
they said, you're never going to get this passed. What
was her name, Grace Johnson? I said, who's Grace Johnson.
She's in charge of standards and practices. We didn't have
that in Canada. I said, what, what are standards and practices?
She decides what is not going to make air. So
I called her, I said, would you have lunch with me?

(06:27):
And I took it to a little place on Vine Street,
a little French place I can't remember the name of it.
I ordered the best bottle of wine and we sat
there with the script all afternoon, eating and drinking wine,
and every time she turned a page she would go, okay,
my mother used to do that, and I thought, I'm

(06:49):
dead I'm dead meat. Okay. We get to the final
page and we've knocked off the entire bottle of wine,
and we're getting along and she closes the script and
she said, let's do this really okay. So we did it,
and so now it airs and you're getting negative feedback,

(07:11):
you're also getting good, good pet feedback, getting good feedback, right,
good feedback from people actually, you know a lot of
Brits wrote because British comedy The Goon Show with Peter
Sellers and Spike Man. I mean that's been I was
raised with that. Okay. In Canada is a Commonwealth country,
so I was used to satire. I love satire, but

(07:31):
this country had never experienced satire. So they were in shock. Okay.
They turned on ABC to see I don't know what
show we replaced, okay, but we replaced some show and
it was obviously nothing like this. So we got great ratings.
And the Miami ABC guy called me and he said,

(07:52):
I own the affiliate station in Miami. He said, we
love the show. He said, if I financed this series,
would you do it? I said of course. He said,
I'm going to come to to l A. I'm going
to meet with the top guys at ABC, and I'm
going to make a proposal. And the proposal was, uh,
Miami will pay for the production of the show the

(08:14):
network and have two free runs as long as the
Miami station owns the back end syndication rights. And ABC
said we wouldn't consider it. And that was that. Okay.
So getting back to where I met Suzanne, I get
a call from ABC right after that, saying, um, you
did a lot of on camera in Canada, right, I said, yeah,

(08:36):
I said, I did from nineteen fifty five until nineteen
from fifty five until sixty Okay, so in the ninety
minutes specially, you were not on camera. No, I was.
I was on for the whole show, That's what I think.
So they saw you. Yeah, I was the guy, right,
so they saw you. What was the question? Okay? The
question was, would you like to host a game show

(08:56):
in ABC? I said great, So I go on and
talk to them, and that was They had the Newlywed Game,
the Dating Game, and my show was called the Anniversary Game. Okay.
So it was this troika and they said, we don't
have any studios in l A. Would you mind shooting
in San Francisco. I said great, So I go to
San Francisco and I'm up there for a couple of weeks.

(09:17):
In pre production, we're laying out what the set looks
like and who the people are, and we're hiring you know,
production people, etcetera. And first day of production, I'm standing
on the stage at ABC in San Francisco and on
the other side of the stage I see the most
beautiful girl woman I've ever seen in my whole life.

(09:42):
And I'm thinking I have to go over there. So
I start walking across the stage and I'm not good
with come onlines. Okay, I always thought Hi. If I
say hi, I'm Alan Hamill, the bullshit light starts flashing. Okay.
So I get right up to her, and I still
don't know what I'm going to say. So I said,

(10:03):
would you mind getting me a cup of coffee? And
she did and we've been together ever since fifty years. Okay. Yeah, Uh,
there's so much there. The average person became aware of
Suzanne when she was in American Graffitian. Okay, but you

(10:23):
never got credit on the on the she she was
not credited on that movie. You could go through the credits,
you will not see the name Susanne. Was that intentional? No,
it was that she had. She mouthed I love you,
that was it. She was like an extra. She couldn't
even say it out loud. And George Lucas Lucas, who

(10:45):
had seen her a few days before um I had
cast her. And then she her agent called her and said,
you got this thing, and it's a small part, and
what is it, well, you have to say I love you.
So Suzanne stayed up all night practicing how to say
I love you, and when she got there, he said,
just mouth it. So she was not credited and was interesting.

(11:08):
After she she was on Three's Company, which was from
seventy seven on ABC ran American Graffiti, and they promoted
it by saying, American Graffiti starring Susante Summers. Okay, so
you meet your in sixty nine or what you meet
her in sixty eight? Okay? So what happens between sixty

(11:32):
eight and seventy three? For her UM, she she had
won a scholarship to Lone Mountain College. I think it
was a girl's college, Catholic girls college, and UM because
she had done Guys and Dolls in high school. And

(11:52):
you're old enough to remember Walter Winchell. Of course, Walter
Winchell turned up for this production. In this San Bruno
would just a little blue collar used to be a
blue collar town in northern California to see the production
because he was represented in Guys and Dolls by one
of the characters, and I can't remember which one it is.

(12:12):
After the show, he came up on stage. We have
a picture of this, and he walked up to Suzanne
and he said, quote, you're going somewhere, sister, And that's
how she got a scholarship to Lone Mountain College. But
the first year she was there, she got pregnant. And
Catholic girl gets pregnant. Okay, church didn't like it. We're

(12:36):
not we don't like you very much because you got
pregnant you weren't married. So she got married and within
a year she was divorced. And then I came along
and I had just gotten a divorce as well, and
we realized that this was not just a a dating situation.
I had never felt this way before. And she called

(12:57):
her mother that day and said the day we met
and said, I met the man, I'm going to marry. Okay,
So it was for real. I didn't know what I
was feeling. I just knew that this was serious, okay,
Because in Canada I had I had being on television
every day, I had access to a lot of attractive women,

(13:21):
and most of them didn't go anywhere. It was just
a I won't say what it was. It was just
a short relationship. This was very very serious for me,
and all they wanted to do was to be with
her constantly, So since we started living together in the

(13:41):
early seventies, I think around seventy. Okay, let's go back
to when you met her in sixty eight. What was
she doing every day? She was struggling. She Uh, she
her family were, except for her mother, Uh, we're all drunk,

(14:02):
serious alcoholics. She had been raised in a house with
a physically violent, crazed alcoholic father whose job was to
put cases of beer on box cars. And they didn't
have coffee breaks, they had beer brakes. And he'd come
home every night ship face and uh, you know, bang

(14:23):
down a few shots of whiskey and some more beer,
and then he would start to hunt down the family.
So the family, uh, he slept most nights in a
little closet. Suzanne, her two brothers, her sister, and her mother,
and they had a lock on the inside of the
closet so he couldn't get to them. And that's where

(14:47):
they slept most nights. And this went on for years.
And one night, Uh, Susanne, I guess was fifteen or
sixteen going to her first prom. Her mother aid her
dress and it was this beautiful dress. Susanne described it
to me, and she had it hanging in her room

(15:07):
so that she could lay in bed and look at
it and dream. And her father burst through the door
in the middle of the night, flipped on the light
and went right to the dress and ripped it up
and ripped it in half, and she started screaming and crying.
Her mother came in. What's going on here? The father

(15:27):
hit the mother in the breast. The mother went down.
Suzanne picked up her tennis rocket and heard her father
over the head and blood gushed out of his head.
They took him to emergency. When he came home, his
head was all bandaged up. From that time on. Um.

(15:49):
What Suzanne realized was her father was afraid of her,
because that was the first time anyone in the family
I have her fought back. Okay, so the family was
drunk for years. The father was this crazed, craze guy

(16:09):
who wanted to be my friend, and I had no
interest in being his friend. And the more I pushed
him away, the more he'd tried to be my friend.
And he was not stupid at all. He was he
was smart, and he was funny, funny guy. I think
that's where Suzanne got her comed againstincts. But it was

(16:30):
brutal growing up that way. And one day Suzanne Uh
said to announce to her family, one day, I'm going
to be a big star. This is when she was
in high school. I'm gonna be a big star, and
my mother is going to be sitting in the front row.
And guess what it happened. Opening at the MGM Grand

(16:54):
in Las Vegas for the first time, there's her mother
sitting in the front row. H Okay, what happened to
the rest of the kids in the family. They all
stopped drinking, including the father, really the mother. The mother
would clean up after the father every night. He had
this thing about going into the refrigerator and throwing food

(17:16):
all over the place, breaking dishes. Then he would pass
out and throw up on the floor with all the
broken dishes, and she would clean it up, clean him up,
and drag him off to bed. She went to Alanon
and alan On said, don't pick him up. Let him
wake up and realize what he had done. So she

(17:38):
started leaving him on the floor and that's when he
decided to go get sober. And her siblings are they
all okay today? Younger brother died when he was forty seven.
He was an alcoholic and a drug addict. And uh,
the seven children and gone okay, and the other siblings.

(18:04):
The other siblings are in great shape. Her older brother
has a carpeting business which he's owned for most of
his life. Uh. The sister married her childhood sweetheart, the
only man she's ever been with. They celebrated their fiftieth
anniversary about five years ago, I guess. And those two

(18:29):
have produced a family of fifty one people between children.
Grandchildren are s Bruno and great grandchildren. They lived down
the street in U. It's an upscale community, Hills Hills.
I don't know that anyway. They live in a And
to what degree when Susie had becomes successful, are they

(18:50):
asking her for money? Not that I'm aware of, Not
that I'm aware of. She had written a book, um,
I think it was a nineteen in the late eighties
called Keeping Secrets. And we had all read books about
written by famous people, uh, who talked about they're usually

(19:16):
their father being an alcoholic. Keeping Secrets was about Suzanne,
who didn't drink, but how it affected her because when
you're living with an alcoholic, you become as sick as
the alcoholic, even if you don't drink, and her her
thing was not drugs or alcohol. Her craziness was spending

(19:41):
money she didn't have, creating a crisis, because crises were
familiar for her. Okay, when you spend every night hiding
from your father in a closet as a crisis, you're
living in constant fear and terror. So she was most
comfortable that way. And she said to me one day,
I could tell the mood my father was in by

(20:04):
looking at the back of his head. And she said,
I would then behave as is. In other words, she
wouldn't behave the way she felt she wanted to behave.
She would behave in a way that was resonant with him.
So to keep the cap on. Okay, but it never worked,

(20:25):
of course, Just to be clear, when she spent money
she didn't have. That was before she had money or
after she had money. No, before she had money. Okay,
I remember the book. So she has a child, she's
out of the college before she meets you. What is
she doing and how does she end up on the set?
She gets a call. She had a semi agent in California,

(20:49):
in San Francisco, and she got a call saying they're
looking for a prize model on this game show. She
had never been on a TV studio in her life,
so she turned up. No one bothered giving her any direction,
Like when you open the refrigerator door, and you know,
you look at the camera with the red light. So
she opened the refrigerator door, but she didn't look at

(21:09):
the camera with the red lights. So they fired her
the first day. You know what, It's good they fired
her because if they didn't fire her, I don't know whether.
I don't know whether we would have had an evolved relationship.
So it were evolved mentally or evolved into that it happened.

(21:32):
I in all the years I did television in Canada,
I never messed around with any of the women who
worked with me. Ever, Uh, it was too dangerous and
what happens if it doesn't work out? Now you're see
him every day. Absolutely, So I never did that. So
would I have done that with Suzanne if she had

(21:54):
gotten the job and stayed on the show. Um, I
don't know. It was pretty pretty powerful action. Okay, so
you become involved with Suzanne. It's an instant romance. Um. Now,
you had a long career where you were in front.
Did you immediately say to yourself, I'm gonna put her

(22:14):
in front. I kept going back to Canada to do
television after I moved here, and from nineteen nineteen seventy
four or five until I did the Alan Hamill Show,
which was like Carson. A matter of fact, the production

(22:38):
people we hired we stole from Carson because we wanted
Carson's roller decks, so I had every guest Carson ever had.
Um So I did that show and then her contract
with three Company was up in night, and uh so
it was time to renegotiate, which is normal in the industry. Okay,

(23:01):
how many years was the initial contract? Was? He was
five usually and was everybody else on five? Yes, but
they had renegoted. John and Joyce had already renegotiated because
they had hired them before Suzanne. So I go to
the negotiation and at ABC and the ABC lawyers there,

(23:24):
one of the producers is there and some other guy,
and within two minutes they told me she's fired. I said,
fired for asking for what She's fired. That was it.
There was no explanation, She's fired. So I got up
and I left. Okay, Then I discovered that Laverne and

(23:49):
Shirley had renegotiated their deal three weeks earlier, and it
was a monumental deal. I mean, without Laverne and Shirley,
there's no laverniture. Okay. So they scored big time, huge,
and the parent company of ABC and today, if if
they decided to do this at a board meeting, they

(24:10):
all be thrown in prison. The parent company of ABC decided,
we have to stop women from asking to be paid
parody with the men, So let's fire the biggest female
star in television. And no other woman will ever ask
to be paid parody with the men. So they did.
It was the dumbest, you know. I ran into a

(24:33):
guy from KATS, which is an independent distributor of TV shows,
at one of those conventions, and he said to me
her firing was known as the biggest self inflicted wound
in the history of television. He said, we know that
they lost over a billion in terms of license fees
and back end. He said, by the time this show

(24:54):
plays out, he said, will be more than that. Okay.
On the street, the word was that she asked for
too much. That wasn't a factor she actually asked for.
I actually asked for half of what men were making.
Whose shows were in the top twenty. Her show was
number one. She had the highest demographics. See what what

(25:15):
you're what you're saying to me right now is what
the pr company for the producers did. They destroyed her
after that, since she was this greedy bitch and she
didn't deserve to have the job, and we gave her
the job and all she wanted. She's a money grubber, etcetera, etcetera.
I asked for fifty percent of what the men were
making and a piece of the back end. Okay, it

(25:38):
wouldn't have mattered if I had asked for a nickel.
They had decided to fire Suzanne Summers, so it had
nothing to do. Nothing to do with my request for
a new contract, and nothing to do with that. They
had decided to fire her. And I had gotten a
call from someone who was with the parent company who
was a mutual friend, and he said, we're not have

(26:00):
in this conversation, he said. I came out of a
meeting and he said, they've decided to fire No, they've
decided to hang a nun in the marketplace. But the
Romans used to do right, They've decided to hang it
nun in the marketplace. And Suzanne Summers is going to
be it, okay, And I said, you're kidding. He said, no,
they're going to fire her. I said, are you kidding?

(26:23):
The greatest chemistry on television between Suzanne and John and
Joyce are gonna fire. They're gonna destroy this show. He said,
they're gonna fire her. He said, this decision is not
coming from creative people. It's coming from business people. They're
just looking at the bucks. That's all they care about there,
looking at the dollar signs. Okay, and that's how it happened. Okay,

(26:45):
let's go back. So you meet her in to what
degree you have your parallel career, To what degree are
you involved in her career. I'm not really involved in
her career at all. Um, she was trying to make
ends meet. I didn't know this. She kept it from me. Um.

(27:06):
I was spending four days a week in San Francisco.
She moved to Saslito, which of course is across the
Bay right to get away from I think, from her family,
and so I moved to So I was living in
a Japanese hotel in San Francisco, the Miyako. I moved
to Saslito and got myself a house boat. I thought,

(27:26):
if I'm going to live in of course you gotta
do it up right, I have to be on a houseboat, right.
So on one side of me, I had a surgeon,
and on the other side of me, I had a
drug dealer. So I knew if I had any health problems,
the guy's right next door, and I didn't have to
go into town to buy any drugs. The guy's right
next door on the other side, by the way, I

(27:47):
don't do drugs. Um. So every night, Um, she'd put
her son to bed, and the babysitter would come, and
she'd come to my house Voute and I'd cooked dinner
for her and Um we'd sit and watch the moon

(28:07):
come over the Golden Gate Bridge and it was just
this wonderful romance. It was like incredible, and I hated
being away from her, and so for the past let
me go back. She gets fired. I said to her,
I'm leaving my talk show and she said, don't do that.

(28:30):
She said, you'll miss it. I said, I've talked to
everybody I want to talk to. Okay, I'm ready. Okay,
I've been doing television for twenty five years. I'm really ready.
She said, what are you gonna do? I said, you
don't have an agent, you don't have a manager, you
have nobody. You don't know what you're doing. I said,
you're gonna give it away and you'll just fade. I said,

(28:51):
we're gonna make this work for us. I know how
to do this. Okay. That was and she spent a
year well before we go there, okay, just to lay
out the thing. How did she end up getting threes company?
She got a call from uh, actually from a woman
who worked for me in casting, who said, can I

(29:16):
work with Susanne? I said, yeah, sure, So she somehow
got a call and sent UH called Susanne and Suzanne
went in and Suzanne had done like eight or nine pilots,
none of which it's sold. And I used to joke
with her and said, anyone who does eight or nine
pilots must be a stewardess. By the way, we can't

(29:36):
use the word stewardess anything that light attendant. Now, okay.
I got a big discussion with something. They said someone
was from India. You know, they're South Asian. You know
the I go out of my way to be politically incorrect.
It pisces me off that someone should decide what my
language should be. Okay, there's something called the First Amendments

(29:58):
and it's the Freedom of Speech Amendments, and I exercise
it liberally. And the idea that you know, when the
Internet started, When the Internet started and I started emailing
in caps, I started getting people saying to me, why
are you yelling at? I said, who? Who? Excuse me?

(30:18):
Whose rule is that? Who decided that caps were yelling?
I said, I write in caps because I'm over forty
five and most of the people I deal with are
over forty five and they would appreciate reading caps rather
than lower case. Okay, they said, you're yelling. So I
never found out who made the rule. Somebody made the rule. Okay,

(30:39):
but I hate all that politically correct bullets. Okay, Okay,
let's go what but you can't say the N word? Right? No? Okay,
So but there are limits. There are limits. Well, it's
like you know, running into a theater yelling fire. Right,
it's the same deal. Okay, let's go back. How does
a nice Jewish boy from Canada end up on television

(31:03):
when I graduated? First of all, how do you know
I'm Jewish? First? Hamil's a Jewish name. Secondly, it's all
over online that you're Jewish, Jewish Jewish Holidays, so that's
another thing. You know. If I wasn't Jewish, I couldn't
say a nice Jewish boy. But I am, so I can't.
I thought I might have run into you with the
steam bath. Okay. Uh. I graduated from high school in

(31:26):
Canada when I was so let's see when I was eighteen.
Let's stop for a minute. We're in Canada and your
parents Canadian or they came from the Old Country. Both
they came from the Old Country and Canadian. Okay, where

(31:49):
did I come from? From Poland? My father came from
uh from Poland right after his bar mispre five it
was borne two. How many people have fathers who were
born and so he came over and in those days,
the federal would be immigrants wanted to live in New York, Philadelphia,
Boston or Chicago. So the federal government said, we will

(32:13):
give anybody a one way train ticket to anywhere else
in America other than those four cities. So my father
went to Texas to be a cowboy, and he loved it.
He lived in Austin, Texas for three years and just
always talked about the Texans, how polite they were, how
wonderful they were. And I don't know what he did.

(32:34):
He had some were some blue collar job there, and
he slept in a what he called a flophouse every night.
And he said I had to sleep on my boots,
otherwise someone would have stolen them. Okay. And I said,
so how did if where did you eat? If you
didn't have a kitchen? He said, there was a brewery
and for a nickel, they would give you a big

(32:55):
stein of beer, and then they'd lay out all these
uh lunch things, breads and and sliced meats and pickles
and things. He said, I didn't drink beer, so I
would take my stinn of beer and I'd sell it
to somebody else for three cents, and then I would eat.
And he said I would have one meal a day,
and that would that would be it. Okay. My mother

(33:16):
came over after World War One, and the two of them,
My mother had a job. He's in Texas. When does
he leave Texas for Toronto? He leoh, a good, good question.
Leaves Texas in nineteen oh eight or nine because one
of his brothers had moved to Chicago so he goes

(33:37):
to Chicago. My father gets a job working in a
sweatshop making pockets Taylor not a tailor, an operator, the operators,
and within a week they go on strike. So my
father doesn't know what a strike is. So I didn't
have strikes in Poland. Okay, they killed you. So they

(33:58):
go on strike and he's standing there and of a sudden,
a cop on horseback rides in, clubs him over the
head and blinds him in his right eye. That's when
my father decided, I'm getting out of this country. So
he moves to Toronto. If youn't know anybody interropted. He
had a sister living there, no a brother, another brother.

(34:18):
She moves to Toronto and loves living in Toronto. And
then World War One happens and he gets, you know,
sucked into the military and he says to the recruiter,
but I'm blind in my right eye, and he said,
so you'll shoot with your left eye. And I mean
even today they don't know how many people they lost
in World War One. It was like by the pound.

(34:38):
They just kept loading guys onto ships and sending him overseas.
So then my parents met. My mother's first job was
scrubbing floors in the train station, and my father got
another job making pockets, which was his lifelong job. And
my father was the most honest, purest man I've ever

(35:00):
met in my whole life. And I learned that less
in the hard way. When I was about fifteen or sixteen,
I had a date, one of my first dates, okay,
with Molly, and then Susie came along, and I really
wanted to go out with Susie. So I made a
date with Susie. But I had to give I had

(35:20):
to give Molly a reason why I wasn't available. So
I said to my dad, so if Molly calls, tell
her blah blah blah blah blah blah. And I left
and I went out with Susie. When I came home,
I asked my dad. I said, did uh Molly called?
He said yeah. I said, would you tell her? He said,
I told you were out with Susie. That's what I realized.

(35:43):
My father was not capable of lying okay and uh.
He was a functional literate. He would spend his days reading, reading, reading, reading.
He couldn't write. He could barely sign his name. So
my mother did everything. And my mother like most immigrants,
round a boarding house and which they bought the house

(36:06):
in uh Boon the twenties, I can't remember when. And
it was a little house, but we there were seventeen
people living there, okay, one toilet. We had eight Chinese brothers.
Four had been born in Hawaii for in China. We
had Reverend Johnny saw the Linda Scottish minister. We had

(36:28):
Eric de Luz, a trinidaddy and artists. We had Van
van Alphin who was a Dutch cartographer. We had a
blind alcoholic trumpet player. We had Harry Lando, a Jewish taylor.
And we had Bill Monger, a British engineer, plus my sister,
myself and my two parents. And I slept in the

(36:49):
dining room with my parents. Stilla was eight years old.
Never had my own room. Okay. Oh. We had one
other guy, Oka Chukka Johnny, who was a Nigerian prince
who was going to the University of Toronto medical school.
And I loved living with him. He had this great
barrel laugh and we were we just we were good together, okay.

(37:14):
And he was a great farter. In the middle of
the night, I'd be awakened, okay, I'd wake up, and
I'd say okay. He would call him okay, okay, are
you kidding and he'd say well, and he had he
had a great laugh. He um. He'd go to Nigeria

(37:35):
every summer for vacation, come back with a big bag,
canvas bag filled with twigs, and the twigs were about
four or five inches long. And that's how he brushed
his teeth. And he'd hold a twig in his mouth
till it softened up, and then he'd brush his teeth
with it. And he had the greatest teeth in the world. Okay,
so there's something wrong with our favorite Okay. Uh So anyway, um,

(38:02):
where were you graduate from high school? Graduate from high school?
Everybody in my family as a doctor, everybody except my father. Um.
And because all their parents came from the Old country
and the most respected man in the village was the doctor.
So when they got to Canada, they said to their sons,

(38:24):
you're going to be a doctor. If you're not going
to be a doctor, you're going to be a lawyer.
And if you're a loser, you'll be an accountant. Okay,
so they all became doctors. If that's why I became
a lawyer, Okay, is it doctrinated from you know, consciousness exactly. Yeah.
So I didn't want to become a doctor because Okay,

(38:45):
who was going to the medical school, would take me
to the lab, okay at night where he was experimented
on rabbits and rats and things, and the smell in
the lab was horrendous, and I couldn't stand blood, looking
at blood. And he'd open up a rat and show
me the rests heart beating inside, and I think, I
can't do this. I can't, So I'm not going to

(39:05):
become a doctor. Okay. So I graduated from high school.
I don't want I'm gonna do. I don't know where
I'm gonna go, what I'm gonna do, And I had
had I've always worked. My first job was when I
was six. I worked at the campus gross Steria across
the street from our house on Saturdays, and I was

(39:26):
in charge of opening the door for the shoppers and
I made it. I made a buck a day. That
was a lot of money. But my favorite job I
worked for the Canadian National Railway from the time I
was thirteen to the time I was seventeen. I was
a newsy Okay, what does the news he do well.

(39:48):
I would walk up and down the aisle of the train,
and some of these trains were like two miles long.
I'd have a basket on this arm, and i'd have
a case of cokes on this arm. In those days,
coke cases were made out of solid wood and bottles.
Of course. Okay, this arm, I'm right handed. To this day,

(40:10):
my left arm is stronger than my right arm. Okay.
And i'd walked down the island, I'd say cigarettes, matches,
chocolate bars, chewing gum, peanuts, biscuits and oranges, novelty, contraceptives, pillows,
and comic books. Did you okay, did you sell any newspapers? No? No,
there's no money in selling newspapers, right, So I was

(40:32):
making three fifty four hundred dollars a week cash. And
this was in let's see there, you say this was
in the early fifties. My father was making twenty five
dollars a week, okay, making pockets. Most people were making

(40:53):
bucks a week. Okay, So I started buying custom suits. Okay,
we're just to know. Were you that good at new
z all newsies make that kind of money? No, well,
I don't know. I don't know what other newsies were making.
I was really good at it. And I was a kid, okay,
who doesn't want to help a kid. I didn't have
to say to people I'm working my way through anything.

(41:14):
I just I was a kid, okay. And uh so
they bought they bought from me. And the night before
I would go on the train, i'd go to the
butcher and I'd have him cut slices of ham for me.
So he cut a slice of ham and hands me
and say, is this thin enough? I hold it up
to the light and if I couldn't see the light

(41:35):
through the ham, I'd say, no, no, it's got to
be thinner than that. So I would get a hundred
and fifty slices of ham. I think a hundred and
fifty slices, maybe a pound. I'd buy a white bread.
It was the only time whitebread ever made us way
into my house, okay. And I would make ham sandwiches
and ham and cheese sandwiches, and I would sell him

(41:58):
for thirty five cents and forty On the train, okay,
I would rent pillows, little baby pillows going west and
then coming east, I turned the the cases inside out
and rent them. On the way back, I'd rent comic
books for a nickel. Uh. The novelty contraceptives, Okay, there

(42:19):
were three of them. I had the French tickler. You
can only imagine what that is. I had the alligator,
you can only imagine what that is. And the third
one was and the clown face what was that? Okay?
It was a condom with a clown faces again okay.
And those I could saw those day and night. It
was amazing, mainly to young men, young soldiers going home,

(42:44):
you know, on vacation, to see their girlfriends or their
wives or whatever. And they would always buy all my
novelty contraceptives. And I would buy them in Winnipeg for
I think i'd get three of them, three of them
in a pack, for thirty cents, and I could sell
them for anywhere between a dollar and four dollars. Okay.

(43:07):
When you got on the train Toronto, where did it go? Okay?
In the summertime, I'd go a cross country. I'd go
Toronto Vancouver, and we stopped in Winnipeg overnight and I'd
stay in this hotel next to the train station. It
was two dollars and fifty cents a night, and there
was no toilet no bath, no toilet, no shower. There

(43:27):
was only a sink, and I wouldn't use the sink
because I knew that every guy who stayed there pete
in the sink. Okay, so you have to go down
the hall to get a shower, and you know, use
the let um. On weekends when I was going to school,
I would use short halls to Toronto, Attawa, Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, Muskoka, Gravenhurst, etcetera.

(43:51):
But I love the summers and I got to see
the country. Okay. I got all the way from Vancouver,
all the way to Newfoundland, and most Canadians have never
been east of Montreal. East of Montreal is Nova Scotia,
New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. Most Canadians have
never been there, which is a travesty because some of

(44:13):
the most beautiful country on the planet is there, and
the people are incredible. People in Newfoundland incredible. Newfoundland is
closer to Ireland than it is to the rest of Canada.
That's how far east it is. As I remember being
at the turn of the millennium and it's like a
half hour, you know, It's like, you know, that's how

(44:35):
they're celebrating what's going on? Yeah, Well, in uh Nova
Scotia's like to drink and they have a rome called screech.
And if you go to Nova Scotia, you go into
one of their saloons. Uh, you can be screeched. What
does that mean? Well, first of all, you buy everyone
in the saloon a drink a shot of screech. Okay,

(44:58):
it's this awful, awful roum right. Uh. So for you
to be screeched by the bartender, you have to kiss
a cod a real codfish, on the lips, and then
you bang down a shot of screech. Everyone applauds, and
then they give you a certificate saying you've been screwed. Okay,

(45:20):
so you're selling stuff on the train. Uh. You continue
to go to school and you start your show business career. No,
I continue, No, I wasn't in show business then. I
was between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. Okay, so
you graduate from high school, then what do you do
When I'm eighteen, I don't know what I'm gonna do.
And one of the guys in my class says to me, um,

(45:43):
what are you gonna do? And I said, I have
no idea I don't know. I'm not going to be
a doctor. I know that. He said, you gotta figure
out what you're gonna do. He said, you're not gonna
go work. I said no. He said, you know Ryerson
Ryerson University in Toronto. Uh, they have a radio and
television arts course, and you have a nice voice. He said,

(46:05):
why don't you go down an audition. That's what I did.
I walked in. I saw TV cameras. I thought studios
like this, and I thought, I'm home. This is perfect
for me. Okay, So, uh, I went there for one year.
I want a scholarship and uh writing a midterm exam

(46:29):
in year two. The professor comes up to me and
he puts a little post it on the on the
table with a name and an address. He said, they're
auditioning at the CBC Radio network for someone to host
a daily three hour classical music show. I think you
could get it. I said, oh great. He said, put

(46:52):
down your pencil and just quietly leave the room. I
told them you'd be there in twenty minutes. So, as
far as I know, my mid term exam is still
sitting on a desk somewhere. You know Ryerson, UM that
was my first job in show business, which I hosted
that show for five years. I loved doing it, and

(47:12):
I had studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music. I
think my mother decided I was going to be a
concert pianist like all Jewish mothers, okay um. And that's
how I got the job, actually, because the audition was
a little tricky, like they had words in there that
unless you knew how to pronounce them, you would not
pronounce like divor Jack. There's no it's devor ac, which

(47:37):
is the incorrect way of pronouncing it. Right. So I nailed.
I nailed the audition, got the job, and they sent
me to Windsor, Ontario, which is across the river from Detroit,
and I my first year I made three thousand, three
hundred dollars okay, and I'm thinking I made a lot
more money working on the trainer, right. So then I

(48:00):
started doing commercials in Detroit for Chrysler and uh So
in nineteen so I was there. I went there in
nineteen fifty five, and in nineteen fifty six, along with
my my three thousand, three hundred dollar money I got
from the CBC, I made twenty five thousand dollars doing commercials.

(48:23):
So I call it, Who do you call when you
make twenty dollars? Your mother? So I called my mother.
I said, guess what I made twenty five thousand dollars,
And without taking a breash, he said, and how much
have you saved? So that was the beginning. I stayed
in Windsor for five years. Did you say any did
you blow it? No? I blew it. I blow it

(48:44):
was it was making custom suits. I was going to
the New York Custom New York Custom Shirt Shop or
whatever was called, having custom shirts made with my initials
on the sleeve. Uh. I was wearing black silk stockings
with garters, not guarter belts. But you know, just below
the knee. I don't know who that person is. Okay.

(49:06):
Even today I look back on it and I see
pictures of myself and I'm thinking, what were you thinking?
Who did you think you were then? And the answer
is I don't know, okay. So then I moved to
Toronto in nineteen sixty. Back to Toronto in nineteen sixty
as a classical DJ. Well I gave up the After

(49:26):
five years, I gave up the classical DJ job and
I moved into TV at the CBC in Toronto, and
I was in TV there from from sixty to sixty
eight when I moved here. Okay, how does one make
the transition from radio to TV? How do you make
the transition? Well, I'll can tell you. Um, while I

(49:52):
was in Windsor in nineteen early sixty there was a
store called the Metropolitan and they had a terrible gas
explosion in the store. There were people, uh, there were fatalities,
people wounded, and it blew all the stuff from the
store out into the street. And the radio station was

(50:15):
half a block away. So I was the first guy
on the scene doing reports, right, And what was tragic
was everything was covered in dust and you you you,
I thought I saw a baby. It wasn't a baby,
it was a doll. And the it was filled with people,

(50:37):
people who were really badly wounded. So I started doing
reports and next thing, I'm doing reports for Toronto as well,
and I'm doing some reports for American outlets as well.
And I got a call from Toronto saying we have
an opening, and he said, she said, we rarely have
an opening. She said, we'd like you to come and

(50:57):
join us. So I went moved to Toronto and I
went into TV, and at first you're doing what, pardon,
what is your role? At first in television? The first
role was sitting in a booth every night for hours saying,
this is the CBC television network. That was it. What

(51:19):
did that evolve? It was the next step. The next
step was doing commercials, live commercials on a primetime music show.
And once I did that, that was became like my showcase. Okay,
and then I started getting calls and I by the
time I finished television in Canada, I had done close

(51:42):
to four thousand hours of network okay, just very quickly.
So you're doing commercials. What's the next step? What do
you do to ultimately work your way up to the
Johnny Carson esque talk show? I just did a lot
of shows I did. I did a My first series
was a show called Razzle Dazzle. It was a kids
show that was on every day on the network, every

(52:04):
day for half an hour. It was live. I did
that for five years. The host I was the one
of the hosts and one of the players, one of
the Then I did a simultaneously. I did the show
called Nightcap, which was the satirical show, and that ran
for five years. Um I did the commentary at the

(52:28):
Tokyo Olympics in X four. I did the commentary in
early six eight at the Mexican Olympics. I did a
show called cine Club, which was a show about short
film festival films. I did a show called on the Scene,

(52:49):
which was a show where we'd go to a different venue,
a different location or a different city every week. And
I created a show called Sports Date that specialized in
sports that we're not on TV. No baseball, no football,
no hockey, like why World of Sports in America. We
we did ballooning over the Alps, we did Thailand boxing,

(53:12):
we did skydiving in Ava, through in British Columbia. We
did all the off So then I created the the
Canadian International Deep Canadian International Invitational Deep Sea Fishing Tournament
in the Bahamas, Okay, and we invited the heads of
all five oil companies and they loved coming. And we

(53:35):
had hats and we had little medals, and we had
the whole thing. And it was all to get the
hell out of Toronto, Okay, right right right, as far
as I know, that thing may still be running. Okay.
Key to your success was, or is wow, my mother. Okay,

(54:01):
explain a little bit further. My mother, Um, it was
very smart. So she ran a boarding house. Right when
she died, she was a millionaire from the boarding house. Um.
She believed in me no matter what I wanted to do.
When I told her when I was thirteen years old,

(54:22):
I'm getting a job on the railroad and I'm going
to be traveling all over the country, she said, great, Okay. Uh.
How many mothers would say to their thirteen year old,
especially today. None. So whatever I wanted to do, she
was behind me all the way. She encouraged me. When
I won a scholarship, she turned up. Um. So I

(54:49):
have to believe that my both my parents heavily influenced
my life. My father because of his purity and his
honesty and his loyalty. Um. And I suffer from some
of those diseases myself. But my mother just, uh, you

(55:11):
can whatever, you can do it, whatever you want to do.
But I've I've also been in Los Angeles, i e.
Hollywood for so long to know that there are certain
stripes of people, usually people who can't fit into the
regular world, who have certain skills that allow things to
go forward, whether it be the gift of gab or
creativity in terms of making up shows or something. What

(55:32):
skills do you believe helped you in that area? Okay,
I've I've always had the gift for gap and I
think it happened when I worked on the trains, Okay,
because aside from just running up and down the train,
you know, selling stuff, I talk to people. I talked
to adults. You know, when kids talk to adults, they
yet to be adult. And I think that that helped

(55:54):
me a lot in my life and in my business.
Um I am somewhat introverted normally. Uh When Susanne and
I go out to a big party, I usually find
a nice quiet place at the bar, and she loves
working the room and I just kind of hang out

(56:16):
at the bar and I don't care if anyone talks
to me or not. And Susanne has given up saying
why don't you talk to people? I said, I'd rather
just stand here and watch people. Okay, And uh so
the answer is, I don't know. In front of a camera,

(56:36):
I'm not introverted at all. Okay, I'm I'm right out there.
I love performing, um or, I loved past tense performing
and today Susanne and I do uh two or three
Facebook live shows every week. Well before we get there,
let's clean up the past where we can after threes company. Okay,

(56:59):
So thank working for the CBC. Even when you hit
the ceiling with a nightly talk show, it's not that lucrative.
It was pretty lucrative. It was when I left the
CBC in um the first month I was living in
l A. I get a call from the CBC saying,

(57:19):
we're doing a new show on Saturday night, called in person.
We'd love you to host it. And I said, I'm
living in l A now and they said, so you'll
fly back. We'll shoot you know, two or three shows
at one time, and it won't be a big deal.
I said, okay. I said, just pay me what I
made the last year at the CBC, and they said,
it's not a problem. I get a call back three
days later and the guy says to me, we can't

(57:43):
pay you what you made last year. I said, but
you paid me what I made last year. Yeah, but
we can't just pay you you earned it. I said,
well I'm going to earn it again. You want me
to do the show? No, but you did so many
shows that you you you made four times and more
than the president of the CBC, I said, but my

(58:04):
ratings are better than the president of the CBC. Okay, anyway,
he said, Okay, we're gonna figure this out. So they did.
I made. I made. I made a hundred and sixty
thousand dollars and that was a nineteen sixty seven. Okay,
a lot of money, A lot of money. I think
you know. Baseball players they were lucky, were making a
hundred yeah, and hockey players are making eight thousands. Okay,

(58:28):
do you play hockey or you a hockey fan? I
played hockey every day of my life, okay, every day
of my life. And the only fist fights I ever
got into were on the ice, so no one ever
got hurt. You don't get hurt fighting when you're on ice.
But I played every day, every single day. I love
playing hockey. And uh I gave up hockey when I

(58:49):
started working. So there's a bunch of crazy Canadians who
live here, okay. And I get a call probably once
a month and they say, okay, we need one more on,
we need look forward. So said, we're it's go next
week at the blah blah, and I say, are you
freaking crazy hockey? I'm an old guy one body checking

(59:14):
in the hospital. No, no no, but we don't body check.
I said, don't tell me that. You guys get out
on the ice and you think you're eighteen again. Okay,
and you forget the rule about no body checking and
your body checking. He said, well it happens. Okay. So
I run into Gratzu Wayne Gretzky one night at a
party and the two of us are standing at the bar,

(59:36):
and I said to him, I tell him the story
about the crazy Canadians. He said, I get the same call.
I said, what do you say? He said, are you see?
Are you serious? Are you freaking crazy? You think I'm
gonna come out and play hockey with you guys? Okay,
So you have your nightly talk show in the seventies.

(59:58):
That the last time you're in front of the camera,
in front of a network camera. Yeah, the last time
I did a series. Okay, but we're now doing a
different kind of show. Okay, but let's before I told
that first secade. Okay. So you meet Suzanne in at

(01:00:19):
what point do you get married? We get married in
seventy seven, when she got hired for three company. I said, Okay,
you finally got a job, so let's get married. Okay,
so I'll tell you something interesting about her first paycheck,
which was not big, okay, but she had never had
a paycheck okay. So she was supporting her. So I

(01:00:45):
was paying all the bills. And I didn't have any
money either, okay, because when I got my divorce, I
did not want life to change for my two children.
They were going to school and uh West Brent, Brent
was i'mwhere private school. I didn't want their life to change,
so I simply left. All I took was my car

(01:01:06):
with me, Okay. I rented an apartment um in Beverly
Hills for two hundred dollars a month, and it was
this terrible, crummy one bedroom. One bedroom was like a
little bigger than this desk. But it was my place.

(01:01:28):
And that's where Susanna and I started living together. We'd
been essentially living together before that. She'd come to l
A and I was living with a buddy of mine
and bell Air and I'd go to to San Francisco
to Sasolito, etcetera. But we officially started living together in
seventy early seventy. Sometimes uh so I'm so depressed after

(01:01:54):
leaving my wife. What was the motivation for leaving your wife?
I only knew her for two weeks before we got married.
We shouldn't have gotten married. Okay. We got married when
I was twenty or twenty and how long did that last?
Ten years? But I was away. I think I created
those shows for the CBC to get me out of town.
It's not that I just I didn't dislike her. I

(01:02:15):
really liked her a lot. She was a very talented
artist and a lot of humor, et cetera. But I
wasn't in love with her. We should have just been friends. Okay,
So it wasn't this terrible, awful thing. It's just that
we just kind of grew apart and it was kind
of natural to had a divorce. Uh. So I walked

(01:02:38):
away with my car. I didn't take any money. I
didn't take I took nothing, and I rent this crummy apartment.
And I'm really depressed, really depressed, And for a good
year and a half two years, I didn't answer the phone,
I didn't open a letter. I didn't want to see anybody.

(01:03:02):
I was depressed and humiliated. Um I knew how my
mother felt about it because she told me, she said,
nice boys don't leave their wives because no one in
the family had ever gotten a divorce, even though they shouldn't.
They should have gotten a divorce. I mean, my parents

(01:03:25):
were together for sixty three years. They should have you
gotten a divorce twenty years earlier. Um, but no one,
just no one did that, of course. Okay, So one
day I come home to my crummy two apartments and
I walked in and uh, I had an aquarium with

(01:03:48):
guppies aquarium. So I said, he is, where's my aquarium?
And she said I had to sell it. I said why.
She said, to pay the rent. But who's saying that
I had to sell your aquarium to pay the rent?
I said, we who. No one's going to pay you
two hundred dollars for that crummy little look. She said,

(01:04:10):
I also sold your clothes. I said, you sold my clothes.
She said, You've never been poor, have you? I said no.
Even when I was living with my parents and I
was poor, I didn't realize I was poor because we
had everything. Okay, I said, so, no, I've never been poor.

(01:04:32):
She said, well I have. She said, when you're poor,
you sell your stuff. And then when you have money,
you buy more stuff. I said, Okay, So suddenly I
had very few clothes. I actually had quite a wonderful wardrobe. Okay,
I had kashmere suits in the pants lined in silk.
I had wrapped around overcoats made out of camel whatever

(01:04:57):
they call it, camel hair. That was all gone. So
there are guys walking around l a your clothes and
if they look into their inside pocket, they'll see my name.
I'll see my name and the date that it was.
It was mad it made for me. These are all
custom clothes. Yeah, so how did you get out of
the rut? Out of the depression. So after a year
and a half or two years, I'm in the bathroom

(01:05:22):
and uh, really feeling terrible about myself because I'm thinking,
this isn't me. I just feel awful and I've never
been depressed in my whole life, and I'm really depressed.
I'm not suicidal, but I just feel like crap. I
feel like I'm useless, and I feel badly because I
left my children. So I'm in the bathroom and I

(01:05:47):
look around. There's no toilet paper. It's going to get
a little graphic. All that was in the bathroom was
the nash Old geographic. Okay, have you ever used a
page out of the Nationals? Can't imagine it? The page
is this thick, it's also shiny that paper. Okay. So

(01:06:12):
I thought, okay, I finally hit the wall. This is it.
So I call a commercial agency called Abraham's rubil Off
and so they do commercially. Said, they have people and
they send them out to do commercials. And I talked
to U Neil Noel rubil Off and he said, oh,

(01:06:33):
come on down. So I go down there and we
talk and what do you do in Canada to television?
Blah blah blah. I said, okay, said I'll send you out.
So I was in those days. Well, I won't get
to this. He sends me out to audition for a
company called Household Finance. I don't even know, h okay,
I don't know if they're still around, I don't know. Okay.

(01:06:56):
So I walk in, I do the audition. There are
these eight guys from the agency sitting around the conference table.
I do the audition and the guy in sharde says
to me, you sure sound like the right guy, but
you don't look like the right guy. And I said,
what are you talking about? He said, go down the hall,
there's a bathroom, look at yourself in the mirror, and

(01:07:17):
ask yourself the question, would you borrow money from a
guy who looks like this? So I came back. I said,
you're right, because during the time I was depressed, I
stopped dressing and I was wearing funky jeans, work boots,
um denim jacket, some kind of funky shirt. I had

(01:07:41):
a big natural I had a mustache, I had a beard,
a small beard, going, etcetera. I said, I agree with you.
I said I would not borrow money from a guy
who looks like me. I said, are you guys here tomorrow?
And they said yeah. I said, can I come back? Yes?
So next morning I turn up at eight o'clock for

(01:08:02):
an eight thirty meeting, and at eight thirty, these all
eight guys walk in. They walk right by me. They
didn't they didn't recognize me. Right, I walked in and
they said, you got the job. I had a haircut,
I shaved, I put on a suit with a shirt
and a tie, and I looked like a guy you'd
borrow money from. So I did three national spots. I

(01:08:23):
mean fifty thou dollars, which was a lot of money
when you have no money, even if you have money,
fifty thou dollars a lot of money. And then I
started doing a lot of commercials voiceovers and I really
enjoyed it. It was easy money and I didn't have
to get dressed for you know, any voiceovers. They called

(01:08:43):
me to turn up and I shoot, you do a
couple of commercials. And then in nineteen nineteen seventy three,
maybe seventy three, Um, I get a call to audition
war a supermarket called Alphabeta. Of course, and uh, they

(01:09:07):
also want Susanne to audition. And no one's ever heard
of Suzanne Summers in nineteen seventy three, right, So the
two of us audition as a as a couple. I
get the job, she doesn't. So I did thousands of
commercials TV and radio for Alphabeta from nineteen seventy three,

(01:09:32):
I think to night and or nineteen seventy nine maybe,
and uh, I actually I didn't get sick of doing them.
But it was like I became the Alphabeta man and
the the the tagline at every commercial was tell a friend,

(01:09:56):
and wherever I had to go at people would say
tell a friend, and I'd go, like the first time
I heard it, So it's now no, okay, Susanna and I.
It's now and Susanne and I are on a red
eye to New York for a meeting and she just

(01:10:17):
finished shooting Three's company and she's tired. We get on
the plane and we start arguing about nothing, and then
we stopped talking to each other. And now we're sitting
beside each other. We're flying to New York and we're
not talking. We get to New York, we get into

(01:10:38):
the car, the driver to take us to this meeting.
We get to the building, and instead of pushing the
express elevator that goes to the floor, I pushed the
one that goes to three. Okay, now we're not talking
to each other. Okay. We get on the elevator. We

(01:11:00):
get as far away from one another as possible. The
door opens on the second floor and a guy gets on.
He looks at Suzanne, looks at me, smiles and says,
and I said, fuck you, okay, And I was surprised

(01:11:22):
that I said that, but I was piste off at Susanne.
We weren't talking. There was this anger thing. Now the
guy that I said that too. I felt so badly afterwards.
I wish I could apologize to him. He couldn't wait
to get off the elevator because Mr happy that he'd

(01:11:43):
seemed to tons of commercials. Okay, suddenly he's trapped in
this steel room with this lunatic okay, who's yelling at him? Anyway,
he gets off, Susanne and I looked at each other.
We started laughing. I realized, what are we fighting about?
It so stupid? Okay. So and by the way, from

(01:12:08):
the time she was fired, which was when I left
my talk show two today, because we're in business together.
We have not spent one night apart in over forty years,
and we're together twenty four hours a day. Wow, that's amazing. Okay,

(01:12:31):
let's start there. She gets fired, what's your plan, because
you do reinvent her and you have a lot of
business enterprises. What was your What were your thoughts at
the time? And I had no business enterprises. Um, I
didn't have a plan, but I knew I could come
up with a plan, which I did. So we're talking,
and you know what we're gonna do and where we're

(01:12:51):
gonna do it, and how we're gonna do it and
the three company people were ignorant about branding because I
went to them and I said, we should brand Chrissy Snow. Okay,
we should brand the like the hair thing and the
hot pants and the boots and the and there should
be a Saturday Morning animated cartoon, you know, the Adventures
of Chrissie's. And they say, all we care about is

(01:13:14):
the show. We don't care about anything else. I said,
but don't you understand this brings more audience in, it
brings more loyalty to No, we don't care about that, okay.
So one of the things that I talked to Susanna
about was branding, and branding was a fairly new word
in there weren't too many people branded. I said, everybody

(01:13:35):
knows who you are. I said, the firing, in one
sense was really good because it puts you on every
newspaper in the country and talk show and interviews. And
I said, that's all they're talking about is ABC fires
Chrissie Snow from Three's Company. I said, so we're starting
off by the fact that you are extremely well known

(01:14:00):
and will globally be well known as well, because the
show ran in like a hundred and thirty countries. So
she said, you know, um, I did guys and Dolls
in high school and I really enjoyed it. She said,
I'd like to do a show in Las Vegas. So
it was her idea, her idea. Yeah, So I said, uh, jokingly,

(01:14:25):
can you sing? And she try to try to hit me.
So I go to Vegas. I go to the Sahara Hotel.
They offered two weeks big money. Went cold once again,
no agent, no nobody else. I go to the Riviera
two weeks big money, and I realized, oh, that's the

(01:14:46):
format for big TV stars because they don't think they're
gonna last longer than two weeks. So the Mob was
still running Vegas. Then okay, they were just beginning to transition,
but the Mob was still in charge. So I go
to the MGM Grant and the president's name is Bernie Rothkoff.
Bernie Rothkoff was the nephew of Modalitz. Modlitz was head

(01:15:10):
of the the Cleveland Mob okay Jewish Mob. So uh,
I bypassed the entertainment director. I learned from my first
sale to ABC, go right to the top. I'm total
believer in that the first who can say yesterday. That's right.
And they may say that's not me. You have to

(01:15:31):
talk to Fred. But why go to Fred first? Okay?
So I walk into Bernie Rothkoff's office and it's huge.
It's he's fifty feet away from I'm not kidding. There's
no furniture, okay, other than he had a little desk
probably three or four ft wide, and he's sitting in

(01:15:51):
one chair there and there's one chair on the other side.
That's it. There's no art on the wall, there's nothing.
So and he's writing. He doesn't even look up. He's
writing something and this is like I'm walking to the
death chamber, and without looking up, he says, what do
you want? And at that moment I realized he's like

(01:16:13):
all my uncle's he's they're all a tough, tough talking guy,
heart of gold. Okay. So I said, I want a
two year deal for Susanne Summers and I don't care
what the money is. So he puts the pencil down
and he said, why do you want a two year deal?
I said, I told him about the Sahara and the river.
I said, I don't want to come here with two weeks.
I said, it's a waste of time. I said, I

(01:16:34):
don't know if she's going to succeed in two weeks.
So that's where I want a two year deal, because
everything she does, she succeeds. Okay, you ever watched Threees Company?
He said, I love threes Company? He said, okay, did
she succeed? He said yes. I said, so two year deal.
What have he got to lose? He said, no, one's
got a two year deal. He said, I've got Dolly.
He named all this all the stars he's got got

(01:16:56):
cause I got love. I said, they have six weeks,
a six month, six eight months deals. He said, no
one is. I've never heard of a two year deal.
He gives me a two year deal and the money
was more than I was asking threes Company for. So
now we got to put a show together and we've
never done it, and she's never been on stage other
than in high school for guys and dolls, and uh

(01:17:20):
so I bring in some of the people I had
worked with in Canada, and one of them in particular,
who was a buddy of mine in Toronto, and he
became a head of comedy at NBC and he and
his partner produced a lot of big variety shows when
variety was big in this country. Sali Wilson and So

(01:17:41):
I told So, I said, we got this deal. I said,
you know, I want you to help us out, he
said with pleasure. So he took charge. He became the
producer of the original show, and he brought in the choreographer,
He cast all the singers, he cast all the dancers.
I said, don't even think about what it's gonna cost.
Whatever it's costs, we're fine, I said, just do just

(01:18:04):
do a great show. So we had projection, we had everything,
because I wanted all this there so that Suzanne's not,
you know, naked on stage all by herself. So we
opened and her opening theme music is playing in Susanna
and I were standing in the wings and it's time
for her to go on, and she's not going on.

(01:18:25):
So I put my foot on her rear end and
gently pushed her out on stage. Okay, And when she
got on stage, when she was out there, she was
very comfortable. She loved it. It was a great show.
We were sold out and we I think we were
at the MGM for a week or two weeks, and

(01:18:47):
that was the beginning of Vegas. She became UH Female
Entertainer of the Year one year we live. We lived
in Vegas for ten years and we worked in Vegas
for thirty five weeks a year. She still holds the
record for selling the most tickets over a two and
a half year period. For two and a half years
we were at the Las Vegas Hilton. We had a

(01:19:08):
gigantic show there, cast of sixty people. It was the
Mula Rouge, and she wound up starring in the Mula Rouge. Strangely,
I get a call from the president of the Hilton,
Henry Lewin, who was a German jew who had run
for his life, you know, during the war and spent
the war years in China. And he called me and said, Allen,

(01:19:33):
I have this show and I want to do as
an accent. He said, I have this show and I'm
paying these guys in Paris UH a lot of money
and royalties. Every single week he said, we have more
people on stage than we have in the audience of night.
He said, would you and Suzanne come and look at it?
So that night we go look at the show. I

(01:19:54):
love big. I love big production shows in Vegas. Okay
to any production show. Beautiful girls with feathers and you know,
a lot of music and dancing. I love that, so,
I said, Henry, Henry lewin was I said, Henry, it's
it's a beautiful show. He said, I know, I know.
He said, but what's wrong? I said, you don't have
an anchor. I said, there are two other shows in

(01:20:17):
Vegas that have French names. I said, nobody knows what
those the shows are. They It's like, what's the move
long Route? What is it? Okay? I said, here's what
I suggest. Suzanne opens the show, she does her act
in the middle of the show, and she closes the show. Okay,

(01:20:37):
we will do that. If you promised to do this,
he said, I'll do whatever you want me to do.
I said, you have to buy every available billboard in
Las Vegas. You have to buy every available billboard in
the feeder cities, Okay, Phoenix, Burbank, l A, et cetera.
I will produce to video commercials and several radio spots.

(01:21:02):
I will give you photo ready art to use in print.
You have to just forget about what it's costing and
just lay it on. And if you do that, I
promise we will succeed. So that was I can't remember
what month it was. Two months later, we opened eight
hundred seats at the Las Vegas Hilton. I was a

(01:21:22):
little worried, okay because the night we were there to
watch the moon law Rouse that were probably maybe a
hundred people. And it's off the strip. Okay, it's off
the strip, so we don't even have the benefit of
people walking by. So I gave him a picture, a
head shot of Suzanne sexy head shot. I said, put
this on your on the the what do they call it, yeah,

(01:21:46):
the Marquis. Okay, we opened, were sold out. It was
the first time the the balcony had people sitting in
it since Elvis was there in the sixties. Okay, they
were storing lighting equipment in the balcony. So we sold
out to two hour shows every night, seven nights a week.

(01:22:12):
Those were the days when Vegas hotels provided entertainment every
night of the week. After year and a half or two,
and we're still selling out like crazy. I said to
Henry lew And we gotta have a day off. And
he said, Allan, is it money. I said, it's not

(01:22:32):
the money. I said, we're happy with everything, with everything.
I said, it's not that at all. I said she
needs a day off just to lay in bed. He said, okay, okay, Monday.
So that started all the hotels only doing shows Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
and sometimes Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Okay, it broke. The

(01:22:54):
seven day rule was an unofficial rule. So we did
that for two and a half It's You and a
half years and sold gazillions of tickets, and that established
her as a headliner in Las Vegas, and we started
playing theaters around the country and that got old after
a while. You know, one playing nighters and you finished

(01:23:17):
doing the show and you're eating crap on the road.
By the way, that's another conversation. All the people, all
the entertainers who have been on the road all their life,
okay forty fifty years. I don't know if you've noticed
or not, but they all have dementia or Alzheimer's. And
why because they're doing nighters. They get to the venue,

(01:23:41):
they're nervous, so not eating. They do a sound check, rehearsal,
they do the show. Eleven o'clock at night, they say
to the the road manager, go get some food. So
what's open? You know, what's open at eleven o'clock at
night if you're lucky, because he brings back crap food

(01:24:02):
that's it's sprayed with poison and who knows what else.
And that's what these people have been eating for forty
and fifty years, and I believe it's the food. Okay,
how does the thigh master happen? Get a call from
a guy I casually knew in Toronto and he says

(01:24:24):
to me, and he's part of a film development company.
There are three of them. He said, I got this
exercise device. He said, I don't know what to do
with it. He said, I want you to take a
look at it. So he comes to what we're living in,
Palm Spring. He comes to Palm Springs and it's called

(01:24:44):
a V Toner because it's shaped leg and it's an
upper body workout. It's not for thighs, its upper body.
And the idea is if you use it for your
upper body, your upper body will be shaped like a
V as well. So it's called a v Toner and
it was invented by a Swedish doctor and it's Swedish looking,
kind of gray, has a gray utility, sort of looked

(01:25:09):
to it, and it'd been around for fifteen or twenty
years and they couldn't sell a unit. So Suzanne takes it,
puts it between ear thighs and started squeezing it and
says to the guy, is this good for thighs? And
he says yeah, but it's an upper body. She said, okay,
leave it with us. So during the next two weeks

(01:25:30):
we came up with the name. Suzanne says it was her,
I said it was me um, and we changed the
color combination so it had a red knob and blue handles,
and we shot the commercial and the commerce you a
little flaccid. The results were a little flaccid. We weren't

(01:25:53):
losing money, but we weren't making the money we thought
we were going to make kah, So we had to
figure out what do we do next? So we added
three pages called Susanne Summers Helpful Hints for Healthy Eating

(01:26:16):
as a premium and I took off like a rocket.
What do you why do you think that was people
like getting free stuff? Yeah, okay, so most people who
have a heyday on TV, certainly at that time, I
want to get back on weekly TV. What was your
feeling about that about me getting back? Well, she had

(01:26:39):
done most people don't even think think about this. She's
done two hit series. Three's Company. Then she did seven
years with Patrick Duffy on Step by Step seven years.
That's a that's a hit TV show. She did Candy
Camera for two years. I believe she did a she
did the first um, the first time they produced a

(01:27:05):
virgin sitcom for syndication. Usually it goes to the network
and then so they decided, Lorimar decided, let's produce a
sitcom for syndication before it goes to They'll never go
to a network. Right. It was called She's the Sheriff,
and Susanne was the sheriff, of course, and she she

(01:27:26):
did not like doing the show. I said, why why
don't you like doing the show? She's I don't like
what I have to wear. I said, okay, okay, but
they're paying you every week, right, She's yeah, but I
don't like Okay. So that show ran for I think
a year, maybe two years, I can't remember. So she's
done a lot of TV, A lot of TV. We
did music specials for CBS, a lot of guest starring

(01:27:49):
on music specials with Paul Anka and you know, John Wayne, etcetera.
So a lot of television. Does she want to go
back to TV? Um? I think if she went back
to TV, it wouldn't be to do a sitcom because
it's never going to be as good as what she's done. Uh.

(01:28:13):
She would probably go back to do a talk variety
show remember those of course, Okay merv Griffin, and you
know she'd go back for that. She'd probably said, well,
let's do it out of Palm Springs. Okay, so we
do it out of Palm Springs. But what we're doing

(01:28:35):
right now is um. She was on the shopping channel
HSN for seventeen years, one of the top vendors, and
we started with jewelry, then we went to fashion, then
we went to small kitchen appliances, then we went to
organic food, then we went to audio video, then we

(01:28:56):
went to publishing. Uh, and then we went to candy
and chocolate, and then we went to bedding. I'm probably
missing okay, but I had. Your memory is phenomenal, um.
And she was one of the top vendors and they
referred to her as the Queen of TV shopping Okay,

(01:29:17):
seventeen years. So then she started writing these books and
she wrote her first book was seventy three She wrote
a book of poetry called touch Me and Uh. That's
the story in itself. She came down to audition for
the Dom Delawis Show and she had a call back,

(01:29:38):
so she went to the commissary at NBC to wait
to be called back. It was mid afternoon. She was
the only one in there in watch Johnny Carson, and
she thinks, oh my god, there's Johnny Carson. Oh my god,
Johnny Carson is coming over to me. So he comes
over to her and says, hey, little lady, what are
you doing here. I'm here for Don Delawi. He said, Oh,

(01:29:59):
he's a friend of my and I hope you get it.
She didn't have an eight by ten. She hands him
her book of poetry, so he takes it. That was Wednesday, Friday.
She's on the Tonight Show having purchased address with a
bad check. Okay. Carson loved her because she was a

(01:30:20):
small town girl, totally open. I mean he would say
to her, when did you get to town? She'd say
this afternoon okay. Um. So he had her on I
don't know every month. He loved having her on. And
um so from that Fred Silverman, so Freddie was head

(01:30:42):
of NBC, there were no They didn't have committees then
to decide if they're going to do a show or not.
Now it's by committee because no one wants to, you know,
get be responsible. Yeah, but they all take credit from
a win. Right. So Fred had watched Suzanne on the
Tonight Show often. They had done two pilots with two

(01:31:04):
other Chrissie Snows that did not test well. So he
said to the producer producers, I've got the girl. So
they called Suzanne, and Suzanne said, you know, and I
did a bunch of pilots and none of them sold.
I think I'm done. I'm going to teach cooking. Okay,
now he's coming for this one, lad. Okay. So she

(01:31:26):
goes in not caring if she gets the job, which
of course is the best way to get the job, right.
And she gets home, the phone rings, you got it
and we start Monday, Monday, Monday, Okay, not with a pilot.
We're in production Monday, and the first order was for
six shows, which was normal in those days. Okay. She

(01:31:49):
walks in to the room where they're all sitting around
the cast and the producers and the writers are sitting
around for a table read and she's never been to
a tape will read. She's never done done anything right.
So the first thing she announces to everybody, Okay, this
is a small town girl speaking. I've never had an

(01:32:12):
acting lesson, and I I'm not quite sure what I'm doing,
but I learned fast. All the professionals were sitting around
and I'm sure they were thinking, what this is one
of the three stars of the show who's never had
an acting lesson and doesn't know what she's doing. Okay,

(01:32:34):
but that was her honesty. I'm just telling you. I'm
telling you people who I am. Okay. So the first
she doesn't like the first year of threees company, she said,
I didn't hit it okay, but by the second year,
she was hitting it out of the park. She got that.
She I said, it's very hard to be a likable

(01:32:59):
dumb because most dumb lawns are irritating. She said, I
created a moral box for this character, and in the
moral box, I don't lie ever, and I'm never going
to steal anyone's husband or boyfriend. That's my moral box. Okay.
Always tell the truth, never come on to anybody's guy, okay.

(01:33:23):
And that's why people love that character. Okay. So but
now that you were saying a couple of times, you're
doing Facebook shows. So we have a we have about
a thousand products that we've all of which we've developed
over the years. We have Susanna Organics, which is and

(01:33:43):
by the way, Susanna Organics came out of you know,
for every downside, there's an upside. The downside was twenty
or twenty one years ago, she was diagnosed with breast
cancer and she couldn't figure out why she would host
this terrible disease. And she realized it was because she
was staying up late at night writing, Uh, she was eating. Uh,

(01:34:09):
you know when you're doing when you're doing a TV show,
there's the craft table cross service. I call it the
crap table, okay, because there's orange things there. There are
no natural foods other than oranges that I know of
that they're covered in orange powder. And you're a little nervous.
Every time you go by, you grab something and just
throw it in your mouth. And then if they serve,

(01:34:31):
you know, lunch, it's not with a gourmet food. It's
the cheapest food they could find. Right, So she figured
a part of it was staying up late not getting
enough sleep, uh, being too busy and not being aware
of the food I was eating. So she decided to
change her life and ultimately my life, and uh, get

(01:34:56):
all the toxins out of our life. Okay. We got
rid of all the stuff in our house for cleaning,
which is poison. We created a home cleaning system that
you could drink. It tastes awful, but you could drink
it okay, and it works incredible. We created Susanne Organics.

(01:35:16):
It's uh organic skincare, organic hair care, organic cosmetics. Okay,
because when you see the the stuff that you buy
commercially for skin care and hair care, you wouldn't want
to go anywhere near it. Okay. So on your Facebook
live show, do you promote these products? Absolutely? So what

(01:35:37):
we do is it's like a reality show. Oh. A
few years ago, John Feldheimer, who's a dear friend of
ours who runs a lions Gate, he said, I want
to do a reality show with you and Sudan. We said,
but we don't argue, we don't fight. We're not like
you know, all these reality shows they kick the crap
out of each other. Okay, and that's the show, and
we don't do that. He said, that's why I want

(01:35:58):
to do it with you guys. I know you so
well and you don't argue, but you have this great,
loving relationship. That's what I want. So I said, okay,
So for three days we had two guys with big
cameras like this following us around. I called John. I said,
I can't do this, Okay, I said, I there are
things that I want to do that I can't do
because I know it's going to be on camera. I said,

(01:36:19):
and even though you know we we have the final
look in terms of it, I said, we can't do this. Okay,
we can't do it least I understand. So what we
do now with Facebook Live and we simulcast on I
g TV, Instagram, and we're on our way to another
nine or ten digital platforms. We've been doing this for

(01:36:42):
about a year and a half. We've archived about a
hundred hours which you can You can go to Suzanne
Summers Facebook and you'll see them all there. There's no
script Susanne and I don't discuss what we're gonna do.
The only thing that we plan ahead is what products
are we going to be selling and how much are

(01:37:02):
we charging? Okay, we discount our products like crazy. How
lucrative is it? Well, it depends on your definition of lucrative.
I mean everything is relative, you know. But okay, how
long are the shows, like between forty and to an
hour show? What is the range of the lowest amount

(01:37:24):
of gross product you could sell to the top. I
don't know how to answer that question. Um, most of
the show is Suzanne and I or if our families
there are families on just goofing around. Um, I'm the
bad boy, okay, I say things that we know. The

(01:37:48):
audience goes, oh did you hear what Allan said? And
I'm not making it up? Who I happened to be?
I like being a bad boy? Okay. So we have
fun doing these shows, and we market not all of
our products. Um, like we did a show with a
thime master a few weeks ago, and I mean we

(01:38:13):
keep a good supply of thime masters. Okay. So when
you email, you always emailed with me with marketing wisdom.
So as you look at and you talked about branding earlier.
So what are a couple of lessons you can tell
my audience in terms of selling their products. But first
of all, you have to believe in your products. The

(01:38:35):
first aside from my experience on the train, I got
a job selling food freezer plans in Canada. That's like
selling you know, ice to the Eskimos. Really uh. And
the sales manager said to me, I don't care if
you like the food freezer plan or not. Okay, I

(01:38:56):
said no, no, he said, I don't care if you
like it or not. He said, you have to talk
yourself into believing that you love it. If you can
believe that you love it, you can then get anyone
to love it. Okay. So I said, okay. So that
was my first lesson in marketing to people that may
not want to buy anything. So with all the products

(01:39:20):
we have, we developed all of them ourselves. So there
are no products there where someone comes to us and
says other than thy master. That happened in the eighties. Um.
We we created all these products. Okay. We we have
a formulator. We do it all ourselves. We have a
team of four that runs our digital programs. Uh. Soon

(01:39:42):
we're gonna get into the podcast business. We've been avoiding
it for a long time, but it's time okay. Uh.
And we sell our products. Um. We don't spend a
lot of time during the hour. During the hour, it's
mostly goofing around and every so often and we try
to make it look homemade. There's nothing slick. There are

(01:40:03):
so in other words, let's assume I'm watching your Facebook
live show. Where do I buy it from Susanne Summers
dot com? So you're driving everybody to Suzanne Summers. Yeah, okay,
we could go out for hours. You're you know, your
incredible rack and tour. You've been listening to Alan Hamlet.
We could listen all day telling his stories, you know,

(01:40:25):
just about Canada, never mind threes Company. Thanks so much
for being here and informing my guests what's going on
in the Billy of the Beast. Well, thank you for
inviting me. This is my first podcast. Well it's not
your first time around the block talking Alan. Thanks so much.
Thank you. Until next time, This is Bob Left six

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