A FEW MONTHS AGO, after his passing, I wrote about the great Milton Berle and mentioned how Milton had set me up for one of the neatest jobs I ever had, which involved Frank Sinatra. Several of you wrote in afterwards asking to hear that Sinatra story itself, sometime. Well, it is now officially “sometime.”
In 1987, Milton put me on a charity benefit show called “S.H.A.R.E.” I can’t remember what it stands for, but it’s a big, yearly thing in Hollywood that raises a ton of dough for something good. All the movie people who attend dress up in western clothes, that is, fancy western clothes, rhinestone cowboy stuff, and that’s fine, and they all have a good time, and that’s fine, too. As a side note, old-line, traditional benefits like this are sometimes the only places to see great stars like Virginia Mayo, or Caesar Romero, or Greer Garson, or Walter Pidgeon, or Lizbeth Scott, all sorts of folks, lots of whom are still alive and well today and sitting around wondering why no one is trying to learn from them. For the life of me, I don’t know why my business doesn’t regularly honor these beloved people. Wait a minute, of course I know why. Hollywood, like so many of our greatest industries and institutions, is often run by careening egomaniacs, who don’t believe anything of value ever existed before they got their jobs. I was at an audition once and made reference to a scene from “Casablanca,” and one of the producers in the room remarked, quite pleasantly, that he had never seen it. I think his exact words were, “Yeah, gotta catch that one of these days.” To which I replied that being a movie-maker without knowing “Casablanca” by heart was kind of like being a neurosurgeon without having gone to medical school. I don’t believe I got that part. Then again, maybe I did. Hollywood can be just that weird.
