Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 3, 1990 TAG: 9006060111
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ROBERT I. ALOTTA
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There comes a time in everyone's life when you discover that you participated in history and didn't know it. That's what I discovered in "Kovacsland," Diana Rico's masterful biography of Ernie Kovacs.
Kovacs, for those too young to remember the golden years of television, was the first - and to this day, the only - person to deal with television as an electronic medium rather than as an extension of theater or vaudeville or radio. Kovacs improvised and innovated in such a dynamic manner that he was far ahead of the times, and many people did not understand him.
I was a kid growing up in Philadelphia when Ernie was doing the absurd on WPTZ-TV (now KYW-TV). Peter Boyle, a classmate of mine, took me over to the studios to see his father in action. Pete's dad Kovacs had played "Pete the Cop" on one of Ernie's earlier shows. We visited him on his own "Chuckwagon Pete" show. Young Pete moved onward and upward from there to star in such films as "Young Frankenstein" and "The Dream Team." He even portrayed his father in a vignette as part of "The In Crowd."
Little did I realize back in that television studio that I had been touched by history. It really was no big deal . . . then, since we weren't overly impressed with the medium, and the people involved in it didn't think of themselves as stars but as journeymen.
Ernie Kovacs' concept of television was unique. He really didn't like live audiences because they could see into his tricks. Much like a magician, Kovacs wanted his secrets to remain that way. Once he even put a curtain in front of his sound stage and forced the studio audience to watch the monitors. He was like a child with the medium. He experimented with a tilt-stage, a device that made all his actions - pouring a glass of a milk or letting an olive roll across a table - appear out of step with reality.
Much of what he did in those days has been recreated by modern technology, but he did it first and without computerized electronics. His motto, "Nothing in Moderation," was his rule of life as well as his creative maxim.
When Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis broke up, NBC got Lewis to agree to his first solo television appearance. They booked him for an hour but set aside 90 minutes for the show. Lewis stood by his contract: one hour and no more. NBC had to fill that other half hour and so they turned to Kovacs, who was on contract to the network. He agreed to do the half-hour show but demanded total creative control. With reluctance, NBC agreed. As a result, in 1956, Kovacs did what Mel Brooks did 20 years later in "Silent Movie." He created a comedy show that relied on visuals to get the jokes across.
In the opening sequence, we see a stuffed rabbit sitting in a forest when a tree falls. There is no sound . . . and Ernie pulls wads of cotton from the rabbit's ears! Masterful, exciting and so far ahead of its time. The "No Dialogue" or "Silent" show drew far better ratings from the critics and the audience than the Lewis spectacular.
In 1962, Kovacs, not yet 43, died in a car crash - his lifeless hand reaching for a Havana that he had tried to light and which was the cause of the accident - leaving a great deal of creativity undone and a monumental amount of bills for his widow, actress Edie Adams, to pay. Much of what Kovacs did, save the films in which he acted, has been lost to contemporary audiences. What a waste! We learned so much from Ernie Kovacs but there is still so much potential to the medium. He was a free spirit, a genius who took chances in a world where most of the executives didn't believe in learning from mistakes and who liked to bet only on a sure thing.
Diana Rico has done a fantastic job of bringing Kovacs back to life. "Kovacsland" is filled with first-person stories about the man, including personal memories from his daughter and close friends. More than once, while reading the book, I had to brush a tear aside as I thought of how great television might have been if Kovacs hadn't driven too fast on an oil-slick road in a Corvair station wagon, and I also thought of Don McLean's "American Pie" and wondered if Kovacs' death wasn't the day television comedy died.
by CNB