David Pollock - Bob and Ray: Keener Than Most Persons

Copyright 2013 by David Pollock

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2013 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation
7777 West Bluemound Road
Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices
33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by UB Communications

Unless otherwise noted all photos are from the personal collection of Bob Elliott.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pollock, David.
Bob and Ray, keener than most persons : the backstage story of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding / David Pollock.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55783-830-8 (hardcover)
1. Elliott, Bob. 2. Goulding, Ray. 3. ComediansUnited StatesBiography. 4. Radio broadcastersUnited StatesBiography. 5. ActorsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
PN2287.E418P65 2013
791.440280922dc23
[B]
2012049815

www.applausebooks.com

To Jillzy

Contents

Bob and Ray became a part of my life when I was a young boy. The weekend NBC Radio program called Monitor was my first exposure to Bob and Ray. Each hour the broadcast would feature a report from Bob and Ray. Even as a youngster I could tell these guys were not hooked up right. The ridiculous was taken for normal. Silliness was reality. They would state the premise and off they went. They were both loons. This is a pretty irresistible form of comedy. Bob and Ray began on radio or perhaps whatever people did before radio. As I grew up their many appearances on radio and television shows was something my father and I looked forward to and enjoyed. I thought it was very cool that my dad loved Bob and Ray.

Later in my life when I was thoughtlessly given a television show of my own Bob and Ray made several appearances. This was thrilling, hard to believe and funny. Wait a minute, maybe it was just Bob. Or maybe it was just Ray? Maybe I never had a show. Im so old I can hide my own Easter eggs.

Anyhoo, so here we finally have a book about Bob and Ray. David Pollock has done a wonderful job writing this book. Someone had to write it as sadly, I think Ray is dead and Bob is illiterate. Also good Christ, when are we going to stop wasting trees? On the other hand, whats a couple hundred board feet of lumber compared to a book that guarantees a solid nights sleep? Well I could go on all day about Bob and Ray, but I need to get back to my own private hell. Let me finish here by saying: Bob and Ray, gay? Read the book then flip a coin.

God bless you, and good night.

He reached over to the shelf in his cramped dressing room and, with a little tap, launched the handcrafted wooden Italian clown into another round of perpetual somersaults. The mesmerizing, brightly colored figure, a gift from his wife, Lee, had done all that Bob Elliott could ask of it to keep him nicely distracted from the anxiety-filled realities of that sweltering, September 24, 1970, opening night of Bob and RayThe Two and Only .

The large, brightly lit make-up mirror he seated himself in front of symbolized the alien world in which he now found himself. Elliott had been informed by the conventions and rhythms of broadcastingradio guys did not slap on make-up and become Broadway actors; they performed comedy bits mocking Broadway actors, a responsibility he never shirked. Could tonight, he wondered, be some kind of cruel payback?

In AM radios twilight decades, Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were snapped up by every major network still standing, some stretches on the air seven days a week. Their comedy, said Groucho Marx, reminded him of Robert Benchley: They have that same Alice in Wonderland philosophy.... Im just crazy about them. Johnny Carson called them two of the funniestand most influentialhumorists of their time. But that was history now, as was their original nightly fifteen-minute NBC television series. Only some of the Broadway first-nighters in the John Golden Theatre would remember that Elliott and Goulding had been TV pioneers, on NBC five nights a week.

Next door, in equally Spartan quarters, separated only by a common bathroom, sat Ray Goulding, mindful of his voiceall of his voices, in fact. As there were no understudies, if he had a cold, all of his characters had a cold. It becomes an epidemic, he liked to say. And he was in a constant state of worry that he might catch one. According to his widow, Liz, He lived on Vitamin C. For Goulding, it would take more than a somersaulting toy clown to allay anxiety.

Like every New Yorker that night, he and his partner were victims of the fiendish Indian summer heat wave. Johnna Levine, co-producer of the show, had advised the two that if it got impossible to keep the theater comfortable, Take off your goddamn jackets and tell everybody in the audience to do the same.

The usual opening-night angst was peppered by the fact that the two were not used to the theater, Johnna pointed out. They were full of trepidation about this new milieu. It was not something they had ever done before and they were very uptight, but friendly and malleable, lets say, in terms of what had to be done.

Johnnas co-producer husband, Joseph I. Levine, the salesman of the two and a longtime Bob and Ray fan, had initially written them years earlier, proposing a most exciting and delightful evening in the theater. It was an overture that most performers only dream of, plopped in their laps by the co-producer of a recently successful two-man show, At the Drop of a Hat a point Levine was careful to slip in. The warm, emphatic producer, when teamed with his equally enthusiastic wife, was not an easy man to say no to, especially when he was lavishing praise. But Elliott and Goulding managed to do it.

And they persisted in their refusals throughout seven years of arm-twisting by the Levines. They were disinterested or apprehensive, Johnna said, with the idea of performing on stage. They had never been and didnt want to try. In truth, disinterest masked apprehension. Following a disastrous nightclub engagement in Buffalo a decade earlier, Elliott and Goulding had intuitively avoided placing themselves in harms way. Removed from their radio studio comfort zone, insecurities lurked. They had to be dragged to Broadway kicking and screaming, Johnna said.

Jeez, we cant memorize two hours of stuff, Goulding had repeatedly told the two producers in a series of yearly meetings. We never do the same thing twice. But his partner knew that was not necessarily true. Elliott had not exactly leapt at the opportunity either, though the idea had secretly intrigued him.

In the end, however, it was not the Levines persistence that did the trick. The guys had a change of heart, Johnna said, but I think the change of heart realistically was the fact that nothing else was happening. Thats the reality. They didnt have a specific radio outlet; there was no show. It was time to try another venue.

The stage manager, Don Koehler, stepped to the bottom of the narrow stairs leading to the second-floor dressing rooms and shouted, Five minutes, gentlemen. He, too, was anxious over the evenings outcome. This was his first job in nearly a year.

Elliott and Goulding, in sports jackets and ties, headed down the long, straight stairway to the Goldens drab, forbidding backstage. The theater on West Forty-Fifth Street, they had been told, had been selected because of its rich history of intimate two-person revues. But force-fed tales about the successes of A Party with Comden and Green , Flanders and Swanns At the Drop of a Hat , and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May , did not particularly put the two at ease. Nor, for that matter, were they reassured when they learned that the Goldens biggest smash was a 1929 hit called Ropes End , based on the team of Leopold and Loeb.