Oh No! Not ANOTHER Dead Celebrity Memory!

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

Not completely a household name, but certainly a BIG name, as I got to meet Richard Kiel, the 7 foot 2 actor who played the villain Jaws in two James Bond movies, “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Moonraker.” Since I was never a James Bond fanatic, a) I didn’t know his character was the only recurring villain in the entire litany of Bond films, which meant that b) I’d never heard of him until the day I met him. Kiel died this past Wednesday, only a few days before his 75th birthday.

Flash back to 1978, and it was the first national TV appearance for me and my partner, unless you want to count our three appearances on “The Gong Show.” The venue was The Mike Douglas Show, and for all you kiddies and Brits out there, Douglas’s show was the 70’s equivalent of Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show, in that because it’s daytime, it’s a little more saccharine than its night time counterparts, but for the most part that doesn’t discourage big names from dropping by.

Our debut was not particularly good, mostly because we had trouble getting the producers to agree which parts of our act would translate best to the show’s audience, mostly housewives and retirees. We wound up settling for a bit that we hardly ever performed, and probably never performed it again after that less than auspicious showcase.

So how did we get on in the first place if we weren’t really ready? Well, it’s time for, as the late San Francisco journalist Herb Caen called it, “Namedrops Keep Falling.” A couple months earlier, we played some big time banquet at SF’s Fairmont Hotel for nearly all of the local elite, and the out-of-town celebrity guest speaker was the actor Ed Asner, best known as TV’s Lou Grant, who’s still a working actor some 36 years later. Don’t know why, but he just really liked us, and we would stay in touch for several years after. Another major speaker at the banquet was SF’s mayor George Moscone, who would be assassinated three months later. I still have and cherish a wonderful group photo of all of us together.

A couple months after the banquet, Asner got to co-host the Douglas show for a week, and he apparently had a say-so in who would appear on the shows. He used his position to get us on, and I remember as he was introducing us, he made a big mention of how wonderful our SINGING was! Oops, too bad that the bit we wound up doing was an amalgam of impressions that weren’t very solid to begin with, and no real harmonies to speak of. Oh well, at least we had his endorsement.

On that particular show, the first guest was country star Loretta Lynn, around the time she’d published her autobiography “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Richard Kiel was on to plug one of the Bond films, and the other guest, fresh from all his body-building medals and preparing to embark on an acting career, was indeed Arnold Schwarzenegger. Next to Kiel, Ahnold was dwarfed, but so was everyone else! (Arnold was in fact, shorter than me!) I remember watching Kiel as he walked toward us down a hall, and the light behind him was totally extinguished by this massive figure.

And how were they as people? We didn’t exactly talk to Loretta Lynn, though from across where she was sitting on the panel, she did say something like “Well done” after our performance. Arnold, however, actually walked over to shake our hands, Asner gave us all a big hug, and Kiel was even nicer, talking with us after the show was over. He asked when we’d be performing in LA, but we couldn’t answer that at the time. That’s a shame, because only nine months later, we would be at the 6000 seat Universal Amphitheatre opening for “that late comedian I said I wouldn’t name drop again.” It was the only time I ever met Kiel, but the impression he left was memorable enough that it lingers after all this time.

So, of the 100 or so celebrities my partner and I met over a five-year period in the late 70’s and early 80’s, about half of them are still with us, meaning I got maybe another 50 blogs to go.

September 12th, 2014



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