Jeff Simon: Three life stories we desperately need
"Call Me Ted" is the title of Ted Turner’s new memoir. So he went on Letterman on Monday to peddle a copy or six.
Hi Ted. Hi Dave. Much joshery proceeded.
And, as I watched, it occurred to me that the wrong movie and TV big shots are writing their autobiographies. For every Barbara Walters whose life story actually has a lot that’s engrossing to read about all sorts of things, there seem to be a bushel of Ernie Borgnines (who was McHale on “McHale’s Navy,” you’ll recall) and Tony Curtises (a regular on Robert Urich’s “Vega$” you remember) to tell us stories either already known or that we couldn’t give a flying fig about.
In Curtis’ case — get this now — his new book “American Prince: A Memoir” (“all my life I had one dream and that was to be in movies”) is the second autobiography the fellow has written in 15 years. Not only did I read and review the first but I talked to him about it on the phone for 45 minutes. He called me “darling” a lot which I took to be the way some guys did things in Hollywood’s Golden Age, but I was just this close to saying “Dude, I like your movies and I love your Yvonne De Carlo story and I always thought you were underrated but, under the circumstances, don’t you think ‘darling’ might be a bit much?”
Since I’m always here to help if I can, I’d like to suggest some folks of monster TV pedigree to the world of agents and publishers whose autobiographies the world actually needs:
• David Caruso (suggested book title “Who the Hell I Think I Am”). Behind almost every story— blind gossip item and otherwise — ever written about Caruso of “CSI Miami” has been the unasked question “Just who the hell does this bozo think he is anyway?” I, for one, would be happy to read a 340-page autobiographical memoir answering that question, full of sideswipes at producers and actors he doesn’t like. Ernie Borgnine’s mini-marriage to Ethel Merman is one thing. This is info we might need to know for our peace of mind.
• Roger Ailes (suggested book title “Unfair, Unbalanced”). It’s lovely, really, that Ted Turner, aka Capt. Outrageous, wants to tell us how good it was of him to invent CNN and give away all that money to charity and marry Jane Fonda, but the guy whose memoir I want to read is the darkest of all dark princes in the world of American politics and TV journalism, Roger Ailes, a genuine evil genius of his trade who might have been right at home as the villain in a James Bond movie.
Since he’s still very much running Fox News, this is one book that’s got a snowball’s chance in South Beach of existing. But, my God, think of what an amazing and Satanic document it might prove to be if Ailes were to tell, with total candor, every tale out of school that he knows, including those of the political bozos he turned into winners through TV ads and all those Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannitys who found themselves the blunderbusses at the core of a whole generation of cable bloviators that Ailes, more than anyone else, invented.
Who wouldn’t want to know how Fox News really functions? As a conservative Politburo? A wild and utterly genuine altnetwork that just happens to come from the right rather than the left? Here is a book, that could answer in the devil’s own words, what Geraldo Rivera is
really like.
If the volume ever came to pass, watch out for my elbows. I’m ready to be first in line.
• Mel Brooks (suggested title “Blazing Blintzes” — with the chapter on his elder years called “Blazing Bladders”). In all seriousness, the one American showbiz memoir that might have been immortal is the one we’ll never read by the Brooklyn meshuganah who lent his craziness to the invention of Sid Caesar and his 2,000-year-old man routines with Carl Reiner and who brawled with Buck Henry over how “Get Smart” was born and remade American film and musical theater comedy in his own image.
He’s starred in the memoirs of just about everyone he ever worked with including Caesar, Larry Gelbart and Carl Reiner but we’ve never really had the full Mel’s-eye-view itself from the Brooklyn comic genius whose friends included the late Mario Puzo and Joseph Heller.
That’s because Brooks has been too busy creating films and mining his movie career for Broadway blockbusters to bother with the reflective, contemplative gag-writing of putting a life story together.
As Buckminster Fuller used to say, “I seem to be a verb.” Brooks has been an active verb for so long who can blame him for not taking time to be a first person pronoun?
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