 James Curtis is the author of W.C. Fields, a biography which was awarded the Special Jury Prize by the Theater Library Association and named one of the notable books of the year by the New York Times. He's also the author of William Cameron Menzies, The Shape of Films to Come, Spencer Tracy, a biography, James Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters, and Between Flops and Acclaimed Biography of Writer-Director Preston Sturgis. His new book is entitled Last Man Standing, Mort Saul and the Birth of Modern Comedy. Thank you for doing this, James. You're in Brea, California today? Yeah, that's a, it's a suburb of Disneyland. All of America's a suburb of Disneyland. That's how we ended up with Trump. Yes, that's true. Full disclosure, James. I'm obsessed with Mort Saul. I thought I knew everything about Mort until I read Last Man Standing, Mort Saul and the Birth of Modern Comedy. It came out last month. It's a masterpiece. Go buy this book. You will learn so much not just about Mort Saul but where modern stand-up came from. My first date was to go see Mort Saul. I was 16 years old and I took a young lady at the age of 16 to Danger Fields to see Mort Saul. Oh, New York. Yeah. I was obsessed and still am obsessed with Mort Saul. I can remember going to the library when I started doing stand-up. I would go to the library in Berkeley. I moved to Berkeley to do stand-up and I would just go to the stacks and look up old newspaper articles about Mort. I'm going to pretend I don't know who Mort is for the benefit of a new generation of comedy fans. Before I start asking you questions, I want to thank you for the book. Thank you. Well, no, thank you. It's seriously. No, no, thank you. Thank you. No, no, no. Seriously. I'm obsessed with Mort. I wasn't sated, but what you did is you have made me go back and listen to my Mort Saul albums. I was thrown out of my house four years ago for this divorce and I took very few things with me. But I took my Mort Saul albums and I haven't even unpacked them. I started listening to my Mort Saul albums and on YouTube you can find Mort Saul. He is a miracle of democracy and show business. Why did you pick Mort Saul? Well, let's see. I feel I've always had very good luck in terms of the quality of the subjects that I've been able to work on and Mort continues in that tradition. I've always been fascinated by Mort and I always thought that he merited a biography. It's a unique story, unique Americans, uniquely American story, I guess I should say. And so I considered it for years, kind of talked myself out of it on a couple of occasions because I had always done long deceased subjects and I was a little intimidated by doing a living one. But in this particular case it worked out well and I'm happy to have done it. I first discovered him in 1966 here in Los Angeles when he had a TV series on KTTV, the local Metro media outlet out here. It was kind of an early version. Well, Seven Nights a Week, KTTV had what you could call controversial talk shows at 11 o'clock. They ran for 90 minutes. Tonight's the week you got Joe Pine, if you remember him. Lewis Lomax, who was the Black Joe Pine at that time. Regis Philbin did it for a while, Melvin Belli. And on Friday night they gave that slot eventually to Mort and he came in and started to do a 90 minute talk show each week. And I just found him fascinating in the very first. Mort's show was canceled due to bad ratings. Then what happened? Then what happened was they found, well, first of all, there was a tremendous groundswell of protest. There was a listenership that was absolutely rabid and they took up arms figuratively speaking and proceeded to inundate the station, the station management with correspondence mail as we knew it back then. And then miraculously they found another set of ratings that showed that Mort's numbers were actually better than they had thought. He was a hit. He was a huge hit. He was a hit. And what happened was after a short period of time at 90 minutes, Mort took on a little troop of comedy sketch artists. He was kind of a very early prehistoric version of Saturday Night Live and they would perform topical sketches with the week's news and people like Pat McCormick and Anne Elder who were part of that. Lily Tomlin's partner, Anne Elder. Mark London and Jack Riley. And these guys were all poverty stricken at the time and probably worked for Nixon no money. And they were so impoverished. Anne Elder told me that they had to write out their material on the backs of your shirt cardboards, the sorts of things when you had your shirts come back from the laundry that they were packaging. Cardboard and they'd save this cardboard and write out their scripts on it. And they proceeded to, with Mort, I think establish a new standard for creativity in local television out here. And it was the place to be for a while. It was really a remarkable show. In your book Last Man Standing, Mort saw the birth of modern comedy. You interview Anne Elder. She went on to work with Lily Tomlin when countless Emmys, she said that Mort was very easy to work for, very encouraging of comedy writers. That's true. And that's easy to believe too. I don't think she's just telling me that. I think that Mort was very accepting of other writers and talents in his sphere and I think it made for a better program. I mean, if he had been hostile to what they were doing, it wouldn't have worked. As it was, they were a big family and they were doing a lot of important stuff together. And I think that came over the airwaves and I think that's what I responded to at such an early age. You said to me before we started the interview that Mort was a tough cell. He's been a tough cell since the early 60s. I want to talk about his history. I want young people to buy your book, learn about the origins of stand-up comedy. There is no modern stand-up comedy without Mort. Although my... I don't think there is. Yeah. What year did Mort start doing stand-up comedy and where did he start? He started in December of 1953 at the Hungry Eye, which was in North Beach in San Francisco. And who owned the Hungry Eye? Enrico Benducci, who was a restaurateur, very flamboyant character. Trademark was wearing a beret at old times, which I think he did to the very end of his life. And the Hungry Eye was in the basement of a Flatiron building on Columbus, which cuts right through the center of North Beach. The building is still there. It's known by Francis Ford Coppola. Beautiful building. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's a Zotro building. I don't think it was quite in the state of repair back then it is today, but in the basement of that particular building was the Hungry Eye and it was a little kind of thrown together night spot. Mold wine is what they served at the bar. And so... And like... And this is a pattern that Mort encountered throughout his early career was it was strictly a music venue until Mort was brought in. Actually, Mort was next to poverty himself at the time. And he was brought in to cover a week when the featured singer was away during Christmas season. And Mort just got up there and started to try to figure out how to put across what he had in his head about a new kind of commentary, a new kind of social satire. And it wasn't a lot of politics early on. But if you think about that period, the top comedians of the day on television, you had people like Jackie Gleason and Milton Berle, of course. And if you saw somebody in a nightclub or a live theater or some sort, they were typically in a tuxedo or otherwise dressed to the nines. And they were telling Borsch Belt material, mother-in-law jokes, my wife is so fat, that sort of stuff. And so Mort didn't traffic in that stuff. He didn't have the Catskills in Doctrination, if you will. And so he had a completely different line of reasoning, a completely different way of presenting himself. And he said very early on, I got to thinking what kind of character would ruminate on this sort of material. And he came up to the graduate student persona and... Was he a graduate student? Was he a graduate student? Did he go to college? Did he go to college? He has a degree in civil engineering from USC. And he started to do advanced studies and kind of walked away from it at some point. And when he was up in Berkeley, he was essentially there because his girlfriend had gone up there and he followed her. And so he was kind of a vagrant around town at that point. They had all my coffee shops and the like. And he would hang out where... He was always kind of a nocturnal character. And so he would hang out and debate people and kind of hone what he had to say in his own particular peculiar way. And that's what was put forth at the Hungry Eye. It was December 22nd, 1953. The mythology about Mort is he came to the Hungry Eye fully formed on that night. He was living in Berkeley. Where did he get his comedy chops? I mean, I can't imagine that the first time he ever got in front of an audience was at the Hungry Eye. Well, it was... There was a little bit ahead of that, but it wasn't professional. He was kind of a roadie for Stan Kenton earlier on. Who was Stan Kenton? Who was Stan Kenton? Stan Kenton was one of the great West Coast band leaders of the swing era. And he had a kind of following all his own. Stan Kenton was very loud, very brassy on talking in terms of his music. He was a very bombastic piano player. And Mort appreciated the idea that he was all out. I mean, there is nothing modulated about Stan Kenton and his music. And he really was the leader of the West Coast jazz movement in the 40s and late 30s. And he had a number of people, personnel with his band that went on to great solo careers, including his vocalist, Anita O'Day, originally June Christie after that. So, Stan Kenton was a tremendously influential guy. And Mort just had a bad case of hero worship. So occasionally, Stan Kenton, Stan Kenton could fill the palladium, 6,000 people on a Saturday night. And occasionally, he would allow Mort if it was arrangeable to go up on stage when the band took their break and he tried to make more impression. But this is not paid gig. Okay. So Mort, his analog for an open mic was before the hungry eye, he was a roadie for Stan Kenton. And then Stan let him get up on stage. So he got his comedy chops working for swing and jazz audiences basis. Yeah, that's it. He and Lenny Bruce, both of the Lenny Bruce at the time was working strip clubs and was doing a fairly conventional act. Lenny Bruce was doing movie parodies and imitations, that sort of thing. So it was the example that I think Mort set that inspired Lenny Bruce to push the envelope in his own direction. What was Mort thinking as a roadie for Kenton and getting up? Did he have aspirations of being a nightclub comic? I'm not sure he was that it was an idea that was fully formed in his mind at that time. He he loved the music. And he had a peculiar way of looking at things, a distinctive way of looking at things. And he was very articulate. He could fascinate people with the way he spoke and what he had to say how he put things. And that's true to this day. And it's hard to say where that came from. You know, at a certain point, it just becomes a certain level of genius that he was able to put things the way that he did. He came out of no established pattern of any sort. There's nobody that really predates him. Before Mort's Hall, your stereotypical stand-up comedian was Henny Youngman, someone like that. Nobody dared delve deeply into the political minutiae that Mort got into, primarily because it was the early 50s and it was considered dangerous. You didn't get up on stage and knock Senator Joseph McCarthy. Comics, you know, watch other comics. You know, at first, for lack of a better word, they steal the cadences and the rhythms and the areas of their comedic heroes before they find their own style and voice. I know that Mort is the Steve Wozniak of modern stand-up. He's a god, but he did not spring fully formed. There had to be somebody besides jazz musicians who he was getting his rhythms from. Was there some kind of underground intellectual circuit that he pulled from? Were there any comedians? There are no comedians, really. The people that he told me that he listened to on radio in the late 40s, besides Stan Ken, were Henry Morgan, were Herb Schreiner, and he also remembered back to the days of Will Rogers when he was a kid. Who turned out to be an anti-Semite, according to your book. Well, that's Mort's judgment. I don't think it's necessarily as simple as that. But I think that where Mort came from was a result of the reading he did, was a result of the people he hung out with, was a result of what he heard on radio, what he heard in the media. But there was no particular comedian who did exactly what he did. The irreverence, I can pretty much trace back to Henry Morgan, of course. The casual way of ruminating on subjects of significance, you could say, came from Herb Schreiner to some degree who was a latter-day Will Rogers type. But I do think that a lot of the delivery was influenced by the music that he carried in his head and was not a musician himself, but he had such a wonderful appreciation for it. And where the notes hit in a musician's ear, that's where the words hit from Mort. And I think that how Mort was able to ingratiate himself with the musicians and in effect become accepted as one of them made a tremendous amount of sense when it came to how he developed, how he formed, and also how he was able to essentially strike out and set up a network of clubs around the country that were strictly music venues until he came in. His style, if I go back and listen to his albums, he takes a theme like a jazz musician and then goes as far away as he possibly can from that theme until right before, on the precipice of losing the theme and then he goes back to it. That's what a jazz combo does and that's what he does in a live performance. He tells some kind of story about something and ventures as far away as he possibly can from what he was talking about then brings it back. So he learned that I would assume being around great jazz musicians. Did he play an instrument? No, no. He had no chops in that respect at all. He couldn't play, he couldn't sing, but he appreciated the stuff and they appreciated him. His entrepreneurial spirit, you say in the book and you just said it that he was smart enough to know that he couldn't play mainstream clubs, maybe Mr. Kelly's in Chicago and eventually the Playboy Club for Hugh Hefner, but for the most part he gravitated to specifically jazz rooms. That's true. That's smart business sense, right? He knew that. The hungry eye was essentially a folk venue when Mort went in there. All of these cases without exception were music exclusively policy rooms until Mort came in. That's true of Mr. Kelly's. That's true of the Blue Note. That's true of the hungry eye. It's true of Storyville in Boston. It's true of Basin Street East in New York City. It was true of the Crescendo in Los Angeles and the interlude above the Crescendo. All of these places without exception were strictly musical venues until he came in for the first time. In each case it was considered a risk on the part of the proprietory to bring someone like him in as a category that was known at the time if you went into the record stores, spoken word, but Mort had this unique appeal to the audiences that sought out and appreciated the music. That's the connection that he forged. That's the connection he forged in setting up that informal network of clubs. Once he had done that, then that same network is available to Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman, and Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The other exponents of the so-called smart comedy movement, mothers, brothers, Woody Allen, etc. The first label that he was recorded on, you say, was Verve? Verve, correct. He brought Shelley Berman in, and he brought Jonathan Winters in, and Shelley Berman ended up recording his first album, his first comedy album, which I'm trying to think that was recorded at the Hungry Eye. I can't remember now, called Inside Shelley Berman, was a tremendous hit. It sold in the tens of thousands, and he underwrote by his sales a lot of musicians that Norman Grant's recorded at Verve that could not have been recorded otherwise. Some definite money-losers, but great albums on the left. Yeah, and Shelley Berman. So for a period, comedy was keeping jazz alive. That's true. That's true. That's interesting. Well, you know, one of the interesting things, because I interviewed Shelley Berman for the book, and he started in Chicago, and he, like Mort, did not work the Catskills. That was not his thing. He did not have that burden. He did not have that influence, which was great for him. But what I realized about Shelley Berman and what got emphasized to me was that Shelley Berman didn't come as a stand-up comic or as a comic that was going to get up in front of audiences and do routines as he did, finally. But he was rather gifted to a Shakespearean actor. And when he was first there in Chicago, discovering Mort, he was with the Compass Group. It was a provisional comedy group, and as were Mike Nichols and Elaine May. And so Shelley Berman's evolution to the point where he could get up in front of an audience by himself, in part came because he saw the example of Mort Saul in Chicago at Mr. Kelly's. Mort, is it fair to say, was the first comic with a college degree? Could be. I don't know, I don't, I haven't surveyed everybody's CV to see if they all came forth without college. Did Henry Morgan go to college? I'm not sure. No, he didn't. I knew Henry Morgan. He was a big influence on me. And I have a watch that Henry gave me, which I use to get backstage to meet Mort every couple of years. I have a watch that Henry Morgan gave me and Mort lets me in backstage. So he influenced Woody Allen, which I want to get to. But first, when I started doing comedy, the rap against Mort was he didn't like most stand-up comedians. And if you listen to his old albums and his current stuff, you can understand because while Mort invented stand-up comedy, he's really not doing stand-up comedy. He's doing these professorial jazz riffs that are more spoken word than they are stand-up. What I didn't know until I read your book was that he did support comics with Verve. He was the one who brought a lot of people along with him early on in his career. Yeah. Shelly Berman told me that he would never have gotten to where he was without Mort's example and Mort's encouragement. If you ask Woody Allen, if he would have become a performer without Mort's example and influence, he said, absolutely not. It's 100% true, he told me that it was Mort's example that convinced him that he should do it for himself. Did you interview Woody Allen? Yes, I did. And if Woody Allen had never been a performer, I doubt that he would have ended up being the filmmaker that he is today. I know that Woody says Mort changed his life. Yeah, and he said there was nothing else like it when he had seen it for the first time. He thought, nothing else like it I've ever seen, and he said I've never seen anything quite like it since. Was Mort in the military? Yeah, yes he was. He tried to get in during World War II, and he was in the Air Force. He tried to get in during World War II, and he was too young, which didn't stop him. He got in a couple of times. In one case his mother retrieved him before he got too far. He had kind of a five o'clock shadow when he hit puberty, and so he looked a little older than he actually was. I asked him one time where he was when he learned that Pearl Harbor had been hit. He said it was in the billion-dollar theater on South Broadway in Los Angeles in the afternoon. He remembered the band leader coming up on stage and telling the audience what had happened. He remembered going out to the street afterwards. I said, what was your action? He said I went out and tried to enlist. I tried to enlist. He tried to enlist, and he was 14 years old at the time. But he did serve in the military. Did he serve overseas during Korea? Did he see any actions? No, no. This was just after the end of the war, 46 when he got in. He was there for a year. He was sent up to Alaska ultimately where he got himself in a lot of trouble. He put out a very irreverent base newspaper called Poop from the group. He antagonized the commanding officer to the point where he did some record number of days of KP as a result of that. It was not a happy experience for him, but boy he was gung-ho during the war. He saw the great military movies of that period. He was a tremendously successful figure in ROTC. He won an Americanism award one time from the American Legion during the war. This was at USC? No, this is before USC. This was when he was in high school. He went to Belmont up on the hill above Los Angeles. He had an ROTC company and eventually became the commanding officer. He was steeped in all that. He liked the formality and the pageantry of it. What he didn't like was the corruption of authority, as he saw it. So a year in the military kind of did it for him, I think. That's why we need a draft. Everybody should serve. Tell me about his love affair with America. He was born in Montreal, Jewish. He came to America. How much does he love this country? Well, I think immensely. I think that the interesting thing that came out of the talks that we had, we recorded 40 hours over the space of a year. We'd get in all kinds of topics. But the thing that struck me when we got into his childhood in his early years was that when he was living in downtown Los Angeles, his father was a civil servant and didn't make much money. He was an only child. So they would take one bedroom apartment and more would sleep on the couch. As a result of that, Moore tried to get out of the house as much as possible. So he'd go out and walk down to Main Street in Los Angeles. There were a collection of small grindhouses on Main Street that would be open all night in some cases. They'd have three films, continuous showings, and he'd go in there and he'd sit for hours and hours and just absorb this stuff. And he came to Los Angeles in 1935 just after the production code started to be enforced. The Hays code. And so as a result of that, there was a certain enforced view of America that was put forth by Hollywood to the world. And criminals were punished, and people didn't have sex before marriage and all that stuff. But in a way, it was kind of a very idealized view of what the American idea was put forth by people like Frank Capra and George Stevens and the like, and Leo McCary. And as a result of that, Moore grew up with that impressed upon him. He saw these films again and again at a very impressionable age and they stuck with him. And I think maybe the culmination of that was in 1939 when he saw Mr. Smith goes to Washington for the first time. And to this day, it's still a film that can bring tears to his eyes. Right. And he wanted to remake it at one point. Yeah, at one point, yeah. He did. He calls himself a romantic. Which is true, very true. Yeah. And it seems to me that America has treated him the same way every woman ever treated him. Yeah, that's probably true to some degree. I think that his wife, Tina said at one point that Mort's stance toward America has always been as if it were a woman who had been unfaithful to him, which I thought was very perceptive. But he still believes. Yeah, he still believes he's incurable in that respect. Right. One of the the last line in the book really is just kind of reaffirmation of the romanticism, the thing that really animates him. And I think that's missing in a lot of assessments of him, just how important that is. He was a true believer and it came through. It came through in his relationships with women. I don't think he was an easy guy to live with or get along with in particular, especially in his prime. I think however that he attracted a fascinating and really high quality type of woman. And it's kind of like who was available at that time that he was seen with and took up with at various points. Everybody from Diane Cannon to Tippi Hedger into, well, Yvonne Craig, of course. Phyllis Kirk. Phyllis Kirk. Just one after the other. And Gina Lee who was a historic in the sense that she was the first Asian centerfold in Playboy. Without prying into his personal life, the takeaway from your book is that she's the love of his life. I kind of think that was the case. I kind of think that was the case. I wouldn't presume to speak for him. But I think it's one of those situations where when it was great, it was really great. And when it was bad, it was really bad. And you had two very strong, forceful individuals. And they fought as much as they loved. And I think that there was a point at which it just kind of blew apart for all kinds of reasons. But they were in a lot of ways of an ideal pair given their temperaments. And at the same time, it was probably always destined to break apart. But they made a good team when they were together. He was attracted to really, really brilliant women. Phyllis Kirk was a brilliant, brilliant woman. That's true. How's it pronounced? China? China. China. It's pronounced, it's spelled China, but it's pronounced China. Also, a brilliant woman. He was trying to understand women before most men thought they were worth figuring out. I mean, he was hanging out with Hugh Hefner, who was not interested in, was not interested in their head. No, not at all. But more genuinely was thrilled and turned on by a woman's mind, treated them as intellectual equals. And I think a little trouble that he got into with women was he treated them as intellectual equals and may have been misconstrued as a misogynist because he figured they could give as good as they take. That's a fair statement in the early 60s when you're trying to sort this stuff out early on. Yeah, I think so. I think so, sure. Yeah. Women found him sexy, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, definitely. I've talked to him about that. And he, we're told he radiated energy and testosterone and attitude and a little bit of danger. I think that was attractive also. Plus, he was really powerful at that time in terms of his presence on stage in terms of his fame, in terms of his influence, and also the people he knew. I mean, he knew everybody, everybody, and hung out with them. And they appreciated him as much as he appreciated them. It was really quite a time. There's a great moment in the book that I remember vividly because it really spoke to me about the problems women faced up until recently. Phyllis Kirk had an eye, she was probably smarter than Mort. I think Mort would admit that. She met Jack Kennedy and she wanted to talk to Kennedy. I think it was in Palm Springs. It was some party in Los Angeles. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, automatically assumed she was making a move on him. When, in fact, she was an intellectual who wanted to talk to Jack Kennedy, but she was reduced to a woman. Yeah, he hung out with Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando. He almost became more than a character actor, a leading man at one point. They were, right? Wasn't he being groomed as an actor? Well, Jerry Wald, specifically the producer, was a big fan of his and had plans for him. Jerry Wald died in 1962. And so he didn't have the chance to really put those plans into motion. But I think had Jerry Wald live, that Mort would have done more films. As it was, Mort, Yvonne had an interesting thing to say about that, which I think was true because Mort took on some stage work and that sort of thing. And the problem was he was not geared. He had a good memory, but he was not geared to learning lines. She said if you're going to do something and improvise it, he'd be home free. But having to learn and repeat lines the same way every night, that was not something he could do. Or wanted to do. Or wanted to do. And he said at one point, which I think is absolutely true, that he said a lot of people can act. I'm the only one that can do what I do. And that's true. I mean, that's kind of the trap of true genius is that you do something so unique and startling that you kind of get fall into that pit. You can't move sideways. You can't move up or down necessarily. Because you've got, you're a captive of that particular gift of yours. And I think that was very true in Mort's case. Nobody else could effectively do what he did. But as a result of his not being able to say carve out a career for himself in television or movies, that when the nightclub world as we knew it in the early 60s went away, Mort had nowhere to go. Even though he had already learned how to network with jazz clubs, right? Oh, yeah. But jazz went into a decline about 1962, 63. Part of it was because of the way the tax code was being rewritten. So that the people who frequented the clubs in, say, in Chicago, Mr. Kelly's, I mean, they could not write off whole evenings entertainment the way they could before. And that was Kennedy himself that was pushing that particular agenda. So by the time 62, 63 rolled around, a lot of the clubs had closed or had gone off their entertainment policies. That was something I didn't realize before I started digging into this. Yeah. And you can find the news items of the time. It was a time of extreme crisis. But back in the late 50s, here in Los Angeles, I'll use an example. The Sunset Strip, that two miles of unincorporated roadway that connects Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, you had the clubs like the Crescendo, which was basically a jazz venue, the McCombo places like that. And any given night, you could go see maybe Duke Ellington downstairs at the Crescendo, with Mort, upstairs the interlude, you'd have some like Jerry Southern or Shorty Rogers, who came from the Kenton Band, across the street would be Sammy Davis Jr. At the Coconut Grove would be Judy Garland. Slate Brothers would have a very early version of Don Rickles. You had the Mulan Rouge, Louis Prima, Keeley Smith. All of this stuff was going on continuously at that time. And most of these places, you could, well, use an example, Mort fell ill with mononucleosis the day before he was to open at the Crescendo. And Gene Norman, the impresario on 24 hours notice, was able to get his replacement. June Christie, a really great, great vocalist, and Mike Nichols and Elaine May. And you could see that show for a two dollar cover and a two drink minimum. It's just astonishing, the amount of live entertainment that was available. I mean, first rate top tier entertainment, same was true in San Francisco, same was true in New York City, of course. He started in 53, or at least he became known in 53 at the Hungry Eye. How long did it take before he was known nationally? Well, that took a little while. Nord says, and he said at the time, it took him about six, eight weeks to really kind of find his center there and click in with audiences at the Hungry Eye. And he stayed there a good long while, most of the year. He was encouraged to go off to Chicago at one point to do a two week gig at a club back there. And again, he was not immediately accepted by the audiences. I mean, they had to get their bearings with him. They hadn't seen any like him before when he went on television for the first time. It was the Steve Allen show in 1955 in New York. And again, he started off and there were a few minutes where he got no response from the audience. He said then the dam broke and all of a sudden this wave of laughter came through. But it took them a few minutes to figure out what was going on. And that happened pretty quickly for him. I mean to go. Yeah, it did. It did have two years to go from the Hungry Eye to the Steve Allen show to the Tonight Show in two years. That's pretty quick. I think where he really broke out was when he opened in Los Angeles in 57 at the interlude, which was a small bar performance space that was up on top of the Crescendo on Sunset Boulevard and seated about 85 people about the same size as the Hungry Eye was. And he would alternate with a musical act, Shorty Rogers initially. And he would do these really bracing tight 30, 35 minute sets. And he'd do two or three a night on the weekends. He'd do as many as five. And it was it was electric. When you hear a recording of what he did at the interlude, for instance, it was just electric. What's the earliest recording we have of Mort? The Sun Authorized album that was recorded in 1955 in Carmel, actually, in the Monterey Peninsula. It was recorded by Fantasy Records. Mort worked an evening at a place called the Sunset Auditorium. And it was with Dave Brubeck with Paul Desmond. And Mort went in as the comedy act. And they were looking out for him in such a way so that the Brubeck organization did their first set of, I think, five numbers. Then Mort came on. And he did about 40 minutes of material. Then Brubeck and Desmond came back and did their final set. And Fantasy Records in Berkeley was recording Brubeck's music for a potential album that night. They had engineers and taped in the back of the room. And as it turned out, they recorded Mort as well, though Mort was unaware of it at the time. And that album was eventually issued as Mort's solid sunset. But it was unauthorized. It came out after Mort's first official album for a verve, which was called The Future Lies Ahead. And Mort had to sue to get the album off the market because by that point he considered it dated. It was 1958 and the material was three years old. Were they paying him for that? Or they were just ripping him? No, they were just pulling a fast one, if you will. And so if you can find a copy of Mort's solid sunset these days, it's a real collector's item. Are there any recordings of him before The Hungry Eye? Not that I'm aware of. Not that I'm aware of. That's the earliest. There are two tapes in his collection that were recorded after that. There's about 70 minutes of material from the interlude about a month after he opened in Los Angeles, spring of 1957. There's a tape that's marked Hungry Eye 1954, I think. I gotta look back on my list now. That hasn't been digitized yet. That is pretty early as well. The interlude tapes are really fantastic though. They're really exciting and fun to listen to. I'm telling you, and I made my kids listen to Mort when they were growing up because my kids hate me. Just so you know why my kids... In order to go to Disneyland, we had to go to the Nixon Library in Whittier first. That was one of the big complaints. That was like, you have to earn Disney. Well, then we just... Finally, I lost all authority and we just went straight to Disneyland. If you want to learn American history, one of the ways I learned American history was filtering it through the prism of Mort's albums. I wanted to know who these references were, and now that I'm old enough and steeped in enough history, his stuff, to me, it's timeless and just jaw-droppingly brilliant, was the height of his career in 1960 when he made the cover of Time Magazine. If you were to ask him what was the absolute peak of your career in terms of fame and money and power and influence hanging out with the Kennedys, was 1960 the Zenith? Probably, running up to the election in November, sure. And did he suffer once Kennedy got elected because he didn't have any friction? In other words, he was up against Eisenhower, but now you have Kennedy, which is... You would assume Kennedy would be what Mort wanted. People would come to him after the show and when he was knocking Kennedy and they'd say, well, isn't this what you wanted? And he would say, you didn't have to do it for me. No, when he started, he had... He was looking at two terms of Eisenhower and Nixon. And so he cut his teeth on Nixon, especially. And he had a nice long run with those guys. And he participated unofficially in the Kennedy campaign, although he was really a Stevenson man. And so the run-up to the election was really a time of tremendous excitement, not only in show business, but in the country as a whole. I mean, I remember it because I was a kid back then, that the real excitement of having a man in the White House or the prospect of having a guy in the White House who was not only as charismatic as Kennedy was, and boy was he charismatic, but also someone who had actually been born in the 20th century. I mean, Kennedy was the same age as my father. And all those World War II vets at the time were in the early 40s. And they had the world by the tail. And I have to say that I can equate it in some ways to when the Obamas went into office, because there again, you had a great charismatic leader, not only that, but a really photogenic family, good, solid. Now we've learned that there were cracks in the facade with Kennedy, but there was a lot of that same feeling, I thought. Also, there was a lot of dissension about Kennedy, especially in the South. He was reviled. But I think that in that time, there were a lot of hopeful people in the world, and they didn't want to hear about Kennedy getting knocked. But Mort's attitude was really that he considered anyone who was in power to be a target. Looking back, because he ended up writing jokes for Kennedy. Yeah, that's correct. Looking back, he got a little close to Jack Kennedy. Yeah, I'd say so. Was that a mistake? I think he fell under that particular... You know what may have happened ultimately, I think, is that because he had fallen under Kennedy's spell in a way that when Kennedy did become president, remember what a close election that was, I think that he, in a sense, was determined to go all out against Kennedy just to show that he hadn't been compromised. So I do think that that had something to do with it. Mort had a lot to work with Kennedy. I mean, Kennedy's brother was the Attorney General, remember at that time, and Robert F. Kennedy. And Mort came up with a line, little brother is watching for that. There were a lot of things going on that Mort could grab on to. The Cold War was a big one, for instance. But I think that there was a period of time when people were sensitive to any kind of fund that got made of the Kennedy family. And Mort, that was his stock and trade. So yeah, it was tough for him for a while. And then when... Well, we'll get to that. But as I understand from your book, Jack Kennedy was okay with Mort's barbs. It was the Praetorian guard that was protecting him. He was told that by some insiders. And that's easy to believe that people assumed that the President wanted to be protected when really he perhaps did not want to be, or he didn't consider Mort to be a serious danger, though it was kind of a compliment to Mort that some people did, I think that... Did Mort saw, going back to the early 50s, did he curse? Did he talk blue? He talked about women. He talked about relationships. How vulgar did Mort ever... He was... Mort was a real puritan. He didn't smoke. He didn't drink. And he didn't work blue on stage. He won't to this day. Right. So he was kind of the anti-Lennie in terms of Lenny Bruce and what Lenny Bruce was up to. But no, Mort was a straight arrow in comparison. When you say he didn't drink at all? Or he would go out and have an occasion? No, not really. He never had a taste for the stuff. He was asked one time in a playboy interview if he ever drank. He said only with chicks, which may have been the case. But the wives, for instance, knew he was a safe guy for their husbands to go out with because Paul Newman was a heavy drinker. And Mort was usually along with Newman because he would drink orange juice or something and Newman could get as blasted as he wanted to. And he knew that Joanne Woodward knew that Newman was safe when he was in Mort's company. Well, Mort was the designated driver and it seems to me... In a way... Driving was Mort's vice. Cars were his indulgence. In the early 50s when he was starting, was it really the height of McCarthyism? I don't have an almanac in front of me, but it seems to me by 1954 McCarthy had already been exposed by Edward R. Murrow? No, Murrow did it in early 54, like the spring of 54. I'll see it now initially. But Mort started in December of 53 with McCarthy jokes and that was not considered cool at that time. The only guy that poked fun at McCarthy in a very, very, very mild way was Bob Hope. His quips came across as friendly in comparison. But Mort was developing the philosophy of savagery with these targets. He was not going to give any slack to any of these people and McCarthy was right through the top of the list. And he and Banducci both told stories of how the plungry eye was a basement place, a cellar place, and people would come along toward the end of the evening. They shoved garbage cans down the staircase and hollered communists, that sort of thing. And they'd have to fight their way out of the club at night because of that. Do you think he played against type? Mort was a college educated Jew and people automatically assumed this is when the Rosenbergs were getting electrocuted and you ask most of middle America, they would think that all communists were Jewish. Didn't he play against type in that you go and listen to him in the early 50s while he was making jokes about McCarthy, Nixon and Eisenhower. It was brilliant. It was funny. It was more dint, more dint, but not vicious, not over the top, mostly sly and patriotic. Right? It wasn't, was he ever arrested? No, right? He was never arrested. No, no, no, he didn't push the balance of decency the way Lenny Bruce did. Lenny did things purposely to get himself arrested, I think. I think that was part of his persona and self-image, let's say. No, Mort never got arrested, but there were two sides to Mort. There was the political side, the thinker, if you will, and the other side was the guy who was living the Playboy philosophy a lot of ways. You don't see him with a martini in his hand or a cigarette, but he was driving the fastest of cars and he was dating the most famous and beautiful actresses, and he certainly loved the music. There was a lot there that coincided with what Playboy was putting forth to its readership as being the kind of guy you wanted to aspire to be. I think that Mort's riffs on lifestyle fit right in in terms of of what you saw as the disillusionment of the post-World War II set. These guys that went to college like Mort did on the GI Bill and achieved a level of financial and personal security, and were wondering at that point what was left or what there was to it all. The point of it all would be to be able to buy a better brand of gin and live in a bigger house, that sort of thing. What did it all add up to? Mort's commentary at that time really kind of pointed to that. You're getting into the area of the man with the gray flannel suit, which is a big bestseller in the mid-50s. The idea, the questioning as to what America was putting forth as the ideal and was it intellectually vacuous? Were there things that one should be considering that were not encouraged at that time? I think that Mort was the guy that gave voice to that rebellious nature in people, that questioning nature in people. A revolutionary so much as he was. He played at middle class aspirational when it came, as you said, to women, to toys, to things. And then the disillusionment, as you said, that comes from pursuing empty things like beautiful women and fancy cars. So that kind of played into the 50s and was capital. So he was the quintessential playboy role model in a lot of ways and at the same time he was biting that particular hand as it was feeding him. Right. Yeah, very coy with his politics until this day. You cannot pigeonhole them. Hey, go ahead. I was going to wrap it up and invite you back next week because I could talk about Mort Sol forever. Well, can we do this again? Thank you. Sure. I can talk about Mort. I had him on my show in 2013 for the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. There's so much to talk to him about other than the Kennedy assassination. Very quickly before you go, this is just a personal question. Mark Russell, how's he doing? Very well, as far as I know. Had a nice chat with him. He gave us a very nice comment for the book when he read it. And he and his wife, Ali, live in Washington to this day. And as far as I know, everything's copacetic with him. Good. Good. Well, this has been a thrill. Thank you. You were very generous with your time. Again, thank you for the book. James Curtis is the author of Last Man Standing, Mort Sol and the Birth of Modern Comedy. You're also the author of W.C. Fields, a biography, which I'm going to go get on my Kindle after we hang up. And a lot of other books, Spencer Tracy, a biography, James Whale, a new world of gods and monsters. And Between Flops and Acclaimed Biography of Writer-Director Preston Sturges. I know his son, Preston Sturges. I met him through Jeff Garland. Very sweet. Preston or Tom Sturges? Preston? Preston, the son. Preston. Okay. Yeah. He used to live next door to my friend Jeff Garland. Well, James Curtis, thank you so much. I will call you next week. And if you can slum it for another hour with me to talk about Mort, nothing would thrill me more. So why would you do it? And I appreciate your interest. Well, the book is great. And I'm obsessed with Mort Sol. He influenced an entire century of comedians. I thought I knew everything about him. No book could sat my curiosity about Mort. What you did do was I am now falling asleep at night listening to Mort Sol. And you have reinvigorated my appreciation for the father of modern stand-up comedy. So thank you for that, James Curtis. Your book is Last Man Standing, Mort Sol and the Birth of Modern Comedy. I hope to talk to you next week, sir. Thank you, David. Stay on the line for one second.