George Schlatter was working in the mailroom at a talent agency when he first met Frank Sinatra. It was 1948 and Schlatter was so fresh-faced that Sinatra told him, “I have ties older than you.”
Later on, as greeter and manager at the famed Sunset Strip nightclub Ciro’s and a show producer at the Hotel Last Frontier and Silver Slipper in Las Vegas in the ‘50s, Schlatter rubbed shoulders with scores of famous folk, from actress Lucille Ball and celebrity stripper Lili St. Cyr to gangster Mickey Cohen and the bawdy comedienne Mae West.
He booked Ronald Reagan into a Vegas casino lounge as the straight man to a troupe of five chimpanzees — which did not go well. He helped Sammy Davis Jr. buy the former Hollywood home of Judy Garland to circumvent the discrimination that Black Americans, even superstars, faced. He produced a 1962 TV variety series for Garland, too.
But if there’s one thing that most people know about George Schlatter it’s that he created “Laugh-In,” the colorful, hip comedy series that brought the vibrancy and youthful energy of the ‘60s into millions of homes each week. The program looms large in his new memoir, “Still Laughing: A Life in Comedy from the Creator of ‘Laugh-In.”
George Schlatter photographed in 2018.
(Chris Pizzello / Chris Pizzello/invision/ap)
That show, which ran from 1968 to 1973, introduced the world to breakout stars such as Lily Tomlin and Goldie Hawn — Tomlin wrote the memoir’s foreword and Hawn the afterword — as well as a cast of talented, funny performers that included Ruth Buzzi, Jo Anne Worley, Arte Johnson and Henry Gibson.
“It was an adventure,” Schlatter says in a recent call from his Los Angeles office where, at 94, he still goes each day. “The interesting thing is what’s on the air today, I don’t see any color.
“I mean, ‘Laugh-In’ was a montage, a blast of color and action,” he says. “Colorful costumes, colorful people, colorful scenery, colorful music.
“And today it seems to really be darker — let’s call it less light — and it doesn’t seem to me that anybody’s having as much fun as we had.”
In the book, Schlatter makes the claim that ‘Laugh-In’ holds the little-known record of having been the first to broadcast a woman’s nipple on prime-time television. The event occurred after the makeup artists on the pilot got a little bit carried away working on the “body credits” — show credits painted on the skin of Hawn and Judy Carne — and painted the petals of a daisy on Carne’s bare breast.
Instead of cutting that bit, Schlatter just made the edit faster, figuring no one would be able to tell exactly what it was they were seeing.
“We eventually got it down to about two frames,” he says. “The network would look and say, ‘What is that?’ I’d say, ‘I don’t know.’ Finally, when you could stop-frame video they figured out it was a nipple, but by that time it was too late. We had a 50 (ratings)] share and nobody could tell me anything, you know?
“Maybe it’s just my creeping senility but I don’t see anybody today having that much fun,” Schlatter says. “We got away with a lot. We pushed the boundaries a lot. And it was so fast that you weren’t aware of it until the next day.”
Stories to tell
“Laugh-In” might have been the most fun but Schlatter is proudest of his marriage of 67 years to wife, Jolene, and the two daughters they raised. (The dedication in August of the George and Jolene Brand Schlatter Theater at the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, N.Y might be his second-proudest accomplishment.)
He says he decided to write the book because friends and acquaintances kept telling him how wonderful his stories were.
“I talk to people, they say, ‘Oh, tell me about it this, tell me about that,’” Schlatter says. “So I started in the office and it was just talk, talk, talk. We then gave that to Jon Macks.”
Macks organized the stories into episodes. He also helped Schlatter avoid going where he might not ought to.
“I said, “Try to get rid of everything that’s gonna get me in trouble,’” Schlatter says. “The original dictation could have gotten me in trouble because I was telling stories that probably were best left untold.”
Of course, Schlatter’s idea of where to draw that line leaves plenty of eyebrow-raising tales in the book. Like the one about how he helped launder money for mobster Mickey Cohen. Or a chapter titled “Stories I Refuse to Tell,” which goes right ahead and spills laugh-out-loud-worthy anecdotes about stars such as Richard Pryor, Bette Davis, Groucho Marx, and Peggy Lee.
“I didn’t miss out on much,” Schlatter says of his long career in show business.
“I mean, going back to when I was a greeter at Ciro’s, and they wrote a story saying that I had been a bouncer. And Jolene didn’t want to hear that. So I released the story that I had been an ‘executive in charge of emergency departures,’ ” he says. “She said it still sounds like a bouncer. There was a lot of adventure in that, and it was a different time.”
George Schlatter, left, poses with actress Lily Tomlin at “Still Laugh In: A Toast to George Schlatter” in Hollywood in 2013.
(Chris Pizzello / Chris Pizzello/invision/ap)
Nightlife and love
A few nights before our call, Schlatter watched a TV special on Chasen’s, the West Hollywood restaurant that from 1936 to 1995 had been one of the most star-studded spots in town. If you want to know what Ciro’s and the Sunset Strip were like in the ‘50s, watch that, he says.
“The stars arrived and they were dressed and they were having a good time,” he says. “The front room was full of all these interesting people. Today, there’s no sense of community like there was then. But every one of those people who came in there was interesting for different reasons.
“And I was in the midst of it,” Schlatter says. “I was very, very young, and I knew them all. And while I was working at Ciro’s I began booking the shows at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, which exposed me to another level of the culture, or subculture, if you will. I didn’t put a lot of that in the book, but it was certainly a large part of my early adventures.”
It was at Ciro’s that he met his future wife, Jolene Brand, who was a dancer in the revue at the nightclub in addition to her acting career on TV shows such as “Gunsmoke,” “Zorro” and “The Ernie Kovacs Show.”
“All the guys came around Jolene,” Schlatter says. “I said, ‘Yeah, you can talk to her, but be careful, she’s going with a really ugly guy.’ Jolene’s like, ‘I don’t understand it, all these guys are talking to me. Nobody ever asks me out.’ I said, ‘I’ll ask you out.’
“When we announced we were getting married, these guys all came to me and said, ‘You son of a — , you were the ugly guy!’” he says, laughing. “That’s right, I’m the ugly guy. We’re married 67 years.”
Frank and Judy and laughter
Sinatra shows up throughout the book, from Schlatter’s first encounter when he had just been hired by the MCA music talent agency to his farewell to Ol’ Blue Eyes as a eulogist at his funeral 50 years later.
“He came in to sign his contract and I was there in my gray suit and argyle socks and florid tie,” Schlatter says. “Everybody else was wearing MCA black and I must have looked like a cartoon. But as a result, I kind of got to know Frank, and over a period of years that relationship grew and it became a series of adventures and misadventures.
“I just enjoyed it. I had more fun. He was dangerous, though, you know, you couldn’t fool around with Sinatra. The only way Frank and I got along, I could make him laugh. It interrupted that tension.
“There were colorful people, but I don’t think anybody ever had the majesty, the magic, the energy, the volatility of Frank Sinatra,” Schlatter says. “He could do something crazy and then go out on stage and sing a ballad and you forgave him everything.”
Judy Garland was almost as volatile to work with as Sinatra was to hang out with, he says. Again, making her laugh was the key to a good relationship during the time he produced her 1962 variety show.
“It was very successful,” Schlatter says of the five shows he made with Garland in six weeks before the network fired him, which he says was because the episodes seemed more like stand-alone specials than the traditional variety show he’d done with Dinah Shore.
“Judy isn’t Dinah. Judy was more of an event,” he said. “Anyhow, my adventures with Sinatra, my adventures with Judy, up to my adventures with Goldie and Lily, it’s been a very colorful journey we’ve been on,” he says. “All of my survival as a result of being able to laugh and being able to make the stars laugh. They are all vulnerable and laughter is the best lubricant you can have.”
Book jacket for “Still Laughing: a Life in Comedy: From the Creator of Laugh-In” by George Schlatter.
(Courtesy photo)
“Still Laughing: A Life in Comedy from the Creator of ‘Laugh-In” by George Schlatter (Unnamed Press, 2023; 320 pages)
Larsen writes for the Southern California News Group.