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Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger
LOVE ETC.
Coming out: Ricky Martin, who
This ‘gig’ was no
laughing matter
CNN
That was news to Hughley’s promoter. Indeed, when the promoter, Tracy
T
Wiggs, checked with the star himself — actually in town for a night of stand-up comedy at the Equestrian Center in Upper Marlboro — it turned out he didn’t even know about it, says Hughley’s lawyer. And both were baffled by the fliers they found online, promising that the star of “The Original Kings of Comedy” and “The Hughleys” would headline the waterfront nightspot’s “Free Fall Friday” — bottle service and VIP access available. Hughley filed a $1.1 million lawsuit
onMonday against Zanzibar in Prince George’s County Circuit Court, alleging fraud, invasion of privacy and
he radio ads said D.L. Hughley was going to appear at D.C.’s Zanzibar nightclub last Friday.
misappropriation of his name and likeness. A rep for Zanzibar said she was exploring the matter and did not offer a comment by deadline. But Hughley’s lawyer alleges that the club refused his requests to cease promoting his appearance — an appearance the comedian insists he never agreed to make. Even when they’re legit, celebrity
“hosting” gigs tend to be somewhat phantom affairs: Athletes and entertainers are booked to do little more than show up, then vanish into a private room, leaving just a cloud of stardust in their wake. Many clubgoers have low expectations: At a
much-hyped Jamie Foxx appearance
at Love nightclub in 2007, patrons partied on happily even when the superstar called in sick. But Hughley is taking this one
D.L. Hughley is suing Zanzibar for promoting an appearance that he says he knew nothing about.
seriously. “People called Tracy, saying, ‘Why’d your boy fake on us? We went to the club, he wasn’t there,’ ” said Hughley’s Bowie-based attorney Jimmy A. Bell. “This is what D.L. said to me: ‘I don’t ever want this to happen to me again.’ ”
MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS
Martin: “Blessed to be who I am.”
HEY ISN’T THAT . . . ?
Jon Bon Jovi and family
celebrating his son’s 6th birthday at Buck’s Fishing & Camping restaurant on Sunday. The rocker (vest and leather jacket with inlaid leather red eagle) was in town for Monday’s concert at Verizon Center. His lead guitarist, Richie Sambora (wearing all black), showed up at the National Portrait Gallery onMonday; spent most of his time in the Civil War and America’s Presidents exhibits.
James Gandolfini and
friends dining at Zola on Friday night. The “Sopranos” star (jacket, dark shirt, jeans) stopped in D.C. before a USO trip to the Persian Gulf with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman
Adm. Mike Mullen.
Bon Jovi had a birthday treat in store for his 6-year-old.
BRYAN BEDDER/GETTY IMAGES
announced he’s gay onMonday. “I am proud to say that I am a fortunate homosexual man. I am very blessed to be who I am,” he said in a statement on his Web site. The Latin pop star and adoptive father of two said he decided to write his memoirs a few months ago, a project that freed him “from things I was carrying within me for a long time.” Martin said he wasn’t sure how the news would affect his career: “It doesn’t matter. . . . The word ‘happiness’ takes on a new meaning for me as of today.”
TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2010
THIS JUST IN
Just a little in-flight
“He’s in this horrible situation
where he’s got to be nice.”
— Donald Trump on Sunday night’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” assessing why Rod Blagojevich has thus far been such a weakling reality-TV contestant.
Trump explained to Blago’s C-list co-stars (Bret Michaels, Darryl Strawberry, etc.) that the ex-Illinois guv is awaiting trial on federal corruption charges, and “one of your fans might be sitting on a jury.”
entertainment: On the trip back from Mexico last week,
Hillary Clinton screened for
her high-powered traveling
companions (Janet Napolitano, Dennis Blair,
etc.) an advance copy of the much-buzzed-about “Countdown to Zero,” a new documentary (from “An Inconvenient
Truth” producer Lawrence Bender)
Kevin Spacey
about the possibility of the world ending in nuclear holocaust. A thumbs-up, we’re told. Another long-awaited film — “Casino Jack,” in which
Kevin Spacey plays disgraced
lobbyist Jack Abramoff — has found a distributor, Metropolitan Inc., which announced Monday that it will
release the movie in theaters this fall, Variety reports.
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‘Kukla, Fran and Ollie’: When TV was young, a show that drew everyone close
H
ow painful to see “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” consigned to somebody’s slapped-together Internet list of
“Forgotten TV Shows.” Forgotten? Not by untold thousands for whom the adventures of Kukla, Fran and Ollie were once as integral to a day as eating breakfast, going to school or teasing your sister. For some boomers, “K, F and O” may
have been the first television show they ever really loved — not some prefabricated folly to be lumped in with “Holmes and Yo-Yo” or “Baggy Pants and the Nit-Wits” or others in the ranks of the forgotten. To help keep it remembered, fans of the show and colleagues of its creator, the gifted Burr Tillstrom, have reissued five episodes from a latter-day revival and packaged them in a five-disc 60th anniversary commemorative-edition DVD set. Faithfully enough, these episodes are in color, unlike most of the clips available on YouTube and other sites; the Kuklapolitans were on one of the first regularly scheduled color shows, mainly because they appeared on NBC, which was owned by RCA, which originally made all the color sets sold in this country. Technically, “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” was a kids’ show, but adults watched almost religiously — and we’re talking adult adults, celebrated adults — including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai E. Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The famous actress Tallulah Bankhead was such a fan that when Fran Allison, the human member of the cast, got sick, Bankhead came in and replaced her for the two weeks she was incapacitated. There doesn’t seem to be any old kinescopes or films or videotapes of that momentous oddity lying around, and in fact, not much of “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” still exists, considering it aired five days a week on NBC for the first 10 years of television, 1947-’57. You won’t find any surviving scripts, either, because there weren’t any in the first place. Tillstrom, who dreamed up the show and worked all the puppets, ad-libbed every performance.
Allison, a former schoolteacher who’d
achieved some fame as a singer and as wacky Aunt Fanny on “Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club” (the only radio show yours truly truly remembers), followed cues and suggestions she got from the puppets, only she never related to them as puppets. They were her friends, and ours — beamed through the air as visions of light, apparitions on the family’s 14- or 21-inch console TV set. Those early sets and that early
television brought the family together —
Like this: “Doo-doo-DOO-doo-doo-doo.” Okay, it sounds too too precious. Even
advertising for the show would advise viewers to watch it more than once in order to readjust one’s perceptions appropriately. But once hooked, you were theirs for life. TV critic Harriet van Horne announced that she was moving dinner at home to 7:30, a half-hour later than it had been, so she would never miss “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” at 7. The accolades were extravagant, and remained so for years. Tillstrom continued to work with his puppets after the show was canceled, returning in such vehicles as a “CBS Children’s Film Festival” on Saturday afternoons. In the ’60s, he created eloquent hand ballets for NBC’s satirical show “That Was the Week That Was,” one of them a hands-only (and of course hands-on) interpretation of two people meeting at the Berlin Wall and being forced to part. The new DVD’s are available from
EML LIBRARY PARTNERSHIP LTD.
THE GOOD OLD DAYS: Kukla, from left, Ollie and Fran reflected the best part of family TV from 1947-’57.
TOM SHALES
On TV
literally close together; because the picture was so small, the family had to scrunch together near the set for everyone to see it. “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” aired weekdays, live from neither New York nor Los Angeles but Chicago, in those days poised to become a major television production center. Poise is one thing; the dream never quite came true, and as the ’50s ended, television migrated from New York to L.A., flying right over Chicago as if it didn’t exist. (Years later, an arrogant network
executive, identity unknown, achieved anonymous infamy when he haughtily referred to viewers in the Midwest as “the people we fly over,” which helps explain how television got the way it got). The Chicago School, which original
“Today” show host Dave Garroway also typified, was a gentler and kinder television but also as cool as jazz and very independent-minded. It was mostly real-time television, attuned to the rhythms not of movies or radio but of the real world. “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” occurred in real time and was a benign
and bewitching example of pure television. It was perhaps more similar to a conference call than to the typical TV show of then or now. We couldn’t actually participate in the call, of course, but the degree of intimacy and bonhomie achieved by the puppets and Allison’s interlocutions was a charismatic marvel: There is nothing like it now, but there was nothing like it then, either — other puppets, sure, but none with the same sweet status and homey appeal. Kukla, the leader of the pack — his name taken from the Russian word for “doll” — was a cherubic but savvy chap with a down-to-earth outlook and a
touch of sophisticated skepticism. His arched eyebrows and look of alarm led a brilliant Style writer of the ’90s to declare that then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher was a dead ringer for him. She was right. Oliver J. Dragon was the naughty-boy rebel of the company, a one-toothed reptile with a leopard-skin body, for some reason, and a pair of soulful, doleful, heavily lashed eyes. There were other supporting players, too, chief among them Buelah Witch (named for one of the original producers, Beulah Zachary), opera singer Madame Ophelia Oglepuss, Southern windbag Col. Crackey, and Cecil Bill, who talked in a language that only Kukla could decipher.
DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau
KuklaFranandOllie.com. It’s not possible to re-create the circumstances of those original viewings so many unforgiving years ago, but the Kuklapolitans on home video do at least plunk responsive chords.
And that may be as far as it is advisable to go. A character who dies in the third act of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” is allowed to leave the grave, return to consciousness and live any one day of her life over again, exactly as it was. She tries, but the happiness and poignancy overwhelm her. It is, she says, “too wonderful” to bear. So it is that some of us keep trying, full knowing we must never succeed.
shalest@washpost.com
ONLINE DISCUSSION Tom Shales talks about “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,”
Christiane Amanpour’s move to ABC and more at noon ET at washingtonpost.com/style.
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