Quotes

[on Jack Carter] Jack Carter does not make a lot of friends. He had a series and so forth but he was always so pissed off that he stepped on his own dick, all the time.

[on Red Skelton] Red Skelton had that phony God bullshit with, "God Bless," y'know. Then you realize that his dress rehearsal was the filthiest event in town. They did the dirtiest dress rehearsal around and then he would go on and do this, "God Bless" and the country and the flag and all this shit and he was a dirty old man! But he was tough. Red was tough. I did his last television show. Jackie Gleason was tough, too. First show I ever did with Gleason we show up with the script. And I had heard all of the stories about him. He sits there with a giant hangover and he looks over the script and says, "This is shit!" He threw the script up in the air and pages went all over the room. He says, "Work on this. It's shit." Everyone was sitting there saying, "Ah, holy shit, how do we even put this all back together?" He walked out and I pulled another script out. I said, "I knew what that fuck was going to do. Here's the script." So the next day he looked at it and said, "That's a lot better."

I talk to [Red Skelton]'s wife all the time. He was not a nice man, you know? Nor was [Jackie Gleason] a nice man. [Frank Sinatra] loved Gleason. They would hang out a lot together. Red Buttons was murder on writers. So was Bob Hope. Jack Benny was not. At one point [he] had two writers that were in their mid-60s, the last ones to join his staff. Benny said, "Well, let the new kids do this." They were 60 years old!