"Oh it has been so long since we've seen each other over the orthicon tube." - Ernie Kovacs as Percy Dovetonsils Kovacs created the first kaleidoscopic images on live television with a large metal can with two mirrors inside of it, taped to the lens of a television camera. Ernie Kovacs (1919 - 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer. His visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs and individuals for years after his death, including Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television and Uncle Floyd among others. Chevy Chase thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live. Some of Kovacs's unusual behaviors included having pet marmosets and wrestling a jaguar on his live Philadelphia television show. When working at WABC (AM) as a morning-drive radio announcer and doing a mid-morning television series for NBC, Kovacs claimed to dislike eating breakfast alone while his wife, Edie Adams, was sleeping after her Broadway performances. His solution was to hire a taxi driver to come into their apartment with his own key and make breakfast for them both, then take Kovacs to the WABC studios. While Kovacs and Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series in 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal car accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist." Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992. Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaujfalu, Hungary (now known as Turnianska Nova Ves, Slovakia). Andrew was 16 years old when he arrived at Ellis Island on February 8th, 1906. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger. Ernest Edward Kovacs was born in Trenton, New Jersey on January 23rd, 1919. Originally it was a family of modest means, but at the age of 10 his father, a former Trenton Police Department foot patrolman, became a prosperous "beverage dealer" during Prohibition. Andrew Kovacs was very successfull at his new job and moved his wife Mary, son Ernest, and Ernie's older half-brother Tom into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton. Ernie was afforded the sudden luxury of attending Miss Bowen' 5 Private elementary school in Trenton where he developed an early interest in performing, backed by a strong-willed mother who would journey to Philadelphia to have a professional costumer outfit him for two elementary-school plays. When the Kovacs family's bubble of prosperity burst with the failure of his father's business in 1935, Kovacs, who had skipped two grades in private school, entered public high school as a bright but indifferent junior and in the next year managed to fail history, Latin, algebra and chemistry. Meanwhile, he had acquired a passable baritone voice and an abiding interest in theater, joining the high school chorus production of "H.M.S. Pinafore." Held back from graduating with his class in 1936, he returned to school until 1937 and sang in the chorus of "The Pirates of Penzance," which resulted in a scholarship for him with the John Drew Memorial Theater in Easthampton, Long Island. There he experienced a full summer of walk-ons, supporting roles and second leads in "Green Grow the Lilacs," "Stage Door," "The Frogs" and "Arms and The Man." It was also during this period that he learned to play poker, which was to become a lifelong habit. Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a $4-a-week fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City where he lived and studied in near-poverty for two years. During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later. A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Like any aspiring actor, Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. To earn money he returned to Trenton to perform in local dramatic and musical productions, then to Easthampton and to Brattleboro, Vt. to perform in summer stock. During his second year at the Academy, his health began to fail, and while in Vermont in the summer of 1939 he collapsed; diagnosis: pleurisy and pneumonia. A mix up in medical records put him in the tuberculosis ward. Kovacs spent the next year in a hospital on Welfare Island, in New York's East River. In 1940 his drama coach arranged to have him transferred to a sanatorium in Brown's Mills, New Jersey. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR, and sharpened his comedic talents, entertaining both doctors, nurses and patients with his antics. He also ran a poker game in the hospital kitchen to help pass the time. One day in the early summer of 1941 he got up, dressed and walked away from the hospital. He was never sure whether he had had tuberculosis or not. By this time his parents had separated, and Kovacs returned to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. Soon after he returned home the war broke out but, 22 year old Ernie was unable to enlist because his illness had damaged his lungs. He found whatever work he could including working as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit. Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was in 1941 for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He started off doing a few minutes of announcing on air, then began hosting a late-night disc-jockey show, and from 1941 to 1950 had worked his way up to director of special events with his own sound truck and a $40-a-week salary. Over the years he would become famous in the Trenton area for his stunts and off-beat, anything-goes style of comedy. He did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. During this period he also hosted an afternoon celebrity-interview show called "Talk of the Town," where he came into contact with many show personalities who played the Trenton Armory or various local theaters which sometimes served as staging areas for Broadway. He also wrote a celebrity-gossip-entertainment column called "Kovacs Unlimited" for The Trentonian, a weekly newspaper that turned daily in 1946, and became master of ceremonies for Thursday night wrestling matches at the Armory, while managing to squeeze in some acting in local theater in his spare time. Arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition wearing a barrel and shorts got Kovacs his first television job in January 1950. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials. Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7-9 am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and using a camera trick, tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man popped up, said a few words in Chinese, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3. The viewers responded filling the station's lobby. A Kovacs character no one ever saw inspired even more gifts. He was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties. The password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14th, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year. During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4th, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28th, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready, the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954. At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers' activity beyond the boundaries of the show set, including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Mischievous crew members substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show. Once stagehands substituted straight gin for the fake martini during a Percy Dovetonsils sketch. Kovacs swallows the booze and without breaking character, clues the audience in on the practical joke and then milks it for the rest of the segment. Addressing the director offscreen, Percy asks, "Did I read the poem or didn't I?" A born improviser, Kovacs understood the value of impulse. The character Percy Dovetonsils, the lisping poet laureate, was created instantaneously when someone handed Kovacs a pair of gag glasses with coke-bottle eyes pasted behind the lenses. Thrust into the pressure cooker of a live broadcast, he could be funnier when things went wrong. It was live TV and things went wrong and it wasn't always a practical joke. Cameras gone astray, miscues and sets falling down were just part of the fun. Kovacs was even knocked unconscious once when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it. Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle. He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs later repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look. One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head. Kovacs also developed such routines as a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio. It skit was introduced during during a 10-week summer series in 1955. At the start of every show for the first four weeks Kovacs would promote the first prime-time appearance of the "World Famous Nairobi Trio." At the end of each hour, Ernie would profoundly apologize for the absence of the group, declaring they had been "held up by customs agents" or had "fallen unexpectedly ill" or "had become lost in heavy traffic," but he assured viewers that "The Nairobi Trio" would positively be on the next program. Finally, after a spectacularly prolonged buildup, there they were, three derby-hatted apes miming as they played mechanically and rhythmically to the strains of Robert Maxwell’s "Solfeggio." AV CLUB FEATURETTE DEPARTMENT The Nairobi Trio was a comedy skit that Ernie Kovacs performed many times for his TV shows. The skit was a live-action version of a child's animatronic wind-up music box. Always experimental, Kovacs combined several existing musical and comic concepts with impeccable timing for a unique and memorable result. The middle gorilla was always played by Kovacs with a cigar and conducted the musicians with either a baton or a banana. To the left stood a gorilla holding two oversized timpani mallets. This character was played by different actors including Jack Lemmon and Frank Sinatra. Seated at a piano was a female simian who robotically thumped her hands up and down on the keys. This part was variously played by Barbara Loden, Jolene Brand, and Kovacs's wife, Edie Adams. BUY ERNIE KOVACS DVD'S SHOP MORE ERNIE KOVACS STUFF Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor (below). it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines. Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage. Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-running (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout, and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8th, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons their instruments for a safe cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio" but speaking, two of the three would also appear in an "Outer Space" sketch. Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr.Question Man character in his radio monologues. He was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors. Nowadays, parodying TV shows and commercials may seem painfully trite, but when Kovacs did it, TV as a nationwide phenomenon was only a few years old. Kovacs made fun of cooking shows, game shows, kids' shows and late-night horror movie hosts (his Uncle Gruesome is the direct ancestor of SCTV's howling Count Floyd). The idea of lampooning commercials was even more subversive because, at that point, real commercials were still routinely integrated into programming, and in fact were often performed live by the hosts, including Kovacs. His actual commercials could be as zany as his fake ones, which only blurred the line further. The first incanation of The Ernie Kovacs was on CBS in 1952. It was his first prime time show. Unfortunately he was up against Mr Television Milton Berle and was cancelled after three months. After leaving CBS for the new Dupont Network in 1954 The Ernie Kovacs show returned in a late night time slot, this time opposite Steve Allen. Three to Get Ready (Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952) It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series) Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951) The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks) Gamble on Love (game show 1954 - DuMont Network) Time Will Tell (game show 1954 - DuMont Network) One Minute Please (panel show 1954 - 1955 - DuMont Network) Filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show (Mon and Tues 1956–57) Take a Good Look (1959–61) Kovacs also had a brief stint as a celebrity panelist for the television series What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you - and this is just a wild guess - but are you Abraham Lincoln?", a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln brand automobiles. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the Sunday night show one week because he wanted to go out for dinner instead, his stint on the panel show was ended. Kovacs also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene, the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956 when guest-hosting the The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs's special that received the most attention. After it aired Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. It was selected by the United States as the only television program screened at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs's last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23rd, 1962. The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers. While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'." Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Laugh-In producer George Schlatter is married to actress Jolene Brand (below), who had appeared in Kovacs's comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Both Brand and Schlatter were close friends with Kovacs and his wife, Edie Adams. Brand was also known for her part in the Disney television show Zorro. She played the romantic interest for the main character played by Guy Williams. Bill Wendell was a young NBC staffer, was Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980–1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman, whose show and style of humor were greatly influenced by Kovacs. Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines. Songwriter Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio" became associated with the derby-hatted apes; 'The Nairobi Trio'. In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard the melody, he immediately knew what he wanted to do with it, creating a music-box-like trio that moved in time to the tune. Kovacs was introduced to the song in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network. Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan Garcia Esquivel to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. A perfectionist, Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday - but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson, who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations, in comic vignettes. Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Bela Bartok; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks" and from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples," the theme to his shows, as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters. For the show of May 22nd, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a version of Swan Lake, normal in it's presentation except all the dancers are in gorilla suits. He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections. Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs's experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld. While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine. Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy). There was no on-air mention of this being the final episode. It aired on April 1st, 1960 and was filmed without a live audience. The episode was titled, "Lucy Meets the Moustache" and was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple were to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4th, 1960). The plot of the episode has Ricky feeling depressed because he has not been getting any TV offers lately, so Lucy, Fred, and Ethel try to get him a job on Ernie Kovacs’ show. In 1968, Edie Adams appeared on an episode of "The Lucy Show" as an old flame of Mr. Mooney (Gale Gordon) looking to take him away from his wife. To scare her off, Lucy pretends to be "Mooney’s Other Wife". When scenes take place at the Mooney home, Mrs. Mooney is, as usual, out of town. The Mrs. Mooney character was never actually seen on camera. Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover their symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom. Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer in such movies as Operation Mad Ball (above right), Wake Me When It's Over, and Our Man in Havana (above left). While working in his first movie role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959). He garnered critical acclaim for his movie roles, such as the perennially inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle (above left) and as the cartoonishly evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane (above right), where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over (below left) and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska (below right). His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death. Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13th, 1945. With-in four years they had two children, Elizabeth (Bette) and Kip Raleigh (Kippie). In 1950 Bette walked out on the family and the marriage ended. Ernie brought his mother out from Philadelphia to help him look after this children as he fought for custody of the girls. The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. In 1953 Ernie sent the girls (then 4 and 6) for a visit with their mother. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. Keeping it a "family matter" Ernie and his father searched for the girls all over Florida themselves and hired private detectives as well. After three months the police were contacted and a nation wide search was begun. In the two years that followed Kovacs would spend 50,000 dollars on private detectives but it was a two cent postcard send by Ernie's mother that solved the case. Mary Kovacs would send out postcards with photos and descriptions of the girls throughout the south and one day someone responded. The girls were found in Florida and they were reunited with their father. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum. Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2nd, 1962, by claiming $500,000 was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30th, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Elizabeth Kovacs's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie. Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams's affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest even after the show went out of town. Adams booked a six-week European cruise which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12th, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it, Women's Lib be damned!") Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe), or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20th, 1959. Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first movie role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better, and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner. Kovacs was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles during the early morning hours of January 13th, 1962, 10 days shy of his 43rd birthday. Kovacs, who had worked for much of the evening, met his wife Edie Adams at a baby shower given by Billy Wilder for Milton Berle and his wife, who had recently adopted a newborn baby boy. The couple left the party in separate cars. After a lull in a southern California rainstorm, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards in Beverly Hills. He was thrown halfway out the passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries. A photographer managed to arrive moments later, and images of Kovacs dead body appeared in newspapers across the United States. An unlit cigar lay on the pavement, inches from his outstretched arm. Jack Lemmon, who also attended the Berle party, identified Kovacs's body at the morgue because Adams was too distraught to do so. In 1965 Ralph Nader's book, "Unsafe at Any Speed" was published. It was a time when U.S. automakers were still largely unregulated. His book accused car companies of designing vehicles with an emphasis on style and power at the expense of consumer safety. One chapter focused on handling problems with the Chevrolet Corvair, a car produced by auto giant General Motors (GM). In February 1966, Nader testified before the U.S. Congress about some of the issues in his book. Shortly after Nader’s congressional testimony, the news media reported that Nader had been followed by detectives hired by GM to spy into his personal life in an effort to discredit him. Nader sued GM for harassment and invasion of privacy and won a settlement. The publicity surrounding GM’s actions helped make "Unsafe at Any Speed" a best-seller. Nader’s public advocacy on auto-safety issues helped lead to the passage of the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which sought to reduce the rising number of injuries and deaths from road accidents by establishing federal safety standards for every American-made vehicle, including safety belts for all passengers. The design proplems applied to original unaltered Corvairs from 1962. After the problems of the Corvairs were realized by third-party manufacturers and mechanics, aftermarket parts that made the vehicle safer became rather common. By 1964, these aftermarket repairs were no longer necessary; Chevrolet implemented safer designs for all new Corvairs. But it was too late, the Corvair, which suffered from slumping sales due in part to the negative publicity from Nader’s book as well as to consumer lawsuits (the car’s suspension system was blamed for rollovers), was discontinued by GM in 1969. After attending funerals for Hollywood friends, Kovacs had expressed his wishes to Adams that any funeral services for him be kept simple. In keeping with his request, Adams made arrangements for Presbyterian services at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The active pallbearers were Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, Mervyn LeRoy, and Joe Mikolas. Kovacs's father and brother, Andrew and Tom, respectively, served as honorary pallbearers. The attendees included George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle. There was no typical Hollywood-type eulogy, but the church's pastor paid tribute to Kovacs, adding that he once summed up his life in two sentences: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since." Kovacs is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation - We all loved him." Kovacs's second daughter Kippie and her husband, Bill Lancaster (1947–1997), a screenwriter and the son of actor Burt Lancaster, are the parents of Kovacs's only grandchild. Kippie died on July 28th, 2001, at the age of 52, after a long illness and a lifetime of poor health. Kovacs's only child with Edie Adams, Mia (1959–1982, below), was just beginning a career as an actress when she was killed in a vehicle accident similar to the one that took her's father's life 20 years earlier. Kovacs, who consistently spent his money whenever possible and as soon as he made it, found himself deep in debt. By 1962, he had accrued $600,000 in gambling debts and owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result and in 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes. His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less memorable movie roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton). Some of the issues regarding Kovacs's tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs." In 1942, at age 15, Edie was the baton-twirling champion of Tenafly, New Jersey. Later she was Miss U.S. Television 1950. Edie Adams (born Edith Elizabeth Enke on April 16th, 1927) was an American comedienne, actress, singer and businesswoman. She was an Emmy Award nominee and Tony Award winner. She was born in Kingston, Pennsylvania, the only daughter of Sheldon Alonzo Enke and his wife, Ada. Ada Enke taught her daughter singing and piano, and her grandmother, a seamstress, taught her how to sew. She made her own clothing beginning in the sixth grade and Adams would later have her own designer line of clothing, called Bonham, Inc. Adams earned a vocal degree from Juilliard and then graduated from Columbia School of Drama. She studied at the Actors Studio in New York and at the Traphagen School of Fashion. Initially, Adams could not decide whether to pursue a career in fashion design or music, so she tossed a coin, and music won. In 1949-50, she appeared in the early live television show Bonnie Maid's Versatile Varieties as one of the original "Bonnie Maids" doing live commercials for the sponsor. In 1950, she won the "Miss U.S. Television" beauty contest, which led to an appearance with Milton Berle on his television show, billed as Edith Adams. One of her early appearances was on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts. She was seen by the producer of the Ernie Kovacs show Three to Get Ready (in Philadelphia), who invited her to audition. Adams had very little experience with popular music and could perform only three songs. She later stated: "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." She became part of the show in July 1951. Adams had never seen the program she was hired for. When he saw his daughter on the show, Adams's father was upset to find her role involved trying to avoid pies in the face. In one of his last interviews, Kovacs looked back on the early days, saying, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only, the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it, 'Let's get married.'" Adams began working regularly on television with Kovacs and talk show pioneer Jack Paar. After a courtship that included mariachi bands and an unexpected diamond engagement ring, Adams and Kovacs eloped and were married on September 12th, 1954. Adams starred on Broadway in Wonderful Town (1953) opposite Rosalind Russell (winning the Theatre World Award), and as Daisy Mae in Li'l Abner (1956), winning the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. She played the Fairy Godmother in Rodgers and Hammerstein's original Cinderella broadcast in 1957. Adams was to play Daisy Mae in the film version of Li'l Abner but was unable to due to the late arrival of her daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs. The part went to Leslie Parrish. Adams and Kovacs received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series in 1957. In 1960, she and Kovacs played themselves in The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour final television special on CBS. Adams made two appearances on What's My Line? (once as "Edith Adams (Mrs. Ernie Kovacs)" while her husband was on the panel; once as Edie Adams). Shortly after her Kovacs's death, Adams won a "nasty custody battle" with Kovacs's ex-wife over her stepdaughters. Another court battle began for Adams in the same year, this time with her mother-in-law, who refused to believe there were more debts than assets in her son's estate. Mary Kovacs accused her daughter-in-law of mismanaging the estate and petitioned for custody of her granddaughters. The dispute lasted for years with Adams remaining the administrator of her husband's estate and guardian of the three girls. She worked for years to pay her late husband's tax debt to the IRS. She said she concidered it her debt too because she helped him spend the money. The couple's celebrity friends planned a TV special benefit for Edie and her family, but she declined, saying, "I can take care of my own children." She spent the next year working practically non-stop. Kovacs was a noted cigar smoker, and Adams did a long-running series of TV commercials for Muriel Cigars. She remained the pitch-lady for Muriel well after Kovacs's death (despite being asthmatic), intoning in a Mae West style and sexy outfit, "Why don't you pick one up and smoke it sometime?" Another commercial for Muriel cigars, which cost ten cents, showed Adams singing, "Hey, big spender, spend a little dime with me" (based on the song "Big Spender" from the musical Sweet Charity). Adams's cigar commercials made her one of the top three recognizable television celebrities. In subsequent years, Adams made numerous television appearances, including on Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, McMillan & Wife, Police Woman, Murder, She Wrote, It's Garry Shandling's Show, Bosom Buddies and Designing Women. In addition to her TV work she was also a successful nightclub headliner. Just after Kovacs's death, his network, ABC, gave Adams a chance with her own show, Here's Edie (1962 - 1962, retitled The Edie Adams Show in its second season) lasted only 21 episodes. The show shared a time slot and alternated each week with Sid Caeser and highlighted Adams's singing and comic talents. While variety was a pretty common concept for a show of the era, the ambitious execution of the shows reveals that Adams had a creative flair for creating unique television just as her late husband had and the show would received five Emmy nominations during it's run. What sets Here's Edie apart from the majority of variety series and helps to underscore Adams's unheralded gifts, are the first eight episodes of the program, each of which is devoted to a single theme or concept such as: "Love," "New York," or "Bossa Nova". These early episodes of the series have Edie partnering with producer-director Barry Shear, who had worked on a few Ernie Kovacs projects and went on to do some Man From U.N.C.L.E. episodes. Like Kovacs, Shear likes to play with the medium of TV with quick edits, nonlinear and wordless sketches, experiments with split-screen and other in-camera effects. Edie singing a romantic ballad smash cuts to her performing a (TV G-Rated) striptease. Another performance by Edie is done as a daydream and an episode shot on location in London is full of technically challenging shots for a TV crew in 1962. Shear leaves the show shortly before the end of the first season and is replaced as director by Joe Behar, who also previously worked with Kovacs. Later, Gordon Wiles takes the reins and shows the same affinity for blackout sketches that Kovacs did. Wiles's would later work as a director on Rowan and Martin's Laugh In. The later episodes are more conventional TV variety of the day but Edie, with her impressive vocal range, sultry charm, and infectious good humor keeps the show afloat, designing the show in a way that keeps it from settling into a stale pattern. In addition Edie designed her own costumes for the show, under the name Enke (her real last name). Guest stars on Edie's show included: Hoagy Carmichael, Count Basie, Rowan and Martin, Bobby Darin, Buddy Hackett, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Soupy Sales, Terry-Thomas, Bob Hope, Alan Sues, Louis Nye, Duke Ellington, Eddie Fisher, Stan Getz, Al Hirt, Spike Jones, Johnny Mathis, Dick Shawn, Nancy Wilson, Don Rickles and Sammy Davis Jr. Her show featured one of the first times that a black man and a white woman would be seen together singing on a stage. In episode 9 Ernie's daughter Elizabeth (then 16 years old) appears on the show with her friend, Debby Dawson, as the Betty Kovacs and Debbie Dawson Duo. Betty sings lead vocals and Debbie Dawson performs harmony vocals and guitar, singing "What have they done to the Rain". The duo even had a 45 rpm single on the Sonata label. Adams played supporting roles in several films in the 1960s, including the embittered secretary of two-timing Fred MacMurray in the Oscar-winning film The Apartment (1960). She co-starred with Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Lover Come Back (1961). She was the wife of a presidential candidate (played by Cliff Robertson) in The Best Man (1964) and was reunited with Robertson for the comedy The Honey Pot (1967). In 1963 she played Sid Caesar's wife, Monica Crump in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Ernie was originally cast to play the character of Melville Crump but he died before principal shooting began. In 1963 she made Love With the Proper Stranger with Steve McQueen and Natalie Wood and Call Me Bwana with Bob Hope. She also co-starred with family friend Jack Lemmon in Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963, below left). In order to help Adams with the debts left after Ernie died Lemmon not only insisted upon hiring her for this film, but further insisted that her part be expanded considerably from the original stage play to give her more work. In 1966 she starred with Ann-Margret in Made in Paris (below right) and the The Oscar. She also played Tommy Chong's mother, Mrs. Tempest Stoner, in the first Cheech and Chong movie, "Up in Smoke," in 1978. Adams started her own businesses, Edie Adams Cosmetics, which sold door-to-door, and Edie Adams Cut 'n' Curl beauty salons, which she began in 1967. She once owned a 160-acre California almond farm and was the spokeswoman for Sun Giant nuts. Because of her 20 years of commercials for Muriel cigars (retiring in 1976) and her successful business ventures, Adams went from being mired in debt after Kovacs's fatal accident in 1962 to being a millionaire in 1989. Adams campaigned for Dwight Eisenhower's re-election during the 1956 presidential election. She was also an early advocate of civil rights, frequently lending her support to the movement at celebrity events and on her own television show during the early sixties. She insisted that her duet with Sammy Davis Jr. on her variety show "Here's Edie" be staged so that they were seated next to each other - as equals. It was common at the time for entertainers of different races and sexes to perform so that one had to be in front of or behind the other. After Kovacs's death, Adams was married two more times. In 1964, she married photographer Martin Mills. In 1972, she married trumpeter Pete Candoli, with whom she appeared in a touring production of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes. Adams's son with Mills is Josh Mills. Josh is an award winning Producer/Director and has also worked as an actor and writer. He now runs the estate of Edie Adams and Ernie Kovacs and continues the work began by his mother to keep the preserve the legacy of Kovacs' body of work. Adams died in Los Angeles, California, on October 15th, 2008, at age 81, from cancer and pneumonia. She was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills alongside her first husband Ernie, between her daughter, Mia, and her stepdaughter, Kippie. AV CLUB SLIDESHOW DEPARTMENT slideshow Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: few kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes in New York Bay. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs's insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs's IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board. If it wasn't for Adams, Kovacs' legacy would be completely forgotten according to Adams son, Josh Mills (above left), "It’s a very personal thing for me because even though Ernie wasn’t my dad, my mom for the last 50 plus years paid for storage and restoration and all the other things to make sure that Ernie’s legacy didn't go away like so many other old comics who unfortunately had their masters dumped." Mills continues, "I’m actually talking to a lot of people who are into film and television preservation, and they’re kind of talking about my mom as the patron saint of film preservation. Shortly after Ernie died, she got a call from one of his technical people that he used to work with who said that the networks were just basically taking the shows and taking the masters and using them for PSAs, or weather reports, or the news, or something like that. They didn’t want to pay the bills to actually store old tapes&ldots; So, she went to her lawyer and essentially said 'Go to all the networks, everyone that he was on&ldots; just buy it&ldots; anything that says Kovacs I’ll buy it.' People would ask her why did she did it, and she would say because, 'I just knew Ernie was doing something special, and I just didn’t want to see it go away forever.'" Kovacs' archivist, Ben Model said that there was no one to preserve the iconic comedian's work so it was quickly forgotten. The idea didn’t exist that somebody should be saving this. According to Model, Adams was thinking "20, 40 years ahead of her time" when she realized the value of preserving Kovacs' work. Adams even testified before the Library of Congress during the mid-90s about the importance of saving television. Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters. Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media. The 1984 television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this movie, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs. Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the movie. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by Jack Lemmon. During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs's shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. In 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute, 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23rd, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD. In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeath, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012. slideshow