Word: flips
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MUCH to the consternation of their pressagents, many younger performers have made reticence about their personal lives a cardinal credo. One devout follower of the Garbo tenet is Flip Wilson, the subject of this week's cover story. When he first approached the comedian, Roland Flamini, our West Coast show business correspondent, "wondered if I'd even be able to snatch some conversation in the men's room." But Wilson slowly opened up to Flamini, particularly after the two were mobbed by a bunch of elderly women fans outside NBC's studios in Burbank. "Sharing...
Nobody who watches television needs to be told who she is. She is Miss Geraldine Jones, the No. 1 character of TV's No. 1 comedian, Flip Wilson. Geraldine and her creator are like nothing that has ever appeared on a top-rated weekly variety hour. It is not simply that both are black, although that is significant enough. It is that Geraldine is pure ghetto caricature. Half the fun of her characterization comes from the clichés of the black experience that she embodies, the other half from put-ons of conventional white attitudes toward that experience...
...Like Flip Wilson, Geraldine represents a fresh twist on traditional themes. The name is borrowed from a childhood crush of Flip's, a little girl in the grimy ghetto streets of Jersey City. The personality owes something to Sapphire, the endearingly bossy housewife on the Amos 'n' Andy radio show of the 1930s and '40s. The voice is derived from the Delta screech of Butterfly McQueen, the eye-rolling, stereotyped black maid in Gone With the Wind, and of so many other Hollywood oldies. What is different and up-to-date about Geraldine, says Flip...
...that matter, none of the characters that Wilson plays take any stuff. "Like Geraldine, they're all in complete control," says Flip. "They're all alive, exciting, and in tune with whatever is in." There is, for example, the Rev. Leroy of the Church of What's Happening Now. The Rev, as Flip calls him, is a hot-gospeling preacher whose collection cup runneth over-into his pockets. There is Freddy the Playboy, the swinger with a quick eye for an ebony leg and an even quicker line of honeyed jive. There is Sonny, the White House...
...Skip and Flip...