Word: gomer
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Mama knew best. By talking natural-like, Nabors, as the star of CBS's Gomer Pyle - U.S.M.C., has grown successively more popular in four seasons, and last week his show finished third, just behind The Lucy Show and Bonanza in the ratings sweepstake. He croons, too, in a big, booming baritone that, on his five bestselling albums, sounds vaguely like, well, a fellow hollering down a drainpipe. On the state-fair cir cuit, he harvests $25,000 for an appearance in which he tells a few jokes ("The tornado was so bad a hen laid the same egg twice...
Nervous Cat. Nabors is both a representative and a caricature of the noble American rustic. As Gomer, a leatherneck Pfc, he wears a gee-whiz expression, spouts homilies out of a lopsided mouth and lopes around uncertainly like a plowboy stepping through a field of cow dung. He is a walking disaster area. When his drill sergeant chastises him for "taking the taxpayer's money without putting in a day's work," the hapless recruit returns part of his paycheck-and fouls up the bookkeeping system of the entire Marine Corps. Yet in the end, Gomer...
Nabors, who offstage is only slightly less gentle than Gomer, went to Los Angeles in 1958 not to feed his ambition but to foil his asthma. He worked as an apprentice film cutter, sang on amateur nights at a club called The Horn. TV's Andy Griffith dropped by one night, liked his country-bumpkin patter between songs and offered him a walk-on role in his series. Nabors says he was as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, but Griffith assured him that "all I had to do was act like...
...film, The Great Escape-CBS had shrewdly cut the 170-minute feature into two installments, and played them on successive nights. The rest of the leaders, in order: Bonanza (NBC), 20th Century-Fox's What a Way to Go! with Shirley MacLaine (NBC), Family Affair (CBS), Gomer Pyle (CBS), Paramount's Fun in Acapulco with Elvis Presley (NBC). No. 81 and last: Good Company (ABC), F. Lee Bailey's impression of the old Person-to-Person show...
...look of Nebraska citybillies, or malt-shop cowboys. Even when they are mildly suggestive, they seem as harmless as two choirboys sneaking a smoke behind the organ. Their style might be described as hokey hip, wholesome enough to trade hayseed one-liners with Guest Jim Nabors (TV's Gomer Pyle), upbeat enough to book such shaggy rock groups as the Jefferson Airplane...