Word: myna
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Richard Nixon? Making jokes on a TV comedy show with a bunch of weirdos? You bet, as they say, your sweet bippy. Everybody and his myna bird wants to make a cameo appearance on Rowan and Martin's manic Monday night affair. It is the smartest, freshest show on television. President Johnson, Igor Stravinsky and Jean-Paul Sartre have not yet appeared at the stage door, but if they do, they'll just have to get in line behind Marcel Marceau, Bing Crosby, Pat Boone, Dick Gregory and Jack Benny. And they will do anything once they...
...jewels, incidentally, were genuine: about $2,000,000 worth used in the course of the picture-most of them came from Bulgari in Rome. Genuine, too, was the Goforth villa, built for the occasion in Sardinia and fitted out with a real monkey, a real myna bird and real sitar-strumming Indians. But not real acting. And certainly not much real camp. About the only amusing scene in the film is the entrance of Noel Coward, a minor character known as the Witch of Capri, clad in a brown dinner jacket and riding pig-a-back on a servant...
Party Stopper. "When I first got in this business ten years ago," says Pet Shop Owner Gene Herman of Evergreen, Ore., "if you sold a monkey a month and a talking myna bird once in a while, it was way out. Now you've got to be able to provide everything from a python to a piranha on a day's notice." Squirrel monkeys, owl monkeys, woolly monkeys and others have become so popular that they are hardly classified as exotic any more. Among other species in demand are such far-out fauna as anteaters (they prefer bananas...
Meader's act at the time actually had very little Kennedy material in it-only five minutes out of 45-because he was trying to shed his identification with the President and shape a career as a general comedian. Nonetheless, Meader had so thoroughly established himself as the myna bird who sounded like a President that he risked never being accepted as anything else...
...Bentley is as magnetic as sin. Playwright Ronald Alexander has surrounded him with zany astrologers of the marketplace-hack writers, foxy talent agents, dubbed-in laugh effects men-who cast horoscopes under the sign of the dollar to see if the public will prefer the TV story of a myna bird that refuses to talk or a chimpanzee that plays Lady Macbeth. The dialogue is more quippish than witty, but the hip mass-media-men-at-work lingo scatters the laughs over an occasional drab patch of script. The life of the play is in the instinctive mendacity...