A Memento of My Failure as a Human Being

Here, as an exclusive December to Remember present to you, my loyal reader, Ian Carey, is the one funny part from my recently shelved hit novel, "Trouble Is My Gun". Apologies to Mr. Jerry Lewis. Enjoy!

Thanks For the Laughs
Charlie Harp Dead at 77

Actor, comedian, filmmaker, and philanthropist Charlie Harp succumbed to heart cancer Wednesday evening in his Beverly Hills home. He leaves behind a wife, Juicy (24), two adult children from three previous marriages (twice to the late Kitty Fike), and a film legacy that includes such classics as 1956's 'Pardon My Bartender,' 1961's 'A Man About the Horse,' and his acclaimed 1981 comeback, 'Darn That Crazy Waiter!'

Born Leopold Schmutz in Kroskvt, Ukraine in 1929, Charlie Harp’s family immigrated to Brooklyn when he was seven. At an early age, young Leopold knew he had a gift for comedy. According to his 1985 autobiography, Let's Talk About Me for a Second, "I knew I was funny at an early age. When you're smaller and poorer and maybe a little smarter than all the other kids, you have to use comedy as your defense. There was also a rich tradition of comedy in the neighborhood. Every Sunday, we'd all go over to Mr. and Mrs. Klubotzky's house and watch Mrs. Klubotzky make blintzes. For some reason, this is what we thought was funny."

In 1947, when he was 18, Leopold Schmutz married his high school sweetheart, Bernice Fleminthal, changed his name to Charlie Harp, and began performing comedy in burlesque clubs, most notably Miss Kitty-Cat's Kit-Cat Club in Manhattan, where he quickly gained acclaim as the most manic young comic of his generation. As he later described his early act, "It was precisely controlled mayhem. I was a virtuoso of silliness. See, the difference between a comic and a comedian is that a comedian goes by instincts, while a comic writes everything out in advance. A comedian is naturally funny, whereas a comic is more like an actor pretending to be funny. I was—and am—a comedian."

His first big break came three years later, one month after the birth of Charlie and Bernice Harp’s only child, Debra, when popular vaudevillian-turned-radio-host Jilly Lafeet discovered 21-year-old Charlie Harp performing at the El Cocomacambro Room in Los Angeles and introduced him to Bert Klein, Lafeet’s long-time agent. It was through Klein that Harp met 30-year-old showman Vic Thomas. The smooth-talking, smooth-singing, dapper Thomas and the hyperactive, clowning Harp became fast friends, and soon developed a popular stage act, which quickly earned them a motion picture contract.

Their first movie, 1950’s Morons for Sail, was an immediate success with younger audiences, who loved Charlie Harp as much as their parents found his pratfalls, his shouting, and his all-around juvenile antics indescribably irritating. It proved to be the children whose opinions mattered; in all, the duo starred in fourteen films in nine years for Loysie Studios, nearly all of them successful.

In 1958, Harp’s nine-year marriage to first wife Bernice ended, and he became notorious for a time for dating some of the most attractive women in show business, claiming in his 1993 biography, The Joys of Being Me, to have bedded nearly all the top stars of the day. The peak of Thomas and Harp’s fame came that same year, with the release of Two if By Sweden, generally considered their finest collaboration. It went on to become the second highest grossing picture of the year (after the Marvin Aloo musical, A Moonlit Dance Through Paris), and the ninth-highest grossing comedy (adjusted for inflation) of all time.

On the set of 1959’s The Jockey is a Dimwit!, however, Thomas and Harp had a falling out. As Harp described it in his 1980 autobiography, Don’t Tell Me I Can’t!: “I was—and am—a perfectionist. Vic Thomas was—and is—not. I felt that what we were doing out there was art. He thought it was a game.”

Vic Thomas disagreed; in his 1978 autobiography, Vic, Mr. Thomas implied that Charlie Harp was the problem: “You go to work every day—year in, year out—with some egotistical little monkey always jumping around your goddamn feet, and see if maybe the magic doesn’t start to fade after a while.”

Whatever their differences, the two men officially ended their eleven-year partnership the day principal photography wrapped on The Jockey is a Dimwit!, and embarked on separate new careers. Vic Thomas began what would turn out to be, in essence, an eighteen-year run at Lucky Lady’s casino-hotel in Las Vegas, with a kitschy, boozy, song-and-dance act that appealed enormously to fans of old Hollywood.

Charlie Harp continued to focus on motion pictures. After acting in several films in 1959-1960 (most notably, Clown About Town), Harp turned his hand to writing, directing, and producing. His debut as producer/director/writer/star was the 1961 smash hit, The Goofy Marine, for which he also composed and sang the theme song, “The Night We Danced,” which went on to become a top 5 single, and led to the 1962 release of Charlie Harp Sings At Last, which sold respectably but was never followed up.

1962 also saw the release of what many critics considered Harp’s masterpiece, The Astro-Nut, which, in addition to playing seven different characters in the film, he wrote, produced, and directed. The Astro-Nut also marked Harp’s sole foray into feature film scoring. In his 1990 autobiography, Charlie Harp: A Penny For My Thoughts, Harp reflected on what The Astro-Nut meant to his legacy, especially abroad: “Vic and I had been extremely popular from day one, and that, in its own way, can be very hard for a performer, especially if you’re a perfectionist and constantly driven to do better and bigger things. ‘The Astro-Nut’ was really the first time I felt in total control of the filmmaking process, and it was an invigorating feeling. On top of that, it really cemented my reputation in Europe, Finland in particular, where I was given a Medal of Distinguished Service to Mankind from the Finnish government and hailed as the greatest film artist of all time.”

French critics and cineastes also began to heap praise upon the American filmmaker. Jean-Luc Godard was quoted as calling Charlie Harp, “the world’s funniest, saddest man, and a true artist, totally unimpressed and not even slightly intimidated by the mores and constructs of conventional cinema.” Unlike most American artists and entertainers who are lionized by their French contemporaries, however, Harp’s domestic success continued unabated with such hits as The Backwards Detective (1963) and Too Many Chefs (1964).

Apart from the typical and expected success of Too Many Chefs, 1964 was a chaotic year for Charlie Harp. In February of that year, he married 18-year-old aspiring actress Catherine “Kitty” Fike. That same month, the ill-fated “Hour of Charlie” television talk show premiered. To the dismay of those who’d grown to love Charlie Harp’s childish antics and clumsy pratfalls, “Hour of Charlie” was, ostensibly, a “serious” program that featured dry interviews, generally with academics and politicians. While high school dropout Harp did his best to set a sophisticated, intellectual tone, the show garnered poor ratings and was cancelled after just two months. According to his 1979 autobiography, May I Be Serious? : “When the show got cancelled, I felt the world turn its back on me. I was no longer batting 1.000. I’d only been married to my second wife for a couple of months, but things were already sour between us. I’m sure my depression had a lot to do with it. I had no films in the works, since I’d expected the show to take up most of my time. I started drinking in the afternoon. Between the booze and the pills I was taking for my leg pain, I spent most of my time in a haze. I basically dropped out from society.”

Harp would not make another film until the 1967 flop, The Dippy Hippy. Exhausted from twenty years of non-stop work and a tempestuous second marriage that had just ended in a bitter and very public divorce, Charlie Harp withdrew from the limelight. He made no public appearances for nearly a year before coming out and announcing on “The Jilly LaFeet Show” that he’d decided to devote his time and energy to charity work, primarily with the organization Crutches for Kids.

In 1970, Harp hosted the first Crutches for Kids “Glitz-athon” televised fundraiser. A roster of all-star talent including such luminaries as Eddie Cantor and Burl Ives helped make the “Glitz-athon” a rousing success, one that continued without fail every year for the next thirty-five years.

In 1972, after a five year break from filmmaking, Charlie Harp produced, directed, and starred in The Night the Clown Wept. His first attempt at drama either as actor, director, or producer, The Night the Clown Wept tells the story of Sigmund Bloor, an impoverished clown living in WWII-era Germany, who is arrested by the Gestapo for impersonating Hitler and thrown in a concentration camp, where he spares his own life by agreeing to lead Jewish children into the gas chambers.

Not surprisingly, critics and theatergoers alike dismissed the movie as inappropriate and unwatchable. Apart from the unsettling subject manner, many who did see the film were quick to point out its many glaring incongruities and production mistakes, like the casting of healthy blonde-haired, blue-eyed, well-fed Scandinavian children (The Night the Clown Wept was filmed primarily in Sweden) in the parts of Jewish concentration camp prisoners, or a scene in which a German officer is seen watching a color episode of Hawaii 5-0.

According to his 1986 memoir, The Road to Me-ville: “The devastation I felt when ‘Clown’ failed to achieve the kind of success I felt (and feel) it deserved was too much for me. I poured my guts into that goddamned picture, and it hurt me not to get any returns on my emotional investment. All through filming, I’d taken pills for my back. After the movie flopped, I started taking the pills just so I could get through breakfast.” In 1976, after four years of near isolation, Harp checked into the Ida McKinley Clinic.

In 1981, still in recovery, Harp co-wrote, directed, and starred in Darn that Crazy Waiter! a throwback film that capitalized successfully on a resurgence in slapstick humor. Critically panned, the TV cable evergreen went on to be one of Harp’s three highest-grossing films.

By 1985, Charlie Harp had conquered the addiction problems that had plagued him for twenty years. Invigorated, he remarried second wife Kitty, twenty-one years to the day after he first married her. Their only child, son Everett, was born a year later. In 1987, Charlie Harp and Kitty Fike Harp divorced for the final time.

That same year, talk show host Jilly Lafeet arranged a surprise reconciliation between Charlie Harp and Vic Thomas on his show. While Thomas and Harp both appeared thrilled to see each other and spoke of rekindling their friendship, the private animosity never truly abated; when Vic Thomas died of liver failure in 1992, Harp did not attend the funeral.

Charlie Harp’s final film comeback attempt came in 1993 with the generally ignored low-budget independent science fiction comedy, A Ramble Through the Yesterbrain. While critics praised Harp’s performance, few movie-goers had the opportunity to find out for themselves thanks to low distribution and, at three weeks, by far the shortest run of any Charlie Harp movie. According to his 1995 autobiography, Me & My Public: A Love Story: “The problem with a movie like A Ramble Through the Yesterbrain is that the people who like it don’t like to admit it. A film like that succeeds only through word of mouth. If the people who are supposed to be spreading the word don’t want to open their mouths, then they, in effect, are responsible for killing the picture.”

For the next five years, Charlie Harp rededicated himself to his charity work, though even this was not free from controversy; in a 1997 interview with Parade magazine, Harp was quoted as having compared handicapped children to broken toys and stating “if they don’t want people to feel sorry for them, they should die already.”

Although the ensuing complaints and protests did little to affect the Charlie Harp Giltz-athon’s ability to raise significant amounts of money for Crutches for Kids, it did seem to sap some of Charlie Harp’s enthusiasm for the charity. Less than one year after the Parade interview, Harp again shifted his focus and opened his successful, autobiographical one-man show, Charlie Harp: The Story of Me, which toured the U.S., Canada, parts of Europe, Australia, and Malaysia until 2003, when he officially retired from performing.

In 2004, Charlie Harp once again made headlines when he married twenty-two-year-old former Miss Teen Kentucky, Juicy Jamison. He was seventy-five at the time.

On July 29th of 2006, Charlie Harp made his final public appearance as host of “America Honors Charlie Harp”, a two-hour televised celebration of his life. Much to the shock of everyone in attendance, Harp opened the show by emotionally announcing that this would, indeed, be his final television appearance; only a week before, doctors diagnosed him with inoperable heart cancer. He had told no one, not even his wife. “Only my doctor and my lawyer knew before just now,” he told the audience. The show went on as planned, but the outpouring of emotion from such celebrity guests as Walter Mondale and Gil Gerard turned the show into something many found immeasurably more riveting than a typical Hollywood “love-fest”. Less than two weeks later, Charlie Harp passed away.

Indeed, there is probably no more fitting way to close an account of Charlie Harp’s life than with the very words he used to close his final public appearance:

“I’d die right now if I knew Heaven is anything like tonight’s been. You’ve been a lovely audience, always. You’ve made it all worthwhile. Thank you so much. Goodnight.”

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Hmm. I promise the thing I'm working on now is a lot funnier.