Articles

Spoofmaster - April 20, 1963 - The Saturday Evening Post

What Sherman did to attain his peculiar eminence was to appropriate folk classics like Frere Jacques, Water Boy and Sir Greenbaum's Madrigal, and people all over the country immediately went crazy over his nonsensical parodies. His LP album My Son, the Folk Singer has sold a fantastic 1,500,000 copies and his follow-up album My Son, the Celebrity has sold 600,000. Both discs are still going strong.

So is Sherman. Currently he is being wooed by the independent Hollywood producers, the Mirisch brothers, to star in a movie comedy. Glenn Ford wants him to play his next-door neighbor in a film, Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing., for which Sherman wrote the screenplay. Sherman is also writing the book and lyrics for a Broadway musical, plotting new LP albums satirizing jazz, rock 'n' roll and Academy Award-winning songs, girding himself for a one-hour TV special next fall and writing a book "I'm going to call it How I Became An Overnight Success in Only Eighteen Years," he says.

My Son, the Folk Singer made Sherman rich, famous and turned his whole life turned upside down. For 15 years he had been leading the solid, substantial life of a television producer. He was, among other things, a specialist in panel shows. It was his job to sit behind a desk, or in a control room, supervising such programs as I've Got a Secret, Masquerade Party and Your Surprise Package. He averaged a steady $500 a week from Goodson-Todman Productions because he had helped invent the CBS show, I've Got A Secret.

A home-loving type, Sherman would race each evening at six o'clock to his $80,000 cottage in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles to be with his wife Dolores and his two children, Robert and Nancy. On Sundays, like any average American $750-a-week television producer, he played golf. On Fridays and Saturdays he went to or gave parties.

I've known Allan Sherman since 1954, and I've attended dozens of parties at which Sherman has either been guest or host, and invariably he would get up and sing his parodies of popular songs-sometimes even boring people with them. But that was before he became a celebrity.

As soon as it became evident that the public loved Sherman, he got three different sets of agents. On the strength of his recording, he was pressed into signing up for a tour of concerts. He protested he wasn't a professional entertainer, but his protests were overcome by the green flash of money-a guaranteed $6,000 a concert.

He since has performed to packed houses in Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York's Carnegie Hall. He played two weeks at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and Garry Moore paid him $5,000 to sing Sarah Jackman on his CBS show. All told, his take will come to $700,000 this year and that figure doesn't include $2,100 he won playing blackjack at the Sands.

The only people unhappy about Allan Sherman are the songwriters whose songs he has parodied. He has been getting letters from music publishers threatening him with lawsuits if he doesn't stop. Meredith Willson didn't like the fact that Sherman transformed Seventy-six Trombones into an ode to a Jewish country club:

Seventy-six Sol Cohens in the country club, And a hundred and ten men named Levine.

And Richard Rodgers detested what Sherman did to There Is Nothing Like a Dame:

We got herring sweet and sour,

We got pickles old and young

We got corned beef and salami and a lot of tasty tongue,

We got Philadelphia cream cheese in a little wooden box.

What ain't we got?

We ain't got lox!

"Allan Sherman is a destroyer," was the glum comment of Rodgers.

"I'm thinking of putting out a new album called My Son, the Defendant," ripostes Sherman. "I feel I have a legal right to parody songs. It's part of the American way of life we should laugh at each other."

In hindsight one can see that Sherman's triumph was inherent in his personality. He has always had a wild, eccentric, farcical sense of life. Once, in New York, he left the Plaza Hotel after lunch. A blizzard had driven almost every taxi into its garage. Sherman is not a man to walk. He waited for an empty taxi several minutes and then became aware of the line of horse-drawn carriages outside Central Park. "Why not?" he asked. He crossed the street and plumped himself into a hansom. "Coachman," he said, "drive me to the National Broadcasting Company, Thirty Rockefeller Plaza." He bade the driver wait for him. He attended a conference and then was driven to a TV rehearsal. Then he clip-clopped to Toots Shor's for dinner. Finally, he ordered his driver to take him to his Westchester home. It cost him $85, including tip.

Recently, in Washington, D.C., he got into a cab with columnist Art Buchwald. Sherman said it was funny that in the movies characters were always saying, "Follow that cab," and he wondered what would happen if you really said it. Buchwald was game. Sherman pointed to an occupied taxi and said, "Follow that cab." They followed cabs all over Washington that morning.

His Hopper went a Copper

When art collecting became fashionable, Sherman said, "I, too, will be a collector." He didn't know the first thing about art, but he liked Edward Hopper's celebrated painting, House by the Railroad. He told his secretary, "Get me the name whoever's got this picture." His secretary tracked it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which coldly informed her it was not for sale. Sherman got on the phone and said, "How much you asking for that Hopper? I'll make you a firm offer of $2,000. Take it or leave it." A museum official explained it was insured for more than $100,000.

"Don't be so independent, Mr. Smart Pants," Sherman told him, "if I can't buy it-I'll paint it."

And he did-after 5 weeks of lessons. His copy of House by the Railroad now hangs in his living room. "I call it Mr. Hopper's House," he says. "What else? It certainly ain't my house."

In the old days Allan frequently got depressed about television producing. During one of these depressions he decided to become a writer. He furnished his den with what he believed were the tools of the writing trade: fluorescent lighting, a photo-copier, a dictating machine, an electric typewriter and an electric pencil sharpener. He announced that he would write every night as soon as he got home from the office. He boasted he would turn out plays, novels, short stories, essays, movie treatments. The first piece he wrote was sold immediately.

Allan then developed the worst case of writer's block I've ever seen. He couldn't write another line. He felt inadequate, rejected, ugly, unloved. He didn't sing his songs at parties. He didn't go to parties. It was terrible. I urged him to do what every writer does in such a situation.

"Go see a psychiatrist," I said.

"What psychiatrist would want to treat me?" he moaned. "I'm no good. I'm rotten to the core." Finally he began going to the late Dr. Edmund Bergler, a leading psychoanalyst who specialized in unblocking blocked writers. Two weeks and six psychotherapeutic session later there was a tremendous pounding on my front door. I open it. Allan was standing there, a derby on his head, a cigar in his mouth.

"Get out of my way," he snarled, pushing into the foyer and elbowing me aside, "this is Big Al!"

Sherman, whose real name is Allan Copelon, was born in Chicago, November 30, 1924. His mother was a flapper who won loving cups at Charleston contests. His father was a racing-car driver. His parents were divorced when he was six, and later he took his mother's maiden name, Sherman, as his surname. She moved around so often that Sherman attended 20 different public schools in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and New York. Both parents are now dead.

He went to the University of Illinois and into the United States Army, in both of which he was an outstanding failure. He ambition was to be a serious songwriter, and in 1945 he came to New York with 75 ballads. When he couldn't get them published, he became a gag writer for Jackie Gleason, Lew Parker, Jerry Lester and other comedians. He drifted into television during its formative years and soon became a writer or producer of such early television variety shows as the Cavalcade of Star, Broadway Open House and 54th Street Revue. CBS sent him to Hollywood to produce Your Surprise Package and he rented a house in Beverly Hills, where Harpo Marx was his next-door neighbor. Harpo introduced him to Jack Benny and George Burns. Soon Allan was being invited to Hollywood parties and breaking everybody up with his song parodies. Then Bullets Durgom, the agent, talked Warner Brothers into making an LP of the Sherman satires. In just three weeks, Sherman thought up all the parodies in My Son, the Folk Singer.

Despite his new affluence, his only obvious acquisition is a $6,900 Lincoln. "I bought it to prove to myself that I'm a star," he says.

I've also acquired a heart condition," he adds. "The second week the record was out I started making appearances on deejay shows and being interviewed by reporters. I was in a terrible, crazy, mixed-up whirl. I went for days without sleeping. Then I collapsed. My doctor told me he saw cases like me during the war. Combat fatigue. He put me under sedation for ten days. I wasn't even allowed to answer the telephone."

He then regarded the future, "All I want now," he said, looking like a lunatic gnome, "is to be a big star. It's nice. You sign autographs. You give interviews. People bring you Scotch when you want it-I've even got sycophants. Besides, being a big star pays well.

I've got one big problem though. I'm not sure if I want to be a movie star, a recording star or a television star. What I'd really like to be is very simple-all of them."