When You're Hot, You're Hot

SHE doesn't walk onstage. She insinuates herself. Rotary-drive hips, and fingers that were probably snapping out rhythms in the cradle. Overstuffed bosom beneath a Pucci dress, $450 shoulder-length brown wig, and eyelashes long enough to rake a lawn with. She coolly surveys the scene and lets fly with a sassafras falsetto: "Whoooo-eeeee! Watch out, honey! Don't you touch me! Don't you ever touch me!" Or: "When you're hot, you're hot; when you're not, you're not." Or her trademark: "What you see is what you get."

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 cliches of the black experience that she embodies, the other half from put-ons of conventional white attitudes toward that experience. Five years ago, any network executive worth his Valium would have sworn that these were not the ingredients of mass entertainment.

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, is that "she demands respect. She is not a loose woman. She always has some meaningful employment, and she's never asking for favors. Geraldine's liberated--that's where she's at. Everybody knows she don't take no stuff."

For 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 janitor, Henry Kissinger's Doppelganger and the only sane voice in the Washington Establishment.

Narrative Gift. On his show, as well as on his records, Flip Wilson spins out these impersonations in anecdotes, not one-liners. His gift is for dialect and narrative, not gags. The laugh track of a Bob Hope or a Milton Berle is a crescendo to climactic punch lines. Flip's graph would be all hills and valleys, zigs and zags. He puts his material over gently, through sheer likability--and considerable body English. Though only 5 ft. 6 in., he has an amazingly elastic physical grace, and a repertory of motions that recalls the masters of silent movie comedy.

One of his funniest sketches, a parfait of incongruities, is Columbus' discovery of America. Trying to convince Queen Isabella--Queen Isabel Johnson, that is--that she should cough up for the trip west, Columbus tells her that without America, there would be no Ray Charles. That sends her into a swivet. "Ray Charles?" she screeches. "You gonna find Ray Charles? He in America?" "Damn right," says Chris. After writing him out a traveler's check so that he can buy the Pinta, the Nina and the Santa Maria at the Army & Navy Store, a zonked-out Isabel announces to the crowd at the dock: "Chris goin' to America on that boat. Chris goin' to find Ray Charles."

Later, when Chris spots America, a West Indian maiden who could be Geraldine's twin is waiting for him, her hand on her hip and "Watch out" in her eyes. "What the hell you want comin' round in them ships?" she asks. "We don't wanna be discovered. You better discover your ass away from here."

In another travesty of history, Bathsheba is a groupie follower of Little David, a rock singer and harpist. "Play the harp, Little David!" Bathsheba shrieks. "Play on that harp, honey!" Eventually David's prowess with women arouses the ire of Goliath, leader of a motorcycle gang called the Philistines. "Watch out, David!" Bathsheba yells. "You'd better watch out! He runnin' up behind you! He got a club!

Gonna hit you!" Some of the catch phrases in these routines have already become part of the slang of the '70s. The best known is the refrain with which a black minister's wife explains her every goof, whether it is buying an expensive dress or ramming her car into the side of the church: "The devil made me do it."

Some middleclass, well-educated blacks are offended by the updated Amos 'n' Andy quality of Flip's material. Wilson's way of playing with the stereotypes, however, unselfconsciously holds them up to ridicule. Not even Archie Bunker could find much ammunition for bigotry in Flip's presentation of Geraldine (see box, page 59). If Flip is Amos 'n' Andy, he is Amos 'n' Andy in reverse shuffle--with 30 years of civil rights battles behind him.

Most blacks, uneducated as well as sophisticated, seem to realize this. Last year when he appeared at Black Expo '71, a trade and cultural fair in the International Amphitheater in Chicago, the audience was screaming for Geraldine even before Flip came on. "There was such a massive outpouring of love and appreciation that it overwhelmed the cat and broke him down," remembers the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who helped organize the affair.

No Color. To those who say that he should do more to advance the "cause," Flip has a ready reply: "I have feelings about these things, but I'm selling professional entertainment. Politics is for politicians. Each man has his own style; mine is that 'the funny' has no color. I do these characters because they're what I know. But people are just people to me. The way I see it, I don't have to think black--or not think black. I just have to entertain. I'm just a comic."

The ratings bear witness to Wilson's success at comedy and to his appeal to whites as well as blacks. In their second season on NBC--which, Flip jokes, now really is "the full-color network"--Flip, Geraldine and his other characters have become regular Thursday-night fare for an estimated 40 million Americans. In recent Nielsen ratings, The Flip Wilson Show has been the No. 1 variety entry and the No. 2 show of any kind (after CBS's situation comedy All in the Family). Sponsors' money has followed the audience, and NBC now charges $86,000 for one minute of the show's commercial time. "You have to have an all-appeal to survive in the top ten in television," says Bill Cosby, whose own show on NBC never did achieve high ratings and lasted only two seasons. "It's no use reaching the teen-ager if the father wants to watch a western or if the mother wants to watch some doctor thing, because the kid loses out. Flip takes in everybody."

What gives Wilson this broad scope is that, compared with other comics, particularly black comics, his humor has a visceral appeal. Wilson is not just a black comedian, any more than Jack Benny is just a Jewish comedian. His characters and his situations are black, but his humor is universal. He has the talent to make blacks laugh without anger and whites laugh without guilt. "Flip touches more comic bases than anyone else," says Actor and Playwright Ossie Davis (Purlie Victorious). "He retains some of the tradition of the clown as against the comic. A comic is a personality who deals with verbal delivery and usually with bland topics like mothers-in-law and taxes. A clown is a character complete unto himself. Flip Wilson can create characters who stand on their own. He is the most versatile comic spirit in America today."

Wilson does not have the slashing wit of a Lenny Bruce, the angry bite of a Dick Gregory, the satirical punch of a Godfrey Cambridge, or the intellectual edge of a Bill Cosby. His approach is at once older and newer than that of the others. The message about racial injustice is the same as Gregory's, for example, but Flip sneaks it in and shakes loose a laugh before the audience can object. After telling a story about Indians, he asks: "How would you like it if you bought a $50,000 house and somebody came along and put up a wigwam next to it?" Or: "This is my riot jacket--I got it in Buffalo out of a window."

Spontaneous as some of Flip's lines seem, they are all the result of dedicated study. No comedian has calculated his career more carefully or worked harder for his laughs. While a neophyte in his 20s, he laid down a 15-year plan for success. Today, at 38, he has not only met his timetable but has bettered it. As in his early years, his absolute concentration on his business gives him a preoccupied, almost aloof air. Even when relaxing, he is studying people for situations or thinking up funny lines. His whole effort is bent toward making each show "my best shot."

Unusual Format. That effort begins each Monday with a reading of the script in Rehearsal Room 4 at NBC's Burbank, Calif., studios. Flip writes about a third of his material himself and sometimes arouses the ire of his writers by heavily editing the rest. While the reading is going on, an assistant sticks tape on the floor to map out the movements. Rehearsals begin on Tuesday. A general runthrough follows on Wednesday, and Thursday is camera-blocking day, when the performers work with camera crews. On Friday at 5 p.m. there is a dress rehearsal, with final taping at 8 p.m. Both the rehearsal and the show are taped before a live audience, and the best scenes from each are spliced together for broadcast on the following Thursday.

Throughout all this, Flip constantly takes time out to attend to details ordinarily left to stagehands--testing the door chimes on a set or making sure that a champagne-bucket prop is positioned correctly. Because of his painstaking approach, the show is known as something of a sweat for guests. Outside performers on the Carol Burnett or Glen Campbell shows can get away with a three-day commitment; Dean Martin's guests have been known not to see him until the day of the show. But Flip insists on a five-day schedule for his guests as well as for himself.

With all that, performers are eager to appear--and not just for the exposure. Despite Flip's demands, the set is remarkably free from tension, and Flip hand-tailors the material for his guests. "The show is my home," he says, "and I want my guests to be comfortable in my home. I want them to relax and have fun. Occasionally it takes some time to hit off because we have to find the right approach. But once that happens, we're smoking." The stars that he has "smoked" with range from Lucille Ball, with whom he was the rear end of a stage horse to her head, to David Steinberg, with whom he was the sympathetic bartender to Steinberg's milk-drinking mama's boy. Last week he was a sane patient telling his troubles to a nutty psychiatrist played by Dom DeLuise.

The show that was taped for airing this week features a sketch with ex-Footballer Jim Brown, now a movie actor. Geraldine, dressed up as a "Chicken Delicious" delivery girl in a micro-mini and lace-up boots, delivers an order to Brown. After announcing the product--"No fancy ribbons on our meat; what you see is what you eat"--she tries to persuade Brown to find work in the movies for her boy friend Killer, never visible on the stage but always present in her thoughts. "What is he doing?" Brown asks. "He don' do nuthin'," Geraldine replies. "What does he want to do?" Brown asks. "He's doin' it," says Geraldine. "But ain't nobody takin' pictures of him."

The show's effectiveness comes partly from the unusual format designed by Producer Bob Henry, a veteran of variety shows dating back to Nat King Cole in the '50s. "The first time I saw Flip live, he appeared on a small platform with a six-piece orchestra on the side," Henry says. "I thought, 'That's the way to do it--intimacy.' " To get Flip closer to the audience, Henry created a theater-in-the-round and placed emphasis on full-body camera shots. "The head-to-toe selling was important," he observes. "What Chaplin's legs were to him, Flip's body is to his program."

Banned were such cliches as long introductions, phony folksiness and chorus lines with phalanxes of pretty legs flung up into the camera. "The best contribution I can make as a producer is to let the personality shine through on the screen," says Henry. "It's a small tube. If you clutter it up with a lot of people, you lose the most interesting thing in the world--the human face." With simplicity as the keynote, nothing was allowed to overshadow the star--Flip Wilson.

Poor Family. Not being overshadowed is a relatively new experience for Flip, who might stand as the model for a black Horatio Alger character. Born Clerow Wilson in 1933, one of the 18 survivors among 24 children in his family, he was "so poor even the poor looked down on me." His father was a carpenter and sometime tippler who was always looking for work. "Occasionally he'd just stand on the corner with his hammer and saw, waiting for someone to come by who needed a job done," recalls Cornelius Parker, whose family ran a funeral home across the street from where the Wilsons lived.

Flip's mother abandoned the family when Flip was still a youngster, and his father floated from place to place in search of low rents. At one point he moved his brood into a coalbin cellar. "We'd steal buns from the A & P, milk, anything to keep alive," recalls Flip's brother Lemuel, a carpenter in Jersey City. "I used to steal Christmas trees so we'd have one on Christmas." In those days Flip was a quick, thin child with a runny nose and a big appetite; his brothers and sisters called him "Tin Can" because he ate so much. He used to hang around the fire station on his block, gagging it up with idle firemen. "He was always joking, always funny," says Fireman Ed Dawson.

When he was nine, Flip made his stage debut. The girl who was supposed to be Clara Barton in a school play became ill, and Flip, in the grand tradition of understudies, stepped in. No record survives of how his performance went over, but certainly the female role prophetically foreshadowed Geraldine. At about the same time, he sneaked into the old Mosque Theater in Newark to see the two comics who went on before the movie. "I knew then," he says, "that I had to make people laugh too."

White Mentor. Because of his family's straitened circumstances, the authorities placed Flip in foster homes. He went from a strict Catholic family to a fortune teller to a family that was almost fanatically pentecostal. In desperation, he kept running away from his foster homes (13 times in all) and was finally sent to reform school. Life there was downright Sybaritic compared with his life on the outside. To ensure that he stayed in, he made a number of escape attempts, which he knew would be "punished" by extensions of his term. "My happiest memory of childhood was my first birthday in the reform school," he says. "My teacher gave me a little package. It contained a box of Cracker Jacks and a can of A.B.C. Shoe Polish."

When he was 13, Flip rejoined his father. After sporadically attending public school, he dropped out and picked up odd jobs on construction sites, in bowling alleys and at parking lots. Then at 16 he lied about his age and joined the Air Force. "I wasn't patriotic," he explains, "just tired of being ashamed of my clothes. And the Air Force beat parking cars for a living." He was assigned, like many other blacks, to kitchen duties. There his cheerfulness and intelligence impressed a white Southern major who gloried in the name of Lloyd Llewllyn Lancaster Lynn. Major Lynn became the first of several white mentors who have guided Flip's life, persuading him to go back to school to learn typing and grammar. Meanwhile, Flip was earning a reputation--and his nickname--by "flipping out" people with his stories and clowning.

In 1954, at the age of 20, Flip left the service and became a $40-a-week bellhop in a San Francisco hotel. He got his first break in show business when an adagio dance trio, the hotel's floor show, let him fill in with a drunk routine while they changed costumes. When the three went off to their next date in Stockton, Calif., Flip went with them--at $1 a night. Soon he left them and started a seven-year odyssey across the country, working the small Negro clubs and sleeping in cheap hotels, bus stations, pay toilets and even on the tops of parked cars. "Those black audiences in the little weekend clubs were the toughest I've ever played for," he says. "With all the trouble black people have, they try to forget on weekends. You've got to be good to make them laugh."

While Flip was playing a small Miami club in 1956, another mentor appeared in Herbie Shul, a local white businessman. Shul saw enough promise in Flip to become his angel for a year, giving him $50 a week while Flip worked engagements in Florida and the Bahamas. The following year Flip married--and almost immediately divorced--a dancer he met in Nassau named Peaches. His feelings about the episode are indicated by the fact that he will not reveal Peaches' last name. In any case, he did not repeat the experiment in matrimony until 1961 in Miami, when he took his second wife, Blondell, by whom he has since had four children.

Since his earliest years in the business, Flip has made an intensive study of comic styles. Deeply impressed by Max Eastman's Enjoyment of Laughter, an analysis of what makes people laugh, he began a book of his own, which until recently he carried in a loose-leaf folder and made periodic entries in. Today the distilled contents of that folder are enshrined on four laminated tablets in Wilson's Hollywood house. Written in antique script with illuminated headings, Flip's Laws of Comedy look like a medieval Book of Hours. "Be sudden, be neat," one exhorts. "Be unimpassioned," reads another. "If you are serious about something, leave it out."

His off-the-cuff comments about his craft are more revealing. "Generally," he says, "it only takes one thing that's different to be great. I don't think there's anything that can compare with Charlie Chaplin's walk and remarkable use of the body. With Bob Hope, it's timing; with W.C. Fields it's complete effortlessness. A long time ago, I decided what my thing was and I eliminated everything else. I used to work with a partner, but he'd get drunk and forget his lines. No partner. I eliminated the orchestra because I didn't sing or dance. I used to wear a ratty old coat and a funny hat. I threw those away. No props. Just me. Flip Wilson."

Flip worked at sharpening what he calls his "funny" with the same persistent, singleminded, analytical approach. His Columbus and Isabella routine, which lasts only six minutes and 50 seconds, took three years to perfect. Eventually such effort paid off, and Flip moved out of the small clubs to the "chitlin circuit," the black equivalent of the borscht belt, which included big theaters like Harlem's Apollo, the Howard in Washington and the Regal in Chicago. "When I used to emcee rock concerts in those theaters," says Flip, "I'd come out and the audience would start milling around waiting for these cats to go 'Doo, doo, doo.' They'd yell, 'We want to hear them!' So then I'd say, 'At least you didn't boo me.' And they'd go, 'Boo, boo, boo!' But I would have their attention. The important thing is to get the audience's attention."

The big break came in 1965. when Black Comedian Redd Foxx was a guest on the Tonight Show and Johnny Carson asked him who was the funniest comedian around. Foxx's reply: Flip Wilson. Carson invited Flip to appear on the show, and Flip broke it up with a spoof of a black woman buying a wig ("You sure it don't make me look too Polish?"). Before long, he was a hot item, and in the following years made appearances on Laugh-In and the Carol Burnett and Dean Martin shows, along with many repeats on Tonight and other talk shows.

After one disastrous attempt at a TV special in 1968--taped but never shown--Flip and his manager, Monte Kay, found the successful formula for his famous NBC special in 1969, which introduced Geraldine as an airline stewardess in a sketch with Jonathan Winters' gray-haired Maude Frickert. The network offered him his own show the next year, and he was off and away. When you're hot, you really are hot. His net income is well upward of $1,000,000 a year. This comes mainly from earnings from his show and royalties from his four comedy LPs (one of them a gold disk), which are put out by a company of which he is an owner. He no longer plays nightclubs.

Flip is as dedicated to consolidating and preserving his success as he was to attaining it. He thinks about little else but his show. During the 26 weeks of the year when it is being taped, he is very nearly a monk. He has not been to a movie for 21 months, is almost never seen at parties or restaurants, and has very few friends in Hollywood. On taping days, he lives on little more than milk and honey, or the turkey noodle soup that he carries in a flask everywhere he goes--his life is awash in turkey noodle soup. "I mustn't eat a full meal before taping because I'll be sluggish," he says, "and it'll throw my timing off."

Fanatical about his privacy, he often disappears for weekends without telling his closest associates where he is going, and during the half-year that he is free he sometimes disappears for a whole week. He hires a plane to take him to Las Vegas or Denver, or, with his valet and righthand man George Whittington in the seat beside him, heads out of the driveway in his new ice-blue Rolls-Royce. The license plate? KILLER.

With its stereo, Dunhill pipe rack and mobile telephone, the Rolls is almost a house on wheels. Which is not too strange, really, because the road is Flip's only real home. "Quite often I feel the tension, and I'll go driving into the desert," he says. On such occasions he keeps a note pad handy to jot down his thoughts. "I don't go to create, I go to relax," he explains. "But I've never gone and not come back with something--a couple of stories, a handful of one-liners."

Nobody, not even the omnipresent George, seems to know what thoughts Flip may have that he does not write down. "He doesn't give much," says Herbert Baker, chief writer on the show. "There's a wall. Inside the wall is a moat. And then the fortress begins." Few members of his show's staff have ever seen the inside of his home, a two-bedroom colonial that he rents in the Hollywood Hills. His awards--which include two Emmys--are placed in front of his bed. facing a brass statue of a clown, a gift from his friend Redd Foxx.

For a star, he gives very few interviews, perhaps because he feels that he has no reason to explain himself. "1 know where I'm at," he says. "I was running before, and I didn't know it. I want to have the rich full life a young man in my position has the opportunity to have. But if anything happens and I'm not able to continue my career, I won't be sorry. I've had my chance, and I gave it my best shot. I have never met a better man than me. There's no one else I'd rather have been. I may not be better than you, but I'm goddam equal."

When he does give an interview, he turns off the moment that the questions get around to his offstage life--to the pretty girls who are special guests in his dressing room on taping days, often a different one each week; to his apparently estranged relations with Blondell; to his early life and his family back in Jersey City.

Flip is known to fly to Miami several weekends a year to visit Blondell and the children: David, 11: Kevin, 9; Tammy, 5, and one-year-old Stephanie. They live in an expensive house in a predominantly white neighborhood on the city's northwest side. The children also spend part of the summer with their father in Hollywood. Blondell seems to share Flip's passion for privacy. Neither she nor the children mix much with the neighbors, and recently she went so far as to call the police when a reporter sought to interview her.

Standing Offer. Flip quietly returns to Jersey City fairly regularly too, looking up old haunts and visiting with his brothers and sisters. Many of them have succumbed to the ghetto syndrome of poor jobs, welfare and--in two cases--jail. Like any other family with such a history, they sometimes reflect a mood of bitterness and envy. Perhaps inevitably, that mood can occasionally focus on Flip, producing a complaint that he is not doing all that a rich and successful brother should do.

But the evidence is not all against Flip. A few years ago, an electrician named Leroy Taylor, who had served as a father figure for Flip and several other kids in the neighborhood, learned that he had terminal cancer and committed suicide. Flip made a special trip to attend the funeral and paid all the expenses. He also sends money to his family, and has made a standing offer to underwrite any niece or nephew who wants to go to college. One who will take him up on it is Wilbur Wilson, a senior at Jersey City's Lincoln High School and an all-county and all-state linebacker. "He's concerned about us," says Wilbur. "He seems like an emotional person. When he comes home, he likes to sit down and talk to someone. It seems like it relieves him."

Whether it does or not. Flip will not say. Of the true nature of his family ties, or his feelings about his past, or even whether he has another 15-year plan for the future, there is no telling. "My show is my statement," he says. "What I have to say is on the screen. My life is my own. I don't want to talk about my private self. Why should I?" It is the same with Flip as with Geraldine. What you see, honey, is what you get.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.