Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir (12 page)

You did not see many black people in those states back then. I pulled into a gas station outside Minot, North Dakota, because my car was overheating. The attendant said, “I can’t believe it! You’re the second black to come through here in the last year and a half. Chubby Checker stopped here when his bus broke down. You guys need to take better care of your vehicles!”

Between dates I returned to New York, where once a week I did studio audience warm-ups for a CBS sitcom called
Calucci’s Department
, which starred James Coco. Not many sitcoms were still being shot in New York rather than LA, so this was a prime gig for a stand-up. My job was to get the audience revved up to laugh during the taping of the show set in a New York State unemployment office. Apparently being out of work was not very funny, because the series lasted just a couple of months. Before it folded, however, a woman came up to me after my warm-up act and said she had cast
Calucci’s Department
. Now she was casting a new series starring Esther Rolle, who played the black housekeeper on
Maude
. She wanted to know if I would be interested in being on a sitcom.

I said, “Sure, let me know,” and walked away. I didn’t think any more about it. There are so many people in show business who say they are this or that—and aren’t; who are going to do this or that for you—and don’t; who say, “give me your card” and “here’s my card”—and never call that you end up not believing anybody. So many gigs and TV shows had fallen through before for me that I was skeptical of everyone and everything. My line is “Everyone is a liar . . . until proven full of shit.” If I had a dollar for every person who came into the Improv with a business card that said “Producer,” I would already have been a rich man.

The next week I was about to do my warm-up and the woman from CBS, Pat Kirkland, was there again, this time with a man wearing a golf hat.

“Jimmie, I’d like you to meet Norman Lear.” I had no idea who he was.

“Welcome aboard,” he said.

What was he talking about? On board what?

“We’ll begin shooting in about a month,” he continued. “We’re glad you’re on our show.”

I said to myself, “What show?” and went into my warm-up.

“You’re very funny,” he told me afterward. “We’d love for you to come in to help audition one of the girls too.” The next day his people called my people—Louie the cook—and left a message with a day and time to meet them at CBS.

Lear had already scored with the massive hits
All in the Family
,
Sanford and Son
, and
Maude
. His new show was called
The Black Family
—at least that is what it said on the pages for the scene I did with the actresses—Chip Fields, Tamu Blackwell, and Bern Nadette Stanis—who were auditioning for the character of my younger sister Thelma. Though I never auditioned, apparently I already had the part of a character named Junior. I believe Lear and producer Allan Manings had earlier seen me at the Improv and on the
Paar
show, and they had approved my casting. But they never told me anything about how they saw the character or what I should do with him. They just said, “Do it.”

That audition scene, about Thelma accusing Junior of stealing five dollars from her, would never make it into the series:

THELMA

(she snatches his painting off the bureau and goes to the open window . . . holds the painting out)

Give me back my $5.00, or I’ll throw this garbage out the window.

JUNIOR

(moving toward her threateningly)

Girl, you throw that painting out the window and you gonna hear some new sounds . . . whoosh when the painting passes the twelfth floor and whoosh again when you pass the painting.

Meanwhile, I was happy doing my stand-up. I had gigs lined up, including the college tour. These people I did not know were talking about taping a sitcom on the West Coast when I was doing just fine on the West Side. Well, they could keep talking; I was going to keep working. I wasn’t going to believe I was on a TV show until I was actually there.

So instead, I was in Fargo, North Dakota, playing a college, when the phone in my motel room woke me up at two in the morning.

“This is Tandem Productions in Los Angeles. We’re looking for Jimmie Walker.”

“You got him.”

“Did you get the contract for the show? You were supposed to sign it and be in Los Angeles.”

“Why?”

“We start rehearsals tomorrow. We sent you a ticket and were at the airport to pick you up. You weren’t there.”

“No one told me.” They had sent everything to Louie at the Improv.

“Go to the airport. A ticket will be waiting for you. Get on that plane.”

They met me in LA and put me up at the Farmer’s Daughter motel next to the CBS studios. As soon as I settled in I called Steve Landesberg, who was in town doing Bobby Darin’s variety show on NBC. “Steve, where can I get on stage?”

I was more concerned with doing my stand-up, which might lead to getting a shot on the Carson show, than this TV sitcom. The
Tonight Show
was the pinnacle for a stand-up comic, but it had moved three thousand miles from me, to Burbank, in mid-1972. If nothing else, this TV series had at least brought me to the West Coast too. I figured I would shoot the first couple shows of the sitcom, maybe get on Carson, then go back to New York to the Improv, call up Lou Johnson, and make up the college dates in North Dakota that I owed him.

That was my “plan” as I stood that night on the stage of the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard—the Store, as comics call it. As it turned out, none of that plan would come to pass.

The Black Family
became
Good Times
. The show was a rare spin-off of a spin-off. Lear had asked black actor Michael Evans, who played Lionel Jefferson on
All in the Family
, for ideas about expanding the character of Florida Evans on
All in the Family
, who had moved on to
Maude
, in order for Esther to head her own series. He and playwright friend Eric Monte came up with a concept based on Monte’s childhood in the Cabrini-Green projects of Chicago.

According to reports, Manings then did his own take on their pilot script, though Monte was credited as the writer of that first episode. The goal—bold and dangerous for the times—was to show the life—both the highs and lows—of a lower-class, urban black family dealing with the world. Importantly, the family would be solid and intact, headed by a father who worked and a mother with a moral backbone.

Florida was no longer a maid, and there was no mention of her previous employer, Maude. John Amos, who played her firefighter husband Henry on
Maude
, was now named James, a man from Mississippi with a sixth-grade education who struggled to keep a job despite his best efforts. Rather than living in New York, the Evans clan was in a housing project in a poor, inner-city neighborhood of Chicago—apartment 17C at fictitious 963 N. Gilbert Avenue. The infamous Cabrini-Green projects were shown in the opening and closing credits, but they were never referred to by name.

James and Florida were role models, strong and admirable. J. J. (as in James Junior) was their always-getting-into-trouble seventeen-year-old eldest, Thelma their beautiful-and-sweet sixteen-year-old daughter, and Michael their hope-of-the-future ten-year-old son. Though Rolle was top-billed, Amos second, and Ja’Net DuBois, who played neighbor Willona Woods, was third, the element that originally was going to make the revolutionary concept of an “urban black family” work for popular TV was young Michael. His appeal, as in many sitcoms before—from Opie on
Andy Griffith
to Ricky on
Ozzie and Harriet
—would be the hook that would bring family audiences back every week.

The difference between those earlier classic sitcoms and
Good Times
is that Michael would talk about more than family life. This “militant midget,” as he was referred to on the series, would talk about society and politics right there in front of the mainstream American viewer. The audience would feel threatened hearing speeches about racism from Rolle or Amos, even—or perhaps especially—on a sitcom. But Michael saying on national TV that “boy” was a racist word was okay. After all, he was just a child.

But who was going to play Michael? The producers very much wanted Ralph Carter, the twelve-year-old who had been Tony nominated for his performance in the Broadway musical
Raisin
. But his contract committed him to a long run of that hit show. So they brought in another twelve-year-old actor, Laurence Fishburne, who had been raised in Brooklyn and had recently made his TV debut during the last season of
The Mod Squad
. They kept working on trying to sign Ralph, all the while being honest with Laurence that he might be replaced at any moment.

I did not have an agent or a manager. With contracts having to be dealt with, I needed someone who knew about the legal side. A friend recommended Jerry Kushnick, the New York lawyer for Ben Vereen, who had starred on Broadway in
Jesus Christ Superstar
and
Pippin
. Kushnick also had recently gained notoriety for winning a major case for Terry Knight, the former manager of Grand Funk Railroad, against that rock group. Jerry agreed to take me on. Louie the cook was relieved he didn’t have to spend any more of his valuable time on my career!

Jerry told me I should also get an agent. I suggested Lou Johnson, who I was already working with on the college tour. He said I needed a far more powerful force in the business and approached ICM (International Creative Management) in New York, even though ICM had seen me perform many times on stage and had never expressed any interest in representing me. But now I was on a TV series; they saw dollar signs and signed me as a client.

I was not an actor and never said I was. While in New York I did a few TV commercials (Ballantine beer, Sears sneakers), but the only acting I had done were tiny roles earlier that year as a gang member in
Gordon’s War
, directed by Ossie Davis, and as a street hood in
Badge 373
, a gritty cop thriller directed by Howard Koch.

Casting folks would see me at the Improv and usually reject me, saying, “You don’t
sound
black.” After working for years to get rid of my ghetto New York accent, ghettoese was exactly what they wanted for their films. On stage I would try to put on an exaggerated black accent. But after playing so many downtown clubs in front of white audiences who did not want to hear ghettoese, keeping that accent was getting tougher and tougher for me. The
Badge 373
filmmakers first saw me at the Improv and had the same problem—they did not think I came across as “black enough.”

When I went to audition, I stopped in a store at a subway station on my way and bought a blue denim floppy hat. I figured that maybe if I wore that hat, after stomping on it and dirtying it up a bit, I would look more urban, more street. It worked. The casting people suddenly thought I was perfect and I got the role—getting kicked in the head in an alley by Robert Duvall.

My few lines in
Badge 373
ended up still being dubbed by someone who sounded “blacker.” But from then on I considered that blue hat my good luck charm.

Naturally, the
Good Times
folks, from Lear to Manings, wanted trained actors. Esther had made her New York stage debut in 1962 and was enormously respected. For three years John Amos had been Gordy the weatherman on the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
—one of my favorite sitcoms of all time. Ja’Net had made her Broadway debut in the original production of
Golden Boy
with Sammy Davis Jr. Whoever played the Evans family’s youngest son Michael, whether Ralph or Laurence, would also be a legit actor. Manings later said they had great difficulty finding a true actor to play J. J. When I was first suggested, he rejected me, saying, “No, he’s a stand-up comic. . . . I prefer to work with actors whom I would bend.”

At the first reading for the first show they realized that I might not bend.

The cast, writers, and producers sat around a table, and the actors read aloud the script for the pilot. After various lines the writers would punch them up with “ha, ha, ha.” I wondered what they were laughing about. I didn’t hear any jokes. At one point I stopped, turned to Lear sitting next to me, and said, “This isn’t funny.”

After we were done but before anyone left the table, I spoke up: “That was terrible. We have to do this over.”

When I go on stage, I want devastating laughter—total devastation—until the minute I walk off. I want to always be the funniest I can be. When I did a joke at the Improv and one of my comic friends didn’t think it worked, he told me. That is one reason comics are always miserable—there is always somebody who doesn’t think you’re funny and doesn’t mind telling you. You get used to it. Or maybe someone would say, “You know what would be better?” and suggest a change. You listened and didn’t take it too personally. Because if it’s better, it’s better.

Manings took me to the side and told me that in television you do not do what I just did.

“Look, I appreciate your input,” he said, “but a lot of people have worked very hard on this. If you have a problem with what people have written, come to me or the story editors, Norman Paul and Jack Elinson, and tell us how you feel. But don’t voice it like you did. That’s not good.”

He was trying to be nice. What he could have said was, “Just read the words, asshole!”

After two weeks of rehearsal with us Fishburne assumed he had the gig. On the day we were set to begin taping for the first time, he showed up ready to go. So too did Ralph. His contract situation had been sorted out, and he was now playing Michael Evans. Laurence was crushed. Many years down the road I would see Laurence at the gym we would go to in LA, and we wondered how his life might have been different if he had been on our show. He would definitely not have been able to land a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s epic
Apocalypse Now
when he was fourteen years old. He may have thought not being Michael Evans was a blow to his career at the time, but perhaps that was the best thing that could have happened to him.