The standard-bearer of old Hollywood: Deceased Artiste Skip E. Lowe

On the East Coast we have the icon Joe Franklin, talk show host extraordinaire, “Memory Lane” expert, and all-around quirky NYC character. The West Coast equivalent of Joe was surely Skip E. Lowe, whose show may have begun 25 years after Joe’s (and was done on access rather than commercial TV), but he was another idiosyncratic talk-show host, a devoted fan of Golden Age Hollywood in all its manifestations and quite a character as well.

Skip E. died this week at 85 after having done his L.A. access show Skip E. Lowe Looks at Hollywood (also carried in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and here in NYC) for the last 36 years. Skip’s show was fascinating, even if you’re not a student of Hollywood’s past or the many lower levels of cabaret entertainment. The show was done against a stark, black background, and both Skip and his guest would be shown primarily in close-up.

Skip plastered on his “sincere listening face” throughout the program (I do believe he was interested in what his guests were saying, it was just the expressions he made while they spoke that were mind-blowing). If he wasn’t being seen, he was heard — verbally assenting, repeating what the guest had said, or merely rushing into the next question.

He had a broad knowledge of show-biz history, but occasionally his mind worked faster than his mouth, and he would ask questions like the one repeated in an L.A. Times article about him, "Now, Marilyn Monroe went back with Joe DiMaggio after she committed suicide, didn't she?" (He explained that away by saying he was referring to her previous failed suicide attempts.)

Skip’s life up until the talk show is covered in his two autobiographies (one of which, Hollywood Gomorrah, was just released). Born Sammy Labella, he was a child actor (seen at right at 16) who worked onstage and in film, after a traumatic event in his personal life — it is noted in the same L.A. Times article that he was raped by a group of boys when he was nine years old. He bragged often on his show about his years as a nightclub MC, where he appeared between vaudeville acts and strippers, doing jokes, songs, or merely commenting on the crowd.

Lowe was a show-biz “insider,” who had strong connections to older stars and those who were on the nightclub/cabaret circuit. He proved his connections over the years by getting a very impressive roster of guests for a cable access show. Everyone from Orson Welles and Bette Davis to the individuals highlighted below came by to pass a half-hour chatting with Skip.

In a New York Times article written with love —and a rather glaring mistake in the opening and closing paragraphs that confuses Skip E. with Mickey Rooney (right) — Harry Shearer noted, “His obsessions with show business has [sic] nothing to do with grosses or ratings and everything to do with big breaks and comebacks and wonderful evenings in the theater. That is, it’s a fairyland reading of an industry that has become crueler and greedier than it was in its Golden Age, whenever that was.”

The most “press” Lowe received on a national level was when Martin Short revealed that his fat-suited character Jiminy Glick, the clueless show-biz interviewer, was based “in part” on Skip. I’ve never been a fan of the Glick character (fat-suit humor leaves me completely cold), but I did love Short’s earlier, more wonderfully “inside” material, which included a bizarre moment on The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley (1988-89).

For some reason known only to Short and his crew (perhaps to entertain themselves), in one of the Count Floyd segments (with Joe Flaherty reprising his classic no-budget horror-host character), Short came out as a schizophrenic horror folk singer named “Skip E. High,” doing an impression of Lowe but making him a rather strange guitar-playing folksinger. The character struck me as very funny, and this was a few years before I found out about Lowe and realized exactly who Short was paying tribute to (and abusing, let’s be honest).

Two channels on YouTube have some good examples of Skip’s show. The earliest interview that has surfaced is this chat with the ever-feisty Eartha Kitt:

The Kitt interview is so early on that the customary black background hasn’t been introduced on Skip’s show. Here’s a classic Lowe segment, with him interviewing the late Eric Douglas. Skip gets up in arms when he discusses how poor Eric has been worked over by the press! (No, I don’t have any idea why the show is in b&w — that old-movie feel?).

As you can imagine, kids of celebrity parents can be found by the barrelful in L.A. Thus, Skip had on Arthur Marx, and here he has both Christina Crawford (who doesn’t say much in this segment) and the late Christian Brando. At this point (before the murder trial and the spousal abuse court cases), Christian was working as (no shit) a tree surgeon:

One of the most interesting sides of Skip’s career was his connection to the periphery of show biz. Here, from one of the many shows he hosted at an L.A. nightclub is a 98-year-old woman comedian woman doing an “adult” song. Here Skip takes a limo ride with Warhol/Morrissey superstar Holly Woodlawn.

And here, because tribute acts are *everywhere*, is an episode Skip devoted to a pair of impressionists touring as Martin and Lewis (whom he interviews as if they were Dean and Jerry, then as themselves, then again as D&J). At the 5:00 mark of this clip, they do an agonizingly long version of “the Announcer’s Test” (already discussed in this blog entry):

Tony Curtis recounting stories of his youth to Skip:

You can see the full opening of Lowe’s show in this segment featuring Skip’s interview with Milton Berle, discussing his experiences as a child actor:

Shelley Winters was a good friend of Skip’s (although it was more likely the other way around). Here she is on the show:

And here she is celebrating her 85th birthday at an outdoor party. She is sadly unrecognizable due to health problems, but she seems to be having a great time with guests Terry Moore, Rip Taylor, Jackie Stallone, Nanette Fabray, Kaye Ballard, and Rip Taylor:

Skip returned to his first career, acting, with small roles in several films in the Seventies and Eighties. On his website he claims to have appeared in “La Dolce Vita (Award-winning French [!] movie),” but that doesn’t appear anywhere else online. He did, however, play an uncredited doctor in Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976) and had a supporting role as a hairdresser in the Blaxploitation movie Black Shampoo (1976). He can be seen at the :54 mark:

Skip did a PSA message about bullying that I’m sure reflected his own past problems. The interesting thing here is that he doesn’t seem to be working from a script (rarely are PSAs ad-libbed, but this one seems like it was home-made):

Skip’s moment in the national news spotlight came in September 1991 when he assaulted businessman (and crook) Charles H. Keating Jr with a powdered blonde wig (taken, an L.A. Times article notes, from an MGM movie travel bag”). Skip apparently lost a great deal of money (close to $80,000, he claimed) because his former business manager invested in Keating’s unsafe “high-yield, high risk” bonds.

Skip is quoted in the Times piece: "’This is for America,’ Lowe said as he took a swipe. ’And this is for the senior citizens you ripped off…. I hated [Keating’s] grinning face and attitude,’ Lowe said. ‘I did something I had to do. It was not just for me but for all senior citizens and for all American people, who have to pay for what he did.’"

In 2008, when John McCain was running for president, Skip did a mock “interview” with a picture of McCain, bringing up the politician’s ties to Keating (Skip calls McCain “an old, grumpy bad man!”). This is cable access at its finest:

When I found out that Skip had died, I immediately flashed on the single most amazing video clip I’ve seen of him (discovered by friend Rich Brown), It’s called “Skip E. Lowe’s Star Sweep.” It consists of Skip walking down Hollywood Boulevard and then settling down on Britney Spears’ star, which he proceeds to clean with a whiskbroom. (The title is blessedly literal.)

He tells young Britney to put her panties back on, to stop getting arrested, to stop being such “a dirty bitch” (bleeped out). I wish he had done more of these segments. Skip, we’re gonna miss ya!

Stella-vision: Leo Stella's "Seems Like Old Times"

Very few cable-access shows can be watched again and again, and fewer still remain entertaining over a decade later. One of the ones that I can rewatch and am still thoroughly entertained by is Seems Like Old Times, the weekly lounge-piano spectacular that was on in the mid-1990s in Manhattan and starred the one and only Mr. Leo Stella. Leo is lost to the sands of time (if you’re out there, give a shout, Leo!), but his show lives on, thanks to those of us with VCRs who captured “the beauty and the splendor of the magnificence that is me” (as Leo would put it).

I have posted on YouTube a chunk of an episode in which Leo holds forth on an old friend of his who was being put in a home by a young social worker — right after he sings a sleepy and suggestive “Some Day My Prince Will Come”:



In another episode, Leo sang the song from the Broadway show Tenderloin that became a hit for Bobby Darin, “Artificial Flowers,” in classic lounge style:



On the same episode, Leo revealed the reason for his mock “street” attire when he performed an utterly mind-roasting rap version of the Noel Coward song “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington”:



And responded to a youthful heckler on the phone (I felt that the show went a bit downhill when he accepted phone calls from the audience) who would just chant, “Faggot, faggot, faggot!” Leo’s response to this young rapscallion was to serenade him in song:



I have more Leo to upload in the future. You won’t be seeing this kind of entertainment on the major networks anytime soon — but things would be a lot better if you did.

"W for... the Weather Report show": Deceased (Access) Artiste Clinton Freeman

Some public access shows can’t be described, they just have to be seen. Such was the case with The Weather Report, a show hosted and produced by one Clinton Freeman, whom I had been informed died a few months back. I offer this slice of his show on YouTube as an example of access at its most creative, humorous (intentional and otherwise), and definitely strangest.

What “Video Clint” (as he at one time referred to himself on the show) did on his show was to deconstruct newspapers and magazine pieces (articles, ads, illustrations) by pointing out common themes. He was particularly obsessed with weather maps and would discuss them in much detail on the show, referring to how their existence in said periodicals provided references to his show. He had several other preoccupations, which included among others Britpop bands (and his hero Morrissey), very beautiful supermodels, gorillas, and bananas. The last-mentioned I believe was an oblique reference to the famous Warhol cover of the first Velvet Underground LP — Clint was obsessed with Warhol and at times seemed to indicate on The Weather Report that Andy was the inspiration for the show.

Clint had done a number of cable-access shows here in Manhattan. His first, The Four Horsemen, was done with friends and was pretty hard to fathom for those who tuned in casually (the participants wore suits and animal masks and made bizarre pronouncements); the phrase “self-aware” would pretty much cover that show. He returned on his own with shows called Lovecats and The Chair (at least I think it was called “The Chair” — perhaps it was “Electric Chair,” which would, of course, be another Warholian citation). In any case, by 1996, the time when this clip was shot, Clint had his own little world of references going on. It was very unique stuff and provoked fascination, laughter, or boredom, or a mixture of the three. See if you experience any of those reactions:



For the year 2000, access producers (working, very obviously, with no budgets) were faced with a minor dilemma: how to commemorate the new millennium? I wanted to do something about the history of film, but settled for a three-episode history of the film noir. For his show, Clint did “the best rock shows of the 20th Century,” which were revealed to have been the rock shows he had attended and liked the most. He held up tickets from the gigs, recalled stories about them, and told us about the venues they took place in. I can’t imagine that kind of content occurring in any other format than cable access (although, of course, YouTube has fast usurped a lot of the strangeness that used to find a home solely on access). Here is Clint’s obit in the New York Times. RIP, Video Clint, your like will not be seen again!

And why did we love public access again?

Classic Manhattan public access is sorely underrepresented on YouTube, but occasionally some clips show up that remind us of the reasons that access was such an addictive pleasure back in the day (“the day” being the 1970s through the 1990s). You can find such pleasures in the great postings of Coca Crystal, but also here in this edited-down rendition of an episode of Richard H. Roffman and Friends.

The Roffman show seemed like a motlier version of Joe Franklin. The reason for this was that Roffman charged the guests on his local radio and cable-access shows (so much for the “friends” idea). The result was that you got a whole-hearted plug, but also had a short (very short) segment on the air, and then that was it. Here you have everyone from a local fashion designer (Roffman urging her “let’s go, c’mon!”) to vanity-press authors to a jello wrestler and the president of a Bing Crosby fan club. The uniquely talented Jim Grasso steals the show, however (hear the stifled laughter).

This condensation of the episode makes yer head spin, in several ways. There are few shows like this on TV anymore (and the remaining ones are all on access). Dig the vintage opening disclaimer from a wary Manhattan Cable:

Speaking of patriotism: Leo Stella sings "All-American Boy"

The common wisdom is that you can find out about anyone on the Internet, particularly those who were in the public spotlight for any amount of time. Well, that ain’t true for those who’ve toiled on public access. A lot of the legends of access here in Manhattan can’t be tracked down via the Net, and their stuff doesn't even show up on the glutted YouTube unless they themselves choose to post their clips. Sometimes, every so often, you get something that turns viral because of its comic appeal — as with the tape of access fix-it host Ken Sander being pranked on a call-in show, or the amazing “Preacher X” from California doing one of his “I’m God, beeyotch” raps.

In that spirit, I offer up another tidbit of the great Leo Stella, a lounge performer who seemed to have had a pretty solid resume in summer stock and other kinds of theater and cabaret when he took on his “Seems Like Old Times” program in the early Nineties on Manhattan cable-access. As the show went on, Leo started opening up to us and showed us his different sides: the show-biz pro would turn into the local neighborhood gesticulating Italian, who would then become a bookish dude reading his favorite poems, who would then give way to the horny Leo who discussed his “cherubs” — the young boys he loved so dearly, and would occasionally provide “candy” for. It was a helluva show, and it is well-remembered by those who saw it back when. In honor of the inauguration of the swelling feeling of patriotism (had to) this week, I offer up an excerpt of Leo crooning his own composition, “All-American Boy.”

NYC Public Access in the early ’80s: a look back

This little gem was posted by Coca Crystal, but deserved its own entry in this blog. It comes from a program hosted by NYC radio and TV fixture Richard Bey, and seems to be the “2 on the Town" segment that Coca refers to in the opener clip linked to below. It reflects the trend in coverage of access to focus solely on the sex-related programming, as Coca is the only non-sex show included in the round-up. As an access producer, I can’t tell you how many pieces I’ve read about NYC cable-access that mention Robin Byrd, who hasn’t been on public access for years (and hasn’t done a new show in eons), but has been making mucho dinero on leased access Channel 35, which was Time Warner’s way of distancing itself from the emerging adult content on “Channel J” (the old public access channel on Manhattan Cable) and has become a mind-deadening corporate-controlled station filled with nothing but faux-erotic 1-900 crap advertising since Goldstein’s Midnight Blue signed off the air several years back.

Anyway, this clip harkens back to the salad days of Manhattan access, starting out with the full range of shows, but settling on interviews with Byrd, Goldstein, Ugly George, and the rather-tame-by-comparison Coca.

Public Access Hall of Fame: Coca Crystal

Long before there was YouTube, there was… public access. I would love to present the cream of the access crop on this here blog, and hope that in the future I have the time to digitize the many oddities I’ve collected on tape just since the early 1990s (I was a latecomer to this gorgeous medium, starting the Funhouse in 1993). For the time being, I can point to the wonders that have already been posted on, yes, the access-usurper that is the mighty YT.

Coca Crystal did a wonderfully free-form variety/talk program on Manhattan access from 1977 to 1995 called (in the paraphrased words of Emma Goldman), “If I Can’t Dance, You Can Keep Your Revolution.” The best thing about pure access is that it’s hard to believe that it ever existed — if you watch the recently released DVDs of Midnight Blue (particularly Volume 2), you’ll see a world that seems imaginary: a television program that had ads for hookers and hustlers, traveling orgies (with buffets!), porn mags, and beaucoup massage parlors and gay swing clubs (in major NYC apartment buildings and hotels). Similarly Coca’s program is a record of a MUCH more liberated time: her range of guests, her loose attitude to interviewing and show structure, and, most importantly, her lighting of a joint on the air at the outset of the program. She even included “review” segments, where she and her cohosts would discuss the grades of pot being sold around the city. Oh man, a very, very different era….

Check out her opening here:


And there’s a cool closer where everyone just dances here.

Of course, the thing that will sustain interest in these programs are the “name” guests that appeared on them, like Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.

And a little piana player named Phil Glass
(listen to the roster he gives out with at the opening of the clip—take a flying trip back to ’80s NYC, man).

But of more interest to me are the truly radical and yes wonderfully weird folk who guested on Coca’s show. This list includes another access host and NYC citizen emeritus, a man who was a Beat, a hippie, a Fug, and a goddamned troublemaker, the blessedly strange Tuli Kupferberg:



And if you like Tuli’s form of revolution, but you need to have your mind warped even further, please do sample the immortal Tiny Tim discussing veteran’s day with the show’s cohost, a writer named Renfreu Neff. I used to review for a magazine that published writings by Ms. Neff — I was sure that the name was a pseudonym, but was assured by the editor that it was a real person. I was interested to learn (you can loin so much from YouTube) that this lady was indeed named Renfreu, and used to cohost Coca’s show, which I caught the last few years of.



And if Tiny was a bit too run of the mill for ya, let me introduce you to his finest discovery, singing/songwriting granddad Izzy Fertel, who had a singular fascination with women’s liberation.



I thank Rich Brown for leading me to Coca’s trove on YT. Rich was the host and co-producer of another legendary Manhattan access show, Beyond Vaudeville. There are only a few BV clips on YT, but let me assure you, it was the very cream of access. A good representative clip can be found here.

East Coast/West Coast war: public access songbirds collide!

I’m going to be linking to many of the items on YouTube that I feel deserve recognition, in an effort to expand what we do on the show every week into — yes, gotta say it, gotta say it — the 21st century. In this case, these vids haven’t been exactly “viral” in the sense of the YT “celebs” saluted on talking-heads shows on VH1. But then again, this stuff, my friends, is the real meat of the matter: folks who are completely sincere about what they’re doing, and they did in a medium dear to my own heart, cable-access.

The first is a song that functions on a “Day in the Life” level: it’s a two-part song by a NYC songbird who made her only TV appearances on MNN’s beloved “Stairway to Stardom.” We salute the obsessed souls who have put the STS clips on YouTube, Mitch Friedman and Jennifer Sharpe, and there are literally dozens of memorable performance up there right now. But few can compare to the joy of Lucille Cataldo, and her original composition, “Hairdresser, Haidresser.” I am particularly taken by the way the song slides into something called “Tease Louise,” which seems to be another song entirely, but is wrapped into the hairdresser theme by Lucille. They always say “write about what you know,” and Ms. Cataldo clearly did that here (rarely has the process of being at a hairdresser been rendered in such a detailed way).

And now we come to the Left Coast’s contribution to the insanely catchy song competition, a song that is itself about insanity. I’ve been told this is a well known commodity on the ’Tube (it has already spawned several cover versions), but I just discovered it last week, and now cannot shake it out of my cranium, no matter how hard I try. It’s Penny Pearce’s penetratingly aggressive “Why Do You Think You Are Nuts?” The song is quite something — although not as complex musically as Cataldo’s two-part epic, Penny and her pals do get into an Alice Cooper groove here with some theatrics that are complemented by their wonderful, non-matching outfits. Feel free to cast a vote for your favorite demented ditty.


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