Queen of the Robot Women: Deceased Artiste Lorene Yarnell

I remain fascinated by the TV variety shows of the Seventies, which basically offered viewers their last glimpse of the weird, anything-goes formula that had been around since vaudeville (today’s talent-competition shows are unbelievably mawkish and possess none of the pizzazz of the classic variety show — I have no patience for "inspirational" amateurs). So why not pay tribute to variety-show vet Lorene Yarnell, who died this week at the age of 66? (I’m passing on Patricia Neal, who will be better covered elsewhere).

Best known — by those who were around at the time — as half of the “Shields and Yarnell” mime duo, Yarnell started out as a dancer who had quite a lot of gigs on variety TV. She was one of the dancing girls on Shindig, The Dean Martin Show,and The Carol Burnett Show, among others. She danced in the movie Sweet Charity and was an all-around theatrical vet when she met street mime Robert Shields in 1972. The two met when they worked on “Fol-de-Rol,” a 1972 Krofft TV special, and became a couple both professionally and privately (they were married until 1986).

At the time S&Y were doing their act, an occasional mime might show up on a talk show or Ed Sullivan, but aside from the master, Marcel Marceau, it’s doubtful that any other mime act got as much attention and screen time as the husband and wife duo. And why was this? Well, it all comes down to one word: ROBOTS. Shields and Yarnell were simply the best fuckin’ robot duo on TV, in a time when Star Wars was about to hit big, and variety shows still had slots for “unusual” talents.

Thus, the pair became regulars on The Mac Davis Show and The Sonny and Cher Show (if my calculations are right, this was the jaw-dropping post-divorce Sonny and Cher show the couple were doing just to get back into starring gigs on TV). S&Y got a summer replacement show in 1977 — that phrase would no doubt need to be explained to anyone under 40, but at one time the networks cared enough about keeping viewership throughout the year that they brought on short-lived variety shows just for the summer months. The pair got the nod for a winter run in January of 1978 but were killed in the ratings by Laverne and Shirley, and from that point went back to doing guesting and stage gigs for the next decade.

In the Eighties, the couple broke up, and Yarnell went back to performing in the theater and acting on television (check out the Wonder Woman role below) and in the movies (Spaceballs). She reunited with Shields many times in the decades since their breakup, and it is indeed safe to say that no one incarnated a robot like those two did — I was initially sorta creeped out by what they were doing when I was younger (it was the not-blinking aspect, they never freaking blinked while playing “the Clinkers,” the robot husband and wife), then I grew to enjoy its sheer strangeness, and now I just think of it as part of a much simpler (and yes, more interestingly weird) time in TV history.

For a little Yarnell trip through variety TV, here’s her dancing behind Donna Lauren on a 1965 Shindig show (with Darlene Love in the backup singing group):



And continuing the go-go mood, here’s a slice from a 1969 show called What’s It All About, World? that I had never heard of before today. Here, Lorene dances to a number by Paul Revere and the Raiders:



Another segment from that show, which obviously was cued into the “nostalgia” vibe of the time. Host Dean Jones sings “The Roses of Success" with Lorene as one of the singer-dancers. Talk about yer Sixties time-trip:



Time-trip you say? What about Tony Randall singing a song about Calvin Coolidge with, again, Lorene Yarnell and Kathy Gale:



And just to truly mess with your head, consider a time when Eve Arden sang Jacques Brel on American television — now, as our society becomes more and more “multi-cultural” for real, the media does nothing to acknowledge music being made anywhere else in the world. For the sublime original by Jacques you can go here, but the Eve Arden version (backed, again, by Yarnell and Gale) is certainly a far weirder experience:



Here, Robert Shields looks back on his time with Yarnell (christ, he hasn’t aged much in 35 years!)



And yes, I have to include the robots. Actually there’s a marionettes bit that can’t be embedded, but here’s some of that Seventies robot stuff:



More robots. Yes, it was the body movement that made the bit, but that not-blinking business sold it.



S&Y do a little robotic turn for a local FM radio station:



And now we turn to some solo Yarnell, which is fascinating. She played the “evil superpowered ant queen” Formicida on The New Adventures of Wonder Woman. There is a hell of a lot of stunt work going on in this fight scene:



And evidently Formicida became Wonder Woman’s comedic sidekick at some point (can an Ant Queen be a comedic sidekick?):



This is the single strangest thing I found in connection with Yarnell’s name, a rather bizarre 1983 ad (which is apparently real) for a child abuse hotline:



Since the last clip is sorta bizarre, let me end on a mellower note with Shields and Yarnell guesting on The Muppet Show. It’s odd to hear Shields talking during their act, but it’s a nice mix of both his initial talent (mime) and hers (dance). And the felt folk too:

Follow the Bouncing Beard: Deceased Artiste Mitch Miller

All-American kitsch is deeply engrained in the legacy of Mitch Miller, who died this week at ninety-freakin’-nine years old. As a record producer, Miller was responsible for some early experiments with layering sound, echo chambers, and using unusual instruments to achieve jarring effects. As a musician, he was considered one of the foremost oboists in the American philharmonic world (and how many oboe players can ya really name?). As a performer and TV host, he was perhaps one of the corniest guys this side of Lawrence Welk, presenting homespun entertainment that was dated even as it was being broadcast for the first time.

Let’s first deal with his work as a producer. As an A&R man and producer for Columbia, he did purportedly discover Aretha Franklin and brought public attention to several singers — including Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, and Rosemary Clooney — who later went on to do interesting work, once Mitch stopped personally producing them. The long string of hit records that he produced at Columbia during the early Fifties are rather amazing for their corny appeal — I mean, I do enjoy these songs, but they were basically novelty records with more talented singers providing the vocals (not that there’s anything wrong with novelty records, I love many of ’em). The highlights were no doubt (yikes) “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” Rosie’s “Come On-a My House” (which one obit notes Miller wanted Clooney to sing in an Armenian accent, per the original dialect-driven version by Saroyan and Bagdasarian; what she wound up doing was an Italian accent), and the song that will always and forever sound wonderfully ridiculous (Mel Brooks’ satire couldn’t beat the real thing), Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train,” which found Miller playing a wood block to simulate a cracking whip.

Miller did get Columbia artists their first major hit, but he felt compelled to create a musical “commotion” around ’em. The only one he couldn’t do much of anything for was former big-band vocalist Frank Sinatra, whom he made sing the best/worst jaw-dropper of the Columbia novelty-songs-sung-by-mainstream-singers, “Mama Will Bark,” in which, yes, Old Blue Eyes does make doggy noises to the bored-sounding TV star Dagmar (see link below). “Mama…” actually isn’t the worst Sinatra song from the Columbia period (I have one on a CD that I may never play again ever, which finds Sinatra being forced to do some kind of godawful choral business). Mitch made Frank sing gimmicky dance numbers, like “The Hucklebuck,” but one of the songs from that period is indeed awesome, “Bim Bam Baby” (which most folks know from its use in a Kids in the Hall piece of film).

So now onto Mitch’s main claim to fame, the amazing series of LPs and subsequent TV series (1961-64) known as “Sing Along with Mitch.” We had the Miller Xmas album in my house and it was indeed dragged out every year and played (sometimes more than once). The sound of all these male voices singing in unison in pretend-happy voices was at first reassuring, then oddly creepy to me as a kid (what was this, a prison choir?). Mitch’s LPs were calculated to “counteract” the rock ’n’ roll music that he hated so dearly, so you’d get a group of songs that “everybody knew” and in case they didn’t, the lyrics would be included in the album’s gatefold.

I have been told that my uncle (a distant one, and now you will know why) brought one of these suckers over to my grandmother’s house, and had everyone listen to it (few seemed willing to actually sing along with the crap). The tune that particularly tormented my parents was the traditional “Go Tell Aunt Rhody (the old gray goose is dead),” which ain’t fun in even the best of folkie arrangements. So, yes, there was Mitch Miller abuse in my family history, the man’s work brought “smiles” (he loved them goddamned smiles on his TV series) to millions of simple-minded souls, but he and his uniformly-jacketed male singers were just damned creepy, the definite precursor to those CIA plants in “Up with People” (and when are we gonna hear more about that, Glenn Close… huh?).

Here’s the hitch, though: I have grown up into an adult who is fixated by camp and kitsch, and so even if I have certain odd sense-memories, I probe the wounds in my present state. And so I will link ya to some Miller MOA-mania. And as you listen, just keep in mind that the same Miller Xmas album I was subjected to as a kid was used by the government to torment David Koresh and the Camp Davidians into giving up their weapons and leaving their compound. And we all know how badly that went.

If we’re going to talk about Miller as a producer, let’s go straight for the throat and have the “singing rage, Miss Patti Page” (oh yes, I listened to William B. Williams as a kid) sing her big hit, “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?”



Without further ado, here is the record that Sinatra hated until his dying day, the aforementioned “Mama Will Bark”:



And because nothing beats singing the bizarreness that was “Sing Along With Mitch,” I urge you watch at least a few mind-numbing minutes of one YT poster’s panoply of Miller episodes. Here’s a good introduction. And what WAS up with Mitch's weirdo method of conducting? (Facing *away* from his singers...):



But if you need the old Sixties variety-show incentive of a guest star, here is a show with George Burns guesting:



Uncle Miltie shows up on this one:



And, in one of the odder convergences of wholesomeness, the grown-up Shirley Temple guest-stars and does sing here: