There`s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the title stars of ”Laverne & Shirley” were so jealous of each other`s air time that when one actress was saying her lines, the other stood out of camera range with a stopwatch to make sure she would get equal time.
That kind of egomania and insecurity might be typical in a star-creating medium such as television, but don`t look for any of those symptoms on the set of ”Newhart,” the CBS sitcom about the eccentric inhabitants of a Vermont country inn, which is in its eighth and last season this year.
On a soundstage in the San Fernando Valley, Peter Scolari, who plays Michael, perhaps the shallowest yuppie on the face of the Earth, is doing a nightclub act at a tacky bar called the Gunpowder Club. It`s clear that Michael shouldn`t give up his day job. His act consists of singing the theme songs from TV shows such as ”That Girl,” ”Bonanza” and ”The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Overcome with emotion, Michael stops singing and has a nervous breakdown that takes up 5 long minutes of airtime on a half-hour show.
Meanwhile, the alleged star of the show, Bob Newhart, is sitting in the nightclub audience, watching Michael`s mental collapse. Newhart didn`t have a single line, and unlike Laverne or Shirley, he definitely wasn`t holding a stopwatch.
Last season Newhart also was largely confined to reacting to Michael and his girlfriend Stephanie`s (Julia Duffy) screwed-up lives. As Newsweek put it, ”Bob Newhart has made a career trying to shrink into the scenery.”
All that represents incredible generosity on the part of the title star of ”Newhart,” but he doesn`t see it that way. The 59-year-old Oak Park-born actor considers it a savvy career move.
”Shows where the star hogs all the stories don`t last more than one season,” Newhart said in his cozy dressing room on the MTM backlot in Studio City. ”Maybe one reason we lasted eight seasons is the rest of the cast gets a lot of airtime. I`d just as soon react to something as do it. And it`s a wonderful scene for Peter. A moment for him to go bananas.”
Jack Benny provided the role model for Newhart`s generosity toward his supposedly supporting players. While preparing for a radio show, Benny gave all his best lines to his guest stars. One of the guests warned him that he was upstaging himself, and Benny, according to Newhart, replied, ”Yeah, but I`m going to be back next week.”
However, longevity, even for a workaholic like Newhart, who plans a 20-city comedy concert tour this spring, has its limits. Although CBS would love to have the critically acclaimed sitcom run forever, Newhart is calling it quits at the end of this season.
”I`m not tired of performing, because the scripts are still good. When you find yourself alone in your den on a Sunday afternoon reading the next week`s script and laughing out loud, you can`t get tired.”
Still, he says, ”There has been this little man on my shoulder saying now`s the time to go. And he has been right in the past.”
In 1978, the ”little man” told him that it was time to go at the end of the sixth season of ”The Bob Newhart Show,” in which he played a psychologist treating patients only marginally more demented than the characters on his current show. Dissastisfaction with the quality of the scripts prompted his departure even though ”The Bob Newhart Show” was still a ratings champ at the time he left.
Last year, Newhart almost called it quits, but that time it was over dissatisfaction with ”Newhart`s” time slot, which the network moved from the supposedly ”adult” hour of 8 o`clock to kiddie time at 7 p.m. The show promptly did a nosedive in the ratings. Newhart, whose mild manner can hide a will of steel, gave the network an ultimatum: Move us out of the family hour or we won`t be back.
”I didn`t want to go off television getting beat by `Alf,”` which aired opposite ”Newhart” in the 7 p.m. time slot. ”A real person I wouldn`t mind losing to, but not to a furry hand puppet,” Newhart said, sounding a lot like the put-upon hotelier he plays on his show.
Newhart has put his foot down on other occasions. When a new director told him to say his lines faster and stop stammering, because the show was running too long, the man was fired.
”I told him, `This stammer has gotten me a home in Bel Air, and I`m not about to change it,”` he recalled. The stammer is real, and Newhart insists he didn`t even realize he had a speech impediment until someone pointed it out to him years ago.
It`s typical of Newhart that his speech defect never bothered him. Unlike most comedians, who seem to have had tortured childhoods, Newhart said his was largely happy except for a little Catholic guilt.
He attended Catholic elementary and high schools and went on to Loyola University, where he earned a degree in accounting. After two years in the Army, he enrolled in Loyola`s law school but was asked to leave after his first year because of poor grades. (His press biography says he quit. Newhart said that`s too kind. ”I was kicked out.”)
Although the 16 years-plus of Catholic education ”laid on the guilt a little too hard,” Newhart remains grateful for the experience. ”I do a whole 7 minutes (in his nighclubt act) on Catholic guilt. It was painful, but anything that gives you material can`t be all that bad. Protestants think a play like `Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You` is a farce. But Catholics know-it`s a documentary.”
Routines via phone lines
After law school, Newhart spent a few miserable years as an accountant at Glidden and Gypsum in Chicago. To alleviate the boredom, he`d call a fellow accountant at another firm and crack jokes. These were the embyronic phone conversations that Newhart later incorporated into his monologues. Newhart and the other accountant taped their conversations and sold them to radio stations. The venture was a commercial disaster.
It wasn`t a total loss. The tapes got him a job performing man-on-the-street interviews for a TV morning show on the local ABC station in Chicago. The competition on the other station, ”Captain Kangaroo,” clobbered Newhart`s show, which lasted a month.
The head of A & R at Warner Bros. Records caught Newhart doing his Abraham Lincoln impersonation at a local Emmy awards show and signed up the young comedian for a comedy album. That album, ”The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” sold 750,000 copies and made it to No. 1 on the charts in 1960.
A year later he had his own variety show on NBC. It won an Emmy and a Peabody but was canceled after less than a year because of low ratings.
Despite that failure, Newhart maintained his love affair with the medium, and after a string of film flops, returned to TV in 1972 in ”The Bob Newhart Show.”
His game plan is to return to TV in two years on another sitcom. He`d like to play a high school teacher.
The only problem would be finding a title, he said. They`ve already used up ”The Bob Newhart Show” and ”Newhart.”
He smiled and suggested, ”We could call it `The.”`
