`Well, it’s about time my royalty was recognized,” Phyllis Diller observed. “With this face, you need a crown.”
Diller is starring in Disney’s “A Bug’s Life,” as no less than the voice of the Queen of the Ants.
“I went in for the audition and did an absolutely cold reading,” she said. “I got the part, I think, because I’ve been a queen so long. I’m pretty much the hotshot of the colony. My character is just adorable. I have no idea how the movie is done. Magic, I guess.”
Diller, whose age is listed as 81 but goes up as high as 84 in some records, has been the High Priestess of the Ridiculous for more years than she’s counting and, minus her cigarette-holder but complete with snazzy snakeskin boots, still cuts a fashion-shocking exterior.
In “A Bug’s Life,” she plays a monarch who has been around the colony a few times and is ready to retire and leave the ant throne to her daughter, Princess Atta (voice of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss).
Diller has no such retirement plans. “I’m booked solid through the end of 1999,” she said. She has a recurring role on the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful.” (“I’m the bold,” she said.) In club bookings, she’s regarded, still, as the only female standup comic of international stature.
“I’ve been one of the boys for years,” she said. “When I got into the business, there were nothing but guys doing standup. Those sweet little bimbos today! I’m not the type. You cannot fake this. But I’m not a natural extrovert. I was in a state of panic for the first 10 years. I was petrified. It took me 15 years to stop shaking on stage. The first night I went on, there were 170 people. It looked like the world to me.”
Born in Lima, Ohio, she met Sherwood Diller at Northeastern University and, 15 years later, was a scrimping mother of five. Her husband was working triple time, and still not making ends meet. “I was a star at the laundromat,” she said.
Then, she got a job as a publicist at radio station KSFO in San Francisco. “At one point,” she said, “they put me on with a 30-minute show called `The Homely Homemaker,’ talking from a kitchen that didn’t exist. The budget for the show was $20, but at least no one could really see that I was homely.”
When her husband talked her into working up a nightclub act, she was booked into San Francisco’s Purple Onion for two weeks. Brandishing a cigarette-holder and making fun of high fashion and life, she stayed for 90 weeks.
“My smartest move was that my husband, Fang, was fictional. He wasn’t Sherwood at all. That meant that I could use him forever. I’ve been married to him, on stage, for over 40 years. The other girls used their real husbands’ names and when they got divorced, or the men dropped dead, they had to change the act.”
Diller thinks there is one universal thing about standup comics. “They usually are only children, or a child born late in life, or someone who has suffered some sense of abandonment. Check it out. It’s true of almost all the comics. Comics are searching for love. In my case, I was an only child. I was the kind of kid who put clothes on the cat in order to amuse people. My idol was Jean Harlow. I dressed like her. Mind you, the body wasn’t bad. But ye gads. The face! I have a Salvador Dali face.
“I never thought I was a celebrity until I met Bette Davis. After that, I knew I must be somebody, but who?”
Getting to Hollywood, she credits Bob Hope with elevating her to stardom.
“When they say I’m international, it’s only because of the films. Bob cast me as a leading lady. Is he all right? Well, he’s 96. No one is all right at 96. Dolores, his wife, is 90 and she doesn’t even take an aspirin. They’re neighbors of mine. I see them all the time.”
As for her current role, she said, “it’s appropriate because I have a long history with bugs — particularly ants in the kitchen. Have you ever heard of just one ant? It was a challenge to play this individual. Then, I once had this pet beetle that you wear as jewelry. He had rhinestones encrusted on his back. I think it was quite illegal but was all the rage in Hollywood for awhile.”
