On the Hollywood set of "Sail A Crooked Ship," a starlet was asked if she enjoyed the far-out humor of one of the film's costars, Ernie Kovacs
"No," she said poutingly. "I always know just what to expect from him -- the unexpected. I like comedy where I know what's going to happen."
Happily for Ernie Kovacs, the starlet represents a minority report on his brand of humor. At 42, the mustachioed madcap has achieved a rare position in fomula-happy America: he has become a star by doing the different, and he'll be the first to tell you the harrowing battle has changed a foot-loose young man into a homebody of serious and reflective mien.
Kovacs' humor nowadays is largely visual. A man at a shooting gallery knocks down moving ducks with monotonous regularity until one duck stops, pivots, and produces a six-gun from under his wing. BANG -- no sharpshooter.
He once showed close-ups of tense scenes -- the soft treading of nurses' shoes, the wheels of an operating table, the swinging doors typical of a surgery room, the masked faces of perspiring attendants. When the camera first rolled back and the music swelled to a climax, the full scene appeared: a family carving a turkey.
"People expect me to be the same off camera as I am on," Ernie says resentfully. A $2. cigar acts as a barometer for Kovacs' blood pressure: at this point it probes straight from his mouth like the lance of a knight ready for battle. "They expect me to run around wearing a chamber pot on my head -- I'm a grown man! Sure, my family and I have lots of kicks -- we listen to Bartok recordings, read, play some poker -- that's fun!
"I suppose wild humor is something you inherit just by being Hungarian," he says, his cigar dropping in a philosophic arc. "My family could put on some kookie shows back in Trenton (N.J.) in the old days. Mom could put on a show just raising the shade. We'd all be sitting at the dinner table, soup spoons half up to our mouths, and Mom would decide to pull the shade up -- would she let it go with a bang or would it slide up softly? Lord," Kovacs says appreciatively, "how she could milk that gag!"
Kovacs' parents were immigrants who became moderately wealthy in the restaurant business and provided their two boys, Ernie and Tom, with clothes, spending money, and autos. "We had it soft," Ernie says, "and it probably brought out the buffoon in us."
The Depression and his parents' divorce threw Ernie into a harsher world, but his flair for the theatrical won several drama-school scholarships and, next, six years of stesady work in traveling stock companies. Acting was serious business to the off-stage clown -- so serious Kovacs overworked himself, fell victim to pneumonia with complications, and spent 19 months with his 6-foot-2, 210 pound frame "laid out like a slab of beef."
After recovery, Kovacs turned to the less strenuous medium of radio in Trenton, alternating between on-the-spot news coverage and disc jockeying. News work became as serious as dramatics to him, but his disc-jockeying was filled with wild improvisations of gags, comic commercials, and nonsequitur interviews through which Kovacs let off steam between his "serious work." News reporting won Kovacs awards, but the relaxed disc-jockey programs won the audiences, and Kovacs reluctantly realized that if he was ever to hit the big time, he'd have to commercialize his instinct for unpredictable comedy.
He had his own show in Philadelphia in 1951 when a promising, pert blonde named Edie Adams auditioned as a singer. "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her," Ernie says, "but it was my show in name only -- the producer had all the say. But Edie won him over, too. Later on I did have something to say, and I said it: 'Let's get married.' "
The couple married in Mexico City in 1954. Edie spent more than two years as Kovacs' singing star and addlebrained stooge, then her own star soared in two consecutive Broadway hits, "Wonderful Town" and "Li'l Abner." Ernie's own career bogged down, however.
In 1957 Ernie turned to Hollywood and won a succession of parts that reestablished him as a top performer. His star status, in turn, gave television producers renewed confidence in Kovacs' offbeat brand of humor, and he was given carte blanche in producing, writing, and acting in his own series of specials.
The Kovacs family includes two daughters by Ernie's earlier marriage, Betty, 14, and Kippie, 12, as well as Mia Susan, who is 2. Their home is a sprawling mansion in Beverly Hills, which the Kovacs have left infrequently in recent years. "It's got more rooms than I can count," Ernie says, "and more servants than I care to pay, but it's great for living."
What strikes Hollywood most about the mansion, though, is the bizarre decor. Unlike other film families who don't buy an ash tray without consulting an interior decorator, the Kovacs have furnished their home with the same uninhibited imagination they display on stage. Each room is startlingly different, and some rooms differ from wall to wall. "They go in for various periods," a publicist explains, "and also question marks and exclamation points."
But Ernie's cigar rises lancelike again when it's suggested that his home is a monstrous sight gag. "We didn't buy brass leopards, armored suits, and Early American to be funny," he insists. "We just happen to like things like that. Honest, we leave our nuttiness for working hours."
