A famous television comedian is someone who has lost at least one big-time weekly network show. Ernie Kovacs stands out as the exception; he never had any. Yet he is a chronic award winner; he has summer-replaced and winter substituted to consistent acclaim. The special half-hour of pantomime he created on NBC last year was the only TV film shown by the United States at the Brussels World Fair. His drainpipe-sized cigar and unlandscaped eyebrows are now a nationally recognized escutcheon whose appearance on the TV screen heralds such sights as Kovacs starting a show from inside a bottle, or "burning down" the studio at the fade-out, or philosophizing while camera-truncated to invisibility from the waist up, or unwrapping a bandage-swathed girl into raw air. The Kovacsian humor blends Puck and Peter Lorre into a style that instantly identifies our most Jongleur of electrons. And still, despite decent Trendex ratings, he bears the stigma (to some, the stigmata) of being "not too commercial."

Why? Possibly because Kovacs is too much of an exception. His manner is intrinsically television; it does not rise out of proven box-office veins like Milton Berle's (night clubs) or Jackie Gleason's (musical comedy), where TV, the cukoo medium, has hatched many of its prominent performers. Furthermore, Kovacs' public image is hair-raisingly genuine. We live in an era of "personalities" no more personal than our casual clothes are casual. Both are carefully tailored, with just a bit too much Dacron. There is nothing well pressed about Kovacs' psyche. If he ever goes so far as to say, "Thank you for letting me come into your living room," he will add, "but it's a shame you couldn't clean it up a little."

The Kovacs manner is unreserved, sometimes uninhibited, creature of his own imagination. He is a maverick, a screwball loner, outside the great creative dynasties in which a Hemingway follows a Mark Twain, or a Sid Caesar a Charlie Chaplin. Almost untouched by the dominant traditions in comedy, he concerns himself solely in the complete, and therefore eccentric, release of his character onto his work.

"I don't like to write the first five minutes of a show," he said the other day. "I just like to get through to them out there with whatever comes into my head. Crazy stuff, noncrazy stuff, whatever. I want 'em to get to know me, really me, exactly the kind of clod I am."

Watxching Kovacs "get through" at a TV show can be a fairly tempestuous experience. Earlier this year he guest-starred in and subverted a usually well-behaved musical divertissement called The Big Record. It was 8 P.M., a half hour before air time, and Kovacs tumbled through the high-tension, split second mazes of the CBS studio like a merry-mustached hellion. At the finale of the dress rehearsal he seized Patti Page's little finger and mimed exploring his nose with it. At 8:15, while everyobe else communed with lyrics or studied lines, poker cards were flying in the wings between Kovacs and Marty Kummer, his MCA agent. At 8:25 he jumped up in apparent terror to shout at the stagehands. "No, not the campus set! They changed that to a torture chamber!" At 8:28 he did a jig in back of the flats, cigar in full eruption. He was not "on," as some comedians always have to be. Nobody had time to watch him, and he didn't even seem to be aware of himself as he hopped along the wall, puffing away, wailing a weird tune under his breath.

"I like to let go just before the show," he explains such behavior. "That's the time I don't want to suppress any impulses. It's like revving up your personality. Then it's all there when you hit the camera."

At 8:30 he pirouetted past his personal prop bearer, tossed him four dollar bills as though they were roses, and escaped thanks with a Swan Lake leap. At 8:31, right on cue, a haphazard motion brought him into fifteen million living rooms where he said his first line with spur-of-the-moment chattiness.

At 8:35, and back to poker while three yards away Miss Page sang of sad love. 8:50: The producer called for the Nairobi Trio, the one typically Kovacsian bit in the show. Kovacs got up, but instead of putting on his costume began to play snake charmer to the electric cables, very upset that they wouldn't dance. This convulsed a script girl but tortured the stage manager. At 8:52, some forty seconds before his cue, Kovacs tossed on his ape mask and ape gloves. "You guys look like you're in show business too," he said to his fellow anthropoids, walking toward the fifteen million living rooms.

The Nairobi Trio, as almost every antenna owner must know, restates the Book of Job in terms of a nihilistic operetta. To the eerie tintinnabulation of a certain record tune three monkeys snap into unearthly motion; one at an upright, pushing down pinao keys as though they were gear-shifts; a second wielding xylophone hammers without the benefit of xylophone; and the baton of the third presiding over the whole madness with rigid precision. At a certain recurrent phrase Kovacs, the conductor monster, is clouted on the head by his ensemble's xylophonist. The manner, nuance and mood of the clout may vary with each performance, but it always produces a drool of bottomless consternation on the conductor's snout, it always dramatizes the unfathomibility of fate and the treacherousness of life, and it always has the audience in stitches over seeing someone else betrayed.

8:54: Kovacs, the chimp-in-chief, returned to the wings, arms around his two cohorts. Off went the simian apparel, up came Kovacs' shirt end with which he dried off sweat formed under the mask. Then he leaned toward a studio watchman. "Gonna loan me a comb, or are you going to be a prig?" Coiffured at 8:56, he entrechatted into the finale.

At 9:15 members of the cast sat in the Cordial Cafe opposite the studio, talking about Mr. K. The discussion produced an astounding fact. As of this writing, Kovacs has not only no sponsors but also no enemies.

"I don't know anybody who doesn't like the guy," said Peter Hanley, the No. 2 ape and featured singer of Kovacs' regular series. "You never feel he's putting on all those shenanigans just to kid the tensions away. It's not calculated. He's naturally that way, and you become that way, too, when you work with him. Everybody in the show gets to be sort of a happy maniac. Nothing throws you, even if there's a foul-up."

"Like tonight there was a little boo-boo," said a script girl.

"That's right," Hanley said. "Barbra Loden -- she's the girl who's usually the third ape -- she couldn't make it. We had to train a third ape in a hurry, and the timing went snafu. That Nairobi thing is a pain, you know. Well, did you see how Ernie came back from the bit with his arms around us? That meant, 'Never mind, it wasn't anybody's fault.' It's the kind of guy he is."

"Ernie's the only uncalibrated V.I.P. I know," a network press girl said. "The other big shots in this business are so damn precise with their kindnesses. I used to be a sort of column-item planter for a few NBC stars, and I always got a bottle of Christmas booze each from the names I handled. One bottle of booze is what I rate. Guess how many I got from Ernie last year -- and that after I stopped working for him? Five! Not a half dozen either -- it wouldn't be like him, one of those exact big kindnesses. But five bottles, that's Ernie all over."

Practically everything about Kovacs is big and inexact, including his height, nominally six feet two but slouch-reduced by a varying number of inches. Kovacs' New York abode displays similar vagaries. His apartment lies on the unfashionable West Side, a highly imprecise location to be inhabited by a celebrity. But it is a vast duplex penthouse, containing sixteen rooms, seven bathrooms, four telephone lines with countless extensions, four complete hi-fi systems, sevral centuries of antiques, porcelain and ivory collections, a mounted armory of guns, two giant wooden blackamoors, and a miniature Yorkshire terrier named Pamela.

Yet all these posh vistas somehow avoid the protestation of success customary in Kovacs' bracket (current motion-picture salary, $7500 a week). There is here the tropical luxuriance common to show-biz Hungarians, even second-generation ones like Kovacs. But there is also the informality of the Trenton boy who has never bothered to shake off Jersey. Amidst the rampant good taste everywhere, hangs a huge portrait of Edie Adams (Mrs. Ernie) entwined with Kovacs' two children of a previous marriage, which testifies to nothing but the pokiest sentiment. From under carpets and out of panelings, wells a certain heart-warming and irrepresible messiness. A hike through the various reachess of the penthouse is likely to turn up some jovial disorder at any time of day. The connoisseur in Kovacsian dishevelment, however, ought to take his trip across the apartment on the morning after one of the master's all-night poker games.

These revels, by the way, may take place at any of Kovacs' three homes: in Hollywood, in New York State's Rockland County, and at Central Park West. Recently, I came on the remnants of a Central Park West party still around at twenty minutes to noon. The apartment, of course, was at optimum disarray.

On the terrace with its voluptuous view across Central Park, the chaises lounges lay sopping because nobody had bothered to take them in during the night's rain. In the living room a half-dead cigar had toppled from an ash tray onto a marble table. From a gold, carved knob in a hallway closet dangled a jacket even though there were hangers galore insisde. Piles of television scripts in Kovacs' study were held down not by paperweights, which lay idly elsewhere, but by poker-chip containers. The solarium, an eyrie made of sky and glass, was exuberantly littered with cards.

To perfect the casual chaos of it all, Kovacs appeared walking to one of the apartment doors with his arm around Sidney Chaplin. Kovacs chugged away bouncily at his freshly lit cheroot. But young Chaplin (Charlie's son and a Broadway-musical lead) showed the effects of a fourteen-hour poker game. His countenance was a symphony in ashen gray.

"Gee, it was great," Kovacs said at the threshold. "Good night, old clod." It was 11:46 A.M.

Kovacs shuffled into his sun-filled study, greeted me, made a monstrous face into a mirror, and observed that he looked a little punchy.

"I didn't get to bed last night either," he said. "I spent it by this desk -- wait a minute, that must have been night before last. Well, whatever night it was before the game, I spent it here, doing odds and ends kicking around a spectacular."

"You mean you've been up for forty-eight hours?" said agent Kummer, another walking ruin, who had just materialized from the card room.

"Why not?" Kovacs asked. I said that was remarkable.

"Not for this here clod," Kovacs said. His rather low and gentle tone, often a contrast to his burly Broadway vocabulary, became more pronounced. "I was just thinking the other day. I've been on that kind of schedule ever since I got out of Trenton High twenty years ago. And the funny thing is I sort of drifted into show business because I had nothing else to do after graduation. I didn't want to become something solid like my brother (a civilian employee of the Air Force) or my father (a restaurant owner). No plans or ambitions. I started to fool around in summer stock."

"Fooled yourself right into the hospital," Kummer growled, examining his post-poker face.

"Well, I wanted to fool around my own way," Kovacs said. "I couldn't get the parts I wanted. So I got my own organization. I was practically a one-clod stock company. I auditioned actors with a paint brush in my hand, and starred, produced, directed and cleaned up the john, and opening night I looked over the footlights, and, by God, there were seven people in the audience."

"Bet you went on too," Kummer said bitterly.

"To me it wasn't a small audience, it was an intimate performance," Kovacs said. "For years I was Jersey's most intimate performer."

"Till you went to the hospital," Kummer siad, stubbornly.

"Best rest I ever had," Kovacs said. "A year and a half. Pneumonia and pleurisy."

"Overworked?" I asked.

"Overcardplayed," said Kummer.

"The only thing I ever could relax with is cards," Kovacs said. "Tennis I love, and swimming, but I always feel I ought to be working instead. But with poker I don't feel guilty, because -- well, I tried to analyze it the other day. Maybe because it's one way to catch up on my friendships. I can't be a one-cocktail-every-three-months friend. If a guy is a friend and he's around, I want to poker it out with him one or two nights a week."

At this, Kummer expired with a groan into a sofa and never stirred to life again.

After the hospital Kovacs was supposed to "rest" in radio. He went to work for WTTM in Trenton, where they made him chief announcer, director of special events, and night disc jockey. Then a Philadelphia TV station heard him broadcast a wrestling match. "So they hired me for a cooking show. Heck, I had my own station. I was on the air thirteen hours a week at WPTZ. No secretary, no typist, just a migraine headache." Kovacs demonstarted that he is the one man alive who can smile sadly with a cigar in his mouth.

"So then NBC shoved me to New York to replace the hell out of guys like Steve Allen and Sid Caesar. Networks's more exciting than local, but not so much fun. Your budget's bigger, network, and your headaches too. Like the pantomime show I did last year on NBC. Now they call it a classic, names like that. The whole thing took me eighty minutes to write, not juch longer than my Philly stuff. Now, there was one bit in the show with a set built at an eighteen-degree angle. The idea for that I always had -- actually, that's my whole life philosophy, that the world's at an eighteen-degree angle -- but it was the first time I had the money to build a big-scale set. For each fifty-second camera motion, like an olive rolling down a "horizontal" table, we had to rehearse a whole afternoon. It's a nightmare when your dreams come true."

As if he had to fortify himself against the recollection, Kovacs bent over his table and yelled, "Coffee, please." Marty Kummer on the sofa didn't stir.

"Rehearsals you can't ad-lib," Kovacs went on, more peacefully. "That's why I hate 'em. Ideas you've got to ad-lib, so I love 'em. Every idea I ever had is based on the fact that it's 2:30 and there's a production meeting at three. Like the Nairobi Trio. I had those ape masks lying around in the room and I was playing a record called Solfeggio which somebody had just sent me. Actually it's just an ear-training exercise. But when that wood-block clunk came on in the tune, I immediately had a divine revelation: One of those monkeys is getting a shot in the head! Only I wasn't sure what kind of a shot. I played it again, and this time I saw it: One monkey at the piano, one monkey conducting, one monkey braining. In fifteen minutes I was set. Then came the back-breaker. Working out the timing. Doll!"

Edie Adams had come in, beautiful, diabolically sacked, a musical-comedy star bearing a coffee tray for her husband.

"Oh, no!" Kovacs jumped up and took the tray away from her. There followed something so tender that it imperiled the coffee and forced me to peruse my shoes.

"Look, doll," Kovacs said five little fondnesses later. He wrote a prideful figure on a sheet. "Last night."

"You won!" said Miss Adams, electrified.

"Give me a smooch," said Kovacs, and led his wife back to the corridor. There, not entireley out of eyeshot, endearments were renewed, not only without any of the "darling!" veneer customary in show business, but with a bear-hugging heartiness orchestrated by joyous smacks, a display of affection rarely found outside of boat piers and railway platforms. The spectacle reminded me of something an NBC executive said recently: "There's something elemental about Kovacs. He can't be formatted. He's his own format, and that's a crime these days. He's the last spontaneous man."

Kovacs returned, all element and aglow. "Isn't she incredible?" he said. "I go AWOL two nights in a row, and she comes in with the coffee! I was thinking the other day. We've been apart much too much lately. Me making movies out West, and she back East."

He sighed and played morosely with a copy of Zoomar, his first novel, which was recently published to favorably surprised review. "Maybe I'll just write," he said. "I can do that anywhere, wherever Edie and the kids are. I love writing, anyway. I ad-libbed that novel. I did the thing in thirty-six hour stretches, some forty pages at a time. I remember writing the last page -- and it's a fairly big book, maybe a hundred thousand words -- and I was rushing down to Edie to tell her I'm finished, when I looked at the calendar. It was thirteen days after I'd written the first line. Everybody's always so surprised at that. But it's the only way for me. If I start tinkering with a thing, it sounds labored. I don't see how these other writers operate."

He warmed his hand lovingly on an Edie-brought cup.

"You think it's crazy to write a book like that, the way you're looking at me. They looked at me like that when I started my first movie last year, Operation Mad Ball. They said I've got to change all my TV habits. Never look into the camera, never improvise, the whole works. It's not true at all. I found you can ad-lib in pictures too. Sometimes better. In Hollywood they never tried to squeeze me into some category the way they're always trying in TV. In Mad Ball I played an Army lieutenant. I'm a supernatural Mexican in Bell, Book and Candle, which hasn't been released, and in It Happened to Jane I'll be a weird old tycoon. Anyway, any role I play is half nuts. That's understood. And Dick Quine -- he's the director in all three of them -- he's a member of the fraternity. I mean he knows, too, that the world's really at an eighteen-degree angle. Dick and I play poker right on the set, even while they're putting make-up on me --"

Suddenly he stopped. He ran over to a mantel shelf lined with a number of Chinese ivory figurines. His hand held up a tiny mandarin, whose face had split off and fallen into a fold of its tunic. "Look at that!" Kovacs said in a flabbergasted, entirely different voice. In vain he tried to restore the face to the figurine. "The poor thing."

There was nothing of the collector's chagrin in the phrase, but a bottomless and naive disconcertment, as though he had a secret five-year-old cheek somewhere that had just been slapped. An apple-cheeked emotion appeared round his eyes which cigar, poker virility and heavy-weight physique made all the more vivid. His stance recalled the conductor of the Nairobi Trio just after the clout. Perhaps his discomfiture dramatized his peculiar genius: in the ability to visualize in one small outlandishness a large dilemma of life; in his capacity to be amazed by what is negligable to most, but which he can tickle the world into seeing.

He stood there, still trying to press the old mandarin's head back into place. It kept falling off, and at last he gave up and merely stroked his little Chinese. Cigar drooping, he rocked him to and fro.

Through the intercom the secretary announced that she was going out for lunch. "Good night, Lillian," Kovacs said from deep within a sad trance, standing there, gently swaying. It was 1:46 P.M. He looked like exactly what he is: a great big slob of a poet.

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