The obituaries, those bald recitations of man's transient visit to these parts, were uniform on the point that he had no enemies. This is true, but it doesn't say much. Shirley Temple has no enemies. Dennis the Menace has no enemies. The shoe clerk who lives a dozen doors from me is the least offensive man you'd ever want to meet.

No, those published obits did their mechanical job well enough, but their knowledge of Ernie Kovacs was strictly from clippings. He indeed went out this past January without an enemy, but it's a cinch for any man, with just a little concentration, to leave no rancor behind after he dies; the simplest method is to keep out of everybody's way. Kovacs didn't. He was a loud, brash man who knew everybody, liked and trusted most people as he met them, and he had a genius for briskly telling off phonies and making them like it, and him.

(He's the only guy on record to have said "Go to hell!" to Columbia Pictures' late Harry Cohn, the most vindicative, feared, and tyrannical product yet invented by Hollywood; Cohn heard the order, blinked in momentary surprise, and embraced him as a friend. This is all the more remarkable when you learn that Cohn, Ernie's boss during several of the first Kovacs movies, had people, not friends. His hatred and distrust of others was staunchly if furtively reciprocated. There were hundreds at Cohn's funeral. The reason, according to one accurate cynic was, "You can always draw a crowd for an attraction people really want to see.")

Kovacs, with his fierce mustache and long black two-dollar cigars, was a perfectionist, the worst kind of trait you can acquire if you expect to be liked. Contrary to the popular notion, he was not an even-tempered performer-writer-director who remained unfazed under crisis. As an employee on the movie set he had Ferdinand the Bull's chronic imperturbability, but when he was responsible for his own television shows, he drove his staff mercilessly and he could storm at them in language nearly as blistering as Cohn's.

Yet there was a palpably basic difference between the two men's techniques. Cohn bullied human beings as property and died still with the belief that they were chattel. Kovacs roared, but invariably with a valid reason, and once the beef was expressed there was full harmony again. I mean to be far from maudlin when I say that the obituaries, in ascribing to him no enemies, meant well but were negative in their approach. The positive, and only, approach to the character key of Ernie Kovacs is to state that he loved the world, with all its acne pits.

I knew Ernie from 1939 till his death. We weren't thick pals, partly because we seldom were on the same coast at the same time -- when he was working in New York I was working in California or Europe, and shortly after he moved to California I'd returned to New York, our original meeting place -- but over those 22 years we saw each other, or talked by phone, or corresponded with fair frequency.

We met (and this setting is right out of imitation Thomas Mann) in a hospital ward on New York's Welfare Island, where we both were patients by fiscal courtesy of the city. I was there with a number of miseries, none of them serious. He was there because, after months of living in a four-dollar a week iceberg of a rooming house in Manhattan and subsisting on little more food than could bloat a moth, he had contracted a frightening parlay of pneumonia, pleurisy, and indications of tuberculosis.

It was the tail end of the National Depression and the vital center of the human depression, the latter an often hopeless condition endured by sick paupers. Ernie, sicker than most, already was on the critical list when we introduced ourselves and , by all that's normal in an abnormal situation, he should have reached despair's rock bottom. At 20, a chunky but strong Hungarian kid until his illness, he was raring to go in some form of show business, and here the State was attempting to transfer him to a New Jersey hospital where he could kick off away from the New York premises. Too, his parents were divorced and never came together to see him. In addition, his father, once wealthy but now wiped out, worked odd hours as a foot patrolman and could get to him only rarely.

Other 20-year-olds perished under less. Ernie, though, breezed through his stay in that dreary ward as if he'd been consigned to Disneyland. To this day he's remembered by the remaining doctors and orderlies at Welfare Island. "He was a deathly ill boy," one doctor recalls, "but along with pulmonary trouble he had guts. One morning he was wheeled into the X-Ray lab. We looked at him through a fluoroscope and we were startled to see a sign that said 'Out to Lunch.' He'd cut it out of aluminum foil and pasted it to his stomach. The X-Ray bounced right off it and the sign showed up right where his stomach was supposed to be!"

A long time orderly claims there's never been another patient like him on the Island: "Even when he looked as if he were ready for the slab, he'd organize things, like a checker tournament for left handed players with three or more gallstones. Or a poker game for anemics whose pulse could break a hundred."

Years later, after he'd hit big on TV and moved into a 17-room duplex apartment on Manhattan's Central Park South, Ernie got a kick, -- and by no menas a morbid one -- out of reminiscing about those days of emotional tightrope walking. One night, during a pinochle lull, he recalled in vivid detail an experience I'd forgotten. We were recollecting the patients of the 100-bed ward. (It's true that he had an atrocious memory for current names, but it was a fascinating quirk of his that he could immediately summon up the names of people from a decade before, and then people he'd known only briefly.) Ernie retraced his admission to Welfare this way:

"Since I was a newcomer, my bed was near the door. I wanted to be at the other end of the room where there was a big window. There was more privacy there and a chance to look at the sky. Every time a bed was vacated, I moved into it. Like a game of musical chairs, I moved nearer and nearer the window. Outside I could hear a crew of carpenters working. I always liked to watch construction work.

"Well, one day a bed near the window was vacant and I grabbed it. At last I could look out. Here's what I saw: coffins. Those carpenters were building coffins. There were dozens of pine boxes piled up against the hospital wall. I put my face against the glass and hollered, 'Which one has my name on it?' "

For a year and a half Kovacs lived in the Grim Reaper's vestibule. Finally moved to New Jersey ("On the weekly critical list," he laughed, "my rating was tops.") to enter another ward, he decided he'd had enough of doctors' fears that he was almost ready for burial. On impulse he quit the hospital, returned to his home in Trenton, and got a job within a day at a local theatrical group. He never went back to the hospital life. Miraculously, he cured himself with the questionable expedient of backbreaking work.

I've gone on at some length about the hospital phase of Ernie's life because it contributed effectively to the high-living, free-wheeling character which was his. From it he developed the fatalistic philosophy he successfully lived by. "When you've sat on death's doorstep tinkering with a passkey for nearly two years," he once confided, "you've had it. Nothing in the way of your own welfare can really bother you again."

It can be agreed that such a philosophy could have been fashioned also by, say, Lucky Luciano, and I guess it was. But Kovacs was purely a social animal. He devised his own society, as do all practicing fatalists, and he was vain, and ostentatious, and as a spender he had most of the values of a boy.

Nonetheless, within the framework of the fat money tree, he was the most inspired creator of lunatic comedy since Harold Lloyd. Have you seen a Lloyd rerun lately? Or Keaton or Langdon? Match them with a Kovacs. Kovacs walks the hell all over their painted faces.

By the time the big, big money began to roll in, Ernie, his pretty wife Edie and his two daughters lived high in Hollywood, far higher off the commerical hog than he'd lived in New York where his income had been only slightly less than staggering. On the Coast he bought the most garishly sprawling house in the filmdom hills and he stocked it with instant nuthouse. Without motif, without even a fundamental decorative plan, the house was designed in such a way that one room had absolutely no aesthetic relationship to the next room. It was, as Leonard Lyons has aptly described it, "All whim and fancy, from both sides of the Atlantic and all periods."

In his vast study, where he wrote his reasonably welcomed novel, Zoomar, in 13 days (often working a 16-hour day), there was a hidden trap door leading to an equally vast wine cellar. On the bottles were appropriate cobwebs, put there by a hired television prop man. You could visit there on an off-night, uninvited, and meet such diverse droppers-in as Sir Alec Guiness, Jack Lemmon, Groucho Marx, and Carl Sandburg. Ernie, though never much of a dedicated drinker, would usher you in and force booze into your empty hand.

The study, crowded with phonographs, books, typewriters, a gun collection, standing suits of armor (the opened mouth of which served as an ash tray), a machine for espresso, spears, and a half dozen television sets, saw work committed in it, but only incidentally. Primarily it was a room for card playing. Kovacs approached cards in almost the way I would like to approach Sophia Loren: with a merging of gentle and intense passion. He would play with anyone he could collar. If no friends were on hand he would seek out his chauffeur or valet. If neither of them was around he would draw his daughters into a lively game of Old Maid. When even they were unavailable he would settle for solitaire. He was a good card player as well as a fanatic one, with a gift for protracted concentration. He gambled on cards with Nick the Greek's alacrity if not Nick's scientific precision; on the telephone with friends he would bet $500 on the turn of a single card.

He was determined to excel, not because he was savagely competitive but because he wanted to know every avenue of anything that interested him. For an extended series of afternoons he and Jackie Gleason played gin rummy. Gleason never won. Mountingly frustrated, Gleason -- who is a savage competitor, hit on away to get even: An accomplished golfer, he secretly mastered the art and invited Kovacs out to the links. "Just a dalliance between chums," he said craftily. "We'll keep our stakes low."

Never on a course in his life, Kovacs bought an expensive set of clubs and rang up Gleason. "I'm ready when you are," he said. "I'd be only too happy to have you win back some of your losses, chum."

Gleason rubbed his large hands in predatory glee and prepared for the kill. The couple met at Fred Waring's golf club in Pennsylvania, exchanged pleasant greetings, made a sizeable bet, and Kovacs beat Gleason's not inconsiderable pants off him. For the remainer of the weekend the crowing Ernie made life hell for the peeved Jackie. On Sunday night they returned to New York, each in his own chauffeured limousine. At a stoplight some miles before the George Washington Bridge, both cars stopped beside each other. Kovacs' car telephone rang. Rolling his window down, he proffered the receiver to the depressed Gleason.

"Phone for you, Jackie," he called. "I'm not sure but I think it's your golf pro."

From the first windfall it was impossible for Ernie to live in anything but the grand manner. He lived in it, in fact, even before the days of commanding $200,000 a movie. In 1956 he and Edie conducted a morning tv show, a nicely paid job but one hardly set to compete yet with the Hopes and Caesars. Still, his wife owned a mink coat, he spent $40 a day on the finest Havana cigars, and his inexpensive convertible was manned by a chauffeur, in full livery. He was several years away from beginning to earn the big bread, but he knew it would come and he wanted to meet it with the proper genteel ease.

The windfall simply stepped up everything. Into his home he brought ivory grand pianos, crystal chandeliers, a dinner table roughly the length of Moby Dick's backbone, an indoor waterfall, the head of a stuffed rhino, and a system that piped classical music from his 700 records into every room. Of those records, Billy Wilder remarked, "I've got a good selection of records, but Kovacs' is even better. I think he has them specially pressed for him by elves in The Black Forest." Actor Hans Conreid, visiting one evening and told by a guest that they were in a real man's home, shook his head and answered,"No, it's more a boy's home."

To some extent, Conreid was right. Kovacs, for all his appreciable sophistication, was a boy who delighted in owning gadgets, and the more, the better. Surely the affluent life was a distant cry from 1953, not very many years before when, as an apparently lost professional soul, he'd headed a Tuesday night television show on CBS. The time was prime -- 8 p.m. -- but the opposition was Bishop Fulton Sheen on one channel and Milton Berle on another. Berle in that era was the undisputed king of TV. You couldn't turn any knob, with the possible exception of a kitchen water tap, without seeing Berle.

Evidently forgotten in the shuffle, Ernie rightly cried, "This show costs about eight bucks less than an old movie." But, little, by little, he gained an audience, the same kind of audience that felt rootless because of Fred Allen's non-acceptance on television. In meeting at their own game the big comics who regarded TV as merely visual radio, Ernie worked assiduously to perfect the sight gag.

There were memorable ones: A bass drummer, poised to play, sees his stick melt into a kettle of sticky mush. An automobile racer, anxious to drive through a flaming hoop, can'r get his auto started. From a painting of a dam on a wall, water erupts into the room. A man opens a copy of Camille and we hear a woman cough.

The creativity-starved public, bored by comics who dressed up in Mommy's lipstick and high heeled shoes and by comics who ripped through tired one line gags, sat up and took the pixie Kovacs to their collective bosom. He really came into his own on the night he followed Jerry Lewis, that hilarious imitator of spastic children, on what Variety has come to quaintly call Big Time Video.

Lewis exhausted his japes and antics after an hour of a sold hour and a half time period. Kovacs was called to fill in the remaining 30 minutes. The idea was originally viewed as a sorry one: A comic shouldn't follow a comic. Especially a quiet, low-pressure comic moving on the heels of a hypertonic one. It was, all agreed, akin to expecting Emmett Kelly to follow Al Jolson.

In his half hour segment, Kovacs reached Lewis' viewers, or those who hadn't switched over to the Roller Derby. After Lewis' ear-splitting hysteria, Ernie played it entirely cool, with a show totally devoid of sound. It worked. The critics went wild and, what's more, the viewers wrote in to acknowledge their pleasure. From then on, he called his own tune. Sponsors and the networks deluged him with offers. Again he played it cool. He would appear on TV only if he could devise his own shows, without interference.

His self sufficiency paid off. By playing not easy to get and not easy to impress, he blithely asked for stupendous fees and received them. Never a gagster as such, he and his success with viewers perplexed the sweating custard pie comics who couldn't fathom what made audiences think him funny; despite his own occasional use of custard pies and popguns, his humor was basically quiet, rarely unnerving. What, questioned the professionals with the baggy pants and the noses painted red, was funny about a knife slicing through a stalk of celery at one instant during the 1812 Overture? That was a typical Kovacs sight and sound gag, and viewers laughed themselves off the couch.

There were other studied insanities. He shot a cavernous hole through his head and casually blew smoke through it. He dueled with himself and played poker with himself. He obtained a throaty chuckle from the Mona Lisa. He stood inside a tremendous bottle and held an umbrella over his head to shelter himself from the rain; as the rain submerged him he tapped the bottle with a hammer and, along with the water and smashed bottle, hurtled toward the cameras.

He represented the Nairobi Trio, three apes in derbies who rendered compositions for mallet, xylophone, and finger bone. He arranged for Tennessee Williams' thumb sucking Baby Doll to roll harshly out of her swinging crib. He had a dainty lady finish sewing a flag, stand back to admire her long, elaborate work, and then look up to hear a newsboy call, "Here is your afternoon paper, Miss Ross. Look -- Alaska and Hawaii have just been voted statehood," upon which she faints.

Audiences ate it all up, claiming Ernie as their find, not their dull neighbors', who, they had a habit of pompously insisting, were at home watching such brainless fare as Pete and Gladys. Ernie himself was unable to understand his adoption by the self-proclaimed elite. "In the beginning," he reminisced a few months before his death, "the network, the sponsor, all my friends, people like John Crosby, all of them said, 'We dig you Ernie, but nobody else will.' Now I get cab drivers who say, 'I dig you, Ernie, but you oughta see the guys I get in this cab.' Everybody thinks the rest of the public is moronic. That's a crock of anti-verisimilitude."

He developed the point by recalling the day he decided to tape this sight gag: he would introduce an "unexpurgated edition" of Webster's Dictionary and show a book with the title Four Letter Words on its cover. The joke was a good one, everyone connected with the particular show agreed, but a visiting young lady from the network happened to wonder out loud if it was in the best of tatste. Kovacs asked her what four letter words came to mind. She blushed.

"You see?" Kovacs declared. "It's all in your own mind. I was thinking of words like 'love' and 'work' and 'play'."

In January of this year, Ernie Kovacs' car wrapped around a wet pole and killed him -- instantly, thank God. All men die, so, in the historic scheme of things, his death at 42 instead of 82 is probably unworthy of weighing.

Still, those of us who knew him and loved him feel like hell, not so much because we've lost a friend as because we -- all of us -- have lost the presence and presents of America's potentially greatest satirist. His death is hard to take because his life had been so crowded with future. In December 1961, less than a month before he attended that baby shower and died on the way to the home he cherished, we talked by long distance phone. He owed me nothing, yet, apparently by his frequent telephone calls and invitations to his house, he liked me. By that statement I don't announce and advertise my universality; he liked gutter-stumbling drunks, Salvation Army tambourine thumpers, industrialists and indigents, fast talkers and emotionally disposed mutes.

In that final call we played a game of hurry-up gin, the two of us 3,000 miles apart. I lost and, though he furnished the better series of hands, he was apologetic. He asked me about my health, my family, and my business. Only after he was satisfied with the answers did he answer questions about himself.

Then he went to town, and his enthusiasm crackled. He'd ordered that afternoon a new gift for Edie ("Nobody, but nobody, could afford it."). His two completed books, How to Talk at Gin and Excuse It Please, the Pencil would be published in 1962, and he had more in the works. He was planning to direct Sir Alec Guiness in a movie, the screenplay of which he'd written. He was deep in the writing of a play for Broadway. The plans bubbled out of him.

"Don't take those three Turkish baths a day," I told him. "Sooner or later they're going to sap your heart."

"Discredited physician, heal thyself first," he laughed. "My heart is my own business." He instructed me to stay well, and hung up.

His heart, as it turns out, was not within his sole domain. I'm not the only one who mourns his passing, these long months after. The aficiandos of true wit weep, too. I'm convinced that a couple of decades from now, when I meet my grandchildren, they will report the TV humor they viewed on The Sons of the 3 Stooges Show. I will cackle and recount the Kovacs era, when humor was really humorous. They might gawk at me as if I'm some kind of geriatric nut. But, like Kovacs, I won't be dismayed by setbacks.

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