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Joey Bishop, 89

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Offline BeAStooge

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Joey Bishop, actor, comedian, TV host and "Rat-Packer," died Wednesday night, Oct. 17, at age 89.

See this website's TV Guest Appearance Filmography for a complete rundown of Mr. Bishop's appearances with The Three Stooges...

 - Joe Besser guest-starred 6 times in the 1st season of Bishop's 1961 - 1965 sitcom (NBC and CBS), and costarred in 91 episodes of the 2nd - 4th seasons. *

 - Moe, Larry & Curly Joe appeared on Bishop's ABC late night talk show in 1968. One appearance is confirmed (see The Three Stooges Scrapbook), and there are possibly two more unconfirmed guest appearances, including one cameo walk-on by Moe Howard. (Research continues on the unconfirmed appearances.)

 - In 1967, Joe Besser made several guest appearances on Bishop's talk show, as one of "The Son-of-a-Gun Players," a stock group of skit performers that also included JoAnn Worley and Ann Elder.

In addition, Joey Bishop costarred in the feature film comedy WHO'S MINDING THE MINT? (1966), which was produced by Norman Maurer.


* Some of the following AP information about THE JOEY BISHOP SHOW (1961 - 1965) is incorrect: seasons 1 - 3 ran on NBC, season 4 it moved to CBS. Only his late-night talk show (1967 - 1968) was on ABC.

Quote
Joey Bishop dead at 89
by JEFF WILSON, Associated Press
 
Joey Bishop, the stone-faced comedian who found success in nightclubs, television and movies but became most famous as a member of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack, has died at 89.

He was the group's last surviving member. Peter Lawford died in 1984, Sammy Davis Jr. in 1990, Dean Martin in 1995, and Sinatra in 1998.

Bishop died Wednesday night of multiple causes at his home in Newport Beach, publicist and longtime friend Warren Cowan said Thursday.

The Rat Pack became a show business sensation in the early 1960s, appearing at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in shows that combined music and comedy in a seemingly chaotic manner. Reviewers often claimed that Bishop played a minor role, but Sinatra knew otherwise. He termed the comedian "the Hub of the Big Wheel," with Bishop coming up with some of the best one-liners and beginning many jokes with his favorite phrase, "Son of a gun!"

The quintet lived it up whenever members were free of their own commitments. They appeared together in such films as "Ocean's Eleven" and "Sergeants 3" and proudly gave honorary membership to a certain fun-loving politician from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, at whose inauguration gala Bishop served as master of ceremonies.  The Rat Pack faded after Kennedy's assassination, but the late 1990s brought a renaissance, with the group depicted in an HBO movie and portrayed by imitators in Las Vegas and elsewhere. The movie "Ocean's Eleven" was even remade in 2003 with George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the lead roles.

Bishop defended his fellow performers' rowdy reputations in a 1998 interview.
"Are we remembered as being drunk and chasing broads?" he asked. "I never saw Frank, Dean, Sammy or Peter drunk during performances. That was only a gag. And do you believe these guys had to chase broads? They had to chase 'em away."

Away from the Rat Pack, Bishop starred in two TV series, both called "The Joey Bishop Show."

The first, an NBC sitcom, got off to a rocky start in 1961. Critical and audience response was generally negative, and the second season brought a change in format. The third season brought a change in network, with the show moving to ABC, but nothing seemed to help and it was canceled in 1965.

In the first series, Bishop played a TV talk show host. Then, he really became a TV talk show host. His program was started by ABC in 1967 as a challenge to Johnny Carson's immensely popular "The Tonight Show."

Like Carson, Bishop sat behind a desk and bantered with a sidekick, TV newcomer Regis Philbin. But despite an impressive guest list and outrageous stunts, Bishop couldn't dent Carson's ratings, and "The Joey Bishop Show" was canceled after two seasons. Bishop then became a familiar guest figure in TV variety shows and as sub for vacationing talk show hosts, filling in for Carson 205 times.

He also played character roles in such movies as "The Naked and the Dead" ("I played both roles"), "Onion-head," "Johnny Cool," "Texas Across the River," "Who's Minding the Mint?" "Valley of the Dolls" and "The Delta Force."

His comedic schooling came from vaudeville, burlesque and nightclubs.

Skipping his last high school semester in Philadelphia, he formed a music and comedy act with two other boys, and they played clubs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They called themselves the Bishop Brothers, borrowing the name from their driver, Glenn Bishop. Joseph Abraham Gottlieb would eventually adopt Joey Bishop as his stage name. When his partners got drafted, Bishop went to work as a single, playing his first solo date in Cleveland at the well-named El Dumpo. During these early years he developed his style: laid-back drollery, with surprise throwaway lines.

After 3 1/2 years in the Army, Bishop resumed his career in 1945. Within five years he was earning $1,000 a week at New York's Latin Quarter. Sinatra saw him there one night and hired him as opening act.  While most members of the Sinatra entourage treated the great man gingerly, Bishop had no inhibitions. He would tell audiences that the group's leader hadn't ignored him: "He spoke to me backstage; he told me `Get out of the way.'"  When Sinatra almost drowned filming a movie scene in Hawaii, Bishop wired him: "I thought you could walk on water."

Born in New York's borough of the Bronx, Bishop was the youngest of five children of two immigrants from Eastern Europe.  When he was 3 months old the family moved to South Philadelphia, where he attended public schools. He recalled being an indifferent student, once remarking, "In kindergarten, I flunked sand pile."

In 1941 Bishop married Sylvia Ruzga and, despite the rigors of a show business career, the marriage survived until her death in 1999.  Bishop, who had one son, Larry, spent his retirement years on the upscale Lido Isle in Southern California's Newport Bay.


Offline Hammond Eggar

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Thanks for the info, BeAStooge.  What a shame!  I can only imagine the Rat Pack reunion that's taking place in Heaven right now.  While all the Rat-Packers could be funny, Joey was the true comic talent of the group.  He and his humor will be greatly missed.  R.I.P. Mr. Bishop. :'(
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." - Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder, 1971)


Offline locoboymakesgood

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I hope I didn't curse the poor guy.. there was a discussion in one thread around here a few months ago about Bishop and I had already thought he'd been dead for years!

RIP!
"Are you guys actors, or hillbillies?" - Curly, "Hollywood Party" (1934)


Offline falsealarms

Yes, there was a thread about him about 5-6 weeks ago. I mentioned I sent a 3x5 card to him at the end of August and received it back signed in the middle of September. It was signed to me and thanked me for the nice letter. Man, I'm glad I wrote to him when I did. That's what happens when you're 89 (anytime really, but especially that old) - you can go quick.

I've obtained autographs of people who have since died, but never so quickly as Bishop. It's an odd feeling.

ABC News online video

The Rat Pack's Final Curtain
Joey Bishop Was The Last of the Entertainers Who Did It Their Way

By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 19, 2007; C01

They were such wonderful merchants of entertainment. Five hepcats carousing on a Las Vegas stage. The marquee outside the Sands Hotel would sometimes stack their names upon each other: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop. At other times it said only: "They're here."

The hotels would be booked solid. It was as if even the mountains in the distance knew that the Rat Pack was in town.

Wit and savoir-faire were their stock in trade. There wasn't a miser among them. They each knew showbiz had more sad stories than happy ones and therefore would tip splendidly. They didn't run from waiters and dishwashers. They each could spare a dime and did so happily.

With the passing Wednesday of the slyly quiet Joey Bishop, they're all gone now. At least in the flesh.

The group's emergence in the '50s as both friends and co-headliners was all so spontaneous that it is hard to imagine now how their charm and silliness -- seasoned with a bit of social activism -- became so popular so quickly, defining a time before Vietnam and the sexual revolution changed America and its entertainers.

Steve Blauner, a former Hollywood movie producer, saw the Rat Pack in person as many times as he could in Las Vegas. He was enraptured. "They were the three greatest entertainers living," he says of Dean, Frank and Sammy. "Everybody wanted to be Dean. Dean was the coolest. He was like your big brother. Everybody wanted to sing like Frank. And Sammy happened to be the world's greatest entertainer."

No longer will writers troop up to Bishop's California home pleading for one more morsel about those days: Anything, Mr. Bishop, about Frank and the fellows? Did you ever see Sammy hanging out with Kim Novak? What can you say about Frank and the mob? Joey mostly wouldn't talk about the other members of the Rat Pack; he had no dark stories to share. He found nostalgia sweet and wished to keep it private. He liked each member. It's that ephemeral thing called showbiz love.

Bishop had long worked as a stand-up comic. Sometimes he opened for Sinatra. Jess Rand -- who traveled with Davis and his 1940s vaudeville act -- once caught Joey opening for Frank at the Copacabana. Joey walked onstage and the place was jampacked. He leaned into the microphone, Rand recalls, and talked about the overflow crowd. Then he raised his voice quite loudly and said: "Hey, Frank. And you thought I couldn't draw a crowd!"

Would stars of today risk such a group undertaking? Would clashing egos survive such a thing? It hardly seems likely.

Rudi Eagan, a piano player, got to Las Vegas in 1955, a struggling kid from back East, full of music dreams. He got himself over to the Sands Hotel, and there, goofing onstage -- the cigarette smoke like a see-through curtain -- was the Rat Pack. "They had a unique thing going," says Eagan, who wound up playing gigs with Frank and Sammy. "They made you feel like you were in somebody's living room."

Eagan, who still lives in Vegas, recalls the town as being quite small then -- "less than 30,000 people" -- and everyone was crazy about the Rat Pack. After the shows -- after Dean had sung "Sittin' on Top of the World," and Sammy and Frank had sung "Me and My Shadow," and the last view of mink coat had slid beyond the door -- the guys would climb down offstage and head out to the casino, tossing the dice, sipping drinks. "They'd be trying to help people win," says Eagan. "They'd drive the pit bosses crazy."

As freewheeling as they were, they were still familiar with the politics of the day.

The Paris summit conference of 1960 had been organized by President Dwight Eisenhower, French leader Charles de Gaulle and the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev. Frank said he'd have a damn summit, too: Hee, hee, hee. He said it was going to be a Rat Pack summit. The scribes of the day had their hook and ran with it. Sinatra and company all knew Jack Entratter, because he used to work at the Copacabana in New York City. Now Jack was at the Sands and began nodding happily as soon as Frank mentioned he wanted to stage a Rat Pack summit there.

The shows sold out; those who couldn't get tickets cried. Perhaps no one benefited more than Sammy Davis Jr. His presence made the enterprise integrated. And it was a black and white time of simmering racial protest across the country.

At the Sands, the tablecloths were linen and the silverware gleamed. The mobsters mingled with the actors and actresses who had come over from Hollywood. Some of the blacks in Vegas tugged at Sammy's elbow, begging him to say something about the city's segregation.

One night onstage, Frank told Dean that Jack Kennedy was in the audience. Who? "What did you say his name was?" Dean cracked.

Sen. Kennedy was already running for the White House; Peter Lawford happened to be his brother-in-law. Dean picked up Sammy like a wounded animal and said to Frank, "Here. This award just came to you from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People."

The laughter didn't stop for a long time. There were blacks in the kitchen who twisted uneasily.

Blauner realizes that some of the statements made by Dean and Sinatra from the stage during Rat Pack evenings would hardly be acceptable in today's climate. "All the things that they did, many people would be scared to do today," he says. "It just wouldn't be politically possible."

When they rolled to California to appear at the 1960 Democratic convention, the Mississippi delegation booed them: Sammy was onstage. Frank called the Mississippians "bums."

The years rolled over and around them. There were Rat Pack movies, such as "Ocean's Eleven," "Sergeants 3" and "Robin and the 7 Hoods."

It was while they were filming a scene for the latter in a Chicago cemetery that someone tapped Frank on the shoulder. They told him Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. Frank shut the production down for a while.

The Rat Pack seemed to die with Camelot. Only it didn't, because George Clooney remade "Ocean's Eleven," then he made "Ocean's Twelve" and "Ocean's Thirteen." The movies were huge hits. Waves of nostalgia erupted about the original Rat Pack, and there were books about Frank, about Sammy, about Dean, books about all of them. There was a cable movie. Vaults were opened and Christmas music by the Rat Pack poured out at holiday parties.

Joey outlived them all. He lived long enough to see them turned into kitsch, then magically back into a pop culture phenomenon. It was a rare return to top billing.