Free Paul Lynde - A Biography by Cathy Rudolph

Records came out with his live recording: Paul Lynde Recently Released. It began with The Trip of the Month: his seven minute monologue that got him noticed in New Faces of 1952. He followed it with The Family Just Across the Moat, where he played a mother who was just released from an institution. He cackles like a witch, while telling her son to wipe his feet, all four of them, and then tells him to go out and play in traffic.
    The second track was called Few Odd Odes, a bunch of morbidly funny poems written and recited by Paul. One of them was for a terminally ill friend in the hospital. It’s called Cheer up:

    There are roses in bloom,
    In my hospital room.
    Hear the bird in my window singing a song:
    Cheer up, cheer up, you haven’t got long…

    The friend passed away while reading it. The artist’s dark humor didn’t hold up its appeal without his physical animated gestures and grimacing faces. The live album died on the shelves, and then his phone went dead too.
    Disaster struck Paul when he was at Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, while performing in Visit to a Small Planet, in the summer of 1958. Paul was having his usual bout of stage fright before curtain time: petrified that he would forget his lines no matter how many times he had done the same show. He always managed to summon up the courage and get out there and pull it off: not that night, though. In an article titled, “The Nervous Nellie of the Networks,” in TV Guide magazine, Paul described how he walked on stage and no words came out of his mouth. His prompters called out his lines, but he stood there frozen for five unending minutes. The audience froze with him. The actors on the stage tried to cover for him, but the scene was not working. Another two full minutes past, still not a sound. The decision was made to bring the curtain down. The speechless actor headed back stage, humiliated, he wanted to walk out and never have anything to do with acting again. The producer and some of the cast reminded him he was meant to be an actor, this was his dream. After much convincing, Paul headed back on stage. He picked up where he left off and he didn’t miss a beat. When the play was over, he received an ovation from the audience.
    He continued with the theater circuit and next played Paul Anderson in Season in the Sun. In July, he headed to Long Island and appeared in the revue Dig We Must, with Alice Ghostly at the John Barrymore Theater in East Hampton. He was getting paid regularly, and he enjoyed having money in his pocket. The next character he played was Maxwell Archer in Once More, With Feeling, in Washington, D.C. He was now well-known in the theater industry, and a respected actor, but it was not enough for him.
    When summer stock ended, Paul returned to his apartment in New York. He continued to go on auditions and afterwards raced home and stayed glued to the phone. He had been receiving enough praises from critics and was frustrated as to why he wasn’t being asked to do something big. When his phone rang and it was one of his friends, he sounded annoyed as he said, “Oh, it’s you.” He was also bothered again by the way he looked; his weight had gone back to over 200 pounds. The last thing he wanted was to be known as the “fat comic.” He began to lose all his ambition. He stopped going on auditions. He stopped reading the cast calls in the paper.
    Then he got a huge break: he was asked to perform his African Trip monologue on Toast of the Town, which in 1955 was officially changed to The Ed Sullivan Show. This lead to more visibility on television , along with good pay and Paul made appearances on The Red Buttons Show and The Martha Raye Show. He played the voice of Horace Fenton, the owner of a hotel chain who was never seen but only heard over a loudspeaker in the show, on a sitcom called Stanley. It starred Buddy Hackett and Carol Burnett, which was aired on NBC in 1956, but was cancelled after several months.