Before Finding Fame, Countless Phone Calls, and One Audition

By JAMES BARRON

In the 1960s, Phyllis Diller's New York was the New York of the performer on the way up. It was the New York of late-night comedy clubs, of grungy audition rooms, of “Broadway Danny Rose” types who claimed to have show-business connections - and were not afraid to pester producers for an audition.

When an audition went well, it could also be the New York of television studios and Broadway theaters. And she did an audition in April 1961 that went very well.

Ms. Diller was appearing at One Fifth Avenue, a club where, she said in a 2000 interview for the Archive of American Television, “young comics, beginning comics, all of them worked there - Jonathan Winters, everybody.” So did the duo-piano team of Bob Downey and Harold Fonville.

“The booker for the ‘Tonight Show' was in night after night watching the same show that Harold was playing for” - her show - “but he wouldn't book me,” even though they were “friends and buddies.” She said she would ask why he would not put her on the “Tonight Show,” and he would tell her, “What you do is not appropriate for the ‘Tonight Show.'”

“In the meantime,” she said, “Harold, my pianist, is calling the ‘Tonight Show' every day. ‘Hello?' He's calling them every day, trying to book me. Now, this call - every, every, every, every, every day - finally broke them down.” The voice at the “Tonight Show” end of the phone said, “Bring her right in,” if only, she joked, to stop the calls from Mr. Fonville.

The audition took place in what she called “a drab office.” The producer scheduled her for that very night. “And that,” she said, “was history.”

It was the first of three appearances on the “Tonight Show” when Jack Paar was the host. Working behind the cameras was a young writer named Dick Cavett, who remembers the sensation Ms. Diller was.

“I got to be in an audience at a club where she worked onstage,” Mr. Cavett said on Tuesday, “and she was dynamite from the moment you glimpsed her entering. She was wild-looking, funny-looking, and her movements and gestures and everything about it just yelled ‘comedy.' Bob Hope told me once he'd be taping a monologue, and he said, ‘You know, when I do my monologue I see Phyllis behind the camera, checking my eye movements.' And I swear if you were doing a doctoral paper on her, you could research when mannerisms of his became mannerisms of hers.”

Mr. Cavett said he remembered chatting with her before her appearances on the “Tonight Show,” which originated in those days from NBC's Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

“She was a stickler for English, for grammar,” he said. “It came up once when we were talking outside 6B or in the makeup room. She said it drove her nuts to hear people saying ‘lay' for ‘lie' and ‘hay-nee-us'” for â €œheinous.”

Another time, he said, “She handed me her new album, autographed ‘To Richard, thou shalt tread the boards. Phyllis.' I thought, ‘Can this be true?'”

She went on to “The Ed Sullivan Show” and game shows like “What's My Line” and “The Match Game” (when Gene Rayburn was the host and, like the “Tonight Show,” the program originated from Rockefeller Center).

She was also on “I've Got a Secret,” a game show on CBS that also originated from New York, three times. The first time, during a snowstorm in 1966, three of her children were mystery guests. She guessed who they were, but not before she brought the house down with a question: “Is the thing that's so special about you, here in the blizzard, that you have no clothes on?”

By coincidence, that appearance prefigured her Broadway debut: Another guest was Carol Channing, who opened in “Hello, Dolly” three days later. In December 1969, Ms. Diller became the la test in a series of replacements for Ms. Channing.

She said she got the part after the producer David Merrick saw her standup routine. Reviewing her performance as Dolly Gallagher Levi, Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times that Ms. Diller was “something of an acquired taste that, clearly unlike most of the audience, I have never acquired.”

“But she sings a lot better than I feared a cabaret artist might,” he added.

She also played the piano a lot better than many musicians expected, as the Bloomfield Symphony in New Jersey discovered when it hired her as a soloist in March 1982. For about 10 years, Ms. Diller - who had studied piano and voice at the Sherwood Music Conservatory in Chicago and at Bluffton College in Ohio, and who had 12 pianos in her home in California - appeared with about 100 orchestras under the made-up name Dame Illya Dillya.

If audiences expected gags and laughs, they got Bach and Beethoven. With the all-volunteer orche stra in Bloomfield, she tackled the first movement of the Beethoven Concerto No. 1. (And yes, she was paid.)

“She was clearly a competent performer,” said Sig Harac, who was the concertmaster. “I have had occasion to hear many of the greats in the piano business and I wouldn't put her up there, but she was far and away the most professional that we'd encountered.”