Newt Gingrich is much taller in person than he is on TV. The lovely Bride of Konig (author of I Wear The Maternity Pants In This Family – www.susankonig.com) and I were invited to a screening of the Newt and Callista Gingrich – produced documentary Ronald Reagan Rendezvous With Destiny the other night, and we got to meet the former Speaker of the House. For some reason I always thought he was on the short, roly poly side. TV’s short, roly poly is, in person, tall, barrel chested and imposing. This is, oddly, the exact opposite of me. On TV I am tall and thin, in person I’m short and fat.
This rare date night out without the various Spawn of Konig, naturally coincided with a gig for me: as my wife was settling into the Director’s Guild Screening Room on W. 57th. 72nd street performing a comedy sketch with TV host extraordinaire Bill Boggs in his live show Talk Show Confidential. The cue for my sketch with Bill is the end of his Richard Nixon anecdote. Boggs tells a very funny story of being a teen-aged intern in the 1960s on a talk show, and the guest is Richard Nixon. Boggs is assigned to Nixon, to make sure Nixon gets to the set on time. En route, Nixon makes a pit stop. Young Boggs is then confronted with his first major, television talk show crisis: how to tell the imposing former Vice President that he’s not only about to go on camera with his fly open, but it’s a “Grand Mal Unzipping,” the kind where your shirt tail is hanging out of the fly.
It’s a funny story, and Boggs tells it well. So, Nixon unzipped, we do our sketch, I hop a cab to the screening – just in time to hear emcee Monica Crowley tell the second funny Nixon anecdote of the evening.
It’s now thirty years post Grand Mal Unzipping. Young Monica Crowley is an intern for former President Nixon at his Saddle River, NJ home / office. Former President Ronald Reagan pays a visit. Monica gets the rare opportunity to be photographed standing in between two presidents. Just before the cameraman shoots, our impetuous young Monica seizes both the opportunity and the aging presidential buttocks, and gooses Nixon and Reagan! The result: a photo of a young, grinning Monica and two very surprised old presidents (or, as Reagan inscribed the photo: “To Monica, a rose between two thorns”).
After the screening, we had a great time hanging out with an actress friend who I’ve known twenty years – but never knew anything about her politics. Turns out she’s a big Reagan fan, and a lifelong Republican. I asked her if she talked politics at auditions or on the set. “Well, I don’t avoid it…But, if I’m in a room full of true believers, what’s the point? I was doing a voice over job last year that had to be rescheduled because I was out of town on the first date they wanted to use me. I was in Minneapolis at the Republican National Convention. The next week at the job, the director was incredulous: ‘Why were you at the Republican Convention? What were you doing there? You mean you’re supporting McCain??’ I said: ‘Okay, let’s just do the work…'”
The documentary, by the way, was very good. I particularly enjoyed the emphasis on how Reagan’s experience negotiating contracts with the studios as president of the Screen Actors Guild directly influenced his negotiating tactics years later with the Soviet Union and the Democratic congress. A couple of things Reagan learned as SAG president: “The purpose of negotiating is to get a deal” and “I’d rather get 80% of what I want then to go off a cliff with my flag flying”.
Ahem. Maybe the current SAG president could learn a thing or two from the old conservative?
And so, with our stomachs bloated with delicious hors d’oeuvres, clutching our gift bags with free Ronald Reagan coffee mugs, our big date night completed, the lovely Bride of Konig and I returned to the Palatial Konig Estates, relieved our brilliant teen-aged daughter of her duties babysitting for her younger brothers, watched the Mets drop another one to the Dodgers, and went to sleep.