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Larry Gelbart, Comedy Writer, Dies at 81
Larry Gelbart,
the writer whose caustic wit was a creative force behind the enduring
success of the television series “M*A*S*H,” Broadway hits like “A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and film comedies like
“Tootsie,” died Friday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 81.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Pat, who said the cause was cancer.
Achieving
success in both film and television as well as on stage, Mr. Gelbart
was in select company among comedy writers. He was able to boast of
Tony and Emmy awards as well as Oscar nominations. And he was matchless
at firing off one-liners, in one instance summing up how much he had
enjoyed readying a show for Broadway by noting: “If Hitler’s still alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.”
Along
with Gene Reynolds, he helped produce and develop “M*A*S*H” in 1972 and
then wrote and directed many of its first 100 or so episodes. His
association with the show lasted four years, but it went on to become
one of the longest running series in television history, ending in
1983. It was also one of television’s most influential sitcoms, with
its innovative use of an ensemble cast, multiple plotlines and mix of
drama and comedy.
Mr. Gelbart’s aim was to put meaning as well as
mirth into the story of a motley team of medical personnel who cared
for the wounded during the Korean War as members of the 4077th Mobile
Army Surgical Hospital. In a 1983 interview in The New York Times, he
described the early episodes as “the Marx Brothers superimposed on ‘All Quiet on the Western Front,’ ” and added, “I wanted it to be more crazy than sad.”
The series, in half-hour episodes, was inspired by Robert Altman’s 1970 film of the same name and appeared on CBS, starring Alan Alda as the wisecracking surgeon Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce. He was abetted by a cast that over time included McLean Stevenson, Wayne Rogers, Mike Farrell, Harry Morgan, Loretta Swit and Jamie Farr.
It
usually used a laugh track, but if the laughs were abundant, the grim
cost of warfare was hard to ignore. “I am convinced,” Mr. Gelbart wrote
in The New York Times in 1983, before the show’s final episode, “that
we achieved a creative freedom unheard of in the medium before or
since.”
A decade before “M*A*S*H,” Mr. Gelbart teamed with Burt
Shevelove to write the book for the 1962 Broadway musical “A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” With music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and directed by George Abbott, the show was a zany riff on the works of
Plautus. The setting was ancient Rome, where a wily slave named
Pseudolus (Zero Mostel) was busy dreaming up ways to win his freedom.
With a cast that also included David Burns, Jack Gilford and John Carradine,
songs like “Comedy Tonight” and lines like “I live to grovel,” the show
was a runaway hit, earning its creators a total of six Tony Awards, including those for best musical and best book.
“Tootsie”
(1982), was Mr. Gelbart’s most successful film. The screenplay, written
with Murray Schisgal, told the story of a struggling New York actor (Dustin Hoffman) who disguises himself as a woman, wins an audition and becomes a huge success as the star of a television soap opera.
“Tootsie”
earned Mr. Gelbart and Mr. Schisgal an Oscar nomination. It was Mr.
Gelbart’s second visit to the Oscar pool. He had also been nominated
for his screenplay for “Oh, God!,” a 1977 comedy directed by Carl Reiner and based on a novel by Avery Corman. It starred George Burns as a wisecracking personification of the Almighty and John Denver as the nebbishy supermarket worker he chooses to be his earthly messenger.
Larry
Simon Gelbart was born to immigrant parents on Feb. 25, 1928, in
Chicago. In the early 1940s, his family moved to California, where his
father, a barber, was soon grooming Hollywood entertainers. When he
mentioned to the comedian Danny Thomas that his teenage son had a knack for humor, Thomas, who was performing
on Fannie Brice’s radio show “Maxwell House Coffee Time,” gave him a
tryout and promptly hired him.
Larry Gelbart was soon writing gags for the Jack Paar, Eddie Cantor and Bob Hope radio shows. He then moved into television, working for Red Buttons and Sid Caesar, among others.
Mr.
Gelbart married Patricia Marshall in 1956. She survives him, along with
their two children, Becky Gelbart-Barton and Adam and two stepsons,
Gary and Paul Markowitz, all of Los Angeles; six grandchildren; and two
great-grandchildren.
Mr. Gelbart’s first try at writing the book for a Broadway musical came in 1961, with “The Conquering Hero.” Based on the Preston Sturges film “Hail the Conquering Hero,” it starred Tom Poston as a World War
II veteran who is persuaded to pose as a hero of the battle for
Guadalcanal. It was a flop, but “Forum” was waiting in the wings.
Mr. Gelbart had more luck with his first film, which he wrote with Blake Edwards, “The Notorious Landlady” (1962), a mystery with laughs that starred Jack Lemmon and Kim Novak.
His movie credits also included “The Wrong Box” (1966), written with Shevelove, in which Ralph Richardson, John Mills and Michael Caine battle over an inheritance, and “Movie Movie” (1978), written with
Sheldon Keller, a takeoff on the corny formula films of the 1930s.
Mr. Gelbart scored his second Broadway success with the 1976 comedy “Sly Fox,” based on Ben Jonson’s “Volpone.” George C. Scott starred as the aptly named Foxwell J. Sly, a wealthy rascal who
pretends to be on his deathbed in order to trick his greedy associates
into surrendering not only their fortunes but their wives. A 2004
Broadway revival starred Richard Dreyfuss as Sly.
The
Iran-Contra scandal, which rocked Washington in the 1980’s, was fodder
for Mr. Gelbart’s biting 1989 satire “Mastergate,” which skewered
double-talking politicians. The show closed after a brief run, but Mr.
Gelbart was soon back on Broadway with a new musical, “City of Angels,”
with a score by Cy Coleman and lyrics by David Zippel.
Mr.
Gelbart’s script took theatergoers back to 1940’s Hollywood, where a
writer struggled with a screenplay about the noir adventures of his
alter ego, a hard-boiled private eye. “City of Angels” went on to win
six Tony Awards. For the second time in his career, Mr. Gelbart won for
best book of a musical.
He also continued to write for television
but was never able to repeat his success with “M*A*S*H.” In 1980, there
was “United States,” a probing comedy about a marriage under stress. It
was quickly canceled by NBC but briefly reappeared on A&E five years later.
Then
came “AfterMASH,” a 1983 sitcom about the postwar lives of several
characters from the original. It ran for two seasons on CBS.
Mr. Gelbart also wrote three major shows for HBO.
“Barbarians at the Gate” (1993) was a dramatization of the corporate
takeover battle for RJR Nabisco. “Weapons of Mass Distraction” (1997)
focused on warring media czars. And in 2003, Antonio Banderas played the title role in “And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself,” Mr. Gelbart’s drama about the Mexican revolutionary.
“Laughing
Matters,” a collection of Mr. Gelbart’s essays and reminiscences about
“Writing ‘M*A*S*H,’ ‘Tootsie,’ ‘Oh, God!’ and a Few Other Funny
Things,” was published by Random House in 1998. It included a Gelbartian observation about growing old.
“Contrary to popular belief,” he wrote, “it’s not the legs that go
first, it’s remembering the word for legs.”