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Pioneers

Queen of the One-Liners

Comedian’s Career Began in Alameda

     An outlandish dress studded with rhinestones and intended to display her skinny legs, a crooked nose, wild hair, a feathery boa, a long cigarette holder, trade­mark short boots and a hearty signature ha, ha, haaaaaaaaaa! laugh. Outrageous in appearance, but self-deprecating, she grabbed the audience’s attention with her unusual looks and then cracked them up with one-liners about herself and her fictitious husband, Fang. That’s how pioneer woman comedian Phyllis Diller entertained millions of people during a career that lasted more than half a century.
     But long before her success, Diller, married and a mother of five, lived in Alameda.
     She and her husband, Sherwood Diller, moved to the Island in 1945 when he got a job at the Naval Air Station. They lived in government housing on Stalker Way, later at 2034 San Jose St., and lastly at 1841 Fremont Drive in the Fernside District. Her last three children were born on the Island, and many attended Edison Elementary School.
    The old adage that comedy is born of tragedy was certainly true for Diller. The Alameda years were tough ones as the
family always struggled financially. Her husband lost the job that brought them to Alameda almost immediately and went from job to job, not able to hold one for very long. Her mother, intent on getting her to divorce Sherwood, came to live with them after Diller’s father died, but died six months after she arrived. She left the family $30,000 but, as her mother had suspected, that didn’t last them
too long. Eventually, Diller had to get a job, and leave her five children at home with a
paid sitter. “I had to do it. It had to be done. They were miserable years,” says Diller, in a recent phone interview from her home in Los Angeles.
    She’d always had a quick wit and set out to make a living using it. Diller got her first job, writing about society, shopping and some news for The San Leandro News Observer newspaper, thanks to her Fernside neighbor, Abe Kofman, publisher and editor of the paper, who also published The Alameda Times Star. “It had been a weekly and was going to daily, so that’s why there was work,” she says. She was paid $75 a week. Her columns were well received, and she injected them with her own unique sense of humor. “I was unwittingly honing skills that would later prove invaluable to me as a professional comedy writer,” she wrote, with Richard Buskin, in her 2005 autobiography, Like A Lampshade in a Whorehouse.
     An only child of two older parents who both had good senses of humor, Diller grew up in Lima, Ohio, and loved to entertain people, playing piano and singing. At age 17, after finishing high school, she headed to Chicago and enrolled at the Sherwood Conservatory of Music to study piano and music theory. There, she found out she had a lyric soprano’s voice and didn’t  quite have the talent or nerves to be a concert pianist.
     Diller served as the music director and sang in the choir at the First Presbyterian Church on Santa Clara Avenue in Alameda, where Howard Brubeck, brother of famed jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, was an
organist (and was a professor of music
at Mills College).
    In December 1946, she conceived and wrote a Christmas show for the church, which led to other performances, including one on motherhood. “I wrote and performed an entire comic routine, and it went down really well,” says Diller. Besides telling jokes, she sang and danced and used props. She began to perform at the Naval Air Station, too. “I’d throw something together for each club for what subject they wanted. I’d just sit and write the thing. I was born to do it,” she says.
     She hated confrontation, and being a comic allowed her to make fun of the things or people who bothered her and couldn’t deal with, including her husband. She didn’t divorce him for the children’s sake. “I often felt close to death — under such pressure, living with hate — and those shows [in Alameda] were my savior,” she writes in her autobiography.
     After the newspaper, she got a job writing advertising copy for Kahn’s, a large Oakland department store, radio stations KROW in Oakland and later for KSFO in San Francisco. Her quick wit and singular style served her well. For one ad campaign at Kahn’s she wrote, “Prices on our damaged refrigerators have been slashed. If demand is heavy, we can damage a few more.”
     While working at KROW, in the early 1950s, she discovered a book one day, The Magic of Believing, which changed her life. She read and studied it for two years.
     Written by Claude M. Bristol in 1948, the book was an early self-help book that she drew upon to purge herself of negative feelings and thoughts. It outlined motivational techniques that advocated the use of the subconscious mind, powers of suggestion, imagination and self-belief to overcome everyday obstacles and achieve personal happiness along with professional success.
     As part of the book’s exercises, she created a book of dreams, things she wanted to do in her life, which included making $200,000 by way of music, writing and humor. “I had the guts to write down what
I wanted to do. When I put those pages in my book, no one would’ve believed I could’ve done it. It was that magic,” she says.
     After much encouragement from Sherwood, Diller, at age 37, began her stand-up career in March 1955 when she got a chance to perform at the now-famous Purple Onion nightclub in San Francisco’s North Beach. “I left the job at KSFO to be an unemployed comic. How’s that for guts?” she asks.
     From there, Diller hit the road and had three years of success and failure on the discovery club circuit. She was often broke and hated being separated from her kids who lived with Sherwood’s relatives, but eventually got her big break in 1958 when she landed an appearance on The Jack Paar Show, which later became The Tonight Show. “I’m probably the only person still alive that’s been on The Tonight Show with all four hosts: Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno,” says Diller.
     Sherwood was the basis of Fang, her fictitious husband, who, along with his family, were often the butt of her jokes, along with herself, but she always kept it light-hearted and silly and shied away from political humor, or anything controversial. “I always worked for one thing: a laugh,” she says.
     The Tonight Show gave her the exposure and name recognition that allowed her to fill nightclubs across the country. She appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1960. Eventually, she caught the eye of comedian Bob Hope, who asked her to co-star in the 1966 movie, Boy Did I Get a Wrong Number. She went on to star in three TV shows, recorded five comedy albums, appeared in 23 of Bob Hope’s TV specials and traveled with him to do USO shows in Vietnam. She also performed in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway in 1970, did guest spots on game shows and wrote five books.
     Music was always a large part of Diller’s life, and she used her musical talents to bolster her career in its latter stages in the 1970s and 1980s. She developed and performed, as Dame Illya Dillya, a 12-minute comedy routine at 100 symphony pops concerts. Along with the comedy, she also played parts of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Bach’s Inventions on the piano. She closed the performances singing “The Ladies Who Lunch” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company and “Before the Parade Passes By” from Hello, Dolly! “It was the greatest thing I ever did. I got such joy from it. It was the icing on the cake,” says Diller of these later years. “It also validated my mother who always wanted me to be a fine musician,” she says.
    Diller’s one-liners came so fast and furious at the height of her career in the ’60s that she set the Guinness world record for delivering 12 punch lines in a minute. But even Diller, who loved being witty and still is, found the wear and tear of stand-up comedy too grueling, even more so after a heart attack in 1999.
     At her farewell stand-up performance in Las Vegas in 2002, Diller, then 85, went out with a typical array of self-deprecating one-liners, joking about her age: “You know you’re old when: your walker has an air
bag, and your neck wins a turkey poster contest, and your birthday cake looks like a prairie fire, and they discontinued your blood type, and somebody compliments you on your alligator shoes and you’re barefoot.”
     Although many see her as a pioneering woman comedian, Diller certainly didn’t think of herself as such at the time. In retrospect, she realizes her timing was fortunate. “No one had ever heard of a female comic. I just happened to hit the big groundswell of getting women out of the kitchen: get the apron off and burn the bras — the women’s movement. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I hit it just right,”
says Diller.
     Diller, now 93, says that she wouldn’t have ever become a comedian or had a performance career if Sherwood had been able to support their family. “I’d still be living in Alameda. I would have become a writer and written funny things. The ‘funny’ had to come out. I wouldn’t have been driven, but I was driven by necessity,” she says.
     Since her retirement from stand-up, she’s kept a busy schedule. Still living in the house she bought in the Brentwood area in 1965, she paints, makes appearances, does voice work for movies and television shows including for Pixar’s A Bug’s Life and Fox TV’s The Family Guy, spends time with her extended family of children, grand- and great-grandchildren and revels in the career she’s had in comedy. “It’s just wonderful that I found my place. I was a round peg in a round hole. A lot of people go through life not finding their passion,” she says.