Non Fiction Book Reviews #309

KOVACSLAND:

A BIOGRAPHY OF ERNIE KOVACS

by Diana Rico

Ernest Edward Kovacs was born on January 23, 1919 in Trenton, New Jersey. His father Andrew had immigrated from Hungary in 1916. His mother Mary was born of Hungarian parents in Trenton. For Mary Kovacs her son was her whole life. In school Ernie was a very enthusiastic student who wanted to learn. He also loved to pull pranks on friends and family. Ernie loved to read and learned to play the piano by ear. His first ten years were probably the most stable of his life. Andrew found the only major business success he would ever have, as a bootlegger. With the end of Prohibition came the end of Andrew's business and a return to the old neighborhood. When the hard times hit there was conflict between his mother and his father. In high school Ernie discovered acting and found a purpose and a place to fit in. After high school he was admitted into Rollins Studio of Acting in East Hampton. It was an intensive and responsibility-inducing program that Ernie responded too. At nineteen, in 1938, after two successful summers at Rollins, he enrolled in the New York School of the Theater. Ernie's tuition was covered by a scholarship, but to pay the rent, plus money for food and for professional equipment at school, he worked at a variety of jobs. Due to a year of inferior meals and the intense routine routine at school, Ernie's health failed. He came down with pleurisy and pneumonia and having no money he was sent as a charity patient to Welfare Island. Twenty-year-old Ernie Kovacs was an undernourished, worn-out, and very sick young man who was being exposed to other people's diseases in an open ward. He was then put into a tuberculosis ward and contracted tuberculosis. After eighteen months Ernie left the sanitarium, and went home to Trenton to his mother who nursed him back to health. Back in Trenton he got a job working behind a cigar counter which allowed him to indulge in his habit of smoking cigars. His other addictive pleasure was playing poker which would become a major problem later in his life as he was a poor player. Although Ernie looked like a strapping, six-foot-two young man, he was rejected by the military due to the condition of his lung. In 1943 he was hired by WTTM to be a staff announcer. He got a nightly music show that involved him playing about twenty records interspersed with commercials and station announcements. Soon he was taking on more and more duties and more and more air time. Ernie also performed in radio plays and hosted a weekday morning show. Soon he was becoming quite a fixture in Trenton. Ernie loved being recognized and got that through his radio work. With an engineer, Ernie did "remotes," what coverage outside the studio was called. The remotes were very popular and added to the Kovacs legend. On April 13, 1945 he married Bette Wilcox. On June 15, 1945, Sam Jacobs began publishing a small weekly paper called the Trentonian and he hired Kovacs to write a column called "Kovacs Unlimited." It soon turned into a daily column in which he wrote it as if it was a hometown letter to a group of friends. On May 16, 1947 his first child Bette Lee was born. On January 4, 1949 his second child Kip was born. Although Ernie was very happy to be a father, Bette was unhappy at being a mother. In 1950, television station WPTZ in Philadelphia, an affiliate of the NBC Television network, hired Kovacs. His first show was a cooking show with his next a combination quiz and fashion program. During this time he was still doing his radio shows and daily column in Trenton. But TV was pulling him in. By the fall of 1950 Ernie and Bette divorced and Ernie moved to Philadelphia with his two girls and to work full time at WPTZ. WPTZ asked Ernie to host a new early-morning wake-up show, to be called 3 to Get Ready in a ninety-minute slot. This show gave him the chance to be innovative and break what rules there was in early television. With the success of 3 to Get Ready, he was given a national show, Time for Ernie. Nest came a nationally broadcast summer replacement show Ernie in Kovacsland. It was on that show that Edythe (Edie) Adams joined Ernie's cast and crew. Soon the two developed a relationship and would marry. In 1952 Ernie moved to New York to do a nationally broadcast show for CBS. Unlike others Ernie used visual tricks with the TV camera which made his shows very popular. In 1953 Better kidnapped her daughters which meant that Ernie had to search of two years until he got them back. For those two years he spent all the money he had and neglected to pay his taxes as he was using that money to pay for the search. This decision would come back to haunt him and Edie. In 1957, dissatisfied with the way the networks had treated him and in a desperate need for money, he accepted an offer from Columbia Pictures. He got a four-year contract at $100,000 per picture. He had hopes that eventually he could write and direct his own films, exercising the total artistic control that seemed to have eluded him in TV. Ernie also dreamed of being a movie star. None of the films he appeared in were of merit nor did he ever get any artistic control over any films. Gambling was becoming more of a problem for Ernie and was affecting his marriage. In 1961 Edie learned from the IRS that Ernie had not paid his income taxes from 1956 to 1960. They were broke and the IRS took control of there monies. Ernie's final project was a Western series, Medicine Man in which Buster Keaton played his Indian sidekick. Both did it for the money. On January 12, 1962 Ernie was driving his Convair station wagon when he lost control of the car and was killed. Not only was Edie Adams left with a mountain of debts, but she got sued by Ernie's first wife and his mother. By November 1967 all the debts were settled. In the 1970s Edie gathered together all of Ernie's materials and donated them to the UCLA Department of Special Collections. A delightfully well done biography of America's most original and bizarre comic genius.