Perry Como Live at the Hollywood Palace (1969)

    Perry Como feels a bit inexplicable in 2020. At the tail end of his cultural relevancy, sometime in the 80’s or maybe early 90’s, he was simply synonymous with a kind of boring, inoffensive blandness, a beige-colored feel associated with Grandma’s living room and old golf magazines found in dentists’ waiting rooms. He has since passed out of the general consciousness in a way that many of his contemporaries haven’t. People still know who Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin are, but for a number of years Perry Como was more popular and higher paid than any of them. He was a television star who transitioned from radio who kept being phenomenally successful for over forty years. He had 14 number one singles and although records are spotty at best it’s generally agreed he had several million in album sales. As he grew older he started limiting his appearances on television to special appearances and holidays, especially Christmas. He lived a controversial-free life and was known for being the same person both on and off screen, a continually casual, easy-going guy.

    Which might be enough to explain both his original rise to popularity and how long it lasted while also fading into almost nothing since his passing in 2001. For the most part we know of his contemporaries by their misdeeds, by their now-offensive stage patter and offstage peccadilloes. Frank Sinatra is known more now for his mob ties than his musical work, mention Bing Crosby and his history of family abuse will quickly come up, and Dean Martin is shorthand for a womanizing drunk. For a man to simply be a good singer and entertainer isn’t nearly enough to be interesting anymore.

This does not become easy to explain at any point.

   

    ‘The Hollywood Palace’ was a weekly television variety show that ran on ABC in the late 60’s. It had a revolving set of guest hosts, most notably the previously mentioned Crosby, Sinatra, and Martin, as well as Liberace, Tony Bennett, Judy Garland, and so on. It’s basically an historical footnote now to acts like The Rolling Stones, who made their first US appearance on the show, and The Jackson Five, who made their first nationwide appearance, but at the time if you were a name of any renown you likely either hosted or appeared on it. It ran for seven years it was finally canceled in 1970.

    On December 20^th, 1969, Perry Como hosted ‘The Hollywood Palace’ for its annual Christmas show. It’s most prominent guest was Diahann Carroll, starring at the time in ‘Julia’ on NBC, the first show to star an African American woman as the central character. By this point she had already won a Best Actress Tony and had been nominated for an Academy award. She would later go on to star in ‘Dynasty’ and pop up frequently in various television roles. Comedian Sheldon ‘Shecky’ Greene acted opposite Como in several skits, and dancer Edward Villella performed an oddly serious ballet number. Oh, and there were also bits with Kukla and Ollie. I ... don’t really have time to go into Kukla and Ollie. Let’s just say it was a puppet show that seemed like it came from the same fever-swamps that spawned Sid & Marty Kroftt shows but had in fact been running, in one form or another, since 1947. People were deeply weird in the past as well.

He's surrounded by ladies a lot.

    

    The show opens with a boisterous introduction, with Como walking onstage to loud applause. He is gently surrounded by the crooning Ray Charles (not that Ray Charles) Singers lilting out a rendition of ‘Home for the Holidays.’ The band starts playing and Como joins in and ... he’s fine. He’s fine. He was famously a quiet singer, to the point where they had to invent a small enough microphone to both pick up his voice and not get in the way of the camera shot. He sounds like a guy with a good voice singing well but there’s nothing there to indicate why the bobby-soxer contingent used to consider him so swoon-worthy.

    He sings a verse then wanders over to lean on a piano and croon away at another song while the pianist tinkles away. I’ll be honest, there are a lot of songs in this special and I know maybe half of them. They were standards of the time but in a day and age where ‘Oldies’ stations refers to songs from the 70’s they have long since faded into relative obscurity.

    Back to the singers and they wrap up the song. He briefly addresses the audience, dropping a bunch of names that mean nothing to me but were clearly familiar to the audience. He seems like a soft-spoken, perfectly pleasant man. Then Shecky Greene wheels onto the stage as a creepy Santa to introduce what is by far the skeeviest section of the show. The best way to explain Shecky Greene is as the poor man’s Buddy Hackett. After some banter Como introduces the ‘lovely girl’ who’d like to meet him, Diahann Carroll, who at the time was 34 and who they decide to dress like this:

And we're moving on.

    

    And yes she does the little girl voice and yes Santa spends the next few minutes drooling over her as she sits on his knee, at one point singing “Thank heaven for little girls!” So, yeah, moving on to Como and Santa bantering with Kukla and Ollie for a few minutes, managing, in 1969, to get in a hippy-punching joke as well. It’s deeply weird outside of the context of the time.

    Next is the dance number which is oddly, fervently serious, set to ‘Little Drummer Boy.’ It’s deeply incongruous. After a commercial break and a gratefully short Carroll / Carol pun a gorgeous Diahann Carroll comes out to sing a number. It’s one of those upbeat 1960’s numbers you’d see in a Vegas review. As good as Carroll is there isn’t a hook to be found anywhere. After the number she sits at the edge of the stage to sing a much more downtempo Irving Berlin tune after which Como comes out to join her. There’s a brief moment where they fumble in getting her dress out of the way and the actual people behind the performers show through. They seem like perfectly pleasant people. They reference her role in ‘Julia’ then banter a little, including a dig at ABC itself about canceling Christmas that plays a little differently now. Then they sing ‘Silver Bells.’

Could not be more late-60's if they tried.

   

    Another commercial break and another ‘comedy’ bit with Shecky Greene as a drunk businessman bemoaning his upcoming divorce to a sympathetic piano player. It’s not even enough to be properly offensive, just slurred speech patterns and an odd insistence on talking about ‘hormone shots,’ which again plays differently now. This eventually ends and then Como is surrounded by The Ray Charles (not that Ray Charles) Singers for another number with dreamy background vocals, all dressed in what must have been sweltering fur coats under all that stage lighting. Another section of Kukla and Ollie going back and forth about long distance phone calls back when that was still an actual thing and a nonsense dragon language. They even drag Diahann Carroll into a sub-sub Sesame Street number. One last commercial break, one last summoning of The Ray Charles (not that Ray Charles) Singers for a Christmas medley before a final good night from Como during which he plugs an upcoming Sears sponsored special on NBC and closes which a snippet of his signature tune ‘You Are Never Far Away from Me.’ Cue curtains and applause.

I mean like all the time.

    

    So what does all this leave us with? The show itself, as presented, is just fine. It’s some pleasant tunes sung by a pleasant man with a strange dance number and some unfunny skits with only one creepy scene, which is pretty good for 1969. It’s ... pleasant. And to modern eyes and ears deeply boring in a kind of fuzzy way that’s more likely to lead to a nap than annoyance.

    I’ll be honest, I expected a lot more to be cringe-worthy about this special. It was 1969, it was the deeply unhip Perry Como, and while not entertaining in the slightest it was clearly a well-put together show by professionals who knew what kind of show they wanted to put out and then did so. Aside from a few grating lines and the general antics of Shecky Greene there wasn’t all that much that was offensive. For the number of people on stage there was a decent amount of diversity for the time, Diahann Carroll is portrayed as the artist she clearly was (with of course one glaring exception) and it manages to give decent screen time to a very serious and artistic dance number. In fact if you cut out all of the bits with Shecky Greene I’d find just about nothing to actually complain about.

Diahann Caroll has very little time for your nonsense.

       

    Not that the occasional crack doesn’t show. The version I got included the commercial breaks which were noticeable for 1. how much shorter they were compared to now, 2. how directly pitched most of them were, essentially nagging people to buy the correct product, and also 3. how deeply jarring it is to see just a straight up television commercial for cigarettes. And although they’re kept to a relative minimum it’s a little unsettling for so many clearly contemporary jokes and pop-culture references to be basically inexplicable without pausing to do a deep Wiki dive every five seconds. The past is like a whole other world.

    This is not the last time we’re going to visit Mr. Como. The rest are going to be specials of his own making, however, rather than just a guest spot in an already running show. We’re also going to stretch later into his career and as a general rule people become more and more themselves as they get older so we’ll see if the image of Perry ‘Beige’ Como still rings true as the years progress.

    After this initial exposure I’m forced to a sort of grudging respect for the man. He was clearly very successful for many years for reasons that I simply cannot explain. That doesn’t make that success invalid, however, just very inexplicable to me. I get the appeal of Crosby, Sinatra, and especially Martin, for whom I will forever have a place in my heart for his wonderful turn in ‘Rio Bravo.’ In a grubby way I even get the appeal of Sheldon ‘Shecky’ Greene. Como is not an enigma, I don’t sense unplumbed depths to the man, but he is something of an anomaly, and while I’m not exactly looking forward to another four hours or so of spending time with him I don’t dread it nearly as much as when I started in on this.