A Sense of Doubt blog post #3445 - Bob Newhart RIP
A lot of people have been dying lately, and I have not even been able to acknowledge them all, such as Donald Sutherland, who I liked a lot.
Another great loss, though of someone who lived a long and full life.
Here's two articles on his life and career.
Bob Newhart, deadpan comedy legend and sitcom star, dies at 94
After winning a Grammy for "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart," he went on to lead "The Bob Newhart Show" and "Newhart."
Bob Newhart, one of television's most revered comedic actors of all time, died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles after a series of short illnesses. He was 94.
His longtime publicist, Jerry Digney, confirmed the news to Entertainment Weekly.
Newhart's career spanned 60 years, from his early roots as a stand-up on The Ed Sullivan Show to his cameos as the beloved Professor Proton on Young Sheldon. His pitch-perfect timing and deadpan delivery made him a timeless comic force.
Born in Oak Park, Ill., Newhart served in a non-combat role during the Korean War before briefly finding work as a less-than-satisfactory accountant for a construction company. (He later wrote in his book I Shouldn't Be Doing This that his motto during the job was "That's close enough.") After a stint in copywriting, Newhart started a career in standup comedy, developing a reputation for his one-sided phone conversation routine, pretending to talk to the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Sir Walter Raleigh, and a security guard at the Empire State Building witnessing King Kong's ascent.
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CBS/GETTY
Newhart released his first comedy album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, in 1960. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1961 (becoming the first comedy album to do so), while Newhart was named Best New Artist. He would release several more albums over the next two decades.
His work in standup got him noticed by NBC, which gave him an eponymous variety show in 1961. The program only lasted one season, but it showed Hollywood he had the chops for hosting — and for busting chops. He went on to help emcee on The Entertainers, The Dean Martin Show, Ed Sullivan, and The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.
Newhart's big break as an actor came in 1972, when he was cast as psychologist Robert "Bob" Hartley on the workplace comedy The Bob Newhart Show. For six seasons, Newhart was the perennial straight man next to bonkers clients like the neurotic Elliot Carlin (Jack Riley) and knitter Lillian Bakerman (Florida Friebus). His work on the show earned him three Emmy nominations.
Since his surname could clearly attract eyeballs, Newhart was back in prime time in 1982 on Newhart, this time playing a New York writer named Dick who runs a rural Vermont inn with his wife, Joanna (Mary Frann). The show lasted eight seasons but was probably best known for the way it ended: A confused Newhart wakes up next to Suzanne Pleshette, his smart-alecky wife from The Bob Newhart Show.
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CBS/GETTY
Newhart credited his longtime wife, Ginny (they were married for 60 years, until her death in 2023), with coming up with the idea.
"JFK once said victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan," he told EW in 2018. "This is the true story of how the show ended. It was in the sixth year of the show, and my wife, Ginny, and I were going to a party. I said, 'I think this is going to be the last year of Newhart.' Suzanne Pleshette was at this party, so Ginny said, 'I think I have the ending. You should wake up in bed with Suzanne and explain to her this dream you had.' So I gave it to the writers. The crew didn't know about it the night of the finale. We did a run-through, the crew went to dinner, and when they came back, we told them we added a scene. We just told them to keep filming, whatever happens."
More seminal roles followed for Newhart, like his gig as bumbling educator Tom Halliwell in In & Out (1997) and as Papa Elf opposite Will Ferrell in Elf (2003). He also lent his voice to The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under, portraying Bernard in Disney's animated adventures. In 2013, Big Bang Theory producers Bill Prady and Chuck Lorre cast him as Arthur Jeffries, a former children's TV host who went by the name of Professor Proton. After a lifetime of indelible roles, his work on the long-running CBS sitcom finally earned Newhart his one and only Emmy.
Newhart is survived by four children — Jennifer, Courtney, Timothy, and Robert — and numerous grandchildren
Bob Newhart, 94, Dies; Soft-Spoken Everyman Became a Comedy Star
He was a show-business neophyte when he stammered his way to fame in 1960. He went on to star in two of TV’s most memorable sitcoms.
His publicist, Jerry Digney, confirmed the death.
Mr. Newhart wasn’t merely unknown a few months before his
emergence as a full-fledged star; he was barely in the business, though he had
aspirations. In 1959, some comic tapes he had made to amuse himself while
working as an accountant in Chicago caught the ear of an executive at Warner
Bros. Records, which in 1960 released the comedy album “The Button-Down Mind of
Bob Newhart.”
The record shot to No. 1 on the charts, and at the 1961
Grammy Awards it improbably captured the top prize, album of the year. Among
the nominees Mr. Newhart bested: Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte and Frank
Sinatra.
He won two other Grammys that year as well, for best new
artist and best spoken-word comedy performance, an honor that was given not to
his first album but to his second, a hastily made follow-up titled “The
Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!” For a while, his first two albums occupied the
top two spots on the Billboard album chart.
“Playboy magazine hailed me ‘the best new comedian of the
decade,’” Mr. Newhart wrote in his autobiography, “I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing
This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny” (2006), describing this period.
“Of course, there were still nine more years left in the decade.”
A Quick Transition
Unlike many entertainers who achieve fame almost overnight,
Mr. Newhart was able to handle the unexpected success of the “Button-Down Mind”
albums. He transitioned quickly and easily into television, landing a
short-lived variety show, numerous guest appearances on the shows of Dean
Martin and Ed Sullivan, regular work guest-hosting for Johnny Carson on “The
Tonight Show” and, ultimately, “The Bob Newhart Show,” a celebrated sitcom in
which he played a somewhat befuddled psychologist.
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| On “The Bob Newhart Show,” Mr. Newhart played a psychologist and Peter Bonerz played a dentist who shared an office floor with him.20th Century Fox Television |
That series ran from 1972 to 1978, and in 1982 he followed
it up with “Newhart,” another successful sitcom, in which he played a Vermont
innkeeper. “Newhart” ran for eight seasons and ended with what is still viewed
as one of the greatest finales in television history.
Mr. Newhart remained busy in television and films into his
80s. He won an Emmy in 2013 for a guest appearance as the beloved former host
of a TV science show on “The Big Bang Theory.” He was nominated again for the
same role a year later but lost to Jimmy Fallon, who won for hosting an episode
of “Saturday Night Live.” And he reprised the role a few times, most recently
in a 2020 voice-over, on the “Big Bang Theory” prequel series “Young Sheldon.”
That Emmy was, surprisingly, his first. He had been
nominated but winless at the Emmys of 1962, for writing; 1985, 1986 and 1987,
as lead actor in a comedy (“Newhart”); 2004, as guest actor in a drama series,
for his role in three episodes of “ER” as an architect losing his sight; and
2009, for his supporting role in the TV movie “The Librarian: The Curse of the
Judas Chalice.”
Though he personally did not win an Emmy until he had been
on television for half a century, his variety show — which ran for a single
season in 1961-62 and which, like his later sitcom, was called “The Bob Newhart
Show” — did win, in a category then called outstanding program achievement in
the field of humor. It beat out “The Andy Griffith Show,” “The Red Skelton
Show,” “Hazel” and “Car 54, Where Are You?”
“I think the whole awards-giving process needs rethinking,”
Mr. Newhart wrote in his autobiography. “For starters, they should bestow
lifetime achievement awards at the beginning of a performer’s career. This way
the person can still enjoy it while he is young, rather than giving it to him
when he has lost most of his marbles and is standing onstage wondering why all
these overdressed people are applauding.”
Nonetheless, he did not object when in 2002 he was
given the
Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
From Accountant to Comedian
George Robert Newhart was born on Sept. 5, 1929, in Oak
Park, Ill. His father, who worked for a plumbing and heating
contractor, was also named George, which is how Bob came to be known as Bob,
though at first that was true only among his family, for clarity’s sake.
George David Newhart and his wife, Pauline, had three other
children as well, all girls, and sent Bob and his sisters, Virginia, Mary Joan
and Pauline, to Roman Catholic schools in the Chicago area. “My family didn’t
have much money so we didn’t go to Florida” to escape the Chicago winters, Mr.
Newhart wrote in his autobiography. “If we went on vacation, it was to
Wisconsin.”
Mr. Newhart graduated from Loyola University, where he
focused his studies on business management and accounting, and then tried law
school but found it wasn’t a good fit for him. (“I hate the phrase ‘flunked
out,’” he wrote. “I failed to complete the assigned courses.”) He served two
years stateside in the Army during the Korean War.
Mr. Newhart was an accountant before he broke into comedy,
but, as he explained to PBS in 2002: “I was never a certified public accountant. I
just had a degree in accounting. The reason I was never a certified public
accountant was because it would require passing a test, which I would not have
been able to do.”
He did, however, hold several jobs in the Chicago area that
required him to do accounting work, and he often told of his habit of balancing
the petty cash drawer at the end of the day by making up shortfalls out of his
own wallet or pocketing any overage. It was while working in one such job, at
the Glidden Company, that he and a friend in another department, Ed Gallagher,
began relieving the monotony by calling each other and improvising comic
dialogues.
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| Mr. Newhart in the 1968 movie “Hot Millions.” He appeared in movies throughout his career. |
In 1956, they tried recording some of these routines and
marketing them to radio stations, but their client base was never very large,
and the unprofitable venture ended when Mr. Gallagher took a job in New York.
Mr. Newhart, though, kept writing solo routines, many of
them using a telephone as a partner: The audience would imagine the half of the
conversation it wasn’t hearing. One memorable bit depicted a press agent
talking by phone to Abraham Lincoln about the Gettysburg Address: “You what?
You typed it! Abe, how many times have we told you — on the backs of envelopes.
I understand it’s harder to read that way, but it looks like you wrote it on
the train coming down.”
His material caught the ear of Dan Sorkin, a Chicago radio
personality, who played some of Mr. Newhart’s routines on the air, which led to
work on a local morning television show opposite “Today” and “Captain
Kangaroo.”
“Given the competition and lack of viewer response, we
weren’t sure the signal was even getting out of the building,” Mr. Newhart
recalled.
But Mr. Sorkin had given some of the tapes that Mr. Newhart
and Mr. Gallagher made to George Avakian, an executive at Warner Bros. Records,
who liked them. In 1959, Mr. Avakian asked Mr. Newhart to let him know when his
next nightclub appearance was so that the company could record the performance.
Mr. Newhart, though, had never performed in front of an audience. A hastily
recruited agent eventually booked him into the Tidelands Motor Inn in Houston,
where, on Feb. 10, 1960, “The Button-Down Mind” was recorded.
“I came off and walked by the maître d’s table,” Mr. Newhart
told The Houston Chronicle in an interview for the 50th anniversary
of that recording. “He said: ‘Go back out. They’re still applauding.’ And I
said, ‘But that’s all I have.’ He said, ‘Well, go back out.’ So I walked back
out and said, ‘Which one would you like to hear again?’”
Sitcom Successes
The success of the “Button-Down Mind” albums brought all
sorts of demands for Mr. Newhart’s dry humor. In April 1961, he made his New
York debut at Carnegie Hall. Later that year, he filmed his first movie, the
World War II drama “Hell Is for Heroes,” providing comic relief as part of a
cast that also included Steve McQueen, Fess Parker, Bobby Darin and James
Coburn. And in December 1961, the first “Bob Newhart Show” had its premiere on
NBC.
That show lasted only one season, but it won an Emmy and
proved that Mr. Newhart’s brand of humor would work on television. He began
turning up all over the dial on game shows, talk shows and variety shows,
including “The Garry Moore Show,” “The Dean Martin Comedy Hour,” “The Andy
Williams Show” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
By the time CBS gave him a sitcom in 1972, also called “The
Bob Newhart Show,” he was a household name, but there was some concern about
the premise. “In the pilot, we were both psychiatrists,” Peter Bonerz, another
star of the show, told The New York Times in 2005. “He was the Freudian, and I
was the New Age behaviorist.” That didn’t test well, so Mr. Newhart’s
character, Dr. Bob Hartley, was turned into a psychologist, and Mr. Bonerz
played a dentist on the same office floor.
The cast was perfectly chosen to contrast with Mr. Newhart’s
well-established persona. Marcia Wallace was Dr. Hartley’s sassy receptionist,
and Suzanne Pleshette was Emily, his blunt, sarcastic wife. In a great era for
sitcoms — “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Happy Days”
were among its contemporaries — the show performed well, especially in the
first three of its six seasons. A statue of Mr. Newhart’s character,
commissioned by the cable channel TV Land, is on display at the Navy Pier in
Chicago, the city where the show was set.
Mr. Newhart returned to the sitcom format in 1982 with
“Newhart,” this time playing Dick Loudon, who with his wife, Joanna (Mary
Frann), abandons urban life to try innkeeping in Vermont. The show ran for
eight seasons on CBS, ending on May 21, 1990, with a finale whose sly surprise
became the stuff of television legend.
As chaos envelops the inn, Dick is struck by a golf ball and
knocked unconscious. To try to preserve secrecy, a fake ending was conceived in
which Dick wakes up in heaven and meets God, who was to be played by either
George Burns or George C. Scott. But the actual ending wasn’t set in heaven at all; it
was set in the familiar bedroom of the Hartleys from Mr. Newhart’s earlier
show. He wakes up next to not Ms. Frann but Ms. Pleshette. The entire second
series had been a dream.
“That scene never appeared in a script, because we knew that
the tabloids would get ahold of it,” Mr. Newhart recalled in an interview for the Archive of American
Television. The secrecy continued right up till filming, which was in front of
a live audience.
“We brought Suzie in from two sound stages over; snuck her
in,” Mr. Newhart said. The crowd got the joke before a word was spoken. “The
audience recognizes the bedroom set, and they start applauding,” he said. “They
started applauding even before they saw Suzie or myself.”
The idea for that ending, Mr. Newhart often said, came from
his real wife, Virginia (known as Ginnie), the daughter of Bill Quinn, a
veteran character actor. Mr. Newhart’s fellow comedian Buddy Hackett introduced
them, and they married in 1963. She died in 2023.
Mr. Newhart is survived by their four children, Robert Jr.,
Timothy, Courtney Albertini and Jennifer Bongiovi; a sister, Ginny Brittain;
and 10 grandchildren.
Mr. Newhart returned to the sitcom format twice more, with “Bob” in 1992 and “George and Leo” in 1997, but neither show made much of an impression. Late in his career he had success as a guest star on other people’s series — “Desperate Housewives,” “ER,” “NCIS” — displaying an ability to play dramatic roles as well as comic ones.
Throughout his career, Mr. Newhart also found time for movies. Among his best-known film characters were Major Major in “Catch-22” in 1970, President Manfred Link in “First Family” in 1980 and the adoptive father of Will Ferrell’s oversize title character in the hit 2003 comedy “Elf.”
He was also in the 1971 film “Cold Turkey,” written and directed by Norman Lear, about a town that tries to quit smoking collectively. That plot had real-life resonance for him in 1985, when he sought treatment for a chronic nosebleed and his doctors diagnosed secondary polycythemia, an excess of red blood cells that can be caused by too much nicotine in the blood. He quit smoking.
Mr. Newhart never really retired, from either acting or stand-up. He explained why to an AARP convention in Boston in 2007, invoking a classic 1950 film: “I call the alternative ‘Sunset Boulevard’ — sitting in a darkened room and having Erich von Stroheim come in and ask me what episode of ‘Newhart’ I would like to see today. That isn’t the way I’d like to spend the rest of my time.”
A correction was made on
An earlier version of a picture caption with this obituary, using information provided by CBS, misidentified one of the people in a photo of the cast of the sitcom “Newhart.” He is Tony Papenfuss, not John Voldstad.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2407.24 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3309 days ago
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