Cigars, Cards and Gadgets

Ernie Kovacs is considered a genius with a unique kind of humour by many. Fortunately, some of his work was preserved and is available on discs for home viewing.

Examination of his comedy seems to have been a byproduct of his sudden death in 1962. In checking through newspaper columns about him in the mid-1950s to his death, writers seem to have focused on his lifestyle instead of his on-camera entertainment. There were plenty of stories about his expensive cars, his 20-room New York City apartment, and his spending. That includes on cigars and gambling.

Two columns that came out within days of each other in February 1960 dealt with his love of gadgets. First up, is this syndicated offering.

Gadgets, Guns, Preoccupy Comedian Ernie Kovacs
By STEVEN H. SCHEUER
(McClure Syndicate)
Ernie Kovacs is a guy who loves gadgets. In between stunts like apes dancing to "Swan Lake," Ernie has always had innumerable props performing odd ways, some of which went over with a dull, but imaginative, thud.
Like his shows, Kovacs' Hollywood hillside home is also jam-packed with gadgets. A huge gate at the bottom of the drive is opened electrically by pushing a button.
A visitor hears Kovacs' voice mutter, "Who's there," and then the gate swings open. On the mail-box next to the gate is a flashlight which turns on its beam in the direction of Ernie's den when the mailman deposits the mail.
"That's so I don't have to walk down the hill thirty times a day to check the mail," says Ernie.
• • •
His den, a converted garage, is the hub of the Kovacs universe. He sits at a desk when not playing poker or gin rummy at a nearby table, and communicates with the world either by writing or by phone.
The phone company must love Mr. Kovacs. His bills run around $2,000 a month as he calls London, Paris and New York without any monetary twinge.
He also has just about everything the phone company has dreamed up so far. Behind his desk, some 80 feet of wire are connected to phones, intercom systems to the main house, a radio, a record player and even a TV set. Ernie's knowledge about all these contraptions is basic. "I know that two wires leading to the function must not be crossed," he says proudly.
• • •
When he finds room for a new gadget, Ernie simply calls the phone company and says: "What have you got that's new?"
"This question has brought a stream of men bringing things like a wire recorder that answers the phone. So Ernie doesn't have to pick up a receiver, he hates that, the phone is hooked up to a loud-speaker on the wall, and all he has to do is listen.
Through his household intercom system and loudspeaker, Ernie can even hear his youngest child, Mia, age almost one, breathe in her crib. The microphone is at the head of her bed.
While gadgets have a certain pull for Ernie, so do guns. There are guns on all four walls in his den, dueling pistols, high-powered rifles like a 270 Wetherby Magnum, and old Chinese cannon.
• • •
"I've grown up with guns," Ernie explains, lighting up a big cigar. It was 4:30 in the afternoon and Mr. Kovacs had just arisen.
"I was a good shot when I was nine. I've also turned Edie (wife Edie Adams) into a pretty good shot. She never hunted before, 'til last year in Vegas.
"I took her out and put up some three-inch targets. She hit three consecutively at three hundred yards. That's like picking out the pupil of a moose's eye."
At home with his guns and phones, Ernie can sit down and write except that every few minutes a voice comes over the loudspeaker and Mr. Kovacs has to talk back. How he gets any time for his writing is a wonder.
"And then I have my gin rummy or poker as an added diversion," said Ernie.
• • •
Like his hero, Fred Allen, Kovacs tries to write most of his material. He writes his own silent commercials and the clues on his panel show, "Take A Good Look," which is sponsored by a cigar company.
He also writes 10 spots for Monitor radio a week and he has two books he must get on with for his publishers.
"About all I do is get up and get, through the bills and the mail and then I blow another day," said Ernie.
At the moment, he is looking for other writers to do his radio work. But he doesn't look too hard because he feels better with his own material.
His mother can always spot material Ernie doesn't write and she lets him know about it.
• • •
"I go on a comedy show and other writers give me their stuff. I do it, but I don't feel at ease, or feel comfortable with it.
"I just have to do it my way. You see, I don't tell jokes. I couldn't do it. I don't know how. I have to ramble on."
With the bills paid and the mail sorted and the novel put off for another day, Kovacs calls his cronies like movie director Mervyn LeRoy and a card game is in the making.
Is Kovacs as handy with cards as with comedy?
Ernie shook his head. "You have to have a killer instinct to be a food card player, and I don't have it. I just like to play."

Here’s another. Same angle, different content.

Ernie Kovacs Keeps Adding Rooms To Store His Gadgets
By ERSKINE JOHNSON
Hollywood Correspondent
Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
HOLLYWOOD—A mad collection of gadgets and assorted objets d'curious once enabled Ernie Kovacs to star in a half-hour TV show in which he didn't say a single word.
After visiting the Kovacs home, I know where Ernie got the idea. He lives in a world of gadgets and objets d'curious.
If a movie heroine can be a "Gidget," Ernie could be called a "Gadget." His home keeps growing all over a Hollywood hillside, collecting things as it goes, to Ernie's mock horror:
"We eventually may have to use pogo sticks to get around all this junk."
Not to be dragging in a movie plug, but “Wake Me When It’s Over” is Ernie’s latest movie and a tour through the Kovacs home leaves you thinking, “We Me When You Think It’s Finished.”
Movie Screen Outside
There's the projection room that Ernie says will go over the garage, with the screen up on the hillside, the steam room, and only Ernie knows what else, but you can be sure it will be something.
What was once a garage is Ernie's pad.
There's a balcony, a fireplace right out of an old English castle, with a dozen steak knives stuck into the soft wood mantle ("handy," Ernie explains); there's a spotlight over a poker table which has a six-inch thick polished hardware top; brass cannon on a coffee table point their muzzles directly at visitors, and a couple suits of armor stand around for use as king-size ashtrays.
Amidst it all and up to his knees in books, records, magazines, papers and cigar ashes, Ernie swivels in front of a desk that looks like it was mussed for "Person to Person."
There are four telephones, an electric pencil sharpener, a gadget to clear the air of cigar smoke, a panel of buttons to operate outside gates, recorded music, the air conditioning system.
There is an intercommunication system over which Ernie tries out his "Take A Good Look" TV program chatter on wife Edie Adams in her "pad" 260 feet away from Ernie's desk.
The cigar smoke air-cleaner is the only gadget not working at the moment. "It was giving me a sinus condition," he laughed. "It was like having my desk in a wind tunnel."
Despite the four telephones, one of Ernie's New York friends has promised to increase the number to five. "The last time he was here," Ernie tells it, "he said he wanted to give me another phone with an unlisted number just for him to call out on and to call me when he's in New York."
The panel of buttons, often covered with a foot of papers, letters, books and scripts, may have to go, says Ernie. "I'm thinking of putting in a panel with flashing lights up there on the wall, along with a pressure gauge for the new steam room."
He may be launching rockets from that desk yet. The adjoining house ends in Edie's room, some 260 feet away where things are all black and white stripes with a zebra-skin couch and a clothes closet that reminds you of the Holland Tunnel after a collision between two clothes delivery vans.
In-between are rooms and rooms, and little things like a five-foot-high world globe too big for Ernie to encircle with his arms.
“There are only two like it,” he says. “Ike has the other one. I don’t know if he fainted when he got the bill, but I did.
Ernie’s swiveling desk chair put his eyes on target of a fancy box of chocolates and he frowned. “Now why didn’t the maid take that out of here? Dust I don’t mind but a box of candy makes me nervous.
A shortage of ice cubes makes him nervous, so he has a cube-maker with a capacity of 1800 a day.
No telephone at his elbow makes Ernie nervous, too, so there's still another one in his car.
And a gadget to record his voice back at home. If all those wires get crossed, man, he's in trouble.

Kovacs moved from California to New York, despite objections from his wife, Edie Adams, who loved to work in the theatre. Ernie didn’t. “It’s overrated,” he told Bell Syndicate columnist Margaret McManus in 1961.

But his decision was based on money. He was offered movies. “Such easy work, six weeks at a clip, and for so much money,” he explained to McManus. “This has all been here while I have been knocking my brains out on television for peanuts. Why didn’t somebody tell me?”

The money was $200,000 a picture, guaranteed, plus expenses, rent money for an Italian villa, and a 25% cut of the net profits of the first of four films. Still, he had to continue to do TV to pay debts. Dutch Masters sponsored Take a Good Look, a game show where Hans Conried and other panellists had to guess at something based on a series of Kovacs sketches.

It was different. But so was Ernie Kovacs.