Dave, I Want To Go Home

Aw, nuts.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Calvert DeForest, the roly-poly character actor with the black-framed glasses and seemingly clueless delivery who developed a cult following as Larry "Bud" Melman on "Late Night with David Letterman" in the 1980s, has died. He was 85.

DeForest, who continued appearing with Letterman under his own name after the late-night comedian moved to CBS in the early 1990s and last appeared on the show in 2002, died Monday in a hospital in Babylon, Long Island, N.Y. after a long illness, said a spokesman for Worldwide Pants, which produces "The Late Show With David Letterman."

"Everyone always wondered if Calvert was an actor playing a character, but in reality he was just himself--a genuine, modest and nice man," Letterman said in a statement Wednesday. "To our staff and to our viewers, he was a beloved and valued part of our show, and we will miss him."

Like a lot of people my age, one of my first memories ever of DeForest was a couple of appearances on the original "Late Night" -- on the third anniversary special, maybe, when he was tasked with interviewing someone, welcoming them to New York, and then giving them a hot towel.

He couldn't master the actions. At all. He'd point the mike away from the interviewer and toward himself when they answered a question, point the mike to them when he asked a question, so most of the thing was off mike. Then he'd fumble the towel, and remember too late to tag it with the awkward laugh at the end. The clumsiness of the action reduced Letterman to hysterics. And me too. And probably a whole generation of Gen X'ers staying up too late so they'd be tired in homeroom the next morning. And maybe a few older kids for whom a couple of bong hits only increased the hilarity.

I encountered Calvert DeForest personally exactly twice. The first time was on a University trip to NYC. He was taping what would be the kickoff of the "Goodwill Tour" that was supposed to take him via Winnebago to Tierra Del Fuego. A few weeks later, a clearly unhappy DeForest would petulantly beg Dave on the air to let him come home. But on this night he trundled out big as life and did his bit where he entered the Winnebago, and triumphantly left New York.

The night before, I had stupidly tripped and gone over on my ankle in a very dimly lit nightclub. So I was on crutches. We were hanging around 30 Rock, after having failed to get into Letterman. Then I noticed the Winnebago parked on 51st Street. I think it might have said something about Calvert DeForest on the side of it. This was right after he dropped the Larry Bud appellation and started going by his own name on the show. (Though news reports frequently get it wrong, they actually had mostly dispensed with the Larry Bud name before he left the NBC show.) In fact, the reason I remember that is because I clearly recall having to argue with a few classmates that "Calvert DeForest IS Larry Bud Melman,"-- hence the sign on the Winnebago was a Letterman thing. This, in the pre-internet, pre-Celeb24hournewsworld, pre-Google age, was how knowing useless shit paid off.)

I was depressed about being in NY on crutches, but when I saw that Winnebago I was stoked. I'd been watching Dave and I'd heard him primping for the upcoming tour -- and I knew that if we just hung around, pretty soon we'd see the next best thing to Dave.

When he finally came out, he was not surrounded by handlers or people. He was just a short, small, scared actor trundling across a street in midtown Manhattan. I don't know what he thought as he saw a six foot three guy lumbering toward him in a dark trenchcoat on crutches, but to his credit, when I touched him, and threw my crutches down and said, "I can walk!" he smiled. And then, when I took a couple of tentative steps (obviously still in pain) he said, "Are you really hurt?" with something like real concern.

It's hard when you straddle that netherland between being someone who's being laughed at, and laughed with... and I'm not sure how much comfort DeForest ever had in that role. I'm not even sure what side of that line he thought he was on.

We've gone so far past the age of Larry Bud Melman. We now regularly know from the rhythms of Springer and Reality TV that there are some people you want to hate; and some people the medium practically demands that you laugh at, because of their venality, or cluelessness, or arrogance.

But Calvert DeForest wasn't like that. He was always a little lost. And what made his bits so joyously funny wasn't just the absurdity of him -- that voice and that white hair and the seeming willingness to do anything -- it was the sense you got, the very real sense, of displacement. You weren't sure where the character stopped and the man himself started. He was guileless.

The second time that I met Calvert DeForest, it was when his second career, his non-Letterman career, had really taken over. His appearances on the Letterman show had grown more infrequent since the move to CBS anyway, and now you were as likely to see him in a music video or pitching something as in the role where he'd always shone the best: as a slightly befuddled older man doing the puckish bidding of another cranky man who just happened to have his own late night TV show.

I rode around with DeForest for most of a day in Toronto, when he was up doing media appearances for a series of Pizza Hut commercials. (I was doing a story for the show I was a producer on, mediatelevision.) We shuffled from radio Station to TV Station to newspaper interview... Everyone who met him was delighted to meet him. And everyone who met him obviously had his own view of the man himself. They had their own favorite bits. The radio guys tried to get him to say lines from favorite movies. While I have to admit, hearing him say, "Don't ask me about my business, Kay!" brought a smile to my face -- he didn't seem to relish the experience very much.

As I talked to him in that limo that day, it became more than clear to me that DeForest really wasn't dialled in to what his place in the culture truly was. It reminds me of a story that Paul Simon once told about meeting Joe DiMaggio and Joe DiMaggio complaining about Mrs. Robinson: "You say I've gone away, but I haven't. I'm still here." Commented Simon wryly: "I guess Joe hadn't really accepted his place as cultural metaphor."

Well, neither had DeForest. He might have been asked to hit his marks (which he never could) remember his lines (uh uh) and emote (please) but no amount of Pizza Hut cash could make him more sanguine about his life as a shill and a punchline.

He had always wanted to be an actor -- had dreamed of it. But even five hundred miles and sixty years away from his native Brooklyn he couldn't quite escape the reach of his disapproving mother -- who he talked about in alternatively hushed and reverent tones that were kind of heartbreaking. She had been an actress for a short time, and she said it was no life for anybody.

His Dad was a Doctor. His uncle actually helped invent the technology which made broadcasting possible. (Check out this site for more on that.) DeForest's mom died when he was forty, and it was only then that he got the courage to branch out, follow his dream, and quit his job in the pharmaceutical industry. He volunteered, and did a few dumb things in the 70's -- which was a nasty time in NY and no time to try to be an actor, of all things. I think he did a lot of extra work.

As we bounced around Toronto in the back of that limo, he talked about another, way more fateful limo ride -- the one that brought him from his job as a file clerk at a rehab clinic to his first meeting with David Letterman. Letterman had seen him in a couple of staffer's NYU films - and thought he saw comedy gold in action.

It was DeForest, and not Letterman, in fact, that opened the very first episode of Late Night With David Letterman. Merrill Markoe had come up with the "Larry 'Bud' Melman" moniker, and when people tuned in to that legendary first show the first face they saw was DeForest's, doing a riff on the prologue to Boris Karloff's Frankenstein.

DeForest, by the time I really met him, was a lifelong bachelor. He spoke reverently not of Letterman and his own showbiz life, but of the theater, and Broadway, and old film starlets of the 30's and 40's -- stars that maybe he could imagine his mother acting with, all those years ago in a time and a New York that had long since faded into... well... the postmodern city where a gap-toothed, wry and cynical Midwesterner could use an aging Walter Mitty as an endless -- and endlessly amusing -- visual punchline.

I don't want to leave the impression that DeForest didn't appreciate the turn his life had taken. He did. He was downright serious when he talked about the rehab clinic and the horrible and sad people that he saw there, and how glad he was to be rid of that. His speech, in person, had that same nasal Brooklyn honk. The glasses were just as thick as you think. He was stout, but impeccably tailored -- his hair was straight and clean and neat. And he carried with him, as all great comics do, the whiff of melancholy.

I don't know if DeForest was always in on the joke, but at least for the day I spent with him, he was a guy who knew what he had. But it had never stopped him from wanting something else. He showed me a picture of his mother, and a picture of him -- as a young man -- and does it need to be said that the guy who was such a funny looking dude on Letterman wasn't bad looking in his youth?

I got out of the limo, having gotten my story, and sure as I could be that DeForest would have traded everything for a chance to have one great scene in black in white with one of those fine old Hollywood legends like Lana Turner, or Ava Gardner.

He signed a picture for me. It got smudged, and now probably it's lost. An ephemeral end to an artifact for a man with a kind of ephemeral fame.

But Good Lord, when he smashed through the Berlin Wall? I laughed like a drain.

Good Night, Calvert. I hope wherever you are, the Bijou's playing the movies you love, and someone else is handing out the hot towels.