Got a Broken Toilet? Don't Call Schneider
Posted: Tuesday, February 26, 2008 9:40 AM by Dan Fleschner
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Live from Studio 1A
Our series, TV's Greatest Casts Reunited, continued today with the cast of "One Day at a Time."
Bonnie Franklin, Mackenzie Phillips, Valerie Bertinelli and Pat Harrington joined Matt for a few minutes (and check out the video to see which special guest crashed the party). WATCH VIDEO
Before the segment, I sat down with Pat Harrington -- who was the iconic 1970s character Dwayne Schneider -- for a few minutes to talk about his life in show business.
Here's our conversation:
DF: Why do you think the character Schneider resonated so much with people?
Pat Harrington: Well, that was his job. [The producers and writers] set it up so that I had five pages in the first act and four or five in the second act, specifically to get laughs.
I had to get laughs, because in a Norman Lear show, they treat heavyweight subjects. Warehousing the eldery, Jesus freaks in high school. If you're going to have that kind of material, you've gotta know that you're going to have some laughs.
[Bonnie Franklin walks by]
That's a beautiful woman right there! [To microphone] Bonnie Franklin just walked by, and I was needling her by telling her she's a good-looking woman. She is a good-looking woman, but she's short.
DF: Now you're going to outrage all the short people out there.
PH: [Laughs] Yeah, well I'm short. I can say what I want about short.
DF: Knowing that it was on you to get laughs and lighten the mood of the show, did that put any extra pressure on you?
PH: No, when I got that job at that time, I had 30 years of experience, working in all kinds of different venues. And the writers were good. The writers were good. We had top people writing the show.
DF: Was Schneider the favorite character that you played in your career?
PH: No, the first character I did on "The Jack Paar Show" was an Italian character called Guido Panzino. He was the junior officer on the Andrea Doria. I had no idea how fortunate I was. That was my first job in show business -- with Jack Paar, okay? Who was only on nine national magazine covers in four months.
And my partner, Howard Storm, we write stuff together. Howard is a wonderful director. He did three years of "Mork and Mindy," he did "Laverne and Shirley," he did them all. We compared his start with me. I started on "The Jack Paar Show," and he was working the High Hat in Paramus [New Jersey].
So Steve Allen saw me and said, "Get that kid on 'The Steve Allen Show.'" Tommy Abbandando saw Howard and took him into the Tick Tock in Bensonhurst [New York]! So that was the difference. He went from the High Hat to the Tick Tock, I went from Jack Paar to Steve Allen.
DF: You followed your father, Pat Harrington Sr., into show business. How much of an influence did he have on your career?
PH: Enormous influence. He was a vaudevillian. He did about 17 shows on Broadway, many of them musicals. Anything Ethel Merman did, my dad was in, because she loved him.
I would see my father on stage, in costume, in makeup. And then he worked cafes, and I would go to see him in the cafes when I was 10, 11, 12 years old. I didn't ever say it, but it was in my psyche: "You want to do this, don't you?" I never said, "Who's that [voice]?" Sure, I wanted to do it.
He would come home after working in a nightclub -- he had a tough schedule. He would be doing a Broadway play, then he'd be doubling as a singer -- he was a wonderful singer -- in a place like Jimmy Ryan's East Side.
I would sometimes have to bring him a clean shirt at the theater, because he'd be working later. He'd say, "Come on, get in the cab, I'll change on the way over." And then I'd watch him do his first 60-minute show, and he was amazing. A wonderful Irish tenor. Then he'd put his hands up on the upright while Lenny Martini, the piano player, would be behind him, and then he'd just raconteur. He used the people as jump-off points.
Frequently, he'd come home in the morning with guys like Bing Crosby, Jimmy Dunn, Pat O'Brien...those guys would be coming home to have eggs in the morning. My mother was sending us up to St. Paul's on 59th Street in the morning, and Dad was coming home with every Irishman from L.A. It was exciting.
DF: You were in a film with Elvis Presley, Easy Come, Easy Go (1967). Any good Elvis stories?
PH: When I did Easy Come, Easy Go, Elvis was at the top of his game. That's when he was the Elvis that we all know. He was lean -- 168 pounds, 160 pounds -- lean! He was quick and fast, and he was into all that karate stuff. The difficulty with Elvis was that he was surrounded by nine guys named "Red." Red Jones and Red Brown and Red Brown-Jones, you know, those guys. So you couldn't get close to Elvis.
When we did a scene, then I had him to myself. He would never get it on the first take or the 10th, but eventually he'd get it. We would talk in between, and I said to him, "Elvis, I can make you laugh." He'd say, "Oh, you can't make me laugh." And I'd say, "Yes, I can." So he said, "All right, next take." And I said, "Next take is going to be tough for you. [The shot's] going to be over my shoulder on you."
So the scene starts and I flared my nostrils just a little bit -- nobody else could see that except him. And he started to laugh uncontrollably.
DF: And nobody else could see it because the shot was on him--
PH: Nobody could see it!
DF: Did he have a little more respect for your comedic abilities afterwards?
PH: No...he was pissed!
DF: Let's go back to Schneider for a minute. Did you ever get tired of being him?
PH: No, never.
DF: Did you ever have the urge to go out in public with the tool belt?
PH: I did some commercials as Schneider in the whole outfit, and I would do shows from time to time as him. But Schneider was shown best in the place where he was designed for, which was on the stage with those women.
DF: When you first started doing the role, did you have any idea that -- for example, in my household, whenever anything needed to be fixed, my parents would call for Schneider--
PH: That always surprised me, the extent to which that happened. Schneider didn't know his ass from his elbow. He couldn't even spell hammer. But he could fake it. Schneider was written well, and I got the hang of him after two or three years. I started writing the jokes -- I wrote I think three or four of the episodes with my partner Jimmy Johnson.
We were on the air for 10 years. We did 228 shows. There was a timespan where we were in the top 20, the top 10, and one brief time in the top five. We were in 25 million homes, two-and-a-half people per home. And then with reruns, what was the cumulative audience like? Millions! Hundreds of millions! You can't fathom that!
The number of times Schneider was seen by millions of people is staggering. It's really staggering.
