Mickey Mantle and the Smothers Brothers and Hot Ice

It is 20 years since I blew up the reactor, almost to the day, and here I am sitting next to Mickey Mantle at the bar in the Smothers Brothers’ dressing room in Las Vegas. How could I have ever predicted that this would happen to me?

I was never a New York Yankees fan. As a kid growing up in Rhode Island we were all diehard Red Sox fans and hated the Yankees. So in 1982, when I found myself sitting next to Mickey Mantle at the bar in Tommy and Dick Smothers’ dressing room, I didn’t know what to say to him. Turns out I needn’t have said anything. After shaking my hand, he stared off into space, glassy-eyed and downright sloshed. After seating himself, a major task, he swayed a bit from side to side, making me wonder if seat belts shouldn’t be mandatory on bar stools.

Moments earlier he and Kyle Rote had weaved their way into the Smothers’ suite in the hotel. Kyle was not in much better shape than Mickey, stumbling a little getting to the bar and managing to get himself into the seat on the other side of Mickey. He managed to carry on a conversation with a couple of other guests, though the words were slurred enough to be incomprehensible—at least from my vantage point. Mickey was silent and continued to stare as though in a trance. Apparently, there was a celebrity golf tournament going on in Las Vegas that day and a few friends of Tommy and Dick were gathered in the suite. At the time Kyle Rote had been long retired from his career as running back for the New York Giants. He was then a sportscaster for NBC. I surmised that he either covered the golf event for the network or participated in it. Mickey also may have played in it. Either way, there had been some heavy partying before they arrived here.

            I had flown into Las Vegas that afternoon from Denver. On the way into town from the Las Vegas airport I saw a billboard promoting the Smothers Brothers show at one of the big casinos. On a whim, when I got to my hotel, I called the casino and was able to get through to Tommy. He invited me to the show that evening. “Come up to the dressing room before the show and have a drink,” he suggested. I couldn’t turn that down.

            That’s how I came to be sitting next to a very shitfaced Mickey Mantle. I felt dismayed and uncomfortable. I may not have been a New York Yankees fan, but there were certain ballplayers that I admired, and he was one of them. As a Red Sox fan, the great Ted Williams, of course, was at the top of my baseball hero list. But not far behind were Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio, even though they were both damned Yankees. And here was Mickey, sitting next to me. I tried desperately to make conversation, but any response from him was an incoherent mumble. Questions ran through my mind in rapid succession – what did he think of today’s hitters, who was the toughest pitcher he ever faced, …? But I knew he probably would not or could not answer them. And so I simply babbled on about the great New York Yankees and the history of great ballplayers on the team and what an illustrious career Mickey had and all the time knowing that my words were drifting past him like butterflies in a strong wind.  Soon Kyle decided that he and Mickey should head back to their rooms in the hotel. However, Tom Smothers had to guide them both to the door and then help them into the elevator. Afterwards I couldn’t shake this image of the two spending the night in that elevator, riding from top to bottom and back, because neither could remember the floor they were on. Kinda like that Kingston Trio song, Charlie on the MTA– They may ride forever in that eleva-tor, they’re the men who never returned. A sad evening but the show later was a great performance by the Smothers Brothers.

*   *   *

            It was one of those strange twists of fate that brought me to that dressing room and Mickey Mantle. In April 1980 Mason Williams was a guest at our house in Evergreen. Mason had been invited as the featured musician to play at the Earth Day celebration in Denver that year. The arrangement for Mason’s performance was made by a good friend of ours, Jane Russo, who worked in the Denver office of the Environmental Protection Agency. She asked us if we could host Mason during his stay. Barbara and I had been enthusiastic fans of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the late 1960s, and Mason’s award-winning song Classical Gas was among our favorites. Mason had been the head writer for the wildly popular Smothers programs. So, we were excited to have him as a guest.

            While staying with us, Mason learned about my nuclear physics background. He and Bob Gardiner, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, were working on a screenplay entitled Hot Ice, which he described as a nuclear meltdown comedy. Learning that I was now a well published writer, as well as a former nuclear physicist, he invited me to help write the screenplay. It sounded like so much fun, I couldn’t turn it down, even though I wasn’t sure the world was ready for a comedy about a nuclear meltdown. It was only a year after the Three Mile Island accident. I had just published a major article in Audubon magazine about TMI and how close it came to becoming a major disaster. On the other hand, maybe it was time for some humor.

            It was in October of 1980 when Mason introduced me to Tom and Dick Smothers. Mason was finishing work on an NBC Smothers Brothers Special to be aired on the network in November. He invited me to come to the NBC Studio in Burbank for the last two days of scripting and rehearsals and the video taping of the show. Afterwards Mason and I would then go to Bob Gardiner’s place in Laguna Beach to work on Hot Ice.

Despite the pressure everyone was under for the upcoming show, on my arrival at the studio I was welcomed warmly by all. When I was introduced, Tom and Dick took time to ask about my photography and writing. Tom, especially, seemed fascinated by my radical career change. Others greeted me as though I were part of the group.

I got to sit in on the final polishing of the script and watched the walk-through and the rehearsal. The script session was fascinating. These were pros and were very serious about their comedy. Pat Paulson was involved, as always playing the dead-pan presidential candidate. Carl Gottleib, who had been in the movie MASH, was one of the writers, as was Bob Gardiner, Ed Begley, Jr., musician Glen Campbell, Martin Mull and, of course, Tom and Dick and Mason.

Pat Paulsen was a very sweet guy, very down to earth and a year or so later we got together for a drink in Denver when he was giving a performance there. Carl was a bit brusque and very business-like, though I suppose he had to be—he was listed as the show’s producer. Someone had to crack the whip. I liked Ed Begley Jr. —he was very cordial as was Glen Campbell. I didn’t get to spend much time with Martin Mull, but the whole gang of them went out of their way to make me, the outsider, feel comfortable. There didn’t seem to be an inflated ego in the bunch.

Though the script was nearly finalized there were a few suggested changes offered by some in the group. Judging from the occasional quip or joke, I can well imagine how lively it must have been at the very early stages of writing the script. These were creative people. Ideas floated through the air like a butterfly, which someone would snatch and put a spin to it and float it again. Some punch lines needed refining. More ideas floated. I was mesmerized by the process, because, in my physics career, one did not make things up. We dealt with cold, calculated facts. This was way more fun.

Some ideas were a bit off the wall, but often that led to another thought related to the first. And then someone else would toss in another variant, taking it in a different direction. Tom Smothers had the final say and it soon became apparent that he was the brains behind creative decisions.

Adding to this creative frame of mind, I had noticed, while walking down the hallway to the scripting session, the definite odor of cannabis (Uh, yes, I was very familiar with cannabis odor). I’m sure that wasn’t sanctioned by NBC, but it was probably overlooked as long as the smoke wasn’t too blatant. I certainly did not see anyone smoking a joint so it was kept sub rosa.

The show was taped the next day before a live audience. Actually, there were two audiences; during the first part of the taping there were pauses and breaks, some scenes and lines were changed, and the show continued. This was all planned, which is why there was another audience brought in for the last half of the taping which also had pauses and breaks. It took almost all day to do a one-hour show. When I watched the show a couple of weeks later back home, it was all very smooth; none of the pauses and breaks were apparent at all. This was professional showbiz, as you would expect.

Mason and I drove with Bob Gardiner to his place after the taping of the show. Bob lived on the second floor, a small walk-up apartment a few blocks from the beach in Laguna Beach. He was twenty-nine then, though he looked as though he might still be in high school. Bob was the consummate free-spirit in an era of lots of free-spirits.  In 1975, when he was twenty-four years old, he and Will Vinton won an Academy Award for the Best Animated Short Feature, Closed Mondays. It was all done painstakingly with clay animation, making slight motion changes in the clay and capturing these frame by frame with a motion picture camera. It was all done in a garage-turned-studio. Even by today’s computer-generated animations, the work still stands as a tour de force. The film can be seen on YouTube and has had more than 55,000 views—mostly, I suspect, by aficionados of the art of animation.

One of the first things I noticed when we entered Bob’s place was the Oscar he had won. It was not prominently perched on a trophy shelf or in a carefully lighted display box. Instead it was on the floor, being used to hold open a door that tended to close when the ocean breeze blew through the windows. An Oscar, the epitome of recognition in the motion picture profession, was a doorstop! This defined Bob Gardiner for me. He was one of the most talented and creative individuals I have ever met. Pick a musical instrument and Bob could play it. Once, while staying at our house, he seated himself at our old upright piano and played various songs, old and new, for almost an hour non-stop. Then he picked up a guitar and did the same. He’d never had a music lesson in his life. His artwork was superb. He and Mason published some children’s books about where Santa went after Christmas, all with Bob’s delightful illustrations. Even while he and Mason and I worked on the script for Hot Ice he often made quick sketches to illustrate his thoughts about how the characters should look.

 Mason was meticulous. Scenes were outlined on large file cards so they could be laid out on the floor or tacked on a wall and rearranged to match our ideas on the story flow. Characters also were put on file cards to match with various scenes.

Mason and Bob had come up with the basic premise of the story, which I can only best describe as Dr. Strangelove meets Godzilla and China Syndrome as told by Mel Brooks with characters out of Blazing Saddles.

The story: Cosmopolitan Edison company’s Happy Valley Nuclear Power Station and Theme Park undergoes a severe accident resulting in complete meltdown of the reactor core. In order to cut costs, Cosmo Ed has cheated on the plant’s specifications by making the containment vessel thinner than required. The core melts completely through the bottom of the containment building, melting its way down through layers of bedrock finally halting in a layer of rock comprised of high carbon content. The enormous heat and pressure of the molten core brings about a phase change in the carboniferous layer, forming layers of crystalized carbon—also known as diamonds. These diamonds are huge and flawless. When discovered by using a remote probe during the damage assessment, the CEO of Cosmo Ed sees a way of making billions of dollars to not only cover their cost of cleaning up the meltdown but making a huge profit by marketing these diamonds.

There is only one slight problem: the diamonds are highly radioactive—Hot Ice. This doesn’t deter the CEO and board of directors. Enter a consultant hired by Cosmo Ed to assess the damage. He is a sophisticated and brilliant nuclear physicist named Newton Archimedes—a kind of Sean Connery James Bond type character. When he discovers how highly radioactive the diamonds are, he threatens to blow the whistle on their dangerous scheme. And thus, one or more major conflicts ensue. Newton Archimedes and his lovely Swedish partner, the brilliant biophysicist chemist metallurgist geologist, Lambda Angstrom, must escape their confinement by the company’s para-military security forces and alert the world about the dangers. All the while, Cosmo Ed sells these flawless diamonds to the wealthiest men worldwide whose wives and mistresses begin dying from mysterious causes after wearing the beautiful necklaces and bracelets and rings. The supply of the world’s most beautiful women is in jeopardy.

Do Newton and Lambda escape from the evil forces of Cosmo Ed? Can they make it to the offices of the New York Times? Is the evil plot revealed? Are the perpetrators caught and punished? Are the beautiful women saved?

We continued work on the script, planning our sessions when travels brought us close enough together. In 1983 I had an assignment from a travel magazine to shoot photos and do a story on the Pacific Crest Trail. In the time allotted to do the story, there was no way that I could backpack that 2500-mile-long trail from the Mexican border to Canada. So, traveling by car, I hiked certain segments of it to get a flavor of the various ecosystems it traversed. I planned one of those sections to be in Oregon, very near Mason’s vacation cabin in Oakridge, located on a lovely trout stream that, fortuitously, was not far from the Pacific Crest Trail. That gave an opportunity to work some more on the script. Bob had been living in Portland, so he could join us. We worked there for five days. When we took breaks from the writing, Mason pulled on his waders and fly fished in the river while I roamed the lovely forest taking pictures. Bob would smoke a joint and practice his music with one of Mason’s guitars.

The writing sessions were not without a certain amount of stress. Bob’s creativity seemed endless, fueled by pot, and the more he smoked the more hyper he got. Ideas flowed from him like a gushing firehose. A lot of it was great, but some off-the-wall ideas strayed too far from the main story. The big problem was putting order into the chaos of his thoughts. He was brilliant. But his mind could not find a way to bring order to his great ideas and Mason and I struggled to get it down on paper in some semblance of a script. At one point, in frustration, Mason slammed his fist into and partly through a wall in his cabin.

When we left these writing sessions we kept in touch by phone and snail mail (no internet then). Occasionally I would get a heavy package from Mason containing a three-ring binder thick with pages of the script along with revisions and some new ideas and thoughts. Those several days we spent at Mason’s cabin were the last time we three got together to write. And sometime later Mason declared the script finished. Or at least, finished enough.

Most screenplays for the average 90- to 100-minute movie range from 100 to 150 pages in length. Our epic was well over 300 pages.

 Hot Ice never made it to the Silver Screen. Mason did try hard. He circulated it to some friends and contacts he had in Hollywood, including Rob Reiner and Lili Tomlin. All turned it down. As interest in it waned, we three screenwriters drifted apart. Mason continued with his music, organizing concerts from time to time with bluegrass groups. He never gave up entirely on Hot Ice. Sometimes I would get a large envelope in the mail filled with notes and ideas, along with a new CD of his music. Bob, I learned, bounced around taking various jobs involving his art. He did a number of television commercials and some videos. For a while, before computer animation came on the scene, his clay animation was popular in television commercials. On occasion Mason had comedy writing gigs and he got Bob involved to give him some income. I think Bob supported himself mostly by tending bar and playing piano in bars and clubs.

I ended up in Siberia. In 1986 I had a contract to do a book with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian poet, entitled Divided Twins: Alaska and Siberia. That year I made the first of my many trips to Siberia. I was out of contact with Bob and Mason for a long time after that

Months went by, then years, without much contact. And then I got an email from Mason in April 2005. Bob Gardiner had taken his own life, hanged himself in his studio in Grass Valley, California. He was 54 years old. It was devastating news.

What is there about the brilliant, creative mind that sometimes, perhaps too often, leads down a path of self-destruction? Has anyone discovered the answer to that question? I’ve worked with, and among, creative people most of my life—in science and in writing and in visual arts. Some stand out in my mind. Bob Gardiner was high on the scale of brilliance. And so was Mason Williams.