It Actually Happened: Bob & Carol & Martin & Barbara

Well, as a devout follower of The Lawrence Welk Show, The King Family holiday specials and Hollywood Palace, you pretty much know I'm going to be down for any sort of colorful, 1960s/'70s variety show containing a mix of eye-popping, ear-splitting, fantastic, frightful, glitzy, ghastly variety material! I was far too young to have ever witnessed The Kraft Music Hall (revival) in its day.  Running from 1967 (the year I sprang forth) till 1971, there was no chance of my having absorbed any of it then. Originally a long-running series featuring Perry Como and guests, it was revived in a different format, which is where today's 1970 offering came to be.

Most of you will "get" the title of the installment without help, but just in case... The prior year, the racy comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) was released. The movie concerned the concept of and potential ramifications from the act of wife-swapping, when two couples decide to get "with it" during the sexual revolution and try it out.

The movie's poster came in the first colorful one shown above, but also had one depicting the four stars in bed. Foreign release posters such as these turned to circular and spiral concepts.

And so it was on Kraft Music Hall when the title was shown on-screen. But WHO are these people??

Bob & Carol were Broadway stars Robert Goulet and Carol Lawrence, by this time married for about 7 years.

Martin & Barbara were TV stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. (This was the season after the two of them abruptly departed the hit show Mission: Impossible.) They'd been wed about 13 years to this point.

At the top of the hour, the two couples impishly discuss how they've been getting together for however many Wednesday evenings and how it may be time to mix things up. "You mean Bob & Barbara and Martin & Carol...??" I won't reveal the joke, but I can tell you that they don't disrobe, tossing their polyester clothes on the stage floor and crawl into bed naked together...! Ha ha!

Pretty soon, they're all gussied-up and singing a song all about Variety, the show business bible.

Needless to say, this is old hat for accomplished live performers such as Bob "Camelot" Goulet and Carol "West Side Story" Lawrence.

Game, but far less comfortable, are The Landaus.

During the number, brief blackout comedy sketches depict these folks as various sawdust-covered showbiz veterans as the understudy who has to go on, the magician whose assistant wants to quit and so on.

Next up, Lawrence is given a series of numbers that involve gender-reversal. For example, there's "Luck Be a Lady" from Guys and Dolls, which was sung in the play by Sky Masterson (Robert Alda in the original production.)

In the main shot here, I thought that Lawrence resembled her West Side Story costar Chita Rivera to no small degree. (If you want to hear me singing this ditty, click here. I played Sky in 1999 and later did a one-take recording of the song in Sinatra's swingy version. I eventually could do it better, but the dice were already tossed... Ha ha!)

That number is followed by "You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two" from Oliver!, the song belonging to Fagin as played in London (and the later film) by Ron Moody.

Then the four male dancers of the special (each one a little sweatier than the one before!) emerge as representatives from West Side Story.

Lawrence, in mini-skirt and go-go boots, pops in for a somewhat psychedelic rendition of "Maria" "Gee Officer Krupke" "Something's Coming."

Thank you, Jesus, for craptastically dazzling moments like this.

In the next bit, our fabulous foursome sweep into an NYC restaurant, fresh from having opened their new Broadway show.

Each member of the quartet is in love with him or herself and all of the others as they fawningly compliment one another. (As a bonus for me, I now know roughly how Bain and Lawrence would have looked had they celebrated New Year's Eve in the ballroom of the S.S. Poseidon!)

Lawrence manages to attract the attention of (an unseen) David Merrick who wants to talk to her about starring in Hello Dolly! (Shout out to the recently-departed, divine Miss Mitzi Gaynor, whose portrait can be seen above Goulet's head!)

Likewise, (unseen) Hal Prince has his eye on Goulet for an upcoming project.

Then the newspapers arrive, with the NYC critics' reviews, none of which is in any way kind!

Now, they all hate each other and the performances delivered by their former besties...!

The gals express the agony of having to audition for a coveted part on the stage, a set up for the next segment.

This gives Landau the opportunity to show off his Method acting chops.

Landau, who at virtually all other times in the special can be spotted reading cue cards, must have poured most of his time and attention into this vignette. He emotes and emotes and goes on and on. (I cannot tell you if it's truly good or not because I must confess that I checked out after a while... There was not enough chiffon in this portion of the show.)

At the tail end, he appears in old age makeup, facing a mirror and it's rather uncanny how much he looks like his much later rendition of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994!) He couldn't have guessed in 1970 that nearly a quarter of a century later he would pick up an Oscar for his portrayal of the elderly portrayer of Count Dracula.

Now comes Bain in her featured solo segment.

Bain is one of my people. She was given a tribute here eons ago. That said, she is in no way a vocalist. She could carry a tune, but she was not a singer. She faintly gets through the early phrases of Jacques Berel's "If You Go Away" before speak-singing much of it.

"Daddy always says an ounce of pretense is worth a pound of manure." Ha ha!

I think there was only one other woman who could out-do Bain when it came to the blonde swoop of the '60s & '70s. That would be the wonderful Gena Rowlands. That style suited both these women exceptionally well.

When I see something like this on TV, I begin to tingle all over...

For my part, the world lost something when we stopped putting together visually arresting, geometric sets with which to frame singers. ('Course, there really aren't many true singers around that I care to watch or listen to!)

There's an almost halo-like situation going on here, though not as literal as that, as Goulet sings "Healing River," a 1964 spiritual.

While Goulet always lends a highly-resonant, polished quality to most any song, this never quite heads out of the stratosphere the way we might have hoped. It's a little bit low-key compared to other times he performed it (sometimes in the company of soul singers, who added energy and lift to the proceedings.)

This is what Poseidon's Underworld ought to have been called...

Here, it's a parody talk show (hosted by real-life producer and TV personality David Susskind portraying himself.) His topic for the program is the change in sexual mores and he assembles quite a melange of expert guests...

I did like Bain's loooonnngg wig!

The finale is really the part that can't be missed. The foursome (not literally! LOL) wonders what their grandchildren might think of that time if they heard some of the lyrics from popular songs of the day. Thus begins a mind-blowing medley, with each star getting a solo as well as taking part in duets with another...

No, he's not reacting to wifey's singing... (But I bet some audience members made a face like this when Marty began to croon...!)

She seems a mite skeptical to me.

The medley includes songs from Hair (!) and the Joe South hit "Games People Play." (This was done to a fare-thee-well by my beloved Nancy Ames on Hollywood Palace prior to this. At 20:03 if you're impatient.) 

Talk about an impossible mission... vocalizing on national television next to two Broadway belters! I'll give 'em credit for trying.

"Abraham, Martin and John."

"The Sound of Silence"

"Everybody's Talkin' at Me" followed by "Make Your Own Kind of Music" and "Put a Little Love in Your Heart."

Check out the TALONS on Ms Bain's hand...!

And so it comes to a close with the performers schnuggled up with their spouse.

As it was, these four could perhaps have used a little more love in their hearts than what was demonstrated here. Showbiz marriages are tough to maintain in the first place and these both, sadly, didn't make it over the long haul. My mother, rather hilariously yet aptly, could never stand performing couples who were too ooey-gooey with one another, like they had something to prove to the world. This was born out in one case, for sure, when Guy and Ralna - THE stickiest and most cringe-inducing ooey-gooeys from The Lawrence Welk Show divorced about 20 minutes after its cancellation! LOL Anyway, this program may be seen in all its glory right here if you're inclined.

That happy day in 1963 when two leading lights from The Great White Way made it legal.

The couple had sons together in 1964 and 1966. They also worked together periodically, including a televised rendition of Kiss Me, Kate. I must tell you that I saw Goulet while he was touring in South Pacific in the late-1980s as Emile de Becque and he sounded positively incredible. I don't think I'll ever forget hearing him do those songs.

Unfortunately, the wheels came off and they were divorced by 1981. In 1990, she released an auto-bio revealing the endless hell of living with her husband. I recall reading it in disbelief since I had always bought their performance as a couple. (As an aside, I just "love" it when people in general have huge, splashy weddings, tearfully vow their undying love, have kids, etc... and then divorce and suddenly the ex-spouse is The Anti-Christ! LOL) Goulet died in 2007 of pulmonary fibrosis at age 73 while Lawrence is still with us today at 92.

The Landaus were wed in 1957 and had daughters in 1960 and 1965. Landau had been a New York stage actor, but made a mark with Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) as a sexually questionable henchman to James Mason. His career progressed successfully, but it was Mission: Impossible that really made him a household name. Though Bain had also been acting for years, she was basically unknown and Lucille Ball (the head of Desilu) had reservations about "someone's wife" costarring on the spy series, but Bain won the part along with three consecutive Emmys!

Things having ended badly on Impossible, the couple later costarred on the British-made sci-fi series Space: 1999, which also had its share of issues. Their careers piddled along with Landau dabbling in horror flicks and the two of them appearing in the infamous The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981.)

This really seemed like a couple who would be in for the long haul, though, and they remained together until 1993. By that time, he'd fully resuscitated his career including two Oscar nominations and an eventual win.  Landau died of heart disease in 2017 at the age 89. Bain is still with us today at 93.

I will end this post with a photo from an entirely different (and not readily available?) episode of Kraft Music Hall that made me smile. It's from a 1989 episode in which two comedians poked fun at the west coast lifestyle. "Don Adams and Don Rickles Are Alive and Well and Living in California." The biker get-ups and the demeanor in the publicity pic reminded me of something out of The Born Losers (1967), a movie we recently discussed in the comments of a prior post...!