"International Showtime"

At about the same time as the JFK assassination, I first met a man I knew only as 'Gil". He would stop by during tapings when he was in the building for meetings. He had started his career as an NBC page himself, about ten years earlier. (I remember him admiring our uniforms, not nearly as gaudy as the gold braid and epaulets he used to wear.) He knew and liked my father and seemed interested in my career plans. One night, during a "Tonight Show" taping, he asked me if I'd be interested in a job as a production assistant on a show he was doing in Europe? I suppose I said something like, "sure" and promptly forgot about it.

I saw him again a few weeks later and he asked me if I'd gotten my passport? I suddenly remembered our conversation and realized he was serious and that my father had been in on the plan all along (although he'd said nothing to me about it). The man's name was Gil Cates * and he was the director of a show called "International Showtime with Don Ameche", produced by his brother Joe Cates (Phoebe's father). In less than a month, I was going to Europe and would be there for almost a year!

"International Showtime" had premiered on NBC in 1961, occupying the Friday night 8:00 timeslot, introducing American audiences to the best of European circuses and ice shows. Former movie great Don Ameche would sit at ringside and in his charming, debonair way introduce each act. This would be the show's fourth and, as it turned out, final season. The second week of January, 1964 we were flying to Europe, our first stop Circus Krone in Munich, Germany.

Needless to say, I was in a flurry of activity to get ready for the trip. I did manage to get my passport in time, bought or borrowed luggage (I don't remember which) and searched frantically for a roommate to take my place at the apartment on West 72nd Street. Luckily, our friend and NBC guide, Shelly Markham (now a well-known L.A. composer-conductor) was looking for a new place and was able to step right in. The question would be what to do when I got back, but we had ten months to think about it.

This trip would be notable in several respects, not the least of which the two months we would spend behind the 'Iron Curtain', first in Budapest, Hungary, then in Prague, Czechoslovakia. 1964 was still the height of the 'Cold War' and the timing was, especially in retrospect, interesting to say the least. It was only eight years since the 1956 Hungarian Revolution had been brutally crushed by the Soviets. And (what we couldn't know) it was only four years before the 'Prague Spring' in which Alexander Dubcek attempted to liberalize Soviet Russian control only to be invaded by the Warsaw Pact nations. We would be among the first Americans to be admitted to either country in many years.

I don't remember much about the flight to Europe other than it was very long. Up to that point, the longest (and only) 'plane ride' I'd taken was three hours to Florida in 1959. If I remember correctly, this flight was over six hours and I was by myself in 'tourist' class, the rest of our group, director Gil Cates, location producer Pat Plevin (Joe Cates remained in New York), associate producer Billy Watts and our star, Don Ameche and his wife Honore ** (known as 'Honey') up front in first class. (If that sounds at all like a complaint, it isn't. The associate producer was lucky to fly in 'first', let alone a lowly production assistant.)

Although he was always a gentleman, this could not have been an easy time for Don Ameche. Beginning in the late 1930's and throughout the 1940's, Don had been a major movie star of the magnitude of a Tyrone Power or Robert Taylor. After playing the title role in "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell" (with Henry Fonda), a generation of Americans would often refer to a telephone call as "an Ameche". He starred in over fifty films, including "In Old Chicago" (1937) with Tyrone Power and Ernst Lubitch's Best Picture Academy Award-nominated "Heaven Can Wait" (1943) opposite Gene Tierney.

Don also had significant careers on Broadway and on radio, most memorably radio's "The (Battling) Bickersons" with Frances Langford. But his career began to fade in the 1950's and by the early 1960's, Don Ameche had been all but forgotten. When our publicity advance man, Axel Glasner, would visit the next city on our itinerary to promote the arrival of the "famous American film star", he was often greeted with blank stares. Don suffered all the "he's waiting for Sonja Henie to make a comeback" jokes with grace and dignity.

I suspect that anyone who ever worked with Don Ameche took great pleasure when his real comeback came, first in John Landis' "Trading Places" (1983) starring Eddie Murphy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Akroyd and fellow film veteran Ralph Bellamy, and in Ron Howard's "Cocoon" (1985) with an all-star cast that included (husband & wife) Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and the sequel, "Cocoon: The Return" (1988). Don won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for "Cocoon".



* Gilbert Cates went on to a distinguished career as a film director ("I Never Sang for My Father") and television producer. A former president of the Directors Guild, he is probably best known today as the producer of the annual Academy Awards show.

** Don and Honore were married in 1932 and remained inseparable until her death in 1986. Don Ameche died of prostate cancer in 1993 at the age of 85.


NEXT: "Munich"