Steve Allen Cast as Man of Mystery

The second speaker had already started his talk at the Round Table West author luncheon at the Balboa Bay Club when a tall, vaguely familiar-looking gentleman in a sport coat, pink shirt and red tie walked in and sat down at a table in the middle of the dining room.

His arrival was not greeted by the predictable gasp of recognition that usually accompanies the entrance of a Hollywood celebrity whose face is known to millions. In fact, barely a single member of the 400-plus audience turned to gape at the man they had paid $25 each to hear speak.

Like Superman who is inexplicably unrecognizable as Clark Kent without his horn rims, Steve Allen just isn’t “Steverino” without his trademark specs.

As soon as he was seated, the nearsighted comedian quickly put on his glasses.

“That was deliberate,” Allen explained later. “I was uncomfortable because there was someone speaking. First of all, even if I was a milkman I wouldn’t want to distract from a speaker, but if you’re well-known sometimes you hear (loud whispering), ‘There’s Paul Newman!’ and the poor guy on the stage is out of luck, so I sometimes disguise myself.”

Actually, arriving “incognito” at the author luncheon last week seemed appropriate for Allen, who is cast as an amateur detective in his latest literary endeavor, “Murder on the Glitter Box” (Zebra, $18.95).

The comedian, as they say in the movies, plays “himself” in the fast-paced murder mystery, which begins when he is asked to fill in for a famous late-night talk show host. It’s show business as usual--until Allen hands a nervous guest a drink of vodka during a commercial break and the guest proceeds to drop dead.

“It turns out he has been poisoned,” Allen told his Round Table West audience. “My name is inevitably on the list of suspects because I did, after all, hand him the drink that killed him. But, of course, I did not know there was poison in the drink.”

Steve Allen, amateur sleuth. It has a nice ring to it.

In fact, Allen is already six chapters into a sequel, and there’s talk of a movie version of “Murder on the Glitter Box.” Casting the lead character, naturally, poses no problem.

Actor and author are just two labels that can be attached to the 67-year-old entertainer, who was introduced by Round Table West’s Margaret Burk as a “Renaissance man”: comedian, pianist, playwright, poet, philosopher, author of 33 books, composer of 4,000 songs and creator of the Emmy Award-winning PBS series “Meeting of Minds.”

Although flattered by the frequently quoted appellation, Allen confessed to his audience that he finds the compliment a bit embarrassing: “I’ve never seen myself as a Renaissance man. I see myself more as a man of the Dark Ages, working my way through the Reformation--perhaps eventually getting to the Renaissance if I keep working very hard at it.”

The fabled Allen wit was in ample supply during his talk in which he discussed everything from his book (“It’s a comic novel, although it’s a serious whodunit”) to America being “the most celebrity happy-culture in history” to Zsa Zsa Gabor (“I never saw anyone wearing diamond handcuffs before”).

He topped it off with a couple of Jerome Kern tunes at a baby grand piano and, after a near-unanimous standing ovation, spent 30 minutes autographing copies of his book. (“He’s writing ‘love’ to his ladies,” gushed one woman clutching two autographed copies of the book.)

As befitting his celebrity status, Allen received star treatment during his one-day stay in Orange County: Round Table West boosters John and Donna Crean offered their private limousine to pick Allen up at his Encino home, and the Bay Club provided a suite overlooking Newport Harbor (stocked with orange juice and fruit at his request) so he could rest before being driven to a book-signing that evening at Book Carnival in Orange. For its part, Book Carnival was asked by Allen’s office to provide a limo for the return trip home. That was a first for owner Ed Thomas: “I don’t mind doing it. We’ll just have to sell enough books to make it worthwhile.”

Despite the star trappings, there was no sign of star temperament, and Allen proved gracious and warm during an interview in his suite after the talk. By turns reflective, serious and funny, the man who served as the original host of the “Tonight” show in the ‘50s proved to be an ideal interviewee as he sat on the “guest” portion of the suite’s sofa.

Allen, who has written four novels, explained that the success of his previous murder mystery, “The Talk Show Murders,” several years ago led to his current publisher approaching him 2 1/2 years ago to see if he’d be interested in writing a murder mystery they had in mind. (“The Talk Show Murders” featured a private eye who sets out to solve a series of murders that occur on four different talk shows.)

“The publisher didn’t have a full plot, but they said we think a murder should take place on a famous late-night talk show and you should be involved in it,” said Allen. “They said make yourself important in the story--a character in it--and tell it in the first person.”

Writing himself as the main character in “Murder on the Glitter Box” did not pose any problems. In fact, he said, he found it much easier writing than his first murder mystery: After all, he didn’t have to invent his main character.

Allen lays to rest reader speculation that the talk show host and a sharp-tongued female comedian in his book are based on Johnny Carson and Joan Rivers: “They are archetypes, you might say, so as soon as you say ‘late-night talk show host,’ you could say he has a green nose and purple ears and they’ll still say, ‘Ahhh, it’s Johnny.’ ”

The sequel to “Murder on the Glitter Box” will be set in New York and will prominently feature Allen’s actress wife, Jayne Meadows, who is “out of town” in “Murder On the Glitter Box.” Allen is already anticipating that the sequel inevitably will lead to comparisons of “Steve and Jayne” to Nick and Nora Charles and Mr. and Mrs. North.

“It’s good having Jayne there as a character” in the sequel, he said, “because it allows for husband and wife repartee, marriage jokes and somebody close with whom to talk over the problems with the case.”

It took Allen two years to write “Murder on the Glitter Box,” but that’s only because he wasn’t devoting his full attention to it.

“I have a peculiar habit of working on many books at once,” he said. “I don’t mean I have eight typewriters on one long table, but I’ll work on one book for 47 pages and then maybe not touch that manuscript for another three weeks.”

Actually, Allen doesn’t use a typewriter at all. Part of the reason he is so prolific is because he doesn’t “write” a book. Instead, he “talks” it into a micro-tape recorder and has a secretary transcribe it.

The method, which he says is much faster than sitting at a typewriter, works: In addition to “Murder on the Glitter Box,” he’s got three more books due out in bookstores within the next few months:

“Dumbth: And 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter.” (“Dumbth,” Allen explains, is a word like length or width. The book “is based on the demonstrable and tragic fact that the American people are getting dumber. Really, every time they put the dipstick in, the reading’s lower.”)

“The Passionate Non-Smokers Bill of Rights,” co-written with Bill Adler Jr., which sums up the anti-smoking controversy. (“I’ve been a troublemaker on that issue for years.”)

A four-volume set of scripts from “Meeting of Minds.”

As the man who pioneered the talk show in the ‘50s, Allen is obviously familiar with the format. In all, he has logged 12 years as a talk show host--one of the most memorable to the baby-boom generation being the talk show he did from Hollywood in the early ‘60s.

“That was a giant with people of your generation,” he acknowledged. “One of the people that used to watch it was David Letterman.”

Indeed, it’s no accident that Allen’s comedy bits--taking the camera into the street, making funny phone calls, taking part in crazy stunts and having weird characters drop in--sound suspiciously like a description of the David Letterman show.

“To his great credit he acknowledges it just about every time he gets interviewed,” Allen said. “He’s very nice about that. Some other people have done my stuff and don’t admit it. But David is very straight about that.”

Despite the proliferation of talk shows over the years, Allen doesn’t think America is all talked out. He does concede, however, that the quality of the talk--and the caliber of the celebrities doing the talking--is often not quite up to that of the ‘50s and early ‘60s when such fascinating and witty people as Oscar Levant, Alexander King and Elsa Maxwell would turn up on the Jack Paar show and other talk shows between the usual assembly of starlets plugging their latest movies.

Allen agreed that many in the current crop of show business names lack the “class” of a previous generation of entertainers and movie stars, many of whom came from the Broadway stage.

“There’s some young actors who have it, but it’s a world of Rambo and dodo rock barbarians and stupid lyrics,” he said. “There’s a lot of social sickness now: much more depravity, much more drugs, much more sexual irresponsibility.”

He doesn’t mean to say that the actors and entertainers of an earlier era were all highly moral people, “but there was something straighter” about show business then, he said. “Also, it had to do with cultural traditions: different threads woven together. The theater was dominant in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, let’s say, and then film sort of drew their cultural approach from the theater.”

And, he said, there were “gentlemen” on the silver screen in those days.

“I learned to be a gentleman, I think, from movies because I come from a disorganized, Irish, Studs Lonigan, lower-middle-class family--a lot of drinking, a lot of irresponsibility--but I’m not that way myself. I’m not saying, ‘Aren’t I marvelous?’ That’s not the point. I love the people I came from, but I’m just somehow different from them, and I think it really is because I saw so many movies that I learned how to act like a gentleman by seeing how William Powell conducted himself, how Clark Gable or Errol Flynn or whoever the stars were when I was 16 years old.

“So they weren’t bad models. . . . Gary Cooper--I mean, boy, shouldn’t we all be like Gary Cooper instead of some of the bums that are in the business today?”

Sounds like there might be a book in there somewhere--if Allen ever gets around to it.

In “Murder on the Glitter Box,” Allen quotes a comment his wife, Jayne, once made that “comedians never retire.”

“I don’t know any comedian who ever retired,” he said. “There are some who sometimes say, ‘Oh, yes, I retired in 1976,’ but I think they’re lying, either to themselves or to you. What it means is they haven’t worked since then, but they would have been thrilled to work if anybody had offered.”

At 67, Steve Allen has no intention of retiring. That’s where being a “Renaissance man” comes in handy.

“I could be out of work in three professions and never know it because I’m working in 12 others,” he said, noting that actors and actresses who must rely on youthful physical beauty reach a point where they’re forced to retire. “But it doesn’t matter what the hell a comedian looks like. Who cares what I look like? I look OK for my age, but in another 10 years I won’t, I guess.

“But I’ll still be funny, so it won’t matter.”