Lucille Kallen; Writer on TV’s ‘Your Show of Shows’

Lucille Kallen, the only woman in the celebrated gang of brilliant, zany comedy writers behind Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” died Monday of cancer at her home in Ardsley, N.Y. She was 76.

“Your Show of Shows,” which aired Saturday nights on NBC from 1950 to 1954, was a classic of television’s golden age that featured the uproarious antics of Caesar and Imogene Coca. It was written by a team of razor-sharp wits whose madcap rush to produce 90 minutes of live television a week inspired the Richard Benjamin movie “My Favorite Year” (1982) and the play “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” (1992) by Neil Simon. Several of the show’s writers became giants of the stage and screen, including Simon, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.

The writers were a notoriously slovenly bunch who littered their office with greasy sandwiches, cigar butts and food wrappers. They lofted pencils into the acoustic tiles, called one another names, told off-color jokes and fought over lines. Brooks was particularly notorious. Hours late, he would burst through the door, slide across the floor and announce his arrival, yelling “Safe!”

In the midst of the bedlam was a tiny brunet who sometimes had to stand on a tattered couch and wave a red sweater to command the attention of her unruly colleagues.

“I was a small person, trying to be feminine,” she said in an oral history she gave recently to the Archive of American Television in North Hollywood.

She never achieved the stardom that many of her fellow writers did. But she was “one of the very few women to have played an important role in the golden age of television,” said Mel Tolkin, the program’s head writer and Kallen’s writing partner on many other shows, including a Broadway play. One of the two real-life models for the character of Sally Rogers, the wisecracking female writer played by Rose Marie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” she more than held her own against a highly competitive crew of loudmouthed, ego-ridden men, contributing what Tolkin called a “natural conversational tone” to the show’s dialogue and a measure of order to the madness that reigned behind the scenes.

“It was so crazy,” Caesar said in an interview with The Times on Thursday. “Everybody would be shooting lines, spitballing all over the place. Who’s going to put [the lines] down? This [writer’s] gotta run, this one’s gotta stand up. Lucille was the one who sat down with a pencil and took it down.”

Reiner’s memory was more succinct. Kallen, he said, “ruled the roost. . . . She was the arbiter. If she didn’t like [the line], she wouldn’t put it down.”

Kallen, according to Coca, was the writer who came up with the show’s first movie parody--a spoof of “A Place in the Sun,” the 1951 classic about the idle rich that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. That launched skits like “From Here to Obscurity” that provided many of the show’s most memorable moments and helped earn it an Emmy for best variety program in 1952.

When the program folded in 1954, Kallen became head writer for “The Imogene Coca Show.” That program lasted only a year, but Kallen continued in the business for seven more years, freelancing for specials and shows such as “The Bell Telephone Hour.”

When the television industry shifted to the West Coast in the early 1960s, Kallen stayed in New York and pursued a second career as a writer of stylishly comical mysteries. She penned five mysteries, all of which featured a character named C.B. Greenfield. She also wrote a novel that explored feminist themes of balancing motherhood and work, “Outside There, Somewhere” (1964).

Kallen was born on May 28, 1922, in Los Angeles. When she was 3, her family moved to Toronto, where she spent her childhood being groomed for a career as a concert pianist. But in high school, she started to write, penning a 25-page story about a popular blond who gets speared on a wrought-iron fence. When she was 18, she formed a theater group (the late actor Martin Balsam was a member). She played the piano onstage and introduced the sketches.

Her work with the Toronto troupe caught the eye of producer Max Liebman, who hired her in 1948 to write for the weekly revues he was staging at a resort in the Poconos. There, Kallen teamed up with Tolkin and met Coca.

Later that year, Liebman made Kallen and Tolkin the writers on a new show called “The Admiral Broadway Revue,” featuring Caesar as host. That program was short-lived, but it led to “Your Show of Shows.”

It was, Kallen said in a 1960 interview, “backbreaking, frustrating” work. The writers rarely got enough credit.

But, as she once told an interviewer, “Can you imagine being young and single and at the top of the heap and writing for guest stars like Rex Harrison?”

Kallen is survived by her husband, Herbert Engel, with whom she lived in Ardsley; a daughter, Lise Engel, of Manhattan; a son, Paul, of Oceanside, N.Y.; and four grandchildren.