Mitzi McCall, Comedian, Actress and Sitcom Writer, Dies at 93
Mitzi McCall, the delightful actress and sitcom writer who partnered with her husband, Charlie Brill, in a sketch comedy act that famously floundered between sets by The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, has died. She was 93.
McCall died Thursday at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, her family announced.
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The pint-sized Pittsburgh native also played the dry cleaner’s wife who wears a fur coat owned by Jerry’s mom on the 1994 Seinfeld episode “The Secretary,” and she was the mother of Carol Leifer’s optometrist character on the 1997-98 WB sitcom Alright Already.
McCall had a thriving career as a voiceover artist; she played Mother Goose on Mother Goose and Grimm and worked on other animated projects including The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, Paw Paws, Darkwing Duck, Yo Yogi! and Ice Age (2002).
And she wrote for shows including 13 Queens Boulevard, Eight Is Enough, One Day at a Time, ALF, Mr. Belvedere, Charles in Charge and Free for All.
She and Brill, who were married in January 1960, worked together often. In addition to their McCall & Brill act, they played a bickering wife and husband on “The Fun Couple” sketches during the second season (1968-69) of NBC’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In; appeared on Tattletales and Match Game; and were a couple on the CBS-USA crime drama Silk Stalkings, created by Stephen J. Cannell. (She played Fran, the free-spirited wife of Brill’s Capt. Harry Lipschitz.)
“Fran is there to support Harry and help him find the light at the end of the tunnel,” Brill once said, “especially when he is sure that light is an oncoming train.”
The pair thought they had gotten the break of a lifetime when they were booked by their manager, future Hunt for Red October producer Mace Neufeld, to make their national TV debut with a live performance on CBS’ The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964.
Unfortunately for them, that also was the day The Beatles were to perform on the show in their U.S. debut, and McCall & Brill were met with mostly silence from the throng of screaming teenagers there to see the Fab Four. “They didn’t have this expression then, but we sucked,” McCall said on a 2005 episode of NPR’s This American Life.
Mitzi Steiner was born in Pittsburgh on Sept. 9, 1930. When she did pantomime on WDTV’s Kiddie Castle, a 5-year-old girl with a cleft palate who was watching suddenly began to speak properly. “If anyone is directly responsible for Claire speaking, it is Mitzi Steiner,” the girl’s mother told a newspaper reporter in 1952.
The 4-foot-11 Steiner, who also had done some acting at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, came to Hollywood and through Bob Hope’s wife, Dolores — her mother, Gazala, had known the Hopes — got a meeting with prominent agent Mitchell Gertz.
“He said to me, ‘You know what, if you lose 10 pounds, I’d be interested in signing you,'” she recalled in 2015 on The Mild Adventures of Fred Stoller podcast. “Guess what? I lost 10 pounds in 10 days. I went back and he said, ‘Anyone who could do that, I will sign in a minute.'”
Under contract at Paramount, she made her movie debut as a schoolgirl named Skeets in Norman Taurog’s You’re Never Too Young (1955), starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in a remake of Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor.
McCall appeared in the 1958 films War of the Satellites, Machine-Gun Kelly and The Cry Baby Killer, then joined the Paramount-based Jerry Lewis Comedy Workshop, where she met Brill for the first time. Brill got in by doing an old-school comic burlesque act with Mel Berger during his audition.
Later, McCall went around the country in a comedy act with 6-foot-3 actress Joan Shawlee (Sweet Sue in Some Like It Hot, Buddy’s wife, Pickles, on The Dick Van Dyke Show). But when she left, Brill took her place, and with a little rewriting, McCall & Brill had their first gig, opening for Gary Crosby at the Slate Brothers nightclub in Los Angeles.
Signed by William Morris, the couple in 1962 appeared on Vic Damone’s summer musical variety show The Lively Ones and on The Tonight Show. Over the years, they would also open for the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Marlene Dietrich and Ann-Margret; they had just warmed up the audience in 1972 when the Swedish-born entertainer fell off a stage Lake Tahoe and broke several bones in her face.
To get on Laugh-In, McCall phoned producer George Schlatter once a day for weeks. They didn’t become regulars until Schlatter lost to Neufeld in a game of pool and had to hire them to honor their bet. Still, they weren’t allowed to work with the other castmembers and were confined to their “Fun Couple” skits, she said.
They appeared on the second season of Silk Stalkings as different characters, then joined the Palm Beach, Florida-set series as Fran and Harry Lipschitz in 1993.
After getting the call that they would be on the Sullivan show, McCall and Brill picked out their material and broke it in at The Horn nightclub in Santa Monica. “It got a lovely, lovely reaction,” he said. “And we told everybody. In fact, I think I sky-wrote it over Hollywood: We’re on The Ed Sullivan Show. Yoo-hoo!”
At Studio 50 in Manhattan, they did their act for Sullivan during rehearsals, but then the host called them into his dressing room. “What you’re doing is lovely, but not for tonight,” McCall remembered him saying. “My audience tonight is 14-year-old kids.”
Sullivan then rearranged their act, selecting the bits he wanted them to do. While they were scrambling to adjust, John Lennon stopped by, got a dime from Brill and bought a Coke out of the vending machine that was in the couple’s dressing room.
Then they were given perhaps the worst slot on the show.
The Beatles would bookend the program, opening with “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You” and “She Loves You” and closing with “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” In between, there were six acts: Dutch magician Fred Kaps, the cast of Broadway’s Oliver!, including future Monkees star Davy Jones; impressionist Frank Gorshin; banjo-playing Welch singer Tessie O’Shea; the tumbling acrobats Wells & the Four Fays; and then McCall & Brill. By the time they went on, the audience was dying for The Beatles to return.
In their 3 1/2-minute set, Brill played a director looking to cast a movie and Mitzi is his secretary and then three women — an aspiring starlet, a stage mom and a Method actor — who want to audition. McCall’s ad-lib joke about beetles (as in the insect) got them the biggest laugh. And when they were done, Sullivan didn’t call them over, as he would often do when a performance clicked.
Some 73 million Americans, or about 40 percent of the country, were watching. Even with the young audience, they were convinced that if they had done their original routine as planned, they would have gone over well.
They were heartbroken, but Gorshin bought them a drink at Sardi’s and told them life would go on. Back home, they didn’t hear from their agent for six months.
“We were in the midst of greatness. We didn’t know it,” Brill said. “People would come up to us and say, ‘Wasn’t that you that was on The Beatles show?’ And we said, ‘Yes, yes,’ waiting for them to say, ‘Boy, did you suck.’ And they went, ‘Oh my God, you’re famous.'”
Her first husband was Jack Tolen, her director on Kiddie Castle.
In addition to Brill — her husband of 64 years is also is known for his turn as the Klingon Arne Darvin on the Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles” — survivors include their daughter, yoga instructor Jennifer Brill; two nieces, sisters Toni Howard of ICM Partners and author Wendy Goldberg, widow of TV producer Leonard Goldberg; and two godchildren, sister actresses Melissa Gilbert and Sara Gilbert.
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