At the end of 1959, Joe E. Ross (Rupert Ritzik) had just finished his opening comedy act at the Black Orchid night spot....there he was impatiently drumming his fingers up and down the white tablecloth, watching the rest of the floor show.
An intrepid reporter ventured up to Joe E. and asked him if he was glad that the hugely successful Bilko television series had finished.
"Everybody is," he snarled, "Phil Silvers most of all. It was a good show and we all enjoyed doing it, but you get kind
of tired of the same routine after four and a half years.
I was only with the series for three years, of course, and I didn't appear in every show, so I had it a lot easier than Phil.
But I know how he felt.
I never acted before I signed for the Bilko show. I was born in New York, on the east side, and started working 25
years ago as a singing waiter, this is how I started in show business.
People do not believe now that I'm a night club comic; they think I just do television --- but it's the other way around.
I'm more at home on these little stages than with a live audience. I've always given these little routines and worked in
with a song or two and people liked it. Now when I come, they expect me to be Ritzik. 'Be Ritzik!!,' they yell, or
'Where's Emma?' Emma, that's my horrible wife on the Bilko show.
I never would have got onto TV if it hadn't been for Nat Hiken. He's the guy who originated the Bilko show.
You know the story about Hiken and Silvers locking themselves up in a warehouse and shouting ideas at each
other until they came up with the army sergeant-con man format.
Hiken is like that --- he built Milton Berle and Martha Raye --- he also invented the Doberman character for Maurice
Gosfield on the Bilko show. He sees things in people that nobody else sees.
The original mess sergeant in the Bilko show (Harry Clark) died in 1956. At that time I was doing my act at a club in
Miami Beach. Hiken and Silvers happened to catch the show one night and Nat stood up in the middle of my act
and said, 'There's my mess sergeant.' We talked afterward and I wasn't too hot on doing TV, but I figured I had
nothing to lose."
At this point Joe E. lifted his heavy frame back in his lofty chair and sent a signal, throught the smoke-riddled room, for the waiter. He ordered himself a black coffee and began to drink it just like a fine wine connoisseur.
"Not as good as that old army brew," he sniggered.
"I wasn't really a mess sergeant in the army, I was in the motor pool. I served from 1943 to 1945 and I
was never made PFC --- I was a buck private all the way. Then I joined the Bilko show; I get one laugh
and they make me a master sergeant."
Even though he was happy that the Bilko show had finally had Taps blown, Joe E. admits that the
television comedy had done him a lot of good. It got him roles in the movies, Hear Me Good
(with Hal March) and Maracaibo (with Cornel Wilde).
"I play a stupid con man in Hear Me Good and a stupid oil man in Maracaibo. Of course, Sergeant
Ritzik never won any prizes himself for being an intellectual. I'd just as soon play a stupid character,
though, if I can get laughs."
Joe E. is on his way back to New York this month to shoot the pilot for his next TV project. This new
show is being written by his old friend Nat Hiken and Joe E. believes it will be hilarious.
"Anything that Hiken does is funny," he states. "I'm going to be either a comic cop or a stupid private eye.
They have to get the okay for a stupid cop from the New York police department. I'm going to keep the
name Ritzik and my good old wife, Emma, will be in it too, I think."
Joe E. isn't really married. He was a few years ago, but got a divorce on grounds of "geography," he
said. "I couldn't stand to live in California and she was an actress and refused to leave Hollywood, so
we decided to go separate ways."
He now lives by himself in a New York apartment hotel and spends a lot of his spare time dreaming up
new routines to make people laugh ........... he even keeps his body in trim by using the gymnasium that occupies the floor below his apartment.
Asked what he would do if the new television show doesn't sell, Joe E. said it wouldn't worry him at all. "I don't look forward to all the work that a weekly series involves," he said. "I think it will go because CBS is making the pilot and they'll push it themselves. If it doesn't sell, well, I'm 47 and too old to start learning how to worry now."
Footnote:
Joe E. should have had no need to worry about his forthcoming new project. Given his track record, it was obvious that Nat Hiken would come up with the goods....and did he ever deliver with the new comedy Car 54 Where Are You? The show became a huge success. It ran ran on NBC from 1961 to 1963. The series followed the adventures of NYPD officers Gunther Toody (Joe E. Ross) and Francis Muldoon (Fred Gwynne) in the fictional 53rd precinct in the Bronx, assigned to Patrol Car 54. Toody was short, stocky, nosy, not very bright, and lived with his loud, domineering wife Lucille. Muldoon, an Irish American, was very tall, quiet, and more intelligent. He was a shy bachelor who lived with his mother and two younger sisters.
In 1962, The brilliantly incomparable, Nat Hiken won an Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy Emmy Award for his work on the series.
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