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Larry Gelbart, 1928-2009
Photo credit: AP Photo/Matt Sayles
Larry Gelbart, one of the stellar writers in television history and a driving force behind "M*A*S*H," has died. Gelbart, who was 81, died at his home in Beverly Hills and had been diagnosed with cancer in June, according to the Los Angeles Times.
With a passionate, ironic, angry and fiercely comic voice, Gelbart turned a CBS comedy - a notably dark one, to be sure - about a group of surgeons in a field hospital in Korea into arguably the most successful series in TV history. The February 28, 1983 finale was seen by 106 million people - a record that still stands and likely always will.
But Gelbart's role in "M*A*S*H," which he developed with Gene Reynolds, overshadowed a career on Broadway that spanned a couple of decades and a briefly spectacular big screen run that yielded two Oscar nominations for 1977's "Oh, God" and 1982's "Tootsie," which he finished writing after the original script had gone through a handful of re-writes by other Hollywood scribes.
And by dint of an association that began in the early '50s, when he worked with Sid Caesar, he was member of the most exclusive club in TV comedy writing, whose members included Neil Simon, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.
Larry Simon Gelbart was born in Chicago on February 28, 1928. In the early '40s, his father, Harry, a barber transplanted the family to California where he cut the hair of major stars like Edward G. Robinson, Gregory Peck, Eddie Arnold and George Raft. The son went into show business as a writer on radio shows, joined the Army, and afterward wrote material for Bob Hope, Jack Paar, Art Carney, and Red Buttons. The association with Caesar - TV's greatest star in the early years - came later.
With Burt Shevelove, Gelbart also adapted a play by Roman playwright Plautus, about a slave attempting to win his freedom; the result was one of the grand successes of the 1962 Broadway season - "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" - starring Zero Mostel with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Following its huge success, Gelbart decamped for London with his family, returning to the states nearly a decade later, when Reynolds recruited him for "M*A*S*H - an acronym for "Mobile Army Surgical Hospital." Gelbart also had a major role in perhaps TV's most famous duds - its very name a punchline, or even shorthand, for a a spectacular and unexpected TV flop. That show, of course, was "After M*A*S*H."
In an interview with Mervyn Rothstein of the New York Times in 1989 - for a piece about a Broadway satire e on Iran/Contra, "Mastergate" - he explained, "I'm not a comfortable person. There are a lot of elbows inside me bumping up against one another. I think that if you're a reasonably well-informed, caring person, you think life is basically sad...that this is a sad world we live in. The thing that most appealed to me about 'M*A*S*H' was not even the movie. It was the theme song (''Suicide is Painless''), the movie music, which was written in a very minor key and appealed to me emotionally. And I know that I pegged all that comedy to that sound.''
Tags: larry gelbart , "M*A*S*H"
