Lydia Cornell: Angel

Inside Television #555

Publication Date: 5-27-11

By: Hubert O'Hearn

About My Friend, Lydia Cornell

In thinking about this column, I started leafing through my internal photo album. I basically only have an internal one - I've never been all that big on taking pictures. Somehow having admissible evidence right at your fingertips of who was and where you should have been tends to block that pleasant coat of strawberry icing that the imaginative memory uses to coat the past. Things are always so much sweeter in retrospect. One never remembers pain nor pleasure quite as accurately as the feeling at the time.

But thinking back has its advantages too, provided that the meditative mood is infrequent, special and pleasant. Nostalgia therefore is best eaten like raw oysters. And yes, that imaginative memory supplies the sweet sauce mixed with pokings of horseradish and lemon.

In doing this nostalgie des temps perdu today, I realized that although I have had many unusual friends, I haven't actually had many unusual friendships. As to the first - well, when you spend the better part of your adult life in the company of theatrical and arts folk in general, the crowd tends to be livelier than most of the accounting profession. Not that I bet they don't have their kicks too. In my case, the following people have been considered in that haloed circle of one's true friends; the rings of the halo formed of molecules of laughter, shared tears, moments and extended narratives. The orbital friends as it were, as opposed to the passing comets. There are or have been (no I'm not ranking) within the halo of this louche saint, magicians, puppeteers, writers good and writers 'oh dear', the occasional politician who should have been an actor, and a lawyer-activist who was an actor and may well be again. Musicians and technicians, certainly; journalists, actors male and female, and a small group of improv actors who were my favourite gang of gangs. You get some lively evenings this way.

Yet, by and large, the friendships themselves weren't or aren't unusual. You meet, find a common interested in that you've both at least heard of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stan Musial or the contribution of Zeppo Marx to the greater good and you hit it off. Then comes laugh laugh laugh, argument, settle laugh what did you mean laugh laugh really stupid thing you do together laugh uproariously someone moves someone gets married dear god he's an idiot why hang around with him hot sex episode hot sex episode guilt normal not quite someone dies you him or the person who was the sun that held the planets that held the moons dies. You drift.

Same as you. (Just to clarify, I have not had hot sex episodes with all my friends. They have however had hot sex at some point with someone, as have I and at some discussion or another the topic has come up. Just to clarify.) All that said, and there was quite a bit, wasn't there?, my friendships have been the usual sort in that one and the other work or recreate together, meet at one another's homes or common bars and at the very least actually know one another.

One of the very best friends I have ever had I've never met, not live and in person. Yet she is one of the kindest yet courageous, talented yet giving people I have ever known. Her name is Lydia Cornell. I hope you'll enjoy our story.

Did her name ring a bell, pluck a string, sound a tinkling note? If you're say 35 or over, there's a good chance that your thoughts formed a phrase starting, 'Wasn't she the one who -' The answer is yes she is.

There was a series on ABC in the early 80s called Too Close for Comfort. Ted Knight, who had been a white hot property after his run as one of the ultimate second bananas in his role as Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He lost a lot of that heat after the six-episode disaster of The Ted Knight Show zeppelined into the ground. Ted, playing Roger Dennis, ran an escort service in New York. Yes exactly. In 2011 you might have a runaway hit; in 1978 on American broadcast television, not bloody likely. So after he had a couple of relaxing therapy experiences as a guest on The Love Boat, ABC thought there was still money in Ted Knight's name. And so the Arne Sultan-written series appeared on the air in 1980. Sultan, by the way, had been a major writer on Gilligan's Island, Get Smart, and Barney Miller so he knew how to do funny.

The set-up of the show, for those who might need further reminding, is that Ted played Henry Rush, a cartoonist whose creation was Cosmic Cow. Henry had two young adult daughters with his wife Muriel. The two daughters lived together in separate quarters in the same house below their parents. This makes Daddy nervous, as the daughters are quite attractive. Fitting the conventions of the day, the daughters were loving and compatible opposites. There was the lovely and smart brunette Jackie (played by Deborah Van Valkenburgh) and the eye-poppingly lovely blonde Sara played by, you guessed it, Lydia Cornell.

A broadcasting or media student could turn out a reasonably passable paper in the comparisons between Too Close for Comfort and its slowly expiring ABC colleague sitcom Three's Company. A quick Cliff's Notes version:

Three's Company: Two gorgeous roommates, smart brunette and slightly thick blonde

Too Close for Comfort: Sisters. Otherwise check.

Three's Company: Annoying landlord always spying to make sure no wild sexual shenanigans were going on.

Too Close for Comfort: Landlord is also Dad.

Three's Company: Thye late and missed John Ritter plays Jack Tripper the male comedy lead, who the landlord thinks is gay.

Too Close for Comfort: Jim J. Bullock plays Monroe Fiscus, who is an unattached and well-groomed single male in San Francisco who never makes a pass at the Rush sisters. Exactly.

That said, formulas in television exist for a reason. Audiences like them. One can work ones's way through the intricate family relationships of a Eugene O'Neill play to relax the mind, or one can watch the old guy get out-smarted and exasperated by the gay guy. If the writing is good and the characters likable, the show will succeed. Television is as simple as checkers to understand for rules, yet as difficult to win as a checkers tournament.

Too Close for Comfort had a very nice run of it. 129 episodes in all, with the first three seasons running on ABC and the final three in syndication - this in an age where syndicated scripted series were still very much a rarity.

I remember the show well. Very much a comedy for a family audience, my Mom always hoped that Ted Knight would wear a sweatshirt from her alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. A smart running gimmick was that Knight would wear a different college or university sweatshirt every week, with this becoming a badge, or at least an iron-on, of honour for the selected. My granddad would laugh his head off at Munro. As for me, I was 21 at the time, so as for my interests... Exactly.

There were a couple of things I could never figure out about the show. Even at age 21 I could see Cosmic Cow as a great marketing angle, so I never understood why we so rarely saw the hand puppet Henry Rush used to talk to while drawing his panels. The other puzzle was why the parts of the daughters kept being cut back. As an audience, we never really got to see Jackie and Sara realize their characters' lives, which I still think was a wasted opportunity. When the show died along with Ted Knight in real-life in 1986, there was hopeful talk of a spin-off featuring the two sisters and Munro, but Ted Knight's estate which owned the rights puzzlingly did not want to pursue a cash cow after Cosmic Cow so that was the end of that.

As to Lydia herself, she has a really unique place in the history of television. I mentioned that she was (I'll get to the 'is' in a few paragraphs) eye-poppingly beautiful, but that requires further description. Her eyes were turquoise dreams of dreams that were yet to be, hair so gold that one felt that gold must have a perfume, and of course the figure that launched a thousand erections. In an evening, at that. Yet, Lydia as Sara Rush was the last of the 'innocent sex symbols'. My most-admired novelist from England, Martin Amis, wrote in last year's The Pregnant Widow a character named Scheherazade; an impossibly beautiful and voluptuous young blonde woman who was unaware of her own power. The Pregnant Widow was set in 1970, mostly, at the first full dawn of the sexual revolution where a beautiful woman could be still be beautiful and unaware of her beauty. Sara Rush was of that line, but by 1986, no one would ever believe it again. Madonna had warmed up her lungs and Kelly Bundy was about to stride onto the set of Married...with Children.

So time passes, as it tends to do unless everything churches and physicists have told us is all an inside joke. Lydia never yet re-achieved the white hot fame of being Number Two in poster sales to Farrah Fawcett. By the by, I never had one. I tended more towards the singers in my youth - Linda Ronstadt and Stevie Nicks guarded my bedroom like defending Valkyrie while I slept.

Still, Lydia kept working and continues to do so. She refined her comedic skills and developed as a writer. I invite the reader to do a search on YouTube for 'Lydia Cornell True Love' to see a very good selection from her one-woman show. She does not have the brassiness of the standard stand-up comic. Her voice is burnished copper and copper is a much mellower metal than brass.

Surely by now the reader is wondering, why am I telling you about all this? Is this just (...checking word count) going to be 2500 words or so of Where are They Now? Well yes; well no. Because here's the thing about Lydia: nothing - absolutely nothing I have told you about her looks and career have anything to do with what is important about her as a person. She checks melons for blemishes at Safeway - her career nay as well be that with the rather important codicil that her career grants her the opportunity to do all the important things in her life. Fame, you see, is a renewable passport to performing good works.

And this is what drew me to her in the first place. As anyone who has ever read much of my work over the years knows, I have grown frustrated and tired over the obsession with Bad Celebrity. The slogan for TV used to be borrowed from Dr. Timothy Leary: Turn on, Tune In, Tune Out. Now it's more like: Be bad, Be worse, Be famous. Charlie Sheen has as much place in an article about Lydia Cornell as Donald Trump at an ashram, but for the life of me I truly fail to understand why anyone would pay money to go to a Charlie Sheen 'concert thingie' when they know the show is so bad people walk out on it by the hundreds? The only defence is that this is what the audience is trained to think: celebrities are like Japanese Emperors or Vatican Popes - they are incapable of error, even when wrong, and must be adored.

So my quest in that part of my writing practice that's in the desktop folder marked Inside Television and on thefearandloathingpage.blogspot.com is to try and bring out stories of Good Celebrity. Because the public eventually turns, you know. I suspect that part of the reason why reality TV is rising against scripted series is that celebrities start to look like a clan of mud pigs that one no longer wants clopping their muddy hoofs across the carpeting.

I like to write about happy things. Nothing pleases me more in writing than the fact that a story I did about Alyssa Milano working to bring clean water wells to Africa is still the most-read story I've ever done.

So what is so great about Lydia Cornell? It reminds me of a story the great Charles Grodin told on CNBC talk show about Marlo Thomas. Marlo, who played maybe the first independent woman on a comedy sitcom - That Girl! - has been a well-known supporter of liberal causes for decades. Marlo talked Grodin into show-doctoring a play that was about an important issue or some such, because, as Grodin said straight-faced into the camera: "When Marlo gets involved with something and asks you to get involved, you have to say yes. You have to get involved because when MLydia Cornell gets inarlo gets involved (slightest pause) she's involved." Lydia Cornell gets involved.

It would have been on Twitter that I first ran across her, 25 years nearly since Too Close for Comfort closed down for good. And for the life of mean, I can't even remember now what the cause was she was promoting. There are so many: Autism, Brain Injuries, Young Women in Crisis, Substance Abuse or something else altogether. Lydia had her run with booze - it was the 80s, everyone had a run with something and sometimes jogged with a crowd. She has not had a drink in 15 years and is the picture of perfect health. More on that too.

Anyway, I was looking for celebrities with interesting stories too tall as part of my research for both Inside Television and my book, The Future Was Television. So I did a Google search and found out some fascinating things about the woman who would become my dear friend. She had become quite political, or at least openly political - co-hosting a radio show in Las Vegas, and through it and her Politically Hot blog Lydia had engaged in a glorious pissing match with Ann Coulter. For those who might not recognize the latter name, if Dick Cheney had transsexual fantasies (and one truly hopes he does; it would explain so much) he would imagine himself as Ann Coulter.

Now call me shallow, but when I find intelligent, bold and charitable people at the car wash, let alone the entertainment industry, I want to get to know them. So I contacted Miss Cornell and asked if she would care to grant an interview to me about her career from Too Close to Comfort to her present-day success. The response I received was both personal and kind. We would do the interview when there was time, which was fine by me.

I also then joined Lydia's Facebook page. If there was going to be time to get to know the interview subject better, then I should spend the time doing so. And without a whisper of exaggeration, Lydia's wall is my favourite page on the Internet - well there is also the football page at guardian.co.uk, but a man must have his idle pleasures.

Lydia has a great friends' list. as they aren't public personages per se I think it would be wrong to single out names, but although all sides of an issue are represented, there is usually a tone of respect between disagreeing parties. If that respect is lost through crude or callous remark, the offender is promptly smacked across the lips with -

Love? Yes, love. No one talks about love, peace and letting go of anger more than Lydia. Life has not been all mandolins and rainbows for Lydia. Her beloved younger brother Paul died a suicide death. Lydia found the body. Two divorces, being a single Mom, trying to be taken seriously as a bombshell with a brain - any or all of these things could build a bullet casing around the heart, but not with her. She actually practices what is preached.

I know that Lydia has a great book in her. Its theme will be a celebrity and how it can be both a cancer yet the fund stream to good works alike. There has not been a weekend or scarcely a week when this wonderful person has not been attending a charity event, or counseling young women, or just being like Roy Scheider in All That Jazz while looking in the mirror and saying 'It's showtime folks!' before dressing herself in the showbiz regalia and making an appearance in support of a friend. Lydia is a proud mother, a staunch and faithful friend, and claims to have the ability to speak Klingon. When we eventually do have our interview, I intend to put this to the test.

Lydia also has a regular chat show on Ustream that can be found here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lydia-live-todhd . That show too is a joy, when it runs on Wednesday evenings from 9:30-11:30 eastern time. The show, Lydia Live is in the process of a set and presentation upgrade from Lydia, a webcam, her iPhone, and a desk lamp for lighting; but I hope it doesn't lose the charm the present show has. Interesting people talking about interesting things in interesting ways don't necessarily have to be famous. As I say, good writing and likable characters make for successful television. And for my money, Lydia is actually much more beautiful now than in her sitcom heyday. The eyes now are not directed to hide their intelligence and she exudes the much-envied look that comes from healthy living. If you watch the show you will see how her inner peace absolutely glows.

I absolutely love this woman, no more so than when our email relationship had got to the point where she asked about Kimberly - my fiancee who was struck by a brain aneurysm a year ago February (my blog on that is here: http://kimberlytheroadtorecovery.blogspot.com/ ). Kimberly lost her short term memory and is still funny and loving and beautiful and the subject of all my dreams and wishes, but will never again be who she was. So I told Lydia about the Love of My Life and the words of prayer that came back were genuine and beautiful. You want to know evidence of when someone cares? When they pray for you. From that moment on she became one of the few who form the eccentric circle I love to call my best friends. She has calmed my rage, raised my hopes and made me laugh. My prayer is that everyone who reads this can say now or someday, 'She sounds just like my friend.' God bless Lydia Cornell. God blesses us for knowing her. God will bless us for being like her.

Be seeing you.

(A song that I think describes my feelings towards my dear friend. Enjoy. As well, if anyone would like to post a link to a good and charitable cause, please comment below. I will post them all. Cheers - H http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQxZztI7264 )  )