RIP Edie Adams

[Snowflake]

RIP Edie

Unforgettable on Ernie Kovacs, in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World and The Apartment, I think I remember most the Muriel Cigar ads.

One obit here

A friend on another board, who knew her posted this

Broadway star Edie Adams, widow of comedian Ernie Kovacs, ex-wife of photographer Marty Mills, and ex-wife of musician Pete Candoli, has died.

Edie is something of a hero of mine. She was quite eccentric, to say the least, and could be very frustrating at times. Endlessly energetic and highly charged, she seemed to gain energy as the hours creeped later after midnight.

Being in the shadow of people like Candoli and Kovacs, Edie doesn't always get the respect she deserved. She was a tremendously talented singer and actress, a graduate of Juilliard, and was nominated for three Emmys for her TV work. She should have been nominated for an Oscar for her great performance in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960). Her TV series, Here's Edie, is a landmark show filled with the very top musical talent, from Count Basie to André Previn. Her TV commercials for Muriel Cigars are unforgettable (particularly to teenaged boys of the era.)

But to my mind, I will always love her best for her preservation work. Her first husband, Ernie Kovacs, was a groundbreaking TV comedian. Most modern TV comedy from David Letterman to Saturday Night Live owes him a debt of gratitude. After Ernie died in a car accident in 1962, Edie found that Ernie's work was being destroyed lock, stock, and barrel by the networks. Already almost hopelessly drowned in debt, she took out more loans and bought everything of Ernie's she could get her hands on. She worked for the next ten years to pay off those debts.

It is because of Edie that we have any record of Ernie's work, and her dogged insistence on re-gathering all the material from his career (and her own, incidentally.) I met her in the late 90s when she was working on the A&E Biography special for Ernie. She'd gotten wind that I had some Kovacs footage she hadn't seen. I had to buy a special answering machine around that time because Edie was incapable of leaving a short message.

I visited her in 1999 and witnessed her house, a wonderland of memorabilia. Never far from her dogs, she had so much delicate stuff that it became necessary to keep her canine pals out of part of the house, which they resented. She had a video room and all manner of stuff. In the late 90s, she still had a beautiful green Jaguar, which she drove at high speed down the mountainside where she lived. I sat in horror as she drove me to the airport, thinking "Oh, no, I'm going to barf on Edie Adams' beautiful mahogany dashboard." Thankfully, I didn't, but I boarded my flight with a head start on being air sick!

In 2005, she and I were both invited to an Ernie Kovacs retrospective in Kansas, and she brought some rare stuff from her collection. A small cadre of Kovacs fans were invited back to her "bed and breakfast" where she showed the tapes in the common area. I can't recall a more frustrating evening! Every show was something I hadn't seen and it fascinated me, and Edie talked over the soundtrack of each one. The result was that I couldn't really hear the shows and I couldn't really hear her important comments about the shows, so I effectively missed both. I felt like Tantalus in Dante's Inferno. I didn't want her to stop, but I had to drive back from Kansas the next day. At 3 am, with no sign of her losing any energy at all, we finally had to break up for some sleep.

Ernie and Edie both had a lot of respect for silent comedy. Ernie won an Emmy for his all-silent show from 1957. His almost unseen silent spoof The Mysterious Knockwurst is a real gem, and almost all of Ernie's commercials for Dutch Masters Cigars were silent. He was also the host for Silents Please for a while in 1961.

Edie never had an easy life. Ernie died in a car accident in 1962, and she had custody problems with his two daughters by previous marriage. Her daughter Mia died in another car accident in 1982.

Among celebrity film historians and preservationists, Edie is second to none. Generous, kind, witty. I had asked for an acknowledgment in the A&E Biography show but she got me a huge credit at the end, even though they used more footage from her collection than mine. I'm going to miss her a lot... I recently found a piece of outtake footage from Our Man in Havana with Ernie, and I really wanted to talk to her about it.

Edie's surviving son, Josh Mills, is doing his best with a bad situation. He's a great guy.

Thanks for all you did, Edie. In the words of Ernie, "It's been real."

[cirquelover]

RIP to a classic starlet and a very talented lady. I didn't know she'd work so hard to save her husbands legacy, thank you for that! Godspeed Edie!

[Gemini Cricket]

Aww. She had one of the best lines in Mad, Mad. "Neville, now you know how much I hate explosions!" (Or something like that.)

RIP Edie Adams

[Bornieo: Fully Loaded]

Mad Mad World is a classic. RIP!