Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 4, 1992 TAG: 9201040348
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAY SHARBUTT ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
STRANGE IS FUNNY
IS it Jonathan Winters or one of his . . . strange people? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the whim.Winters can be Maude Frickert, Sir Trafalgar Whittley, Yale man Binky Bixford, or even Ellwood P. Suggins. But in a recent phone chat, he was mostly himself, save for a touch of flat Midwestern twang now and then.
As when talking of attending a party and escaping a drunk who told him he was crazy, Winters' farewell address went this way:
"Well, I want to wish you Merry Christmas anyway. What kind of car do you drive? I was in demolitions. So if I leave before you do, I'll certainly put a little clay on the door."
A decade ago, Winters, a man with a Silly Putty face and more accents and inflections than you can shake a speech therapist at, played Robin Williams' son in ABC's "Mork and Mindy." That's TV.)
He was back on ABC last midseason in "Davis Rules," playing Randy Quaid's father. He won an Emmy, his first. But the show wasn't on the fall schedule and was held in reserve again as a midseason replacement.
It's still that, but on CBS. ABC sold the show to its rival in November.
Although that was "a good break for us," it surprised cast and crew, Winters said. But such things don't faze a man who has delighted millions with his free-association trips to the Land of Weird since the '50s.
At least in "Davis Rules," he is on familiar turf, playing a retired Marine gunnery sergeant named Gunny. He was in the Corps during World War II, a corporal with a Marine detachment aboard an aircraft carrier.
He still fondly recalls the day he left for boot camp. "I saw Greeks, Italians, all kinds of people saying goodbye to their boys getting on trains. My mother looked at her watch and said, `You better get on.'"
After the war, after completing his last year of high school and what he recalls as "an hour" at Kenyon College, he didn't quite know what to do. Not many 20-year-olds do. Not so their parents, he observed, "They sit down, say, `I tell you what you're gonna do. You're goin' down to Lockheed and get a job, puttin' tails on airplanes.'"
He opted for art. He studied at and graduated from the Dayton Art Institute in his Ohio hometown. He still paints. He insists that his work is "a combination of primitive and surrealistic."
That he wound up in show business is due to his wife. When they first met, she was amazed at his ability to jump from one voice of Americana to the next with the speed of light. She urged him to enter an amateur show.
The rest is history, about which he plans to write soon. He'll do it the old-fashioned way - in longhand, without one of those portable Boswells that celebrities and some anchormen use in writing their life stories.
He calls the Boswell method "a form of cheating. If you can't talk about yourself, good or bad, why have some clown who's gone to Colgate and had an hour and half with the Trib sit down with you and say, `OK, when you were a kid, did you play with a dog?'"
Winters, whose favorite writer and cartoonist is James Thurber, is an author. His book of short stories, "Winters' Tales," came out two years ago. He also has published "Hang-Ups," a book of some of his paintings.
He already has in mind the first paragraph of his autobigraphy:
"I was born Nov. 11, 1925. My mother, I'm sure she said `I'm sure it's a boy, hold it up again.'"
He is very fond of - and speaks seriously about - one fellow writer and one of her poems. The writer is his grown daughter, Lucinda. She wrote the poem for him on his 60th birthday. A few lines gently salute him the best way:
"I played alone with fantasy characters,
"questioned my vivid imagination,
"but you taught me not to be afraid
"to be alone or unusual.
"You taught me to be proud
"to be strange."