Tim Conway, Cleveland legend and six-time Emmy winner, dies at 85
Tim Conway, who died Tuesday at 85, was a special guest at the 2013 Ghoulardifest.
By Mark Dawidziak, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Comedy legend and six-time Emmy winner Tim Conway, a Chagrin Falls High School graduate who got his start in Cleveland television, died at 8:45 a.m. Tuesday, May 14, in the Los Angeles area. He was 85.
Conway had been out of the public eye for a couple of years due to complications from Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus. His death was confirmed by his publicist, Howard Bragman.
His death also was announced in a press release issued by his daughter, Kelly Conway, and five sons, Tim, Patrick, Jamie, Corey and Sean.
Known for his zany improvisational skills and anything-for-a-laugh slapstick abilities, Conway won four Emmys – three as a performer, one as a writer – on "The Carol Burnett Show." He always shone as a supporting player, winning a fifth Emmy in 1996 for his guest appearance on ABC's "Coach" and a sixth in 2008 for playing washed-up comedy star Bucky Bright in an episode of NBC's "30 Rock."
But his many failures as the top-billed star of network shows were the stuff of show-business legend. Typically, he found humor in this disastrous prime-time track record. During the '70s, when TV flops were canceled at midseason after a run of 13 weeks, Conway had a personalized license plate that read "13 Weeks."
Equally at home with ad-libs and physical comedy, Conway became a star playing bumbling Ensign Charles Parker on "McHale's Navy," an ABC series that premiered in 1962. After the show's first season, he was nominated for the "outstanding supporting actor" Emmy, in a field that included Robert Redford and Conway's future co-star in several films, Don Knotts.
"Here's this fellow from this town outside of Cleveland, Chagrin Falls," Harvey Korman said of his friend and "Carol Burnett Show" co-star before they brought their "Together Again'' show to Cleveland's Palace Theatre in 2003. "His mother is a Rumanian seamstress. His father is an Irish groom. And their issue, one child, is this comedy genius. How does that happen? He is indeed one of the most inventive and innovative comedy minds in our business.
"I truly believe he was born too late. I think if he were born in the era of the Chaplins, the Keatons and the Lloyds, he would have been right up there with the great silent clowns."
Unlike many comedians, Conway could be as funny off-camera as on. Carol Burnett liked to tell a story about being at a Hollywood party with Conway. At some point during the festivities, her unpredictable colleague started wrapping his head in toilet paper. This continued without explanation until he somewhat resembled the heavily bandaged Claude Rains in the 1933 horror film "The Invisible Man."
Everyone waited for Conway to take off the improvised "bandages," but it never happened. Instead, the comedian had someone take an Instamatic picture of him, and he left the party still in mummy mode. Driving home on the Pacific Coast Highway, the pride of Chagrin Falls purposely (though cautiously) proceeded through a red light where he knew a traffic cop was posted.
When pulled over, he solemnly produced a license displaying a face wrapped in toilet paper. He had, of course, carefully substituted the picture taken earlier that evening at the party. The police officer was too tickled to give him a ticket.
"I just do these things, and, for the most part, they work out," Conway told The Plain Dealer in 2001. "It's not that I'm always on. It's not that I expect people to know who I am. It's just that I don't take this tour called life all that seriously.
"Bob Newhart and Dick Martin [of Rowan & Martin fame] are two of my closest friends, and we share a kind of dry sense of humor about life. We all feel that you're only here once, so enjoy it while you're here."
Carol Burnett and veteran comrade in comedy Tim Conway share yet another laugh during a gala birthday party for Burnett in 1986.
It was an attitude forged during his Northeast Ohio childhood. Born Thomas Daniel Conway in Willoughby on Dec. 15, 1933, Conway grew up in Chagrin Falls.
"This way of looking at the world has been with me almost all my life,'' Conway said. "I was like that at Chagrin Falls High School. I wasn't a big kid, and if you weren't tough, you had to be funny to get along. I was like that in the Army, although they didn't always have a sense of humor about it."
A 1952 graduate of Chagrin Falls High, Conway did a two-year stint in the Army after earning a bachelor's degree from Bowling Green State University in 1956. By then, the impish sense of humor was well developed.
"I had guard duty for a service club one night," he said. "And every two hours, the lieutenant would check on me, and, as he came toward me, my job was to say, 'Halt, advance and be recognized.' Now, remember, I'm guarding a service hall. Who's going to steal ping-pong balls during peacetime?"
Sneaking a nap in the back seat of a Buick, Conway woke up with a start and realized it was almost time for the lieutenant to be making his rounds.
"As I ran to where I was supposed to be, I realized I'd forgotten my rifle," he said. "So I reached into a trash bin and pulled out a long white neon bulb. I pointed it at him and said, 'Halt, advance and be recognized.' He said, 'What is that?' I said, 'It's a light bulb. Take one more step, and I'll turn it on.' And from there, I got to go paint rocks for two weeks."
He found more profitable outlets for those comic instincts at Cleveland television stations. In 1959, he was hired to write promotional spots at KYW (now WKYC) Channel 3, where he met announcer Ernie Anderson, later known to Channel 8 viewers as horror host Ghoulardi. The two became close friends and partners in mayhem.
Conway said he and Anderson endured one of the worst auditions in Cleveland TV history while at Channel 3. In 1961, they proposed a topical puppet show that would follow Canton native Jack Paar's "Tonight" show.
An audition was arranged with would-be sponsors. Conway and Anderson had scripts balanced in their right hands, holding their left hands over their head to mimic puppets. They quickly discovered two things: They had not figured on how to turn the pages of the script, nor had they factored in how quickly holding a hand over your head gets incredibly painful.
The audition went from bad to worse. The next day, summoned to a station executive's office, Conway managed to get the words "I quit" out between "You're" and "fired."
Conway took a meeting with Channel 8 and convinced the station to hire them.
"I had sold them on Ernie as talent and me as a director," Conway said, "even though Ernie had very little talent and I had absolutely no experience as a director. The combination of the two of us was a mess."
But it was an inspired mess. Anderson was given a daily movie show, "Ernie's Place.'' Conway, still known as Tom, was his director.
"I was such a bad director, I never mastered the art of back-timing the movies," Conway said. "That's where you figure out how much time you need for the movie, allowing for the commercials. So we always ran out of time before the movies were over. People were calling to complain that they wanted to know how 'Citizen Kane' ended."
Their solution was to devote Fridays to showing the missed endings from the previous four days. But since that wasn't enough to fill an entire show, they decided to invite guests to be interviewed by Anderson.
"The show was so bad, we couldn't get anybody to be a guest on it," Conway said. "I mean, nobody. So I would play the guests. Ernie would say, 'We have the world's greatest matador today.' And we'd ad-lib everything. I never knew how he would introduce me. I'd be a matador, a saxophone player, an antique dealer. It was absolute filler time."
Rose Marie, then playing Sally Rogers on "The Dick Van Dyke Show,"' spotted Conway during a visit to Cleveland. She raved about him to Steve Allen, who hired Conway for his NBC show.
There already was a Hollywood actor named Tom Conway, so Allen suggested a change to Tom Kenway. The Tinseltown newcomer countered with an even simpler solution: substitute Tim for Tom.
"The Steve Allen Show" ended its run in late December of 1961, and Conway returned to Cleveland and Channel 8. He soon was offered the role of Ensign Parker on "McHale's Navy." He couldn't decide whether or not to take it. When a station executive asked him why, he cited the brief run on Allen's show. At least Channel 8 was steady work.
The stunned executive told him: "Let me make this easy for you: You're fired."
"McHale's Navy" ran for four years, and it was during this time that Anderson became a Cleveland legend as horror host Ghoulardi. In 1964, Conway made his film debut in the movie version of "McHale's Navy." It was followed in 1965 by a sequel, "McHale's Navy Joins the Air Force."
By the time "McHale's Navy" left the air in 1966, Conway and Anderson had reunited to record the comedy album "Are We On?" at Bowling Green. The duo's second album, "Bull," was recorded at Cleveland's Pat Joyce Tavern and released in 1967.
That same year, Conway tried starring in his first network series, an ABC Western spoof called "Rango," which lasted only half a season. A situation comedy, "The Tim Conway Show," lasted only half a year on CBS. It was followed by "The Tim Conway Comedy Hour," a variety show that lasted less than three months on CBS.
After these three unsuccessful attempts to headline his own network series, Conway got back on track as a frequent guest on "The Carol Burnett Show." The appearances proved so popular, he joined the long-running variety program as a regular in 1975.
"Tim was on the show all the time, but we didn't make him a genuine regular until the ninth year," Burnett told The Plain Dealer, "How stupid were we? Finally, it was like, 'Duh! Why don't we have him on every week?' "
Anderson, who died in 1997, could be heard as the show's announcer.
Conway played long-suffering Mr. Tudball to Burnett's magnificently vacant Mrs. Wiggins, as well as the doddering Old Man, but he was best known for his ability to break up fellow regular Korman in sketch after sketch.
Actor Tim Conway poses in 2008 with his award for outstanding guest actor in a comedy series for his work on "30 Rock"."
"Tim had a secret weapon," Burnett said. "Tim would do a sketch exactly as written in the dress rehearsal. Then he'd come back and do something completely different for the actual show. Poor Harvey would be seeing and hearing things for the first time. We'd all gather around to see what he was going to do."
"I had a terribly unfair advantage," Conway said during one of many interviews with The Plain Dealer. "I also was a writer on the show, and I was using the typewriter as a weapon. We'd rehearse it one way, then I'd change it. I wrote the sketches, so they never knew what I was going to say. I would never tell Harvey."
In the '90s, Conway and Korman reunited for "Together Again," which they brought to Akron's E.J. Thomas Hall, as well as Cleveland. The show included the "Dentist Sketch" from "The Carol Burnett Show," with Conway mistakenly injecting himself with novocaine. Korman died in May 2008.
"Without the Burnett show, I don't think we'd be talking today," Conway told The Plain Dealer in 2013. "It absolutely was the best outlet for anything I wanted to try. You were encouraged to do it."
Conway returned to films in 1973 with Disney's "The World's Greatest Athlete." It was followed in 1975 by another Disney comedy, "The Apple Dumpling Gang," the first of five big-screen comedies teaming him with his pal Knotts. The others were "Gus" (1976), "The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again" (1979), "The Prize Fighter" (1979) and "Private Eyes" (1980).
A second CBS series titled "The Tim Conway Show'' (1980-81) lasted a season and a half. "Ace Crawford: Private Eye'' (CBS, 1983), his eighth network series in 22 years, lasted less than a month.
But in 1987, Conway found success in two other fields: home video and theater. First, there was the release of "Dorf on Golf," a video featuring the diminutive character he played by standing in a hole and putting shoes on his knee caps.
"Harvey said my career was over and this piece of crap saved me," Conway said. "Which is probably true."
Eight "Dorf'' videos followed over the next 11 years, including "Dorf Goes Fishing'' and "Dorf on the Diamond.'' Also in 1987, he embarked on the first of four national tours as Felix Unger in Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple."
After being honored with a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame in 1989, he starred in "Tim Conway's Funny America," a 1990 summer series on ABC, and made occasional mid-'90s appearances as Efrem Wanker on Fox's "Married . . . With Children."
In 1996, he won that fifth Emmy and played dog-biting postal employee Herman Dooly in director Garry Marshall's film "Dear God." In 1997, he had a cameo role in "Speed 2: Cruise Control,'' guest-starred on ABC's "The Drew Carey Show'' (set in Cleveland) and made his first appearance as Tim Conrad on pal Dick Van Dyke's "Diagnosis Murder."
Conway joked about not wanting to work, but jobs kept coming his way. In 1999, he made the first of several guest-voice stops at Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants,'' playing Barnacle Boy to his "McHale's Navy'' co-star Ernest Borgnine's Mermaid Man.
In 2000, Conway made the first of several appearances as Tom Warner on CBS sitcom "Yes, Dear. '' In 2001, he reunited with Burnett, Korman and Vicki Lawrence for the CBS special "Show Stoppers,'' which scored impressively high ratings.
In 2003, he tried yet another series, playing Mr. Henderson in the WB's short-lived improvisational show, "On the Spot." In 2008, the sixth Emmy came his way for "30 Rock." And in 2010, he made the first of two appearances on "Hot in Cleveland."
Conway returned to the Cleveland area in 2013 to appear at GhoulardiFest and to talk about his recently published memoir, "What's So Funny? My Hilarious Life." "I just go merrily through life," he told The Plain Dealer during that visit. "I enjoy people and I realize how fortunate I've been. I never really tried to be a star. I didn't seek stardom. I was a director at Channel 8, and not a very good one."
Conway was married twice, first in 1961 to Mary Anne Dalton. They had six children, including Tim Conway Jr., who became an actor and comedian. They divorced in 1978. Six years later, he married Charlene Fusco. They had one daughter, Jackie, and settled in Encino, California.
Speculation about Conway's failing health began when he was not part of the 50th anniversary "Carol Burnett Show" special that aired in December 2017. His regular humorous observations on social media disappeared after April 2018.
Then, in late August, the reports of Conway's rapid decline over the previous year were confirmed when his daughter Kelly filed documents in Los Angeles, asking to be appointed conservator of her 84-year-old father. Kelly, 56, wanted to be put in charge of her father's medical treatments.
Kelly claimed in the court filing that Conway's wife was "planning to move him out of the excellent skilled nursing facility he is currently at" and place him in a care facility that wouldn't give him access to registered nurses "at all times and his 24-hour caregiver and speech therapist (to help with swallowing)."
She stated that Conway was suffering from dementia, was "confined to a wheelchair," cannot "properly provide for his personal needs for physical health, food, and clothing" and is "almost entirely unresponsive." Later court documents revealed that the dementia was caused by "fluid on the brain," and surgeries involving a shunt that failed and later a valve had failed to improve his condition.
A representative appointed by the court to protect Conway found that he "showed no ability or willingness to talk and no apparent sign that he comprehended the nature of the conservatorship or any of my statements to him."
Charlene Conway denied that she was planning to move her husband out of his current nursing facility, but said she wanted him to be treated by a renowned neurologist. The dispute was settled in March, with Charlene granted conservatorship.
"I marvel at where I came from and what I was able to do,'' Conway said. "If Rose Marie hadn't come through town at exactly that time, who knows? I'd probably be some old guy in Cleveland, telling stories. People would be telling you, 'Go see Tom Conway. He was at Channel 8 for years. He's got great stories. Too bad he never went to Hollywood.' "