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    “Loretta, dahling,” she drawled, “how much will it cost me to tell you to go fuck yourself?”
    Loretta slumped down in her chair as if she’d been struck. And that was the end of the rehearsal.
    Along with my solo gigs in New York, I still had a steady job with Freddy Martin. In fact, we even landed our own weekly television show on NBC. In early television, every show had a single sponsor. Ours was Hazel Bishop lipstick, which was a very famous brand in the fifties—“Won’t smear off. Won’t rub off. Won’t kiss off.”
    “ The Hazel Bishop Show featuring the Freddy Martin Orchestra” originated live every Wednesday night at ten o’clock from the Center Theater in New York. (Now remember this detail; you’ll be tested on it later. The Center Theater had a giant movie screen above the stage so that the studio audience could see everything in close-up, just like the audience at home.)
    There actually was a Hazel Bishop. She was the laboratory technician who had discovered a revolutionary no-smear formula for lipstick. Unfortunately for her, there were also a few problems with her product that hadn’t quite been worked out yet. One particularly annoying side effect was that after putting on the lipstick, a girl’s lips swelled up as if she had been kissed by a bee. The band got free samples without realizing any of this and we gave them out to all our wives, girlfriends, mothers, and sisters. It wasn’t pretty. Of course we couldn’t say anything negative about the lipstick without offending our sponsor.
    Every week those of us who were soloists were required to do a commercial with the spokeswoman for Hazel Bishop (not Hazel herself). Inevitably, my turn came to do the commercial.
    The bit was that I would be singing and the spokeswoman would lean over in the middle of my song and kiss me. I’d act surprised and pull out my handkerchief to wipe off the lipstick. Then I’d look at the handkerchief before I turned it to the audience. “Amazing,” I’d say holding it up, “no lipstick smears!”
    Because very bright lights were required for those early television broadcasts, we needed to wear a lot of makeup. I rehearsed the commercial without it. That night, of course, I had full makeup on for the cameras.
    So the big moment came and the girl kissed me. (Don’t forget, this whole thing was live .) On cue, I wiped it off, but when I looked down at my handkerchief, there was a huge, gooey makeup stain on it. I knew immediately that on black and white television screens that smudge would read like lipstick. But I had to do something. I flipped the handkerchief over quickly so that only the white part was showing and, with a terrified deer-in-the-headlights look, said, “See, no lipstick smears!” Then I shoved it back in my pocket as fast as I could. I don’t know how it played at home, but the live audience saw the whole thing on the big screen. They screamed with laughter for two solid minutes.
    When I went backstage, the real Hazel Bishop was there waiting for me. She was red-faced and shaking with anger. Hazel didn’t give a damn about her company. All she said was, “You embarrassed me in front of my friends!” My “first blush” of success became a very famous clip, one of the original bloopers from early television.
    A side note: the crew of The Hazel Bishop Show would go on to enjoy extraordinary success in the years to come. The director was Perry Lafferty, who would later become the West Coast head of CBS. The front stage manager was Arthur Penn, who went on to direct The Miracle Worker and Bonnie and Clyde , among many great films. And the backstage manager was Bill Colleran, who ended up as the director of Your Hit Parade and, later, The Dean Martin Show . Bill married Lee Remick, and I became godfather to their daughter, Kate. It was an all-star crew and we became very close friends, never imagining what the future held in store for each of us.
    In July of 1952, my own