The Little World of Stan Freberg

While His Affluent Neighbors are still snug in their silken contour sheets, a lanky Beverly Hills resident gulps down 10 varieties of vitamin pills along with a tumbler of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. The sun has yet to pierce the California smog as he pulls on a Beethoven sweat shirt, wrinkled khakis and size 10-1/2-D tennis sneakers. Exiting from his 15-room Spanish colonial villa on North Beverly Drive, he briskly embarks on his morning constitutional, heading past hedgerows toward the Beverly Hills Hotel, a short jog up the street. Outflanking its pink-stucco facade, he wheels right at Sunset Boulevard and then right again on Crescent, pausing briefly to greet a motorcycle cop crouched behind a stop sign. Occasionally a bewildered Japanese gardener looks up from landscaping to observe the loping figure turn at Lexington, hard by the stately mansions pin-pointed on Hollywood star maps, and then negotiate the stretch down palm-lined North Beverly. Back home, hardly puffing, he grunts through 10 minutes of calisthenics and swims four laps in his cherub-studded, Olympic-length pool, capping these bursts with a hot-and-cold needle shower in soapy splendor. After a breakfast of bran flakes with raw almonds, one half of an organically grown papaya, yogurt and stone-ground bread, Stan Freberg, Satirist, is ready for another day at the office.

Despite the evidence of his determined daily regimen, Freberg is far from being another movieland eccentric seeking attention. More accurately, he has attracted plenty of attention already as the nation's foremost plotter of offbeat television and radio commercials (average fee: $55,000 a campaign, including a $5000 consultation fee), the wriest iconoclast on records (some 6,000,000 sold), a TV-comedy innovator, a pioneer in film advertising and a stiletto-sharp deflator of all the plump panjandrums from John Birchers to Bridey Murphy searchers.

The bulk of Freberg's abundant talent and resources has resolutely focused for the past six years on reversing the insidious cacophony of tactless TV and radio commercials with radical new techniques. By creating sales pitches that never sound like sales pitches, he has craftily made products seem warmer and friendlier, clients eventually smiling and contented, customers smitten and eager. To accomplish this nifty triple play, he adroitly laces his subtle spiels with generous doses of show business, histrionics, good humor and gimmickry. The sublime design: to entertain.

But even while avowing such thinking (capricious by Madison Avenue standards), Freberg remains sedate enough to spurn accounts Batten, Barton and Durstine might give their Osborn for. His forte happens to be the corporation in trouble – the coffee company peddling its first instant years after everyone else, the soft drink that has slipped from third to fifth in the marketplace, the ignoble chow mein producer, the tea-bag manufacturer on a treadmill. "If a company comes to me and cannot clearly state its problem," says Freberg, "I don't want to get involved. I recently turned down someone whose problem was that they had 60 percent of the market and they wanted to increase their business. Why, 60 percent, that's a monopoly, practically."

In supporting the underdog, Freberg is not unlike Edward Bennett Williams, mouthpiece for Hoffa, Costello and Dave Beck. He is also a bit of an Abe Burrows, the facile writer frequently summoned to fix a Broadway-bound play wallowing in Boston. "I want the advertising agencies to think of me as that special surgeon they call in," he explains. "Like, four doctors are standing around the patient who is dying and they say: 'Why don't we get Dr. Freberg in Vienna? Do you think he'd come?'"

When Dr. Freberg does arrive he invariably carts along a carpetbag full of razzle-dazzle so irregular that the specialist is often mistaken for a quack. His noncommercial commercials sometimes sound like miniature musical comedies. Many of them start in mid-conversation and never once do they bellow "Say, Mother!" or "Save, save, save," the time-honored attention-getters. Their decibel level is constant, their message semisubliminal. "Advertising has created a commercial barrier," Freberg says. "My object is to break through that barrier. People have become beaten around the ears with the baseball bat of hard sell to the point where they've developed a cauliflower receptivity, and you just cannot reach them with techniques now archaic due to their sheer volume and repetition. Advertisers are paying billions of dollars every year playing to a roomful of empty furniture."

To keep an audience in the living room, Freberg's workaday theory is "to be musically memorable, amusing, completely unorthodox in approach, and all three whenever possible." He has composed a pair of six-minute radio commercials (Woburn! for Salada Tea and Omaha! for Butter-Nut Coffee) that unmistakably resemble tabloid-sized Broadway musicals. He has formed a group of Chinese folk singers, The Chun Kingston Trio, for a chow mein company. He has employed bop-talking beatniks to push cottage cheese with pineapple and mass apple-bobbing parties to sell banks. But mostly he has sold potential advertisers who flock to what he calls "Freberg, Ltd. (But Not Very)", his one-secretary office on Sunset Strip.

Jeno Paulucci, an American-born Chinese food manufacturer from Duluth, Minnesota, (continued on page 98) Little World of Stan Freberg (continued from Page 93) came knocking in 1960, distressed that his canned chow mein was accumulating dust on grocers' shelves. Two of the biggest advertising agencies had failed to hypo sales. Freberg suggested that Paulucci state the hard fact, that 95 percent of the U. S. had not only never tried Chun King, they hadn't even heard of it. "Lay it on the line," said a voice in the first of a skein of commercials. "Let's have a little truth in advertising for a change." Commercial number two sought to prove the unlikely notion that most Americans eat chow mein daily, just as many Chinese subsist on hot dogs. "What did you have to eat last Monday?" a pitchman asks his shill. "Hot dog," is the Chinese-inflected reply. "Tuesday night?" "Hot dog." "Wednesday night?" "Hot dog." "Thursday night?" "Hot dog." "Friday, Saturday, Sunday?" "Hot dog, hot dog, hot dog." The frankfurter fanatic exposes himself and the subgum selling plot by reaching too fast for the bogus testimonial payoff.

Paulucci had already given Freberg, Ltd., the green light, "But when he heard those commercials," Stan recalls, "he called from Duluth in a rage. He said: 'I'm not in business to sell hot dogs. You told me you were gonna put some commercials on the air that are really gonna bring my sales up. You told everybody I'm only selling five percent of the people. That's a terrible thing and I don't want to admit that in public.' His voice was up about three octaves. He said: 'I've canceled all the air time. I want you to redo the whole campaign.'"

Freberg bridled, raising his voice several octaves. "Look," he said, "those commercials are designed to hit people on the head with a two-by-four and make them aware of a product called Chun King. First of all, nobody cares about Chinese food to any great extent, let alone canned Chinese food, let alone a particular canned Chinese food called Chun King. So you can't expect me to get in tired lines about vegetables picked at the peak of perfection. If my campaign doesn't work I will get out of advertising and pull you in a rickshaw up La Cienega Boulevard past Restaurant Row." Paulucci reluctantly demurred, promising: "If it does work I'll pull you in a rickshaw."

The campaign reinstated, Freberg went to work in earnest. He had millions of yellow plastic handles attached to Chun King cans, called them "security handles" – so customers wouldn't feel guilty about abandoning the traditional Chinese restaurant takeout cartons for chow mein in a can. Though Chinese eateries were insignificant competition, they became the expedient enemy. The Chun Kingston Trio rhymed out this intranoodle warfare, and suddenly people were flocking to supermarkets to carry home Chun King by the security handlesful. Sales soared 30 percent within a year and Freberg got his rickshaw ride from Paulucci as flashbulbs popped.

Celebrating further, Freberg hosted a candlelit dinner party on the marbled patio of his $200,000 home. The bill of fare for scores of Los Angeles grocery store buyers: Chun King chow mein served from gleaming copper chafing dishes. "People ate it and raved," Freberg says. "After it was all over I told them it was Chun King. They wouldn't believe it. So I had a uniformed guy from Brink's standing out behind the house. He had all the empty cans padlocked in mailbags." With proper ceremony, the Brink's man expertly unlocked the sacks and littered the patio with empty tin cans. "It created a good public relations feeling for the company," Freberg says.

The first of Freberg's $50,000 campaigns was commissioned by Kaiser Aluminum Foil in 1959. It was an attempt by Kaiser to induce apathetic storekeepers to stock its wrapping and thereby enlist them in shelf-to-shelf combat with Reynolds Wrap. Using animated cartoons, Freberg introduced Clark Smathers, a misunderstood but determined Kaiser salesman who hopped grocers over the head with a mallet to convince them to order the foil. Freberg inundated merchants with mallets of their own (to hit back with), survival kits filled with band-aids and mercurochrome (to patch pummelings by Smathers), and a medal that read: Don't Hit Me, I'Ve Got It, with clusters for Bravery, Valor and Lumps. When Henry J. Kaiser first viewed the commercial on Maverick, he pulled a Paulucci. "I heard that as the mallet came down on the grocer's head, Kaiser literally leaped from his chair as if someone had hit him over the head," Freberg relates. Kaiser picked up a phone in Hawaii and ordered the agency to pull the campaign off the air. They refused. Though foiled, Henry J. did not have to take the wrap. Freberg's irresistible program had vamped 43,000 new retail outlets in four months.

Early last year Salada Tea, a 103-year-old concern located in Woburn, Massachusetts, discovered its tea-bag sales were soggy, its profits limp. For his normal advance consultant's fee of $5000 ("My motto is Ars Gratia Pecuniae– Art for the Sake of Money; I tell them Freberg thinks much better when he gets the money in front"), they summoned Stan, asked him what was wrong. "What they got for five grand," says Freberg, "was 18 mimeographed pages, a simulated leather cover, and two metal brads." Inside was the plan for the Salada campaign.

"The tea industry is living in a fool's paradise," he told them. "Nobody really thinks about tea the way they think about coffee. Salada has to dig into the coffee market and reach people who have just never considered drinking tea, especially Salada. Before you can get people to think about Salada Tea in a new way you have to first get them to think about tea, period, in a new way. The best thing to do was to kid this old slogan that should be carried off to the Old Slogan Home – 'Take Tea and See.'" Freberg's notion for the initial radio spot was a stentorian announcer in an echo chamber declaring: "Take Tea and See." A second voice asked: "You mean I can throw away my glasses?" Then he planned to come right out and say "coffee" in the second tea commercial. One voice queried: "Would you like to shake the coffee habit?" The second voice answered: "Not particularly, I'm a coffee man myself." Old-line ad men were aghast.

Researching at his office, Freberg sliced open dozens of tea bags, noted that most competitive bags consisted largely of a dusty coloring agent to make the tea quickly turn orange. Salada's bags contained nothing but leaves and took nearly three minutes to steep properly. To kill the three minutes, Freberg prescribed putting reading material on the tags of the tea bags – snappy one-liners, philosophical thoughts, instant fortunes like: "You will meet a tall, dark Internal Revenue man" and "A mysterious envelope will be mailed to you with a little window in it. Pay it" – and informing listeners of this literary coup as the campaign picked up momentum.

Salada executives approved Freberg's analysis, shelled out an additional $50,000, and the crusade was under way. Next step, also told in a one-minute commercial, was to have the American Federation of Gypsies (a Freberg invention) strike the home plant at Woburn, claiming tea-leaf-fortune readers were being thrown out of work by the Salada tags on the bags. Separate full-page advertisements in New York and Boston newspapers and The New Yorker stated the gypsies' position in the strike and management's counterarguments. The gypsies alleged that Salada "eliminated the middle man or woman." Salada averred: "You can't fight progress." The climax was a six-minute musical comedy commercial, Woburn!, studded with Fre-berg-concocted songs like Hooray for the A. F. of G., Pity the Poor Gypsies, and a stirring Hymn to Woburn. By the end of the singing, the dispute was resolved. Salada had hired the unemployed gypsies to affix tags to the bags and assist in fortune writing. A third full-page ad announced the strike settlement and (continued on page 126) Little World of Stan Freberg (continued from page 98) the formation of a Bureau of Gypsy Affairs in Woburn.

So effective was the campaign that The New York Times dispatched a Boston stringer to Woburn inquiring about the strike, the issues, and the gypsies building bonfires on the Salada parking lot, before the hoax was discovered. "The whole purpose of this thing was to get people involved, worrying about the gypsies, worrying about the making of tea," Freberg admits. "Salada has now become an interesting product to think about." Sales statistics indicate buyers are thinking six figures harder than ever before.

Flushed with success, the Salada people recently commissioned Freberg to mount still another frontal assault on their archrival beverage. Offering a Freudian explanation for its unflinching references to the word "coffee," one of the new ads proclaimed, "We go on the theory that if you bring a subject like coffee right out into the open, people will be less curious about it, and eventually lose interest in it. So you'll never catch us referring to the other side as 'Brand X' or 'the expensive brew.' All it can do is get Salada Tea into a lot of hot water. We hope so." Another ad displayed the full-page photo of an apothecary jar (labeled Tea) filled with coffee beans beneath the boldface headline, Announcing The Salada Tea Company's 70th Anniversary Coffee Bean Guessing Bee. Whoever was astute enough to submit the closest estimate to the correct number of beans in the jar would win "a sterling silver tea service, a year's supply of Salada Tea, the apothecary jar and the coffee beans" – for which such uses as "making beanbags" and "running through your fingers" are helpfully suggested. In a small footnote the ad explained, for the interest of those who care about such things, "If you're wondering why coffee beans, just try counting tea leaves sometime."

Such inspired gimmickry has punctuated most Freberg campaigns since he co-authored his first jingle for Contadina Tomato Paste in 1956, Who Puts Eight Great Tomatoes in That Little Bitty Can?, a foot-stomping ditty that triggered such a run on Contadina that the competition was twice forced to slash prices. Charged with advertising Nucoa Margarine to 15,000,000 complacent New Yorkers, Freberg bought 567 radio spots and 57 newspaper ads to introduce Dudley, an obtuse skywriting pilot scheduled to perform high above Manhattan daily at noon. Freberg's charming charade was to make Dudley misspell Nucoa for the first four days, e.g., Noops, Nucow, Nucou, Mother, and finally come through with a flourish on the fifth. Trouble was that New York was socked in with low clouds for the full week of Dudley's doodling and gawkers never saw the message. Freberg later used the same idea effectively for Butter-Nut in L.A. In retrospect, he says, "New York is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to skywrite there."

In other creative outbursts, Freberg has adorned an Army officer's epaulets with stars made of Cheerios (the actor was called General Mills), shepherded 25 live sheep through a Nytol (sleep inducer) segment, recorded a singing dog yowling about paper towels, and scripted milk company melodramas àla Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams and Verdi. The opera aping starred a facsimile Milton Cross translating a vital aria as: "Oh, boy, we have found the skimmed milk of human kindness." Freberg's TV Guide spots cannot have retarded the magazine's newly realized 8,000,000 circulation. And more than any recent sortie, they mirror his disgust with Madison Avenue phrasemaking. "Only TV Guide gives you extra pages, stronger staples," intones one of them. "See that quarterinch recess from the staples to the edge of the listings thing? That's the quarter inch that makes the big difference. TV Guide has it at both ends: got the stories, got the listings. So sit back and smoke, er, read TV Guide. Outstanding, and it's cheap." Freberg relished the TV Guide assignment. "The things I like the best are the ones in which I take the part of the abused listener or viewer at home. I blow the whistle on outrageous claims. I figure I'm enabling millions of people to live vicariously. They have wanted to holler at the set and say: 'Big deal.' They identify with it and they love it."

Because his messages didn't sound like commercials, disc jockeys swiftly identified, too, and began slipping in Freberg spots for free, much to the consternation of local account executives. At stations in Salt Lake City, Boston and Phoenix, half-hour gallimaufries of Freberg favorites were slotted like regular programs. His paean to Butter-Nut coffee, Omaha!, broke into the Top 40 tunes on Los Angeles radio and ultimately a special Capitol Records single was issued to capitalize on the growing ground swell. Citizens of the real Omaha invited Freberg to conduct the 78-piece Omaha Symphony Orchestra in the inspiring sales pitch. He did so, after having his baton arm energized by a Nebraska masseur. In an uncanny manner Freberg commercials were developing as widespread acceptance as his dozens of hit single records achieved in the Fifties.

• • •

Stanley Victor Freberg, 36-year-old son of a Swedish Baptist minister, was a sandy-haired banjoist-harmonica player-rope twirler with Red Fox and His Musical Hounds when he recorded John and Marsha in 1951. A spoof of soap operas, the only dialog consisted of a woman (Freberg) orgasmically wailing "John" and a man (also Freberg) gushing "Marsha" while treacly organ music and dripping violins crescendoed in the background. The record sold 250,000 copies in two weeks, even though it was banned on three radio networks because of "suggestive lyrics." John and Marsha signs replaced Men and Women over countless rest-room doorways and Freberg was on his way.

A year later Stan heard a Johnnie Ray record, figured "the whole damn industry is turning into one big wailing wall," and collaborated with Ruby Raksin (composer of the notable You Can Take My Love and Shove It Up Your Heart) to write the Ray lampoon, Try. Wildly sobbing, gurgling, gulping and wailing, Freberg wept his way through the lyrics: "If you're happy and your eyes are always dry,/Don't you know that it's the style to sob and sigh?/Singers do it, crowds do it, even little white clouds do it./You, too, can be unhappy if you taa-ry!" Capitol Records was swamped by phone calls from outraged Ray rooters.

This response was niggardly compared to the tumult that greeted St. George and the Dragonet and Little Blue Riding Hood, both broad burlesques of the renowned Dragnet television show. Within three weeks 900,000 pressings of the double-barreled hit had been sold.

Soon it became automatic for Freberg to turn out one hit satirical record after another. Some prime examples: Wun-nerful, Wunnerful; C'est Si Bon; The Banana Boat Song; Yellow Rose of Texas; Wide Screen Mama Blues; Rock Around Stephen Foster and Heartbreak Hotel. To tubthump the latter, a needling of Presley, Freberg inundated the press with do-it-yourself sideburn kits in four shades – ash blond, henna, slightly gray and greasy black.

With record royalties clinking in, the comedian agreed to a concert tour of Australia in 1956, commencing three days before the Melbourne Olympics. He arrived Down Under a week in advance to case the local scene "so I could satirize them instead of bringing over Lockheed Aircraft jokes." Freberg heard that a torch-bearing relay of Olympic runners was striding toward Melbourne and decided to make a bodacious entrance into vast Melbourne Stadium by running up the aisle with a blazing Olympic torch. "This is possibly the biggest laugh I ever got in my life," he admits. "After I reached the platform I lit the m.c.'s cigar with my torch (he was fumbling for a match) and got a second laugh. You have never heard a sound like 14,000 Australians in an amphitheater cheering you. It's like a roar of the ocean. It's so invigorating you want to stay up there and entertain them for four solid hours." Freberg didn't stay that long, though he did linger long enough to try his Try routine. "I ripped my shirt to shreds and threw the pieces to the audience," he says. "They fought over them. They even ripped my tie off my neck on the street. I'm a star of great magnitude there, much more so than I will ever be in this country." In those pretelevision times, record-happy Australians enabled Freberg to set box-office marks that surpassed Bob Hope's and Frank Sinatra's. His tour was extended from 8 to 26 days and he played to as many as 39,000 customers daily.

Back in the United States, his luster had not dimmed. Perhaps his most acerbic record, Green Chri$tma$, was released late in 1958 and in short order both the CBS and NBC radio networks banned it, as did scores of independent stations. It was a scathing, bull's-eye attack on the overcommercialization of Christmas that lasted nearly seven minutes and lambasted mercenary advertisers to a turn. At an advertising powwow a cigarette manufacturer reveals his latest wrinkle – Santa Claus with tattoos on both arms, one saying "Merry Christmas," the other "Less Tars." "On the fourth day of Christmas," a chorus harmonizes, "my true love gave to me, four bars of soap, three cans of peas, two breakfast foods, and some toothpaste on a pear tree." A chestnut spiel cries: "Tiny Tims roast hot, like a chestnut ought." The singing of Jingle Bells, accompanied by the jangle of cash register bells, consummates the gibe. Green Chri$tmaf was the record sleeper of the holidays. Freberg accepted a scroll from the Trinity Methodist Church in Los Angeles acknowledging his efforts to put Christ back in Christmas and he turned all the disc proceeds over to the Hemophilia Foundation. Detractors predicted an advertising boycott of Freberg for sponsor-baiting, yet three months later Coca-Cola and Marlboro, both twit victims, tendered him choice contracts.

Subsequently Freberg issued The Old Payola Roll Blues, an indictment of grafting disc jockeys, bird-brained young singers and opportunistic managers. It enjoyed only a mild success, and, surmising the singles record market was being controlled by bird-brained teenagers, Freberg temporarily withdrew from his successful satirical run. The self-exile ended in 1961 with a prodigious album, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America. Freberg had flunked history at Alhambra (California) High School and conceivably his puckish rewrite of the old textbooks served as latter-day retaliation. In Freberg's version of our antecedents a cuckolding Queen Isabella offers Columbus a Fiat agency in West Barcelona as incentive to stay at home, Manhattan is sold to Peter Tish-man for $24 worth of junk jewelry, and Franklin fears retribution from the Un-British Activities Committee before grudgingly signing the Declaration of Independence. Washington's forces freeze by the Delaware as their leader dickers for a §1.20-an-hour boat rental, Betsy Ross tastes the General's displeasure over her stars-and-stripes needlework (he wanted polka dots), and only the combination of a mammoth Norman Rockwell canvas depicting fearsome American troops and some realistic cannon and rifle fire sound-effects records fools the British and saves Washington from making a big decision at Yorktown – "You think I ought to surrender in the blue blazer or the trench coat?"

Fourteen consecutive weeks in the recording studio weie required to execute the 49 minutes of drollery. On the final day, impatient Capitol executives shut down the air conditioning in a last-ditch effort to drive Freberg from the premises. The Freberg penchant for perfection (he wrote, acted in, composed and directed U.S.A.) mushroomed production costs to a record $100,000, all recouped when the recording sold 100,000 at up to five dollars a copy. Three more volumes of Freberg's fanciful history, supplementing the initial 1492-1781 entry, are in diagram form and astute producer David Merrick plans to mount a musical comedy version next season on Broadway. Untitled as yet (Freberg is undecided between David Merrick Presents Stan Freberg Who in Turn Presents the United States of America or Oh Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, Freberg's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad), the adaptation is currently being penned by its creator – characteristically sweating over each semicolon and miming each part himself – in a bungalow behind the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Freberg's penchant to oversee every minuscule detail in his vast salmagundi of projects worries him more than who the next client will be. "I know if I keep it up, I'll have a heart attack by the time I'm 40," he admits. That corner is less than five years away and to insure his reaching it he keeps his personal physician, Dr. Charles Benson, on 24-hour call. For in a self-consuming fashion Stan finds it difficult to reach maximum efficiency unless he is smack up against a deadline. Some of his most notable output has been concocted with only a short time to spare. He penned the intricate inner rhymes to the Salada jingles in less than three hours. "We took the phone off the hook," he says, "because we knew they were going to call. It was off the hook for three hours while I wrote all the lyrics. As soon as we put it back on it started ringing. I picked it up and said: 'Gee, I've been sitting here waiting for you to call. I was just about to leave.' 'We tried,' said the voice on the other end, 'but your line was out of order.' 'No kidding,' I said, 'Jud, did you know the line was out of order? Well, anyhow, you wanna hear this stuff?' It's a terrible dodge, but that's the only way I can work."

Victor Richard Freberg, Stan's father and a twice-a-month evangelist at the Los Angeles County Jail, gifted his son recently with a four-intensity shower head, knowing that Freberg does some of his hardest thinking while soaping up. "I put on the needlesharp when somebody's gonna call me in 10 minutes from New York and they want the whole campaign laid out to them on the phone and I have not one thought in my head," he says. "I go from violently hot to ice cold and then back again. It gets my pores breathing and my brain working." Not long ago, during such an immersion, the long-distance phone pealed with five executives tuned in on a conference call. "Have you got the jingle written yet?" they asked. "Yeah," Freberg fibbed, "I got it right down here in front of me. Let me move to another room where I can talk better on a different connection. I'll call you back." He returned the call in 10 minutes. "During that time I wrote die whole jingle," he confesses. "I didn't have a word on paper." Utilizing the rhyming dictionary he keeps at his bedside, Freberg scribbled an Army recruiting pitch called Modern Army of the U.S.A. that eventually won him plaudits in the House of Representatives for its remarkable pull. "OK," Freberg shouted into the receiver, "we have a better connection now. Is everybody there? Can you hear all right? Yeah, that's great. Well, I've been wrestling with this for some time now and I think I've got it tightened up now to where it works."

Once an idea does work, the peripatetic Freberg wheels into action in various guises – as a business agent negotiating price, as an actor interpreting his own writings, as a director coaching other actors and as a film editor splicing together finished frames. Gradually he has developed into a Hydra-headed one-man band, attributable to his ferocious desire to make everything sound and look unequivocally Freberg. "I have rarely found anyone who could carry the thing out so that the end result would be just like I'd done it myself," he confesses. "I must admit that I've carried this to a ridiculous extreme. If I'm going to survive I have to find people who can help me. So far the greatest burden of this has been on my wife. She is the only person I have enough faith in not to blow it."

Two trenchant personalities, his psychiatrist and his wife of three years, have guided Freberg through his fatiguing flurries of activity. In Donna Jean Freberg, Stan acquired more than merely the keeper of his immense home (friends call it "Stan Simeon"). She has developed into a mainstay of Freberg, Ltd.'s four-man staff, functioning in various degrees as bookkeeper, mother, alter ego, companion, critic, timekeeper and associate producer. Her husband says, "On my TV special that kid was in there when the ship was sinking, calling orders and cracking the whip. There came a point two days from the deadline where she just took over and really wailed; because of her we snapped the thing together. She's able to take a terrific objective viewpoint because she knows me so well and knows what 1 want. She becomes my eyes and ears in the studio when I'm acting or out on the floor."

Dr. Jud Marmor, a psychiatrist with a sizable showbiz clientele, was first consulted in 1959, ostensibly to help Fre-berg determine whether he was suited for marriage and also to explore motivations for Ills kinetic existence. Marmor eventually assured Freberg that he was ready to buckle down to the responsibility of marrying his 27-year-old secretary. His dissection of the Freberg psyche was equally rewarding for the harried humorist. "I wanted to find out why I wished to do so many different things," Freberg says. "Six months and quite a few dollars later the answer was I wanted to do all those different things. It made me realize there was nothing wrong with that except that I just had to face up to it and recognize that I wasn't going to get my due amount of sleep. It was comforting to know there wasn't some terrible hidden manifestation, some spurious drive, that was making me do this because of something negative or uncon-structive. I found that I had a terrific ambition and desire to make myself heard in several areas."

As helpmeet in achieving this calling, Mrs. Freberg also acts as a trusted lieutenant in Stan's latest lucrative business: writing, producing and directing trailers, the trade term for movie-house coming attractions, and radio-TV plugs for films such as Sergeants Three, The Road to Hong Kong and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. For these labors United Artists pays Freberg $30,000 per picture, a fee 10 times greater than they ever shelled out for such labors before. "United Artists has the good sense of wanting to depart from all the hoary techniques used in the last 25 years of advertising motion pictures," Freberg points out. "Words like 'the greatest' ... 'a triumph' . . . 'brought gloriously to the screen' . . . 'sensational' . . . have lost their meaning. Any day now they can go back to 'good' and it will have some meaning because they haven't used it in so long."

Early in 1961, after declining proposals lo publicize The Apartment ("I couldn't explain the moral structure of the picture in a 20-second spot without being in bad taste") and Inherit the Wind ("It look a bigoted approach by implying that Southern Baptists were a lunatic fringe"), he huddled with Frank Sinatra to discuss Sergeants Three, the Clan Western produced by Sinatra's Essex Productions. Freberg watched a screening and says he thought: "Good Heavens, the man has remade Gunga Din as a Western."

"Is that what you did?" he asked Sinatra.

"Yeah," Sinatra answered. "We got the rights to Gunga Din and we did it as a Western."

"Well, that's the whole campaign right there," Freberg said. "The first guy says: 'I hear that Frank Sinatra remade Gunga Din as a Western,' and the second guy says: 'I can't accept that.'"

Sinatra nearly fell off his chair, Freberg swears, and told him the idea was great. A week later, at a meeting with United Artists and Essex executives, Freberg had a rougher time selling his conception. "Generally they were a little nervous about such an approach, this honest admitting of what they'd done," Freberg relates. "There was one guy from U.A. who kept saying it would never work, that it was negative advertising, that it was terrible. Frank finally had the last word. 'That's it,' lie said. 'I want to do it.'"

Freberg went ahead and devised a stopper of a campaign that had its greatest impact on television. In the opening blast, Freberg conducts man-on-the-street interviews with passersby, informing them that Sinatra has remade Gunga Din as a Western. "I'm sorry, I can't accept that," say the first two before the microphone. He poses the same intelligence to a crowd of people crossing a street corner. "We can't accept that," they shout in unison. Still clutching his mike, Freberg saunters over to Dean Martin and Sinatra, clad in Civil War uniforms and casually leaning against a rail.

Freberg (to Martin): They can't accept it.

Martin (to Sinatra): They can't accept it.

Sinatra (dispassionately): Yeah, well.

Camera cuts to logo of film's title, "Sergeants Three."

Announcer: Try and see it. Try and enjoy it. Try and accept it.

Not everything Freberg's magic hand touches clears a quick profit. His passionately uninhibited television special last year, The Chun King Chow Mein Hour, typically took too long to produce, resulting in a noticeable deficit in the Freberg treasury. All overtime costs came out of his own pocket and they were monumental. Extensive retakes necessitated three days (34 hours) in the studio and when he finally reduced the 107 hours he had on tape to the hour-long air version, he found his SI25,000 budget as tattered as the leftover scraps of scripts and ribbons of wasted footage. One scene, a precision dance routine requiring four taxi doors to slam on beats of music, took 22 takes to perfect, a mark, previously endemic only to Marlon Brando movies. The printable sequence came at 4 A.M. The last day of shooting, which began at 9 in the morning, ground to a halt at 6:30 the following morning with Freberg surviving on Deximil.

The special in the can, Freberg spent the succeeding two days recording Wo-burn! and then, near complete exhaustion, headed for a bed at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. "All of a sudden, I started to flip," he says. "A plane went over one night and the whole house shook and the vibrations . . . well, I just had a terrible crying jag." But even in the Cedars the garrulous Freberg was hard put to relax. "Everybody in the hospital, all the nurses, kept poking their heads in," he recalls. "So I finally put in a television set so they'd think I was busy, and that's where I made my mistake. I never get much of a chance to watch television. I had been living in this dream that advertising was really getting better, that it was more artistic, that nobody hollered at you anymore or insulted you. I was shocked to see the greatest parade of mediocrity that one can imagine going across that set. I kept thinking that any minute I'd see one of those bright commercials that win awards. Nothing was even passable. It so depressed me that I really began to think about getting out of the business."

Though this prospect appears remote, the Spanish stucco house on Beverly Drive looms more and more as Fre-berg's ivory tower. "When I'm behind those walls I'm living in my own little villa, like I'm on an island in the midst of this community that really is pretty ridiculous," he says. "I'm at a good vantage point to observe. Freberg is a guy who comes out for brief flurries and disappears into the woodwork, anyhow. I really enjoy disappearing. I like having a special audience. I never wanted the mass audience and I never will. Six or seven years ago I thought it was an important thing to be known as a comedian. As time goes on I realize the thing I want to be recognized for is my point of view, as opposed to me as a person. My point of view, I hope, is mostly Frebergian. It is satirical, sharp and incisive. It is the classic viewpoint of the serious, working satirist who would like to pinprick pomposity, sham and frippery. Like Oscar Levant used to say: 'Strip away all the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.'"

At Chez Freberg, with its carved rosewood 1887 Steinway and cherub-encrusted antique mirror (he has tagged the three cupids Patti, Maxine and La-Verne), he ultimately plans to retrench the business that grossed S500.000 last year, and retreat from the dazzling tinsel. "I'm trying to fight my way back out of advertising with a machete," he explains. "For a man who wants to make his living as a humorist and a satirist, I've spent too much time doing commercials. If I wanted to be just an advertising man then I would have turned into a factory long ago. I worry that I have deserted the cause. Maybe now's the time to ride off into the sunset."

At sunset, in his beamed-ceiling catbird seat, the curtailed Freberg could contemplate the pleasant prospect of his upcoming assignment as consultant to designer Charles Fames on the IBM exhibit for the 1964 New York World's Fair. Or he could amuse himself rereading the two dozen volumes of Tom Swift and the stacks of Benchley, Thurber, Perel-man, Buchwald and Shulman that stuff his bookshelves. Or he might write a daily newspaper column (he has already submitted samples to six syndicates) on pet projects ranging from a plan for a Beverly Hills Birch Watchers Society to the Freberg solution to the Cold War – delivering Khrushchev to Disneyland.

But considering Freberg's proclivity for applying the needle, it is unlikely that real retrenchment could last for long. That fact was made perfectly clear last summer, smack in the middle of his first prolonged vacation in two years. No sooner had he climbed into his swim-suit than the jangling of the telephone jarred his Malibu beachhead. The American Broadcasting Company was threatening to yank his latest chow mein campaign off the network. The reason: his one-minute pitches were deft parodies of existing commercials of such free-spending sponsors as Anacin, Buf-ferin, Clairol, Dash and Winston. "Nine out of ten doctors recommend Chun King," one message said. The nine doctors shown were Chinese, the tenth Caucasian. "Does she or doesn't she use Chun King?" went another. "Only her grocer knows for sure." Clairol's ad agency protested that the "for sure" part of their provocative slogan was being violated. Freberg's excitable client, Jeno Paulucci, turned livid, abandoned his rickshaw and raced to New York. After three days of haggling among network, sponsor, ad agency and Chun King representatives, Paulucci clearly had used his noodle. He argued that a commercial could not be trademarked, offered to let the courts decide how valid his thinking was. Though a minor change in the Clairol broadside was yielded (it became "Could it or couldn't it be Chun King, dazzling, easy to manage Chun King?"), all the other spiels were aired as originally filmed. And as he dispassionately dipped his big toe into the Malibu surf, Freberg had a parting blast for the nervous New York nabobs. "I thought the chicken was supposed to be in the chow mein," he said, "not in the network."