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After one disastrous attempt at a TV special in 1968—taped but never shown—Flip and his manager, Monte Kay, found the successful formula for his famous NBC special in 1969, which introduced Geraldine as an airline stewardess in a sketch with Jonathan Winters' gray-haired Maude Frickert. The network offered him his own show the next year, and he was off and away. When you're hot, you really are hot. His net income is well upward of $1,000,000 a year. This comes mainly from earnings from his show and royalties from his four comedy LPs (one of them a gold disk), which are put out by a company of which he is an owner. He no longer plays nightclubs.
Flip is as dedicated to consolidating and preserving his success as he was to attaining it. He thinks about little else but his show. During the 26 weeks of the year when it is being taped, he is very nearly a monk. He has not been to a movie for 21 months, is almost never seen at parties or restaurants, and has very few friends in Hollywood. On taping days, he lives on little more than milk and honey, or the turkey noodle soup that he carries in a flask everywhere he goes—his life is awash in turkey noodle soup. "I mustn't eat a full meal before taping because I'll be sluggish," he says, "and it'll throw my timing off."
Fanatical about his privacy, he often disappears for weekends without telling his closest associates where he is going, and during the half-year that he is free he sometimes disappears for a whole week. He hires a plane to take him to Las Vegas or Denver, or, with his valet and righthand man George Whittington in the seat beside him, heads out of the driveway in his new ice-blue Rolls-Royce. The license plate? KILLER.
With its stereo, Dunhill pipe rack and mobile telephone, the Rolls is almost a house on wheels. Which is not too strange, really, because the road is Flip's only real home. "Quite often I feel the tension, and I'll go driving into the desert," he says. On such occasions he keeps a note pad handy to jot down his thoughts. "I don't go to create, I go to relax," he explains. "But I've never gone and not come back with something—a couple of stories, a handful of one-liners."
Nobody, not even the omnipresent George, seems to know what thoughts Flip may have that he does not write down. "He doesn't give much," says Herbert Baker, chief writer on the show. "There's a wall. Inside the wall is a moat. And then the fortress begins." Few members of his show's staff have ever seen the inside of his home, a two-bedroom colonial that he rents in the Hollywood Hills. His awards—which include two Emmys—are placed in front of his bed. facing a brass statue of a clown, a gift from his friend Redd Foxx.