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Back in Los Angeles, he entered acting school, where he met and married Phyllis Mathis, a runner-up in the 1945 Miss America contest. Meanwhile, he drifted into the used-car business, eventually opened a foreign-car lot with a friend. He recalls: "I had a sizable bank account, a nice four-bedroom-and-den in Van Nuys . . . but I was restless." Hankering for show business, he sold his interest in the agency in 1952 and, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, went to meet a displaced comedian who was interested in working up a nightclub act. The confrontation plays like a bit from Laugh-In:
(Rowan enters Herbert's cocktail lounge in Studio City, Calif., sees the bartender who is eating a banana )
Rowan: "What's with the banana?"
Bartender: "You ever eat here?"
Rowan: "No."
Bartender: "Well, if you'd ever eaten here, you'd know what's with the banana."
The bartender, naturally, was Dick Martin. He had come to Los Angeles in 1943 from Battle Creek, Mich., deserting a job on a Ford assembly line "with the lunch box, sandwiches, apple, cupcakes and all that." At 22, while working nights as a bartender, he began moonlighting as a writer for a popular radio show called Duffy's Tavern.
In 1946, shortly after seeing Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in a nightclub, he met an out-of-work actor named Artie Lewis. "Hey!" cried Martin, "let's get up an act. We're the real Martin and Lewis. We'll use our own names. Let those other guys use their real names and bill themselves as Crocetti and Levitch." Sure enough, they persuaded a theater manager to rig his marquee thus:
Dick MARTIN & Artie LEWIS
The "real" Martin and Lewis worked for three weeks before they were heckled out of their partnership. (Lewis is currently working as a bit actor in TV and movies.) Martin tried again, this time with a young comedienne named Betty Miller. They portrayed Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks, leaping around the stage with swords and shouting "Aha!" This unpromising career gave out in less than a year, Betty got married and Martin went back to real-life work, tossing drinks and eating bananas at Herbert's.
Nine days after they met at Herbert's, Rowan and Martin, in rented tuxedos, were on the stage of a Los Angeles nightspot. They got a few laughs but no pay. Gradually, playing lead-in for strippers like Narda and Her Doves and Dreamy Darnell, they worked up from one-meal-and-two-drinks jobs to $450-a-week dates. "We were raw," recalls Martin, "but we looked good together and we were funny." As they moved on to better clubs, headline comics such as Milton Berle took a liking to the young team and opened their joke files to them. By the early 1960s, they were headlining the mink-lined caves of Miami and Las Vegas.
In 1965, NBC signed the team to host Dean Martin's summer replacement show, and their success brought several offers from the networks to star in a situation comedy. But Rowan and Martin were determined to fashion their own show, based on their vague notions of a "cartoon humor approach." At length, they talked with George Schlatter, who was an independent producer at the time. Schlatter, foaming enthusiastically with