IT SEEMED LIKE A BAD IDEA AT THE TIME

Veteran scriptwriter and comic Vilanch delivers a rueful memoir of life in the trenches.

“Nothing ever happens if you don’t say yes, even if…it seems like a bad idea at the time,” writes Vilanch at the end of a meandering catalog of onscreen disasters, some so improbable that it’s amazing they made it past the cutting-room floor. Take a sitcom with Charo, the cuchi-cuchi Spanish “force of nature” who played a mean flamenco guitar (taught to her by none other than Andrés Segovia) and who put her brilliance under a bushel: “The biggest thing about Charo is her brain, topped only by her good nature,” Vilanch confides. Even so, someone cooked up the notion that she should be married to a Marine sergeant and create bilingual/bicultural havoc at every turn. It didn’t fly, but the writers did cook up a variety show for Charo that, though a ratings hit, was a one-off. Other flops pepper his pages, most of them in the variety vein, and not all of them his fault: He reckons that the film version of Mommie Dearest “holds pride of place in the bad idea hall of fame.” Still, Vilanch owns up to many stinkers of his own (he promises a follow-up volume on the good ideas). There’s nice dish along the way on the likes of Paul Lynde (“effeminate, bitchy, slightly mincy, he was more like the guncle no one talked about”), Betty White (“as sexually charged a personality as you’ve ever seen”), and his own ’70s-era cohort of TV folks before and behind the camera (“Everybody, or almost everybody of a certain generation—Osmonds excepted—was somewhat baked some of the time.”). His central question remains, too: “Why was there a Star Wars holiday special, you might ask.”

A well-written treat for fans of show-biz gossip.