Once you get the kids raised and the mortgage paid off and accomplish what you wanted to do in life, there’s a great feeling of: ‘Hey, I’m free as a bird.’
When I auditioned for ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ on Broadway, Gower Champion said, ‘You’ve got the job!’ I said, ‘Mr. Champion, I can’t dance.’ He said, ‘We’ll teach you what you need to know.’
I have four kids, seven grandkids, and four great-grandkids. Maybe I can become a great-great-grandfather if I hang on!
When I started having kids, I thought, ‘I don’t want to do anything they can’t watch.’
My wife, as proud as she was of me, hated show business for good reasons. There was something about the spouse always being pushed out of the way, shoved aside. She wanted to get away from it.
Everybody knows that I’m shorter, but it doesn’t bother me at all.
My favorite unknown movie is ‘The Comic.’
I’m really in retirement. My career is over. I’m just playing now and having a great time. I like to keep busy, and I’m doing what’s fun for me.
I turned down some movies that were quite good. mainly on the basis of taste.
I sing all day. And it’s good for you. Good for your vocal cords.
I never had a lot of drive, but because I had family responsibilities, I had a lot of tenacity – the tenacity of a drowning man.
But once we got on the air, everybody except Morey Amsterdam pretty much stuck to the script.
But I wish they would make a musical of some kind. I miss musicals so much. You don’t see them anymore.
There are tribes all over the world who sing and dance every day as part of their lives. And we oughta do that.
Bob Hope, like Mark Twain, had a sense of humor that was uniquely American, and like Twain, we’ll likely not see another like him.
I don’t play golf. I have more fun singing and dancing.
I found out retirement means playing golf, or I don’t know what the hell it means. But to me, retirement means doing what you have fun doing.
Everything’s getting homogenized. It seems to me like music and behavior and everything else is getting homogenized.
A lot of violence, a lot of gore in it, and I just didn’t want to do that kind of thing.
I get little kids who recognize me from ‘Mary Poppins,’ and it just delights me because it’s our third generation.