Canadian comedy writer Allan Blye became a variety mainstay on American networks, writing and producing series such as The Andy Williams Show, The Redd Foxx Comedy Hour and the sitcom That’s My Mama.BLYE FAMILY/The New York Times News Service
When it comes to the early breaks that advanced his show business career, the television writer-producer Allan Blye owed much to Elvis Presley and the Smothers Brothers but also to Henrietta Pussycat and King Friday XIII.
In the early 1960s, at the old CBC building on Sumach Street in Toronto, Mr. Blye was a young singer-actor headed to rehearsals for the variety show Parade when he happened upon a man in another studio alone with two hand puppets.
Mr. Blye stopped in and struck up a conversation – not with the puppeteer, but with the characters Henrietta Pussycat and King Friday XIII. Mr. Blye left to attend to his rehearsal, after which he found the puppeteer waiting in the hall to offer him a job.
The puppeteer was Fred Rogers; the CBC children’s show was Misterogers, the original incarnation of the beloved PBS program that came to be Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood. For some 300 shows, Mr. Blye was the live character Captain Blye in the fictional kingdom Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
“It was a wonderful memory, something close to my heart,” Mr. Blye reminisced in an interview with the U.S.-based Television Academy in 2019.
Originally from Winnipeg's north end, Mr. Blye was recruited to move to California in 1966 by Tom Smothers, of the Smothers Brothers, who was impressed with Mr. Blye’s writing with the CBC.BLYE FAMILY/The New York Times News Service
Mr. Blye died on Oct. 4, at the age of 87, at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He had been in hospice care for Parkinson’s disease.
The Winnipeg North End native would leave both Canada and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe for a Hollywood career as an Emmy-winning comedy writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967-69), a ground-breaking weekly program on CBS that commented on the Vietnam War, embraced rock music and satirized politicians. That some viewers were sometimes offended wasn’t a problem for Mr. Blye at all.
“I was encouraged that I could move someone to react so hostile toward what we were doing,” he said later.
Promoted to co-producer of the show, Mr. Blye brought in fellow Winnipegger David Steinberg and worked with young writers such as Bob Einstein, Rob Reiner and future superstar Steve Martin. On the social-media network Threads, Mr. Martin paid tribute to Mr. Blye as his “earliest mentor” and “comic delight.”
Mr. Blye became a comedy-variety mainstay on American networks, writing and producing series such as The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, The Andy Williams Show, The Redd Foxx Comedy Hour and the sitcom That’s My Mama.
Working again in Canada in the 1980s, Mr. Blye collaborated with Mr. Einstein on the sketch comedy program Bizarre and its spinoff Super Dave, with Mr. Einstein playing the arrogant but hapless titular daredevil.
He co-wrote several network specials, including Elvis, now known as the ‘68 Comeback Special, a show that re-established the pop icon’s cool. It was Mr. Blye’s idea to open the broadcast with Mr. Presley cast against a stylish backdrop of dozens of silhouetted Elvis imitators. “Allan became so successful, I could never work with him again!” said the show’s director and co-producer, Steve Binder.
He had been recruited to California in 1966 by Tom Smothers, who was impressed with Mr. Blye’s writing with the CBC. While in Toronto performing at the Canadian National Exhibition with his comedy partner and brother, Dick, Mr. Smothers called Mr. Blye out of the blue to ask him to join the writing team of a new variety show on CBS hosted by the two brothers.
At first, Mr. Blye suspected the phone call was phony. “I thought it was Rich Little doing an impression of Tom Smothers,” he said in 2019.
Arriving in Los Angeles as an unknown, Mr. Blye jumped into The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour writing room undaunted. “I knew no fear,” he recalled. One of his first-season sketches had Jack Benny, George Burns and the Smothers Brothers butchering the song Winchester Cathedral.
“Music was the magic sauce for Allan,” said Garry Blye, who followed his older brother to Los Angeles and became a talent manager and producer. “The theme of his career was music and comedy, and how to make them work together.”
During a taping of a Petula Clark special in 1968, the Downtown star joined arms with Harry Belafonte while they sang a duet of the anti-war song On the Path of Glory. A white woman touching a Black man was controversial at the time. Someone in the control room wanted to know whose idea it was.
It was Mr. Blye’s.
“It was not acceptable to the sponsor,” he recalled, referring to the Chrysler Corporation. Over the car company’s objection, the segment aired unedited on April 8, four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The ratings and critical acclaim were high.
In addition to collaborating with Mr. Einstein, Mr. Blye had writing partnerships with Mason Williams (best known for his 1968 instrumental hit Classical Gas) and the English-Australian funny man Chris Bearde.
“Chris came up with terrific ideas, but Allan was the real writer,” said Mr. Binder, who hired the duo for the Elvis comeback special.
Mr. Blye became friends with Mr. Presley, who under the Svengali-like grip of his manager Colonel Tom Parker had been reduced to a caricature of himself. (When Mr. Blye and Mr. Bearde were introduced to Mr. Parker, Mr. Bearde did not endear himself by saying, “Colonel, I’m very pleased to meet you. I love your chicken.”)
The show’s creative team pushed one of the world’s most famous performers beyond his professional and personal comfort zones. One day, Mr. Blye suggested Mr. Presley needed time apart from his ever-present “Memphis Mafia” posse. The singer was not receptive.
That evening, however, Mr. Blye’s doorbell rang at his Encino, Calif., home. It was Mr. Presley, who had driven there on his motorcycle. He stayed for hours, drinking Scotch and singing and playing a beginners guitar usually strummed by Mr. Blye’s six-year-old son.
At two o’clock in the morning, Mr. Blye phoned Joe Esposito, Mr. Presley’s road manager and friend. He and his crew arrived in a flatbed truck to retrieve the Return to Sender singer and the motorcycle.
“He had a good heart in him,” Mr. Blye said of Elvis. Years later, Mr. Presley called Mr. Blye to wish him a happy 40th birthday. He died less than a month later.
In his career retrospective interview with the Television Academy, Mr. Blye mentioned Mr. Presley and the Beatles’ George Harrison, who appeared on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968.
“I was so lucky to work with some of the best people in the world,” he said. “A kid from Winnipeg, from an Orthodox Jewish family – it’s beyond me.”
Alvin Blye was born in Winnipeg on July 19, 1937. (He was given the name “Allan” years later in Toronto by TV director-producer Stan Harris, who didn’t think “Alvin” would cut it in show business.) He was the second of three sons born to Goldie Blye (née Portnoy) from Russia, and David Blye, a Romanian immigrant who worked in his wife’s family’s dry-cleaning business, Perth’s Cleaners.
Mr. Blye sits next to Cher. After working for the Smothers Brothers, he went on to write for and produce The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour.BLYE FAMILY/The New York Times News Service
According to the youngest son, Garry, their father was a natural raconteur: “He could tell you the same story five times in a month and it was like you never heard it before. That’s where we all got our sense of humour.”
The oldest son, Sydney, was a prodigy who sang and recited prayers in synagogues across Canada. “When I was born in 1937, music filled our home and it was natural for me to follow in his footsteps,” Allan Blye wrote in a short autobiographical essay.
In order to communicate with his grandmother, he learned Yiddish. As a kid, he sang Yiddish songs on the Winnipeg radio station CKSB. As a 15-year-old singer-actor he was a regular on bandleader Paul Grosney’s show on the city’s CKRC. “I was getting $10 a show,” he said in 2019. He also played the violin.
He studied architecture at the University of Manitoba while participating in the annual student performance, Varsity Varieties, directed by future media magnate Izzy Asper.
“He really had a dream of becoming an architect,” said his brother Garry. “I had an architectural drawing of his dream house up on my wall for years. When he settled in California, the house he bought was basically that dream house he had previously imagined. He had forgotten about it, though.”
Mr. Blye married Shirley Brotman in Winnipeg in 1958. They had three children, Debbie (born in 1960), Jeff (1962) and Rob (1963). They divorced in the mid-1980s.
In Toronto in the early 1960s, the Manitoban thrived within the CBC Television variety-show ecosystem, culminating in the head-writer position on Juliette, a vehicle for singer Juliette Cavazzi which aired live on Saturdays after Hockey Night in Canada and a national newscast.
Before he left for the United States, he co-wrote a song for the International Song Festival in Rio de Janeiro. After vocalist Shirley Harmer took sick prior to the event, Mr. Blye stepped in. The composition came in third, but an audience of more than 30,000 people gave Mr. Blye a one-minute standing ovation.
It was the highest moment in Mr. Blye’s professional singing career, and it would more or less be his last. “Allan told me years later that as a pop singer he knew he’d never get an audience like that again,” Garry said.
In 1977, Mr. Blye won his second Emmy, with Mr. Einstein, for best writing in a variety comedy television series for Van Dyke and Company.
In Toronto, Mr. Blye and Mr. Einstein produced Bizarre, hosted by John Byner. It aired from 1980 to 1986 in Canada on CTV and in the United States on Showtime. It was not originally intended for Mr. Einstein to portray the Evel Knievel knockoff, Super Dave Osborne.
“We wrote it as a sketch, then started auditioning people for the part,” Mr. Blye told The New York Times in 1995. “On the second or third day, I turned to Bob and said, ‘I don’t know anyone who could do this better than you.’”
The spinoff Super Dave ran from 1987 to 1991 on Showtime in the United States and the Global Television Network in Canada.
During this period, Mr. Blye married the Californian Rita Rogers, a television director. They had three children: Kate (born in 1991) and twins Hannah and Sam (1995).
He hosted the 75th anniversary dinner for St. John’s Technical High School, in Winnipeg’s North End. For the occasion, he wrote, sang and recorded the song Winnipeg My Home. In addition to Mr. Blye, the school’s alumni include Burton Cummings, Monty Hall and Mr. Steinberg.
He became a cantor in his 20s and continued to be one at synagogues in Toronto and Los Angeles. Despite the Emmys and a career of Hollywood laughs and razzle dazzle, he considered the cantorial role to be his greatest achievement.
“I was very grateful for a chance to do that,” he said in 2019. “It inspires the faith in me. I didn’t realize I had so much faith.”
He leaves his wife, Rita Blye; brother, Garry Blye; children, Debra, Jeffrey, Rob, Kate, Charlie and Sam; and three grandchildren.
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