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hearse!” Phyllis once said, then erupted into laughter.
    My first trip with her would be to Philadelphia. While Maria talked to the travel agent, I called the limo company in L.A. and asked what time they should pick us up to get to the airport on time.
    Phyllis had come up to the office for some reason—something she almost never did.
    “No! You don’t ask them. You tell them when to be here.”
    I was flummoxed because I had no idea how long it would take to drive from Phyllis’s house to the airport. This was her regular limo company, so I figured they would know. Thank goodness the dispatcher on the other end of the line heard Phyllis’s voice and quietly said to me, “Eight A.M. You need to leave the house at eight.”
    “We need to leave the house at eight in the morning. Have the limo here at seven forty-five,” I said, repeating it back to her.
    Phyllis nodded approvingly as she left the room. Maria looked across the desk at me with an encouraging smile. Maria adored Phyllis but also knew that occasionally, very seldom but once in a long while, Phyllis actually could be wrong.
    In spite of that aberration when she expected me to tell someone something I couldn’t have known, it was obvious that Phyllis had a sharp mind, a good business sense, and a phenomenal memory. Sometimes on the road a person would come up to her and say, “Do you remember me?” She would look at him for a moment, then say, “Magic Circle Theater, Sacramento. You were the sound man.”
    On days when she was home, she often met friends for lunch. Phyllis had many friends; she went out to lunch a lot.
     

6
     
    T he first week Phyllis was back, she had a television taping at ABC. Karen drove the Rolls Royce, and we were barely out of the driveway when Phyllis handed me a contract. She pointed to her signature.
    “I want you to learn to write my name,” she said. “I don’t have time to sign everything. I want you to do it for me.”
    “Contracts?” I asked.
    “Everything.”
    I got busy tracing her name, then opened my shorthand notebook to a clean page and started writing “Phyllis Diller.” By the time we got to the studio, I had two pages full. I showed my forgeries to Phyllis.
    “Not bad,” she said, “but the h doesn’t have a loop and there’s no tail on the s . Make the l ’s a little closer together.”
    The guard waved us through and Karen let us off at the back entrance. We hurried through hallways with Phyllis occasionally waving to someone. I was amazed that someone four inches shorter than I could walk so much faster. A quick scurry was her usual pace. Fortunately, Phyllis knew where she was going and in a few minutes we were in her dressing room. I thought I had a good sense of direction, but I was totally turned around. Karen had obviously done this before, since she turned up a few minutes later.
    While Karen arranged the costumes and Phyllis got ready for makeup, I realized there was nothing for me to do there.
    “Why don’t you go out front and watch?” Phyllis said.
    I slipped out onto the set. The mélange of cameras and lights, “grips” (the stagehands who moved the equipment), electricians, script girls, directors, and “gofers” fascinated me. I couldn’t imagine anything coherent emerging from that mayhem.
    The sets were merely “flats,” a wall with a door or a window in it, propped up in back. Two or three of these made up a room, which was open on the fourth side for the camera. Overhead, the lights and microphones dangled out of the camera’s view. I found a place to sit out of everybody’s way and watched as the mayhem gradually resolved itself into order. Taping Phyllis’s segment took most of the day. At lunch there was a huge buffet of cold cuts and fruit. Karen and I sat at a table with Louis Jordan and George Maharis, whom I’d had a crush on since the first time I saw him on Route 66 . We had a pleasant and casual chat as if we were really friends.
    Wow, I thought, this