In the decades after they made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” on Feb. 9, 1964, the comedy team of Mitzi McCall and her husband, Charlie Brill, had a successful career. They performed in nightclubs and on television; both individually and together, they acted on television, in films and onstage.
But that single appearance remained an indelible memory for the couple: It was also the night the Beatles made their American TV debut, and that was all that the screaming young fans in the audience cared about. The couple’s nearly three-and-a-half minutes in the national spotlight came moments before the Beatles returned for their second set. McCall & Brill bombed — in front of 73 million viewers.
“We just about wanted to kill ourselves,” Ms. McCall told The Washington Post in 2004.
“I think it’s hysterical,” Mr. Brill said in a phone interview. “We laid the biggest egg of all time.”
Ms. McCall died on Aug. 8 in a hospital in Burbank, Calif. She was 93. Her death was confirmed by Mr. Brill.
When their manager, Mace Neufeld, told Ms. McCall and Mr. Brill that they were going to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — a Sunday night staple that at the time was often a steppingstone to stardom — it seemed like the type of break a young act needed. And when Mr. Neufeld told them that they would be on the bill with the Beatles, Ms. McCall later recalled, “We weren’t really sure who they were.”
When they rehearsed the sketch that they had honed for a year — “It was beautiful,” Mr. Brill said — Mr. Sullivan rejected it as too sophisticated for an audience that consisted mostly of teenage girls (who knew exactly who the Beatles were). Instead, he had them run through their entire nightclub act and plucked parts that he thought would be suitable, creating an awkward jumble.
While they were rewriting their sketch, a young man with long hair and glasses popped into their dressing room and borrowed a dime to buy a Coke from the vending machine. He hung around and sketched the couple with a pen on a napkin.
“All we thought about was, I wish this kid would go so we can work on our act,” Ms. McCall said in a 2015 episode of the public radio program “This American Life,” recalling their encounter with John Lennon. “Get out of here.”
After the Beatles’ first set, the mix of entertainers was as varied as it always was on the Sullivan show: Fred Kaps, a Dutch magician; the cast of the Broadway musical “Oliver!” (which included a then-unknown Davy Jones, soon to be a member of the Monkees); the impressionist Frank Gorshin; the music-hall singer and actress Tessie O’Shea; and, finally, McCall & Brill.
By then, the audience had been waiting a half-hour for the Beatles to return.
In their sketch, Mr. Brill played a producer casting a young actress for a new movie. Ms. McCall played his secretary and three other roles: a nervous former Miss Palm Springs, a pushy stage mother and a Method actor. The sketch fell with a thud, except for some chuckles when Ms. McCall tossed in an ad lib as the stage mother.
“My little girl was waiting outside, you know,” she said. “She used to be one of the Beatles.”
“Oh, what happened?” Mr. Brill asked.
“Somebody stepped on her.”
When Mr. Sullivan didn’t call them over after their performance to congratulate them, they knew they had failed, swallowed up in early Beatlemania. After a commercial for Pillsbury cake mix, the Beatles returned.
Ms. McCall and Mr. Brill went to Miami to visit Mr. Brill’s grandparents rather than return home to Los Angeles.
Their agent did not call them for six months. But their career eventually recovered.
Mitzi Joan Steiner was born on Sept. 9, 1930, in Pittsburgh. Her father, Emil, was a top manager at a convertible sofa store, and her mother, Gizella (Klein) Steiner, ran the household.
Mitzi started acting at a young age and had roles at the Pittsburgh Playhouse starting in the late 1940s. In the early ’50s, she hosted a television show, “Kiddie Castle,” on which she lip-synced to records by singers like Ethel Merman and Carol Channing.
“She stands, if you can call it that, four feet eleven inches, and loves kids because ‘nobody understood me as a kid,’” Win Fanning, the radio and TV editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, wrote in 1952.
In 1953 she moved with her first husband, Jack Tolen, a television director, to San Diego, where she was featured on a television variety show, “Studio 10.” She soon found a Hollywood agent — with help from a friend of her mother’s, Dolores Hope, Bob’s wife — and signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. Her first role was a teenager in Norman Taurog’s “You’re Never Too Young” (1955), which starred Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
By then, she had given herself a new surname, inspired by reading McCall’s magazine.
After several other films, she joined a comedy workshop Mr. Lewis ran, where she met Mr. Brill. She formed a comedy act with Joan Shawlee (who had portrayed the bandleader Sweet Sue in “Some Like It Hot”) before teaming up with Mr. Brill. They married in 1960.
“Mitzi did some bits and exercises,” Mr. Brill said, recalling his early impressions of her. “She was so funny and so adorable. The cutest in the world.”
They performed their act — which Mr. Brill said was influenced by the comedy of Mike Nichols and Elaine May — until the mid-1980s, opening for Ann-Margret, Ella Fitzgerald and Marlene Dietrich. They had a recurring role as the bickering “Fun Couple” on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In”; appeared on many variety and talk shows, and on game shows like “Tattletales”; and portrayed a detective and his fun-loving wife on the crime drama “Silk Stalkings” in the 1990s.
In addition to her husband, Ms. McCall is survived by their daughter, Jenny Brill.
On her own, Ms. McCall was seen on numerous sitcoms, including “Maude,” “Roseanne” and “Ellen,” and wrote episodes of “One Day at a Time” and “ALF.”
She also played a small but pivotal role in a 1994 episode of “Seinfeld,” as a dry cleaner’s wife with loose ethics who secretly borrows Jerry’s mother’s fur coat from storage. As Jerry confronts her behind the door of a dressing room at a department store, the camera shows only their scuffling feet. When the door opens, she looks indignant and he is carrying the coat.
She then sees Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a customer of the dry cleaner’s. Elaine asks her if she can clean the salt stain on the expensive dress she had worn outside to find a more accurate mirror than the “skinny” one at the store.
“Piece of cake,” Ms. McCall says confidently. “Bring it in.” Then, eyeing the dress as if envisioning it for her use, she asks, “What size is it?”
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