When I was a kid growing up in the ’70s, some of my very favourite TV programs were daytime game shows. As a result, I regarded Paul Lynde (centre square on The Hollywood Squares) and Charles Nelson Reilly (the top-right chair on The Match Game) as the two funniest men in the world—well, second only to Bugs Bunny. I was maybe eight years old, so the fact that Lynde and Reilly were gayer than Liberace’s living room zoomed right over my head. They just had a funny essence to them that went beyond their exaggerated voices. I liked their willingness to be silly, but you could tell they had very sharp minds and weren’t just clowns. They seemed endlessly amused by the world around them, and to me they also always seemed like they were getting away with some kind of secret joke that, judging by the scandalized reactions on those Match Game contestants’ faces practically every time Reilly opened his mouth, was probably really naughty. They made me laugh even if I was too young to understand their jokes. I felt like I was hearing something I wasn’t supposed to.
It turns out I was righter than I knew. At one point in The Life of Reilly—a filmed performance of Charles Nelson Reilly’s autobiographical one-man stage show Save It for the Stage—Reilly recalls a meeting early in his career with a powerful executive at NBC. This would be in the late ’50s, and while Reilly had done a lot of theatre, he had yet to break into television. According to Reilly, the executive took one look at him and said, “We don’t let queers on television.”
That executive, whoever he was, could not have been more wrong: if you watched TV at all in the ’70s, Reilly’s bespectacled face would have been pretty hard to avoid. He was a regular on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and kids’ shows like Lidsville, a guest star on countless sitcoms, a game show mainstay and, after Bob Hope, Johnny Carson’s most frequent all-time guest on The Tonight Show. In The Life of Reilly, he describes his habit of looking through the TV Guide and counting how many times he’d be on that week—sometimes the total would get as high as 56.
There are plenty of funny showbiz anecdotes in The Life of Reilly, but at its heart are Reilly’s heartbreaking stories about growing up amidst a profoundly dysfunctional family, which included his depressed, alcoholic father (an illustrator who never got over his failure to accept a job offer from Walt Disney), his lobotomized aunt, and a mother who seemed determined to crush the dreams of everyone around her.
Except for a couple of references to adults in the neighbourhood calling him “odd” (or worse), Reilly doesn’t talk much about what it was like to be gay in this environment, and yet his story is suffused with the sense of how important it was for this lonely little outsider to be able to escape into a world of make-believe, whether that meant putting on puppet shows, going to the movies, or getting cast as Christopher Columbus in the school play.
And Reilly, who was 73 when the film was shot, is absolutely wondrous in what would turn out to be his final stage appearance before his death in May of last year: so funny, so focused, so touching, so absolutely present onstage, you could swear he’s reliving every story he tells all over again. This is a man, after all, who studied acting under Uta Hagen in the same class as Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook, and Geraldine Page, and there’s a moment late in the film when he recites a soliloquy from Hamlet that's so unexpected, and such a transcendentally joyous affirmation of Reilly's acting talent, that it brought tears to my eyes.
I’m not embarrassed to say I cried at a few other spots in this movie, and I laughed a hell of a lot too. It’s easy to forget how much strength it takes sometimes just to be funny, and in that sense, Charles Nelson Reilly gives a performance here of rare power. The Life of Reilly is a movie to treasure.
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