MY FAVORITE HOLLYWOOD MEMORIES

THE BELOVED ENTERTAINER GIVES US HIS IMPRESSIONS OF LUCY, JUDY AND MORE!

Rich Little will never forget the time Don Rickles pulled him aside for a man-to-man chat. “I was visiting him backstage and he said, very seriously, ‘I want to talk to you. Pull up a chair,’ ” Rich, 80, tells Closer. “I thought he was going to give me a big lecture. He said, ‘I like how you’re combing your hair.’ I replied, ‘I like how you are, too!’” To which the bald comic snapped, “Don’t get smart with me!”

The impressionist dubbed “The Man of a Thousand Voices” has such admiration for his friend, who passed in 2017, that he’s recently reissued his memoir Little by Little: People I’ve Known and Been with a new chapter on Don. “I was always amazed by how he could think so quickly,” recalls Rich. “He wasn’t one joke ahead of you, he was two.” Rich has many fond memories of his decadeslong career in showbiz. “Bing [Crosby]was a very nice man, very humble and sweet natured,” he says. “And I got along well with Frank Sinatra — he never hit me or anything!” In 1964, when he was a guest on The Judy Garland Show, “trying to get Peter Lawford sober and Judy out of her dressing room took a long and she’d get a little down. One day she said, ‘Rich, why don’t we go to the movies?’ We never did, but we got along fine.”

He keeps a special place in his heart for Lucille Ball, who invited him to appear on her sitcom Here’s Lucy in 1971. “She was fun,” says Rich with a smile. “I thought she was going to be a strict taskmaster, but she wasn’t. We had a wonderful relationship.”

— Reporting By Katie Bruno

HE LOVED LUCY (AND JUDY!)

“Both Judy and Lucy were great fun to work with, and not difficult at all,” says Rich, who still performs four nights at week at the Tropicana Las Vegas. Rich (from top left) on The Julie Andrews Hour with Don in 1972, on The Judy Garland Show in 1964 and on Here’s Lucy in 1971.