Phyllis Diller’s Son Remembers: NOTHING COULD STOP HER
DESPITE HER ROUGH ROAD TO THE TOP, THE TRAILBLAZING COMEDIENNE WAS DETERMINED TO KEEP SMILING
Phyllis Diller was never a quitter. “I know you look at me [and] think I’ve given up. I have not,” the colorfully eccentric comic once insisted, setting up a classic joke about her looks. “I was at the beauty parlor four times today — but they wouldn’t let me in!”
Punch lines like that were bountiful during Phyllis’ 57-year career, but acceptance was hard-won. “Once at a club, a guy put his leg out to trip her as she was leaving the stage. These people did not want her to be successful,” son Perry Diller, 67, tells Closer of the gender barriers his mom had to break through in the ’50s as she desperately tried to support her family. “Nothing would stop her,” he insists.
Married to Sherwood Diller in 1939, Phyllis was a housewife until her husband’s growing agoraphobia worsened. “Mom had to get a job,” Perry says, so she created a copywriting job at Macy’s that led to a radio station gig. In 1955, at the age of 37, she decided to give comedy a shot.
COMIC RELIEF
“I became a stand-up because I had a sit-down husband,” Phyllis quipped, using humor to mask the pain of her dire home life. Her jokes landed well enough that her original two-week run at San Francisco’s The Purple Onion turned into an 89-week streak. Fame and fortune were a long way off, however. “When she first started out, we were dirt-poor,” Perry says, and he and one of his four siblings were sent to live with some relatives for many years.
“I was neglecting my children, working on the act,” Phyllis said of her toughest times. “I’ve got these kids. A homeless family of seven for five years. That was my motivation.” Her persistence did pay off, and she caught the eye of Bob Hope, who’d become her mentor, in 1959. “He saw her [bomb] at a club where it was mainly businessmen and strippers,” Perry says. “He put his arms on her shoulder and said, ‘You’ve got it.’ That was like God touching her on the forehead.”
Phyllis, with her rapid-fire delivery (she scored 12 laughs a minute per Guinness World Records), thrived on the club circuit, and she became a staple of game shows and late-night TV, lampooning herself more than anyone. “It was so easy for her to make fun of herself,” Perry says, noting “she was the first star to ever come out and endorse cosmetic surgery,” having undergone several procedures without apology.
That spitfire spirit lasted until her final breaths in 2012. After she lost her speech due to a stroke at 95, Perry teased, “For once I’m going to get the last word. As soon as I said it, this little feeble finger came up. She gave me the finger!” he adds with a laugh. “And that was my last moment with my mother, bless her heart!” — Ron Kelly, with
reporting by Lexi Ciccone