Irrepressible ‘buffoon’ enlivened ‘Today’ show as weatherman
Willard Scott, the portly, toupee-sporting TV personality who spent 35 years enlivening the “Today” show as its weatherman and resident merrymaker, whether delivering the forecast dressed in drag or giving shoutouts to far-flung centenarians, died Sept. 4. He was 87.
The death was announced by NBC’s “Today” show, via a statement by Scott’s successor, Al Roker. Complete details were not immediately available.
Scott first made his name as an irrepressible comedian of Washington radio trading in shtick and satire as half of “The Joy Boys.” On local TV, he was the original Ronald McDonald — the hamburger chain went with a thinner actor for the bulbnosed clown mascot in the national campaign — and had stints as a weather forecaster and Bozo the Clown.
In a broadcasting career spanning six decades, he was best known for his role on “Today,” the popular NBC weekday morning program. He debuted in 1980 and immediately made his presence known, draping his 6-foot-3 frame in outrageous costumes. He once dressed up as Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian entertainer known for her outré fruit-covered hats and garish dresses. On Groundhog Day, he appeared as the rodent.
“People said I was a buffoon to do it,” he told the New York Times. “Well, all my life I’ve been a buffoon. That’s my act.”
The centenarian segment began soon after he joined the show, when a friend asked Scott to wish a happy 100th birthday, live and in color, to his uncle. NBC bosses didn’t like the idea, but Scott went ahead with it. He was soon fielding about 200 requests a week.
He once described himself as a “human after-dinner mint” compared with the more polished anchors on the show, including Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley, who liked to conduct serious-minded sit-downs with world figures.
In 1989, when “Today” had slipped behind ABC’s “Good Morning America” in the ratings for the first time, Gumbel wrote a stinging memorandum to his bosses.
Gumbel savaged Scott for holding “the show hostage to his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste. This guy is killing us and no one’s even trying to rein him in.”
NBC brass insisted that Scott and Gumbel make up, and they soon did, at least publicly. Scott had the last laugh. The weatherman was soon earning $1 million a year from NBC, even though he was seldom on the air for more than three minutes an hour. And a call-in poll in USA Today reported that 27,300 people thought Scott’s weather segments helped the show. Only 854 took an unfavorable view of him.
Willard Herman Scott Jr. was born in Alexandria, Va., on March 7, 1934. Scott was raised and remained a fundamentalist Christian. He seriously considered becoming a minister.
He went into semiretirement in 1996 and retired fully in 2015. His final show drew a chorus of good-natured protests, including a message from former first lady Barbara Bush.
His wife of 43 years, the former Mary Dwyer, died in 2002. Survivors include his second wife, the former Paris Keena, a onetime producer at WRC whom he married in 2014; and two daughters from his first marriage, Mary Phillips and Sally Scott.
“If you were to look at my résumé,” Scott wrote in his 1982 autobiography, “The Joy of Living,” “you’d see that I’m … bald, I’m overweight, I don’t make all the smooth moves, and I dress like a slob.
“I take tremendous pride,” he added, “in the fact that I beat the system.”