Wilson, Flip

By: David Marc

Source:

 American National Biography Online

Wilson, Flip

comedian, actor, and writer, was born Clerow Wilson, Jr., in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of Clerow Wilson and Cornelia Wilson, whose maiden name was also Wilson. His father, a handyman, was unable to support the large family of twelve children, and the boy was given up to foster care at an early age. Although his schooling was sporadic, he managed to appear in a number of school plays, including one in which he played the part of Clara Barton. Drag comedy would later become central to his success. He gained the nickname “Flip” as a teenager because of his inclination to break into sudden impromptu comic performances. Friends said he appeared to be “flippin' out.” At age sixteen he left school and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, serving from 1950 to 1954. It was here that he began to find his vocation as a comedian, delivering comic monologues and putting on skits for his fellow servicemen.

Following his discharge, Wilson settled in San Francisco hoping to begin a show business career in the city's nightclub scene, which was gaining a reputation as a hotbed of stand-up comedy. It was also one of the few places in the United States where black comedians could find work. While supporting himself as a bellhop at the Manor Plaza Hotel, he insinuated his way into the house nightclub by putting on an act, gratis, as a drunken bellhop during the breaks taken by featured acts.

Gaining notice this way, he was offered several gigs at local nightclubs and eventually made it onto the national circuit. Most of the clubs were cheap bars, known in the business as “toilets,” and he often was forced to hitchhike from city to city during the late 1950s as he continued to write new material and develop a repertoire of original characters. By the end of the decade he was playing better venues, including the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach and the Apollo Theatre in New York.

A turning point came in 1965, when Johnny Carson invited Wilson to appear on “The Tonight Show” after hearing veteran comedian Redd Foxx's favorable comment about Wilson's nightclub act. This led to a string of guest appearances for Wilson on some of television's most popular programs, including “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.” In 1969 he starred in his own prime-time comedy special on NBC. Its critical and commercial success led to the premiere of his weekly series, “The Flip Wilson Show,” in 1970.

Following the classic comedy-variety format developed by such early television stars as Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, Wilson typically began the hour with a monologue in front of a stage curtain and then presented himself and his guest stars in a series of short comic sketches and musical numbers. It was in these sketches that Wilson developed his signature characters. They included Geraldine, a sassy, outspoken woman who reveled in testing the limits of female propriety; the ultraspirited, if somewhat shifty, Reverend LeRoy of the Church of What's Happening Now; and Freddie the Playboy, a silver-tongued ladies' man.

Geraldine was by far the most popular. Drag humor was nothing new to prime-time television; Berle had made liberal use of it in the medium's earliest days. Wilson, however, reinvigorated the art by creating an enduring persona in Geraldine. He used the character's unabashed sexuality to push television content into areas that tested the limits of the still-vigilant network censorship codes of the 1970s. Geraldine was especially frank on the subject of her boyfriend, Killer, who Wilson also played on occasion. “The devil made me do it!”—her all-purpose excuse for misbehavior—achieved the status of a national catchphrase.

Wilson became a television star of the first magnitude, winning two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for the show. This was all the more remarkable in light of the commercial failure of earlier attempts to have such well-established African-American stars as Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr., serve as hosts of prime-time variety hours. During the peak of his stardom Wilson continued his live performances, becoming a frequent headliner in Las Vegas. He won a Grammy Award in 1970 for “Best Comedy Recording” with his album of stand-up monologues, The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress, which he produced for his own record company, Little David.

After the 1974 cancellation of “The Flip Wilson Show,” the comedian's career took an unexpected—though not really unusual—turn for a television star. Professing a desire for the stable family life he had never known, he retreated from the national spotlight, only occasionally emerging from his Malibu home to perform. “I accomplished what I set out to do,” he explained to an interviewer. “I wanted the whole cookie and I got it. Now I want to spend more time with my children—make sure they don't go through what I did” (article by Mel Watson, New York Times, 27 November 1998).

Over the next six years, his work was limited to minor roles in just three films: Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Skatetown, U.S.A. (1979), and The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979). In 1980 he became corporate spokesperson for the soft drink maker 7-Up, but his contract was voided following his arrest on misdemeanor cocaine charges within a year's time. Two attempts at new television series during the 1980s both ended in early cancellations. In 1990 he surprised some critics with his dramatic performance as God in “Zora Is My Name,” a play concerning the life of writer Zora Neale Hurston, on PBS's “American Playhouse.” Though he would remain financially secure, Wilson never again would achieve anything like the fame he had known in the early 1970s.

Flip Wilson's personal life was complex. His 1957 marriage to dancer Peaches Wilson (her maiden name) ended in divorce that same year. Soon after, he entered into a long-term relationship with Blonell Pitman, eventually adopting Pitman's daughter, Michelle. Between 1960 and 1970 the couple had four children of their own; they never married, however. In 1979, Wilson wed Cookie Mackenzie, but this second marriage ended in a 1985 divorce.

Wilson told Jet magazine in a 1997 interview that he did not miss his acting career and that he had spent a good deal of the last two decades reading Eastern philosophy, especially the works of Kahlil Gibran. The comedian died of liver cancer at home in Malibu.

The first African American to host a successful prime-time variety show on television, Flip Wilson created several signature comic characters whose appeal transcended race. As Paul Brownfield of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “If Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory represented a school of black comics who translated their backgrounds into crackling, confrontational comedy routines, Wilson was from a different school—not as angry or political, and thus not as much of a threat to white audiences” (28 Nov. 1998).

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