"Oh, I've earned my pay, believe me," Marty said. "It's not easy for two brothers to work together."
An example came up almost immediately. Sid was sharing one especially windy tale when his brother groaned, "Sid, I thought you were telling a story about 'Land of the Lost.' What happened to that?"
"I'm getting there, Marty," Sid said. "You know I can tell long stories too, just the way you do."
Marty answered through a clenched smile: "That wasn't very nice."
A few minutes later, Sid decided to clear his conscience by revealing a 50-year-old family secret -- "We've been living with this lie for decades," he said -- and his younger brother was apoplectic. "Now?! This moment, right now, you decide you need to tell all of this?"
Sid, the man who dreamed up deliriously strange Saturday-morning characters such as Weenie the Genie, Horatio J. HooDoo and Cha-Ka the ape-boy, looked bewildered by his brother's fury. "Well, Marty, I don't see the harm. It's history now."
--
There are still plenty of young dreamers, oddballs and colorful hucksters in the entertainment industry, but, really, the modern corporate era has wiped away most of its greasepaint charm. In the flashbulb era, big stars were bigger and tall tales were taller.
For example, take the celebrated Krofft family history: Sid and Marty are supposedly fifth-generation puppeteers, dating to the opening of the Krofft Theater in the early 1700s in Athens. It is a truly amazing tale and cited in almost every article every written about them, and it's the first line of their bio.
It is also not true. It was cooked up by a New York publicist in the 1940s. The brothers have carried it with them ever since, until Sid suddenly decided to clear his conscience in an interview for this story.
"It became a trap," Sid explained, shaking his head. "I was telling Marty the other day how bad it is that some of his children even have heard it and believe it."
There are other vivid moments in the Krofft biography that test credulity. Marty, for instance, says that Beatles manager Brian Epstein called him seeking tapes of "H.R. Pufnstuf" so the band could keep up to date on the psychedelic Saturday-morning show. Of course, Epstein died in 1967, two years before "Pufnstuf" went on the air.
But, at some point, subjecting the old Hollywood to too much Digital Age scrutiny becomes a crass exercise. Really, should the men who brought the world "Lidsville," a live-action show about giant talking hats, be expected to keep real-world details straight?
