For some reason, Tedd always insisted that Bil Baird had dropped the penultimate “l” rather than the final one. “The thing would have capsized if he’d taken out the final ‘l,’” he contended. “The next-to-the-last letter in any name has had no experience in holding a nomenclature together, but pulling—or rather, extracting—the next-to-the-last ‘l’ was no danger to Baird.
“Adding a ‘d’ to my name,” he went on, “was simply shoring up a good thing, a little insurance against a time when one of my descendants might acquire Baird’s syndrome and pull a ‘d.’ Well, there we’d be back at the same old stand. Few people,” he would say to his martini olive, “are as kind to their family tree as am I.”
Tedd worked with me for several years, through an assortment of girls, wives, and assignations. His attitude toward sex was direct and uncompromising.
“When concupiscence descends upon the Road Runner,” he said, “he selects a small delectable lizard and presents it to the lady of his choice. If she accepts his suggestion of a quick shack-up under the nearest chaparral motel, then, and only then, does he deliver his offering—after the act, after the fact. The Road Runner is wise beyond his years. None of this skittering-flamingo or hooting-swan nonsense for him. He realizes that preliminaries are debilitating, wearisome, and incongruous. Both parties to a mating usually know at the outset whether or not; the rest is just a not-so-stately pavane. The Road Runner wines and lizards his girl afterwards, a touching tribute to a lovely affair.
Pepé Le Pew in a raffish mood in CAT’S BAH (1954)
“I never,” Tedd went on, “offer flowers, baubles, or bubbles before an encounter, but my love and admiration and resources have no boundaries afterwards. I want my love to feel loved, admired, cared for, and deeply aware of my gratitude and affection. I woo her, adore her, and bedeck her in the wonderful post-coitus period, when we are relaxed, tensionless, and confident of each other.”
Tedd was as honest, decent, and thoughtful a young man as ever to emerge from a fake environment: the Stacey-Pierces of Pasadena, Bar Harbor, Choate Academy, Harvard, and Wall Street. His mother, who looked like a demented Margaret Dumont posing as the Statue of Liberty, was so outraged at her eldest son that she disowned him on his fifth birthday for refusing to eat lobster. “Stacey-Pierces eat lobster, Edward. Your great-grandfather ate lobster, your grandfather ate lobster, your father ate lobster, and you, Edward Stacey Pierce the Third, of that honorable line, shall eat lobster also.”
Grand finale: A BEAR FOR PUNISHMENT (1951)
The five-year-old not yet Tedd with two “d”s laughed. “It tastes like boiled daddy longlegs,” he said.
If he had been stubborn, obdurate, or rebellious, she could have trotted out her many draconian skills, but like Eddie Selzer, laughter she understood not at all. That it had to do with humor she knew not at all, since humor she knew not at all. Laughter to her was as the braying of donkeys, and having ridden donkeys in Egypt, she knew by experience that her acid proclamations would have no effect on the obedience of these quadrupeds.
She could not disown a donkey, but she could disown her son. Not legally, of course, but for the rest of his life Tedd was, in her eyes, only an irritating lump on her horizon, and her entire icy affection smothered Tedd’s younger brother, and her entire estate on her death ignored Tedd entirely in favor of his fawning sibling.
Perhaps Tedd’s final touching relationship with his mother can best be demonstrated by this incident:
“Shortly after her death,” he said, “I wandered into my brother’s house in Laguna Beach and there, staring down at me from the mantelpiece, was the urn containing my mother’s ashes. I uncorked the quart mayonnaise jar of martinis that I carried in case of emergency and sat down on the ottoman and thought evil thoughts about Mother. But after the jar had been emptied well below the Best Foods label, all the rough edges had worn off and my lachrimation had replaced the Margaret (Wicked Witch) Hamilton of my memories with a sort of zaftig white Aunt Jemima. Perhaps I had wronged the old bird, perhaps she was not a vulture but a dove? Crying softly as I drained the mayonnaise jar, I achieved a final and noble gesture, a gallantry, a beau-ideal gesture for any misunderstood mother. Carrying the casket before me like the Holy Grail, I went out onto the windswept moonlit beach. With my back to the wind and my mother between my knees, I braved the breakers in our old skiff. Beyond the waves I stood up and turned, opening the urn: ‘Mother, I ask your forgiveness for never understanding how understanding you really were. I consign your sacred ashes to the sea you loved so well,’ and in one dramatic swoop I did consign her ashes to the brisk onshore breeze. Back came Mother’s ashes to blind me, choke me, and cake my loving face. Falling backward into the scuppers, I managed to lose both oars, which—as it turned out—was just as well, since being blind, I probably would have rowed out into the ocean and drowned. As it was, I drifted around, finally going ashore a mile or so down the beach. It took three days to wash Mother completely off my face, but her opinion of me remained as clearly stated in death as it was in life.”
Tedd worked with me as a writer-gag man for several years, a
