The Globe and Mail (Canada)

April 23, 2007 Monday

Stan Daniels

He used his vaudevillian Toronto roots to write hit sitcoms and TV classics;

Hollywood screenwriter who created such favourites as Mary Tyler Moore and Taxi helped transform small-screen comedies, and won eight Emmy awards doing it, writes SANDRA MARTIN

In comedic writing for television, there is something called the Stan Daniels turn, although it is unlikely that the writer, producer and director ever used the expression
himself. The "turn" occurs when a character says one thing and immediately exhibits behaviours that contradicts that comment. The audience laughs at the speaker's lack of
self-awareness and the disconnect between what he says and his subsequent action.

Certainly Mr. Daniels's long-time writing partner, producer and director Ed Weinberger, says he never heard the term in the more than 10 years the two men worked together on such
sitcoms as Mary Tyler Moore and Taxi. Nevertheless, the Stan Daniels turn is now part of show business lore. That is a measure of the man's talent, as are the eight Emmy awards he
won for helping to transform television situation comedies from prat-filled uni-dimensional burlesques into multifaceted human comedies with rounded characters that
lived not only on the small screen, but in viewers' imaginations.

"There was a great sense of decency about him," Mr. Weinberger said. "He was very sweet, very gentle. Actors really respected him and he was just one of those people
that nobody had ill to speak of."

Mr. Daniels's other credits include writing and co-creating Phyllis with Cloris Leachman and Roc, with Charles S. Dutton.

Stanley Edwin Daniels, who was born in Toronto during the Depression, was the only child of vaudevillians Lillian and Albert Daniels. After he was born, they semi-retired from
the stage and opened a movie theatre on the corner of Dufferin and Dundas streets. The family lived above the cinema and Mr. Daniels, a shy, withdrawn boy, used to sneak
downstairs and watch movies. He once told an interviewer that he "knew the names of every major movie star by the time I was 2 or 3."

He went to Parkdale Collegiate, studied piano with Mona Bates in her Jarvis Street studio and went to the YMHA Camp Northland in Haliburton, northeast of Toronto. That's where,
when he was 13, he met Philip Weinstein, a lifelong friend and urban planner.

"He was a real contradiction of a retiring guy who lived in his head, and yet he was a brilliant pianist and an outgoing guy on the stage. And he stayed that way all of his life,"

Mr. Daniels spent an extra year in high school because he was seriously tempted toward a career as a concert pianist and he split his studies so he could spend more time
practising. As a teenager, he also wrote and performed pieces for the Canadian National Exhibition and Mavor
Moore's Spring Thaw revue. Although he decided in favour of academics, he continued to play the piano and write and sing songs for the rest of his life.

He went to University College at the University of Toronto, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and a master's degree the following year. He met his wife, Alene Kamis, at
U of T when they were cast in a series of plays together - The Wild Duck, Darkness at Noon and Camino Royale - at Hart House and at UC. They were married in October, 1956, her
final year of an undergraduate degree in philosophy and English.

Fascinated by the British analytical philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, he took up a fellowship to do his doctorate at Oxford, "and off we went," Mrs. Daniels said.
The first three children Dari, Shelley and Alan are all writers

for television, theatre or film. The youngest son, Larry is a lawyer, or what his father called "a civilian."

Mr. Daniels came so close to an academic career that he actually accepted a position at Carleton University in Ottawa and, after a month of agonizing, turned it down. By
then he had written Better Never, a revue featuring then-unknown actors Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett that had played at the Edinburgh Festival, and some material for a
television comedian in London. "It wasn't that he didn't love academics," Mrs. Daniels said, but "he loved this more." They returned to Toronto in early 1962 and he began
working for CBC television, writing for Wayne and Schuster and for director and producer Norman Campbell, with whom he did a musical version of The Misanthrope by Molière.
Lyricist Elaine Campbell said her late husband loved working with Mr. Daniels because he "could write both the words and the music." He also wrote and performed his own material on
This Hour Has Seven Days, which launched in October, 1964.

Producer and host Patrick Watson recalled that the most memorable of Mr. Daniels's satires was the monologue in which he played an aggressive PR guy on the telephone to
Pope Paul VI (who was set to visit New York City in November of 1965). The audience only saw and heard Mr. Daniels's end of the conversation, in which he tried to persuade the Pope
to take part in some publicity stunts while he was in the United States. According to Mr. Watson, the skit ended with Mr. Daniels saying: "A favour? Of course your Holiness,
anything I can do. Two tickets for Hello Dolly [which had opened with huge fanfare in Jan 1964 and was playing to sold out houses]? Sorry, Your Holiness. You haven't got a prayer."

The skit, which retains its edge, according to people who have seen a tape of it recently, was quite controversial, as so many things were on Seven Days. "Roman Catholic viewers
let us know that they found the skit very funny and on target," said Mr. Watson, while "Protestant viewers let us know that they were offended that we should burlesque the
R.C. Church." When the Pope did arrive in New York, "the extravagant showbiz stuff that surrounded his visit made the jokes in Stan's skit seem pale by comparison," said Mr.
Watson, who remembers him as "an excellent performer."

Mr. Daniels's true love, however, was writing Broadway musicals. His great mentor was composer Frank Loesser, who wrote Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without
Really Trying, among other shows. It was in Mr. Loesser's office in New York that Mr. Daniels met television director Greg Garrison, who worked on shows such as Bachelor Father
and especially The Dean Martin Show, which first aired in 1965 and was hugely popular for several years. Apparently, Mr. Garrison looked at him and said, "You look like a
writer, you should come to Hollywood." Mr. Daniels laughed and ignored the comment. About a month later, Mr. Garrison called him and said: "Are you coming or not?"

That's how Mr. Daniels ended up in California working on The Gold Diggers, the summer replacement for The Dean Martin Show, for about three weeks and on the main show for the
next five years. After a year of commuting back and forth between Los Angeles and Toronto, he moved his family west, where they have lived ever since. Growing up in California,
his daughter Shelley thought the reason her father was so quiet, private and modest and yet told crazy jokes and loved performing was because he was Canadian.

He was extremely funny around the house, she said. "No one had a mind like his. It was full of twists, a little subversive and always surprising." She said he could take an
ordinary or familiar situation and make a joke about it that was inventive and original.

One of the other staff writers on The Dean Martin Show was Mr. Weinberger. "He was the smartest guy in the room. He was unusually tight and very quiet; he would sit in a chair and
talk," Mr. Weinberger said. "He came up with whatever we needed, and that is the way we worked for more than a decade." Strangely, the two men shared a birthday, although
Mr. Weinberger didn't know that for the first five years of their collaboration. He also didn't know, until Mr. Daniels's funeral, that they shared the name Edwin. "So, you
can say that he kept to himself," he joked.

The two men officially became partners and worked together on iconic television sitcoms such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which was set in a Minneapolis television news room
and aired on CBS from Sept. 19, 1970 to March 19, 1977, and Taxi, about the aspirations of a handful of drivers for the Sunshine Cab Company and their dealings with their abusive
dispatcher. It was broadcast from 1978 to 1982 on ABC, and from 1982 to 1983 on NBC.

Away from work, Mr. Daniels was an extremely accomplished and devoted tennis player.

About five years ago, he developed fronto-temporal dementia, a rare pathology of the frontal lobes in which patients develop personality changes and other defects, including
memory loss. In Mr. Daniels's case it made him more outgoing and less reserved, and although he had difficulties functioning in many respects, he never lost his musical repertoire.

After lunch a week ago Friday, he played some Chopin and a medley of some show tunes and then complained that he felt a little tired. Mrs. Daniels helped him to his bed, where he
lay down with his head on his own pillow and quietly died with his wife at his side.

STANLEY (STAN) EDWIN DANIELS

He was born July 31, 1934, in Toronto. He died in Encino,
Calif., on April 6, 2007, of heart failure. He was 72. He is
survived by his wife Alene, his daughters Dari and Shelley,
sons Alan and Larry, two grandsons and his extended family.