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 Howie Mandel (photo: Ernest Doroszuk, Sun Media) |
Most of us wear shoes that match. Not Howie Mandel.
"I buy shoes, but I don't have to like both of them to get the pair," Mandel explains about his mismatched, rainbow-coloured sneakers.
The host of TV's Deal Or No Deal has a closet full of similar shoes. He just reaches for any two he likes and pulls them on. He never, ever ties them up. His logic is pure Mandel: "At this point in my career, I have such a busy schedule, why should I think about either tying my shoes or choosing the one that goes with the left foot?"
Mandel and his multi-coloured runners walked through the Toronto airport late last month. He was arriving to begin a week of taping five episodes of Deal Or No Deal Canada. The first episode airs tonight, immediately following Global's Super Bowl broadcast, with four more airing on Thursday nights at 9 p.m., after Survivor.
It wasn't the sneakers that gave him away at the airport. It was his shaved head and the exposure it gets on his hit game show, which debuted in 2005 and pretty much carried NBC last season. One by one, fans approached Mandel as he stood with wife Terry at the baggage carousel. He cheerfully signed every autograph and posed for every picture -- even for TV critics.
Mandel was truly humbled by the outpouring of affection. For a native son, he hasn't always been so embraced. "How great is that, for a Canadian no less?" he said. "To be welcomed home in this way is the most exciting thing to date, career-wise."
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In December, Mandel sandwiched in a promotional stop in Canada between a Deal taping in Los Angeles and a comedy concert in Florida. Even before Deal Or No Deal changed his life, his work ethic was legendary. Some nights Mandel is whisked by helicopter from the Deal set in Burbank to LAX, where he has flown straight to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. He can be out of NBC at 8 p.m. and be on stage in Vegas at 9:30.
Mandel isn't just striking while the iron is hot. He always has worked hard and has had an incredibly varied career -- from starring on the Emmy Award-winning drama St. Elsewhere in the 1980s to creating the Saturday morning children's favourite Bobby's World to a killer club schedule, including two shows this weekend at Casino Rama.
While he always has worked, Mandel hasn't always felt the love. He has had the attention, dating back to his days pulling pranks as a student at Northview Heights Secondary School in Toronto, where he once hired a construction crew to build an addition on the library. "Everything I've ever been punished for, or expelled for, is what I get paid for today," he has said.
But, until Deal Or No Deal -- a show he turned down three times before wife Terry talked him into it -- Mandel seldom got the kind of respect only a hit can bring.
"The thing about it, besides the success, is the timing," Mandel recalled last December. "At this point in my career, specifically this time in my life, I have some perspective on what this means, and how lucky this is, and how fleeting this can be, and how phenomenal."
Mandel, 51, knows he is luckier than most.
After headlining at Yuk Yuk's in Toronto in the late '70s as that club's breakout comedian, Mandel headed for Hollywood. On a dare, he took to the Comedy Store stage on an amateur night in 1979 and killed. A producer in the crowd hired him immediately to appear in the comedy game show Make Me Laugh; soon he was opening for the likes of Diana Ross.
His manic, "What's your name? Where you from?" style -- which occasionally saw him draw an entire audience out of their seats and into the street in pursuit of some crazy, spontaneous gag -- quickly put him on comedy-club bills with the likes of Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy.
The former carpet salesman had only begun to hustle. He landed a comedy special at new cable network HBO and started auditioning for sitcoms. He wanted to be a TV star.
One Friday in 1982 he met with some producers about a new hospital show. "Can you act?" they asked. "I don't know," Mandel said. Come back Monday, he was told.
They shot scenes all day, after which Mandel was thinking, "This sitcom is so not funny." The show was St. Elsewhere, a drama.
Mandel replaced David Paymer, who was in the pilot. The series ran six seasons, made stars out of Denzel Washington, Mark Harmon and David Morse and won several Emmys. If it was all Mandel ever did, he would have had his Hall Of Fame moment.
In a way, however, it ruined him for future TV projects. "I was 26, I didn't realize that this was so good," he said. "Doesn't everybody that goes down (to L.A.) get this? I didn't know that these were few and far between."
Mandel was about to strike gold again, however. While his stand-up act was never PG, he did have a high-pitched kiddie voice he used to invoke on stage. In 1990, that was spun off as the Fox Saturday-morning series Bobby's World. The animated series ran eight seasons and, as Mandel says, "helped sell a lot of Happy Meals."
As Mandel says, "I've been more surprised than anybody about what I've been doing at the time I've been doing it."
Not everything Mandel touched turned to gold. Howie Mandel's Sunny Skies is a title that still makes CBC executives wince. Shot in Toronto about a dozen years ago in the very same CBC studio where Deal Or No Deal Canada was produced, the sketch series drew hostile reviews. USA Today's Matt Roush trashed it as "a sophomoric showcase (for Mandel) to indulge his penchant for toilet humour and lame sight gags." The Toronto Sun's TV critic at the time, Claire Bickley, dismissed it as "stupid and unfunny."
Getting beat up in his hometown, where his adoring family still lives, was crushing.
"The truth is, I've never been a critic's favourite," he told reporters the year Sunny Skies was launched on Showtime in the States. "I sit in my room. I roll up in the fetal position and have to be forced to come out. It does bother me."
At 40, Mandel realized his career needed a makeover. He reinvented himself as a daytime talk-show host. And while that late-'90s series was not a success, he at least gave people another look, both in content and style. Gone was the curly hair. Mandel's shaved head actually makes him look younger but, more importantly, more mature. It is reflected in his humour; where once Mandel used to yank a surgical glove over his head and inflate it with his nose, he's now on Conan O'Brien finding comedy and connection in prostate exams.
With Deal, he found a showcase for all his talents. When producers at Endemol were twisting his arm to host the series, he asked, "Why me?" Mandel was content getting face time on his old club pal Jay Leno's Tonight Show, between gigs in Vegas and the occasional cable series. The Boston Pizza ads back home helped pay the bills. "I didn't want to be just another game-show host," he said.
The Endemol folks persuaded him that he was perfect for Deal: he had the improv comedy chops, he could handle and enhance the human drama, he was genuinely interested in people. Deal Or No Deal called upon a lifetime of comedy, drama and talk-show training.
It was all on display at the Toronto tapings. In one of the shows, Mandel dances down the steps to a standing ovation from the home crowd. Standing on a large white maple leaf platform, he greets a contestant from Calgary dressed a little too obviously in cowboy hat and chaps. Turns out the dude is part of a gay rodeo circuit.
In a club, Mandel would buck him into the bleachers but here he goes along for the ride. When the contestant tells Mandel it takes 21 seconds for him to slip underwear onto a goat (one of the rodeo events), Mandel says it takes him 24 seconds to get into his.
Later, at the Global wrap party, Mandel works the room, tapping fists all around. It is one of Mandel's great inconsistencies -- that the huggable Howie can't shake hands. An obsessive compulsive disorder has him ever wary of germs.
For the first time in his career, Mandel seems overwhelmed by the attention. Sharing it all is his constant companion, wife Terry. The high school sweethearts have been married since 1980 and have three children, ages 14 to 21.
Howie's and Terry's long union is extraordinary by Hollywood standards, and their closeness is evident at the wrap party and even at the taping. When an audience member yells out for Mandel to salute the stunning Canadian models working briefcase duty, he shyly turns down the chance -- because his wife is in the room.
While the couple lives mainly in Los Angeles, Mandel used to resent that he was passed over for jobs in Canada. He doesn't single out awards shows or Canadian Idol, but what else could he mean? "There are shows on TV here all the time and I've never been asked. (That) makes this sweeter and fresher."
Like a new pair of mismatched sneakers.
"I feel like I've been around forever but it's a good tired," he says. "You know how you go to a party and it's really late, but you're having a good time and you don't want to go home?"
That's how he feels. "And I don't want to go home."
DEAL OR NO DEAL CANADA
Debuts tonight after Super Bowl
Global