I, Fudd - fateful meetings

In a vast estate in North Hollywood, behind ivy-covered walls, dwells one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Elmer Fudd, now mostly retired from show business, rarely grants interviews, much less unfettered access to his family and home, but, much to my astonishment, he granted my request for an extended interview of himself and his wife in their beautiful home.

The Fudds have eight children, all adults, all with children of their own. Many of Elmer's grandchildren also have children. When family gets together it becomes quite a crowd.

"I've always wanted a house full of children." Elmer says, escorting me to his study where we will conduct the interview. (In order to encourage readability Elmer's unique pronunciation will be ignored.) "We've certainly had that over the years!"

We sat at a table in his comfortable study and spent the next several hours rehashing his life. While there were no startling revelations uncovered, Elmer (he insists everyone call him Elmer) had never discussed many of these topic publicly before.

"I was performing the title role in Shakespeare's Richard III (a role for which he was critically acclaimed) on Broadway and one night, after a show, I went to catch a Vaudeville show. That's the first night I actually saw Bugs Bunny. He was the headliner. I'd heard of him but never had a chance to catch his show before. He was hysterical. I'd never seen anything like him before. Nobody had. Turns out he's a big fan of my work, and someone told him I was there, so we met for a drink after the show. We hit it off. He's as funny in person as he is on stage. We talked for a while and decided we wanted to work together. Problem is, while Bugs is a terrific dramatic actor he prefers comedy, and I'm the opposite. I told him, I'm just not funny. He said not to worry about it, he and his writers could make me funny. You know, he was right!"

Elmer became the straight man to Bug's one-liners. Audiences loved it. Backers flocked, and demands to expand the show became impossible to shrug off. "Bugs is a great writer, but he's only one guy. We had some other writers and performers--Dawg and Foggy (Foghorn Leghorn, who started as a writer and became an actor) were on board, but we needed more talent. Writers, actors, everything. That's when we wound up hiring this fellow named Daffy Duck and his companion, Marty the Martian. Daffy was a young comedian, Marty was his chief writer. He just killed every night. Then Sly (Sylvester the Cat) and Tweety came on-board. We had a full house every night.

"Still, I missed Shakespeare. I can't help it. The tragedies, the historicals . . . I just love them so much. I wanted to go back to that. That's when I had the bright idea to bring in this superstar young actor from Eastern Europe as a co-star. I didn't know him but he was getting raves in London. So, I made arrangements for him to come to New York to play Iago to my Othello.

"He was an up-and-coming young actor named Wile Coyote."