The St. Elsewhere Experience wishes Hollywood legend and St. Elsewhere star Norman Lloyd a happy birthday.
The St. Elsewhere Experience is pleased to extend the warmest of birthday greetings to the man who gave life to Dr. Daniel Auschlander--the great Norman Lloyd. We've been blessed to have Norman with us for the past 101 years.
St. Elsewhere broke ground with this story about using medical marijuana to treat chemotherapy symptoms in 1984.
Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd) sees "what all the
fuss is" about cannabis.
This is one of the many reasons Norman Lloyd is awesome--his comedic chops and pathos in this episode from February 3, 1984. His character, Dr. Daniel Auschlander, fights a battle with liver cancer throughout the entire run of St. Elsewhere. He was originally slated to die off after four episodes, but Lloyd proved to be too good to jettison so early, so his cancer went into what Lloyd has described as "the longest remission in television history".
Auschlander's recurrent chemo cycles affect his ability to do his job, and by the middle of season two, he's feeling particularly beaten. In the season's twelfth episode, "Hearing", his oncologist, Dr. Morton Chegley (Arthur Taxier), suggests several options for relieving his patient's pain, and laments that he is not legally permitted to prescribe THC caplets, which, he hears, are quite effective.
Auschlander is not warm to the idea of circumventing the law, but his symptoms push him to take action. He spots Dr. Wayne Fiscus (Howie Mandel) in the cafeteria, and asks if the young doctor might be able to point him in the right direction. Wayne, delighted by the notion of the septuagenarian taking a walk on the wild side, has no luck with his old connection, but enlists the help of orderly Luther Hawkins (Eric Laneuville), to whom Wayne must admit he approached because he assumed that an African-American ghetto-dweller would be able to score some dope.
His assumption was correct, and soon after, Fiscus and Hawkins are supervising the elderly experimenter on a trip to a convenience store, to find the ideal munchies for the occasion. They have some serious explaining to do to a skeptical police officer when it becomes clear that the test subject can't handle his smoke.
The next day, Dr. Auschlander confides to Dr. Fiscus that the whole experience--the undignified behaviour, the night of sleep lost to hallucinations, and the ill effects of a junk-food-munchie-binge--was not worth repeating, and that he'll endure his chemo symptoms without chemical enhancement.
Enjoy the clip!
I don't know if this was the first "medical marijuana" storyline on network television, but it certainly brought up the issue long before there was such a thing as the "medical marijuana industry".
A lot of TV shows have done the "pot" episode, where the joke is that the characters get high and act stupid. For me, this is one of the better ones. Credit that to the writers (Mark Tinker, John Masius, Steve Bello, Robert Daniels), director Charles Braverman, and, of course, the great Norman Lloyd.
When the police officer asks Dr. Auschlander for "his story", Auschlander relates that when he was a boy, his father used to take him to the Metropolitan Opera House. This is the same story, almost word for word, that he tells Dr. Westphall at the end of the series' third episode, "Down's Syndrome".
Elliott meets Mrs. Hufnagel's son, Alvin, and bids her a final farewell with a burial at sea.
Dr. Elliott Axelrod (Stephen Furst) brings mirth to a
grieving Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd),
with some help from Gary Larson.
At last, we've reached the final chapter in the saga of Mrs. Hufnagel (Florence Halop), St. Eligius's most memorable patient. Dr. Elliott Axelrod (Stephen Furst), is a carrying the box that contains her ashes, which Dr. Wayne Fiscus (Howie Mandel) assumes contains cookies. After Elliott explains what the box is for, Wayne tries to convince Elliott that his obligation as a doctor ends when the patient dies, but Elliott feels bad for the medical mismanagement that led to her demise, and he feels that she deserves to have her burial wishes carried out with respect. Elliott intends to have a memorial service in the chapel and bury her at sea, to which Wayne responds by suggesting he just flush her down the toilet.
In the chapel, Elliott is having a solitary moment of remembrance for his departed patient when he is joined in the chapel by a despondent Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd). Auschlander is mourning the death of his old friend, Dr. George Wyler, who was featured in a three-episode arc earlier in the season. Dr. Wyler was a Nobel-winning humanitarian who worked in Africa, but ran afoul of the government in his adopted homeland, and returned there knowing that the consequences would be dire. And lo, they were--he was greeted with a hail of machine-gun fire. During George's visit to St. Eligius, he and Daniel shared some meaningful moments while playing the chapel's organ, so it was a fitting place for Daniel to mourn his old friend. Elliott approaches, and can't but giggle at the Far Side comic in the newspaper sitting on the organ ("The real reason dinosaurs became extinct"), which brings a smile to both their faces.
Alvin Hufnagel (Boyd Bodwell) bids his mother a curt
farewell before kicking his guests out of his new apartment.
Wayne and Elliott then pay a visit to Mrs. Hufnagel's apartment, which Elliott has inherited. Wayne discovers a personally autographed photo of Bobby Orr, and Elliott explains that she was a season ticket holder to the Bruins; however, the seats have been left to Ernest Borgnine. (Wayne feels that Fuji was the real star of McHale's Navy.) He finds a baseball glove that was given to her by Ted Williams, which tells Wayne he can keep. Elliott is planning on selling the stuff, or giving it away, with the exception of the gerbil, which has joined its owner in the great beyond. Then there's a knock on the door. It's Alvin Hufnagel (Boyd Bodwell), who immediately recognizes his glove in Wayne's hands. He gives Elliott a particularly dirty look.
After playing with the dead gerbil, Alvin gets down to business. "You stole mother's affection," he accuses Elliott. Elliott tries to explain how they bonded over the death of Murray Robbin, but Alvin is convinced that he deliberately charmed the old woman with the intent of being included in her will. He's hurt that she didn't leave him anything, but he's a little too sensitive to hear Wayne's criticism about never having visited. When he calms down, Alvin has to admit that they didn't get along. Elliott tries to make Alvin feel better by giving him the computer, but the dejected son wants everything, which the good-hearted Dr. Axelrod concedes without a fight. He invites Alvin along for the burial, but he's not interested, and wishes her a terse, "Goodbye, Mother."
Elliott delivers Mrs. Hufnagel to her final resting place.
In a moving final scene, Elliott delivers what he hopes are appropriate final words, from Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake:
Fleet foot on the correi,
Sage counsel in cumber,
Red hand in the foray,
How sound is thy slumber!
Like the dew on the mountain,
Like the foam on the river,
Like the bubble in the fountain,
Thou art gone, and for ever!
He pours out her ashes, and bids a final "Goodbye, Mrs. Hufnagel," before tossing the rose from his lapel in the water.
And so ends the saga of Florence Hufnagel, ashes to ashes, dust to dust:
There's one last bit of Hufnagel mythology left over. In the season six episode, "Night of the Living Bed", which aired three days before Halloween, 1987, Mrs. Hufnagel is believed by many at St. Eligius to be making her presence known once more. The room where she died seems to be haunted, its lights and TV flicking on and off on their own. Eventually, the bed starts shaking, the floor starts shaking, and the floor opens up and pulls the bed down with it. But it turns out not to be a haunting--the magnetism from the new MRI machine installed on the floor beneath was just too much for the old facility to handle.
So that doesn't quite count as another appearance. As the Gluck family always said: "it is better to be despised than forgotten."
Dr. Auschlander's new assistant is touring the hospital when she gets the inside scoop from Mrs. Hufnagel.
Mrs. Hufnagel (Florence Halop) warns a new hire
about life at St. Eligius.
At the beginning of season three, Chief of Services Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd) has his hands full with a rather contentious nurses' strike on top of his ongoing battle with liver cancer. He decides to hire an assistant to help him better manage his duties, and in "My Aim Is True", he has found a suitable candidate, Sandra Eff (Kate Randolph Burns), and gives her the "cook's tour" of the hospital.
I've decided to leave in the scene that establishes the assistant character, who has spent the last five years as an administrator at an upscale hospital in Minnesota whose husband's transfer to Boston left her in need of a job. Auschlander warns her that the pay is lower, the hours are longer, and the neighborhood is "considerably less pastoral." When Dr. Auschlander gets paged, Mrs. Hufnagel (Florence Halop) takes it upon herself to give the new employee the uncensored version of what happens at St. Eligius. The stories she tells--sex in the morgue, Legionnaires' Disease, the rapist stalking the hospital--are all storylines from the first two seasons (plus a few episodes) of St. Elsewhere.
Videos of an interview with Norman Lloyd about his career and his experience on St. Elsewhere, courtesy of the Archive of American Television and YouTube.
Norman Lloyd (Dr. Daniel Auschlander) discusses his long
career and his time on St. Elsewhere.
Here are some clips from an interview conducted from September 7, 2000, hosted at the Archive of American Television, and also divided into sections on YouTube. In the full version of the interview, Lloyd discusses his long and accomplished career, from studying with Eva Le Galienne (who came out of retirement to appear in the Emmy-winning episode "The Women" in season two), joining the Mercury Theatre, appearing in the title role of Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur and his long association with the legendary director, and much more. I haven't watched the whole thing (it's long), but I'll bet it's interesting. If you're looking for St. Elsewhere stuff, jump to six minutes into part six.
The following clips from YouTube are excerpts from this full version.
It's kind of surreal to me that in the finale of season three, Drs. Westphall, Craig and Auschlander decide they could use a belt or two (at the urging of an ailing Katherine Auschlander, due for heart surgery to be performed by Craig in the morning), and drop into a local watering hole that Westphall had heard Ehrlich talking about, Cheers. Rhea Perlman, John Ratzenberger, and George Wendt are the only Cheers cast members involved. (They had wanted Nicholas Colasanto as Coach, but he died.) It's very strange to see St. Elsewhere's handheld tracking shots on the Cheers set.
Levine gets the story from St. Elsewhere writer John Masius, titled by Masius, "How St. Elsewhere Came to Cheers: A Revisionist History." He offers some interesting background on how the episode came together. The most interesting bit to me is the one bit of negative feedback they got from Cheers writers Glen and Les Charles, who didn't like the dialogue written for Carla and Cliff. I feel the same way. I've always found their appearances to be weird approximations of Carla and Cliff that just don't quite ring true. However, I've always enjoyed the bit where it turns out that Norm was Dr. Auschlander's accountant, and had previously prepared tax returns that stuck Auschlander with a $17,000 penalty.
Daniel (Norman Lloyd) is reunited with his former
accountant, Norm Peterson (George Wendt).
It's not the only crossover between the two shows. There's a Cheers episode from October, 1983, "Little Sister, Don't Cha", where Carla, about to deliver yet another child, announces to the bar that she'll be having her baby at St. Eligius. In this episode of St. Elsewhere, which aired March 27, 1985, Carla reacts with disgust when she finds out the doctors are from St. Eligius, where she had been "forced" to have one of her kids.
In preparing this post, I came across several links about St. Elsewhere's crossovers, including this one. There will likely be a post on those in the future.
Update, September 20, 2012: YouTube comes through again... here's a twelve-minute clip of the scene from "Cheers". The poster refers to it as "one of the most bizarre crossovers in television history."
Update, July 20, 2013:TIME magazine just put this crossover on its list of '10 Classic TV Crossovers'. They used the same YouTube clip I posted here.
Possibly my all-time favourite writing stunt on the show--Daniel Auschlander's mind goes back in time over the entire fifth season.
I first heard of this from Robert Thompson's Television's Second Golden Age, in its chapter on St. Elsewhere. There's a discussion of the show's intricacy and consciousness of its own history, with the McAllister revisit as an example. Then Thompson describes "a second example of St. Elsewhere's attention to detail...so deeply embedded in the scripts that virtually nobody noticed." Tom Fontana recalls:
Dr. Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd) finds
his toys are gone.
In the fifth season, we were going through this story where Auschlander was having this mental breakdown--he was kind of getting senile over the course of the season. We wanted to end the season with him in the hospital saying "Where are my toys?," as a baby again. What we did was--Auschlander was seventy-five, so we divided the twenty-three episodes of the season up into three or four year periods. So in episode number one he was talking about things that related to the year it aired--1986. The next week he would talk about things that related to 1983. The next week he would talk about things related to 1980. We'd try to write in such a way so you couldn't tell if he was just remembering it. By the final episode of that season, when he had been reduced to a baby again, if you'd been tracking it you could see him going bit by bit backward in time. We never even told Norman (Lloyd). My point is that only Masius and I knew what we were doing. We never even told Bruce (Paltrow).
Having just concluded watching season five, I've prepared a "breakdown" of Daniel's journey back through the years:
