Larry Storch, the wacky comedian who starred as bumbling sidekick Corporal Randolph Agarn on 1960s ABC sitcom F Troop, has died. He was 99.
Storch, who started out as a stand-up comic, making impressions and voicing the omniscient Phineas J. Whoopee in the classic animated film Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales, died early Friday morning of natural causes at his apartment on the Upper West Side of New York, it said his personal manager Matt Beckoff told .
“If I told you how nice he was, you wouldn’t believe it,” Beckoff said.
Storch was a good friend of Tony Curtis – a fellow New Yorker whom he met while they were serving aboard a US Navy submarine tender – and they appeared together in The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951), Who Was That Lady? (1960), 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962), Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), Sex and the Single Girl (1964), Wild and Wonderful (1964), and The Great Race (1965), in which Stork’s character touched a quiff bar fight.
Storch had a recurring role as a drunk on “Car 54 Where Are You?”, played a groovy guru on “Get Smart” (with his Tennessee Tuxedo teammate Don Adams, a school friend) and fell in love with the leading lady as boxer Duke Farentino The Doris Day Show.
Warner Bros. Television’s F Troop aired for just two seasons (65 episodes from September 1965 to April 1967) but lived on in syndication for decades. Set in the fictional Fort Courage in the 1860s Wild West, the comedy starred Ken Berry as greenhorn Captain Wilton Parmenter, Forrest Tucker as the scheming Sergeant Morgan O’Rourke, and Storch as his (much smaller) accomplice, a man who hails from Passaic , NJ.
In a running gag on the series, O’Rourke told Agarn, “I don’t know why everyone says you’re stupid.” Agarn would have liked that at first, but then he blurted out, “Who says I’m stupid? He also portrayed Agarn cousins Lucky Pierre from Canada, Dmitri Agarnoff from Russia and Pancho Agarnado (and even his sister Carmen) from Mexico on the show.
Storch received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series in 1967 for his work on F Troop.
Stork was a pretty good sax player and is said to be responsible for the memorable Cary Grant line “Judy, Judy, Judy,” which the actor never actually uttered on screen. As the story goes, Stork was in the middle of his Grant impersonation during a nightclub performance and reacted when Judy Garland walked in.
Lawrence Samuel Storch was born on January 8, 1923 and grew up in the Bronx. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School and, at age 17, used his flair for impressions to appear on a bill at New York’s Paramount Theater with Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee. He then moved to World War II and worked aboard the USS Proteus providing supplies to a submarine.
After the war he wrote for The Kraft Music Hall radio program and did part time jobs for Frank Morgan (he made a great impression on The Wizard of Oz actor). A chance meeting with bandleader Phil Harris in Palm Springs led to Lucille Ball hiring Storch to open for her husband Desi Arnaz and his orchestra at Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip.
Storch was earning $125 a week for this stand-up gig and was working in clubs in Las Vegas and New York, and appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show would follow.
Storch hosted DuMont’s Cavalcade of Stars in 1951 and two summers later he ran The Larry Storch Show, a summer supplement to Jackie Gleason’s program.
When Storch performed at Copacabana in New York, he hired Curtis (then known by his first name, Bernard Schwartz) as his assistant. Later, when Curtis became a movie star, he insisted that Stork be in many of his films, including Who Was That Lady? Storch had portrayed a Russian spy in the 1958 Broadway play-turned-film.
In 2003, the good friends collaborated again in a stage version of Some Like It Hot.
Stork was the knowledgeable Mr. Whoopee, the “man with all the answers,” on “Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales,” which aired on CBS from 1963-1966. When Tennessee (the penguin voiced by Adams) and his walrus sidekick Chumley (Bradley Bolke) couldn’t figure something out, they turned to his friendly character.
Created by the legendary Max Fleischer in 1919, the animated clown Koko was brought back in 1962 for the syndicated series Out of the Inkwell, and Storch voiced this character in dozens of TV shorts.
Storch did have a thriving voiceover career; Beginning in 1968, he played the Joker on The Batman/Superman Hour and worked on such cartoons as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and The Brady Kids.
Storch has made guest appearances on TV shows such as Gilligan’s Island, Mannix, Columbo, Phyllis, The Love Boat, CHiPs and as himself in Married…With Children, and has appeared in other films including The Great Bank Robbery (1969) – under the Directed by F-Troop producer Hy Averback – The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977) and The Silence of the Hams (1994).
He was married to actress Norma Storch, also his manager, from 1961 until her death in 2003. She had a daughter, June, with Jimmy Cross, a song-and-dance man, but she sent her 4-year-old to another couple to raise.
June Cross revisited it all when she produced the 1997 Emmy-winning documentary Secret Daughter and wrote the 2006 book Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away.
In addition to June, survivors include his daughter Candace; stepdaughter Larry May; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Storch’s brother was the late actor Jay Lawrence (Stalag 17), who once had a comedy act with Adams.