The PHYLLIS DILLER Only I Knew

THE SON OF THE GROUNDBREAKING COMEDIAN SHARES MEMORIES OF HIS REMARKABLE MOM

- LOUISE A. BARILE

For many years, Perry Diller had a standing Monday lunch date at the home of his mother, Phyllis Diller. She was an excellent cook — despite her many jokes to the contrary — but she liked to test the limits of her son’s sense of humor. “She knew that I hated anchovies,” Perry tells Closer. “She would make me a salad and under the lettuce there would be three hidden strips of anchovy. I’d say, ‘You’re such a lunatic!’ but she’d be howling!”

Anchovies aside, Perry feels blessed to have had Phyllis as a mother. The groundbreaking star, who became one of the first nationally famous female comedians, grew up in Ohio aspiring to a career in classical music. Instead, Phyllis eloped with Sherwood Diller, a pal of her brother, and became a mother of five. “My father, unfortunately, was kind of a bum,” Perry says. Sherwood suffered from agoraphobia, leading to frequent unemployment, “but he was the one who encouraged her,” Perry says. “When Milton Berle signed a million-dollar contract with a TV network, he said, ‘You could do that. You are that funny.’”

Phyllis found an additional source of strength in The Magic of Believing, a 1948 book about positive thinking by Claude M. Bristol. It changed her life: “From here on, it was straight up, all the way,” she wrote in her 2005 memoir Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse: My Life in Comedy. “Everything I’d touch would turn to gold.”