 The first time I saw Joe X Price in Hollywood, he was perched atop a shoeshine stand on the parking lot outside the fabled Schwab’s Drug Store (a longtime Hollywood landmark long gone) puffing on a Cuban cigar Redd Foxx had given him for his birthday.
“Welcome to Hollyweird,” Joe said, “it's the only place I know where legends are made on somebody’s back lot.”
Leave it to the X-Man to come up with a zinger. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s always been good for a laugh or a good quote. It’s not surprising he has always been invited to Hollywood’s private parties with all the big name stars.
 Joe the X-Man knows everybody who’s anybody in Hollywood, and everybody in Hollywood knows him. For years, he covered the show biz beat at fabled Hollywood haunts and mixed and mingled with the great, the near great and the not so great at the counter in Schwab’s Drug Store on Sunset Blvd.
 Then, when the Hollywood in-crowd changed, Joe made the scene in all sorts of dives down on the strip, and at hotspots like the Whisky, Gazzari’s, Sneaky Pete’s, Filthy McNasty’s and the popular conventional Hollywood hangouts like the Cock and Bull, Musso and Frank’s Grill (the oldest restaurant in Hollywood), the Brown Derby, the Troubadour club on Santa Monica, the jazz hotspot, Shelley’s Manne Hole, or that renowned landmark Barney’s Beanery.
 Just about anywhere you went in Hollywood, you were bound to bump into Joe. I don’t know when the guy found time to sleep. While everybody else was relaxing at their pads in the Hollywood hills, Joe was out there busting his butt chasing down a lead for his column in Variety.
He beat more than one well known Hollywood gossip columnist to the punch with a hot scoop and has helped promote the careers of some of the world’s top stars, like the late John Lennon of the Beatles.
 Maybe you remember that fabled Lennon quote: “The Beatles are more famous than Jesus,” that caused all the uproar when it made the headlines all over the world. Sure, Lennon said it, more than once in fact, each time embellishing it a little bit. The truth is, John was prompted in his startling observation by Joe the X-Man when he was handling publicity at Capitol Records.
“I don’t think John thought very much about what I said at the time,” the X-Man told me, “and I was surprised when, one day, I picked up the paper and saw the quote in headlines. He took a lot of flak about it from critics in the press, but it added to the Beatles mystique and helped sell a lot of records.”
 Then there was the time Joe was hanging out at a party at the late Roger Miller’s house with a handful of notable Hollywood music pals. “Roger was just strumming around on his guitar and singing some popular favorites,” Joe recalled. “Somebody asked him to sing one of his new compositions, so Roger did. He sang several, in fact, including one song that soon had everybody’s feet tapping. But Roger didn’t think the song had much merit. He said he’d written so many other songs that he liked better, he’d almost forgotten about it. But, I knew from the first time I heard it, he had a hit record. So I kept bugging him to go into the studio and record it. One day he did. Sure ‘nuff, the song, (‘King of the Road’), became a monster hit and today is still remembered as maybe Roger’s most popular song.”
 When Bobbie Gentry was first shopping the hit song “Ode to Billy Joe” to Hollywood record labels she wasn’t having much luck. A&R guys all over town were turning thumbs down on it. Many thought it was too controversial or that it was just plain un-commercial. Everybody but Joe X Price.
Bobbie shopped the song at Capitol Records, but by-passed the A&R department and instead went directly to Joe’s office in the publicity department. He heard the song and immediately saw the potential for a hit record. One quick call “upstairs” by the X-Man did the trick.
 After Joe’s tenure at Capitol Records, he opened his own publicity and promotions firm, in a suite at Dot Records, handling press relations for singers, recording artists, musicians, actors and actresses. Among his show biz oriented clients (for a brief time) was the fabled Knickerbocker Hotel, which first opened in the 1920s, and was trying to make a legitimate comeback after its famed heyday and the eventual rumor that it was haunted by ghosts of numerous Hollywood legends.
I remember going with Joe one time to take some photos of the Knickerbocker. I wanted to see first-hand what all of the “hoop-da-do-hocus-pocus” was all about. Joe said Rudolph Valentino often hung out at the bar, during the hotel’s heyday, and legend had it his ghost came back often to his old haunt.
 Fabled magician Harry Houdini lived at the Knick. In 1926, Bess Houdini, (Harry’s wife), staged her first of many séances on the hotel’s roof on the first anniversary of her husband’s death.
Hollywood mogul D.W. Griffith also lived at the hotel, and died of a stroke standing under the large crystal chandelier in the hotel’s lobby. Frances Farmer was arrested at the hotel in 1942, and dragged half-naked by authorities from her room.
 Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio honeymooned at the hotel in 1954. (They say Marilyn’s ghost returned several times to the hotel, but the X-Man said he never saw her if she did). Elvis stayed in Suite 1016 at the hotel in 1956, while shooting the film “Love Me Tender.” Costume designer Irene jumped to death off the top of the Knickerbocker in 1962.
Partially because of these series of bizarre events, rumors in Hollywood circulated that the Knickerbocker was “cursed” and the historic hotel became a veritable fleabag. It was said to be haunted by the ghosts of numerous Hollywood legends, and its popularity quickly diminished. Finally, it was boarded up and un-used for 25 years.
 The fabled old hotel re-opened in the 90s as a nostalgic posh coffee shop-bar, but after its gala opening festivities, and a brief resurgence, management lost its lease and the facility was shut down as a Hollywood show business landmark.
It now houses a senior citizens retirement home. The famous facility has a secured main entrance. Tourists or visitors to Hollywood cannot go into the old hotel, but they can get a glimpse of the grand chandelier that once belonged to Liberace by peeping through the front door.
The last time I checked with the X-Man, there had been no more reported sightings of Valentino, Monroe, or Elvis and no one had tried to commit suicide by jumping off the roof.
 Hollywood has changed a lot since the days of Gable and Lombard. Bogie and Bacall. Lana Turner, Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe. “Yeah,” recalled Joe, “It’s a whole new ballgame today. Ted Turner owns everything now except the Hollywood Bowl and Heidi Fleiss’ trick list. Schwab’s Drug Store even closed. Didn’t surprise me. Too much competition. People were selling drugs on every street corner.”
With the new breed of stars walking down fabled Sunset Blvd. it’s often hard to know “who’s who.” Many of Hollywood’s big names often get lost in the hustle and bustle. But the tourists still flock to the fabled boulevard, gawking at anybody and everybody.
Once, when my hair was longer, in the heyday of the Beatles, I was sitting with the X-Man at one of those patio tables outside a restaurant on the strip, and a young girl came over to us and asked for my autograph and shot a picture of us.
“Look, mama!” she screamed as she ran back to the bevy of fans checking out the sites, “I just got John Lennon’s autograph.” The mother hugged her daughter and said, “See, honey, I told you we’d see some hippie rock stars on the Sunset Strip.”
Joe and I both wanted to crawl under the table.Years later, the X-man and I enjoyed a good laugh about the embarrassing incident. “Whose name did you sign, anyway?” he asked me. “My own,” I told him, “but I put a big X between my first and last name.”
Sometimes, in Hollywood, it's better to be quotable than it is to be notable. And so, while the stars come and go the X-man just keeps on zinging along.
“Sex appeal is different today than it used to be,” he once observed. “Sex appeal is 25 percent what you think you've got, 25 percent what you've got and what 50 percent what other people think you've got - less, of course, the 20 percent you have to pay your Hollywood agent.”
And what about the fabled Hollywood directors vs. the current crop of directorial dudes? “It's easy to become a film director in Hollywood today,” recalled the X-Man. “You don't even have to go to film school. The only thing required is a current membership in Alcoholics Anonymous.”
And what about the ol’ Hollywood casting couch mystique?
“Oh, they still use the casting couch today in Hollywood, but it’s not considered ‘hip’ anymore,” Joe noted. “There’s not room enough for an orgy.”
Longevity has lost its edge today in Hollywood. At least the X-Man thinks so. “If you stay in Hollywood too long,” he sez, “you become so jaded, you can’t see through the smog.”
Hollywood marriages, according to Joe, are different, today, too. “I was walking down Sunset Blvd. one day recently,” he said, “and saw a car passing by with a sign that said: ‘Just re-married.’ Times change. Today, ‘a Hollywood divorce’ means that the wife is asking for custody of the money.
“Hollywood today is the place where a guy grows up and marries the girl next door, and the girl next door to her. But, you know a happy marriage in Hollywood. It’s a marriage in which the man loves his wife more than somebody else’s.”
I was curious, so I asked the X-Man about the Hollywood divorce rate today. He swore there’s a group called Divorce Anonymous. It works this way: If a male member has the desire to get a divorce, they send over an accountant to talk him out of it.
 Through the years in Hollywood, Joe never met a stranger. He couldn’t always remember everybody’s last name but he didn’t need to. He just called people Honey or Darlin’ if he drew a blank. Zsa Zsa Gabor taught him to do that. And a few more choice things, too, I imagine, if the truth were known.
The X-Man was always too busy tracking down a good story to become notorious in Hollywood as a womanizer, like many of his other show biz cronies, though many a star often called him in the middle of the night to “cry on his shoulder,” so to speak, or beg him to do her a favor.
For as long as I can remember, Joe has always been doing favors for somebody, even me. I remember one time he was doing a number on a sexy little babe who was a cross between a young Kim Novak and a Britney Spears clone in the back room at the Jolly Roger, a coupla blocks from the Variety office. He kept telling her about this film producer-guy from Texas who was gonna be in town that weekend, and if she was cool, he’d introduce her to him.
Judging by the figure she cut in her tight sweater, I’m sure she’d heard that ol’ line “stick with me baby and I’ll make you a star” so many times it sounded like a warped record. But she just smiled at Joe, blinked her eyes and asked, “Really?”
“Yeah,” Joe lied, “The guy’s hung like a horse and loaded.” When the gal excused her pretty young self and trotted off to the little girl’s room, I asked Joe why he had done that. “So you can get laid, man,” he said, and then quickly added, “Don’t worry, Big D, it ain’t like this gal’s a virgin.”
 Then he spotted a well-known actress talking to the late Variety film columnist Jim Harwood at the bar. “That broad over there won an Oscar one time.” Joe said. “You know why all those washed up old dames wanna win a Oscar don’t you?” he asked me. “It’s about the only way they can get a little naked man to go home with them to their bedroom.”
Joe has always been a practical joker, but I’ve never known him to insult anybody. He just has a bizarre sense of humor and can sometimes get a little carried away. Like the time he set me up for a date with the late actress Deborah Walley, who played “Gidget” in the popular TV series.
“Be sure and wear a tux,” he told me. “If you don’t have a tux, rent one. This babe loves to get all dolled up and make a big impression.”
 So I showed up at Gidget’s front door at the appropriate time, and she greeted me in a UCLA sweatshirt and not much else. The sweatshirt was covered with paint and so was her face. I was stunned.
“I thought we were going to dinner,” I told her. “Joe said you liked to paint the town.” She looked at me and grinned. “I do,” she said, “but tonight we’re gonna paint my kitchen. And then we’ll eat.”
She handed me a paint bucket and told me to get out of the tux. So there I was in my shorts and Monkees t-shirt trying to be cool. Before my paint brush ever touched the wall, the door bell rang. It was Joe.
“Somebody order a pizza?” he asked. Leave it to the X-Man to get the last laugh.
Then there was the time that Joe threw a press party to kick off his new Joe X Price A&R report. He rented this plush bungalow suite in one of Hollywood’s most exclusive landmarks located on the Sunset Strip.
I showed up expecting to be greeted by a sexy young starlet in a dazzling evening gown. Instead, there was Joe and a handful of his buddies, sitting on the floor, drinking beer and munching on hotdogs from Ben Franks. Joe pitched me a can of cold beer and a stapler and told me to get to work.
Everybody there was busy assembling print-out pages for Joe’s premiere edition of his soon to be fabled A&R Report. Some of Joe’s guests were busy addressing envelopes; others were licking stamps and playfully sticking them on Joe’s mug shot on the newsletter’s front page.
“Hurry up you guys, we‘ve got a deadline to meet,” Joe said. “After we make the mail run to the airport, we’re coming back here and clean up this mess.” So much for the so-called press party.
One time I showed up in Hollywood before Super Bowl week and surprised the X-Man. What a weird trip that turned out to be. This hot shot Texas promoter had dreamed up an idea for a Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl record, and hired me to go to Hollywood with the product and get it played on the radio.
That would have been fine, except the Cowboys lost their playoff game and the Los Angeles Rams became the Super Bowl team. Which meant the promoter had to re-write the song and go back into the studio and redo the damned thing. So at the last minute, I was headed for Hollywood and another unique adventure with the X-Man.
 I’m convinced that nobody but the X-Man could have pulled it off. He called his friend, Georgia Frontiere, who owned the Rams at the time, and told her that he had cooked up this great promo idea for the Rams and was sending over a copy of a disc for her to hear.
In a coupla hours, she was on the phone with Joe, telling him she had played the thing for quarterback Vince Ferragamo and the players and they thought it was a super idea for the Super Bowl hype. But we were running out of time. We still had to get the records pressed and distributed to the area radio stations.
Leave it to Joe to come up with the solution. Before the end of the work day he had rounded up a bevy of beauties from the Hollywood actors’ extras pool and guaranteed them free tickets to the Super Bowl. In no time at all, his office began to look like Grand Central Station.
Busty young Gollywood starlets in halter tops and short shorts began manning the X-Man’s phones, calling radio stations and telling Dj’s they had heard about this Rams Super Bowl record and asked them if they were gonna play it. Hell, the pressing plant hadn’t even delivered the records to us and the X-Man
already had his bimbos plugging it.
Then they showed up at all the radio stations in those skimpy outfits with “freebie 45’s” and it was a matter of time before “Rams Royal Flush” became a hot commodity. The afternoon bimbos came into Joe’s office and started bugging the stations on the phones, wanting to hear the record, and the rest, as they say, is history. Or at least we thought it was.
 “Rams Royal Flush,” thanks to the X-Man, was such a big hit, Georgia decided to throw a little party and play the record for all the team’s players and stockholders. The Rams, as it turned out, celebrated so much, they got their butts beat in the Super Bowl, but the team got a lot of publicity thanks to the X-Man, and nobody seemed to care too much.
In fact, Georgia threw another party and the X-Man was the guest of honor, telling funny stories with dirty innuendos and doing his best Joe E. Lewis imitation.
Like: “I think conventional sex is boring. I used to enjoy it when I did it doggie style. It was the only way we could watch TV and get it on at the same time.”
After the applause, another Joe E. Lewis zinger: “It’s been so long since I’ve had sex, I can’t remember which end of the bed the handcuffs are under.”
Or this one, which brought down the house: “Now-a-days, I always practice safe sex. I don’t do it on the balcony no more,” he deadpanned, “Or on the railroad tracks if I hear a train coming.”
I told Joe he had missed his calling. He should have been a stand-up comedian. “Oh, I tried telling a few jokes, introducing a young comic one time at a comedy club on Sunset,” he told me, “but nobody much laughed at anything. Except my necktie.”
I asked how long he had been in Hollywood. “I don’t really remember,” he said. “ It seems like forever. I’ve been around so long, I knew Shirley MacLaine when she was a cocker spaniel.” Now that’s a line, man, that would have gotten a laugh at the Comedy Store.
Maybe he bombed at the comedy club, but Joe the X-Man is still one of the funniest guys on the planet as far as I’m concerned. He cracks me up every time he tells a crazy story.
One time Joe told me this story about Dorothy Parker, who often partied with her screenwriter pals in Hollywood’s heyday at the famous Garden of Allah and at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City where she shared a tiny little office with a well-known gentleman. I remembered the occasion well and also Dorothy’s punch line.
“If it had been an inch smaller,” I quoted her, “it would have been adultery.” And Joe, bless him, said to me, “Baloney, if it had been an inch smaller, it would have been a crime.”
One thing about the X-Man, no one ever accused him of being shy. During one of his first interviews, Joe questioned a girl about her kinky sex life. Kidding, he asked her if she had ever had sex with a donkey. The girl looked at him for a coupla minutes, then burst out laughing. “Why,” she asked, “Do you have one?”
  Some guy took a wild swing at Joe one night in a bar after he had had one too many to drink. “They told me this was a swinging place,” the X-Man jibed, “but I thought they were kidding.” Then he laughed and bought the guy another drink. It turned out to be Frank Sinatra. They became great pals.
Joe has always been the life of the Hollywood in-crowd party. He often showed up dressed like Groucho Marx in funny fake spectacles and mustache. As long as I’ve known him, he never has had much patience for drug abuse. One time at a trendy Hollywood bash, this bimbo, who looked a lot like Courtney Love, got a little stoned and started talking up a blue streak. Joe told her to shut up and to cool it with the drugs.
“And don’t pull a Tallulah (Bankhead) on me and say it’s okay, they’re not addictive and you should know ‘cause you’ve been taking them for 16 years,” he explained. “The only thing you’ve been taking for 16 years is birth control pills.”
I always thought the Tallulah antidote was funny, particularly since the X-Man had once written a stinging blurb in his column in which he called her “Tallulah Brickhead.”
One time at the Hollywood Press Club’s annual Christmas party, a zany redhead was making a fool out of herself showing off a gaudy diamond ring. It was so ludicrous, even Carol Channing would have blushed. “I can’t wait to show this rock to Zsa Zsa Gabor,” she remarked loudly. “She’ll love it.” Not to be upstaged, the X-Man observed wryly, “The only diamond Zsa Zsa doesn’t like is a baseball diamond.”
Then there was the time a busty blonde Dolly Parton look-alike walked up to the X-Man at a party after the Academy Awards and asked him to dance. “Not tonight, darling,” he quipped, “tonight I have writer’s cramps.”
 Most movie moguls had quite a reputation as booze hounds, but Redd Foxx told me one time Joe could out drink anybody in Hollywood. Unless maybe it was Errol Flynn or Dean Martin.
“I once seen ol’ Joe grab two bottles off the bar before Dino ever found an empty shot glass.” Redd said. “One time him and Martin were raising hell and Dino told the bartender to get him six shot glasses, fill ‘em up and put ‘em on the bar. Then Dean went over to talk to this girl with big boobs and asked her if he could warm his nose. It was a cold night.
 “Meanwhile, one of Joe’s cronies unzipped his fly behind the bar. In a minute or two Dino’s shot glasses were full and lined up on the bar. Dino came back over to Joe, dragging the chesty young thing with him and proceeded to throw them down the hatch, one after another. Joe was over in the corner laughing and Dino was never the wiser.”
Rumor had it that the X-man was the inspiration for that famous Mae West line: “Is that a gun that you have in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?” But Mae was a Hollywood legend way before the X-Man’s time.
That story probably started making the rounds because, for awhile in Hollywood, it was a well known fact that if you wanted to become a big star in “tinsel town,” you had to know one of the “Big Three.” At that time it was Sinatra, Milton Berle and the X-Man. (You can draw your own conclusion about being dubbed “The Big Three.” It had nothing to do with the size of their income or the size of their feet).
Everybody, it seems, in Hollywood has the answer about how Joe got the famous X initial in his name. Some said Sinatra gave it to him, because he thought a guy named Joe Price ought to have a middle initial like Cecil B. DeMille. Some said he came by the famous initial after writing a notorious X-rated screenplay for a famous Hollywood producer.
The truth is, Joe borrowed the X initial from his father, Philip Price, who enjoyed wearing shirts monogrammed “PP,” until folks starting repeating the initials and teasing him. Joe said his father decided to insert an X between the two P’s to put a stop to all the nonsense. And, so, when Joe left Chicago and came to Hollywood, he “borrowed” the X from his father and brought it with him.
 When he went to work for Variety, and first began writing his column, he used the by-line Joe X Price. And so the legend of the X-Man began. Regardless of personal likes or dislikes, Joe kept the X in his name (without the period). He liked it so much, in fact, he even put it on his personalized automobile license plates. It was also on the cover of the book he wrote about Redd Foxx. The book was titled “Redd Foxx, B.S.” (The B.S. Joe always contended stood for Before Sanford).
Joe’s busy at the moment cranking out another best-seller. He sez it’s a “send up” on “The Vagina Monalogues,” whatever that means. I asked him what he was gonna name it. Joe thought about it a minute and said: “You Don’t Know Dick.” And then he added real quick, “It ain’t dirty, it’s funny.” Yeah, uhuh.
Oh, well, that’s show biz, baby.
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