Show Business: Frog Prince

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Along the way, he married British Pixy Judy Carne, who later became Laugh-In's "Sock It to Me" girl. She apparently got a lot of preparation for taking lumps before she and Burt split in 1965: "It was a wild trip, our marriage. The hostility got so out of hand that one day I bought him a punching bag."

Nowadays Reynolds spends much of his spare time in Florida on the 160-acre ranch that his father, newly reconciled, runs for him. "I feel like the Marlboro man there," he says. But increasingly the Marlboro man is being lured back to Hollywood to woo the Perle Mesta of the Bel Air set, Dinah Shore. It all began when Dinah, 19 years his senior, had Burt on her show last summer. Oscar Levant once said he couldn't watch Dinah because he had diabetes. But, as Dinah tells it, the show she did with Burt would have been X-rated if it had run as taped. "I'm not that sweet," she says.

With Dinah and Deliverance, Reynolds hardly needs any more boosts. But his Cosmopolitan caper has given him a taste for prankish self-promotion. This fall he will appear on the cover of Esquire—in the raw again, but cropped above the waist. Burt will be looking down at himself, his mouth agape with disbelief. A headline asks: THE IMPOTENCE BOOM: HAS IT HIT YOU YET?