November 24, 1958 - International Ballroom, Beverly Hilton Hotel
"Harry Einstein---better know as "Parkyakarkus" of old-time radio fame performed that evening.
When he finished to an ovation, emcee Art Linkletter asked the audience, "Why isn't this man on TV in prime time?" The comic reached his seat and replied, "Yeah, why aren't I?" He then turned to event producer Barry Mitkin and asked, "Was everything all right?"
At that very moment, the comic was seized by a fatal heart seizure in full view of nearly twelve hundred persons in the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. "He had for a moment lurched forward," said 'Variety,' "mortally stricken with a heart attack with the crowd's applause and laughter still ringing in his ears"
Linkletter took the microphone and called out for a physician, and the stunned audience began almost hysterically shouting for doctors. Ed Wynn, seated nearby, ran to the dais, shouting, "Put his head down!" Einstein's wife, actress Thelma Leeds, rushed up from the audience and pushed nitroglycerin pills into her ashen-faced husband's mouth. Five physicians converged from all corners of the room and were at his side in seconds but could detect no pulse or respiration and, after carrying him to a narrow vestibule in back of the dais, vainly applied artificial respiration for about twenty minutes without noticeable results. In a grisly scene, City of Hope chief surgeon Alfred Goldman sliced open Einstein's chest with a pocket scalpel and with a trio of doctors took turns at massaging his heart. "Electric shocks, effected by makeshift means from a lamp's wire cord were applied directly to the heart." continued 'Variety,' "but life's spark was gone from Einstein." He was pronounced dead at 1:10AM., an hour and twenty minutes after first being stricken."
His son? Albert Brooks.