Thrice-named celebs -- from Anna Nicole Smith, John Charles Daly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Mary Tyler Moore to James Earl and Tommy Lee and Catherine Zeta Jones -- are typically compensating for too-short-or-common surnames. You don't want to be Ed Poe or Bill Williams. Edgar Allan and William Carlos are more to be reckoned with.

Case in point: Charles Nelson Reilly, the subject and object of a wonderful filming of a wonderful one-man stage show, "Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly," opening today at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers' Harris Theater, Downtown.

I never gave Reilly the time of day (my day, his heyday) in the '60s and '70s. All I knew was that he won a Tony for playing Bud Frump in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" (1962) and subsequently cashed in with campy cavorting on TV sitcoms. Reilly's huge glasses, crazy ascots and toupees, double-entendres and raucous outbursts -- famously yelling his punch lines -- struck me as condensed Soupy Sales.

But this is a guy who appeared 95 times on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" (a record second only to Bob Hope) and became the quintessential American phenomenon known as "a game-show fixture" -- before fading from view.

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'The Life of Reilly'

3 1/2 stars = Very good
Ratings explained

• Starring: Charles Nelson Reilly
• Rating: R in nature for language
• Web site: charlesnelsonreilly.com

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Sic transit show-biz gloria. The pitfall of youthful celebrity is geriatric oblivion. "A voice in my head says I'm in my twilight," Reilly whispers at the outset of his swan song. Cut to man-in-the-street interviews of people saying, "I thought he was dead!"

He's very much alive in this one-man show to rival Spaulding Gray's -- an anecdotal mass of bittersweet memories. Reilly was the Bronx-born son of an overbearing Swedish mother (whose standard command to shut the kid up was, "Save it for the stage!"). His Irish father was a gifted Paramount poster artist who turned down an offer to go into business with another illustrator and make the first color cartoons in California. ("Who wants to listen to a mouse that talks?" his mother objected.)

It was Walt Disney, of course. Reilly père had an alcoholic nervous breakdown and never recovered. Reilly fils' home life included Aunt Lilly, "whose hair smelled of honeysuckle and Lucky Strikes" -- before she underwent a botched brain operation -- and Uncle Benny, who visited dead strangers in local mortuaries nightly ("He was the only one in the family who had an active social life").

"At dinner," says Reilly, "I'd sit between my comatose father and lobotomized aunt, across from my uncle getting ready to go out to funeral homes -- everybody speaking Swedish and spitting out bones from their herring. I spent my adolescence in an Ingmar Bergman movie."

He spent his adulthood in the more lucrative medium of television: "Car 54 Where Are You?," "The Ghost & Mrs. Muir," and the endless quiz shows, such as "Match Game" and "Hollywood Squares" -- all terrible but terribly popular. (Well, OK: I loved the "Squares" -- but was strictly a Paul Lynde partisan).

"You can't do anything else once you do game shows," Reilly says. "You have no career."

But, in fact, Reilly did. He was a serious student of Uta Hagen. His classmates included Orson Bean, Harvey Korman, Frank Langella, Steve McQueen, Jason Robards, and Hal Holbrook. He was proudest of directing "The Belle of Amherst" (1976), Julie Harris' one-woman show on Emily Dickinson. He directed five Broadway plays and was nominated for three Emmys. At one point in "Life of Reilly," he breaks into a lovely Shakespearean snippet -- a fine rendition of Hamlet's "The play's the thing" speech.

Directors Barry Poltermann and Frank Anderson integrate black-and-white historical clips, fuzzy as memories should be, into the proceedings, leaving us wanting more rather than less of them. Minimal music subtly fades in and out as needed. With no better props than a paper bag and a rag doll, Reilly wanders from table to chair and back again, in telling his tales. ("The Staging is breathtaking, isn't it? Fosse would be so envious.") Frail as he is, he does everything with terrific energy and perfect comic timing. It is a moving, mesmerizing display.

Twilight, indeed. The two performances in North Hollywood at which this documentary was shot were Reilly's last. He died shortly after -- a year ago this week -- at the age of 76.

The sole explicit reference to his homosexuality comes in recounting his chilling first interview and rejection by an NBC executive: "They don't let queers on television."

A few years later, there were 56 listings of Charles Nelson Reilly appearances on network shows in one week's TV Guide.

He who laughs last makes us do the same.