NEW YORK (AP) — Some of the most promising talent in show business was on the bill one day and night in 1955 at San Francisco's Purple Onion:

Eartha Kitt and Alice Ghostley; Paul Lynde and Robert Clary; a singer and dancer with the stage name Maya Angelou, and an eccentric former housewife, a few years older than her fellow performers, with the married name Phyllis Diller.

Angelou's family, including two small children (Clyde and Joyce), were seated in the front row. Years later, she would remember watching Diller and wondering how her guests would respond to her friend's "aura of madness."

"Black people rarely forgave whites for being ragged, unkempt and uncaring. There was a saying which explained the disapproval, 'You been white all your life. Ain't got no further along than this? What ails you?'" Angelou wrote in "Singin' and Swingin' and Getting Merry Like Christmas," a memoir published in 1976.

"When Phyllis came on stage Clyde almost fell off the chair and Joyce nearly knocked over her Shirley Temple. The comedienne, dressed outrageously and guffawing like a hiccoughing horse and a bell clapper, chose to play to the two children. They were charmed and so convulsed they gasped for breath."

The housewife soon became a star.

"AH-HHAAAAAAAAAAAA-HA-HA-HA!

Diller, the cackling template for Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman and so many others, died Monday morning in her Los Angeles home at age 95. She faced the end, fittingly, "with a smile on her face," said longtime manager Milton Suchin.

Diller, who suffered a near-fatal heart attack in 1999, was found by her son, Perry Diller. The cause of her death has not been released.