Fred Allen
Fred Allen circa 1940
Birth name	John Florence Sullivan
Born	(1894-05-31)May 31, 1894 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Died	March 17, 1956(1956-03-17) (aged 61) New York City, New York
Show	The Fred Allen Show
Network	CBS, NBC
Style	Comedian
Country	United States

Fred Allen (born John Florence Sullivan, May 31, 1894 – March 17, 1956) was an American comedian whose absurdist, topically pointed radio show (1932–1949) made him one of the most popular and forward-looking humorists in the so-called classic era of American radio.^[1][2]

His best-remembered gag was his long-running mock feud with friend and fellow comedian Jack Benny, but it was only part of his appeal; radio historian John Dunning (in On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio) wrote that Allen was radio's most admired comedian and most frequently censored. A master ad libber, Allen often tangled with his network's executives (and often barbed them on the air over the battles), while developing routines the style and substance of which influenced contemporaries and futures among comic talents, including Groucho Marx, Stan Freberg, Henry Morgan and Johnny Carson, but his fans also included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and novelists William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Herman Wouk (who began his career writing for Allen).

Fred Allen was honored with stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for contributions to television and radio.^[3]

Childhood[link]

Born as John Florence Sullivan in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Irish Catholic parents, Allen barely knew his mother, Cecilia Herlihy Sullivan, who died of pneumonia when he was not quite three years old. His father, James Henry Sullivan, and his infant brother, Robert, were taken in by one of his mother's sisters, "my Aunt Lizzie", around whom he focused the first chapter of his second memoir, Much Ado About Me. The father was so shattered by the mother's death that, according to his son, he drank more heavily. His aunt suffered as well: her husband Michael was partially paralyzed by lead poisoning shortly after they married, leaving him mostly unable to work, something Allen remembered as causing contention among Lizzie's sisters. Eventually, Allen's father remarried and offered his sons the choice between coming with him and his new wife or staying with Aunt Lizzie. Allen's younger brother chose to go with their father, but Allen decided to stay with his aunt. "I never regretted it," he wrote.

Vaudeville[link]

Allen took piano lessons as a boy, his father having brought an Emerson upright along when they moved in with his aunt. He learned exactly two songs – "Hiawatha" and "Pitter, Patter, Little Raindrops" – and would be asked to play "half or all my repertoire" when visitors came to the house. He also worked at the Boston Public Library, where he discovered a book about the origin and development of comedy. Enduring various upheavals at home (other aunts came and went, prompting several moves), Allen also took up juggling while learning as much as possible about comedy.

Some library co-workers planned to put on a show and asked him to do a bit of juggling and some of his comedy. When a girl in the crowd told him, "You're crazy to keep working here at the library; you ought to go on stage," Allen decided his career path was set.

Fred Allen (right) with dummy, circa 1916.

He took a later job in 1914 at the age of 20 with a local piano company, added to his library work, and appeared at a number of amateur night competitions, soon taking the stage name Fred St. James and booking with the local vaudeville circuit at $30 a week, enough at that time to allow him to quit his jobs with the library and the piano company. Often billing himself as the world's worst juggler, Allen refined and advanced the mix of his clumsy juggling and the comic routines such as standard jokes and one- liners with humor directed at his own poor juggling abilities. He toured the world in a decade worth of vaudeville work during which a billing mixup provided the stage name change that stayed with him the rest of his life. His agent was named Edgar Allen, from whom he eventually borrowed the last name to become Fred Allen.

While performing in vaudeville, Allen commissioned comic-strip artist Martin Branner to cover a theatre curtain with an elaborate mural painting depicting a cemetery with a punchline on each gravestone. This was the cemetery where old jokes go to die. In Allen's act, the audiences would see the curtain (and have at least a minute to read its punchlines) before Allen made his entrance. Audiences often would be laughing at the curtain before Allen even appeared. Robert Taylor's biography of Allen includes an impressive full-length photo of Branner's curtain painting, and many of the punchlines are clearly legible in the photo.

Allen's wit was at times not intended for the vaudeville audience but rather for other professionals in show business. After one of his appearances failed one day, Allen made the best of it by circulating an obituary of his act on black-bordered funeral stationery.

In 1921 Fred Allen and Nora Bayes toured with the company of Lew Fields. Their musical director was a nineteen-year-old Richard Rodgers. Many years later, when he and Oscar Hammerstein II appeared as mystery guests on What's My Line?, Rodgers recalled Allen's act, sitting on the edge of the stage, his legs dangling down, playing a banjo while telling jokes.

Broadway[link]

Allen gave vaudeville itself a timeline of 1875–1925 in Much Ado About Me, but he actually left vaudeville a few years earlier, moving to work in such Shubert Brothers stage productions as The Passing Show in 1922. The show played well in its runup to Broadway but lasted only ten weeks at the Winter Garden Theatre. Allen did, however, take something far more lasting from the show: one of the show's chorus girls, Portland Hoffa, who became his wife in 1927.

He also took good notices for his comic work in several of the productions, particularly Vogues and Greenwich Village Follies, and continued to develop his comic writing, even writing a column for Variety called "Near Fun." A salary dispute ended the column: Allen wanted only $60 a week to give up his theater work to become a full-time columnist, but his editor tried a sleight-of-hand based on the paper's ad rates to deny him. He spent his summer in Boston, honed his comic and writing skills even further, worked in a respectfully received duo that billed themselves as Fink and Smith, and played a few of the dying vaudeville houses.

He returned to New York to the pleasant surprise that Portland Hoffa was taking instruction to convert to Roman Catholicism. After the couple married, Allen began writing material for them to use together ("With a vaudeville act, Portland and I could be together, even if we couldn't find any work"), and the couple divided their time between the show business circuit, Allen's New England family home and Old Orchard Beach, Maine, in summers.^[1]

Radio[link]

Fred Allen's first taste of radio came while he and Portland Hoffa waited for a promised slot in a new Arthur Hammerstein musical. In the interim, they appeared on a Chicago station's program, WLS Showboat, into which, Allen recalled, "Portland and I were presented... to inject a little class into it." Their success in these appearances helped their theater reception; live audiences in the Midwest liked to see their radio favorites in person, even if Allen and Hoffa would be replaced by Bob Hope when the radio show moved to New York several months afterward.

Allen playing the tuba, date unknown.

The couple eventually got their Hammerstein show, Polly, which opened in Delaware and made the usual tour before hitting Broadway. Also in that cast was a young Englishman named Archie Leach, who received as many good notices for his romantic appeal as Allen got for his comic work. Hammerstein retooled the show before bringing it to New York, replacing everyone but two women and Allen. Leach decided to buy an old car and drive to Hollywood. "What Archie Leach didn't tell me," Allen remembered, "was that he was going to change his name to Cary Grant."

Polly never succeeded in spite of several retoolings, but Allen did go on to successful shows like The Little Show (1929–30) and Three's a Crowd (1930–31), which eventually led to his full-time entry to radio in 1932.

[edit] Town Hall Tonight

Allen first hosted The Linit Bath Club Revue on CBS, moving the show to NBC and becoming The Salad Bowl Revue (in a nod to new sponsor Hellmann's Mayonnaise, which was marketed by the parent company of Linit) later in the year. The show became The Sal Hepatica Revue (1933–34), The Hour of Smiles (1934–35), and finally Town Hall Tonight (1935–39). In 1939–40, however, sponsor Bristol-Myers, which advertised Ipana toothpaste as well as Sal Hepatica during the program, altered the title to The Fred Allen Show, over his objections. Allen's perfectionism (odd to some, considering his deft ad-libs) caused him to leap from sponsor to sponsor until Town Hall Tonight allowed him to set his chosen small-town milieu and establish himself as a bona fide radio star.

Publicity photo for the premiere of Texaco Star Theater, 1940.

The hour-long show featured segments that would influence radio and, much later, television; news satires such as Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In's "Laugh-In Looks at the News" and Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" were influenced by Town Hall Tonight's "The News Reel", later renamed "Town Hall News" (and in 1939–40, as a sop to his sponsor, "Ipana News"). The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson's "Mighty Carson Art Players" routines referenced Allen's Mighty Allen Art Players, in name and sometimes in routines. Allen and company also satirized popular musical comedies and films of the day, including and especially Oklahoma!. Allen also did semi-satirical interpretations of well-known lives – including his own.

The show that became Town Hall Tonight was the longest-running hour-long comedy-based show in classic radio history. In 1940, Allen moved back to CBS Radio with a new sponsor and show name, Texaco Star Theater airing every Wednesday at 9:00 pm ET on CBS, then Sundays at 9:00 pm in the fall of 1941. By 1942, he shortened the show to half an hour, at 9:30 pm ET – under network and sponsor edict, not his own. He also chafed under being forced to give up a Town Hall Tonight signature, using barely known and amateur guests effectively, in favor of booking more recognizable guests, though he liked many of those. Guests included singers from Kingston, New York, the original woman behind the "Aunt Jemima" on syrup bottles, and more guests up the road - from Saugerties, like the singer, Donald Gardner.

Back to NBC[link]

He took over a year off due to hypertension and returned in 1945 with The Fred Allen Show on NBC, Sunday nights at 8:30 p.m. EST. Standard Brands' Blue Bonnet Margarine & Tenderleaf Tea, and later, Ford Motor Company, were the sponsors for the rest of the show's life. (Texaco revived Texaco Star Theater in 1948 on radio, and more successfully on television, making an American icon out of star Milton Berle).

Allen again made a few changes, including the singing DeMarco Sisters, to whom he'd been tipped by arranger-composer Gordon Jenkins. "We did four years with Mr. Allen and got one thousand dollars a week," Gloria DeMarco remembered. "Sunday night was the best night on radio." Sunday night with Fred Allen seemed incomplete on any night listeners didn't hear the DeMarco Sisters – whose breezy, harmonious style became as familiar as their cheerfully sung "Mr. Al-len, Mr. Alll-llennnn" in the show's opening theme. During the theme's brief pause, Allen would say something like, "It isn't the mayor of Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga, kiddies."^[4] That device became a signature for three of the four years.

Allen's Alley[link]

The other change, born in the Texaco days and evolving from his earlier news spoofs, proved his most enduring, premiering December 6, 1942. The inspiration for the mythical Main Street of "Allen's Alley" came from the small-town heartland folks who were often profiled in the newspaper columns written by O. O. McIntyre (1884–1938), one of the most popular columnists of the 1930s with some seven million readers.^[5]

"Allen's Alley" followed a brief Allen monologue and comic segment with Portland Hoffa ("Misssss-ter Allll-llennnn!"), usually involving gags about her family which she instigated. Then a brief music interlude would symbolize the two making their way to the fictitious Alley.

The segment was always launched by a quick exchange that began with Hoffa asking Allen what he would ask the Alley denizens that week. After she implored him, "Shall we go?" Allen would reply with cracks like, "As the two drumsticks said when they spotted the tympani, 'let's beat it!'"; or "As one strapless gown said to the other strapless gown, 'What's holding us up?'"

A small host of stereotypical characters greeted Allen and Hoffa down the Alley, discussing Allen's question of the week, usually drawing on news items or popular happenings around town, whether gas rationing, traffic congestion, the Pulitzer Prizes, postwar holiday travel, or the annual Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus visit.

The Alley went through a few changes in the first installments. Early denizens included sarcastic John Doe (John Brown), self-possessed Senator Bloat and town drunk Sampson Souse (Jack Smart), dimwitted Socrates Mulligan (Charlie Cantor), pompous poet Falstaff Openshaw (Alan Reed), and wry Jewish housewife Pansy Nussbaum (Minerva Pious). By 1945, Pious and Reed were joined by two new Alley denizens: Parker Fennelly as stoic New England farmer Titus Moody, and Kenny Delmar, the new show's announcer, as bellowing Southern senator Beauregard Claghorn. Pious is credited with tipping Allen to Delmar, who based the character on a real-life person he had encountered while hitchhiking in 1928. Within weeks, Claghorn became one of the leading comedy characters of radio as listeners across the country began quoting his catchphrases: "Somebody, Ah say, somebody knocked"; "I'm from the South, Suh"; "That's a joke, son"; and "Pay attention, boy!" Claghorn served as the model for the Warner Bros. cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn, who first appeared the following August in the Oscar-nominated Walky Talky Hawky.

Other characters had catchphrases that were almost as famous as Claghorn's, such as Titus Moody's "Howdy, Bub", and Falstaff Openshaw's "That is precisely why I am here." Mrs. Nussbaum always greeted Allen by saying, "You were expecting maybe...", and then she would mispronounce the name of a glamorous film star. The Alley sketches made only one further cast change, when Peter Donald's chipper Irishman Ajax Cassidy succeeded Reed's Falstaff.

The show was popular enough for Ford Motor Company to feature it in a Life magazine ad in April 1948.

Despite the ethnic diversity, the Alley characters seemed less citified and more akin with O. O. McIntyre's small-town America. Allen's topical humor is sometimes thought an acquired taste for audiences curious about his generation of radio stars; Dunning has written that when he "went into topical humour, he may have forfeited his only opportunity to be the Mark Twain of his century. He had flashes of undeniable brilliance. But the main body of his work deals with the day-to-day fodder of another time, and sons have seldom been amused by the embarrassments or tragedies of their fathers."

But others find many parallels to today's world and its absurdities. The "Allen's Alley" stereotypes make some cringe, as Allen biographer Robert Taylor noted (in Fred Allen: His Life and Wit), but others find them lancing more than lauding stereotypes, letting listeners make up their own minds about how foolish they could be. "Interestingly enough," wrote Frank Buxton and Bill Owen in The Big Broadcast 1920-1950, "[Claghorn, Nussbaum, Moody, and Cassidy] were never criticized as being anti-Southern, anti-Semitic, anti-New England or anti-Irish. The warmth and good humor with which they were presented made them acceptable even to the most sensitive listeners."

Allen employed a writing staff but they served as his sounding boards and early draft consultants as much as actual writers; it was Allen who had the final edit and rewrite of each week's script, working as long as twelve hours a day in his own right on ideas or sketches. His ad-libbing ability caused many a show to fade away behind the ending network identification, because Allen often ate up air time. It was not as unusual for him as for others to sign off with "We're a little late, so good night, folks." Buxton and Owen believed the Allen show needed it more than anyone else of his era.

Allen also "died" more eloquently than other radio comics, particularly in the later years. When a joke was greeted with an awkward silence, Allen would comment on the lack of response, with his ad-libbed "explanation" almost always funnier than the original joke.

Closing the Alley[link]

Allen's Alley was radio's top-rated show of the 1946-47 season. Allen was able to negotiate a lucrative new contract as a result not only of the show's success, but thanks in large measure to NBC's anxiety to keep more of its stars from joining Jack Benny in a wholesale defection to CBS. The CBS talent raids broke up NBC's hit Sunday night, and Benny also convinced George Burns and Gracie Allen and Bing Crosby to join his move.^[6]

But a year later, he was knocked off his perch, not by a talent raid but by a show on a third rival network, ABC (the former NBC Blue network). The quiz show, Stop the Music, hosted by Bert Parks, required listeners to participate live, by telephone. The show became a big enough hit to break into Allen's grip on that Sunday night time slot. At first, Allen fought fire with his own kind of fire: he offered $5,000 to any listener getting a call from Stop the Music or any similar game show while listening to The Fred Allen Show.^[7] He never had to pay up, nor was he shy about lampooning the game show phenomenon (especially a riotous parody of another quiz show Parks hosted, lancing Break the Bank in a routine called "Break the Contestant" in which players didn't receive a thing but were compelled to give up possessions when they blew a question.)

Unfortunately, Allen fell to number 38 in the ratings, as television began its rise as well. By this time, he had changed the show again somewhat, changing the famed "Allen's Alley" skits to take place on "Main Street," and rotating a new character or two in and out of the lineup. He stepped down from radio again in 1949, at the end of his show's regular season, as much under his doctor's orders as because of his slipping ratings. He decided to take a year off, but it did more for his health (he suffered from hypertension) than his career; after the June 26, 1949 show, on which Henry Morgan and Jack Benny guested, Fred Allen never hosted another radio show full time again.

The Feud[link]

Good friends in real life, Fred Allen and Jack Benny inadvertently hatched a running gag in 1937, when a child prodigy, violinist Stuart Canin, gave a very credible performance on the Allen show, inspiring an Allen wisecrack about "a certain alleged violinist," who should hide in shame over his poor playing. Allen often mentioned his show-business friends on the air ("Mr. Jacob Haley of Newton Highlands, Massachusetts" was Allen's way of saying hello to his pal Jack Haley), and on the Canin broadcast Allen knew Benny would be listening. Benny, according to Allen biographer Taylor, burst out laughing, then responded in kind on his own program. And they were off and running, going at it for over a decade and doing it well enough to convince some if not many fans of both shows that the two comedians really were blood enemies.

The Allen-Benny feud was the longest-playing, best-remembered dialogic running gag in classic radio history.^[8] The gag even pushed toward a boxing match between the two comedians and the promised event was a sellout. It also never happened, really. The pair even appeared together in films, including Love Thy Neighbor (1940) and It's in the Bag! (1945), Allen's only starring vehicle, also featuring William Bendix, Robert Benchley, and Jerry Colonna. He also starred with Oscar Levant in O'Henry's Full House, starring in the story "The Ransom of Red Chief."

Some of the feud's highlights involved Al Boasberg, who is credited with helping Benny refine his character into (arguably) America's first stand-up comedian. Boasberg was well known behind the scenes as a top comedy writer, but he seldom received recognition in public. He worked, uncredited, on many films (including the Marx Brothers' hit A Night at the Opera). Steaming mad because of his long battles for recognition, Boasberg was said to have delivered a tirade that ended up (in slightly altered form) in an Allen-Benny feud routine:

Allen: Why you fugitive from a Ripley cartoon ... I'll knock you flatter than the first eight minutes of this program.

Benny: You ought to do well in pictures, Mr. Allen, now that Boris Karloff is back in England.

Allen: Why, if I was a horse, a pony even, and found out that any part of my tail was used in your violin bow, I'd hang my head in my oatbag from then on.

Benny's side of the feud included a tart interpretation of Allen's Town Hall Tonight show, which Benny and company called "Clown Hall Tonight." A signature element of the feud was that, whenever one guested on the other's shows, the host was liable to hand the guest the best lines of the night. (Both Benny and Allen revealed later that each man's writers consulted with each other on routines involving the feud.)

They toned the gag down after 1941, though they kept it going often enough as the years continued, climaxing on Allen's May 26, 1946 show, in which a sketch called "King for a Day," satirizing big-money game shows, featured Benny pretending to be a contestant named Myron Proudfoot on Allen's new quiz show.

Allen: Tomorrow night, in your ermine robe, you will be whisked by bicycle to Orange, New Jersey, where you will be the judge in a chicken-cleaning contest.

Benny (rapturously): I'm KING for a Day!

[Allen proceeds to have Benny's clothes pressed:]

Allen: And that's not all!

Benny: There's more?

Allen: Yes! On our stage we have a Hoffman pressing machine.

Benny: Now wait a minute! Wait a minute!

Allen: An expert operating the Hoffman pressing machine will press your trousers in seconds.

Benny: NOW WAIT A MINUTE!!! (total audience hysteria laughter, as Benny's pants are literally removed).

Allen: Quiet, King!

Benny: Come on, Allen, give me my pants!

Allen: Keep your shirt on, King.

Benny: You bet I'll keep my shirt on!

Allen: We're a little late, folks! Tune in next week---

Benny: Allen, this is a frame--- (starts laughing himself) Where are my pants!

Allen: Benny, for 15 years I've been waiting to catch you like this!

Benny: Allen, you haven't seen the end of me!

Allen: It won't be long now!

Benny: I want my pants!

Allen and Benny couldn't resist one more play on the feud on Allen's final show. Benny appeared as a skinflint bank manager and mortgage company owner bedeviling Henry Morgan. Typically, Allen handed Benny the show's best crack: "Listen, I was never this cheap on my own program!"

Benny even used the feud on his TV show, which depicted Benny and Allen as rivals for the sponsor's favors. When the sponsor pointed out that Benny was also a musician, Allen countered with a passage on his clarinet.

As Benny said in his co-memoir, Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story (1990; his daughter, Joan, added her own recollections and published the book after her father's death), [T]he sky was the limit. Or rather, the mud was the limit."

Censorship[link]

Allen may have battled censors more than most of his radio contemporaries. "Fred Allen's fourteen-year battle with radio censorship," wrote the New York Herald-Tribune critic John Crosby, "was made particularly difficult for him by the fact that the man assigned to reviewing his scripts had little sense of humor and frankly admitted he didn't understand Allen's peculiar brand of humor at all." Among the blue pencils, according to Crosby, were:

• Allen was barred from saying "Brenda never looked lovelier", at the time of socialite Brenda Frazier's wedding, unless he could get direct permission from the Frazier family itself.

• Allen was ordered to change the Cockney accent he assigned the character of a first mate aboard the Queen Mary — on the grounds that the ship's first mate could only be a cultured man who might not like a Cockney accent.

• Allen actually had to fight to keep Mrs. Nussbaum in the Allen's Alley routines – because NBC feared Jewish-dialect humour "might offend all Jews", never mind that Jewish dialect humour had been a vaudeville and burlesque staple for years.

• Allen was ordered not to even mention the fictitious town of North Wrinkle until or unless it could be proven that no such town actually did exist. (It didn't.)

"Allen not only couldn't poke fun at individuals", Crosby wrote, "he also had to be careful not to step on their professions, their beliefs, and sometimes even their hobbies and amusements. Portland Hoffa was once given a line about wasting an afternoon at the rodeo. NBC objected to the implication that an afternoon at the rodeo was wasted and the line had to be changed. Another time, Allen gagged that a girl could have found a better husband in a cemetery. (The censor) thought this might hurt the feelings of people who own and operate cemeteries. Allen got the line cleared only after pointing out that cemeteries have been topics for comedy since the time of Aristophanes."

Life after the Alley[link]

After his own show ended, Allen became a regular attraction on NBC's The Big Show (1950–1952), hosted by Tallulah Bankhead. He appeared on 24 of the show's 57 installments, including the landmark premiere, and showed he had not lost his trademark ad-lib skill or his rapier wit. (The show's head writer, Goodman Ace, later told radio host Richard Lamparski that Allen's lucrative NBC contract was a large factor in getting him on the show, though Allen also wrote the segments on which he appeared and consulted with the respected Ace and staff on other portions of the show.)

In some ways, The Big Show was an offspring of the old Allen show: his one-time Texaco Star Theater announcer, Jimmy Wallington, was one of The Big Show's announcers, and Portland Hoffa made several appearances with him as well. On the show's premiere, in fact, Allen – with a little prodding from head writer Goodman Ace – could not resist one more play on the old Allen-Benny "feud," a riotous parody of Benny's show called "The Pinch Penny Program."

Television[link]

It was also on The Big Show's premiere that Allen delivered perhaps his best-remembered crack about television: "You know, television is called a new medium, and I have discovered why they call it a Medium – because it is neither Rare nor Well Done." That did not stop the Museum of Broadcast Communications from considering Allen "the intellectual conscience of television." Aside from his famous crack about not liking furniture that talked, Allen observed that television allowed "people who haven't anything to do to watch people who can't do anything."

Allen tried three short-lived television projects of his own, including a bid to bring "Allen's Alley" to television in a visual setting similar to Our Town. NBC apparently rejected the idea out of hand. "Television is a triumph of equipment over people," Allen observed after that, "and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in the navel of a flea and still have enough room beside them for the heart of a network vice president." His other two TV tries were quiz shows. Judge for Yourself (subtitled "The Fred Allen Show) was a game show incorporating musical acts. The idea was to allow Allen to ad-lib with guests à la Groucho Marx, but the complicated format had to be revamped in the middle of the run. (The star was "lost in the confusion of a half hour filled with too many people and too much activity," wrote Alan Havig.)^[9]

A comedy series, Fred Allen's Sketchbook, did not catch on.

Allen finally held down a two-year stint as a panelist on the CBS quiz show What's My Line? from 1954 until his death in 1956 (March 17, 1956). Allen actually appeared as a Mystery Guest on What's My Line? on July 17, 1955, when he was taking a week off from the show to have an emergency appendectomy. Afterwards he joked about the operation: "It was an emergency. The doctor needed some money hurriedly."

Allen also spent his final years as a newspaper columnist/humorist and as a memoirist, renting a small New York office to work six hours a day without distractions. He wrote Treadmill to Oblivion (1954, reviewing his radio and television years) and Much Ado About Me (1956, covering his childhood and his vaudeville and Broadway years, and detailing especially vaudeville at its height with surprising objectivity); the former – which included many of his vintage radio scripts – was the best-selling book on radio's classic period for many years.

Death[link]

The headstone of Fred Allen in Gate of Heaven Cemetery

Taking one of his regular late night strolls up New York's West 57th Street Saturday night March 17, 1956 he suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 61.^[10] A popular myth repeated for many years, first published in the New York Times story which appeared the next day reporting on his death, was that he had died while walking his dog. However, his biographer Robert Taylor later revealed that Allen had never owned a dog. Allen died before he could complete the final chapter of his memoirs, and as a result the book was published as he had left it. A tireless letter writer, his letters were edited by his wife into the publication of Fred Allen's Letters in 1965.

During the following night's regular Sunday broadcast of What's My Line? at 10:30PM, barely 24-hours following Allen's death, host John Daly preceded the program with a special message to the viewing audience.^[11] He stated that earlier in the day the producers had considered replacing the regular game play with a special memorial episode, but Allen's wife Portland Hoffa stated that she preferred the show be conducted as it always had been, indicating that this is what Allen would have wanted. The program then proceeded as normal, but with a noticeably subdued tone. Steve Allen took Fred's chair on the panel. During the final ninety seconds of the program he, along with Arlene Francis and Bennett Cerf (whose eyes began to water) gave brief but heartfelt tributes to Fred.^[12] A somber Dorothy Kilgallen thanked Steve Allen for stepping in and helping them to carry on at a difficult moment. He is buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York. Both his real and stage name are engraved on the headstone.

Allen has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: a radio star at 6709½ Hollywood Blvd. and a TV star at 7021 Hollywood Blvd. His widow, Portland Hoffa, married bandleader Joe Rimes in 1959 and celebrated a second silver wedding anniversary well before her own death of natural causes in Los Angeles on Christmas Day 1990. Fred Allen was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1988. A pedestrian passageway in Boston's Theatre District, designated "Allen's Alley", also honors his memory.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Fred Allen

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Fred Allen

Cultural legacy[link]

Allen was an influence on the writing and comedic timing of satirist Stan Freberg.

Tex Avery's cartoon Thugs with Dirty Mugs features the main character addressing the audience and showing them his Fred Allen impersonation in one scene. The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos features a Fred Allen fox screaming about being misinformed, hinting about his heated feuds with censors who were often at the last minute forcing script changes on his show because of its content. Warner Brothers spoofed Allen's radio show with their 1936 cartoon Toy Town Hall.

Bibliography[link]

• Allen, Fred. Much Ado About Me (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956).
• Allen, Fred. Treadmill to Oblivion (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).
• Allen, Fred, ed. by Joe McCarthy, Fred Allen's Letters (New York: Doubleday, 1965)
• Allen, Fred, ed. by Stuart Hample, all the sincerity in hollywood... (New York: Fulcrum Publishing, 2001). (The lower-case of the title was a tribute to Allen's habit, later in his life, of typing his letters in all-lower case, à la poet E. E. Cummings.)
• Smith, H. Allen, introduction by Fred Allen. Low Man on a Totem Pole, Doubleday, Doran, 1941.

References[link]

Sources[link]

• Jack Benny and Joan Benny, Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story. (New York: Warner Books, 1990).
• Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, The Big Broadcast: 1920-1950 (New York: Flare Books/Avon, 1972).
• John Crosby, Out of the Blue: A Book About Radio and Television (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952).
• Alan Havig, Fred Allen's Radio Comedy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
• Ben Schwartz, "The Man Who Invented Jack Benny" ('Written By', Writer's Guild of America, 2002)
• Robert Taylor, Fred Allen: His Life and Wit (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).
• John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
• Hilmes, M. (1997). Radio voices American broadcasting, 1922-1952. Minnesota Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

External links[link]

Biography portal

• "Fred Allen" Old Time Radio
• Fred Allen Fred Allen's Radio, television, and film appearances
• Fred Allen at the Internet Movie Database
• Fred Allen In-depth Fred Allen Biographical Interview with Martin Gostainian
• Fred Allen at the National Radio Hall of Fame
• Laughterlog.com Biography with list of radio, television, film and record appearances
• Fred Allen at Find a Grave
• Final What's My Line? appearance on March 11, 1956
• Irving Wallace on Fred Allen

Listen to[link]

• Internet Archives: The Fred Allen Show (150 episodes in MP3 format)
• OTR Network Library: The Fred Allen Show (84 episodes)
• Biography in Sound: "A Portrait of Fred Allen" (May 29, and December 18, 1956)

This article, from "Characters" on down, is written like a personal reflection or essay rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (January 2010)

Jack Benny
Jack Benny in 1958
Birth name	Benjamin Kubelsky[1]
Born	(1894-02-14)February 14, 1894 Chicago, Illinois, United States
Died	December 26, 1974(1974-12-26) (aged 80) Beverly Hills, California United States
Show	The Jack Benny Program
Network	NBC, CBS
Style	Comedian
Country	United States

Jack Benny (born Benjamin Kubelsky, February 14, 1894 – December 26, 1974) was an American comedian, vaudevillian, radio, television, and film actor, and also a notable violinist. Widely recognized as one of the leading American entertainers of the 20th century, Benny played the role of the comic penny-pinching miser, insisting on remaining 39 years old on stage despite his actual age, and often playing the violin badly.

Benny was known for his comic timing and his ability to get laughs with either a pregnant pause or a single expression, such as his signature exasperated "Well!" His radio and television programs, tremendously popular from the 1930s to the 1960s, were a foundational influence on the situation comedy genre. Dean Martin, on the celebrity roast for Johnny Carson in November 1973, introduced Benny as "the Satchel Paige of the world of comedy".

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Jack Benny as part of the Waukegan High School band, 1909.

Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky on February 14, 1894, in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in neighboring Waukegan, Illinois.^[2] He was the son of Meyer Kubelsky and Emma Sachs Kubelsky. Meyer was a Jewish saloon owner, later to become a haberdasher, who had emigrated to America from Poland.^{[3][4][5][6][7]} Emma had emigrated from Lithuania. Benny began studying the violin, an instrument that would become his trademark, when he was just six, with his parents' hopes that he would be a great classical violinist. He loved the violin, but hated practice. By age 14, he was playing in local dance bands as well as in his high school orchestra. Benny was a dreamer and a poor student and he was expelled from high school. He did equally badly in business school and at his father's trade. At age 17, he began playing the instrument in local vaudeville theaters for $7.50 a week.^[8] He was joined by Ned Miller, a young composer and singer, on the vaudeville circuit.^[9] They became life-long friends and Miller eventually joined the cast of The Jack Benny Program in the 1960s.

In 1911, Benny was playing in the same theater as the young Marx Brothers, whose mother Minnie was so enchanted with Benny's musicianship that she invited him to be their permanent accompanist. The plan was foiled by Benny's parents, who refused to let their son, then 17, go on the road, but it was the beginning of his long friendship with Zeppo Marx. Benny's future wife Mary Livingstone was a distant cousin of the Marx Brothers.

The following year, Benny formed a vaudeville musical duo with pianist Cora Salisbury, a buxom 45-year-old widow who needed a partner for her act. This provoked famous violinist Jan Kubelik, who thought that the young vaudeville entertainer with a similar name (Kubelsky) would damage his reputation. Under pressure from Kubelik's lawyer, Benjamin Kubelsky agreed to change his name to Ben K. Benny (sometimes spelled Bennie). When Salisbury left the act, Benny found a new pianist, Lyman Woods, and renamed the act "From Grand Opera to Ragtime". They worked together for five years and slowly added comedy elements to the show. They even reached the Palace Theater, the "Mecca of Vaudeville", but bombed. Benny left show business briefly in 1917 to join the U.S. Navy during World War I, and he often entertained the troops with his violin playing. One evening, his violin performance was booed by the troops, so with prompting from fellow sailor and actor Pat O'Brien, he ad-libbed his way out of the jam and left them laughing. He got more comedy spots in the revues and was a big hit, and earned himself a reputation as a comedian as well as a musician.

Shortly after the war, Benny started a one-man act, "Ben K. Benny: Fiddle Funology".^[8] But then he heard from another lawyer, this time that of Ben Bernie, another patter-and-fiddle performer who also threatened to sue. So Benny adopted the common sailor's nickname Jack. By 1921, the fiddle became more of a prop and the low-key comedy took over.

Benny had several romantic encounters, including one with a dancer, Mary Kelly, whose devoutly Catholic family forced her to turn down Benny's proposal because he was Jewish. Benny was introduced to Mary Kelly by Gracie Allen. Some years after their split, Kelly resurfaced as a dowdy fat girl and Jack gave her a part in an act of three girls: one homely, one fat and one who couldn't sing. This lasted until, at Mary Livingstone's request, Mary Kelly was let go.

In 1922, Jack accompanied Zeppo Marx to a Passover seder where he met Sadye (Sadie) Marks, whom he married in 1927 after meeting again on a double-date. She was working in the hosiery section of the Hollywood Boulevard branch of the May Company and Benny would court her there.^[8] Called on to fill in for the "dumb girl" part in one of Benny's routines, Sadie proved a natural comedienne and a big hit. Adopting Mary Livingstone as her stage name, Sadie became Benny's collaborator throughout most of his career. They later adopted a daughter, Joan.

In 1929, Benny's agent Sam Lyons convinced MGM's Irving Thalberg to catch Benny's act at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. Benny was signed to a five-year contract and his first film role was in The Hollywood Revue of 1929. His next movie, Chasing Rainbows, was a flop and after several months, Benny was released from his contract and returned to Broadway in Earl Carroll's Vanities. At first dubious about the viability of radio, Benny was eager to break into the new medium. In 1932, after a four-week nightclub run, he was invited onto Ed Sullivan's radio program, uttering his first radio spiel "This is Jack Benny talking. There will be a slight pause while you say, 'Who cares?'..."^[8]

Radio[link]

History[link]

Benny in 1933, when he was newly-arrived at NBC and the host of The Chevrolet Program.

Benny had been only a minor vaudeville performer, but he became a national figure with The Jack Benny Program, a weekly radio show that ran from 1932 to 1948 on NBC and from 1949 to 1955 on CBS. It was consistently among the most highly rated programs during most of that run.^[10][11]

On April 6, 1932, the NBC Commercial Program Department arranged for an audition of Jack Benny for Ayer and its client Canada Dry, after which its head, Bertha Brainard made an assessment of this new comic: "We think Mr. Benny is excellent for radio, and while the audition was unassisted as far as orchestra was concerned, we believe he would make a great bet for an air program." With Canada Dry Ginger Ale as a sponsor, Benny came to radio on The Canada Dry Program, beginning May 2, 1932, on the NBC Blue Network and continuing there for six months until October 26, moving the show to CBS on October 30. With Ted Weems leading the band, Benny stayed on CBS until January 26, 1933. The commercial ran twice a week from 9:30 to 10:00, it ran for almost a year.^[12]

Arriving at NBC on March 17, Benny did The Chevrolet Program until April 1, 1934. He continued with sponsor General Tire through the end of the season. In October, 1934, General Foods, the makers of Jell-O and Grape-Nuts, became the sponsor most identified with Jack, for the next ten years. American Tobacco's Lucky Strike was his longest-lasting radio sponsor, from October, 1944, through the end of his original radio series.

The show switched networks to CBS on January 2, 1949, as part of CBS president William S. Paley's notorious "raid" of NBC talent in 1948–49. There it stayed for the remainder of its radio run, which ended on May 22, 1955. CBS aired repeats of old radio episodes from 1956 to 1958 as The Best of Benny.

Characters[link]

This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (December 2010)

Benny's comic persona changed in the course of his career. At some time he developed the tightwad/cheapskate persona.^[13] This stage character was just about everything the actual Jack Benny was not: cheap, petty, vain, and self-congratulatory. His comic rendering of these traits became the linchpin to the Benny show's success. Benny set himself up as the comedic foil, allowing his supporting characters to draw laughs at the expense of his character's flaws. By allowing such a character to be seen as human and vulnerable, in an era where few male characters were allowed such obvious vulnerability, Benny made what might have been a despicable character into a lovable Everyman character. Benny said on several occasions: "I don't care who gets the laughs on my show, as long as the show is funny." Jack felt he got the credit or blame either way, not the actor saying the lines, so it had better be funny.

The supporting characters who amplified that vulnerability only too gladly included wife Mary Livingstone as his wisecracking and not especially deferential female friend (not quite his girlfriend, since Benny would often try to date movie stars like Barbara Stanwyck, and occasionally had stage girlfriends such as "Gladys Zybisco"); rotund announcer Don Wilson (who also served as announcer for Fanny Brice's hit, Baby Snooks); bandleader Phil Harris as a jive-talking, wine-and-women type whose repartee was rather risqué for its time; boy tenor Dennis Day, who was cast as a sheltered, naïve youth who still got the better of his boss as often as not (this character was originated by Kenny Baker who was replaced by Day); and Eddie Anderson as valet-chauffeur Rochester van Jones. Singer Larry Stevens was Dennis Day's replacement from 11-5-44 to 3-10-46 while Day was in the Navy.

Rochester was allowed to one-up his vain, skinflint boss. In more ways than one, with his mock-befuddled one-liners and his sharp retorts, he broke a comedic racial barrier. Unlike many black supporting characters of the time, Rochester was depicted and treated as a regular member of Benny's fictional household. Benny, in character, tended if anything to treat Rochester more like an equal partner than as a hired domestic, even though gags about Rochester's flimsy salary were a regular part of the show.

Rochester seemed to see right through his boss's vanities and knew how to prick them without overdoing it, often with his famous line "Oh, Boss, come now!" Benny deserves credit for allowing this character and the actor who played him (it is difficult, if not impossible, to picture any other performer giving Rochester what Anderson gave him) to transcend the era's racial stereotype and for not discouraging his near-equal popularity. A New Year's Eve episode, in particular, shows the love each performer had for the other, quietly toasting each other with champagne. That this attention to Rochester's race was no accident became clearer during World War II, when Benny would frequently pay tribute to the diversity of Americans who had been drafted into service.

After the war, once the depths of Nazi race hatred had been revealed, Benny made a conscious effort to remove the most stereotypical aspects of Rochester's character. In 1948, it became apparent to Benny how much the times had changed when a 1941 script for "The Jack Benny Program" was re-used for one week's show. The script included mention of several African-American stereotypes (i.e. a reference to Rochester carrying a razor), and prompted a number of listeners, who didn't know the script was an old one, to send in angry letters protesting the stereotypes. Thereafter, Benny insisted that his writers should make sure that no racial jokes or references should be heard on his show. Benny also often gave key guest-star appearances to African-American performers such as Louis Armstrong and The Ink Spots.

The rest of Benny's cast included character actors and comedians:

• Sheldon Leonard (later a hugely successful television producer and creator) as a tight-lipped racetrack tout
• Joseph Kearns (best remembered as cantankerous Mr. Wilson on the television version of Dennis the Menace) as Ed, the superannuated guard to Jack's money vault
• Verna Felton as Dennis Day's mother
• Frank Nelson, usually as an oily desk clerk or floorwalker, always greeting Benny with an eager Yeeeeeeesss?;
• singer/bandleader Bob Crosby (who succeeded Phil Harris in the early 1950s);
• Artie Auerbach as the Yiddish-accented Mr. Kitzel ("hoo, hoo, hoo!");
• Bea Benaderet, as Gertrude the switchboard operator;
• Mel Blanc, who provided several characters' voices, including the railroad station announcer who said, "Train leaving on track five for Anaheim, Azusa and Cu... camonga!". This running gag became so well known (including use in several Bugs Bunny cartoons (which Mel Blanc also voiced)) that it eventually led to a statue of Benny in Cucamonga. Blanc also was featured with Benny in the classic Si-Sy routine and on radio as the sound of Benny's Maxwell automobile. Blanc is perhaps best remembered as Benny's perpetually frustrated violin teacher, Professor LeBlanc, who was as likely to throw his own and Benny's instrument into the fireplace as he was to have a nervous breakdown before he was out the door.

Other musical contributions came starting in 1946 from the singing quartet the Sportsmen (members: Bill Days, Max Smith, Marty Sperzel and Gurney Bell) singing the middle Lucky Strike commercial. In the early days of the program, the supporting characters were often vaudevillian ethnic stereotypes whose humor was grounded in dialects. As the years went by, the humor of these figures became more character-based.

Benny's method of bringing a character into a skit, by announcing his name, also became a well-known Benny shtick: "Oh, Dennis ..." or "Oh, Rochester ..." typically answered by, "Yes, Mr. Benny (Boss)?"

Situations[link]

The Jack Benny Program evolved from a variety show blending sketch comedy and musical interludes into the situation comedy form we know even now, crafting particular situations and scenarios from the fictionalization of Benny the radio star. Any situation from hosting a party to income tax time to a night on the town was good for a Benny show, and somehow the writers and star would find the right ways and places to insert musical interludes from Phil Harris and Dennis Day. With Day, invariably, it would be a brief sketch that ended with Benny ordering Day to sing the song he planned to do on that week's show.

One extremely popular scenario that became an annual tradition on The Jack Benny Program was the "Christmas Shopping" episode, in which Benny would head to a local department store. Each year, Benny would buy a ridiculously cheap Christmas gift for Don Wilson from a store clerk played by Mel Blanc. Benny would then have second (then third, and even fourth) thoughts about his gift choice, driving Blanc (or, in two other cases, his wife and his psychiatrist, as well) to hilarious insanity by exchanging the gift, pestering about the Christmas card or wrapping paper countless times throughout the episode: in many cases, the clerk would commit suicide, or attempt and fail to commit suicide ("Look what you done! You made me so nervous, I missed!") as a result.

In the 1946 Christmas episode, for example, Benny buys shoelaces for Don, and then is unable to make up his mind whether to give Wilson shoelaces with plastic tips or shoelaces with metal tips. After Benny exchanges the shoelaces repeatedly, Mel Blanc is heard screaming insanely, "Plastic tips! Metal tips! I can't stand it anymore!" A variation in 1948 concerned Benny buying an expensive wallet for Don, but repeatedly changing the greeting card inserted—prompting Blanc to shout: "I haven't run into anyone like you in 20 years! Oh, why did the governor have to give me that pardon!?" – until Benny realizes that he should have gotten Don a wallet for $1.98, whereupon the put-upon clerk immediately responds by committing suicide. Over the years, in these Christmas episodes, Benny bought and repeatedly exchanged cuff links, golf tees, a box of dates, a paint set (water colors or oils), and even a gopher trap.

In 1936, after a few years broadcasting from New York, Benny moved the show to Los Angeles, allowing him to bring in guests from among his show business friends — such as Frank Sinatra, James Stewart, Judy Garland, Barbara Stanwyck, Bing Crosby, Burns and Allen (George Burns was Benny's closest friend), and many others. Burns and Allen and Orson Welles guest hosted several episodes in March and April 1943 when Benny was seriously ill with pneumonia, while Ronald Colman and his wife Benita Hume appeared frequently in the 1940s as Benny's long-suffering neighbors.

On the broadcast of January 8, 1950, journalist Drew Pearson was the subject of a joke gone wrong. Announcer Don Wilson was to say he heard Jack bought a new suit on Drew Pearson, but said Pearson's name wrong; Don said "Drear Pewson". Later on in the show, comedic actor Frank Nelson was asked by Benny if he was the doorman. Changing the script (by suggestion of the writers), Nelson said, "Well who do you think I am ... Drear Pewson?" The audience laughed for almost 30 seconds.

Sponsors[link]

In the early days of radio (and in the early television era, often as not), the airtime was owned by the sponsor, and Benny made a point of incorporating the commercials into the body of the show. Sometimes the sponsors were the butt of jokes, though Benny did not deploy this device as frequently as his friend and "rival" Fred Allen did at the time, or as his cast member Phil Harris later did on his own successful radio sitcom. Nevertheless, for many years Benny insisted in contract negotiations that his writers pen the sponsor's commercial in the middle of the program (leaving the sponsor to provide the opening and closing spots) and the resulting ads were cleverly and wittily worked into the storyline of the show. For example, on one program, Don Wilson accidentally misread Lucky Strike's slogan ("Be happy, go Lucky") as "Be Lucky, go happy", prompting a story arc over several weeks that had Wilson unable to attend the show due to being severely traumatized by the error.

In fact, the radio show was generally not announced as The Jack Benny Program. Instead, the primary name of the show tied to the sponsor. Benny's first sponsor was Canada Dry Ginger Ale from 1932 to 1933. Benny's sponsors included Chevrolet from 1933 to 1934, General Tire in 1934, and Jell-O from 1934 to 1942. The Jell-O Program Starring Jack Benny was so successful in selling Jell-O, in fact, that General Foods could not manufacture it fast enough when sugar shortages arose in the early years of World War II, and the company had to stop advertising the popular dessert mix. General Foods switched the Benny program from Jell-O to Grape-Nuts from 1942 to 1944, and it became, naturally, The Grape Nuts Program Starring Jack Benny. Benny's longest-running sponsor, however, was the American Tobacco Company's Lucky Strike cigarettes, from 1944 to 1955, when the show was usually announced as The Lucky Strike Program starring Jack Benny.

Writers[link]

Benny was notable for employing a small group of writers, most of whom stayed with him for many years. This was very much in contrast to other successful radio or television comedians, such as Bob Hope, who would change writers frequently. Historical accounts (like those by longtime Benny writer Milt Josefsberg) indicate that Benny's role was essentially that of both head writer and director of his radio programs, though he was not credited in either capacity. In contrast to Fred Allen, who initially personally wrote all of his own radio scripts (and continued to extensively rewrite scripts produced in later years by a writing staff), Jack Benny was often described by his writers as a consummate comedy editor rather than a writer per se. He would often debate the precise wording of jokes, and always sought to ensure the preservation of the integrity of the show's characters above easy gags.^{[citation needed]}

Jack Benny has a reputation for being a master of timing. Since his days at the radio, he often explored the limits of timing for comedic purposes, like pausing a disproportionate amount of time before answering a question.^[13][14]

Theme music[link]

During his early radio shows, there was no recurring theme, the program instead opening each week with a different then-current popular song. Throughout the Jello and Grapenuts years, announcer Don Wilson would announce the name of the show, some of the cast, and then state "The orchestra opens the program with [name of song]." The orchestra number would continue softly as background for Don Wilson's opening commercial.

Starting in the Lucky Strike era, Benny adopted a medley of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "Love in Bloom" as his theme music, opening every show. "Love in Bloom" later became the theme of his television show as well. His radio shows often ended with the orchestra playing "Hooray for Hollywood". The TV show ended with one of two bouncy instrumentals written for the show by his musical arranger and conductor, Mahlon Merrick.

Benny would sometimes joke about the propriety of "Love in Bloom" as his theme song. On a segment often played in Tonight Show retrospectives, Benny talks with Johnny Carson about this. Benny says he has no objections to the song in and of itself, only as his theme. Proving his point, he begins reciting the lyrics slowly and deliberately: "Can it be the trees. That fill the breeze. With rare and magic perfume. Now what the hell has that got to do with me?"

"Your money or your life"[link]

Harry Truman and Jack Benny 3 September 1959

In an episode that was broadcast March 28, 1948, Benny borrowed neighbor Ronald Colman's Oscar, and was returning home when he was accosted by a mugger (voiced by comedian Eddie Marr). After asking for a match to light a cigarette, the mugger demands, "Don't make a move, this is a stickup. Now, come on. Your money or your life." Benny paused, and the studio audience—knowing his skinflint character—laughed. The robber then repeated his demand: "Look, bud! I said your money or your life!" Benny snapped back, without a break, "I'm thinking it over!" This time, the audience laughed louder and longer than they had during the pause.

The punchline came to Benny staff writers John Tackaberry and Milt Josefsberg almost by accident. Writer George Balzer described the scene to author Jordan R. Young, for The Laugh Crafters, a 1999 book of interviews with veteran radio and television comedy writers:

... they had come to a point where they had the line, "Your money or your life." And that stopped them... Milt is pacing up and down, trying to get a follow... And he gets a little peeved at Tack, and he says, "For God's sakes, Tack, say something." Tack, maybe he was half asleep—in defense of himself, says, "I'm thinking it over." And Milt says, "Wait a minute. That's it." And that's the line that went in the script... By the way, that was not the biggest laugh that Jack ever got. It has the reputation of getting the biggest laugh. But that's not true.

The actual length of the laugh the joke got was five seconds when originally delivered and seven seconds when the gag was reprised on a follow-up show. In fact, the joke is probably not so memorable for the length of the laugh it provoked, but because it became the definitive "Jack Benny joke"—the joke that best illustrated Benny's "stingy man" persona. The punchline—"I'm thinking it over!"—simply would not have worked with any other comedian but Benny.

The actual longest laugh known to collectors of The Jack Benny Program lasted in excess of 32 seconds. The International Jack Benny Fan Club^[15] reports that, at the close of the program broadcast on December 13, 1936, sponsored by Jell-O, guest Andy Devine says that it is the "last number of the eleventh program in the new Jelly series." The audience, who loved any sort of accidental flub in the live program, is still laughing after 32 seconds, at which point the network cut off the program to prevent it from running overtime.

According to Jack himself, Mary Livingstone got the biggest laugh he ever heard on the show, on the April 25, 1948 broadcast. The punchline was the result of the following exchange between Don Wilson and noted opera singer Dorothy Kirsten:

Don Wilson: Oh, Miss Kirsten, I wanted to tell you that I saw you in "Madame Butterfly" Wednesday afternoon, and I thought your performance was simply magnificent.

Dorothy Kirsten: Well, thanks, awfully. It's awfully nice and kind of you, Mr. Wilson. But, uh, who could help singing Puccini? It's so expressive. And particularly in the last act, starting with the allegro vivacissimo.

Don Wilson: Well, now, that's being very modest, Miss Kirsten. But not every singer has the necessary bel canto and flexibility or range to cope with the high tessitura of the first act.

Dorothy Kirsten: Thank you, Mr. Wilson. And don't you think that in the aria, "Un bel dì vedremo", that the strings played the con molto passione exceptionally fine and with great sostenuto?

Jack Benny: Well, I thought—

Mary Livingstone (to Jack): Oh, shut up!

According to Jack, the huge laugh resulted from the long buildup, and the audience's knowledge that Jack, with his pompous persona, would have to break into the conversation at some point.

A nearly identical exchange occurred over a year earlier, among renowned violinist Isaac Stern, actor Ronald Colman, Jack Benny, and Mary Livingstone. The quartet's back-and-forth, which centered on Stern's recent public performance of a Mendelssohn piece, was heard on an episode first broadcast on February 16, 1947. The resulting laughter lasted some 18 seconds, after which Jack retorted, "Mary, that's no way to talk to Mr. Stern."

Later in life, when performing as a stand-up comedian in Las Vegas, Jack had just begun to tell an old joke about the salesman, the farmer and the farmer's daughter: "So the salesman and the farmer's daughter come to the front door, and the farmer opens the door." At this point, Sammy Davis, Jr. walks onstage behind Jack, the audience screams, and Sammy proceeds to speak and sing and dance about 25 minutes or so, while Jack continues to stand at center stage, quietly watching the spectacle. When Davis finally walks offstage and the audience's applause dies down, Jack continues to watch Davis offstage for a few moments, then as the audience is finally quiet continues: "... So the farmer said—" And that's about as far as that joke got, because the audience laughed for minutes afterward.

The Benny-Allen "feud"[link]

In 1937 Benny began his famous radio "feud" with rival Fred Allen. Allen kicked the "feud" off on his own show, after child violinist Stewart Canin gave a performance credible enough that Allen wisecracked about "a certain alleged violinist" who should by comparison be ashamed of himself. Benny, who either listened to the Allen show or was told about the crack, answered in kind on his own show. And the two comedians were off and running.

For a decade, the two went at it back and forth, so convincingly that fans of either show could have been forgiven for believing they had become blood enemies. In fact, the two men were good friends and each other's greatest admirers. Benny and Allen often appeared on each other's show during the thick of the "feud"; numerous surviving episodes of both comedians' radio shows feature each other, in both acknowledged guest spots and occasional cameos. Benny in his eventual memoir (Sunday Nights at Seven) and Allen in his Treadmill to Oblivion later revealed that each comedian's writing staff often met together to plot future takes on the mock feud. If Allen zapped Benny with a satirisation of Benny's show ("The Pinch Penny Program"), Benny shot back with a parody of Allen's early favourite, Town Hall Tonight. Benny's parody? "Clown Hall Tonight." And their playful sniping ("Benny was born ignorant, and he's been losing ground ever since") was also advanced in the films Love Thy Neighbor and It's in the Bag!.

Perhaps the climax of the "feud" came during Fred Allen's parody of popular quiz-and-prize show Queen for a Day, which was barely a year old when Allen decided to have a crack at it on The Fred Allen Show—an episode that has survived for today's listeners to appreciate. Calling the sketch "King for a Day", Allen played the host and Benny a contestant who sneaked onto the show using the alias Myron Proudfoot. Benny answered the prize-winning question correctly and Allen crowned him "king" and showered him with a passel of almost meaningless prizes. Allen proudly announced, "Tomorrow night, in your ermine robe, you will be whisked by bicycle to Orange, New Jersey, where you will be the judge in a chicken-cleaning contest," to which Benny joyously declared, "I'm king for a day!" At this point a professional pressing-iron was wheeled on stage, to press Benny's suit properly. It didn't matter that Benny was still in the suit. Allen instructed his aides to remove Benny's suit, one item at a time, ending with his trousers, each garment's removal provoking louder laughter from the studio audience. As his trousers began to come off, Benny howled, "Allen, you haven't seen the end of me!" At once Allen shot back, "It won't be long now!"

The laughter was so loud and chaotic at the chain of events that the Allen show announcer, Kenny Delmar, was cut off the air while trying to read a final commercial and the show's credits. (Allen was notorious for running overtime often enough, largely thanks to his ad-libbing talent, and he overran the clock again this time.)

Benny was profoundly shaken by Allen's sudden death of a heart attack in 1956. In a statement released on the day after Allen's death, Benny said, "People have often asked me if Fred Allen and I were really friends in real life. My answer is always the same. You couldn't have such a long-running and successful feud as we did, without having a deep and sincere friendship at the heart of it."

The CBS talent raid[link]

On the advice of MCA's Lew Wasserman, Jack Benny formed a holding company, "Amusement Enterprises" (a tax break major entertainers usually enjoyed in those years), which allowed him to bundle his entire program and personnel into a single commodity. The company also gave Benny the opportunity to produce and package other radio programs (including his 1947 summer replacement series starring Jack Paar), and invest in other entertainment ventures, including the production of a 1949 feature film, The Lucky Stiff, starring Dorothy Lamour, and as a key financial backer of the 1948 Broadway version of Mister Roberts, starring Henry Fonda. While Benny was top of the proverbial heap on NBC, CBS czar William S. Paley cast a hungry eye upon the comedian. Paley apparently had good reason to believe Benny could be had. In the summer of 1948, he successfully negotiated a deal with Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, buying their holding company, which owned the Amos 'n' Andy radio show (and the rights to those characters), moving the entire "package" from NBC to CBS that fall: he then learned that NBC balked at buying a "Jack Benny" package deal when "Jack Benny" was not the star's real name. Paley reached out to Benny and offered him a deal that would allow that package-buy.

But Paley, according to CBS historian Robert Metz, also learned that Benny chafed under NBC's almost indifferent attitude toward the talent that attracted the listeners. NBC, under the leadership of David Sarnoff, seemed at the time to think that listeners were listening to NBC because of NBC itself. To Paley, according to Metz, that was foolish thinking at best: Paley believed listeners were listening because of the talent, not because of which platform hosted them. When Paley said as much to Benny, the comedian agreed. Because Paley took a personal interest in the Benny negotiations, as opposed to Sarnoff who had never met his top-rated star, Benny was convinced to make the jump. He convinced a number of his fellow NBC performers (notably Burns and Allen, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton and Kate Smith) to join him.

To sweeten the deal for a very nervous sponsor, Paley also agreed to make up the difference to American Tobacco if Benny's Hooper rating (the radio version of today's Nielsen ratings) on CBS fell to a certain level below his best NBC Hooper rating. Benny's CBS debut on January 2, 1949 bested his top NBC rating by several points while also pumping up the ratings of the show that followed, Amos 'n' Andy. NBC, with its smash Sunday night lineup now broken up, offered lucrative new deals to two of those Sunday night hits, The Fred Allen Show and The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. Benny's bandleader and his singing actress wife now starred in their own hit sitcom, meaning Harris was featured on shows for two different networks.

Benny and Sarnoff eventually met several years later and became good friends. Benny said that if he had had this kind of relationship with Sarnoff earlier, when he was Sarnoff's number-one radio star, he never would have left NBC.

Television[link]

Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone, 1960.

Benny first appeared on television in a brief appearance on the inaugural broadcast of Los Angeles station KTTV (Channel 11) on January 1, 1949. KTTV was the Los Angeles CBS Television outlet at the time.^{[citation needed]}

The television version of The Jack Benny Program ran from October 28, 1950 to 1965. Initially scheduled as a series of five "specials" during the 1950–1951 season, the show appeared every six weeks for the 1951–1952 season, every four weeks for the 1952–1953 season and every three weeks in 1953–1954. For the 1953–1954 season, half the episodes were live and half were filmed during the summer, to allow Benny to continue doing his radio show. From the fall of 1954 to 1960, it appeared every other week, and from 1960 to 1965 it was seen weekly.

In September 1954, CBS premiered Chrysler's Shower of Stars co-hosted by Jack Benny and William Lundigan. It enjoyed a successful run from 1954 until 1958. Both television shows often overlapped the radio show. In fact, the radio show alluded frequently to its television counterparts. Often as not, Benny would sign off the radio show in such circumstances with the line "Well, good night, folks. I'll see you on television."

When Benny moved to television, audiences learned that his verbal talent was matched by his controlled repertory of dead-pan facial expressions and gesture. The program was similar to the radio show (several of the radio scripts were recycled for television, as was somewhat common with other radio shows that moved to television), but with the addition of visual gags. Lucky Strike was the sponsor. Benny did his opening and closing monologues before a live audience, which he regarded as essential to timing of the material. As in other TV comedy shows, canned laughter was sometimes added to "sweeten" the soundtrack, as when the studio audience missed some close-up comedy because of cameras or microphones in their way. The television viewers learned to live without Mary Livingstone, who was afflicted by a striking case of stage fright. Livingstone appeared rarely if at all on the television show (for the last few years of the radio show, she pre-recorded her lines and Jack and Mary's daughter, Joan, stood in for the live broadcast as the pre-recordings were played), and finally retired from show business permanently in 1958, as her friend Gracie Allen had done.

Benny's television program relied more on guest stars and less on his regulars than his radio program. In fact, the only radio cast members who appeared regularly on the television program as well were Don Wilson and Eddie Anderson. Day appeared sporadically, and Harris had left the radio program in 1952, although he did make a guest appearance on the television show (Bob Crosby, Phil's "replacement", frequently appeared on television through 1956). A frequent guest was the Canadian born singer-violinist Gisele Mackenzie.

Benny was able to attract guests who rarely, if ever, appeared on television. In 1953, both Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart made their television debuts on Benny's program.^[16][17]

Canadian singer Gisele MacKenzie, who toured with Benny in the early 1950s, guest starred seven times on The Jack Benny Program. Benny was so impressed with MacKenzie's talents that he served as co-executive producer and guest starred on her 1957–1958 NBC variety show, The Gisele MacKenzie Show.^[18]

Benny did many television specials after leaving his regularly scheduled show. This is a promotional postcard for one of them.

In 1964, Walt Disney was a guest, primarily to promote his production of Mary Poppins. Benny persuaded Disney to give him over 100 free admission tickets to Disneyland for his friends, but later in the show Disney apparently sent his pet tiger after Benny as revenge, at which point Benny opened his umbrella and soared above the stage like Mary Poppins.^[19]

In due course the ratings game finally got to Benny, too. CBS dropped the show in 1964, citing Benny's lack of appeal to the younger demographic the network began courting, and he went to NBC, his original network, in the fall, only to be out-rated by CBS's Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. The network dropped Benny at the end of the season. He continued to make occasional specials into the 1970s. His last television appearance was in 1974, on a The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast for Lucille Ball. The videotaped show was telecast just a few weeks after his death.

In his unpublished autobiography, I Always Had Shoes (portions of which were later incorporated by Jack's daughter, Joan, into her memoir of her parents, Sunday Nights at Seven), Benny said that he, not NBC, made the decision to end his TV series in 1965. He said that while the ratings were still very good (he cited a figure of some 18 million viewers per week, although he qualified that figure by saying he never believed the ratings services were doing anything more than guessing, no matter what they promised), advertisers were complaining that commercial time on his show was costing nearly twice as much as what they paid for most other shows, and he had grown tired of what was called the "rate race". Thus, after some three decades on radio and television in a weekly program, Jack Benny went out on top. In fairness, Benny himself shared Fred Allen's ambivalence about television, though not quite to Allen's extent. "By my second year in television, I saw that the camera was a man-eating monster...It gave a performer close-up exposure that, week after week, threatened his existence as an interesting entertainer."^[8]

In a joint appearance with Phil Silvers on Dick Cavett's show, Benny recalled that he had advised Silvers not to appear on television. However, Silvers ignored Benny's advice and proceeded to win several Emmy awards as Sergeant Bilko on the popular series The Phil Silvers Show, while Benny claimed he never won any of the television honors.

Filmography[link]

See Jack Benny filmography

Movies[link]

Benny also acted in movies, including the Academy Award-winning The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Broadway Melody of 1936 (as a benign nemesis for Eleanor Powell and Robert Taylor), George Washington Slept Here (1942), and notably, Charley's Aunt and To Be or Not to Be. He and Livingstone also appeared in Ed Sullivan's Mr. Broadway (1933) as themselves. Benny often parodied contemporary movies and movie genres on the radio program, and the 1940 film Buck Benny Rides Again features all the main radio characters in a funny Western parody adapted from program skits. The failure of one Benny vehicle, The Horn Blows at Midnight, became a running gag on his radio and television programs, although contemporary viewers may not find the film as disappointing as the jokes suggest.

Benny may have had an unbilled cameo role in Casablanca (claimed by a contemporary newspaper advertisement^[20] and reportedly in the Casablanca press book^[21]). When asked in his column "Movie Answer Man", critic Roger Ebert first replied, "It looks something like him. That's all I can say."^[21] In response to a follow-up question in his next column, he stated, "I think you're right."^[22]

Benny also was caricatured in several Warner Brothers cartoons including Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur (1939, as Casper the Caveman), I Love to Singa, Slap Happy Pappy, and Goofy Groceries (1936, 1940, and 1941 respectively, as Jack Bunny^[23]), Malibu Beach Party (1940, as himself),^[24] and The Mouse that Jack Built (1959). The last of these is probably the most memorable: Robert McKimson engaged Benny and his actual cast (Mary Livingstone, Eddie Anderson, and Don Wilson) to do the voices for the mouse versions of their characters, with Mel Blanc—the usual Warner Brothers cartoon voicemeister—reprising his old vocal turn as the always-aging Maxwell, always a phat-phat-bang! away from collapse. In the cartoon, Benny and Livingstone agree to spend their anniversary at the Kit-Kat Club, which they discover the hard way is inside the mouth of a live cat. Before the cat can devour the mice, Benny himself awakens from his dream, then shakes his head, smiles wryly, and mutters, "Imagine, me and Mary as little mice." Then, he glances toward the cat lying on a throw rug in a corner and sees his and Livingstone's cartoon alter egos scampering out of the cat's mouth. The cartoon ends with a classic Benny look of befuddlement. It was rumored that Benny requested that, in lieu of monetary compensation, he receive a copy of the finished film.

Running gags[link]

Jack Benny rehearses with members of the California Junior Symphony Orchestra, 1959

Benny teamed with Fred Allen for the best-remembered running gag in classic radio history, in terms of character dialogue. But Benny alone sustained a classic repertoire of running gags in his own right, including a skinflint radio and television persona; a perpetual listed age of 39; and ineptitude at violin playing, most frequently demonstrated by futile attempts to perform Rodolphe Kreutzer's Etude No. 2 in C major.

A skit heard numerous times on radio, and seen many times on television, had Mel Blanc as a Mexican in a sombrero and serape sitting on a bench. Jack Benny sits down and begins a conversation. To each question asked by Benny, Blanc replies Si. When Benny asks his name, Blanc replies Sy, which would prompt the exchange, Sy?, Si. And when Benny asks where Blanc is going, Blanc replies, "to see his sister", Sue (Sue?, Si.), who of course sews for a living (Sew?, Si.).

A running gag in Benny's private life concerned George Burns. To Benny's eternal frustration, he could never get Burns to laugh. Burns, on the other hand, could crack Benny up with the least effort. An example of this occurred at a party when Benny pulled out a match to light a cigar. Burns announced to all, "Jack Benny will now perform the famous match trick!" Benny had no idea what Burns was talking about, so he proceeded to light up. Burns observed, "Oh, a new ending!" and Benny collapsed in helpless laughter.

Benny even had a sound-based running gag of his own: his famous basement vault alarm, allegedly installed by Spike Jones, ringing off with a shattering cacophony of whistles, sirens, bells, and blasts, before ending invariably with the sound of a foghorn. The alarm rang off even when Benny opened his safe with the correct combination. The vault also featured a guard named Ed (voiced by Joseph Kearns) who had been on post down below before, apparently, the end of the Civil War, the end of the Revolutionary War, the founding of Los Angeles, on Jack's 38th birthday, and even the beginning of humanity. In one appearance, Ed asked Benny, "By the way, Mr. Benny...what's it like on the outside?" Benny responded, "...winter is nearly here, and the leaves are falling." Ed responded, "Hey, that must be exciting," to which Benny replied (in a stunningly risqué joke for the period), "Oh, no—people are wearing clothes now." In one episode of the Benny radio show, Ed the Guard actually agreed when Jack invited him to take a break and come back to the surface world, only to discover that modern conveniences and transportation, which hadn't been around the last time he'd been to the surface, terrorized and confused him. (Poor Ed thought a crosstown bus was "a red and yellow dragon".) Finally, Ed decides to return to his post fathoms below and stay there. The basement vault gag was also used in the cartoon The Mouse that Jack Built and an episode^[25] of The Lucy Show.

A separate sound gag involved a song Benny had written, "When You Say I Beg Your Pardon, Then I'll Come Back to You". Its inane lyrics and insipid melody guaranteed that it would never be published or recorded, but Benny continued to try to con, extort, or otherwise inveigle some of his musical guests (including The Smothers Brothers and Peter, Paul and Mary) to perform it. None ever made it all the way through.

In keeping with his "stingy" schtick, on one of his television specials he remarked that, to his way of looking at things, a "special" is when the price of coffee is marked down.

The explanation usually given for the "stuck on 39" running joke is that he had celebrated his birthday on-air when he turned 39, and decided to do the same the following year, because "there's nothing funny about 40". Upon his death, having celebrated his 39th birthday 41 times, some newspapers continued the joke with headlines such as "Jack Benny Dies – At 39?"^{[citation needed]}

Another popular running gag concerned the social habits of Benny's on-air orchestra, who were consistently portrayed as a bunch of drunken ne'er-do-wells. Led first by Phil Harris and later by Bob Crosby, the orchestra, and in particular band member Frank Remley, were jokingly portrayed as often being too drunk to play properly, using an overturned bass drum to play cards on just minutes before a show, and so enamored by liquor that the sight of a glass of milk would make them sick. Remley was portrayed in various unflattering situations, such as being thrown into a garbage can by a road sweeper who had found him passed out in the street at 4 am, and on a wanted poster at the Beverly Hills police station.

One Christmas program had Crosby agonizing over what to get Remley:

Benny: "Well, why don't you get him a cordial; like a bottle of Drambuie?" Crosby: "That's a nice thought, Jack, but Drambuie's an after-dinner drink." Benny: "So?" Crosby: "So Remley never quite makes it 'til after dinner."

Crosby also got consistent laughs by frequently joking about his more famous brother Bing's vast wealth.

The Maxwell[link]

Jack Benny shakes hands with Harry S. Truman from the seat of a c. 1908 Maxwell Roadster

Starting on the radio show, a running joke was that Benny drove a Maxwell automobile, a brand that went out of business in 1925. Benny's old car was so worn out that it would barely run, but the miserly Benny insisted he could get a few more miles out of it. When a sound effects man missed a cue for the automobile engine, Mel Blanc quickly improvised a vocal imitation of a sputtering car engine that was so funny it became a regular feature of the show. By 1943, Jack Benny's Maxwell had become such a well known aspect of popular culture that it was referenced in the Spike Jones record "The Sound Effects Man".

When the Jack Benny Program began appearing on television in 1950, a 1916 Maxwell Model 25 Tourer became one of the production's standard props. Benny's Maxwell later became a 1923 Tourer. In addition to on the program, Benny would often make public appearances in Maxwells. He appeared behind the wheel of one in the film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and drove a Maxwell onto the stage in one of his last television specials. Benny and his archaic auto were featured in a series of television and print ads for Texaco from the 1950s through the 1970s. A series of gags were built around the premise that Benny appreciated the value of "Sky Chief" brand gasoline in keeping his car running smoothly, but was too cheap to buy more than one gallon at a time.

Final years[link]

A mod Benny from his January 1974 special.

After his broadcasting career ended, Benny performed live as a stand up comedian and returned to films in 1963 with a cameo appearance in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Benny was preparing to star in the film version of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys when his health failed. In fact, he prevailed upon his longtime best friend, George Burns, to take his place on a nightclub tour while preparing for the film. (Burns ultimately had to replace Benny in the film as well and went on to win an Academy Award for his performance).

Benny made one of his final television appearances in the fall of 1972 on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson when Carson celebrated his 10th anniversary. (An audio recording featuring highlights of Benny's appearance is featured on the album Here's Johnny: Magic Moments From The Tonight Show released in 1973.) During this appearance, he stated that he loved the violin so much, "if God came to me and said 'Jack, starting tomorrow I will make you one of the world's great violinists, but no more will you ever be able to tell a joke', I really believe that I would accept that." He also related something Isaac Stern once told him: "You know, Jack, when you walk out in front of a symphony orchestra in white tie and tails and your violin, you actually look like one of the world's great violinists. It's a damned shame you have to play!" Jokes aside, Benny was a serious, dedicated violinist who could play aside Stern and not embarrass himself.^[26]

Death[link]

In October 1974, Benny canceled a performance in Dallas after suffering a dizzy spell, coupled with numbness in his arms. Despite a battery of tests, Benny's ailment could not be determined. When he complained of stomach pains in early December, a first test showed nothing, but a subsequent one showed he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Choosing to spend his final days at home, he was visited by close friends including George Burns, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Carson and John Rowles. He died on December 26, 1974. George Burns, Benny's best friend for more than fifty years, attempted to deliver a eulogy. He broke down shortly after he began and was unable to continue. Bob Hope also delivered a eulogy in which he stated, "This is the only time Jack's timing was all wrong. He left us much too soon." Two days after his death, he was interred in a crypt at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California. Benny's will arranged for flowers, specifically a single long-stemmed red rose, to be delivered to his widow, Mary Livingstone, every day for the rest of her life. Livingstone died nine years later on June 30, 1983.

In trying to explain his successful life, Benny summed it up by stating "Everything good that happened to me happened by accident. I was not filled with ambition nor fired by a drive toward a clear-cut goal. I never knew exactly where I was going."^[8]

Upon his death, his family donated to UCLA his personal, professional, and business papers, as well as a collection of his television shows. The university established the Jack Benny Award in his honor in 1977 to recognize outstanding people in the field of comedy. Johnny Carson was the first award recipient.^[27] Benny also donated a Stradivarius violin purchased in 1957 to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.^[28][29] Benny had commented, "If it isn't a $30,000 Strad, I'm out $120."^[30]

Honors[link]

Jack Benny has one star each on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for TV, film, and radio.

Posthumous tributes[link]

When the price of a standard first-class U.S. postal stamp was increased to 39 cents in 2006, fans petitioned for a Jack Benny stamp to honor his stage persona's perpetual age. The U.S. Postal Service had issued a stamp depicting Jack Benny in 1991, as part of a booklet of stamps honoring comedians; however, the stamp was issued at the then-current rate of 29 cents.^[31]

Jack Benny Middle School in Waukegan, Illinois, is named after the famous comedian. Its motto matches his famous statement as "Home of the '39ers".

See also[link]

	United States Navy portal
	World War I portal

• List of most-listened-to radio programs

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• The New York Times, April 16, 1953, p. 43, "Jack Benny plans more work on TV"
• The New York Times, March 16, 1960, p. 75, "Canned laughter: Comedians are crying on the inside about CBS rule that public know of its use"
• Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone Benny, Hilliard Marks with Marcia Borie, Doubleday & Company, 1978, 322 p.
• Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story, Jack Benny and Joan Benny, Warner Books, 1990, 302 p.
• CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye, by Robert Metz, New American Library, 1978.
• The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV's Golden Age, by Jordan R. Young; Past Times Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0-940410-37-0
• Well! Reflections on the Life and Career of Jack Benny, edited by Michael Leannah, BearManor Media, 2007.
• Jack Benny v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 25 T.C. 197 (1955).
• Hilmes, M. (1997). Radio voices American broadcasting, 1922–1952. Minnesota Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Further reading[link]

• Benny, Jack; Benny, Joan. (1990) Sunday Nights at Seven: The Jack Benny Story. Warner Books.
• Josefsberg, Milt. (1977) The Jack Benny Show. New Rochelle: Arlington House. ISBN 0-87000-347-X
• Leannah, Michael, editor. (2007) Well! Reflections on the Life and Career of Jack Benny. BearManor Media. Contributing authors: Frank Bresee, Clair Schulz, Kay Linaker, Janine Marr, Pam Munter, Mark Higgins, B. J. Borsody, Charles A. Beckett, Jordan R. Young, Philip G. Harwood, Noell Wolfgram Evans, Jack Benny, Michael Leannah, Steve Newvine, Ron Sayles, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Marc Reed, Derek Tague, Michael J. Hayde, Steve Thompson, Michael Mildredson.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jack Benny

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jack Benny

• Audio

• • Jack Benny Show – OTR Podcast – Daily episodes of The Jack Benny Program in MP3 format with new introductions and Benny Trivia
  • Over 350 episodes of The Jack Benny Program in MP3 format
  • Two broadcasts (East/West) of The Jello Program: "Christmas Shopping for Perfume and a Necktie" (12/17/39)
• Video
  • Jack Benny Hour (1965 NBC hour-long special) is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• Jack Benny at the Internet Movie Database
  • The Jack Benny Program (TV pilot) at the Internet Movie Database
  • The Jack Benny Program (TV series) at the Internet Movie Database
• Jack Benny at the Internet Broadway Database
• Jack Benny at TVGuide.com
• Jack Benny at AllRovi
• The Jack Benny Program at TV.com
• Jack Benny at the National Radio Hall of Fame
• Jack Benny Fred Allen Feud
• Jack Benny Audio History
• International Jack Benny Fan Club
• In-depth interview with Laura Leff, Founder and President of the International Jack Benny Fan Club (2011)
• Online audio and video of Jack Benny
• Copies of Jack Benny's Radio and TV scripts, with handwritten edits
• Free 2 minute download of Humphrey Bogart on the Jack Benny Show
• Jack Benny Middle School
• Jack Benny Center for the Cultural Arts
• "The Friars Club"
• Jack Benny papers at the University of Wyoming—American Heritage Center
• FBI file on Jack Benny

Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor (right) with Bert Gordon, aka "the Mad Russian"
Born	Edward Israel Iskowitz (1892-01-31)January 31, 1892 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	October 10, 1964(1964-10-10) (aged 72) Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actor, comedian, dancer, singer-songwriter
Years active	1907–53
Spouse	Ida Cantor (1914–62) 5 daughters

Eddie Cantor (January 31, 1892 – October 10, 1964), born Edward Israel Iskowitz,^[1] was an American "illustrated song" performer, comedian, dancer, singer, actor and songwriter.^[2] Familiar to Broadway, radio, movie and early television audiences, this "Apostle of Pep" was regarded almost as a family member by millions because his top-rated radio shows revealed intimate stories and amusing anecdotes about his wife Ida and five daughters. Some of his hits include "Makin' Whoopee," "Ida," "If You Knew Susie," "Ma! He's Makin' Eyes at Me," "Margie" and "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree?)" He also wrote a few songs, including "Merrily We Roll Along," the Merrie Melodies Warner Bros. cartoon theme.

His eye-rolling song-and-dance routines eventually led to his nickname, "Banjo Eyes." In 1933, the artist Frederick J. Garner caricatured Cantor with large round eyes resembling the drum-like pot of a banjo. Cantor's eyes became his trademark, often exaggerated in illustrations, and leading to his appearance on Broadway in the musical Banjo Eyes (1941).

His charity and humanitarian work was extensive, and he is credited with coining the phrase and helping to develop The March of Dimes.

Biography[link]

Cantor was born in New York City, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Meta and Mechel Iskowitz. His mother died in childbirth one year after his birth, and his father died of pneumonia when Eddie was two, leaving him to be raised by his beloved grandmother, Esther Kantrowitz.^[3] As a child, he attended Surprise Lake Camp.^[4] A misunderstanding when signing her grandson for school gave him her last name of Kantrowitz (shortened by the clerk to Kanter). Esther died on January 29, 1917, two days before he signed a long-term contract with Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. to appear in his Follies.

The Cantors in 1952.

He had adopted the first name "Eddie" when he met his future wife Ida Tobias in 1903, because she felt that "Izzy" wasn't the right name for an actor. Cantor married Ida in 1914. They (famously) had five daughters, Marjorie, Natalie, Edna, Marilyn and Janet, who provided comic fodder for Cantor's longtime running gag, especially on radio, about his five unmarriageable daughters. Several radio historians, including Gerald Nachman (Raised on Radio), have said that this gag did not always sit well with the girls.

He was the second president of the Screen Actors Guild, serving from 1933 to 1935. He invented the title "The March of Dimes" for the donation campaigns of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was organized to combat polio. It was a play on the The March of Time newsreels popular at the time. He began the first campaign on his own radio show in January 1938, asking people to mail a dime to the nation's most famous assumed polio victim, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Other entertainers joined in the appeal via their own shows, and the White House mail room was deluged with 2,680,000 dimes.

Following the death of daughter Marjorie at the age of 44, both Eddie's and Ida's health declined rapidly. Ida died in August 1962 of "cardiac insufficiency."^[3][5] On October 10, 1964 in Beverly Hills, California, Eddie Cantor suffered another heart attack and died, aged 72. He is buried in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery. Cantor was awarded an honorary Academy Award the year of his death, for distinguished service to the film industry.

Stage[link]

Saloon songs to vaudeville[link]

By his early teens Cantor began winning talent contests at local theaters and started appearing on stage. One of his earliest paying jobs was doubling as a waiter and performer, singing for tips at Carey Walsh's Coney Island saloon, where a young Jimmy Durante accompanied him on piano. He made his first public appearance in Vaudeville in 1907 at New York's Clinton Music Hall. In 1912, he was the only performer over the age of 20 to appear in Gus Edwards's Kid Kabaret, where he created his first blackface character, "Jefferson." He later toured with Al Lee as the team "Cantor & Lee." Critical praise from that show got the attention of Broadway's top producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, who gave Cantor a spot in the Ziegfeld rooftop post-show, Midnight Frolic (1917).^[3]

Broadway[link]

A year later, Cantor made his Broadway debut in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917. He continued in the Follies until 1927,^[6] a period considered the best years of the long-running revue. For several years Cantor co-starred in an act with pioneer African-American comedian Bert Williams, both appearing in blackface; Cantor played Williams's fresh-talking son. Other co-stars with Cantor during his time in the Follies included Will Rogers, Marilyn Miller, Fanny Brice and W.C. Fields.^[7] He moved on to stardom in book musicals, starting with Kid Boots (1923) and Whoopee! (1928).^[6]

• Ziegfeld Follies of 1917 - revue - performer
• Ziegfeld Follies of 1918 - revue - performer, co-composer and co-lyricist for "Broadway's Not a Bad Place After All" with Harry Ruby
• Ziegfeld Follies of 1919 - revue - performer, lyricist for "(Oh! She's the) Last Rose of Summer"
• Ziegfeld Follies of 1920 - revue - composer for "Green River," composer and lyricist for "Every Blossom I See Reminds Me of You" and "I Found a Baby on My Door Step"
• The Midnight Rounders of 1920 - revue - performer
• Broadway Brevities of 1920 - revue - performer
• Make It Snappy (1922) - revue - performer, co-bookwriter
• Ziegfeld Follies of 1923 - revue - sketch writer
• Kid Boots (1923) - musical comedy - actor in the role of "Kid Boots" (the Caddie Master)
• Ziegfeld Follies of 1927 - revue - performer, co-bookwriter
• Whoopee! (1928) - musical comedy - actor in the role of "Henry Williams"
• Eddie Cantor at the Palace (1931) - solo performance
• Banjo Eyes (1941) - musical comedy - actor in the role of "Erwin Trowbridge"
• Nellie Bly (1946) - musical comedy - co-producer

Radio and recordings[link]

Radio[link]

Cantor appeared on radio as early as February 3, 1922, as indicated by this news item from Connecticut's Bridgeport Telegram:

Local radio operators listened to one of the finest programs yet produced over the radiophone last night. The program of entertainment which included some of the stars of Broadway musical comedy and vaudeville was broadcast from the Newark, N. J. station WDY and the Pittsburgh station KDKA, both of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. The Newark entertainment started at 7 o'clock: a children's half-hour of music and fairy stories; 7:[35?], Hawaiian airs and violin solo; 8:00, news of the day; and at 8:20 a radio party with nationally known comedians participating; 9:55, Arlington time signals and 10:01, a government weather report. G. E. Nothnagle, who conducts a radiophone station at his home 176 Waldemere Avenue said last night that he was delighted with the program, especially with the numbers sung by Eddie Cantor. The weather conditions are excellent for receiving, he continued, the tone and the quality of the messages was fine.^[8]

Cantor's appearance with Rudy Vallee on Vallee's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour on February 5, 1931 led to a four-week tryout with NBC's The Chase and Sanborn Hour. Replacing Maurice Chevalier, who was returning to Paris, Cantor joined Chase and Sanborn on September 13, 1931. This hour-long Sunday evening variety series teamed Cantor with announcer Jimmy Wallington and violinist Dave Rubinoff. The show established Cantor as a leading comedian, and his scriptwriter, David Freedman, as “the Captain of Comedy.” Cantor soon became the world's highest-paid radio star. His shows began with a crowd chanting "We want Can-tor! We want Can-tor!," a phrase said to have originated in vaudeville, when the audience chanted to chase off an act on the bill before Cantor. Cantor's theme song was his own lyric to the Leo Robin/Richard Whiting song, "One Hour with You." His radio sidekicks included Bert Gordon, (comic Barney Gorodetsky, aka "The Mad Russian") and Harry Parke (better known as "Parkyakarkus"). Cantor also discovered and helped guide the career of singer Dinah Shore, first featuring her on his radio show in 1940, as well as other performers, including Deanna Durbin, Bobby Breen and Eddie Fisher.

Indicative of his effect on the mass audience, he agreed in November 1934 to introduce a new song by the songwriters J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie that other well-known artists had rejected as being "silly" and "childish." The song, "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," immediately had orders for 100,000 copies of sheet music the next day. It sold 400,000 copies by Christmas of that year.

His NBC radio show, Time to Smile, was broadcast from 1940 to 1946, followed by his Pabst Blue Ribbon Show from 1946 through 1949. He also served as emcee of The $64 Question during 1949-'50, and hosted a weekly disc jockey program for Philip Morris during the 1952-'53 season. In addition to film and radio, Cantor recorded for Hit of the Week Records, then again for Columbia, for Banner and Decca and various small labels.

His heavy political involvement began early in his career, including his participation in the strike to form Actors Equity in 1919, provoking the anger of father figure and producer, Florenz Ziegfeld. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Cantor publicly denounced antisemitic radio personality Father Charles Coughlin and was dropped by his sponsor, Camel cigarettes. A year and a half later, it was his friend Jack Benny who was able to get him back on the air.

Recordings[link]

Cantor began making phonograph records in 1917, recording both comedy songs and routines and popular songs of the day, first for Victor, then for Aeoleon-Vocalion, Pathé and Emerson. From 1921 through 1925 he had an exclusive contract with Columbia Records, returning to Victor for the remainder of the decade.

Cantor was one of the era's most successful entertainers, but the 1929 stock market crash took away his multi-millionaire status and left him deeply in debt. However, Cantor's relentless attention to his own earnings in order to avoid the poverty he knew growing up caused him to use his writing talent, quickly building a new bank account with his highly popular, bestselling books of humor and cartoons about his experience, Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street ^[9] in 1929 "A.C." (After Crash), and Yoo-Hoo, Prosperity!

Cantor was also a composer, with his most famous song seldom attributed to him. In 1935, along with Charles Tobias and Murray Mencher, Cantor wrote "Merrily We Roll Along," which he recorded in the 1950s. It was adapted as the themesong for the Merrie Melodies series of animated cartoons, distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures between 1937 and 1964. Cantor himself was frequently caricatured in Warner cartoons of the period, (see Film and television: Animation).

Film and television[link]

Cantor also bounced back between movies and on radio. He had previously appeared in a number of short films, performing his Follies songs and comedy routines, and two silent features (Special Delivery and Kid Boots) in the 1920s. He was offered the lead in The Jazz Singer after it was turned down by George Jessel. Cantor also turned the role down (so it went to Al Jolson), but he became a leading Hollywood star in 1930 with the film version of Whoopee!, shot in two-strip Technicolor. He continued making films over the next two decades until his last starring role in If You Knew Susie (1948).

Filmography[link]

Television[link]

Cantor as host of The Colgate Comedy Hour, 1952.

In the 1950s, he was one of the alternating hosts of the television show The Colgate Comedy Hour, in which he would introduce variety acts and play comic characters like "Maxie the Taxi." However, the show landed Cantor in an unlikely controversy when a young Sammy Davis, Jr. appeared as a guest performer. Cantor embraced Davis and mopped Davis's brow with his handkerchief after his performance. Worried sponsors led NBC to threaten cancellation of the show; Cantor's response was to book Davis for two more weeks.

On May 25, 1944, pioneer television station WPTZ (now KYW-TV) in Philadelphia presented a special telecast featuring Eddie Cantor, which was also fed to the NBC television station in New York City, WNBT (now WNBC). Cantor, one of the first major stars to agree to appear on television, was to sing "We're Havin' a Baby, My Baby and Me". Arriving shortly before airtime at the Philadelphia studios, Cantor was reportedly told to cut the song because the NBC New York censors considered some of the lyrics too risqué. Cantor refused, claiming no time to prepare an alternative number. NBC relented, but the sound was cut and the picture blurred on certain lines in the song. This is considered the first instance of television censorship.^{[citation needed]}

Animation[link]

Cantor appears in caricature form in numerous Looney Tunes cartoons produced for Warner Bros., although he was often voiced by an imitator. Beginning with I Like Mountain Music (1933), other animated Cantor cameos include Shuffle Off to Buffalo (Harman-Ising, 1933) and Billboard Frolics (Friz Freleng, 1935). Eddie Cantor is one of the four "down on their luck" stars (along with Bing Crosby, Al Jolson and Jack Benny) snubbed by Elmer Fudd in What’s Up, Doc? (Bob McKimson, 1950). In Farm Frolics (Bob Clampett, 1941), a horse, asked by the narrator to "do a canter," promptly launches into a singing, dancing, eye-rolling impression. The Cantor gag that got the most mileage, however, was his oft-repeated wish for a son after five famous daughters. Slap Happy Pappy (Clampett, 1940) features an “Eddie Cackler” rooster who wants a boy, to little avail. Other references can be found in Baby Bottleneck (Clampett, 1946) and Circus Today (Tex Avery, 1940). In Porky’s Naughty Nephew (Clampett, 1938) a swimming Cantor gleefully adopts a "buoy." ^[10] An animated Cantor also appears prominently in Walt Disney's Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (Wilfred Jackson, 1938) as Little Jack Horner, who sings "Sing a Song of Sixpence."

Books and merchandising[link]

Cantor's popularity led to merchandising of such products as Eddie Cantor's Tell It to the Judge game from Parker Brothers. In 1933, a set of 12 Eddie Cantor caricatures by Frederick J. Garner were published by Brown & Bigelow. These advertising cards were purchased in bulk as a direct-mail item by such businesses as auto body shops, funeral directors, dental laboratories and vegetable wholesale dealers. With the full set, companies could mail a single Cantor card each month for a year to their selected special customers as an ongoing promotion. Cantor was often caricatured on the covers of sheet music and in magazines and newspapers. Cantor was depicted as a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade,^[11] one of the very few balloons based on a real person.

In addition to Caught Short!, Cantor wrote or co-wrote at least seven other books, including booklets released by the then-fledgling firm of Simon & Schuster, with Cantor’s name on the cover. (Some were "as told to" or written with David Freedman). Customers paid a dollar and received the booklet with a penny embedded in the hardcover. They sold well, and H. L. Mencken asserted that these books did more to pull America out of the Great Depression than all government measures combined.

Bibliography[link]

• My Life Is in Your Hands by Eddie Cantor (1928) with David Freedman; Harper & Bros.
• Caught Short!: A Saga of Wailing Wall Street by Eddie Cantor (1929) Simon & Schuster
• Between the Acts by Eddie Cantor (1930) Simon & Schuster
• Yoo-Hoo, Prosperity!: The Eddie Cantor Five-Year Plan by Eddie Cantor (1931) with David Freedman; Simon & Schuster
• The Rise of the Goldbergs by Gertrude Berg (1931) Forward by Eddie Cantor; Barse & Co.
• Your Next President! by Eddie Cantor (1932) with David Freedman, Illus. by S.L. Hydeman; Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc.
• Eddie Cantor in An Hour with You: A Big Little Book (1934) Whitman
• Eddie Cantor Song and Joke Book (1934) Illus. by Ben Harris; M. Witmark & Sons
• Ziegfeld: The Great Glorifier by Eddie Cantor (1934) with David Freedman; Alfred H. King
• World's Book of Best Jokes by Eddie Cantor (1943) World Publishing Co.
• Hello, Momma by George Jessel (1946) Forward by Eddie Cantor, Illus. by Carl Rose; World Publishing Co.
• Take My Life by Eddie Cantor (1957) with Jane Kesner Ardmore; Doubleday
• No Man Stands Alone by Barney Ross (1957) Forward by Eddie Cantor; B. Lippincott Co.
• The Way I See It by Eddie Cantor (1959) with Phyllis Rosenteur, ed.; Prentice-Hall
• As I Remember Them by Eddie Cantor (1963) Duell, Sloan & Pearce
• Yoo-Hoo, Prosperity! and Caught Short! by Eddie Cantor (1969) Greenwood Press
• The Golden Age of Sound Comedy: Comic Films and Comedians of the Thirties by Donald W. McCaffrey (1973) A.S. Barnes
• Radio Comedy by Arthur Frank Wertheim (1979) Oxford University Press
• The Vaudevillians: A Dictionary of Vaudeville Performers by Anthony Slide (1981) Arlington House
• American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries by Charles W. Stein, ed. (1984) Alfred A. Knopf
• Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business by Gregory Koseluk (1995) McFarland
• Eddie Cantor: A Bio-Bibliography by James Fisher (1997) Greenwood Press
• Banjo Eyes: Eddie Cantor and the Birth of Modern Stardom by Herbert G. Goldman (1997) Oxford University Press
• The Great American Broadcast: A Celebration of Radio's Golden Age by Leonard Maltin (1997) Dutton
• My Life Is in Your Hands and Take My Life by Eddie Cantor (2000) Cooper Square Press
• Film Clowns of the Depression: Twelve Defining Comic Performances by Wes D. Gehring (2007) McFarland
• Eddie Cantor in Laugh Land by Harold Sherman (2008) Kessinger Publishing

Tributes[link]

Cantor was profiled on the program This Is Your Life, in which an unsuspecting person (usually a celebrity) would be surprised on live television by host Ralph Edwards, with a half-hour tribute. Cantor was the only subject who was told of the surprise in advance; he was recovering from a heart attack and it was felt that the shock might harm him.

On October 29, 1995, as part of a nationwide celebration of the 75th anniversary of radio, he was posthumously inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame at Chicago's Museum of Broadcasting Communication.

In 1953 Warner Bros., in an attempt to duplicate the box-office success of The Jolson Story, filmed a big-budget Technicolor feature film, The Eddie Cantor Story. The film found an audience but might have done better with someone else in the leading role. Actor Keefe Brasselle played Cantor as a caricature with high-pressure dialogue and bulging eyes wide open; the fact that Brasselle was considerably taller than Cantor didn't lend realism either. Eddie and Ida Cantor were seen in a brief prologue and epilogue set in a projection room, where they are watching Brasselle in action; at the end of the film Eddie tells Ida, "I never looked better in my life"... and gives the audience a knowing, incredulous look. George Burns, in his memoir All My Best Friends, claimed that Warner Bros. created a miracle producing the movie in that "it made Eddie Cantor's life boring".

Something closer to the real Eddie Cantor story is his self-produced 1944 feature Show Business, a valentine to vaudeville and show folks that was RKO's top-grossing film that year. Probably the best summary of Cantor's career is in one of the Colgate Comedy Hour shows. The Colgate hour was a virtual video autobiography, with Cantor recounting his career, singing his familiar hits, and re-creating his singing-waiter days with his old pal Jimmy Durante. This show has been issued on DVD as Eddie Cantor in Person.

As talented as Cantor was, he is an excellent example of the mega star who virtually vanishes with the passing of time. His biographer, Gregory Koseluk, wrote in 1995 that Eddie "is all but forgotten," (from Eddie Cantor: A Life in Show Business [Introduction]). In recent years, Eddie Cantor has been a recurring character on HBO's series Boardwalk Empire, where he is played by Stephen DeRosa. He appeared in three episodes of the show's first season and one episode of the second season.

Sources[link]

Goldman, Herbert G. (1997). Banjo Eyes: Eddie Cantor and the Birth of Modern Stardom. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Watch[link]

• A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor, Star of "Kid Boots" (1923) A six-minute film made in Phonofilm by Lee De Forest featuring Cantor telling monologues and singing two songs.

Listen to[link]

• Command Performance 1942-03-01 ep001 - Eddie Cantor
• Command Performance 1942-04-01_ep006 Kay Kyser & Eddie Cantor
• The Chase and Sanborn Hour with Eddie Cantor (excerpts)
• Free OTR: The Eddie Cantor Show (30 1936-52 episodes)
• OTR Network Library: The Eddie Cantor Show (11 1936-52 episodes)

References[link]

External links[link]

• "Eddie Cantor" Old Time Radio
• ""Ask Eddie Cantor" Old Time Radio"

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Eddie Cantor

Biography portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Eddie Cantor

• Eddie Cantor at the Internet Movie Database
• Eddie Cantor at the Internet Broadway Database
• Eddie Cantor official site
• Cantor's Sidekick: Bert 'The Mad Russian' Gordon @WFMU
• Eddie Cantor at Virtual History

Kenneth Howard "Kenny" Delmar (September 5, 1910, Boston, Massachusetts – July 14, 1984, Stamford, Connecticut) was an American actor active in radio, films, and animation. An announcer on the pioneering radio news series The March of Time, he became a national radio sensation in 1945 as Senator Beauregard Claghorn on Fred Allen's program Allen's Alley. The character Delmar created was a primary inspiration for the Warner Bros. cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn.

Early life and career[link]

Kenneth Frederick Fay Howard^[1] was born September 5, 1910, in Boston, but moved to New York City in infancy after the separation of his parents. His mother, Evelyn Delmar, was a vaudevillian who toured the country with her sister. Kenny Delmar was on the stage from age seven. His first screen appearance was in the D. W. Griffith film Orphans of the Storm (1921), in which he played the Joseph Schildkraut role as a child.^[2] During the Depression he left the stage to work in his stepfather's business. After running his own own ballet school for a year he married one of his teachers, Alice Cochran,^[1] and decided to try a career in radio.^[3]

Radio[link]

By the late 1930s, Delmar was an announcer on such major radio series as The March of Time and Your Hit Parade. He played multiple roles in the Mercury Theatre's infamous October 1938 radio drama The War of the Worlds.^[4] His main role was that of Captain Lansing, the National Guardsman who collapses in terror when confronted by the Martian invaders.^[3]:66[5] He also was heard as Commissioner Weston on early episodes of The Shadow.^{[citation needed]}

Delmar is notable for creating the character Senator Beauregard Claghorn on Fred Allen's radio program Allen's Alley, which he did while also serving as the show's regular announcer. Senator Claghorn made his radio debut October 7, 1945, and six months later was called "unquestionably the most quoted man in the nation" by Life magazine.^[3]:61 The role inspired the Warner Bros. animated character Foghorn Leghorn,^{[6] [7]} first seen in the Oscar-nominated cartoon Walky Talky Hawky (1946).

"During the late 1940's, Mr. Delmar captivated 20 million radio listeners every Sunday night with his burlesque of a bombastic, super-chauvinistic legislator who drank only from Dixie cups and refused to drive through the Lincoln Tunnel," wrote The New York Times. "His stock expression, 'That's a joke, son,' was for many years one of the nation's pet phrases, mimicked by children and businessmen alike. … The windbag character, he said, was inspired by a Texas cattle rancher who had picked him up while he was hitchhiking and barely stopped talking."^[4]

At the height of his popularity, Delmar also starred as Claghorn in a theatrical feature film, It's a Joke, Son! (1947).

Delmar was also announcer and voice performer on The Alan Young Show. One of the characters that he played was Counselor Carteblanche who is obviously similar in mannerisms and voice to Senator Claghorn.^[8]

Animation[link]

Delmar was also a well-utilized cartoon voice talent whose voice was familiar to baby-boomers as Commander McBragg, The Hunter, and other Saturday morning cartoon icons.

Personal life[link]

He is buried in Stamford's Long Ridge Union Cemetery.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Kenny Delmar at the Internet Movie Database
• Kenny Delmar at Find a Grave

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2012)

Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Bankhead, 1941
Born	Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (1902-01-31)January 31, 1902 Huntsville, Alabama
Died	December 12, 1968(1968-12-12) (aged 66) New York, New York
Years active	1918–68
Spouse	John Emery (m. 1937–1941) «start: (1937)–end+1: (1942)»"Marriage: John Emery to Tallulah Bankhead" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Tallulah_Bankhead)

Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968) was an American actress of the stage and screen,^[1] talk-show host, and bonne vivante.^[2] Bankhead was also known for her deep voice, flamboyant personality, romances with men and women, and support of liberal causes, which broke with the tendency of Southern Democrats at the time to support a more conservative agenda.^[3] She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981.^[4]

Life and career[link]

Early life and family[link]

Bankhead was born in Huntsville, Alabama, to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia "Ada" Bankhead (née Sledge). The event took place on the second floor of what is now known as the Isaac Schiffman Building; a marker has been erected to commemorate the site and, in 1980, the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.^[5] "Tallu" was named after her paternal grandmother.^[6] Her mother died as a result of blood poisoning on February 23, 1902, shortly after Tallulah's birth, and is buried in Huntsville's historic Maple Hill Cemetery. Tallulah has been described as "an extremely homely child", overweight and with a deep, husky voice resulting from chronic bronchitis.^[6] However, others described her as an exhibitionist, performer, personality, and star from the very beginning.^[7]

Bankhead's former residence in Washington, D.C.

She came from the powerful Bankhead and Brockman political family, active in the Democratic Party in the South in general and Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936–1940.

She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Bankhead herself was a Democrat, albeit one of a more liberal stripe than the rest of her family. Her elder sister and only sibling was Evelyn Eugenia "Sister" (born January 24, 1901 – died May 11, 1979). Tallulah's family sent her to various schools in a vain attempt to keep her out of trouble, which included several years at a Roman Catholic convent school (although her father was a Methodist and her mother an Episcopalian).^[8] Bankhead herself would be raised as a Methodist.

Early career[link]

In her autobiography, Bankhead claimed that her "first performance" was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain. "I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher," Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright." ^[9]

At 15, Bankhead won a movie-magazine beauty contest and persuaded her family to let her move to New York. She quickly won bit parts, first appearing in a non-speaking role in The Squab Farm. During these early New York years, she became a peripheral member of the Algonquin Round Table and was known as a hard-partying girl-about-town. During this time she began to use cocaine and marijuana, going as far as saying "Cocaine isn't habit-forming and I know because I've been taking it for years."^[10] However, she did not consume alcohol to any great degree. She also became known for her outspokenness. Once, while in attendance at a party, a guest made a comment about rape, and Bankhead reportedly replied "I was raped in our driveway when I was eleven. You know darling, it was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel."^[11] She professed to having a ravenous appetite for sex, but not for a particular type. "I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic. And the others give me either stiff neck or lockjaw", she said.^[12]

Once, at a party, one of her friends brought along a young man who boldly told Bankhead that he wanted to make love to her that night. She didn't bat an eye and said, "And so you shall, you wonderful, old-fashioned boy."^[13][14] Another version of the story holds that Bankhead met Chico Marx at a party before her reputation had overturned the presumption that William B. Bankhead's daughter would be disgusted by Marx's typically crude (yet generally effective) approach. According to Dick Cavett, after Marx had been cautioned to be on his best behavior with Bankhead, the two first spoke at the punch bowl.

"Miss Bankhead."

"Mr. Marx." And, as everyone breathed a sigh of relief, Chico told her, "You know, I really want to fuck you." She replied, "And so you shall, you old-fashioned boy."^[15]

In 1918 she made her stage debut at the Bijou Theatre in New York. In 1923, she made her debut on the London stage at Wyndham's Theatre. In London she was to appear in over a dozen plays in the next eight years, most famously, The Dancers. Her fame as an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize. She was famous not only as an actress but also for her many affairs, infectious personality and witticisms like "There is less to this than meets the eye"^[16] and "I'm as pure as the driven slush."^[17] She had the reputation of being sexually available to anyone she found attractive, famous or not. Her longest known affair during this period in her life was with an Italian businessman named Anthony de Bosdari, which lasted just over one year.^[13] By the end of the decade, she was one of the West End's — and England's — best-known and most notorious celebrities.^[18]

Welsh artist Augustus John with Bankhead and her portrait (1929)

While in London, Bankhead also bought herself a Bentley, which she loved to drive. She wasn't very competent with directions, however, and constantly found herself lost in the London streets. She would telephone a taxi-cab and pay the driver to drive to her destination while she followed behind in her car.^[13]

During her eight years on the London stage, Bankhead earned a reputation for making the most out of inferior material. For example, in her autobiography, Bankhead described the opening night of a play called Conchita:

“In the second act…I came on carrying a monkey…On opening night the monkey went berserk…(he) snatched my black wig from my head, leaped from my arms and scampered down to the footlights. There he paused, peered out at the audience, then waved my wig over his head…The audience had been giggling at the absurd plot even before this simian had at me. Now it became hysterical. What did Tallulah do in this crisis? I turned a cartwheel! The audience roared…After the monkey business I was afraid they might boo me. Instead I received an ovation.” ^[19]

Mid-career[link]

Bankhead returned to the US in 1931, but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 1930s. She rented a home at 1712 Stanley Street, in Hollywood, and began hosting parties that were said to "have no boundaries". Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and the pair became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and didn't have the patience for it. She didn't like Hollywood either. When she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him, "How do you get laid in this dreadful place?"^[20]

She expressed some interest in spirituality, but did not outwardly pursue it, although in 1932 she met with the Indian spiritual teacher Meher Baba.^[21]

Although Bankhead was not very interested in making films, the opportunity to make $50,000 per film was too good to pass up. Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Cary Grant, and remains the only picture with both Cooper and Grant as the film's leading men. She later said, "The only reason I went to Hollywood was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper."^[20] One of Bankhead's most notorious events was an interview that she gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932, in which she ranted wildly about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:

"I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now.... I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long.... If there's anything the matter with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind.... The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!"^[22]

Hollywood, Broadway and politics[link]

In 1934, after recuperating in Alabama, she returned to England. After only a short stay, she was called back to New York to play in Dark Victory. Although Bette Davis played the leading character in the film version, she openly admitted in later years that she had emulated Bankhead in the role. Bankhead continued to play in various performances over the next few years, gaining excellent notices for her portrayal of Elizabeth in a revival of Somerset Maugham's The Circle. David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind (1939) called her the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara.^{[citation needed]} Although her screen test for the role in black-and-white was superb, she photographed poorly in Technicolor. Selznick also reportedly believed that at age 36, she was too old to play Scarlett, who is 16 at the beginning of the film (the role eventually went to Vivien Leigh). Selznick sent Kay Brown to Bankhead to "sound her out" about playing prostitute Belle Watling in the film, which she turned down.^[23]

Returning to Broadway, Bankhead's career stalled in unmemorable plays. When she appeared in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with her husband, John Emery, the New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson wrote "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile, last night, and promptly sank!"^{[citation needed]} Her portrayal of the cold, ruthless Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) won her the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Performance, but Bankhead and Hellman feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland. Bankhead (a staunch anti-Communist) was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, while Hellman (an equally staunch Stalinist) objected strenuously, and the two women didn't speak for the next quarter of a century.^[18]

More success and the same award followed her 1942 performance in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, and also husband and wife offstage). During the run of the play, some media accused Bankhead of a running feud with Elia Kazan, the play's director. Kazan confirmed the story in his autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, published by Doubleday i 1988. Kazan stated that Bankhead was one of the few people in his life that he ever actually detested.^{[citation needed]}

In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as the cynical journalist, Constance Porter, in her most successful film, both critically and commercially, Lifeboat. Her performance was acknowledged as her best on film and won her the New York Film Critics Circle Award. Almost childlike in her immodesty, a beaming Bankhead accepted her New York trophy and exclaimed, "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"^{[cite this quote]} After World War II, Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968.^[18]

Bankhead circulated widely in the celebrity crowd of her day and was a party favorite for outlandish stunts, such as doing cartwheels in a skirt while wearing no underwear or entering a soirée stark naked. Always extravagant, upon leaving the theater one evening she encountered a Salvation Army band passing around the tambourine. Reaching into her purse, Bankhead withdrew a twenty dollar bill, tossed it into the tambourine and exited into a taxi with the remark, "There darlings, I know it's been a rough winter for you Spanish dancers".^{[cite this quote]}

Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat but broke with most Southerners by campaigning for Harry Truman's reelection in 1948. While viewing the Inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-Governor Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket, splitting the Democratic vote. She is credited with having helped Truman immeasurably by belittling his rival, New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Bankhead said Dewey reminded her of "the little man on the wedding cake", although Alice Roosevelt Longworth is often credited with the comment.

Late career[link]

Though Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Although she had become a heavy drinker and consumer of sleeping pills (she was a life-long insomniac), Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, in the occasional film, as a highly-popular radio show host, and in the new medium of television.

In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy Show which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies but also performed monologues and songs, many of which can be heard on the album Give My Regards To Broadway!.^{[citation needed]} Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny's and Edgar Bergen's ratings.

Bankhead, who proved a masterful comedienne and intriguing personality, however, was not blamed for the failure of The Big Show as television's growth was hurting all radio ratings at the time, so the next season NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights. Bankhead's most popular television appearance was her December 3, 1957 appearance on The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour. Bankhead played herself in the episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door". The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but she had to bow out after cracking her vertebra. Lucille Ball reportedly was a fan of Bankhead's and did a good impression of her. By the time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Desi Arnaz were extremely frustrated by Bankhead's behavior during rehearsals. It took her three hours to "wake up" once she arrived on the set and she often seemed drunk. She also refused to listen to the director and she did not like rehearsing. Ball and Arnaz apparently didn't know about Tallulah's antipathy toward rehearsals or her incredible ability to memorize a script quickly. After rehearsals, the filming of the episode was not problematic.^[24] Four days before the Lucy-Desi appearance aired, Bankhead was the only guest on the November 30, 1957 episode of the short-lived NBC comedy/variety show, The Polly Bergen Show.

Bankhead appeared as Blanche DuBois in a revival of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1956), but reviews were poor. Fans who saw her late into the six-week run at City Center were given a far better performance. She received a Tony Award nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in the short-lived Mary Coyle Chase play, Midgie Purvis (1961). Her last theatrical appearance was in another Williams play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), directed by Tony Richardson.^[25] Although she received good notices for her last performances, her career as one of the greats of the American stage was coming to an end. Her last motion picture was a British horror film, Fanatic (1965), co-starring Stefanie Powers, which was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!. Her last appearances onscreen came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow in the Batman TV series, and on the December 17, 1967, episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour comedy-variety TV series, in the "Mahta Harry" skit.^[26]

According to author Brendan Gill, when Bankhead entered the hospital for an illness, an article was headed "Tallulah Hospitalized, Hospital Tallulahized". Bankhead's large, charismatic personality inspired voice actress Betty Lou Gerson's work on the character Cruella De Vil in Walt Disney Pictures' One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which the studio calls "a manic take-off on famous actress Tallulah Bankhead."^[27]

Personal life[link]

Bankhead married actor John Emery, the son of stage actors Edward Emery (circa 1861–1938) and Isabel Waldron (1871–1950), on August 31, 1937, in Jasper, Alabama. They divorced on June 13, 1941 in Reno, Nevada.

Bankhead had no children but was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend, actress Eugenia Rawls, and Rawls's husband, Donald Seawell. Bankhead was an avid baseball fan whose favorite team was the New York Giants.^[28] This was evident in one of her famous quotes, through which she gave a nod to the arts: "There have been only two geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. But, darling, I think you'd better put Shakespeare first."^[29]

Bisexuality and alleged sexual exploits[link]

The interview that she gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932, in which she ranted wildly about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children created quite a commotion. Time ran a story about it, and, back home, Bankhead's father and family were perturbed. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak with a magazine reporter again.^[20] However, following the release of the Kinsey Reports, she was once quoted as stating, "I found no surprises in the Kinsey Report. The good doctor's clinical notes were old hat to me...I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."^{[cite this quote]}

Rumors about her sex life have lingered for years, and she was linked romantically with many notable female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, Laurette Taylor, Katharine Cornell and Alla Nazimova, as well as writer Mercedes de Acosta, the wealthy Betty Carstairs, and singer Billie Holiday.^{[30][page needed]}

Actress Patsy Kelly reportedly made a claim to controversial author Boze Hadleigh, which he included in his 1996 book about lesbianism in Hollywood, that she had had a long affair with Bankhead, although Hadleigh’s work has been criticized as opportunistic and unconfirmable.^[13][20] John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate, insisting that Bankhead needed to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul Bowles had recently translated), but Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and kept insisting "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."^[31]

In 1933, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to venereal disease. Only 70 pounds (32 kg) when she left the hospital, she stoically said to her doctor, "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"^[32]

Death[link]

Tallulah Bankhead died in St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan of double pneumonia, complicated by emphysema and malnutrition, at 7:45 A.M. on December 12, 1968, aged 66.^[33] She was buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, Chestertown, Maryland.^[2][34] Her last coherent words reportedly were "Codeine... bourbon."^[35]

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Tallulah Bankhead has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6141 Hollywood Blvd.

Portrayals of Bankhead[link]

Rock star Suzi Quatro portrayed Bankhead in a musical named Tallulah Who? in 1991. The musical was based on a book by Willie Rushton. Quatro co-wrote the music with Shirlie Roden. The show ran from 14 February to 9 March at The Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch, UK and received favourable reviews.^[36][37]

Valerie Harper starred as Bankhead in Looped, which originated at The Pasadena Playhouse. It opened on Broadway on March 14, 2010 at the Lyceum Theatre, and closed on April 11, 2010.

Other actresses to portray Bankhead include Eugenia Rawls (in her one-woman stage show "Tallulah, A Memory"), Kathleen Turner (in Sandra Ryan Heyward's one-woman touring show "Tallulah" in the late 1990s), Carrie Nye (on television in The Scarlett O'Hara War) and Helen Gallagher in an off-Broadway musical, Tallulah!^[38]

MI5 investigation of Eton school scandal[link]

In 2000, declassified papers thrust Bankhead into the limelight of public scandal posthumously. She had been investigated by MI5 during the 1920s amid rumors she was corrupting pupils at Eton. The documents alleged that she seduced up to half a dozen public schoolboys into taking part in "indecent and unnatural" acts. This rumor had sent shockwaves through the 1920s British establishment.^[39]

The documents compiled by the British Aliens and Immigration Department allege that the investigation was scuttled by a determined cover-up by Eton's headmaster, Dr. Cyril Argentine Alington. The allegations were based purely on gossip and word of mouth, and lacked credible evidence. It appears that they were assembled by MI5 at the urgings of a Home Office minister.^[39]

Filmography[link]

Stagework[link]

• The Squab Farm (March 13 – April 1918) (Broadway)
• 39 East (March 31, 1919–unknown) (appeared in six performances as a replacement for Constance Binney until Actors' Equity Association strike shut the play down) (Broadway)
• Footloose (May 20 – June 1920) (Broadway)
• Nice People (March 2 – June 1921) (Broadway)
• Everyday (November 16, 1921 – January 1922) (Broadway)
• Sleeping Partners (June 11, 1922) (Baltimore)
• Good Gracious, Annabelle (June 20, 1922) (Baltimore)
• Danger (December 22, 1921 – February 1922) (stepped in as two-week replacement for an ill Kathlene MacDonnel) (Broadway)
• Her Temporary Husband (August 31 – November 1922) (replaced during tryouts in May 1922 before the show premiered on Broadway) (Stamford, Connecticut)
• The Exciters (September 22 – October 1922) (Broadway)
• The Dancers (February 15, 1923–unknown) (London)
• Conchita (March 19, 1924–unknown) (London)
• This Marriage (May 15, 1924–unknown) (London)
• The Creaking Chair (July 22, 1924–unknown) (London)
• Fallen Angels (April 21, 1925–unknown) (London)
• The Green Hat (September 2, 1925–unknown) (London)
• Scotch Mist (January 26, 1926–unknown) (London)
• They Knew What They Wanted (May 18, 1926–unknown) (London)
• The Gold Diggers (December 14, 1926–unknown) (London)
• The Garden of Eden (May 30, 1927–unknown) (London)
• Blackmail (February 28, 1928–unknown) (London)
• Mud and Treacle (May 9, 1928–unknown) (London)
• Her Cardboard Lover (August 21, 1928–unknown) (London and Scotland)
• He's Mine (October 29, 1929–unknown) (London)
• The Lady of the Camellias (March 5, 1930–unknown) (London)
• Let Us Be Gay (August 18, 1930–unknown) (London)
• Forsaking All Others (March 1 – June 1933) (Broadway)
• Dark Victory (November 7 – December 1934) (Broadway)
• Rain (Revival) (February 12 – March 1935) (Broadway)
• Something Gay (April 29 – July 1935) (Broadway)
• Reflected Glory (September 21, 1936 – January 1937) (Broadway)
• Antony and Cleopatra (November 10–14, 1937) (Broadway)
• The Circle (April 18 – June 1938) (Broadway)
• I Am Different (August 18, 1938–unknown) (opened in San Diego, California, closed during tryouts)
• The Little Foxes (February 15, 1939 – February 3, 1940) (Broadway)
• The Second Mrs Tanqueray (July 1, 1940) (Maplewood, New Jersey)
• Her Cardboard Lover (June 30, 1941) (Westport, Connecticut)
• Clash by Night (December 27, 1941 – February 7, 1942) (Broadway)
• The Skin of Our Teeth (November 18, 1942 – September 25, 1943) (replaced after 229 performances by Miriam Hopkins) (Broadway)
• Private Lives (June 19, 1944) (Stamford, Connecticut)
• Foolish Notion (March 13 – June 9, 1945) (Broadway)
• The Eagle Has Two Heads (March 19 – April 12, 1947) (Broadway)
• Private Lives (Revival) (October 4, 1948 – May 7, 1949) (Broadway)
• Dear Charles (September 15, 1954 – January 29, 1955) (Broadway)
• A Streetcar Named Desire (Revival) (February 15, 1956–unknown) (New York City Center)
• Ziegfeld Follies (April 16, 1956–unknown) (opened in Boston, closed during tryouts, retitled Welcome Darlings for a one-night-only show in Westport, Connecticut)
• Eugenia (January 30 – February 9, 1957) (Broadway)
• House on the Rocks (June 1958) (tour)
• Crazy October (October 8, 1958–unknown) (opened in New Haven, Connecticut, closed in San Francisco during tryouts)
• Craig's Wife (June 30, 1960) (Nyack, New York)
• Midgie Purvis (February 1–18, 1961) (Broadway)
• Here Today (June 1962) (tour)
• The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (January 1–4, 1964) (Broadway)
• Glad Tidings (June 1964) (tour)

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Lobenthal, Joel (2004). Tallulah!: The Life and Times of a Leading Lady. Regan Books. ISBN 0-06-039435-8. 
• McLellan, Diana (2001). The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood. St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 0-312-28320-2.  (review)
• Oderman, Stuart, Talking to the Piano Player 2. BearManor Media, 2009. ISBN 1-59393-320-7.
• Israel, Lee (1973). Miss Tallulah Bankhead. Dell Publishing. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tallulah Bankhead

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Tallulah Bankhead