Living With Mel Blanc

Mel Blanc didn’t only have a successful career. He had a successful marriage, too.

He and his wife Estelle were together for 56 years. Their marriage only ended with his death in 1989.

Radio Mirror had a unique profile of Blanc in its April 1946 issue. It was, supposedly, written by Estelle. She talks about his radio career wherein her husband supplied character voices on some of the top shows. While she doesn’t talk about his cartoon work, some of the voices he used on the radio were also heard in cartoons, including Porky Pig and Sylvester (actually, Sylvester’s name and voice were borrowed from the Judy Canova show).

There’s no mention of Blanc’s own radio show that would debut in September; it likely hadn’t been conceived yet. Variety reported on April 23rd that a transcription demo was being cut at NBC by creator Joe Rines, who quit the show two months after its debut over creative differences.

Anyway, this is a different perspective on Blanc, and a pleasant one, too.

"Everything Is Shared"
By MRS. MEL BLANC
FIFTEEN years ago, I wrote I my diary, "I met the cutest fellow. I wonder if he'll call me?"
That first note about Mel wasn't much different from the other entries in my diary in those five years from the time I was fifteen, when I started keeping it, until I was twenty — and met Mel. All the notations, in those days, were about dates I'd had, or adolescent speculations about what would happen to me in the years to come, plus anxious (and unanswered) queries to the deux ex machina of the little book about when and whom I would marry.
Then, late one night in the spring of 1931, I came home and wrote about the "cute" fellow who I hoped would call — and that was the beginning of the real diary — the first entry in a day-by-day account of pure happiness.
I had gone to a dance that night with a friend of mine named Vera, her brother, and my brother. While I was waltzing with my brother — and who, at twenty, wants to waltz with her brother, no matter how much she loves him — I saw Vera talking to a man I'd never seen before. Now, normally I was very shy indeed — which probably accounted for my dancing with my brother, while Vera found herself this delightful stranger. But even shyness couldn't keep me away then. I walked over toward them, and sort of hung around on the outskirts, hoping with all my heart that Vera would be generous enough to introduce him.
She was. "Estelle," she called, and I closed in the gap between us with most ungirlish haste.
Vera's eyes were teasing. "How would you like to meet someone who's in radio?" she asked.
Mel tells me that I turned a nice, rich rose color. "This is Mel Blanc," Vera went on. "He's in California from Portland, Oregon, and he's really and truly in radio — he's on the Al Pearce program."

Mel and I just looked at each other. In retelling the story, he likes to point out that here I blushed again. But he did ask for my telephone number. Even so, blushes and all, I wasn't sure that he was really interested. Didn't I anxiously question my diary that night, "I wonder if he'll call me?"
I spent the next two days in awful anticipation of the calamity that would blight my young life in case he didn't call. But finally the phone rang, and I could breathe again, for it was Mel. We didn't see each other that day, but my diary plainly states (with obvious relief) "I am so happy! Mel Blanc called today!"
I wish I could have seen into the future. I wish I could have seen Mel Blanc as my husband, and also as one of the most famous comedians on the air. It would have saved me a lot of worrisome days.
But now the future is here. I've been Mel's wife for a long time, and he's been that famous comedian for a long time. He's on five shows a week at present. He's Mr. Wortle on Judy Canova's show, and he's also Pedro and the man with the hiccups. He works for Jack Benny and meets himself coming and going on that program as the parrot, the train caller, the French violin teacher and Detective Flanagan. And my incomparable husband is also Bob Hope's incomparable Private Snafu. To George Burns and Gracie Allen he is the happy postman and the cigar store clerk. For Abbott and Costello he plays Scotty McBrown and Cartoony Technicolorvitch. And he gets a big kick out of the fact that he's been billed as "miscellaneous voices" on so many shows he can't keep count of them.

AND so, in the exciting present, I'm married to a motley collection of wonderful funnymen, all of whom boil down, at home, to the grandest husband in the world.
That, as I say, is the exciting present. Not that the past wasn't exciting, too. It was. There were those long months, for instance, when I knew as well as I knew my own name that I was head over heels in love with Mel — but when I had no idea whether or not he loved me.
I decided, at last, that it was up to me to make some move. I finally asked him if he would consider acting as master of ceremonies at the cabaret dance our club was giving. I didn't see exactly how this was going to further my romance, but at least I'd be with Mel, and that was something. I didn't really think that he'd accept, but he said yes without hesitation, and my stock rose by leaps and bounds with the other club members. I was pretty proud of myself.
I was still sure, when we went to that dance, that I liked Mel a great deal more than he liked me. But by the time the evening was over I was walking on air, because suddenly, right in the midst of a dance, I knew that the feeling was mutual. Mel hadn't said a word, but I just knew, in that mysterious way that females have of knowing when a man's in love with them.
Mel was the cautious type — he still is. For a long while we saw a great deal of each other, but he never mentioned that little word "love." Mother was suspicious — perhaps she thought I was wasting my time. And Mel hadn't said anything, so I couldn't reassure her. Instead I'd just say, in my best off-hand manner, "Why, I only feel sorry for him, Mother. He wants a home-cooked dinner — he doesn't know anyone in California." And I'd quickly add, while she was in a softened mood, "Can't we have him over again tonight?"
I don't for one moment think that Mother was fooled by all this, but just the same, she used to let me invite Mel to dinner regularly.
In July, he had to go back to Portland — to attend the wedding of a friend, and to see his family. I was pretty excited when he asked me, the night before he left, if he could leave his car with me. Surely, I told myself — and my diary — that meant something. At least, he trusted me with his most cherished possession. (I think if he had run over me with his most cherished possession, I would have found some way to turn it into an indication of affection for me!)
When an embossed leather writing case arrived from Portland for me, I smiled a knowing smile. Why of course — that was Mel's own way of saying, "Write to me, dear. I miss you."
In August, when Mel got back from Portland, I was so eager to see him that I drove right through a stop signal on my way to meet the boat. I got my first ticket then, and Mel hasn't let me forget it to this day.
But he was still slow about proposing. Being of a practical turn of mind, I decided to go to night school to fill in my time. I was working for an attorney, but I was interested in drama — which, incidentally, was elegantly labeled "Oral Art" in the evening sessions catalogue. Suddenly Mel, who had often told me how much he hated school, started going to classes with me. A good sign! To my diary I confided, "He must love me. He goes to school with me every night, and I know it isn't school he likes. Why doesn't he propose?"
To ease your mind — it certainly eased mine — he finally did!

HE waited until Thanksgiving Day to ask me, and even then we didn't get married right away. Mel thought that we should have an engagement period. Mel is very serious about marriage; he thinks far too many people ruin their lives by not being sure, by rushing into marriage. He didn't want us to make a mistake.
Goodness knows, I wanted our marriage to last, so I was perfectly content to do just as he wanted — and so we waited until May, 1932. We were married on Mothers' Day, and two hours later we left for Portland. It was a wrench to leave my Mother and Father for the first time in my life, much as I loved Mel — and I was, grateful to him, then, for that long waiting. By now I was sure. I wasn't any flighty girl, who rushed headlong into marriage. I was a woman, sure of my love, sure of my husband's love.
Mel had a chance to do a new show for a Portland station, KEX. The name of the program — Cobwebs and Nuts — will give you a pretty good idea of what it was like. Mel did the whole thing, from beginning to end — wrote it, ran the mimeographing machine, produced it, did all the male voices. And there my "oral art" came in handy — because I played all the feminine parts! We worked sixteen hours a day on the thing — and it was on the air six nights a week. Mel would sit at one typewriter and I at another; as he turned the stuff out, I made clean copies, with carbons.
The show was a success, if you count success in satisfaction and acclaim, and not in monetary gain. The financial end of that sixteen-hours-six-days-a-week show was a check for precisely fifteen dollars a week. After a couple of months we suddenly realized that we simply couldn't manage on that. So Mel scouted around and got a job writing scripts for the Portland Breakfast Club, also on KEX. This he managed to turn out on the seventh day — and got an extra ten dollars for it.
So, if we weren't wealthy on that, we were at least solvent for the time being. We kept our chins up, and managed. But after two years of it, we felt we owed ourselves a baby — but a baby couldn't possibly be squeezed into that budget. So Mel asked for a raise, and got it — five dollars a week.
When he came home that night he said, "Estelle — I think we'd better get out of this town. Cobwebs and Nuts has been swell as experience for me — in fact, I chalk it up as a college education. But we've got to have more money! I've got to get out of here — and it'll either be a sanitarium or L. A. Maybe down there we can make some decent money."
It was a good idea all around, of course. Los Angeles is the place where a good half of the best radio shows originate, and a lot more than half of the best comedy shows. Besides, in Los Angeles we had my family to fall back on.
And we did fall back on them to the extent of living with them for a year and a half. At that point, Mel was bringing home $25.00 every week — and twenty-five being just twenty-five whether it's in Portland or Los Angeles, he was pretty discouraged. But I wasn't. I had all the faith in the world in Mel. Everything in radio was "breaks," I told him, over and over — and someday very soon now, his break would come.
And one day it did seem, finally, as if our dam of hard luck was beginning to give way. Mel came home walking on air.
"Honey — listen to this," he cried. "I've got a spot on the Joe Penner show!"
"This is your break," I told him.
"At any rate, it's our first network show," he answered, cautious to the last ditch. (And right in that conversation you can see one of the reasons why our marriage is a happy one. "Our first network show" he said, not "my." Although it was his break, it was ours because nothing in all of our lives belongs to one or the other of us — everything is shared.)

IT'S fun to realize that although Mel is famous now for his dialects and voices, particularly animal voices, he did not play Joe Penner's duck. But as sometimes happens when things are going wrong, they suddenly begin to go very right. That first night that Mel was on the Penner show, two producers were listening, and both of them called Mel for their shows.
That was the beginning, and success, slowly but surely, followed on the heels of "our" first break. And success meant another fulfillment for me — we decided that now it was time for us to have our baby. We hoped and hoped for a son, and our luck held good. We named him Noel after Mel's grandfather, and he has been one of the greatest delights of our life together.
By 1943, my hard-working husband was doing a grand total of fourteen radio shows a week, and that meant hardly breath-catching time in between. Mel used to say that he met himself coming in and out of rehearsals.
As we always do when there's a problem, we talked it over; Mel was working too hard. We had too little time together. So we decided that Mel had better pare it down to five shows a week, and we'd have a little more time for living.

THE talking things over covers everything in our life together — our personal lives and business, too. We have no agent or business manager, and when a new proposition comes up, or when a change of some sort is suggested to Mel, it's the talk-it-over method that makes the decision. Mel never signs a contract unless I read it first, and he delights in telling our friends that I have an excellent business head. I don't know about that, but so far everything has worked out all right. I'll just keep my fingers crossed and go on helping as much as I can, because I love our share-and-share-alike way of life.
We've seen a lot of changes in our fourteen years together, Mel and I. There's the matter of money, for instance. People often ask, "Is there any money in work like Mel's — not being the star of your own show, I mean, but doing comedy parts on a lot of shows?" My answer is that there is, at least for Mel. It's a long, long way from that fifteen-dollars-a-week period in Portland. And so is our very pleasant, eight-room house in Playa del Rey, a suburb of Los Angeles, different from that first room in which we lived in Portland.
Our house is about one hundred feet above the ocean, so we get in lots of fishing and swimming. I started to fish because Mel loves it, although I privately had my doubts. He was so pleased with my cooperative spirit in the matter that he set about teaching me how to cast, and all of a sudden I found that I was a fishing enthusiast, too. Now we enjoy it more, and do more of it, than almost any other type of fun. Last fall we spent a month at Big Bear Lake in southern California, and most of our meals there consisted of the fish we'd caught ourselves. We liked it up there so much, in fact, that we bought ourselves a lake-front lot where we intend to build a mountain home this summer.

Mel's and my tastes are pretty similar. We like to swim; we like to fish; and most of all we like our quiet, simple home life. There's nothing in the sitting-and-drinking life of the night club that appeals to us, so we simply don't go to them. But we do love both the theater and the movies — and we're still young enough and in love enough so that it's a thrill to go dancing. We love to watch the jitterbug experts — although we feel it's out of our line and made a solemn pact never to try that particular form of exercise.
Our son, Nonie, wants to be "just like Daddy" when he grows up, but I have a private hunch that he'll be a doctor. When Nonie was three, Mel used to read him to sleep. But he didn't read fairy tales — he read, for some strange reason known only to himself, first aid books. Nonie is seven now, and very adept at amateur doctoring. When I have a headache he solemnly brings me a cold towel for it, then slips in with aspirin and a glass of water. When the recovery is complete, he is as satisfied as if he'd performed his own little private miracle.
We have a Scotch housekeeper, too — Mrs. Elizabeth Ross — who is like a third grandmother to Nonie. She's an excellent cook, but Mel and I both like to have our finger in that pie, too. Mel adores Mrs. Ross' roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but hastily adds a "simply terrific" description of my fried chicken. He's embarrassingly dreamy too, about my macaroni and cheese, a dish I sometimes make of rice and mushrooms, and about my corn pudding.
But leave it to Mel — he always winds up with, "I'm not a bad cook, myself." And that's true. One of his specialties is baked ham. He uses lots of brown sugar, bastes it with ginger ale, and calls it, for some strange reason, "ham spliced and spiced."
Mel says, "I'm a one-woman man," but I say, in answer, "I'm a twelve-man woman." And I really do feel, sometimes, as if I had a round dozen of husbands because of all those air characters of Mel's. I have a male harem, and never a dull moment, and I love every second of my own brand of polyandry.
That's about all there is about us, except to say again and again that we're happy, and we're still in love. Those things could never be repeated too often. Our project for the future? To keep on living this life we love so much just as it is. Oh, yes — and we do have every intention of going to Niagara Falls some day for a bang-up second honeymoon!