Jack Benny was in the latter category. He toured the South Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. He performed his radio show from bases in the U.S. He pushed bond sales in the U.S. and Canada. His daughter Joan discovered her father spoke to injured service members in hospitals overseas, wrote down their names, and then wrote their families to provide some comfort.
Jack tried touring during the Korean War but found it too grueling for him after one trip.
As Germany was about to surrender, Benny found himself with the American soldiers there. Here’s part of an Earl Wilson column from the New York Post, August 2, 1945 where one of Jack’s funny letters is transcribed. (Another portion involves Ed Gardner overseas, complaining about the incompetence of some USO special service officers).
Jack wasn't as prolific a letter writer as Fred Allen (whose letters were posthumously collected into a book), but he did write a fair bit and his letters are in a collection at the University of Wyoming.
Benny's A Man of Letters
By EARL WILSON
I GUESS I'm the first columnist brave enough to come right out and write about Jack Benny's epistolary habits. I've known of his epistolary tendencies for months, but it took this epistle, which he wrote to Goodman Ace from Landau, Germany, to bring out he's an epistolary genius.
"I'M WORKING very hard while you're doing nothing, yet you're the kind of a louse that'll go around showing everybody how I spelled debris. I could have said bricks and dirt or I could have spelled it dee-bree. But no, you're not satisfied receiving a letter from me from Germany and have to make a lot of stinking remarks about my spelling and education. You're just not the friend I thought you were.
"INSTEAD OF WASTING my time writing to you, I could have written to Allen Jenkins or C. Aubrey Smith or even my wife, but no, I write to you! Just because you were a newspaperman doesn't necessarily mean you have sit there like a damned idiot wondering how I got where I did in show business. Why, if I hadn't started this letter, I wouldn't write you if I lived to be 1000 years old. That's all I've got to say to you."
Then he added a P.S.: "You can change the start of this letter from 'Dear Goodie' to 'Dear Goodman.' "
Jack and Goodman Ace shared the same kind of sarcastic, witty humor. That's one reason why they were good friends for years.
ReplyDeleteA probable response from Mr. Ace:
ReplyDelete"Dear Jack:
The word debris- or a similar word more potent (and more pungent)- has been bandied about by the ad agency when they recently offered their opinions about several of my "Easy Aces" scripts. Now, I tend to ignore them because they sure as hell don't listen to the show, anyway. But when they informed me that Jane shouldn't say this or that...including a veiled reference to the fact there IS a shortage of medicinal products, including my sponsor's product, that's when I got very angry. I said to them, "Don't you know there's a war on?". And they acted as if there weren't anything else that exists besides headaches, neuritis, neuralgia, Anacin, and lousy sales. Well, one of these days, I just might have a headache and use Bayer, just to spite them. And if this kind of nonsense keeps up, I just might hit myself on the head with a hammer and have one, anyway................."