Dispelling the Benny Myths

Jack Benny was a great actor. People listened to his radio show and some of them believed it was a documentary, the real life Jack Benny.

It’s silly. But some deluded themselves into believing what they were listening to what was happening in Benny’s life. Jack gave who-knows-how-many interviews where he had to spell out that what was on the air involved a fictional version of him.

That’s how a feature profile of Jack started out in the October 1947 issue of Cosmopolitan. It’s lengthy so we’re going to cut it in half and post the second part next week. This part may have the longest description of lighting cigar in history.

The Fiddler From Waukegan
This will come as a shock to many of his listeners, but Jack Benny in real life isn’t a tightwad. As a matter of fact, he never lets anybody else pick up the check. Here is a complete and entertaining study of one of the most popular comedians of our time
By MAURICE ZOLOTOW
Jack Benny never ceases to be perplexed by the fact that many of the twenty-five million people who listen to his Sunday evening radio program take its improbable happenings with more than a grain of salt. Last year a lawyer in Cleveland wrote Benny complaining because he paid Rochester, his valet, so little money. Benny laughed at the letter and ignored it. The lawyer sent more letters, accusing Benny of white chauvinism, antilabor tendencies, reactionary ideas and enmity toward the common man. When the lawyer started writing to Rochester, too, Benny was stung into making a reply.
“Please stop writing these foolish letters,” he told the lawyer. “I only hope that you’re making in one year what Rochester makes in a month.”
Rochester, as a matter of fact, makes two thousand dollars a week for an appearance of about three minutes on the Benny show. He lives in a fifteen-room house in southwest Los Angeles. He has three servants, two cars, a breeding farm and a racing stable.
On his radio program, Benny refers to the Ronald Colmans as his next-door neighbors. He drives an ancient Maxwell automobile and forces Dennis Day to mow his lawn, as well as sing on the program, for eight dollars a week. He represents himself as a tight, grasping show-off who is constantly being exposed and humiliated and ridiculed by Mary Livingston, Phil Harris, Don Wilson and other members of his cast. They make sneering references to his baldness and his anemia.
But Benny often has to stop and explain, sometimes even to his intimate friends, that the Colmans in real life live about eight blocks away from him. His next-door neighbors are actually a couple named La Chappelle who are not moving-picture actors. His lawn is mowed by a gardener named William Holden. He drives a maroon Cadillac convertible. He has a receding hairline, but he is not bald. He is not sickly.
And Benny is not a pinchpenny. He pays his actors and writers the highest salaries in radio. He gives gifts lavishly and supports a horde of relatives and down-at-the-heel vaudeville actors. He is a heavy tipper. His wife—the Mary Livingston of the radio show—is one of the smartest dressed and most generously jeweled women in Hollywood. He never allows anybody else at his table in a night club to pick up the check.
By submitting himself to such public abasement and embarrassment every Sunday at seven o’clock (Eastern Standard Time) over 161 stations of the National Broadcasting Company, it would seem that Jack Benny has an almost neurotic urge to be derided on a mass scale. A psychiatrist might find this mania an interesting case of psychopathic compulsion.
Jack Benny, however, is as psychopathic as a fox. Since 1932, his willingness to undergo these weekly half hours of public humiliation has grossed for him about ten million dollars. While almost all the great names of radio in the early 1930’s have drifted into obscurity, Jack Benny still remains steadily at the top of the Hooper ratings, which measure the number of listeners for every network show. He is usually in first, second, third or fourth place on the list, battling it out with Bob Hope, Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.
In May, 1947, Benny made his first theater appearance in ten years, a vaudeville engagement at a Chicago movie house. In one week he grossed $113,466, setting an all-time record and beating by twenty thousand dollars previous records established by Danny Kaye and Frank Sinatra, two Johnny-come-latelies who are the hottest box-office attractions of our time.
So there is a method in Benny’s mania. Still he can’t quit understand why his listeners mistake the carefully rehearsed realistic effects of his show for true facts in real life.
“If I was really such a skunk on my program, he says, “would I broadcast it to the whole world? How am I supposed to get laughs. Should I be a spendthrift?” Then he explains, “The humor of my program is this. I’m a big shot, see? I’m fast talking. I’m a smart guy. I’m boasting about how marvelous I am. I’m a marvelous lover. I’m a marvelous fiddle player. Then, five minutes after I start shooting my mouth off, my cast makes a schmo out of me. Wherever I go, I get into trouble for no good reason at all.
On a recent program, Jack Benny goes to a ticket window at the Union Station and says that he is taking the Chief to Chicago, and he wants to know if the clerk at this window is validating tickets. “What,” snarls the clerk, “do you think I’m doing with this rubber stamp—voting for Hoover?” Benny still wants his tickets validated and the clerk, a character named Nelson who appears in many guises on the Benny program, continues to frustrate this perfectly reasonable request. In the midst of the argument, a man comes to the window and wants to know if the train on track eight is going to Pasadena, Anaheim and Glocca Morra. Nelson beams genially and says that it certainly does. The man thereupon inquires how are things in Glocca Morra and is the little brook still leaping there and does it still run down to Donney Cove, through Killey-beggs, Kilkerry and Kildair. To these questions, Nelson courteously replies while Benny quietly goes out of his mind.
“It’s difficult,” remarks Benny thoughtfully, “to analyze why a situation like this is funny. It’s a certain kind of insane humor. I go to the ticket clerk strictly on business, and me he hates. Another guy comes up and pesters him about Glocca Morra, and to him he explains the whole thing politely. But me, he hates.”
Benny replies to questions about humor and his program with an air of worried concentration. He hates talking to strangers. He dislikes making conversation. He paces nervously back and forth in the library of his fourteen-room house in Beverly Hills, an impressive cream-colored Georgian mansion which he built in 1939 at a cost of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. His rumpled, sparse gray hair falls over his forehead. Benny is dressed as he usually is in sports clothes: gray flannel slacks, a checked blue sports coat, gray cashmere sweater, a flamboyant tie of reds and yellows and blues. At the last count, he owned thirty-nine sports coats, eighty-nine sweaters, one hundred and twenty pairs of gray flannel slacks. He thumps an empty pipe into the palm of his left hand. He is not supposed to smoke cigars but he dislikes pipes. He sits down, knocks the pipe against a smoking table. He chews his thumbnail. He rubs his gray suede wing-tip shoes against his trousers. He picks up the pipe. He lays it down. Finally, he sighs. He springs up and strides toward a humidor in a corner of the room and helps himself to an Upmann Perfecto. He removes the cigar from its glass container. He lights it. He breathes in the pungent smoke with a sigh of relief. Then he drops into an arm-chair and stretches out his legs.
“Now,” he murmurs, speaking as he always does in a shy, self-conscious, ill-at-ease voice, his round face weary and apparently confused, “what is the humor of the Jack Benny program? Take Nelson—the humor of Nelson is: Why does he hate me? The humor of Phil Harris is: How can a man that is supposed to be working for me go on getting drunk, chasing women, insulting me, and still I don’t fire him? The humor of Rochester is: How can he get away with it? If Rochester and I share a bedroom on a Pullman he rushes in first and grabs the lower, and I have to sleep in the upper berth. The whole humor of Jack Benny is: Here’s a guy with plenty of money; he’s got a valet; he’s always traveling around, meeting important people, and yet he’s strictly a jerk.”
Far from being the brash, boastful, vain, garrulous egomaniac that he is on the air, Benny in real life is a self-effacing, brooding sort of person. Strangers, meeting him for the first time, find him dull.
“Away from the stage, Benny is one of the most boring people I have ever met,” a friend says. “He has no violent ideas on any subject whatsoever. I never heard him express a strong opinion on anybody. He doesn’t seem to hate anybody. The worst he’ll say of a person is ‘He’s not too nice.’” Since the second most popular sports in Hollywood is ripping apart reputations, it’s obvious why Benny is considered boring company there. “The only thing Benny will get really excited about is a glass of water or a chocolate soda. He’ll come up to you and say, ‘I just had the greatest soda in the world. I’ll take an oath on my life it was the greatest soda in the world.’ Or, ‘I just drank the greatest glass of water in the world.’ But you take a subject like politics or Darryl Zanuck, and you’ll never get an opinion out of Benny one way or the other. In fact, I don’t see how he ever came to be a comedian. I have yet to hear Jack Benny say one single funny thing."
Ed Beloin, one of Benny’s writers for seven years and now a Paramount script writer, says, “Benny is the most naïve and unsophisticated person I know.” Because Benny is a placid person in public a theory has arisen that he is not at all witty, that his comedy stems entirely from the minds of his four writers, Sam Perrin, Milt Josefsberg, George Balzer and John Tackaberry.
When he was defeated on one occasion in a sharp battle of wit with Fred Allen, probably the quickest impromptu comedian alive, Benny muttered in all sincerity "Fred, I'd give a thousand dollars if I had been able to say that." Another time Allen was taunting him about his legendary anemia. "You're so anemic,” Allen said, "that if you were eating celery the people at the next table would think it was a stalk of rhubarb."
"You wouldn't talk like that to me," said Benny in desperation, "if my writers were here.”
Yet in his own pianissimo fashion, Benny is not unwitty. His humor is based on subtle understatement. Usually his punch line does not sound funny when it is removed from the particular situation that Benny was in at the moment he delivered it. And its humorous effect is largely due to Benny's velvety, petulant, apologetic tone of voice and to his masterly sense of timing. According to John Crosby, radio critic of the New York Herald Tribune, this is true not only of Benny's personal humor hut also of the humor as a whole in his radio show.
One night Crosby listened to a particular Benny program and felt that it was one of the funniest half hours he had ever heard. He sent for a copy of the script and read it over carefully. On paper, Crosby discovered, the show seemed dull. It had gone over big on the air because of the good acting, superb timing and the easygoing air of informality.
Despite the jokes on his program, Benny is a fairly competent violinist. Once, at a benefit for Grcek War Relief, he amazed all Hollywood, when, during his turn, instead of telling stories, he slowly walked on the stage, placed a handkerchief on his shoulder, poised his violin on the handkerchief, solemnly nodded to the conductor, and proceeded to perform an elaborate concerto arrangement of ''Love in Bloom," replete with trills, staccatos and arpeggios. After the final note, the audience burst into applause. Benny did not crack a smile. He bowed to the audience. He bowed to the maestro. Then he slowly walked off the stage.
After the show, somebody said, "Jack, I didn't realize you played the fiddle so beautifully."
"Listen," Jack said, with a grim expression on his face, "when I was younger they used to call me another Heifetz." He paused and glowered, "Not this Heifetz ... another Heifetz!"
In April, 1944, Benny took his company to Vanconver to stage a gala benefit to open the Fourth Canadian War Loan. After the show, they flew back to Los Angeles. Somewhere over Oregon, the ship ran into a heavy fog that turned into sleet and snow. Jack was playing Casino with Phil Harris when the plane was sucked into an air current that suddenly whipped them at the rate of a mile a minute. Benny's hand, in the act of lowering a card, was paralyzed in mid-air due to the air pressure. Benny said nothing. He went white. The plane took a series of sickening dips and began to wobble. Then the pilot appeared on the scene. "'The de-icer isn't working," he announced. "The radio has gone dead. Somewhere ahead of us lies Mt. Rainier, and I'm afraid we're not on the beam."
“Hmmmmm,” observed Benny gently.
"I think," pursued the pilot, "we could make Los Angeles tonight, but it's a little risky. I'd rather turn back and stop off at Corvallis. Oregon, where there's a good field. What shall I do?"
"Hmmmmmm," said Benny.
The plane turned back to Corvallis. It bumped safely to stop on the field. One by one, the troupe emerged. The pilot approached Benny and asked, "Now, sir, is there anything I can do?"
"Yes,” said Benny, “just get me a room in a nice one-story hotel.”
During the summer of 1945, Benny, together with Ingrid Bergman and harmonica-virtuoso Larry Adler, played the USO circuit in Europe. One night, following a performance before our troops in Stuttgart, the three stars were riding back to their quarters. They were sitting in the back of a jeep. As it rattled along, an MP stationed at a corner ordered the driver to stop. He was a little slow about it, and the MP fired several shots at the car. Benny heard the bullets whooshing through the air. The driver braked quickly. The bullets had missed their heads by only a few inches. After their papers were examined, they were allowed to proceed. They returned to the jeep and a few blocks later, when the driver paused to get his bearings, a huge black cat stepped off the curb and padded across the street directly in front of the jeep. All four of them watched the cat. Benny sighed and said, "NOW he tells us!"
But Benny isn't particularly proud of his ability to comment on a situation. He would rather be able to coin such quotable quips as Fred Allen's "Hollywood is a great place if you're an orange." Or Mizner's "I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education." Or Solly Violinsky's "Hollywood is a wonderful place. No matter how hot it gets in the daytime there's no place to go at night." Or Joe E. Lewis's remark when someone visited him in the hospital and asked how he felt: "I've taken a turn for the nurse."
A remarkable fact about Benny, remarkable because actors are the most egocentric persons alive, is that he would rather watch comedian perform than perform himself.
“Benny," says Danny Kaye, "is a sensational audience for a comedian. He's the kind of audience every comedian dreams of. He doesn't just laugh at you with his mouth, but with his whole body."
To provoke Benny to hysterical laughter has become a personal hobby of Kaye's. When they are both invited to a dinner party, Kaye always manages to be seated facing Benny. Benny knows what is coming and tries not to look at Kaye, but his eyes are inevitably drawn in that direction. For Jack's benefit, Kaye has two routines at a dinner. He prongs some food on a fork and passes it to his mouth but the fork keeps missing his mouth and jabs his cheek, his head, his nose and his neck. Or he rapidly shovels food into his mouth and whips his neck around from one side of the table to the other, like a piston rod, as if he is trying to hear every bit of conversation on every side of him.
By the end of the soup course, Benny is in convulsions and is pounding the table, choking on his food, and sputtering in agony. People who do not know Benny think he is either drunk or having an epileptic fit.
"Because Benny is such a great audience, in fact the greatest audience," says George Burns, "he has everybody in the business working for him. I know lots of comics would rather do an hour's entertainment for Jack, in Jack's living room, than play a week in a big theater in New York. Benny gets a million dollars' worth of entertainment for nothing. When Groucho Marx or Lou Holtz or George Jessel run into Benny, right away they're on. Benny has a wonderful time." Benny has a curious appreciation for humor. He has almost the mania of a collector. Once, in Romanoff's at luncheon, he noticed Helen Ferguson, the head of a large publicity office in Hollywood, sitting with Gene Raymond. Raymond said something, and she laughed heartily. Benny—who did not know either of them—approached their table and asked, "Pardon me, but what did you say that made her laugh like that?"
Of them all, Burns makes Jack laugh hardest. Benny has been laughing at Burns for twenty-five years. It's reached a point where all Burns has to do is wave a key ring at Benny, and Benny roars. When Benny was lunching at the Brown Derby recently Burns hefted Benny's glass of milk and snarled, "Laugh."
"That's not funny," said Benny. "I won’t laugh.”
“I said—laugh,” insisted Burns, raising the glass higher and scowling.
“No, I won’t."
"Oh," said Burns, "so you're going to be tough today!" At this, Benny promptly collapsed into a quivering heap.
Recently, at a party at Benny's house, George Jessel, Burns, Kaye and several other professional comedians, were amusing everybody with their lightning-like repartee, Around eleven thirty Benny could stand it no longer. He arose. He announced, "Everybody gets laughs around here but me. And it’s my own house." He strode upstairs. Fifteen minutes later, he reappeared. On his head was a battered brown fedora. A bandanna was tied around his neck. With mascara, he had drawn a thick mustache on his upper lip. He had his fiddle under his chin, and he played Italian street songs in the wheeziest style of which he was capable. Convinced this was hilarious, Benny then passed around the old hat for money.
Nobody laughed.
BENNY usually wakes up at six in the morning. He is a light sleeper. Six mornings a week he prepares his own breakfast and then goes to the Hillcrest Country Club and plays golf for two or three hours. He shoots in the eighties. His time during the rest of the day is dominated by his radio program. His only other diversions are taking long walks, running off movies in his home and driving his automobile. Barbara Stanwyck, one of his closest friends, claims that he is the worst driver in the world. "When he sits behind the wheel," she says, "he goes all dreamy-like. He'll be driving along Wilshire Boulevard, with nobody bothering him and nothing in front of him, and for no reason at all he will suddenly shift into second."
So many comedians are either drunks or violent gamblers. Benny often takes one Scotch highball before lunch and two Scotch highballs before dinner, but whisky doesn't lift his spirits. The more he drinks the moodier he gets, so he does not drink much.| Playing cards for any length of time he finds boring. Shooting craps he regards as a stupid occupation.
Goodman Ace is a devout follower of the nags. "And I've got the canceled checks to prove it," he adds. Ace is responsible for such remarks as "I had a good day at the track. I broke even." Also: "I broke even at the track today, and I certainly needed the money." Ace has tried to interest Benny in betting on horses. Once, in Florida, he took the comedian and his father, the late Mayer Kubelsky, to Hialeah. Ace got Jack all excited about a horse in the fourth race and Jack bet five hundred dollars on the nose. The horse lost. Jack was downcast. "That's terrible," he moaned.
"Don't worry, Jack," his father said. "After all—horses are only human!"
THERE is something helpless and mutely suffering about Jack Benny that arouses the sympathy of all his friends. They worry about him. They constantly tell him he is smoking too many cigars. He smokes about fifteen to twenty a day, although his doctor has told him to cut out smoking. The fact that he is sponsored by a cigarette company does not deter Benny from smoking cigars. When he walks out on the stage of Studio A in the Los Angeles NBC studios, he puffs at his cigar brazenly, knocks off some ashes, waves the cigar in the air and says maliciously, "Welcome to the Lucky Strike program!"
His friends worry about the fact that he does not sleep well, that he eats too fast. Benny eats rapidly, like a machine. He has no strong preferences in food. He usually asks everybody around him what they are ordering and then orders the same and gobbles it down.
Sometimes, when he falls into a really desperate mood of boredom, he tells his wife, "You know, once I played a good violin. If only I had practiced hard and stuck with my fiddle, I would be a fine violinist today."
And Mary usually answers, "But then you'd have lost all the humor of being a lousy violinist on your program."
"Yeah, but then I wouldn't have a program."
"Which is better?" she asks.
"I guess you're right,” he replies, sighing.
Violinists are about the only people for whom he feels serious respect. Whenever Heifetz, Szigeti, Ricci or Isaac Stern gives a concert in or around Los Angeles, Benny is there, sitting in a front-row seat and watching the fingers of the virtuoso with a concentrated stare. He envies them. And when he has a chance to talk to Szigeti or Heifetz he becomes ecstatic. He treasures the fact that Heifetz once told him he had a rich tone, and that he should never have neglected his music when he was a boy. Whenever Stern gives a concert in Los Angeles Benny insists on putting him on his program as a guest star. His writers go crazy trying to invent a reasonable situation in which Benny, Rochester, Dennis Day and Phil Harris can be blended with Stern playing the "Melody in F" or the "Hora Staccato."
Last fall, he had already signed up Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Colman to appear on a certain program. The Colmans received six thousand dollars for their personal appearance. Then Isaac Stern turned up in Hollywood, and Benny insisted on putting Stern on the same program. Since Stern's fee was five thousand dollars, and since Benny is allotted no more than ten thousand for guest stars on anyone broadcast, this meant Benny was paying one thousand out of his own pocket. When a friend asked why he was doing this, he replied, "Well, it was too late to cancel out the Colmans, and that night was the only Sunday Stern had open. But I had a wonderful time during rehearsal. Of course, I had already made up my mind what numbers I wanted Stern to play, but I didn't tell him. I asked him what he had in mind, and he started playing some tunes. I had him playing solos for me for two hours. I guess he played about twenty selections. It was wonderful."

Read part two of the Cosmo story in this post.