Art Metrano

There are people who suddenly appear on TV with a routine that’s funny. That was the case with Art Metrano.

He has passed away at age 84.

His obits talk about Police Academy. I remember him doing an odd comedy magic act where his gimmick was da-da-da-ing the melody to “Fine and Dandy” while he screwed up. He popped up everywhere with it, especially on The Tonight Show.

Metrano wasn’t really an overnight sensation—Walter Winchell led off a column with his name in 1958 when he was at the Burt Lane Theatre Workshop on West 46th Street. Fast forward more than ten years later to when I may have seen him first. He was a cast member on one of Tim Conway’s innumerable failures. I readily admit I watched any show Conway starred in. Usually once.

Here’s a syndicated column from around July 20, 1971. He was now famous. Or was he?

No More Da, Da, Da
By TOM GREEN
Gannett News Service
BEVERLY HILLS—"Oh, aren't you the one from the Tim Conway show?"
Art Metrano looked up from his menu at Nate and Al's Delicatessen and was face-to-face with a harried-looking waitress in the throes of recognition.
"Yep," he smiled, bursting into the little tune that has become his trademark. “Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da-a-a-ah! It's me.”
"I loved you! I loved that show! I used to always watch it. Why did they ever take it off?"
"Because there weren't enough people like you," smiled Metrano, and the waitress hustled off.
Stocky little Art Metrano beamed as the waitress disappeared into the kitchen. That "da, da, da" bit, which he sings to accompany himself as a magician doing tricks, has brought the one-time football player a long way in the last year or two.
This fall, he'll play Big Nick, an Al Capone gangster-type and chief adversary of the quick-witted operator of a speakeasy, Dean Jones, on CBS' spoof of the prohibition era, "The Chicago Teddy Bears." It means goodbye to the “da, da, da” for a while, but Metrano is excited about the project. "People like gangsters. Look at Bogart and Cagney and those guys. There's some kind of magic about being a gangster. I know that crime is not supposed to pay. But, boy, it sure does pretty good.
"I'm going to like doing it. I can't wait to go to Chicago if the show's a hit to meet the real boys."
Metrano is also going to be seen soon as Jon Voight’s brother-in-law in “The All-American Boy,” a major Warner Bros. feature film.
“I’m basically a dramatic actor. I’ve spent most of my years studying drama . . . I was part of a Shakespeare group in New York. But I was never around long enough because I was always on the road getting $75 a weekend doing a comedy team act in the Catskills.”
Actually, Metrano started out headed for a career as a pro football player. He was an all-American in high school and won a football scholarship at what is now the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. But he always acted on the side.
"I couldn't see any future in pro football. At the time I had a 19-inch neck and weighed 267 pounds. It would take days to recover from a game.
"I realized I really liked to perform. I was always clowning around in the locker room. As big as I was, I felt aesthetic. So I went to New York to study professionally."
The waitress was back with a plate of sausage and eggs.
“You know, Doris Day usually sits right here,” she said, pointing to the seat next to Metrano. “Milton Berle comes in here all the time. But it’s you bright young talented people I like to see.” “I may take a room here,” Metrano said, as the waitress disappeared again.
In New York he got a scholarship to an acting workshop in which John Cassavetes was involved. Then for three years, he studied with Stella Adler and by the time he decided to pack off to Hollywood, he was a method actor.
He came West cold three years ago with no job prospects, partly because he had read an article by Jackie Gleason in TV Guide which advised an aspiring actor to do so. He finagled a job selling telephone systems with Hollywood as his territory.
"It was a snap. If you just walk by the guards at any studio in this town with a briefcase and look like you know what you're doing, you can get in."
He started trying to sell studio brass the phone system and at the end of every pitch, he would pass out an 8x10 glossy of himself with his resume.
Finally, he got into an educational television play and a stage production of Norman Mailer's "Deer Park." The critics liked him and panned everything else about the stage play. So Metrano sent out a flurry of copies of the reviews and wound up with an agent.
In a few months, he got his first televsion acting job in "The Outcasts." Then came two lines on a "Bewitched" segment in which he impressed director William Asher. He was brought back four times, each time with an expanded part.
He played a fat marathon dancer in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" and became a regular on "The Lohman and Barkley Show," KNC’s Emmy-winning comedy show. Here he started the "da, da, da" bit, sung to the tune of "Fine and Dandy."
A number of television appearances followed that and he was signed to last fall's short-lived Tim Conway show.
“I did da-da-da first at a Christmas party. We were clowning around and the tune hit me. It reminded me of all the opening songs you've ever heard for magicians. I just started doing it, no matter what I did.”
"You're just great," the waitress said, back again. "Just great. Could I have your autography? My grandson's name is Bobby. I don't know your name."

Ah, The Chicago Teddy Bears. It was supposed to be Metrano’s big ticket to stardom. That isn’t where the ticket took him.

There was plenty of talent on the show but few laughs. Maybe it tried too hard to be funny. Maybe it was too full of stereotypes. All I remember is I don’t think I got through the first episode. Only twelve more followed before cancellation.

Metrano had huge hopes, as you can see by this story from the Newspaper Enterprise Association of September 9, 1971.

Teddy Bears Try Laughs
Metrano’s Can’t Shoot Straight
By JOYCE GABRIEL
NEW YORK — (NEA) — In this age of the non-Mafia, CBS-TV has dared to schedule a fall show about gangland. It's produced by Untouchables producer Jerry Thorpe, but it's doubtful any Italian Americans will object. The show, Chicago Teddy Bears, is a spoof on the gang-ridden Chicago of the 1920s and '30s. played strictly for laughs.
Art Metrano plays the gang leader. Big Nick, a Capone-type character, without Capone's menace. Big Nick is a defused bad guy because his big bad plans never work out. They don't work out because Big Nick is not big on brains. He is a caricature of the sly, tough, cunning underworld creature.
Metrano looks as if he could be a gangster, albeit stereotyped. Short and squat, his body is past a plump. His complexion is swarthy, his hair curly and his stubby fingers are made to clutch a cigar. He wears an Al Capone fedora, tilted over his brow the way Capone wore his.
Metrano’s clothes for the series are pure Prohibition: wide-lapeled pinstripe suits and a huge topcoat he wears thrown over his shoulders. “I wear the topcoat like a cape—it makes me look important, like a count or something.” Metrano says.
His car is an old Duesenberg. His walk is a swagger.
“It’s a walk I picked up from a kid I grew up with in Brooklyn,” he explained. “This kid was tough—football player and all. He was small, but he strutted. You knew he could take you.” Metrano paused and shook his head sadly. “He’s in prison now.”
Metrano changes his voice for the part. As Art Metrano, his voice has only traces of his former Brooklyn accent. Its tone is gentle. As Big Nick, the voice becomes lower, more gravel-laden, and the accent is strictly Flatbush Avenue.
“Ya always gotta sound like you don’ want nobody to know whatja talkin’ about,” he said in a rough whisper. “See whad I mean? There’s gotta be a feeling of toughness in the voice, ya know? Because if ya talk too good, they’ll think you’re a fairy. You gotta say ‘dame’ when ya mean woman, and when you want somebody, ya say, ‘You! C’meah.’ ”
Metrano’s gangland buddies are as broadly comic as he is.
Huntz Hall, one of the old Dead End Kids, plays Big Nick’s valet.
“He never stops ‘valeting’ for a minute,” says Metrano.
“He’s always touching me, flicking dirt off my lapels, straightening the crease in my pants, cleaning my glasses. He even carries an atomizer with him—he uses it to spray the carnation in my lapel.” Mickey Shaughnessy plays Big Nick’s bodyguard and Jamie Farr is “Lefty,” Big Nick’s driver.
Dean Jones costars as Metrano’s cousin—and foil—in the series. He plays all-American boy, Linc, to Big Nick’s “hood.” John Banner plays their mutual uncle and Marvin Kaplan is Jones' nasal-voiced accountant and the only one who is afraid of Big Nick’s bluster.
Metrano has immersed himself in the Big Nick role. There’s even a practical joke he is planning.
“One day, when we break for lunch, me and the boys (Shaughnessy, Hall and Farr) will take the Duesenberg to one of those drive-in restaurants. We’ll wear our gangster clothes, too. That would shake people up,” Metrano said.
It has taken Metrano 10 years in show business to get this series. For seven of those years, Metrano couldn’t make a living in the business. He worked as a hairdresser to support himself. His father would tell him, “You’re a bum, why don’t you go into the family business and start working for a living?” But Metrano stuck and three years ago he started getting acting jobs in TV series.
What he’s best known for now is the comedy routine he does on guest shots: a magic act that isn’t. Metrano does nontricks while singing “da-ta-da-ta” to the tune of “Another Opening, Another Show.” It’s an act people either love or hate, because the humor depends on the absurdity of what he’s doing.
Metrone’s father is dead now, but his mother is alive to appreciate his success.
“I go home to the old neighborhood in Long Beach, L.I., and my mother says, ‘You gotta go see Rose next door. She’s been so nice to me and she’d like to see you.’ So Rose comes in and I sit in a chair, like the Pope waiting for an audience, and I give her my autograph and I tell her, “Yeah, so-and-so star is really like he seems on TV.’
“To my family and the people in the neighborhood, I’m a superstar already.”

Metrano’s fortunes changed for the better when he went to the other side of the law. From being an old-time gangster, he became a cop in the Police Academy movies.

But an even funnier Metrano was born of tragedy. In 1989 he fell off a ladder at his home and was paralysed from the neck down. “What a shmuck! You fell on your own property! You can’t even sue!” he told himself, quoted in a Miami Herald interview in 2013. “You knew better — Jews don’t belong on ladders!”

After 21 operations and getting around on a motorised wheelchair, Metrano wrote and performed a one-man show called “Jews don’t belong on ladders!” to help others with spinal cord injuries.

To more than his family and people in the neighbourhood, that should have made him a superstar.