The question for Jack Benny in the late 1940s was—when are you getting into television? More and more stations were signing on and, crucially, more and more sponsor money was taken from radio budgets and dumped into the far-more-expensive visual medium.
Once Benny worked out a deal to begin occasional TV shows starting in 1950, the question changed to—when are you getting out of radio?
TV Guide mulled over that question in its issue of February 5, 1954. It turns out Jack had one more radio season left in him, but abandoning the medium wasn’t altogether his idea. Despite attempts reported in the trade press, no sponsor would come up with the money needed to put the show on radio for 1955-56.
Mary Livingstone pretty much left the programme in the last season. Whenever she did show up, it was either on a re-run, or from a tape recorded in the Benny mansion that was spliced into the broadcast. In the latter case, either Jeanette Eymann, Jack’s script secretary, or his daughter Joan would fill in on stage for the studio audience and read Mary’s lines. Joan later made a number of non-dad TV appearances and added her thoughts to fill out her father’s autobiography. It’s an excellent book I would heartily recommend.
You’ll notice the picture of Jack as Buck Benny. His series of Buck Benny sketches ended at least 15 years earlier, so the photo is an odd choice. It’s almost as if the editor picked the picture first and then wrote the start of the story around it. As it is, the story seems to be a collection of random items about Jack, not an actual narrative with a point to it.
HEADIN’ FOR A NEW RANGE?
JACK BENNY, still riding along on an even keel at the pinnacle of his career, is perhaps the least pretentious star show business has ever known. He’d as soon throw a wad of paper at a script girl as shake hands with the Queen of England, and he’s done both. The script girl and the Queen, to him, are two very likable human beings.
If there can be a secret to any man’s success, Benny’s lies in his enormous capacity to enjoy his work. He takes it seriously, but never to the point of undermining either disposition or health. He plays golf, shooting in the high 80’s and never worrying about the time he might have shot a 79. When, as he occasionally does, he feels that he has to get away from it all, he merely piles into his car and takes off.
When he works, he is a perfectionist. He spends as much time on his radio show today as he did ten years ago when radio was king and he was its crown prince. And he gets as much fun out of it.
Oddly enough, Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone, suffers miserably through the whole business of a Jack Benny show. A mainstay on the radio show almost since its inception, she has no conception of herself as a star, dislikes publicity and would give her left arm to get out of it. She loves show business for Jack, hates it for herself. “This,” she says defiantly, “is absolutely my last season.”
May Abandon Radio
Jack himself is reluctant about returning to radio next year. “If the sponsor wants me to do TV every other week, that will be the end of the radio show.”
Benny thus far hasn’t found it at all difficult to come up with a TV show once every three weeks and feels at the moment that every other week won’t be any harder. “The ideas just seem to come,” he says. “We never point deliberately for a ‘great’ show. And if one does happen to come off better than most, we don’t knock ourselves out trying to top it. We just do ’em as they come along.”
Papa Won’t Push
If Benny has a major interest aside from show business, it is his adopted daughter, Joan, now 19 and a junior at Stanford. He and Mary have made it a policy from the beginning to keep her in the background and to let her grow up in as normal surroundings as possible. She has appeared on two or three of Jack’s radio shows and on one TV show, but the decision has always been hers. Benny is proud of his daughter and sure she can make her own way without undue help from him.
Perhaps the master of comedy timing onstage, Benny offstage can bumble along with the best of them. He frequently forgets names and is honest enough to become covered with confusion instead of trying to ad lib his way out with a funny line. The funny line, in fact, has never been Benny’s forte. He is more the introvert, a quiet man content to let things ride and preferring to have his audiences seated out front rather than gathered around him at a bar. Unlike most comedians, he invariably thinks the other fellow a very funny man and is known among his cohorts as “the best audience in the business.” With Benny in the front row, a comedian is guaranteed a belly laugh on even his worst jokes.
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