Not Being Ed Norton

He was more than just Ed Norton, and Art Carney set out to prove it after The Honeymooners went off the air in 1956.

Carney had little choice. Jackie Gleason continued with Honeymooners sketches in his 1956-57 variety show but when he came back in 1958, Carney wasn’t on the show. He had to do something, so he managed to sell NBC on the idea of airing occasional specials where he could finally star.

Not everything went smoothly for the Emmy-winner. In 1961, new material had to be quickly inserted into a special in January after the NBC ordered the deletion of an eight-minute sketch where he and Lee Remick portrayed Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy. NBC said it was “improper” and in bad taste to have people playing the president and his wife. (In March, another Kennedys sketch was censored in a Mort Sahl special where Carney was to play the president. Sahl then refused to do the show).

The Saturday Evening Post profiled Carney that year and he appeared in a gag photo spread in Seventeen magazine. Here’s another profile from one of the newspaper syndication services. It glosses over his radio career, considered ancient history in the 1960s, and his work on the Morey Amsterdam show on Du Mont which led him to Gleason’s Cavalcade of Stars (and the first Honeymooners sketches) on the same network.

Carney Modest About Acting
By ROBERT NETHERCOTT
NEW YORK, Oct. 2 – Art Carney won't believe it when told he's one of the finest performers TV has ever nurtured. He smiles and says, "Cut it out."
Tall, spare and graying, Art Carney has been about as important to television during the past six or seven years as the image orthicon tube.
He started out with the burdensome task of creating three wonderfully dissimilar characters on Jackie Gleason's show – sewer man Ed Norton, inoffensive Clem Finch and the starchy Sedwick Van Gleason, father of Reggie.
To live up to and at the same time live down such popular Frankensteins was considered one of the neatest twists out of being "typed" ever pulled off by an actor.
But Carney went on to straight dramatic roles like a graduate of Old Vic. Parts he played on Studio One, Playhouse 90, and other major shows ran the gamut of human expression.
In 1957 he took on his own program a series of eight specials. No two were alike. Many of them were hailed as "blockbusters." They showed that Art could do pretty nearly anything.
"It annoyed me a little," Carney said, “when people who had watched me on the Gleason show would come up to me after a Kraft Theater performance and say, 'I never knew you were an actor!' What did they think I was doing up there on the Gleason show – bowling?"
Bill McCaffrey, Carney's agent and close friend, has defined Art's seemingly effortless perfection in any role he takes on as a sign that he's a "primitive in acting." Art, who hardly ever disagrees with McCaffrey, grins a knowing grin.
On October 9 Carney will be among a glittering cast on the Westinghouse program's "Sound of the Sixties" (NBC). Written and produced by Dore Schary and to be narrated by John Daly, the show will feature Art in a sketch about a "do-it-yourselfer."
Carney thinks it's one of the funniest things he's ever done.
"They got the right guy for the job," he says. "You see this character is a very ignorant somebody when it comes to doing handy little things around the house. That's me. I can screw in a light bulb and put out the garbage. Very little else."
Asked about whether he's more at home in comedy or dramatic parts, he replies that he feels good doing both and wants to continue mixing them up.
"In the 'Sound of the Sixties," for instance," he says, "I might be considered a comic doing a funny bit. But I think of myself as an actor in a comedy situation. I always think of myself as an actor. That's why I feel comfortable."
Art plans to do some other TV this coming season but his main project is a Broadway play, "Age of Consent" which opens in December. Unlike his first Broadway role some seasons back, "The Rope Dancers," this play is a light hearted comedy.
"I enjoy my work," Art concludes.
Maybe that is as good an explanation as any of what makes this gifted, original and somewhat solitary man tick – and click.

Newspapers continued to publish little blurbs about the inability of Carney and Gleason to get together on television again. Earl Wilson used up most of his column of February 24-25, 1962 on the subject.

NEW YORK—Art Carney stirred some vanilla yogurt with a spoon, ate it and said, "Jackie Gleason and I never had a cross word. . ."
He was lounging in his dressing room at the Biltmore Theater where, with the help of his reputation as Ed Norton the sewer worker, is doing good business as the stage star of the B'way show "Take Her She's Mine."
"Lots of people don't believe it, but it's true," he said. "We just hit it off."
It was a timely discussion because Gleason's agents have tried to get them together again for one more "Honeymooners" effort as a special or even as a new series.
They failed to make the merger.
"Bill McCaffrey, speaking for me, wanted certain things just as Jackie would want certain things." Art sipped some coffee out of an enormous cup. "After all, what else are we working for?
"But I know Jackie'd do anything for me and I hope he knows he's got the same kind of friend in me."
Carney and Gleason, by coincidence, each have the same problem now — that of being too funny.
"Gleason just doesn't want to stick to doing the funny stuff — he's an actor," Carney said.
"In this show here" — about a father seeing his daughter growing up and away from him — "I could get a laugh with an Ed Norton gesture but I'd be out of character.
"Still I got to say I love the Norton character. I was in California before the show opened. . ."
An elevator operator mentioned seeing Ed Norton every day.
"Every day! You're kidding!" Carney said.
"Yeah they run it out here every day," the elevator operator said.
So next day who was in the great unseen audience watching "Honeymooners" rerun"? Ed Norton.
"Gleason never called me a stooge. I was the second banana, sometimes I was straight man for him, sometimes he was straight man for me. The fact he didn't like to rehearse much didn't hurt — the spontaneity was there. If anybody fluffed or ad-libbed it was in."
Carney yearns to do a musical. He loves music.
"I play the piano by ear," he mentioned. "I was a dope as a kid. I took a few lessons — but gave it up. I wanted to do all the things fellows wanted to do — girls . . . sports . . . girls . . . girls . . . girls.
"I remember the day Gleason played me the acetape [acetate] of his album ‘Music for Lovers Only.’ He said ‘Art, that's my first pair of long pants.’
Carney has had just the reaction you'd expect to his serious attempts at times to be serious.
"I get letters from people saying ‘Dear Mr Carney: Why do you waste your time doing comedy when you're such a fine dramatic actor?’
"And it's very nice until I read the next letter which says, ‘I saw your dramatic show. Why the hell don't you stick to comedy?’”

Carney went on another honeymoon with Gleason from 1966 to 1970. His career was doing just fine but his personal life was a mess because of addiction. He cleaned up, won an Oscar and lived to the age of 85.

He may have shone in his forgotten TV specials but the world still knows him for bringing to life one of the most beloved characters of the 20th century.