A Visit With Jack Benny at Radio City

Anyone fortunate enough to get tickets to see the Jack Benny radio show on stage got a bonus. They got to see the audience warm-up by the performers, including Jack.

The Pittsburgh Press of December 9, 1934 gave a neat little description of a Benny broadcast. The show was still being aired from Radio City in New York; Jack would pretty much move his home base to Los Angeles within a few months. The Benny show had been under the sponsorship of General Foods for not that many weeks.

Fans today don’t think of Jack as either grey-haired or smoking a cigar, but both traits were commonly known at the time. What’s different in this description of the broadcast is the revelation the cast tried to break up Jack. Frank Nelson said many years later that deviating from the well-polished script was forbidden. This show, though, is during the period Harry Conn put together the scripts with Jack.

The column wraps up with Mary talking about their baby. While newspaper and magazine pictures in the 1930s were pretty obviously staged, it’s apparent reading over the years that Jack did have great affection for his daughter.

Jack And Mary Become Serious About Business Of Being Funny
Co-Stars Try Hard To Trip Star
By S. H. STEINHAUSER
Would you like to go behind the scenes in radio with Jack Benny?
About two minutes to 7 tonight transfer yourself in thought to Radio City.
You're on the third floor of a magnificent building, walled in mahogany, floored in deep green carpets. Brass rails polished to the very limit encircle stairs leading downward to the next floor.
On the right side of the building a long line of men, women and children move silently through wide doors. Each holds a ticket rather proudly, for there are just 299 seats inside.
At a door further to the front of the building sits a little group on a grilled iron bench, with plush cushions.
One very wide-eyed, slender woman, clad smartly in brown, seems just a bit "on edge." She seems to sense that something is about to happen. Standing just in front of her and beaming down from his almost six feet is a hefty fellow in tuxedo and patent leather shoes, He's very formal, all except his smile. He knows what's on the little lady's mind and seems to be getting a big kick out fo [of] her excitement.
Almost paternally he glances from his wrist watch and says, "Let's go, Mary." His arms tower above her head as Don Wilson, one of radio's ablest network announcers, pushes the double doors of the studio open to admit one of the merry wives of radio—Mary Livingstone.
Immediately inside a gray-haired, serious looking fellow wearing a double-breasted blue suit paces the floor, looking everywhere, saying nothing. He looks like he'd make a good undertaker. If someone greets him, he awkwardly "comes back to earth" and says, "Oh, Hello." He isn't trying to be high hat. He has been away on a thinking tour of the program to go on the air. You see, he's Jack Benny, the funny guy. He and Mary take their seats at the extreme left of a triple-terraced stage. The sound effects man is just behind them. Jack gives him all of the signals. The Don Bestor band occupies the upper terrace of the stage. Microphones dot the others.
* * *
Far to the right, seated on a bench. is a fellow looking like "the undertaker's aide." His life seems to hang on what is about to happen. He's looking at the floor, his heavy-rimmed glasses making him a standout to stare at. He's Don Bestor.

Behind him, leaning over a baby grand piano, chewing gum and beaming as though he's the only one in the studio expecting to have a good time, is sleek, black-haired Frank Parker [left], the fellow who pushes his gum between his teeth and his cheek when he sings, then starts chewing all over again when he's through. He learned the trick from Will Rogers, on whose programs he also works. And when Will is on vacation Frank is on Stoopnagle and Budd's broadcast. And enough others to make his voice as familiar as the network chimes. You may expect to hear him any time you turn on your set.
"Schlepperman" and all of the other character players, who are seldom, if ever identified, stand around behind Parker.
Now the audience is seated. Don Wilson starts to make a speech inviting everyone to have a good time, "laugh and applaud all you wish." Then Jack Benny comes to life and really smiles. He informs everyone, (while puffing at his cigar) that the "first rule of the studios is no smoking." Then he introduces Mary, Frank Parker, Don Wilson and Schlepperman. He always pretends to forget Don Bestor, then, calling him to the stage, says "Look at those spats. White spats, phooey.”
Jack tells the audience a story (not for broadcasting or publication purposes). Usually its about the Benny adopted five months-old daughter and the Gracie Allen-Georgie Burns baby. Of course the story is one of Jack's impossibilities, but it puts the audience in an hysterical mood, just as the mikes are opened and there you are on the air with Jack Benny and his gang.
Everyone but Jack and Mary uses separate mikes. They stick together at one end of the stage. Don Wilson works at the center mike and Don Bestor and Frank Parker at mikes on the other side. They may seem to speak to each other but they're at least 40 feet apart.
The one big hope of everyone but Jack (and Mary is on the plot) is to cross Jack on the written lines. They do their best and usually catch him. Frank Parker or Don Bestor hand him a reply, just a little too hot to handle and Jack, looking on his script finds no reply, so the whole gang gives him the laugh and when they are through he has figured out a crack to shoot back at them.
Thus, the program goes on to its conclusion. Mary promptly slips out of the studio, takes her seat on the little bench outside the door and waits for Jack, who greets the audience, signs autographs and goes back to the business of being serious.

The floor of the studio stage is littered with typed sheets, dropped there by each member of the cast, as the lines are read. The mikes—they hope—don't pick up the fluttering of the pages as they drop to the floor. Children scramble for the pages and so do some elders.
The crowd finally leaves. Some I have tickets for other broadcasts at ! later hours on other floors of Radio City and go there. And the rest go home.
* * *
Jack and Mary hurry away to the Essex House, just off Central Park, to spend the rest of the evening with their little girl.
“Jack's gone crazy over her," Mary explained.
"And so have I. When Jack is out of town he phones home every evening to ask about the baby. We've discovered that having a little tot around is real living and we're happy that we've adopted her. We hope that she will never find out that she is not our own child. We love her as our own and want her to know us as her mother and dad. Fortune has smiled on us and we expect to devote it to this little girl—and maybe some others."