Behind The Feud

“Fred Allen Forecasts 1937” reads a yellowed newspaper clipping of undermined origin. One of Fred’s prognostications simply states “Jack Benny will win the World-Telegram Radio Editors’ Poll.”

The gag here is Jack won the poll every year, so it’s not much of a prediction. (By the way, Allen guessed correctly).

Allen did not predict something else about Benny—that the two of them would begin a radio feud that pretty much lasted his entire life. The reason is simple—it had only sort of started.

The crack by Allen that set it off happened on December 30, 1936. When this column came out, Jack hadn’t responded and Allen hadn’t picked up on it.

The feud supposedly ended on March 1937, when the two made up on Benny’s show. But, as a reporter for the Boston Post editorialised, it was really too good to end permanently. To me, it got better with time. Let’s face it: does “You Wednesday night hawk” strike you as funny, let alone much of an insult? The original feud seems to have been full of weak name-calling and weird, one-shot characters that Allen invented to back up his insults. But audiences loved it.

We’ve reprinted two feature stories from the Post about the feud. The one below was the first in the series, from the March 21, 1937 edition. It comes from a picture taken of a scrapbook in the Allen archives in the Boston library. The newsprint is glue-stained, shot at an angle, with copy and photos in the page gutter (making the pictures unusuable). In fact, I am guessing at the words in one paragraph as they are out of focus and in the gutter.

Jack Benny-Fred Allen Feud
Gathered, by intrepid reporter and cameraman, in the jungles of Manhattan, the Boston Sunday Post presents today the first installment of a series on the wordiest embroglio of modern days, the famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen radio feud.
At jeopardy of life and limb, and irreparable damage to their laugh muscles, these Post men have bearded the dualists in their retreats among the cliffs of New York and have garnered from them the “inside” facts of the inception and progress of the mock-controversy based on Jack Benny’s ability to play “The Bee” on his violin.
Read it exclusively in the Boston Sunday Post, if you think you can stand it.

By JOHN F. COGGSWELL
“Why, you bow-legged musical mistake, are you reachin’ for a violin again? Well, as I live and breathe and tear my silver locks, if you load that lethal machine with ‘The Bee’ and point it toward me, I’ll have you arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Well, you listen to me, you Wednesday night hawk! Another crack like that and Town Hall will be looking for a new janitor.”
“Why, you fugitive from a Ripley cartoon, you lay a hand on me and...”
Jack “Buck” Benny, the Waukegan wrangler, suddenly swung a hay-maker from the floor straight for the lean jaw of Fred “Boo” Allen, the Boston word-tosser.
A flash of light stabbed through the murk of the little room back stage in Studio 8-J of the National Broadcasting Company’s palatial pile of architecture, over in New York.
“Boys, that was swell! No, Jack, you......”
But feminine voices took command of the instruction giving.
“You boys sure you aren’t getting a little too realistic in this thing?” Mary Livingstone cautioned. “Besides, you used some of that stuff before, in your great reconciliation meeting Sunday night.”
“Yeah, and besides,” broke in Portland Hoffa, “if you used less time in chatter and more time in picture taking, we might get home and to bed some time tonight.”
“Well, you know, girls, we have to sort of get-in-the-spirit-of-the thing,” protested Jack.
Radio fans, don’t be looking for me for any odds that the famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud, that has been delighting millions ever since the latter made disparaging remarks about Jack’s violin playing, especially his musical preparation and ability to play Schubert’s “The Bee,” is all washed up, finished, forgotten and forgiven.
Just Loves Feuding

If you glued your ear to you loud speaker, last Wednesday evening, at 9 o’clock, you found of that that gun-totin’, feuding wildcat Fred Allen had no more than signed a peace treaty with Jack Benny, than he swing his artillery around in another direction and started a war with the Carvers, dwelling in their shack down the valley, just in nice gun range.
Why, that guy Allen just loves feudin’, especially when it’s all in fun. And just before he shook hands good-by and told me he was leaving for Hollywood tomorrow, Jack Benny observed...
But that comes later in the story. Did you notice, too, another little episode occurred Wednesday night? It was just after Portland had observed that it was rather stupid of Jack Benny to have sent Fred a “Happy Birthday” telegram, when it wasn’t Fred’s birthday at all. And Fred cracked:
“It isn’t the stupidity that makes me love him, it’s the sentiment.”
Now, I leave it to you, in spite of all this Jackie-Wackie, Freddie-Weddie, Palsey-Walsey stuff, that has been bedrivelling the airlanes, ever since Fred and Jack went out in the alley last Sunday night to fight it out to the death and came back scatheless, leaving out Jack’s dotted eye, and breathing undying friendship, does that wise crack sound like love?
Besides, of all the millions who laughed and shrieked and gurgled over this feud, which didn’t last quite so long as the one during which the Hatfields and the McCoys were tossing lead from West Virginia into Kentucky and vice versa, but had a lot more listener-inners, none enjoyed this mock embroglio more than Jack Benny and Fred Allen, themselves, did.
Then there’s the angle of whether or not the listening public is going to stand for such and abrupt ending to an aerial face that has given it so many genuine belly laughs as this one.
It Wrote Itself
For this was “tops” comedy at every angle. The boys and their companies had a hard time to keep from guffawing into the microphone, so high was their glee. The sponsors loved it; the whole thing cost them not a single cent for the extra talent or the like.
And the public? Why, man, the public ate it up. Last Monday a concern which specializes in that sort of thing made a country-wide survey, calling a large number of homes by telephone in every city and most of the villages in the nation. That survey showed that of all the radio fans called, of those who had their radios going from seven to seven-thirty last Sunday night, 95.5% were listening to the Jack Benny programme.
“Small credit to us,” Jack insisted to me. “The whole thing was a natural; if we couldn’t steal the air show with it, we’d better quit.”
“Yeah, but what about you and Allen taking a little credit for shaping up a natural,” I asked.
“Huh, we didn’t shape it up; the darn thing wrote itself from start to finish,” he insisted. “All we did was keep it going.”
Well, it went, all right. A couple of weeks ago the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra had just finished playing a number that all but brought to its feet an audience composed of the elite of the big-river metropolis. The applause rose, flooded the huge auditorium as the gathering clapped and roared its approval.
Such an ovation demanded an encore. After repeated bows the maestro turned to the players, waved his baton. From the instruments there flowed forth a swiftly-moving drone of melody. A titter of delight ran over the listeners. Soon it swelled to a roar of laughter that shook the rafters, all but drowned the music. It was a nonplussed leader who turned his face to his convulsed audience at the end of the short number.

Huh, he had just made a mistake; that was all. He should never have played “The Bee” before an audience that knew its Jack Benny and Fred Allen just as well as it knew its Schubert. But I’m told that even that fiasco was all right with a certain musical house; they have republished “The Bee” several times since Fred Allen made his crack about Jack not being able to play the piece on his fiddle.
A pair of “swell guys”—I use the term advisedly; ask any hold-over from the vaudeville days, such as these two old friends are, about anybody and if he assets that fellow is a swell guy, that’s praise—this Jack Benny and Fred Allen.
There they were, the two of them, at 1 a. m. last Thursday, in the little room backstage of Studio 8-H, where this installment of The Famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen Feud began.
Jack was in pretty good physical shape. Aside from the fact that he had been continuously busy for over 14 hours, working with his script writers, interviewing insistent talent, and attending to a thousand and one little things that he must accomplish before trekking back to Hollywood. If you think putting on a radio show is a soft way of earning a living just follow a couple of putters-onners for a few days as Frank Jason and I have been doing; honestly, we were run ragged.
Yet Jack was fairly bright and chipper, that early morning. But Fred Allen was dying on his feet. His hands were shaking; lines of fatigue were etched into his rugged, good-natured pan.
He had been up early Wednesday morning, laboring long putting finishing touches to the script—you know, he writes all his stuff, himself—timing the show, cutting, revising. At a few minutes before 2, he came hightailing it into the studio for rehearsal, his iron hat on the back of his head.
During three hours of rehearsal, that hat never left his head. Oh, it changed position; it did, you know. He’s one of those fellows who wears a hat all over his head; on the back of it, on either side, tilted over his eyes. “Does anything ever knock that derby off your head,” I asked him during a lull in the rehearsal, when he came down to sit with us a few minutes.
Right there, I got an illustration of the difference between these two head-liners of radio comedy. Benny would have laughed that one off, gone right on with serious stuff.
Jack Really Plays
But not Fred Allen. Always ready to “ad-lib” a wise crack when on the air, he’s just as ready to display his wit in conversation. The hat slid to the back of his head, his voice assumed the nasal twang so familiar.
“Man, I wouldn’t take that hat off to take up a collection to get Jack Benny not to play the ‘Bee,’” he cracked.
Well, anyway, he rehearsed three hours, rushed out and put in more time than that revising and cutting, came back and put on his regular full hour’s performance at 10, then showed up for another hour at midnight for the repeat programme that goes to the Pacific coast.
By 1 o’clock, he had been working continuously at hard, concentrated labor for nearly 20 hours. Yet he was willing to spend another hour in that stuffy little room, the sweat streaming down his forehead, and down Jack Benny’s, too, going through all sorts of stunts for a couple of newspapermen from the Boston Post.
We did everything but ask these two radio top-notchers to stand on their heads and you’d have thought we were movie directors or something, the way they caught the ideas and proceeded to give us something a little more than we asked for.
Swell guys! You bet! And Jack Benny played the fiddle for us. What do you think of that? I’m not going to try to name the piece; it wasn’t “The Bee” and it wasn’t “Love in Bloom,” which piece really started the feudin’, but, anyway, noises did come out of the instrument and they sounded like music to me, but my music teacher always thought that I must have been dropped on my head as a child.
The way it came about that we got this sample of Jack’s fiddling was that we’d asked one of the orchestra players to stick around for a while so that we could take a picture of his violin being played by the comedian. Of course, Jack Benny can’t carry a fiddle around with him all the time, not even in these parlous times when he’s called upon constantly to defend his prowess.
Jack picked up the loaned instrument, while its owner watched it with jealous eye, to see that nothing untoward happened to it. I gathered the impression that he, the professional violinist, didn’t believe that Benny should be trusted too far with any fiddle. Anyway, Jack tucked the proper end of the instrument under his chin and drew the bow across the strings making the aforesaid sounds.
“I’ll bet even money you never had as good a fiddle as that one to commit musical assault with,” drawled Fred Allen. “And I’ll give odds that fiddle was never handled by a lousier fiddler.”
“Oh, yeah!” roared Jack. “I’ll have you understand I’ve got a mighty good violin.”
Which struck me as good comedy missed during the feud. Anyway, no foolin’, I’ll lay a bet myself that if Jack Benny were given the choice of being, say, the 10th or 20th best violinist in the country, which he isn’t or of being radio’s top-notch, A-1, champ comedian, which he is, if national polls and awards count for anything, he’d choose the fiddling career.
If you get to talking confidentially which him on violining, he may pull a wallet from his back pocket and extract from it a yellowing newspaper clipping. It is comment upon a vaudeville act put on by Jack Benny, some 16 years ago, written by a critic in a small Mid-West city.
“What we would like from Benny,” the clipping reads, “is more violin and less chatter.”
“Why didn’t you hit Fred Allen between the eyes when that feud was on?” I asked Jack.
“Well, he answered, “if you get to thinking it over carefully, you’d get the idea that he didn’t exactly say that my playing was good, but he leaves no doubt of his opinion about my chatter.”
But his chatter is good enough now, eh? Anyway, we’d better start getting this feud to broiling, if we’re to get any real balling into this installment.
Really, it was “Love in Bloom” and not “The Bee” that set the air lanes for the great Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud, though the latter did start the bullets to singing through the atmosphere.
Those who were there, that afternoon at a rehearsal in an NBC studio, will never forget that milestone in radio comedy. When I asked Don Wilson, the big, good-natured announcer who carols “Strawberry, raspberry, cherry, orange, lemon and lime” so melodiously every Sunday night, about that, his whole frame shook, his triple chin jogged up and down violently for minutes before he could reply.
He’s a Riot
Here’s the picture. The first part of the rehearsal is over. At front stage stands Jack Benny, his treasured violin tucked under his chin, the bow just about to sweep over the strings. The champ comedian is to show the world that he can be as artistic as he is funny. Mary Livingstone tips a wink to Don Wilson.
The orchestra strikes up the first few chords of “Love in Bloom,” and fades out. The waiting bow sweeps. A wail of music sweeps over the studio. The first few bars and the other members of the company are tittering, a few more mouths are wide open with guffaws. Jack hits a sour note and quite, to find his small audience doubled up in mirth.
“It’s terrific, Jack!” shouts a control man, bursting out of the control room.
“It’ll lay them in the aisles,” roars the production man as he slaps Jack on the back.
“We’ll put it in the show permanently,” decrees the sponsor’s representative, rubbing his hands together gleefully.
“You’re breaking my heart,” Benny mourns. “Here I thought I was to blossom out as a virtuosos and what am I? Just another musical joke.”
“Joke, thunder,” yells Don Wilson with just as much enthusiasm as he puts into a Jello plug. “Man, you and that fiddle ain’t no joke; you’re a riot.”
And blest if the bit wasn’t a riot when it went out over the air. Jack Benny’s attempt to play “Love in Bloom” made radio, comedy history. All America listened and laughed.

There’s the background. Now, let’s allow the villain of the piece to come buzzing into the plot, all set to sting a feud into action, to fill the air with verbal bullets, to lay a man-sized portion of the populace in the aisles. Enter “The Bee,” herded by a 10-year-old kid, Stuart Kanin, of Edgemere, Long Island.
Stuart brought the insect in, concealed in a violin case, on the evening of Dec. 20, 1936 [sic], when Fred Allen had called a number of juvenile performers into his Town Hall show. A new year about to dawn; youth, emblematic of the drawing year. See?
Stuart Kanin was there to show what a 10-year-old could do with a fiddle. He played Schubert’s “The Bee” and played it darn well, got a lot of applause.
They Just Ad-Libbed
What followed the dying down of the applause isn’t to be found in the script of the show that night. It wasn’t written in; Fred Allen ad libbed it on the spur of the moment; sent it wafting out over the air waves, just as old Devil Anse Hatfield sent the first bullet whining across the clearing after the McCoys had shot down one of his hogs in cold blood. And with just as immediate results.
“That was fine, Stuart,” twanged Fred Allen. “Jack Benny and his ‘Love in Bloom.’ Phooey! He ought to be ashamed of himself after hearing you play ‘The Bee’.”
Those may not be Fred’s exact words—he can’t say for sure, himself—but they convey the intended sentiment.
Listening in on Jack Benny, the following Sunday night you’d never have known, until the programme was over, that he had heard Fred Allen’s ad libbed wise crack. The orchestra had played its last number, “Buck” Benny had finished the evening’s gallop and in the “closing tag” wished his guest and radio audience a Happy New Year. For the act that set a feud to broiling let’s follow the words of the original script, which is before me as I write:
Jack—Oh, Mary!
Mary—Yes.
Jack—Take a wire to Fred Allen.
Mary—Okay.
Jack—Dear Fred: I am not ashamed of myself. When I was 10 years old I could play “Flight of the Bumble Bee on my violin too. Aegh! signed Jack Benny.
Mary—This mystery will also be continued next week.
Mary spoke prophecy that night all right. And many weeks! There was the beginning of the feud—a wise crack and a casual comeback. But the rest of it, with the radio audience, the stuff that has set all the nation shaking with laughter, was built up word for word, phrase by phrase by these two old time, warm friends, with much wringing of eyebrows and rearranging of scripts.
Maybe the reader thinks that a radio script is something that just happens. I kind of thought so, too, but changed my mind after a short period spent in the room in which Jack Benny, his secretary and three writers were getting together tonight’s programme. Imagine! They spent a whole half hour playing with one small bit.
It may or may not be on the air tonight, depending upon whether they were able to work the idea into anything. One of them had, figuratively speaking, seized upon that baker’s confection known as an “upside down cake.” Maybe they could work something out of that. Listen to Jack Benny toying with a slash of genius.
“Say, listen. How would this be? I’ll say to Mary. ‘What did you eat for supper?’ and she’ll say, ‘Upside down cake. Why?’ and I’ll say, ‘I wondered what had stood you on your head.’ U-m-m. Nawh. That isn’t so hot, it it? Well, no, maybe ...”
I’ll be interested in learning what they do with that. Also whether Jack gets the Mayor of Waukegan to New York for tonight’s show as he was trying to do by long distance as I was leaving. The feud’s over, eh? Well, if it is, why does Benny need the Mayor of Waukegan to back him up?

Next week! Oh, thunder, let’s allow Fred Allen to make the announcement, he’s a Boston guy and would just as soon do it. “Don’t fail to read in on the next installment of the hair-raising tale of the famous Jack Benny-Fred Allen feud, next Sunday at this same hour in the Boston Sunday Post. There’ll be fun, Hah, hah, ha!—Tragedy, Unhand me, villain—Pathos, Ah, woe is me, Drama—And what, oh...”