We passed along a couple of stories on the weekend about Fred Allen warming-up his radio audiences.
In the television era, that task generally fell on people other than the stars. The general consensus at one time was the best in the business was Johnny Olson.
Likely your first thought when Johnny’s name comes to mind is the 1970s revamped version of
The Price is Right and his excited call to contestants to “Come on down!” Those of us at the age of superannuation will fondly remember him before that on
To Tell the Truth,
The Match Game (the New York-based version) and “from the Fun and Sun Capital of the World, Miami Beach,” home of the mid-1960s version of
The Jackie Gleason Show.
There were many, many more shows.
And there was one extremely unusual warm-up job—for a political rally.
Here’s the scoop from the
Chicago Tribune of July 4, 1971.
Television’s Top Second Banana Reaps Rewards
By Carol Kramer
He jumps up and down, kisses the ladies on the aisle, makes funny, faces, and does so much to make an audience appreciative that even the most hardened cynic, including a television writer, feels impelled to applaud and applaud and applaud.
Who is this magician? Johnny Olson, television's top second banana, the man you've probably heard more often than any other television voice. This is his 25th year in television. He spent the first decade as a top banana, host of his own shows, the Johnny Olson Luncheon Club and Rumpus Room, the first daytime network television show from New York.
But then, he explains, the tide turned, and "since I had always done warmups I got the idea of being a second banana, announcing the shows and doing the stunts. I'm not seen, but the money's the same."
That money has often been as much as $100,000 a year. But he works hard for it.
I visited Johnny recently during the taping of two segments of Joe Garagiola's Memory Game. Johnny's regular assignments this season have included that show, which goes off the air soon. [He's already been approached about some other shows, as well as What's My Line? And To Tell the Truth. The latter is syndicated and not seen in Chicago just now.]
Johnny has been announcing What's My Line? for 18 years and To Tell the Truth for 12. The current top performers on those shows are Wally Bruner and Garry Moore. Johnny's first radio job in New York, when he arrived in 1944, was as a replacement for Moore on Everything Goes.
The boss that people associate Johnny with most in recent years is Jackie Gleason. Johnny warmed up the Great One's audiences for 11 years. For six of those years, he commuted to Florida every Friday night just so he could tell people that Jackie Gleason was about to step out of the wings.
Now that the Gleason assignment is over, Johnny Olson has not slowed down his pace. He does 18 shows a week.
And he doesn't confine his work to the studio. People standing in line at NBC are often surprised to find Johnny Olson shaking hands and asking them where they're from.
"I feel the pulse of the crowd and it gives me food for material. I find out if there are any special groups, and it helps to know that there are people from Chicago or Libertyville."
Over the years, he's announced I've Got a Secret, the Match Game, Play Your Hunch, the Peggy Fleming special at Madison Square Garden, and the Victor Borge special at Lincoln Center.
That warmup holds the record. The cameras kept breaking down, Borge didn't want to come out before air time, and Johnny did a 42 minute warmup.
What does he say? He never knows. The day I watched him, he found a group of kids from P. S. 227 and a little boy named George who broke everyone up because when Johnny offered George a buck to say "a big black bug" three times in a row, George refused his money.
Kids seem to take naturally to Johnny. Once, he had a show called Kids and Company on Saturdays. And when Leslie Uggams was nine years old she sang with Johnny on Rumpus Room.
Leslie has never forgotten, Johnny says, and he glows whenever he reads a quote from Leslie about how "Johnny Olson gave me my first break."
Some of the other kids who were on Johnny's early shows Include Connie Francis, Sal Mineo, Bobby Darin, Patti McCormick and George Segal.
Perhaps the most difficult warmup he's had to do, aside from those for shows that have been taped just after national tragedies, was a nontelevision assignment. Johnny was asked to warm up the crowd at a rally for Presidential candidate Nixon in 1968. It was at Madison Square Garden, the Friday night before the election, and a lot of hecklers were in the crowd. "Ron Ziegler and the others kept asking me how I would handle it. I didn't know. I never know until I get out there."
Johnny just went out and gave them that Scandinavian charm, asked the crowd to have some respect, and asked the nonhecklers to squelch any heckling as soon as it began. It worked so well that Nelson Rockefeller came over and said, "Where were you when I needed you?" [Remember Miami?]
The fact that Johnny worked at the Nixon rally doesn't indicate his political bent. He says he's nonpolitical, but he also is quick to tell you that audiences have changed in the last couple of years "and I hate to say it, but I think it started when the Republicans came in."
Whatever it is, audiences are more somber today. "They're not in that fun mood. Maybe they're more concerned with world problems. Sometimes I come out and they're sitting there in deep thought. They're not as happy as they used to be."
But being a second banana hasn't made Johnny more somber. "It was a little difficult at first. I've had to bite my tongue a lot of times. But as far as fulfillment, I get that from the audience, and I don't have any ulcers because I don't have to worry when a show is canceled."
Johnny has been married to the former Penny Towers of Stevens Point, for 32 years. During the week, they stay in their Manhattan apartment. On weekends, they head for their 16-room, four-story stone house in Greenwich, Conn. It's so big, Johnny hasn't been on the top floor in two months.
I guess that's proof enough that being a second banana at least has some monetary advantages!
Olson died in 1985. Bell-McClure Syndicate writer Richard K. Shull, long-time entertainment editor of the
Indianapolis News, had a personal remembrance published Oct. 30, 1985. He reveals Olson played a little subterfuge on audience members that was similar to one on a Bob and Ray radio show, except Olson’s is funnier because it’s real.
Johnny Olson, master of warm up
When Johnny Olson died at age 75 a couple of weeks ago, the only photo Associated Press could find to send out to newspapers was 33 years old.
The picture was taken back in the days when Olson still was considered "talent" on TV, a fellow who could move easily from game shows to talk shows as a host.
That was before he reached his real forte as television's premier warm-up man, a guy with a special talent, who could take 200 or so human beings and train them in about 20 minutes to laugh and applaud on cue.
In recent years, he was best known for his work on "The Price Is Right." "Come on down," he would shout to prospective contestants.
But I admired him most for his glib ability to make any stranger feel like a long lost friend. He had the knack for what palm readers and fortune tellers call a "cold reading," to get people to tell all while thinking they are revealing nothing.
He never acted superior about it. Olson genuinely loved people. And the cons he pulled on them were to make them feel good, not to take advantage of them.
One rainy morning, I met Olson at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway in New York where he was scheduled to warm up audiences for three game shows. In those days, he did the warm-up for 14 different shows, a behind-the-scenes chore that brought him about $250,000 as year.
It was mid-morning, but Olson decided it was time to have a little eye-opener, so we dashed up the aisle of the empty theater intent on going to a bar next door.
He never forgot
In the lobby, a horde of tourists waited to be seated. We pushed through the crowd, and a gray-haired lady looked at Olson with anticipation.
"Good to see you again," Olson told her.
"I was here 10 years ago," she replied.
"Why, of course." Olson gushed, "You're Mrs. . . .”
"Appleton."
"Of course, Mrs. Appleton. I never forget a name. And you've come all the way from. . .”
"Davenport. Iowa."
"That's right. Davenport. Once I see a face. I always remember the name and where you're from. I'm glad you came back to see me, Mrs. Appleton."
Olson repeated the routine three more times before we got through the lobby. And each time, the women turned and beamed to their friends, a bit awed by Olson's photographic memory.
In the bar next door, Olson stowed away a boilermaker while I attempted to gag down a few sips of draft beer. It's 10:30 in the morning, remember.
Warming up an audience was an exacting science, Olson explained as he fondled the second jigger of bourbon before him. A lot of amateurs are in the warm-up business, he complained, inepts who will clumsily make an audience crest 10 or 15 seconds early, losing the moment.
He prided himself in working his audiences to peak pitch at the precise microsecond the cameras roll and the emcee steps out.
Sometimes, he said, if he had an audience finely tuned, he'd reuse it, cajoling the people to stick around and sit through another show, and maybe another, having them move around in their seats so the home viewers couldn't detect the deception.
One time, he laughed, he not only used the same audience on three shows taped for CBS, but trooped it down the street to NBC and used it on three more shows.
When he had an audience ready, it was ready for anything.
When we returned to the theater, the fortified Olson moved back through the lobby crowd, making a few more tourists feel like he'd had their names and hometowns on his lips all along.
Having a laugh-in
When the audience was seated, Olson began working with the people—gentle humor, a few jokes, maybe patter, all calculated to put the guests at ease and ready to respond to his commands.
He taped their loudest guffaws. Later, when the show was rolling and they laughed, he'd dub this pretaped laughter in on top of their live laughter, compounding the sound.
And if anyone asked if that was really the reaction of that audience, he could swear on a stack of Bibles that it was.
"Watch me, don't watch them," Olson told his audience. When he applauded, they applauded. When he laughed, they laughed.
When the game show started, Olson was in position on the wing of the stage, just out of cameras range, and all eyes in the audience were on him, not the performers. At the end of the half-hour, the emcee could congratulate himself on how well the audience had loved the show. But I knew, and now you know, it wasn't the show, it was Johnny Olson who earned their reactions.
The obituary from California said that Olson died on Oct. 12, which was technically accurate. Actually, he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on Oct. 7 while driving to the studio for yet another taping of another game show.
When there was no hope of recovery, his wife invoked a pact they had made against heroic medical measures and ordered the plug pulled on the life support systems on Oct. 12.
And all these years, you thought the audiences were laughing at the shows.
Warming up could be dangerous. A December 1961 newspaper story revealed Olson was running toward the stage as usual to begin his warm-up. It was a rainy day in New York. A woman in the audience left her umbrella in the aisle. Olson tripped on it and broke his ankle.
Perhaps even more unusual for Olson than warming-up an audience for Richard Nixon was his casting in a Broadway musical. He played himself in “The Selling of the President,” which opened March 22, 1972. Olson’s role on stage was, not surprisingly, as an audience warm-up man. He even understudied. No, he didn’t get to sing (though he did in his first radio job in 1928), and was quickly back in Los Angeles. Audiences didn’t “come on down” and the show closed after only five performances.
Johnny O wasn’t known for being on-camera, though he was eventually put into showcase sketches on
The Price is Right.. But he was actually one of the first game-show hosts who appeared on the small screen. His Blue Network radio show
Ladies Be Seated jumped to television in February 1945 for a short test run. He was among the hosts who stopped on the DuMont television network before 1950.
After his death, producer Mark Goodson said Olson “can never be replaced.” Of course, he was. The show had to go on. Goodson-Todman director Mark Breslow said it best when he declared “There isn’t a single person at CBS...who didn’t love Johnny Olson.” That went for millions of TV viewers, too.
