Kenny Baker, Gee, He's a Thrill

Jack Benny had incredible good fortune when it came to singers.

Setting aside the Canada Dry show, which featured whatever vocalists the band had, Jack had one person hired to sing, and his batting average was pretty good. Michael Bartlett didn’t stay long, Larry Stevens doesn’t seem to have been trusted to do anything but warble and whistle, and Jack’s first non-band vocalist, Jimmy Melton, really didn’t seem to fit the show.

But following Melton came Frank Parker, who was popular, and after Bartlett left, Kenny Baker was hired. Both were capable of handling lines. After Baker quit, Mary Livingstone discovered Owen Patrick Eugene McNulty. They changed his name to Dennis Day and he became bigger than the other two, with much more of a flair for ridiculous comedy, and eventually demonstrating he was a showman, too, on stage in Las Vegas.

Still, I like Kenny Baker. His started out as a “bashful tenor” with a not-always-logical way of looking at the world. His character was a little more mature than Dennis’—he called Jack Benny “Jack” and not “Mr. Benny” like Day (and Stevens).

Kenny had ambitions beyond the Benny show and the silly character he had to play. He signed an exclusive deal with the Texas Company to appear on the Texaco Star Theatre and walked out on Benny. Unfortunately, he never achieved real stardom in the movies and his film career fizzled during the war. And while Fred Allen had a fake feud with Benny, he had somewhat of a real one with Baker, and he was dumped from the Star Theatre when it was cut to 30 minutes after the 1941-42 season (Allen had joined the programme a year after Baker). Benny, however, showed no ill-will toward Baker, who made a few guest appearances and was referred to in the Benny scripts, even into the 1950s.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch profiled Kenny in a feature story in its Sunday Women’s Magazine on April 18, 1937.

A TENOR TURNS TO THE FILMS
Youthful Kenny Baker, Who Has Been Heard by Millions Over Radio, to Be Seen in the Movies.
By H. H. Niemeyer
HOLLYWOOD, April 17.
EVERY Sunday night for a good many weeks now radio listeners have been thrilled, if they are the thrill, hero-worshiping type, at the singing of Kenny Baker on the Jack Benny program. Four or five million air fans hear him every week. Maybe it's 10 million—we're not up on radio figures. Kenny himself modestly places the crowd at a million or so, but whatever the number is, Kenny's audiences have never seen him Or practically never. But all that is about to be changed. Young Mr. Baker is getting a real chance in the films now and will be on display shortly.
The customers will be rather agreeably surprised, too. Kenny is, as everyone knows, a tenor, and the public’s idea of most tenors is a little fat man who sings romantically but who doesn't look the part. This, of course, doesn't take in the movie tenors. Screen heroes—and all picture tenors just have to be heroes; you couldn't have a cinema villain clutching a machine gun while reaching up in the clouds for a high note, could you?—must be reasonably handsome. And Kenny Baker is not little or fat. In fact, he's a pretty husky lad, standing 6 feet tall and weighing 170 pounds. Something of an athlete, too. Plays golf rather well and better than the average game of handball. Strange to say—and this Is no mere publicity stunt—his hobby is chopping wood, which is, to say the least, an unusual one for any tenor. He likes to get out with an ax and chop down trees. Maybe, as each one falls, he says, to himself, of course, “There goes Bing Crosby," or Allan Jones, or Dick Powell, or some other tenor, leaving himself standing, majestically, among the ruins.
Be that as it may, Kenny Baker CAN sing, and he is good-looking. The necessary touch of romance for a screen hero is furnished by a thick mat of light brown hair which is "naturally wavy." Also, if you care to know, his eyes are blue.
—o-o—
STRANGE to say, Kenny Baker, who has had a small part in one picture and who is about to be starred in “Mr. Dodd Takes the Air,” a film version of Clarence Buddington Kelland’s story, “The Great Crooner,” has been under contract to one of Hollywood’s most widely known picture producers, Mervyn LeRoy, for two years, but it just now coming into the spotlight. LeRoy picked him up one night at the Cocoanut Grove, where the young man—he was then 23—was singing. Thought he sounded promising, got his name on the dotted line and then, apparently, more or less forgot about his discovery.
Now, at 25, Kenny ranks among the first three male singers of the radio and LeRoy figures he has something worthwhile. Kenny hopes so too, for he has more assurance now than he had that night two years ago when, as a very nervous boy, he stepped before the microphone and was presented by Orchestra Leader Eddie Duchin to the assembled guests from filmdom and Los Angeles society, as just another tenor.
Baker didn't know it at the time, but his destiny was in that room. LeRoy, one of the top-notch directors of Hollywood, and the man famed for his discovery of Clark Gable, Loretta Young and Fernard Gravet, was seated at one of the tables among the cocoanut paIms. and heard Baker sing.
LeRoy numbers among his friends Jack Benny and he arranged for the personable Benny to hear his new find, with the result that was given a trial booking on the Jack Benny hour in October, 1935. A seven-weeks contract was followed by another for 13 weeks and a trip to New York.
—o-o—
THIS was the first time that young Baker had ever been on a train. In fact, it was the first time that he had ever gone out of California, the state in which he was born, The date of that event was Sept. 30, 1912, and the place was Monrovia, a little town in the foothills of the Sierra Madres of the Rocky Mountain range. Monrovia is about 30 miles from Holly wood. It is considerably more remote than that, insofar as the temperament of its people is concerned. Most Monrovia folks look upon Hollywood as a place of iniquitv and shake their heads at the idea of a fine boy like Kenny Baker being there.
The only child of Gordon C. Baker, a Monrovia furniture dealer, and his wife, Dorothy, Kenny has been singing ever since he could toddle, but like those other movie singers, Bing Crosby and Dick Powell, his first musical inclinations were instrumental rather than vocal. He wanted to become a violinist, and he spent much to Los Angeles—for business reasons, not on account of Kenny's fiddling and the boy, then in knee pants, became assistant leader and concert-master of the Robert Louis Stevenson junior high school orchestra.
Later, when his family moved again, away from their proximity to Hollywood, down to Long Beach, Baker discovered that he possessed an exceptionally wide wage of voice, and he sang at school assemblies and entertainments. However, for a time a shyness, not often noticeable among tenors, lack of professional training and encouragement hampered his progress.
He got a summer job working in a Los Angeles furniture store and used every cent of the money he earned for vocal lessons. So ambitious was he that he tried out a dozen different teachers within a few months.
Now he knew that he had the makings of a successful singer, that he had the voice to begin with, radiant health and youth. But the next summer vacation, he got a job helping build Boulder Dam and later on a farm in New Mexico, and it was impossible for him to take any voice lessons in those places. His quest for a singing career waned a little, but did not die.
Upon his return to Los Angeles, it was rekindled brightly when he got a few days work singing with a choral group in a Ramon Novarro picture. That was the boy's first contact with films.
His mother, who always encouraged him in his ambitions to sing, now persuaded him to enter the current trials for the Atwater Kent auditions, and he began to study with Edward Novis, brother of Donald Novis, a former Atwater Kent prize winner. But young Baker could, finish no better than second in the Long Beach district.
After this setback he entered Long Beach Junior College, and then he began to learn to sing by singing. He sang at every conceivable sort of function. For the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis, the Lions, a parent-teachers group, a church social. In fact, any place where they wanted a singer—without charge.
And all the time Baker was developing a likable personality which now, says Mervyn LeRoy, is going to make him a great screen star. He got his radio start, singing for 15 minutes with Ted Bliss, at Station KFOX, Long Beach. This didn't pay very much money, but it gave him confidence—and a local reputation.
May 6, 1933, was a red-letter day in young Baker's life, for he married Geraldine Churchill, who had been his best girl all during his days in high school. They are still married, even though four years is a long time for such things in Hollywood.
Now singing was a bread-and-butter proposition for him. He had to make it pay. He got a job singing at a Christian Science church, then he was given $19 a week and meals for himself and his wife for singing tenor in a radio quartet at California Christian College. He sang solos at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, too, every once in a while.
There is a man in Hollywood you seldom hear of, but he plays a mighty important part in the making of movies. His name is Dudley Chambers and he provides voices for the background music you hear in the movies—the large choruses and choirs. Baker became acquainted with Chambers, and worked as a “background singer" at Paramount, Fox and the Walt Disney studios. But he received no "screen credit" for these vocal efforts and Hollywood heard him without hearing of him.
One day when Baker was singing "background" again, in Lawrence Tibbett's "Metropolitan" picture, he was notified that he would be given an audition next morning in a Texaco radio contest sponsored by Eddie Duchin. He sang and was notified that he would enter the semifinals the next day. This was getting somewhere. He sang so well in his next attempt that he entered the finals—and won. This netted him his first national broadcast and also a week's engagement at the Cocoanut Grove at $100 for the week. It was his first important money.
It was then that LeRoy saw him and launched him on the road to fortune and fame.
In October, 1936, when Jack Benny returned to the air waves after a long absence, Kenny Baker joined him again, but this time as featured soloist. For 39 weeks Baker's voice thrilled the air-minded millions, and enabled him to place third in two national radio polls.
Then LeRoy began to realize what he had and gave him his first picture opportunity in "The King and the Chorus Girl," one of the big hits of the last few weeks. Baker appeared in the Folies Bergere number, singing the "For You" song. It wasn't much of a part, to be sure, but Kenny was launched in pictures.
However, "Mr. Dodd Takes the Air" is the picture which will show moviegoers the real charm and talents of young Mr. Baker. He's making it now.
He is still studying voice an hour each day, with Edward Novis as his coach. But he does not aspire to sing opera. His ambition is to step into the shoes of John McCormack. Ballads and semi-classical numbers are his favorites and he tries, in each singing appearance, to take full advantage of his exceptional voice range. Maybe you've noticed, over the air, how he has pulled many a bum ballad out of a bad hole by going up to High C or thereabouts, at the finish. Good old Chauncey Olcott used to do it the same way to the great delight of his Irish audiences at Havlin's Theater. Chauncey Olcott never played anything but Irishmen, you know, but he wasn't really an Irishman. Neither is Baker. John McCormack is still one up, there, on the boy who wants to fill his place in the music world.