The Articulate Hansel

Hans Conried always had a sense of high-brow theatricality about him. But he never came across as snooty or superior. I suspect he cultivated it because he thought it was amusing.

Conried was always amusing in everything he did, at least when it came to comedy. He was an accomplished dramatic actor, too, appearing on shows including Lux Radio Theatre, The Cavalcade of America and Suspense. He recalls he turned more to comedy after the war, through he did a number of shows with Burns and Allen starting in 1943. This allowed him to put his talent for outrageous accents to use.

Television, as Conried and others noted, was limiting as you had to look like what you were playing. Still, Conried found a career there, too—acting, appearing on Pantomime Quiz and other game shows, and a late-night merchant of observations with friend Jack Paar. And, yes, because someone will say I “forgot,” there were cartoons and Fractured Flickers for Jay Ward (for a full list, consult the internet).

Here is Hans on his career to the North American Newspaper Alliance, in a column that appeared in February 1961.

The Many Sides of Hans Conried
By HAROLD HEFFERNAN
North American Newspaper Alliance
HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 4—Movie, radio and TV actor Hans Conried for many years was just a voice—doing as many as six network radio shows a day, playing Italians, Germans, Greeks, Brooklynites and Injuns. In one program he did 18 different characters in 25 minutes.
"You could get away with it then," laughs the Baltimore-born son of Viennese parents. "No makeup, no wardrobe—just a change of voice."
HANS BECAME a face—playing Nazi sub commanders, a Lebanese matchmaker (he's Lebanese again this year as Danny Thomas's Uncle Tonoose on TV), a Russian spy, a British lord.
And next he was revealed as a wit—decorating most of the top panel shows and saving many from disintegration with his rapid repartee.
"My voice and face were always much better known than my name," he frankly admits.
ALL THE Hans Conried pieces will be put together in the June Allyson Show (CBS-TV, Feb. 13), in which he plays a masterful imposter, impersonating a distinguished professor in a play titled "A Great Day for a Scoundrel." It will be one of his rare forays into straight drama.
"Oddly, this role somewhat parallels my own life," Hans observed in the home he occupies with his wife and four children overlooking a lake high in the Hollywood hills. "This character is an eloquent lecturer. Well, I may not be eloquent, but I spend half my time lecturing. "Whenever I'm afraid of overexposure on TV, I hit the road and talk before women's clubs. It's a gold mine.
"YOU KNOW how many women's clubs there are in the country?" He asked, and answered with a surprising "over 100,000. Know what many of them pay for guest lecturers? From $350 to $1000. And just for an hour's talk. "Why, if I'm properly scheduled I can knock off two a day.
"Of course, there's a drawback to everything," pointed out the 6-foot-2 former Shakespearean actor. "The chief trouble with a lecturing career is all the clubs serve chicken a la king.
“And when it comes to chicken I'm—well, I'm chicken. You can eat only so much of the stuff before you start to cackle."
CONRIED GIVES the clubs a choice of subjects for his talks. Shakespeare, music appreciation or modern philosophers.
"Know what subject they ask for most?" he asks. "That's right, all want me to talk about Hollywood. So I read up on the columns and give them a big earful."

While the Paar show brought him name-recognition which resulted in large sums of cash as an arch relater of show biz gossip to that quaint specimen of obsolete Americana, the afternoon women’s charitable club, he maintained his affection for network radio.

Here’s a 1963 story which was published in newspapers in February that year.

Conversation Leads to Stardom
BY DONALD FREEMAN
Copley News Service
HOLLYWOOD, Feb 11—Hans Conried, that richly theatrical mummer who might well have sprung to life in one of the more flamboyant Restoration cornedies, sums up his current professional state in a phrase: “I am not a star."
Then he reconsiders with a rueful smile: "Ah, but to a star I'm not a star"
A mere technicality of course. Or is it?
“Well, my name is now placed above the title of the play," said Conried. "And I am recognized in the various cities where my profession calls. I am, in a word, known. Which is a far cry from my days in radio.
"Ah, radio," Conried sighed, "the theater of the mind, a stage where the rubies were always big and flawless and where an actor was cloaked in blessed anonymity—very desirable, I might add, since audiences could not therefore take your measure for a suit of tar and feathers."
FOR MANY YEARS now the disarmingly candid Conned has enjoyed a public acceptance—notoriety he would probably call it, based on a variety of roles. Today, for instance, he might play Uncle Tonoose on the "Danny Thomas Show," then act in a dramatic special, then romp through a session of charades on "Stump the Stars."
And of course Hans is one of the talking people thrust into a special niche by the "Jack Paar Show," with its stress on airy conversation. Conried's flair for talk has, in fact, given him another public cloak—he is now a "television personality."
"For years I was just an actor, a wandering player," Conried noted, with his usual wry self-deprecation, "and then Jack Paar fortunately exploited my, uh, leaning to the verbose. Paar, you know, likes to glance about him before going into battle and see the old trustworthy faces waving the banners aloft. That is to say. he's loyal to old friends.
“Now, as a result, I've become a 'personality.' I never sought to be one but I accept it gratefully, for it has been, after all, a boon to my career—a word I usually avoid. It's nice."
NOT LONG AGO, Conried was one of the regulars who journeyed with Paar to Japan. I wondered, was he often recognized by the Japanese?
Conried shook his head. "They only know American cowboy heroes. In my day I have played western engagements but I was strictly black sombrero—a villain or a charlatan or a snake oil merchant. I was never in short a laudable page out of the great book of Americana."
Conried was momentarily thoughtful. "I started out, you know, as a classical actor. Born in Baltimore—but left as a babe of 6 weeks so they can't claim me. Claim me? They don't even want me. I've never been back and I've heard of no public outcry to have me return to place my feet in cement. . .”

Here is something featuring Hans Conried that you may not have seen. It’s a Jay Ward-esque look at model railroading, with a kazoo soundtrack, an oom-pah Germanic march, and that annoying BOINGGG! you hear in the Gene Deitch Tom and Jerrys. It opens with a little chat by Walt Disney’s most amusing animation director of the day, Ward Kimball. Conried is narrating.