Tralfaz Sunday Theatre: A Manner of Speaking

If you wanted an actor to blow up into a rage, you hired Fred Clark.

That’s what Jerry Fairbanks Productions did in the A.T. & T. industrial film A Manner of Speaking (1959).

You’ll recognise Clark and his anger instantly as the advertising agency boss who loses a client because of sloppy phone manners. Naturally, a Bell representative gives advice (for the viewing audience to take into account) and we’re left to presume all’s right at the end.

You may not need credits to pick out other cast members. Richard Erdman is a copywriter who wastes time on the company phone settling a dispute with his friends. Dan Tobin is the underling who won’t place his own calls. Barbara Eiler is in here, too. She played Dennis Day’s girl-friend on one of his “two shows” on radio.

You may recognise the music as being from the Capitol Hi-Q library. The Yogi Bear cartoon cue TC-436 SHINING DAY by Bill Loose at 24:57. Other cues include:

2:03 C-51 MECHANICAL INDUSTRIAL UNDERSCORE by Bill Loose.
2:41 C-35 LIGHT MECHANICAL by Bill Loose.
10:12 SF-83 MYSTERIOSO (aka ATOMIC SKY) by Louis De Francesco.
13:10 TC-203 WISTFUL COMEDY by Bill Loose and John Seely.

And the director’s name may be familiar. We’ll let you look up John Rich on your own.

What? Worry About Television?

The beginning of the end of network radio was nigh. And everyone knew it.

Americans had been pretty much promised there would be television after World War Two and it slowly, but surely, happened.

A stream of stations signed on in 1947 and 1948. More transmitter construction permits were approved by the FCC. Coaxial cable was being laid in the East to bring more live programmes to more cities. The broadcast day was being expanded. All of this happened before the huge popularity of the Texaco Star Theatre with Milton Berle on television.

More, importantly, sponsor money was slowly being siphoned toward television. It was leaving network radio.

During 1948, newspaper columnists made a to-do about the top radio comedians and how television would affect them. It wasn’t quite like going back to vaudeville. There were hot lights, cameras getting in the way of the audience and, worse still, dialogue that changed with every programme; a vaudeville act went from city to city with maybe minor tinkering along the way.

Perhaps the most successful comedian to move into television from radio was Jack Benny. His TV show remained on the air from 1950 to 1965, and he followed that with periodic specials until his death in 1974. This was even as the style of comedy evolved.

The Bridgeport Port of August 2, 1948 took up the situation in a column supposed written by Jack himself. Whoever penned it made fun of the trepidation that newspaper columnists seemed to feel was eating away at comedians.

Video No Worry To Benny! Oh, No?
(Editor’s Note: While Rocky Clark is on vacation, his column is being written by guests from the radio and entertainment world. Today’s guest columnist is Jack Benny, comedian).
It seems that every radio comedian I bump into these days is worried sick about television. What will it be like? How will it affect them? What will be the reaction of the public when it can see as well as hear these comedians?
For the actor, it means learning a new medium, mastering a different technique. No more reading from scripts—every line must he memorized. The sudden transition will not be easy.
We few, who won't be affected by television, can't help but notice the fear in the faces of those less fortunate actors. It's like a Frankenstein monster that haunts them until they can't see or think straight.
Recently I had lunch with Eddie Cantor, a case in point. He spoke about Ida, his five daughters, the new picture he's producing, a play he has coming up on Broadway. He told me a few stories (which I had already heard from Jessel) and raved about some song he was doing next week on the air. But not once did he mention what was uppermost in his mind—television.
Cantor is always acting, but he couldn't fool me. I knew that underneath his apparent gaiety—the handclapping, the eye-rolling, the jumping up and down—he was trying to find escape, escape from the morbid fear that was sapping his strength and confidence.
Of course, with me, it's different. But I couldn't help wondering how I would feel if I were in poor Eddie's spot.
As we left the restaurant, I tried to cheer him up. I shook hands with him and said, "Don't worry, Eddie."
He said, "Worry about what?" Pathetically, he pretended he didn't know what I was talking about. And as the chauffeur opened the door and little Eddie stepped into his big Cadillac. I knew that during that long drive to his 40-room home in Beverly Hills the one thing in his mind was that terrible dread of television.
Burns And Allen, Too
Then, there are Burns and Allen. I played golf with George Burns and he pulled the same act as Cantor. He made out that he didn't have a worry in the world. He purposely played a better game of golf than I did, just so I wouldn't see how upset he was.
On the way back to the club-house he kept laughing and telling me the same jokes Cantor told me (which I had already heard from Jessel) and all the while I knew his nerves were at the breaking point, that the specter of television gnawed at every fibre of his being. I kept thinking how fortunate I was—that I wasn't in the same position. Poor George, and Eddie, and Bob Hope, too!
I met Hope the other day, and he was carrying on worse than Burns and Cantor. Naturally, Bob is younger. He's just getting his break, and television will hit him harder than the others. There he was, standing in the lobby surrounded by a crowd of GI's signing autographs and cracking the same jokes that George Burns told me, that Cantor told me (which already heard from Jessel).
And when Bob called out, "Hello, Jack, I'll be with you in a second," I knew immediately from the timbre of his voice that television was making a nervous wreck out of him, too.
But I've got to hand it to Hope. In spite of the heartbreak, the fear inside of him, not once did he let down and allow his actions to betray his real feelings. He was brash and breezy, eyes sparkling, fall of pep, but when I inadvertently mentioned what television would do to some radio comedians, that got him.
His reaction was instantaneous. His face sobered. His manner softened. He put his arm around my shoulder, and for a brief moment I thought I saw a tear in his eye. At that instant, I hated myself for having let these words slip out. How it must have hurt the boy!
He said, "Buck up, Jack. It'll work out somehow." Poor Bob! He didn't want me to worry about him.
Poor Mr. Allen!
Then I got to thinking about the others. Fred Allen, for instance. What must be going on in his mind? In spite of what everybody thinks about Allen, we must admit he is intelligent. He realizes what television will mean to him. He shaves every morning. He knows what he looks like.
I tuned in on his program accidentally recently, and it was pitiful. He told the same jokes that Bob Hope told those GIs that George Burns told me after Cantor told me (which I had already heard from Jessel). I never felt so embarrassed for anybody in my life. The only thing that saved Allen's program was the audience. They were so sorry for him, they laughed continuously all through the show. You can't fool the American public. The people know television is just around the corner, and it was just their way of saying, "So long, Fred. You did a great job."
Last night I couldn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw poor little Eddie Cantor, Burns and Allen, Bob Hope, Fred Allen and all those other radio comedians less fortunate than I. It was a never-ending parade, Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton, Jack Carson, the Great Gildersleeve—all potential victims of television.
And as I lay there wide awake in bed, I knew what they were going through—sleepless nights, tossing and turning, wondering what the future held in store for them. The uncertainty—the agony of waiting! The feeling of complete helplessness as, moving ever closer, television crept to engulf them and relegate them to the past.

Some radio comedians weren’t all that interested in television. The most surprising of the lot was Edgar Bergen, who was president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences until mid-1947, and had appeared in a short film on W6XAO in Los Angeles in 1940. I still think Burns and Allen were better on television and radio. And networks tried to find something that fit Fred Allen but never really did.

Jack Benny, however, had created such a strong, laughable persona for himself that, even without Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris and Dennis Day (for the most part) that he was able to move from the microphone to in front of the camera with ease.

Paul Frees

Here is a statement I defy you to disagree with.

Paul Frees is great.

It’d be fool-hardy, and probably impossible, to list everything he did in his career. There were commercials. There was voice matching. There were radio shows. There were television roles, on camera and off. There were films. There were novelty records.

And there were cartoons.

Some of them were fantastically funny (anything he did for Jay Ward). Others were, well, not (we shall let you be the judge of those).

Around 1968, Frees tired of tooling around Los Angeles in a Rolls Royce and decided to move to the quiet of Marin County north of San Francisco. He was still available for work and flew south if it paid enough. It did.

The San Rafael Independent-Journal figured Frees was worth an extended story. This is what was published in the August 16, 1969.

The Voice Is Familiar
It's Made Paul Frees Rich Man
By GIL PEARSON
Paul Frees, who commutes between his home in Marin and his work in Hollywood, believes he is the highest salaried person in the United States. There is general agreement in the business that he is the world’s top voice mimic. And if he were writing this story, he might well begin it by promising you “a tale . . . well-calculated . . . to keep you in S-U-S P-E-N-S-E!”
THAT FAMILIAR line, heard week after week years ago in the deep, measured and resonant Frees tones, will jog the memory of many a radio-fan grandparent.
Early-day television enthusiast parents will recall with equal pleasure the Frees voicing of the somber and shaky speech of the wealthy and aged John Beresford Tipton once a week as he directed his secretary "Mike” to present a fat and juicy check to some deserving person as depicted on "The Millionaire.” And these days, the youngsters and other generations alike hear Paul Frees daily doing a diversity of voices in hundreds of movies, commercials and animated cartoons for television and the screen.
"I HAVE BECOME a Marinite for keeps,” Frees said the other day, using his own natural voice during an interview in his brand new cliff-hanging home in Tiburon. "I look forward to a happy life in this happiest area I have ever known.”
Frees says he "fell in love with this place” five years ago while visiting his life-long friend, Marin County Sheriff Louis Mountanos. As our probing into the life of this Hollywood master of voice projection progressed, there emerged an impression that here at hand we had a man whose overwhelming interest in life rests on what he can contribute artistically.
AS IS TYPICAL with talented people, Frees is gifted in many fields. He has enjoyed staggering successes award-wise and money-wise in acting, directing, producing, writing, painting, announcing, cartooning, and of course voicing for all sound media. He does not spend time discussing other matters such as hunting, fishing, sailing, current events, women or travel.
In a word he is a show-business practitioner from A to Z.
AT AGE 49 Paul Frees finds that the demand for his voice is so great that he can afford to reverse the usual business week of five days work and two days off to two days at the studios and five days rest in Marin. He averages voicing 1,500 TV commercials a year. How does this workout in salary?
Let’s look at it:
AN AVERAGE national TV program commercial will pay in residuals (repeats) from $3,000 to $5,000 per year. Frees has done as many as 30 different Pillsbury commercials in a two-hour recording session each commercial averaging $4,000. Multiplied by 30 this works out to $120,000 for this session, or $60,000 an hour.
His annual income is over a million dollars, which, however, he spreads into the future for tax purposes.
At the present time Frees' voice is heard on more than 20 different animated TV shows which are beamed towards young children. He dubbed in the voices of the Beatles for the Beatles animation series.
“I AM BACHING today," he advised us while pouring some very dark coffee, "so this stuff probably has plenty of hair on it.”
If it astonishes you that so moneyd a personage is not surrounded by cooks and valets, you should be told that Paul Frees went through that routine long ago in his $250,000 Hollywood digs —Rolls Royce and all. He sold out to move north.
He now keeps only an apartment in Los Angeles, but does have the use of a Rolls while hopping from one studio to another.
"IT HAS A couch in the back, a bar and icebox, and there are telephones in front and rear," says Paul.
His commercials include such products and brands as Kleenex. Del Monte, Nestles (he's the little chocolate mam. Pillsbury (he’s the little doughboy who gets his tummy poked). Opel Kadet, and Johnson's Raid (he's the voice for the bugs “It's Raidddd!”).
“What about your movie acting?” we pressed.

“THESE DAYS I can’t afford to be an actor. I make more in an hour than a movie or TV star makes in a week. I recently turned down a quarter of a million to do animal animations [imitations?] for the Doctor Dolittle movie in the South Seas with Rex Harrison.
"If I should just drop all my commercial jobs for 13 weeks or so, they would be snapped by other voice men,” he said. “However,” he continued, “I am able to do voice dubbing for the movies. For instance, Humphrey Bogart preferred to sail on his boat rather than hang around after picture-taking to correct any lines he flubbed. So I would imitate his voice over those spots.”
PAUL FREES is a heavy-set man and he is calm and collected. but his neck turned red when we asked him if the name of one of his children’s TV shows is spelled as one or two words. He roared, “Bullwinkle is one word! You're the only one in the country who doesn’t know that show!” But he cooled off at once and told me that he is the voice for Boris Badenov (the bad guy). "Good casting, there,” we ventured. And both of us laughed.
HIS LIVING room is lined with 20 of his own paintings, mostly heads. His oils have hung in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute. He says, "I work in all media and get from $3,000 to $5,000 a painting. Sid Caesar and Frank Sinatra have bought some pieces. It all began for Paul in Chicago when he left school at age 14 to go into vaudeville as a song and dance man.
HIS BOYHOOD practice of mimicking the various dialects of Polish, Italian, German and other ethnic groups living in the Windy City turned out to be the greatest of assets for a person with inborn showman talents. He suffered through all the stresses and strains common to those who seek stardom in Hollywood and over the airwaves. As an actor he played in some 200 films with practically all the well-knowns. He composed music. He wrote scripts. He played as many as a half dozen characters in a single play, all with different voices. He has dubbed in the English translations for over 800 foreign films.
HIS 6-YEAR-old daughter is named Sabrina Sara and his 16-year-old son Fred William has quit school and entered show business. As Paul Frees posed for our camera to catch him on his sundeck overlooking his personal view of his beloved Marin we felt admiration for one man who has made his dreams come true.

While Frees had a Wellesian voice, some of his movie appearances weren’t exactly of the calibre of Citizen Kane. Here is a trailer for an eye-roller released by 20th Century-Fox, Space Master X-7. The full film is on archive.org. The cast also includes Moe Howard, as his son-in-law Norman Maurer was behind this. Being a low-budget science fiction film from 1958, it is no surprise the music in the background is from the dependable Capitol Hi-Q library. The movie’s main title music (not heard here) is ATOMIC AGE (aka SF-83 MYSTERIOSO) by Lou De Francesco.

Wabbit Switch

One of the great things about Hare Tonic, a 1945 Warner Bros. release, is that the action never lets up. Bugs Bunny continually gets the best of Elmer Fudd in a stream of gags that doesn’t slow down. The best part is the ending, which I loved as a kid 60-plus years ago and still love now.

In one scene, Bugs—purchased by Fudd at a meat shop!—cons Elmer into looking into his grocery basket because there’s no rabbit inside. Bugs then shoves Elmer into the basket and switches places with him, strolling along and singing a wabbit-ized version of “Shortnin’ Bread.’

Elmer stretches up from the basket. “Ooooh, you twickster!” he says to Bugs, and shoves him back into the basket. The action is one drawing per frame.



We’ll skip several drawings where the action is indicated by dry brush.



Elmer carries on as before.

Tedd Pierce is the credited story man (I can’t help but wonder if he was still teaming with Mike Maltese), with Ben Washam, Ken Harris, Basil Davidovich and Lloyd Vaughan being credited with the animation.

In the days when Warners cartoons ran endlessly on local stations that signed a deal with AAP, this one aired often, at least where I grew up. The rabbit-titis sequence at the end is still a treat.

Woims

You have to wonder what took place during story sessions at the Van Beuren cartoon studio.

Jolly Fish is a 1932 short starring Tom and Jerry. It appears the staff tried to come up with funny situations but when they couldn’t figure out a payoff, they just quit and went on to the next situation.

In one scene, Jerry reaches into a can of worms. The can has a Brooklyn accent, and reads “Woims.” The funniest thing so far is Jerry’s weird eye shapes.



Jerry ties the worms together and dips them in the lake. Soon, a fish rises from the water, devouring the string of worms. Jerry then grabs the fish and shakes it. And then.



Well, that’s it. There’s no punch line. It’s like the staff couldn’t think of one so they just went on to the next scene. The cartoon is full of moments like that.

John Foster and George Stallings get screen credits along with Gene Rodemich, who puts two instrumentals on the soundtrack for mood.

The cartoon features fish of various sizes, swaying eels, a smiling lobster dancer seen in The Haunted Ship (1930) (a funnier cartoon) and a duodecipus.

Battle of the Comedy Sexes

While scrolling on line, I spotted the caricatures you see below that were sent on the Associated Press wire. So I decided to post the drawing and the article that went along with it.

This appears to be one of those stories where the writer asked a number of celebrities being interviewed some side questions, then banked them for a compilation feature piece for later publication.

This story appeared in papers in 1948. As it was written on the East Coast, it is devoid of opinions of West Coast radio comediennes or comic actresses, such as Gracie Allen, Cass Daley, Eve Arden, Lucille Ball, Marian Jordan and many others (this is not an excuse for you to comment “You forgot {insert name here}.”).

There is validity in the points raised. People will listen to old radio shows or watch aged animated cartoons and won’t laugh because they don’t get the references. I imagine gags on Bob Hope’s shows about ensigns or top sergeants went over big with his military audiences in World War Two, but they do nothing for me.

I chuckle about the columnist’s disdain for Henry Morgan. Morgan expressed disdain for women, especially ex-wives who wanted his money.

Cynthia Lowry spent years in Los Angeles reviewing television shows, but she was no fluff reporter. She was assigned to France by the A.P. during the war and got a first-hand look at the horrors of the Belsen concentration camp in Germany in March 1946. She died in 1991.

Comedians Differ on Why Women Laugh, or Don't
By CYNTHIA LOWRY
(Associated Press Newsfeatures)
New York, June 26.—Women laugh at jokes because they have sense of humor.
Just a minute, now, let me finish. This isn't my opinion. I'm just reporting it. It's what some of America's top comedians think. Except Henry Morgan: He thinks women just laugh at things men don't think are funny. I don't think Henry Morgan is funny.
A couple of lady comics think women laugh quicker, sooner and harder. Maybe you think they are prejudiced, so we'll amplify that later.
Jack Benny does not think questions about women's sense of humor calls for gag answers.
"Men and women respond to about the same things in the way of humor," he said. "I'd go a little heavier in the sex angle with an audience of women. But not too rough. That would embarrass them."
Fred Allen, another veteran of vaudeville, puts it somewhat differently. He thinks the world is quite simply divided into people with a sense of humor and people without a sense of humor.
"If they have one, they laugh," said, "If they don't, they don't. But it isn't question of whether it's woman or a man.
"Women will laugh at gags about styles or stocking shortages," he continued thoughtfully. "Men will laugh at golf jokes, gags about horse racing. But they're just laughing at things they know about. Women don't play the horses much.
"A college professor will snicker it someone trips over some ivy by a university building. A garbage man will laugh if someone slips in the swill. They're both laughing at basic thing—only in settings they are familiar with. But they laugh because they think it's funny—not because they are men.”
Jack Haley, one of the stars of "Inside U. S. A.,” agrees that it is familiar things that make people laugh. But he thinks women are more likely to laugh at "light things" than men.
"Men like heavy humor you can put your teeth in," he says. "Women go for more frivolous stuff. There's no better, more responsive audience in the world than bunch of women—all women."
He thinks there are many men more comedians than women because "humor is an aggressive thing." He didn't explain that.
Paul Hartman, a master of humor in dancing and now starring in "Angel in the Wings," said women laugh as hard as men, but are likely to laugh at different jokes.
"For instance, women in an audience will always go for the classic burlesque: A man pantomiming a woman adjusting her girdle or trying to find an unfastened garter. We've got a sketch in our show built around some military slang, but it never goes over to a matinee audience. Women just don't understand military slang."
Then there's this Henry Morgan.
"I've often noticed women laughing," said Morgan, "but usually only at the minor calamities that befall men. If women had sense of humor why should they on being women?"
Gracie Fields thinks men and women laugh equally hard at the same jokes—it they're familiar with the subject matter.
"But," she adds, "women catch on to a gag faster every time."
Nancy Walker, star of the musical comedy hit "Look Ma, I'm Dancin'," is the summer-upper.
"Dames," she said, "are the quickest, smartest people in the world, but they spend most of their lives trying to keep men from knowing it. Just about the only time they don't have to cover up and let their hair down is when they're all together at matinee.
"Then they'll laugh and whoop louder than anything you ever heard at anything that strikes them funny. They get the gags quicker. But just at matinees. They don't act that way when they go to the theater with their men in the evening."

Ape Mouth

There’s not a lot of mountain music in the 1933 Warner Bros. cartoon I Love Mountain Music. There are some western musicians and Will Rogers at the start of the short, and an ice skater twirling around to the title song in the middle. Things then switch to Hawaii, then Switzerland (okay, it has mountains).

The last third of the cartoon involves some crooks robbing a cash register, with the good guys ganging up to catch them.

This is a magazine-covers-come-to-life cartoon, so we get the ringleader chased by “Ping Pong” from the pages of “Screen Play” magazine.

There’s another of those familiar gags when a character comes right at the camera and swallows it, which probably looked better in theatres than on the small screen.

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Friz Freleng and Larry Martin are the credited animators.

The version of this cartoon in circulation has an odd iris-out at the end, followed by an urchin who does not appear in this short exclaiming “So long, folks!” Was this tacked on from another cartoon?

Asian Avery

A cymbal is kind of the same shape as an Asian conical hat, so Tex Avery tosses that into a gag in Magical Maestro (1952).

I’m certain sure anybody reading here knows the plot of the cartoon. Mysto the magician gets revenge on opera star Poochini (who refused to hire him) by impersonating the singer’s conductor and transforming him into various things. In this case, the cymbal turns him into a jabbering Oriental stereotype.



He dances around and sings in dialect. I don’t know the name of that tune; Bob and Ray included it on one of their NBC radio shows.



Poochini snaps out of it and discards the "hat" and kimono, then carries on with his solo from The Barber of Seville.



Avery had tossed in the same kind of gag in Bad Luck Blackie (1949).

Rich Hogan is the credited story man, with Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton animating the short, and Johnny Johnsen supplying the backgrounds. Keith Scott has discovered the man singing the Chinese song in this scene is a comedian named Frank Ross.