Jack Benny Will Not Be Seen Tonight. Almost

The show must go on, goes the old entertainment saw.

For Jack Benny, that wasn’t always quite true.

In the radio days, he had an extremely serious case of pneumonia (originally downplayed in the public press) in early 1943 and missed five shows; Orson Welles filled in for him on most of them. There was another show in the late ‘30s when he was bedridden, and then too emotionally upset to do his Sunday show after the death of Carol Lombard in 1942.

It also happened when Benny took on television, and that provided the starting point for a newspaper feature story about him.

The broadcast was supposed to be a live one on February 22, 1953. Reading the story from the Associated Press, I can’t help but think of the pancreatic cancer that claimed Jack’s life at the end of 1974; he complained of stomach cramps then, too. The story made the front page of the Los Angeles Times and several other papers.

Benny Ill, Watches TV Film From Bed
HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 23 (AP)—Instead of appearing on television last night as scheduled, Jack Benny, stricken by the flu, sat up in a hospital bed and saw himself on a TV film. A spokesman reported his condition “fine.”
The comedian was taken to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital early yesterday after suffering from severe stomach cramps. He was stricken about 11 P.M. Saturday after dining at the home of Dory Schary, MGM production chief.
Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone, took him home and nursed him through the night. Dr. Myron Prinzmetal, summoned early yesterday, drove Benny to the hospital. He will remain there a few days.
Ann Southern Show On
The comedian’s regular Sunday radio show went on the air on schedule; it was taped several days ago. A filmed television show starring Ann Sothern, which occupies the TV tie spot between his appearance every fourth Sunday, replaced his scheduled live TV show.
Benny saw the Sothern telecast in which he had played a bit part.
In his own TV show, he was to have played the role of Dr. Jekyll in the Benny version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

The show was rescheduled for a month later. The Jekyll idea actually originated on radio in late 1941.

The temporary illness gave the Washington Post entertainment writer a chance to do one of those Benny-Isn’t-What-He-Is-On-TV/Radio stories. This was published March 1, 1953.

Just a Nice Guy
The Real Benny’s a Real Doll
By Sonia Stein
THE influenza bug that bit Jack Benny last Sunday must have had cast iron nerve. If ever there was a man who looked to be in the peach of condition (Californians seem to stay perpetually peach instead of pink) it was Benny. For a man who celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday for the twentieth time on Valentine’s Day, Benny cuts a fine figure.
This should come as a terrible blow to fans of the 20-year-old radio character Jack Benny. They know him (Sunday nights at 7 on WTOP) as stingy, aging, bald, foolish, fat, vain and unloved. His gag-writers have created—with his enthusiastic approval—a querulous bachelor covering his baldspot with a toupee in a fruitless attempt to make his friends think he is 39. His acute parsimony leads him to cheat his employes, to take in laundry, to charge guests for refreshments and cigarettes, to wear seedy clothes and to drive around in a moribund Maxwell.
THIS character is so well planted in the American consciousness after Benny’s years as America’s top-rated radio comedian, that a hatcheck girl once flung a dollar tip back at him and begged, “Please, Mr, Benny, leave me some illusions!” If you feel as the hat check girl did, look the other way, because we must in conscience report that Jack is handsome, generous, well-loved, intelligent, happy to admit his 59 years, slim, modest and the owner of a fine head of white hair which he tints steel grey for photographic reasons.
A quietly tailored man, Benny has, nonetheless, a look of the actor about him. He has a commanding “presence” even when he is silent. This looking-like-an-actor situation puts Benny in mind of a joke.
“When I first got on Broadway I wanted people to point at me and say ‘There goes an actor!’ So I bought a flashy Broadway outfit that looked like sunset with buttons. Then, one night as I was leaving the theater I heard a stagehand remark, ‘There goes Benny. He always looks like an actor.’ For a moment I floated on air. Then I heard his companion reply, ‘Yep, Benny always looks like an actor—except when he’s on stage’.”
He does worry about his waistline and diets rather carefully the last two weeks before each of his TV shows (once a month Sunday nights at 7:30 on WTOP-TV). But even during his dieting period last month Jack relaxed his vigil. When a waiter set before him a creamy strawberry parfait at a press luncheon Jack looked sternly at it a moment and then dug in with the explanation that, “It’s not fattening if you don’t order it and I didn’t order it.”
THE conceited aspect of the fictional Benny seems to be practically nonexistent in real life. When Benny was here February 7 to entertain at the Radio Correspondents Association dinner, he had an appointment, at the White House with President Eisenhower, whom he had met In Europe when he was touring Army bases to entertain the troops. Affairs of state necessitated moving the Benny appointment a couple of times. Instead of being hurt or angry, Jack was wreathed in smiles: “Say, that’s very complimentary to me I think. It would have been so much easier for them to just cancel the appointment than to move it, but they keep moving it to try and fit me in,” he said.
On his program Jack not only plays straight man and butt of the jokes for every member of his cast, but works hard to build the others into rounded, popular characters. “People don’t say ‘I listened to Jack Benny last night and he was good,’ they say, ‘I listened to the Jack Benny Show last night and it was good’,” Jack explains. And he considers that smart business tactics. (It’s a little hard to quibble with him on business tactics, since he sold Amusement Enterprises, Inc.—the company under which his various activities are organized—to CBS for $2,260,000. As owner of 60 percent of the firm he got $1,356,000.)
Benny’s program is also the first one on which I ever heard any credits given to the writers.

MENTION of Benny’s writers always brings up the subject of whether or not Jack can be funny on his own. Not noted for ad lib ability on the air, Benny is frequently described as a gifted comedian who can judge humor well and deliver it perfectly, but who cannot write it at all, This certainly doesn’t appear to me to be the case. Although he does not keep up a steady line of gags and tends to discuss his work on a very serious level in terms of general approaches rather than specific jokes, he has a delightful wit which comes through when he is relaxed.
At a recent conference with the press, Benny was discussing the virtues of repeating some of the good shows after a suitable time lapse. “You can repeat the good ones and skip the bad ones,” he said. Then, leaping to his feet as if he had been insulted, be demanded to know, “Who has bad shows?”
Benny has never been accused of off-color humor except by isolated persons who found some item offensive. His good taste in humor goes unchallenged. Ronald Colman, long shy of radio because of a few unpleasant encounters, finally entrusted himself to Benny because he trusted Jack’s sense of good taste. After several succesful [sic] appearances with Benny, Colman and his wife became radio stars on their town show. Dennis Day and Phil Harris also blossomed out with shows of their own after learning some tricks at Benny’s knee.

While Jack personally got positive ink like you just read, his shows didn’t. When the Jekyll episode finally aired, C.E. Butterfield of the Associated Press remarked:

Jack Benny, back on television after missing his February appearance because of a sudden illness, demonstrated that he is at his best when doing a satire. This time he gave attention to “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which he had rehearsed for February. More rehearsing in March got out all kinks and the end product was near the ultimate in entertainment.

But “Trau” declared it “was not one of his better efforts” and went on:

There might have been some who regarded as inventive the fact that Dennis Day did a “surprise” personation of the Hyde character for the snapper finish, causing Benny to observe that the interference snafued the show. He could have been kidding on the square. The stanza did contain some rewarding sight bits, but not sufficiently to carry the half hour. Jeanne Cagney did what she could as the nurse, Bob Crosby as the interne, with Don Wilson appearing as a London bobby in narration (plus a neatly integrated Lucky Strike plug), and the décor was extra special. Best piece of business was Iris Airian [Adrian], as an old bag, overpowering Benny in his Hyde form in a series of physical tussles that had JB gasping. That and Mel Blanc’s solid sound effects. Overall, the heartiness of a Benny show was missing.

There was also a network transmission glitch, as reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

A segment of the Jack Benny Show, telecast locally by WCAU-TV, hit a technical snag last night when trouble developed on the coast-to-coast audio line “somewhere west of Chicago” and some of the spoken parts of Benny’s version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” faded and became inaudible.
Benny was presenting the show with Jeanne Cagney and Bob Crosby from the CBS studios in Hollywood when the interruption occurred. A spokesman in WCAU’s control room laid the blame to trouble on the line “somewhere west of Chicago.” He said he did not know what was missing in the dialogue.

Despite mixed reviews (he also got them for his January TV show), Jack’s TV series eventually expanded and stayed on the air for another 12 years. For Jack Benny, the show must go on. And it generally did. For longer than many TV stars.