First Stop, Kansas

The Jack Benny radio show’s humour became so honed after World War Two that when Jack took his show on the road he knew exactly what elements he needed for success.

Eddie Anderson was one. Another was Phil Harris. The bandleader once said “Jack and I did our own routines in lots of theaters, and we were a good team and always kept the audience laughing.”

One of the Benny entourage’s stops was in Wichita, Kansas in 1950. Going along with the three were guitarist Frank Remley, who was regular travelling company of Jack’s, drummer Sammy Weiss, and the Wiere Brothers. Jack loved them so much, he tried to get them on TV. Eventually, they succeeded in breaking onto the schedule in mid-season 1962, and succeeded in being cancelled before the season was done.

The Wichita Eagle of May 17, 1950 featured several stories about the record-breaking shows the night before.

8,200 at Show in Forum
Jack Benny’s Troupe Plays As Radio Audiences Like It
By TED HAMMER
(Eagle Staff Writer)
If Wichita’s city dads are asked soon to repair the roof and rafters of the Forum, blame the Jack Benny-Phil Harris show which played there to two standing—room-only audiences Tuesday night, setting a new stage attendance record. More applause and laughs were provided by the show than ordinarily might come from a good season of top attractions.
The principles just played themselves, as radio audiences have learned to like them. Jack Benny appeared hurt when numerous performers declined to let him accompany them on the violin, he finally got to play “Love In Bloom,” and Phil Harris showed him how to play a love scene. Eddie (Rochester) Anderson was brought on after a telephone bell interrupted a Benny speech, just as it happens on the radio every Sunday night when the CBS show is broadcast by KFH, KFH-FM here.
Benny found the easy way that if he doesn’t get a new radio contract and doesn’t click in television, he can return to his old time single act, a monologue. And Wichitans loved him just as they did back in 1922 when he played at the Orpheum, before he became famous on screen and radio.
There just wasn’t time enough for Harris to satisfy the audience with his southern style songs, but he had to sing four of them before he and Benny started s new routine to stop the applause. Vivian Blaine of the films did three songs which proved why she has been given her own television show next fall. And Rochester demonstrated that his singing and dancing are just as good as his gags spoken in the crackly, high pitched voice which radio fans enjoy so much.
The three Wiere Brothers, who also have been in pictures and are internationally famous, could have stayed on the stage another half hour with their violins, dancing and comedy. They proved more than equal to advance billing as top jugglers, with some hat and stick feats new to Wichita theatergoers. Phil Harris baud was responsible for much of the show’s success.
The Stuart Morgan Dancers, three fellows and cute girl, did some breath taking adagio which made the audience believe Benny when he said he went to a lot of trouble to get them.
Closing the show was a musical routine featuring Benny and Miss Elaine with members of the Phil Harris band. Dressed in weird costume they provided “mountain music,” with Benny as director and violinist, while Miss Blaine played it deadpan, Sam the drummer and Frank Remley guitar player, were in this group, the “Beverly Hillbillies.”
Good as the others in the cast are, it was a Benny-Harris show, marked by gags and songs of the type for which they’re famous—even including the band leader’s “That’s What I Like About the South” and “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?”
The Wichita shows were attended by more than 8,700, with some 100 persons allowed to buy standing room, to set a record. Extra seats were placed down in front and in corners at the last night to accommodate a few more persons, according to Mrs. Mary Floto who handled the ticket sale.

It’s Informal But Lively at Rehearsals
In rehearsals of the Jack Benny-Phil Harris show, It’s “Phil, or Curly,” when members of the band or cast address the leader. And everyone calls Benny “Jack” or “Jackson.” The latter is the nickname used by Harris since they became associated 14 years ago.
When the drummer was called to the telephone during rehearsal at the Forum Tuesday, Harris took his place, even going through a number he was to sing in the show.
While Harris handled much of the musical rehearsal, Benny took care of “business” and timing. When Vivian Blaine asked Benny if she could use a different opening song than previously rehearsed, he told her “fine,” and she ran through it with the band.
“After all, Wichitans don’t know that we had the other number ready,” Benny said as he resumed his chair in a corner of the Forum stage. He was on his feet a moment later to hurry beck and forth, making suggestions.
Once, while Miss Blaine, Benny and Harris discussed a bit of business, the drummer called out, “Let’s go, we’ve got a show to do tonight.” Show time was four hours away, but everybody laughed.
In an interview on Don Anderson’s “Harmony Ranch,” over KFH, KFH-FM. Harris credited Benny with much of his success. After stating that he grew up in the show business, the son of parents who were in the theater, he said Benny helped him get the show started in which he and his wife, Alice Faye, are co-starred.


Benny and Company Make Vet Patients Noisy with Mirth
A hollering houseful of patients at Veterans hospital Tuesday saw a funfest fostered by Jack Benny and his company.
In the end they found that Benny, the consummate master of ceremonies, can really play the violin. Hot violin, too.
He’s no Joe Venuti, but he can finger the fiddle. With confidence and savoir—faire that best can be described simply as Benny-like, he finally fiddled after frustrating interruptions by Phil Harris, Rochester, and Vivian Elaine. The latter interruption was most welcome to Benny and audience.
An eight-man outfit from the Harris orchestra pulled the curtain ahead of schedule and entertained the ex-GI’s with improvisations that added up to Dixieland. The drummer, a bigger man than Broderick Crawford, used a folding chair and a tissue box for traps.
Benny entered to assure the vets that he isn’t stingy. I throw money away. Not very far, but..”
Harris interrupted for a routine with the boss and then did “Preacher and Bear” and “Darktown Poker Club.” The boys found out that Harris is not good, but perfect, and that he has to be a lot faster than it sounds like on the phonograph.
Vivian Blaine insulted the be-junior out of the boss with a frank appraisal of his sex appeal—zero—then caressed the patients with two numbers, including a job on “You Made Me Love You” that created a lot of hot but harmless humidity.
Then came Rochester, who apologized for making the boss look like a cheap skate. (“I have all the luxuries. Shoes, bread ...”)
Rochester, of course, stopped the show with “Sunny Side of the Street” and a return to his original occupation, booting, that gave the lads a laugh with every lunge.

Three thousand people greeted Jack and his group as they arrived on a TWA Constellation the day before. They were travelling by air because of a railway strike. A 50-passenger passenger plane was chartered along with a second plane to haul scenery, costumes and props.

The schedule was grueling—21 cities in 21 days. Stops included Montreal and Toronto. It climaxed at Carnegie Hall. Afterward, Benny, Harris and Rochester boarded the Queen Mary for return engagements to the Palladium in London and the Empire in Glasgow.

Greeting him on his return was a new radio season. And a new medium. He began his 15-year television career that October 28th.

Juul Haalmeyer

The best worst dancer in television has left the stage.

Amsterdam-born Juul Haalmeyer was part of one of the most brilliant shows of all time to come out of Canada, SCTV. He may have played an inept dancer and choreographer on the show, but his actual costume designs were incredibly stunning and creative. He put together an outfit for Andrea Martin as Edith Prickley as Queen Elizabeth I in one day. It took 36 people to make it. He even out-Divined Divine, creating an over-the-top outfit for John Candy as John Waters’ favourite drag queen.

He was Anne Murray’s personal designer. He came up with outfits for Phyllis Diller for her Vegas shows. He got a call out of nowhere in 1979 from Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, performing at Maple Leaf Gardens, asking him to redesign the band’s stage-wear. His answer was leather and mediaeval style capes, and went on the road with the group for two weeks. He had never been to a rock show before and never went to one after.

Reports today on Facebook say Juul has passed away. He had been suffering from cancer.

Juul told me he had been in musicals in high school. He was a loud singer but a mediocre dancer. I had an affinity with him. I explained to him in my chorus boy days in high school, I danced like a lawnmower and fumbled with a recalcitrant prop that seemingly mocked my inabilities on opening night.

The Toronto Star came out with a fine feature story on May 14, 2000, when Juul was 51. It’s a little long, so I’ll quote from the last half.

Haalmeyer came to Canada a draft dodger in 1969.

“I was a singer, but I took every job that didn’t require a university degree,” he reminisces, exhaling ciggie smoke. “My first job was as a shipper at the McCaul location of Malabar where Michael Scheider hired me as his apprentice. At that time, Malabar was dressing 94 per cent of the operas in North America: the San Francisco Opera, the Seattle, even the Met. They were so good.
“(Designers) Bob Mackie and Ret Turner came in to do Sonny & Cher, and I became their liaison with Luigi Specca at Malabar to buy fabric. I asked to come to see how the show was put together in the studio. ‘Hey! I could do that.”
“I auditioned for the CFTO costume department. They said, ‘We realize you’re not a costume designer. If you sweep the floor in the carpentry shop for six months, ...’ I was so excited. I was in showbiz.”
His first gig was Kenny Rogers Rollin’ On The River. Here he had to dress Mr. Rogers, and he’d never so much as sewn on a button.
“I locked myself in a room with a rented sewing machine and a pattern. I learned to sketch — my father was an artist, and he told me to take the catalogue and sketch every model. So I did.”
And he points out a sketch of Todd Eldridge, world champion figure skater, in one of his designs.
Haalmeyer likes the variety of doing film and TV. “There is always something different — one day it’s a Hollywood babe and 40 American cops. The next day, a children’s show. Someone comes up with a script, and you can come up with something more suitable.”
And sometimes you come up with yourself. Haalmeyer fronted the legendary Juul Haalmeyer Dancers on SCTV.
“I was a bad dancer at SCTV,” he says proudly. “They couldn’t hire dancers as bad as me, so I got dragged around into sketches as the Juul Haalmeyer Dancers.
“It all started when I was costume designer (he got the gig through attrition: the former designer moved on), and Catherine O’Hara was doing a number as Lola Heatherton. They were auditioning dancers, but they couldn’t move badly enough, so I was told to take five or six guys from the crew and form a dancing group. I picked Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, two of the writers, a grip or prop guy. And the six of us were the worst.
“So every time they needed cheesy dancers or a bad singer. . . .I also appeared as myself, a costume designer.”
He offers up a photo of himself, Catherine O’Hara and Rick Moranis as the Polyesters, a takeoff on the Nylons. Haalmeyer looks alarmingly like early Robert Goulet.
“I still get stopped on the street,” he grins. “I was shopping at the Salvation Army in Bowmanville, and this woman was checking out in front of me with a stroller. All of a sudden, she let out this blood-curdling scream: ‘I know you — you’re that bad dancer.’”
He’s the bad dancer that Carol Burnett adores.
“She was on the set of SCTV while she was in town doing Between Friends, that movie with Liz Taylor,” he explains. “She came right over to me, kissed my feet and said. ‘Juul Haalmeyer, I want to bear all your children.’
“She did a walk-on as herself in a court scene. She is a fabulous woman, just so warm.”
Ah, but then there are the stars who were not so hot. “The ones that made me wish I had gone into props,” Haalmeyer groans.
Like the sitcom star who had a hissy fit over her “stolen” dancing shoes. She made such a scene that Ruth Buzzi, who had the adjacent dressing room, stepped in, slapped her face and demanded, “Are you a jerk-off or a professional? Pull yourself together!”
Meanwhile, Haalmeyer spray-painted 30 pairs of dancing shoes and told her to choose.
He shops for wardrobe everywhere from Kmart to vintage stores to lawn sales from Bowmanville to upstate New York.
He has worked on more than a thousand shows, dressing the famous and infamous. In 1974, he worked with Margaret Trudeau doing Perils Of Pauline.
One of his last projects was outfitting extras for the Nathan Lane film Laughter On The 23rd Floor.
“I did all the ‘70s variety shows,” he calculates. “I made Anne Murray’s Vegas clothes, all the beaded stuff. Every lamp in our house (where he lives with his mom, Trudy) is beaded with fringe. It takes 2,000 hours to do a gown. You go blind, and you have to charge the price of a car and still don’t make any money.”
He worked with the series CODCO for four years and considers it his hardest gig.
“We did 26 episodes in five weeks; it was breakneck speed,” he says, stubbing out another cigarette. “They needed 27 Elizabethan costumes in primary colours within 24 hours.
“Or they’d call and say, ‘I’m the last cod in the ocean. We need the costume in the morning — with cod-piece.’ So I bought a wetsuit and a smack of sequins and glued the sequins to make it scaly — he was a fish. It was scary. I came out (Codco was shot in Halifax) with 112 wardrobe containers. After I saw the scripts, I had stuff flown in every say from Toronto.
He produces a pair of fabulous ‘50s cat’s-eyed glasses trimmed with rhinestones.
“They belonged to Eugene Levy’s mother. When she died, Fred Levy, Eugene’s brother, who is my accountant, gave them to me.”
Which brings up finances. Haalmeyer did the Alice Cooper Welcome To My Nightmare special, and it lived up to its name.
“I never got paid,” he shrugs. “The company folded as soon as they called ‘wrap.’...
“I am owed over $300,000 for 30 years; I could have owned a house by now.”
And he needs one.
“My aim is to have a very large building and have most of what any body needs for a movie. My home is floor-to-ceiling with clothes. I have three racks around my bed; I have to move a rack to get into bed.”
If he had to do it all over again, he would be an opera singer.
“I had the pipes and the potential scholarship from Juilliard. Then I took up smoking and drinking, and it was game over.”
Besides, if he were an opera singer, he could wear outrageous hats like the ones he designs for Noddy.

Noddy was a live action/animation kids show produced in Ontario in the late ‘90s.

Besides collecting a mountain of awards for his costume design, Juul was a humanitarian. The Star of March 16, 1989 reported on it:

Stories in The Star and on CBC radio prompted a flurry of calls to The Star’s Halifax bureau asking for information about how to help some of the New Brunswick families living in appalling housing conditions. Some of the calls are starting to bear fruit.
Toronto costume designer Juul Haalmeyer has sent two batches of clothing to a New Brunswick self-help organization for unemployed rural workers. [...]
When Haalmeyer read a Star story detailing the squalor in which one such family lives, he telephoned the newspaper’s Halifax bureau and asked how he could help.
Haalmeyer designs costumes for stage and television shows, and has to dispose of them when the productions are finished.
“We donate a lot of clothes to a home for battered women,” he said. “And any time there’s an international disaster we send clothes off.”
Then he read about New Brunswick’s rural poor.
This week, he sent two bundles of clothing for distribution by the Unemployed Workers of Rural Canada, based in Woodstock, N.B.

On a Christmas promo during an episode of SCTV, Juul was part of a subtle commentary on Hollywood phoniness and the closet. He and Lola Heatherton cozied up like they were the ultimate heterosexual show biz couple. But when Lola got to her usual declaration about wanting to bear his children, reality broke through. Juul gave a look of repulsion and walked off. Lola dropped her show-bizzy façade, using a normal voice while following after him, saying “it doesn’t mean anything.”

His design work may be summed up in a review in the Ottawa Citizen of Nov. 23, 1982. A staff writer panned a stage play, except to observe “the outrageous costume designs by Juul Haalmeyer were far wittier than any of the lines.”

That was never the case at SCTV, where everyone abounded in talent that meshed together perfectly. That included the deliberately hackneyed terpsichory of Juul Haalmeyer and his troupe of enthusiastic, but less-than-able, dancers.

Fleischer's Snow-White

The Fleischer studio cartoons of the early 1930s are among my favourites of all time.

Their attitude is different than the happy musical setting you’ll find in a Harman-Ising cartoon for Warner Bros. The Fleischer cartoons are bleaker, nightmarish at times, and, given the musical artists featured, not very white. In urban New York, that meant alcohol, drugs and illicit sex.

Jerry Beck’s “The 50 Greatest Cartoons” (JG Press, 1998) skips past Swing You Sinners! (1930), but includes three great Fleischer cartoons in its top 20. Number 19 is the Betty Boop version of Snow-White. Unlike the Walt Disney feature version, the dwarfs here are not likeable with child-like personalities. They’re zeroes. Instead, we get Betty in the title role, Bimbo and Koko as palace guards who rescue Betty, the Wicked Queen and her magic hand mirror.

The songs given to Betty (Mae Questel) are fairly ordinary, but the cartoon gets into bizarre territory when the four characters go into a mystery cave and Koko acquires Cab Calloway’s voice and sings “St. James Infirmary Blues,” with Betty in an icy “coffin” (she is still alive and moving) and the clown into a high-stepping ghost enacting the lyrics. It’s a far cry from Foxy singing “Smile, Darn Ya, Smile.”

A real highlight is the background art in the cave sequence. I suspect some of you have seen this video, but it’s new to me. Someone has managed to clip together the panned backgrounds from two scenes. It must have taken forever to get around the characters that take up most of the foreground. Then there’s always a problem (as I have discovered trying to do the same thing) of making the black-and-white tones from one frame match another. I don’t have fancy software to help; I use an ancient version of MS Paint. I gather that’s what this person has done.

You can see a video of the backgrounds below.



To look at the background recreation from frames, you can go here.

We’ve posted Film Daily’s review of the cartoon elsewhere on the blog. Here are some capsule comments in The Motion Picture Herald of the day:

SNOW-WHITE: Betty Boop—Clever cartoon that features “Saint James Infirmary Blues” sung by Cab Calloway. I featured this in my advertising and believe that it helped.—H. B. Schuessler (Martin Theatres), LaFayette Theatre, LaFayetts, Ala. Small town patronage.

SNOW WHITE: Betty Boop, Cab Calloway—One of the very best cartoons we have shown. It deserves billing. Running time, 9 minutes.—A. B. Jefferis, New Piedmont Theatre, Piedmont, Mo. Rural and small town patronage.

SNOW-WHITE: Betty Boop—good filler on any program. Running time, one reel.—D. E. Fitton, Lyric Theatre, Harrison, Ark. Small town patronage.

PICK-UP: Sylvia Sidney, George Raft—Dated this with Paramount short “Snow White” and RKO “Century of Progress.” Patrons liked feature and business was excellent, due probably to extra draw of the shorts, which we had advertised heavily. Played October 1-3.—Avece T. Waldron, Blue Moon Theatre, Oklahoma City, Okla. Suburban family patronage.

And from the March 1933 issue of the journal of the National Board of Review:

SNOW WHITE (Talkartoon)—Paramount. Family audience. Junior matinee.

Yup. Entertainment suitable for children. Approved by censors. Depression-era kids were a hardier lot than the “Oh, you can’t show guns on Saturday morning cartoons. Think of the children!” Mind you, you couldn’t show kids a cartoon cow’s udder back then. Every generation has its ridiculousness.

Calloway was a Fleischer favourite, appearing first in Minnie the Moocher (1932), then in Snow-White and, finally, The Old Man of the Mountain (1933).

While Doc Crandall got the sole animation credit for this short, the background artist isn’t credited. That’s a real crime.