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.

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.