When Rochester answered the phone and said “Jack Benny’s residence, star of stage, screen, radio and (fill in gag here),” he was listing the Benny accomplishments in chronological order. Before radio, there were films at MGM as sound came in. And before that, there was the vaudeville stage.
Jack not only played at the pinnacle of vaudeville success, the Palace in New York, he was contracted in 1931 to be the Master of Ceremonies in addition to doing his act.
Critics, by and large, in the 1920s, found little to complain about Jack’s performances, whether they were on the Orpheum circuit on the West Coast, in Chicago, or on his East Coast swing.
But in 1931, there was no Rochester to play off of. There was no Maxwell, 39, or even being a cheapskate. So what exactly did he do?
Here’s an indication from the New York Daily News of Sept. 8, 1931. Of interest to Benny radio fans is Jack worked with Abe Lyman well before the bandleader made guest appearances on the Benny radio show. And, as it turned out, Kate Smith, another member of the General Foods stable (for some baking flour until she was given the Jell-O sponsorship) who appeared once on Jack’s show.
ENTER JACK BENNY AS NEW PALACE M. C.
By JOHN CHAPMAN.
The Palace Theatre, having found a large, new public during the course of a seven weeks' run of Lou Holtz and company, is attempting to retain its customers by assembling a new offering in which Jack Benny, Harriet Hoctor and Abe Lyman's band, are featured.
Just for luck, too, the management has kept a couple of features from the Holtz fiesta. It will be interesting to see if the new program can approach a long-run record; to see if Benny is as successful a master of ceremonies as was his predecessor.
Miss Hector Returns.
Benny's scheme is different. Holtz, a sure marksman with a scatter gun, aimed for howls and got them. A shrewd interpreter of the vaudeville patron's mind, his humor was broad, low and loud. Benny's wit is sharp, dry and cynical.
[omit Hoctor review]
Lyman's band has rhythm and go—and some jerkily conceived arrangements. It serves for a funny scene in which Benny doubts that a leader's baton-waving amounts to much. Left by Holtz.
"After all," says Jack to Abe, “what could you do with this stick if the band didn't show up?"
So Benny tries some stick-waving of his own with ludicrous results.
This wasn’t Jack’s first go-round as M.C. at the Palace that year. Chapman’s column of May 25, 1931 mentions:
Least obtrusive and funniest of the recent masters of ceremony is Jack Benny, who soberly plays a violin while a sound news reel is crashing about the screen, quips with [Mexican dancer] Armida and is otherwise of assistance.
Incidentally, Jack was held over the following week. The headliner was Georgie Jessel.
Jack spent part of 1931 on the road with his act, a Chester Hale production called “Bits of Wit.” It seems to have been more terpsichore than anything. It included “syncopated spirit of inebriation” Evelyn Wilson, acrobatic dancer Billy Rolls and Jack Benny’s Dancing Girls. He was assisted by the “Comedy Girl,” Marie Marsh, known today as Mary Livingstone.
During a stop in Buffalo at the end of April, Ardis Smith of the Times profiled Jack. This may be the only time you see the word “cachinnation” anywhere. Considering he spent a great amount of time years later ridiculing The Horn Blows At Midnight, it’s interesting seeing him do the same thing year. The difference was, as he related on the Merv Griffin show, the Tiffany film really was bad.
JACK BENNY, on the Great Lakes stage this week, doesn't hanker after applause. No, Sir, or Madame. He wouldn't know what to do with it if he had it. It would embarrass him. What he wants is continued cachinnation out there in the dark where the audience crouches. The more immoderate the laughter, the more expansive Mr. Benny becomes. No guffaws and Mr. Benny is actually chilled, he says, and needs an overcoat.
On those few occasions when a dour congregation of paying customers, of those who have come in on passes, show an obstinate disinclimation to titter, Jack works on the orchestra or the ushers. If the musicians laugh, he knows it's the same old Benny after all.
• • •
DURING one performance Saturday, it became necessary for Mr. Benny to play to the orchestra, the first time in a long spell. This contretemps was unprecedented as far as his appearances in Buffalo go.Mr. Benny, who proudly advises his current audiences that he was six months in Earl Carroll's "Vanities," "four months on the stage and two months with the company in jail," played 18 years in vaudeville and then broke into the talking pictures over night. He broke out with parallel suddenness and into the Earl Carroll theater.
• • •
YOU may have noticed that Mr. Benny is a fiddler. He fiddles from left to right on the stage, hands in pockets, lazy, nonchalant, drawling, quite certain that most folks think he's pretty funny. Well, he really is a fiddler. At 15, he was playing the violin in a theater orchestra. A year or two later he took his instrument to the stage. Then he began to talk. Pretty soon he was just totin' the fiddle and wending his full 20 minutes in inconsequential banter, chatting with the ushers and the late arrivals. This seemed to go better than "Fantasy Impromptu" so pretty soon, he quit bothering with the violin.
• • •
DURING the war Mr. Benny enlisted in the Navy.
But the recruiting service or the propaganda bureau found he was quick with his bow and quip, and he spent the period of the war skedaddling about the country, helping finance the war and raise a navy. He never did get on intimate terms with the briny blue, and he eyes any large fluid body fairly askance to this day.
He's going to London this summer to play at the Palladium, but he doesn't know whether the British will like him. The English feeling for humor is sensitive enough, he says, but you never can tell for sure what they want over there in the way of patter. And it may be too late by the time you find out.
• • •
MR. BENNY was playing two a day vaudeville in Los Angeles when Metro picked him to share with Conrad Nagel the mastering of ceremonies in “The Hollywood Revue." After that he made "Chasin' Rainbows" and a quickie for Tiffany which he saw last week in Cleveland the first time. The latter talkie, “The Medicine Man," released over a year since, was the worst moving picture ever made, he brags. "Really, you have no idea—atrocious!" • • •
HE would be pleased to go back to Hollywood. He cancelled his contact with Metro because he wasn't getting any work to do and he thought Broadway, the absent-minded thing, might forget him. Now, he would like to make two pictures a year and play in a revue like the "Vanities" every winter. He is spoken for by Earl Carroll and will be on hand when that entrepreneur casts his next entertainment. • • •
MR. BENNY was married in 1927 and his wife appears with him on the Great lakes stage. He wears the same clothes on the street and in the theater, uses little or no make-up and usually strolls around town window-shopping between turns. His patter is never the same two performances running. He makes up a good deal of it as he goes along. He has blue eyes and prematurely gray hair. One of his eyes is a trifle bluer than the other which may indicate to you that his favorite sport is golf, though I don't know how.
• • • MR. BENNY wouldn't be a star in the movies for any amount of money, this is any amount be could met- A comedian is crazy to be starred he says. The really smart comedic craftsman is one who is missing from the screen or stage at least half the time while the audience is wishing he money, that is any amount, he could itself that he is stealing the whole shebang from the topline principals.
He thinks it was too bad they made Jack Oakie a star. Oakie was so popular a year ago that theater patrons actually cheered his audible shadow. Now look at him. Mr. Benny says in the more recent Oakie pictures, you can actually see this naturally happy-go-lucky clown groaning under the responsibility of carrying the central role.
• • •
BENNY, of course, thinks Metro the greatest of the movie producers. Norma Shearer, he believes, in [is] his favorite feminine screen personality, though he is particularly partial to Marie Dressler.
The Great Lakes star doesn't smoke and while I was interviewing him he refused a drink. He is partial to blue double-breasted suits and light gray snap brims, never tries to sing or dance the tango, and is tremendously serious and studious about his work. When his gags are not taking hold, he talks it over with his wife, the manager, the musicians or the head property man.
Jack was soon back with Earl Carroll. Then Carroll tried to cut Benny's salary twice, the second time by 20%. Variety reported February 9, 1932 that Jack was quitting the road. “Star of radio” was only a few months away.
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